Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Schools as Catering Halls

From a very disgruntled NYC teacher who just wants to teach the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth

It is the month of the harvest moon and the first frost. Gold and red leaves will soon scrunch under our feet. But there is an acrid taste, a prickly touch, a reeking smell, a raucous cry, and very crisp cowardice borne by the wind. It is a new academic season. Time for the halls of scholarship to be confirmed anew as catering halls. How so?

On the eve of the past presidential election, Garden State teacher wasfired for posting, among a gallery of presidential portraits on her classroom's bulletin board, a photo of the current George Bush. Students' parents, partial to John Kerry, demanded he get equal billing. The teacher explained that she had not endorsed or censured either candidate. There had been no electioneering. The only reason that Bush was cheek to jowl with Jefferson and Lincoln was that they all held at one time the highest office in the land. The unappeased parent bee-lined to the principal who ordered the teacher to remove the offending picture or collect her personal effects and beat it. After much turbulence she was restored to work but transferred. The scowl of media spotlight spared the terminating rod.

Catering to parents and historical revisionists has become a primary duty of teachers not on a martyrdom track. Kowtowing has become the backbone of the educational process. Textbook publishers doctor history to treat their own bottom line ailments. Politicians who control school boards are themselves ruled by a wide range of pressure groups. The ancient and sacred nature of teaching has itself yielded. No longer do we chaperone the spirits of youth to the truth wherever it leads us. Instead we draft our students as pawns in a despicable chess of political litmus tests.

A few years ago, a public service "documentary" lauded the American Army's Black soldiers who liberated European extermination camps at the end of World War 2. The problem was it didn't happen that way. The credit was no distortion; it was fabrication. The army was deplorably segregated back then. No Black troops were positioned to have a chance to exercise the noble capability that they shared with the fighters who actually did the job. Not having accomplished what was beyond their control was neither their shame nor their achievement by proxy. The film's defenders viewed this revelation as petty and mean-spirited. They argued that relations between Blacks and Holocaust-minded Jews were warmed by the fable, so the creative license was a salutary example of the means justifying the ends.

If I tactfully exposed this whopper in class, what would happen if a parent or organized group cried racism out of sincere or other assumption? Should I be persecuted like the curator of the presidential portraits? If as an English teacher I need to illustrate the uneven literary quality of Nobel Prize for Literature winners, and Toni Morrison came naturally to mind as unworthy company of Beckett, Eliot, Hemingway, and Churchill, must I bite my tongue and cite a non-Black laureate, just to play it safe? When the social studies textbook shows a typical Nigerian kitchen looking like Billy Joel's, may a teacher sympathetically set the record straight? And what if he has a rightly muted kind word for the British Empire?

Are we not more than paid mouths? Must we agree with the assertions made commonly in texts and in the film "Motorcycle Diaries" that the Incas in sixteenth century Peru were in the midst of performing brain surgery when they were rudely interrupted by the Spaniards' gunpowder? We have been re-educated to recoil at Christopher Columbus the plunderer. And when did the major publishers decide that the Aztecs did not really rip out the still-beating hearts of children in sacrifice to virgin goddesses?

If the teacher implicates the drug culture of Colombia, being careful not to equate it with Colombian culture as a whole, should he fear the wrath of those who would call him, absurdly, anti-immigrant? Should reference to India's caste system, including such indignities as requiring its "untouchables" who, because of their low-born social class, must clean toilets with bare hands, be avoided because South Asian societies might complain?

During a discussion of current events, mandated as "enrichment", an astute student in a Queens, New York middle school linked the imminent American election to the global omen of terrorism. In the natural course of providing context and perspective, his teacher identified Israel as the only nation in the Middle East that shares America's democratic values and institutions. A local Imam was not amused. That discussion will never happen again. But shouldn't it?

Will we all now be required to present the flip side of terrorism? "Balanced" views of the Pearl Harbor attack are already fed like Fruit Loops to children. Dare we show the audacity to depict our own way of life with at least benign neutrality?

On Korean Thanksgiving Day, late September, my middle school students wore traditional native dresses and treated the staff to some lovely sweet rice. Linking their holiday to our classroom discourse, we compared notes about gratitude. I was astonished that not one child had ever been told about America's sacrifice, self-interested as it may been to a degree, to keep the whole Korean nation from a perpetual diet of tree bark soup, as in North Korea. Was my eye-opener inflammatory as charged?

In the judgment of the father of one of my students, I was obliged to excuse his child's failure to complete my assignment on world affairs on the grounds that according to their upbringing, adolescence was too soon to endanger a child with political notions. Should I have worked around it to keep the peace or stood on principle? Since he is a customer of education, as the Department of Education sees him, the father's bum steer could not be addressed safely.

Many students in New York schools are children of United Nations employees. The United Nations, of which criticism is taboo, has admitted to hiring laborers who are known terrorists in Gaza. It has also been implicated in the "oil for food" turpitude If this comes up in class, can we "run with it" or must we suppress, sanitize, or must we give the truth the slip? If a member of my class happens to be the daughter of a consul, may I get a ginger ale on the way to the principal's office? How do we raise consciousness if not under the sturdy roof of free inquiry?

The inhibitions provoked by pandering can be funny. A teacher of science cited Edwin Teale's classic about bees, The Golden Throng. A parent mistook it as "Thong." To make life simpler, the teacher now tells the kids that the book is called The Golden Swarm. But at the end of the day, truth wants no caterer.

Source






Teaching reform in Australia: It is time to change what, and how, our schools teach

"One of the most hypocritical aspects of Australian public life over the past 30 years has been the way politicians talk about education, without ever doing anything to improve it. At election after election candidates promise to spend more on schools to ensure existing standards are improved. And they cite selective statistics to demonstrate how students in their state are either the best, or worst, in the world, depending on whether they are in government or opposition. But they never address the values crisis that cripples public education, and risks reducing it to a second-rate system, shunned by all but the poor. And they never discuss why we are in this mess, with a system designed to serve circumstances that no longer exist. And we are stuck with the outcome of their inertia today. The philosophical basis of schooling still dates from the 1960s, when education was supposed to drive social reform. And the structure of senior secondary education reflects the assumptions of politicians in decades past who assumed there would never be enough jobs to go round and so used school to keep kids off the unemployment rolls.

All of this is ancient history now. But while the real world changed, education theory did not. The result is we are are cursed with an education system that would make old hippies happy. In Australia today, the education orthodoxy holds that schools should teach students to critically analyse information, which is code for courses that emphasise Australia's faults and failings, especially with regard to the environment and indigenous issues. And in terms of what kids learn, it does not matter if it is not much. What is important is for them to learn at their own pace, regardless of the skills they lack at the end of each school year. And we encourage far too many students to go on to Year 12. The final two school years were originally intended for an academically inclined minority. But today they are holding camps for enormous numbers of kids, many of whom would be happier learning a trade.

One result of this sorry situation is too much of the syllabus reflects what teachers were taught about their role as social reformers. Another is that students who would be better served by trade training are forced into studying abstract subjects, for which they are not suited. And in the process, the academic element of Year 12 is eroded to cater for "mixed ability" classes, an Orwellian euphemism if ever there was one. Fortunately solutions to this archaic assembly of old-fashioned political ideology and education theory are starting to emerge. Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has tapped into the community's deep disquiet with the quality and content of teaching and learning in Australian schools. His demands for plain-English report cards, and comparative assessments of core subjects between the states, are pushing them towards reform. Inevitably state ministers complain Dr Nelson is playing politics with education. But it is easy to imagine they are privately pleased with the way he is forcing reforms that may be unpopular with academics and union leaders, but will please parents and serve students.

The federal Government has also established the foundations for a long overdue return to the old system of streaming, where students could select the sort of high school that suited their interests and aspirations, with the creation of new technical colleges. That Kim Beazley supports the general approach of student choice is an excellent outcome. If this means that one day we will emulate Germany, where tradespeople are respected for their ability and the benefits they bring society, good. For too long the orthodoxy in Australian education has been that only a university education would do. We are paying the price for this silly snobbery now, with lawyers in plague proportions and shortages of tradespeople so severe they threaten our economic growth. And significant structural reform is also on the agenda, with talk of ways to encourage autonomy for individual public schools. While the syllabus in each state will always be set by central bureaucrats, the more decisions made at a local level the better. Of course all these ideas and initiatives will be howled down by advocates of the failed status quo, who always argue every reform is anti-teacher. Nonsense. There is nothing wrong with Australia's committed teachers. It is the prevailing philosophy of education that they are obliged to follow which is one of the core problems in Australian education. In a just society, schools give every student the education they need to make the most of their abilities. For too many our children Australia's schools do no such thing. It is time they did".

(The above is an editorial from "The Australian" newspaper of October 1st)

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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