Sunday, July 23, 2006

HOLIDAY CONFUSION

Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, and Christian - each faith has its holy days. Schools across the country are asking how to respect them all. Consider the University at Albany, which canceled classes on major Muslim holidays. Faculty wanted the move out of concern for Muslim students after the Sept. 11 attacks. But then came the questions: What about Hindus? Buddhists? President Kermit Hall last fall decided to return to the original calendar. "Can you operate a university and give each religious group an accommodation? I think the answer is, 'No,'" he said.

Make that "maybe." School administrators across the country are rethinking their calendars as their student bodies become more diverse. In May, Muslim parents asked New York City's education department for days off on two major Muslim holidays, which some districts in Michigan and New Jersey already have granted. In January, a Long Island mosque petitioned New York Gov. George Pataki to consider the holidays when scheduling mandatory statewide testing. Last month, the state Legislature passed a bill that would take all religious holidays into account when scheduling the mandatory tests. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called it the first step toward recognizing Muslim holidays in public schools.

But also last month, despite a Muslim group's lobbying at every board meeting, the Baltimore County district in Maryland approved a calendar with a day off for the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashana, but none for Muslim holidays. The group had hoped the district's growing diversity - 47.8 percent of students last year were minorities - would be persuasive. "Either I go against my faith, or I miss my schoolwork and have imperfect attendance," said 15-year-old Kanwal Rehman, who will enter 10th grade in Baltimore this fall. In January, her midterm exams fell during Eid al-Adha, one of the two most important holidays in Islam.

It can get complicated. When Muslims in the Tampa Bay region of Florida asked for a day off to celebrate the end of Ramadan, another local religious group perked up. "There was discussion in the Hindu community if we should also push for a holiday," said Nikhil Joshi, a board member of the national Hindu American Foundation. The Hillsborough County school board responded by ending days off for all religious holidays. The move inspired more than 3,500 e-mails. Christian leaders pleaded for the Muslim holiday. Finally, the district restored this fall's original calendar, with days off for Good Friday, Easter Monday and the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. The Muslim community was relieved it hadn't hurt other faiths. The Hindu community decided not to ask for days off. "You would hope in a country of religious freedom all would be recognized, but we know that's not practical," Joshi said.

School districts say they can't take days off for purely religious reasons, but they can act if they think operations are affected by students or staff taking the day off. That practice gives school holidays a certain regional flair. Some schools close for the beginning of hunting season. San Francisco schools have Cesar Chavez Day on March 30 to celebrate farmworkers, and Chicago schools have March 5 to honor Casimir Pulaski, a Polish count who helped the American side in the Revolutionary War.

Religion is more sensitive. Some districts mark "special observance days" when no test or exam can be scheduled. Other districts find inspiration in the business world - each student gets a number of "floating" days to celebrate his or her own holidays with an excused absence. "'Choose your own holiday' has become more popular," said Kathryn Lohre, assistant director of Harvard University's Pluralism Project, which studies diversity in religion. "It takes pressure off the school boards."

New Jersey's board of education now lists 76 excused religious holidays, from Russian Orthodox to Sikh. New York City schools are even more flexible. Students with a letter from parents get an excused absence for a holiday in any religion. Some have tried the traditional route of schoolwide holidays, and failed. In Ohio, the Sycamore Community School District once canceled classes on the Jewish High Holy Days after some parents asked why schools closed on Good Friday. Muslim and Hindu parents then asked why they didn't get days off. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the district. The case was settled in 2000, and the High Holy Days became school days again.

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ADDLED VISION OF FUTURE COLLEGE EDUCATION

What will higher education look like in 50 years? If you weren't in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago, you might not know. Alas, I wasn't there either. But a glance at the panels of a conference convened there--called "The Campus of the Future"--offers a clue: College in the coming decades will have even less to do with learning than it does now. Of the conference's almost 200 offerings--e.g., "Responding to Climate Change," "Branding Your Identity" and "Takin' It to the Streets"--none seemed to have even a tangential relation to the idea that, in college, teachers are supposed to impart knowledge to students.

The organizers, in their defense, are not academics and probably don't consider it their jobs to think about what goes on inside classrooms. (The sponsoring groups included the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers and the National Association of College and University Business Officers.) But they were interested enough in classroom life to ask Thomas Friedman to lecture on the topic. The New York Times columnist obliged, offering his thoughts on what colleges can do to keep America competitive in a global economy.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Friedman "urged educators to focus less on concrete outcomes like grades and test scores and more on teaching students how to learn, instilling passion and curiosity in them and developing their intuitive skills." To anyone who has followed the rhetoric of educationists in recent years, these bromides will sound familiar. Suffice it to say that if colleges take up Mr. Friedman's suggestions, they will move further away from their academic mission, and the kind of student who thrives in a university environment will change.

Mr. Friedman suggested to his audience of 4,000 that preparing students for an uncertain future was akin to "training for the Olympics without knowing which sport you will compete in." This blustery overstatement is also painfully familiar: Change is so rapid, we are told, that we can't even imagine what the future will look like. I recently found myself at a "career night" at my old high school in Worcester, Mass., where I heard ideas similar to Mr. Friedman's. An alumnus on my panel advised students that "the job [you] will hold probably doesn't even exist today."

One has to wonder whether such claims will become, for students, an excuse for laziness. Remember the young Alvy Singer in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall"? Upon finding out that the universe will eventually come to an end, he decides to stop doing his homework. In such a way, students today--hectored about the hyper-changing world they are in--may decide that there is no point in traditional learning since the future will be so very different. Why read Gibbon when only "intuitive skills" are going to be worth anything?

But for all the anxiety of education experts, it may well be that the skills that were useful to our parents and grandparents will be useful for years to come. People who edit Web sites, after all, still have to know grammar. Biologists who manipulate DNA still have to know the phases of meiosis. Businessmen--who, Mr. Friedman suggests, now need to be "synthesizers," and "adaptors"--still have to know how to calculate the bottom line. Even columnists may find that the history they learned in school comes in handy (though perhaps not often enough).

A few years ago, David Brooks wrote a piece for The Atlantic called "The Organization Kid," in which he described the harried life of a college student today. At Princeton, Mr. Brooks recounted, he "asked several students to describe their daily schedules, and their replies sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more."

Perhaps, as Mr. Brooks concluded, students are amazingly diligent these days. Perhaps they are more serious about college than, say, the baby boomers were. But study after study has shown that less and less of their time is devoted to academics. It is given over instead to "leveraging," "synthesizing" and other Friedman-ite activities, often aided by handy electronic organizers.

Some might say that a palm-piloted life is exactly what a young person will need for the 21st century. But not everyone is suited for it. We've been reading a lot recently about boys falling behind girls in school. You don't have to hang around teenagers for long to realize that girls are much bigger fans of to-do lists and neat calendars than boys. They are more adept at "multi-tasking," too. Meanwhile, boys throw themselves into one or two subjects, keep messy notes and need to be reminded where they have to be next.

Some dean may chalk these proclivities up to immaturity, but there is a reason to value the kind of academic single-mindedness that male students often bring to an educational environment--the kind of thing that pushes up those old-fashioned test scores. Even on the campus of the future.

Source

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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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1 comment:

Mariesaintmichel said...

Hello John,
I did enjoy reading you and I'll be back often to visit your nice blog! Thank you very much for sharing your ideas. I have just created a blog that has much to do with education, What Women Think. Please feel totaly invited to visit us there.