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Relating the thoughts of a longtime teacher with whom he corresponds, the author writes:
It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.
We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.
It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
My question is - are the author and his teacher friend right? Or are they just expressing the skepticism with which older generations generally regard younger ones?
Are we on the down-curve of America? And if so, is it a float or a plummet?
33 comments:
Read the writing of John Taylor Gatto. He was a former teacher of the year from New York City that "jumped ship" and proclaimed the entire compulsory education system an intentional method to control populations. This system was devised by the power elite and involved the intentional dumbing down of most of the population, beginning with disrupting the teaching of reading through using the whole word method. Very interesting reading that goes along with this article.
I'm a fan of Gatto's.
When I first read one of his books, I thought he was over the top.
Now I don't.
"It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society ..."
I've run across people who talk like this. I get away from them as fast as I can. They are neither right or wrong. They are just unwilling (or unable) to frame their positions more carefully.
I don't believe in power elites who decide things (I'm hoping not to turn out to be wrong about this, too).
I do believe in power orthodoxies and path dependencies that overwhelm everything standing in their path.
Either way, the result is the same.
The path dependency idea is probably the place where I intersect with Taylor. I (still) don't know the history of public education, but wasn't there quite a lot of talk of Americanizing immigrants (which would mean reducing the influence of their parents)?
I do know that the progressive movement was focused on preparing different "levels" of students for their different stations in life. e.g., girls who were destined to become seamstresses weren't supposed to learn Latin and algebra.
The further I go, the more I see gatekeeping & sorting -- all hidden by a veneer of progressive, democratic talk.
Ed says the book we should all read about the relationship of families to the state is Christopher Lasch's Haven in a Heartless World.
understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.
This is the kind of thing that always gets me going.
You don't need a peer-reviewed study to know that when a high school student can't define democracy or agriculture we're looking at a horrific school failure.
Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.
hoo boy
Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games.
ummmm.....
not quite
I don't think so.
Not sure we're in the "affluent" category, but we know a gazillion people who are.
Their kids have TV, video games, and junk food.
Plenty of them are in public schools, too.
I have no idea what to think as to whether things are worse -- has the SAT score decline leveled off?
Do we know?
I'm thinking it did....
My friend's 7th grader's assignments:
Teacher supplied 10 sentences. Student must underline nouns, circle verbs.
Class read the novel "Everest" out loud in class. Student wrote 26 sentences about the novel ("Everest: A to Z) and typed them up, cut them out and glued them to posterboard.
Are these really appropriate assignments for a child 5 years from high school graduation and SATs?
Any parent who thinks so should contact Rod & Staff Publishers (Mennonites in Kentucky) and get a sample of their 7th grade offerings.
Off-topic, but what's up with the line about evangelical Christians? I realize it's the SF Chronicle, but still... I'm an agnostics heathen from NYC, but one thing I find more annoying than fundamentalist evangelical Christians are the self-righteous coastal twits who think it's ok to rip on them every ten seconds - particularly when they're (largely) not the ones responsible for the dumbing down of curriculum.
"My question is - are the author and his teacher friend right?"
Short answer: no, they are not right.
Longer answer to come. I'll note that we basically have anecdotes from a single teacher in one of the worst school districts in California. I'd be very reluctant to generalize for the country from this data set.
-Mark Roulo
I've noticed a worrisome trend. Local high schools are offering "SAT prep" as for-credit courses. The high school profiled in the New York Times today, in Needham, MA, seems to have a segment in English class devoted to writing college application essays.
In the old days, the SATs and application essays were done on your own time, and not for credit. What's been cut out of the curriculum to make room for this? How widespread is this phenomenon?
Independent George - I almost added "despite the unwarranted slap at evangelicals..."
Didn't see a reason for the unfounded jab - certainly didn't help the article, except to remind people that this is the SF paper.
In the old days, the SATs and application essays were done on your own time, and not for credit. What's been cut out of the curriculum to make room for this? How widespread is this phenomenon?
Interesting.
Teacher supplied 10 sentences. Student must underline nouns, circle verbs.
Class read the novel "Everest" out loud in class. Student wrote 26 sentences about the novel ("Everest: A to Z) and typed them up, cut them out and glued them to posterboard.
The amount of posterboard being consumed by middle schools across the country is not to be believed.
Usually, these days, it's those tri-fold thingies.
How 'bout one of you people who enjoy history checking out the per cent of people who even attended high school in the US 75-100 years ago.
We are more aware of such cases as people who can't make change because we encounter them as clerks at fast food restaurants. We didn't pay them as much attention back when they were "down on the farm."
From the article:
"Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens."
There are many reasons why the educational picture is dismal in the inner city. Ed ideology, cultural factors and SES are some of the prominent ones. I doubt a conspiracy by the "power elite" is one of them.
There are 1,001 things I'd like to say here, but I'll stick to a few dozen.
This article is terrible. Leaving it at that doesn't add much to this debate, and for that I apologize, but it's what I'm going to do.
It shocks me when people say that the public school system is designed to control the masses, to inculcate, etc. That's absolutely ridiculous and baseless from both a theoretical and a practical perspective.
When I hear someone like J. T. Gatto rant on hegemony-this and other-fashionable-pseudo-academic-term-that, I can't help but recognize the fallacy in their thought. That fallacy? That the practitioners of public education are largely untalented [relative to the private sector], yet they still manage to shepherd the masses through either that maze they so deviously designed themselves [where it leads, I don't know], or execute perfectly the will of the grisly gang that designed the sausage-grinder of public education 100+ years ago. And what they had in mind, I also don't know... but we sure know it had to be bad!
Yawn.
It's not unlike those geniuses who march around carrying signs about how Chimpy McHalliburton is the dumbest sack of crap in human history, yet also think he designed and pulled off the most complex inside job the world's ever seen.
It isn't a sound way to look at things.
I'd comment on the evangelical Christians line, but Independent George hit the nail on the head [and no, I'm not a practicing Christian].
I also agree with Instructivist's practical explanations here.
But Mark Morford has made himself famous with these sorts of screeds. Calling him an "envelope-pusher" is an understatement.
I read 300+ ed blogs every day. This story has come up on a few of them and not once has anyone pointed out the source. So, here's a glimpse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Morford
And from his SFGate bio:
"He also teaches yoga, subscribes to magazines, admires trees, detests shrill alarmism (including his own), sleeps naked. He has not seen your blog, but is sure it's amazing. He never wears sneakers. He writes about politics, pop culture, sex, music, design, a wry and punch-drunk universe, vibrators, scotch, media, spirituality and small European cars. And sometimes, genital grooming."
He's so edgy and cool!
So, if you want the truth, he's made a career out of being a douchebag for the sake of perverse art, vanity and entertainment. This isn't the first Morford instant-classic I've read [but it is the first on education]. He's not to be taken seriously, and it's my personal opinion that a fair amount of his work is pure fiction [that may or may not be right].
... yet the edublogosphere has taken him seriously.
Whoops, I hit publish before I was done.
Lots and lots of other people are taking this article seriously, too - not just the edublogs.
That the practitioners of public education are largely untalented [relative to the private sector], yet they still manage to shepherd the masses through either that maze they so deviously designed themselves
lol!
Good point.
Path dependency is real, though.
You should read Robert Putnam's book on Democracy one of these days.
So should I.
And I will!
I'm sure of it!
he's made a career out of being a douchebag
that is actually a new one to me
I am going to remember it, and use it whenever the occasion arises
To follow up on this piece - I do understand that this article reflects the opinions of just two people, and that it's meant to be provocative. But they're hardly alone in their thinking - there are a lot of people who have thrown up their hands at the perpetual and intractable problems we face in K12 education, and believe the country is on a downslide as a result.
I was just using the article as an intro to that discussion - not to use their anecdotal (and inflammatory) piece as the litmus test, but to see whether they're tapping into a truth that a lot of other people see.
And looping back further - no, I don't think there's some grand scheme to keep the masses down. I'd look at the flip side: that the business community backed the idea of universal education, but only wanted to fund it to a point that met their needs, which was to prepare people for moderately skilled mass production work.
That seems perfectly reasonable, and consistent with the self-interest mentality of business - funding something to the extent it meets your needs, not becoming altruists and providing unlimited funding so that people can self-actualize.
I'm with Brett (and Matthew as far as the article itself is concerned...)
The article doesn't necessarily tell us anything one way or the other, but anecdotal accounts are important. (Bayes alert!)
I've read the same reports from teachers at prep schools (wonder if I can find the one observation that was so amazing....)
We've had 20 years of constructivism taught in ed schools, and constructivism, I've realized belatedly, is the progressive education of Dewey and Kilpatrick twinned with the relativism of the 1960s.
Plus there is the sturdy phenomenon of path dependency.
We know schools declined from the 1970s to....the late 80s? (Not sure)
There's a real question in my mind whether decline is happening now.
It may be.
We are more aware of such cases as people who can't make change because we encounter them as clerks at fast food restaurants. We didn't pay them as much attention back when they were "down on the farm."
That's the thing!
Eighth graders on the farm appear to have graduated with better math skills than many 12th graders today.
(Must find the sample 8th grade test from the turn of the century...)
Eighth graders on the farm didn't go to high school a hundred years ago.
The March 11, 1930 N Y Times reports that in 1927-28 more than 50 per cent of high school age students in the US were in high school. This capped a rapid growth between 1915 and 1925.
10 years earlier it was only 30 per cent and 25 years earlier (the turn of the century) it was only 10 per cent.
I'm guessing eighth grade was similar.
My rural farmer ancestors in the late 1800's did go to high school and even on to college in spite of the fact that their elders weren't necessarily schooled. They learned Latin and Greek on top of it.
It probably all depended on what area you were from.
Irrespective of the high school attendance (or graduation) rate of a century ago, there is some data that basic skill mastery in literacy, everyday math applications and reasoning, has declined generally. An obvious source is the U.S. Army entrance testing data. The basic tests remained the same for many decades but over time there was a significantly higher percentage of enlistees/draftees who were rejected because their literacy and numeracy skills were too low. The most precipitous drop (if I remember correctly) was between those tested during WWII and those tested during the Korean War. During the Vietnam war the bar was lowered because of the need for manpower, and a cohort of low-scoring applicants was admitted (I believe they were nicknamed "McNamara's Morons"). As I recall, the drop in average achievement was most precipitous for blacks and other minority groups.
The ability to make change, understand simple measurement or money operations, read the label on a prescription bottle or a simple newspaper article are not skills typically taught in high school anyway. Now they tend not to be taught in elementary school either -- and THAT is the problem. "Exposing" children to knowledge is not the same as teaching to mastery, and doesn't deliver the same result. Now there are significant numbers of teachers in the system whose own grip on many of these skills is tenuous, compounding the problem.
Constructivism has been the order of the day for much more than 20 years. It was aggressively promoted in the ed schools in the 50's and 60's as well. Perhaps the diference now is that it has pretty well supplanted all other points of view.
Well, if the power elite did this, then Morford is claiming the Fundamentalist evangelical Christians did it, right? Isn't he now saying that through NCLB, Halliburton has taken over the dumming down of American Education?
Uh huh. Explains everything.
I don't really see how someone suffering from BDS is producing an argument worth evaluating.
It was aggressively promoted in the ed schools in the 50's and 60's as well. Perhaps the diference now is that it has pretty well supplanted all other points of view.
Interesting.
Slavin says that direct instruction (small letters) dominated ed schools around 20 years ago (though I wouldn't be surprised if it replaced a dominant progressive-ed content before that).
There's also a lag time between ed schools teaching a new philosophy and the old-timers retiring.
Hirsch puts the changing of the guard in the....1960s?
Can't remember.
I absolutely believe that's what we're experiencing here. All of the baby boomers are retiring and our teachers are in their 20s to early 30s.
Even if they're not "frank" constructivists they believe their job is to teach higher order thinking, and they don't seem to connect the ability to do higher order thinking to subject matter knowledge.
From where I sit, public education seems to be turning into one long opinion fest.
Sorry I didn't post on this earlier -- my firewall at work now blocks everything on blogspot at "potentially dangerous content."
As a San Francisco resident, I can attest that Mark Morford is an idiot.
He is a rave scenester that has spun his who's-taking-drugs with who musings into an general "it's all Bush and the patirarchy" style column.
But he's really more of a local gossip than anything more profound.
If you are interested in educational opinions typical of your local ectasy-dealer, he's your man.
If you are interested in educational opinions typical of your local ectasy-dealer, he's your man.
That is quite a recommendation!
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