Russ, a reader from Pennsylvania (and all-around good guy), sent me this email in response to yesterday’s post. Messages this good make me wish I had a comments feature.
I’m glad to hear Oppenheimer has written a new book. I think his ideas are really essential to trying to get a handle on why our current education fixes aren’t getting to the root of the problems, and well-meaning advocates from both teaching ranks and administrators, liberals and conservatives, have screwed this up.
I had some doubts concerning the actual usefulness of computers in K-12 education in relation to their perceived usefulness back when the Internet went wide, and Oppenheimer’s earlier piece in The Atlantic gave those doubts some substantive evidence. My take on the larger education crisis is that we cannot effectively educate our populace today because we lack a suitable and convincing “narrative” or “purpose” to justify the necessary expenditures of time and work needed to become an educated people. The narrative of “become educated to get a well-paying job” is insufficient. That has been modified to something approaching “become educated to stay abreast of the high-tech information economy.” That’s also insufficient, in my view. Neil Postman’s book The End of Education put forth a few proposals for replacement narratives, but I didn’t find any of those compelling.
Yeah, this whole computer thing is suckering a lot of school districts into spending a lot of money on technology and, subsequent staving off of obsolescence — and that’s not to mention the misspending of precious instructional time. The kids of rich or successful families can afford this misallocation of resources; they’ll still receive the time and attention in and out of school to make up for the time not spent wisely in front of a computer screen. It’s the poorer kids who will likely suffer the most, despite their families being told that this technology would level the field.
I think there’s some hope for a wider discussion of the education narrative question. In his column which ran locally Monday, William Raspberry reviewed a book about the achievement gap and noted that a huge obstacle in overcoming the gap is the lack of a convincing rationale being presented to many African-American youth to justify the toil of education. They’re not falling for the “good job” hook. This raises the larger question that leaves me awestruck: assuming we could find a replacement narrative satisfying to a plurality of the interested parties, how do you go about inculcating that narrative into the schools and the culture at large
As I told Russ, when I was teaching freshman comp, I would always do a unit on “cultural literacy,” which was my way of forcing students to confront (if not accept) the rationale behind the traditional liberal arts education (“liberal” in the classic, non-partisan sense). Freshman comp was an interesting avenue for such a discussion, as it is the only course required of all UT graduates — the first of the many “Basic Studies” requirements undergrads typically encounter, often begrudgingly. I don’t know if my unit “worked” or not, but I always valued the discussion it would generate. 90% of my students thought of college as grade 13 — as the next, burdensome step toward a high-paying job. So many are so firmly written into that cultural narrative Russ has described.
I find myself stuck in an odd position: I want to be a classroom teacher, but the tight job market and the “business” of graduate teaching assistantships has left me working instead in Instructional Technology, a field about which I feel ambivalent, at best. I see occasional flashes of value in what I do, but at times I wonder if my salary (and my overhead) could be put to better use elsewhere. It’s a sticky issue, to say the least.