Remembering The Good Old Days...

(Remembering Today)
By Bryan E. Hall, MPW

School Days, School Days Good old golden rule days... Reading and writing and rithmetic, Taught to the tune of a hickory stick... These lines used to be sung with a positive reminiscence by young people who had completed their education, despite its difficulties. The song did not conjure up mentally incapacitating trauma from days gone by of physical abuse and overly demanding educators. Instead, most people of this era review the experience as character building. The methods have all but disappeared slowly but surely since the sixties, when it was apparently decided that disciplinarians and those with high demands were damaging self-esteem, etc. A whole new vocabulary of enabling replaced the ageold classical assumptions that learning has not occurred if it has been easy. Not to blame all of the current rash of violence and sex on the failings on current educational methods, but it is all related to a general sense of guilt which parents and authorities throughout history have felt, the guilt of the executioner. For many years, the gunmen of the firing squad were given one bullet among several shooters, so no one man would feel the guilt and one could therefore deem himself innocent of the act, in some strange way. The same guilt has always existed, and the methods that accompany the guilt have varied. Mothers have said, Wait until your father gets home. As schools consolidated and enlarged, teachers deferred corporal punishment to the principal, or schools created Deans of discipline, Assistant Principals, etc. to hand out the sentences and the punishments. The teachers, after all, did not want to be viewed as policemen, pigs as they were called by the anti-establishment politicos who had gained notoriety. In these economically charged late fifties and sixties, though mothers were, in ever increasing numbers, entering the work force, America was developing a new class of bourgeois, the beatnik or hippie. They were usually considered college students who were simply expressing their freedom of speech, outrage at the repressive regime which perpetuated war and violence, Peace, Man. The popular assumption effectively disregarded the notion that many of these activists were simply kids who did not have a job, go to college, contribute to intellectual product or, really anything other than smoking pot, and having sex at respective Woodstock arenas. These young people were a product of a very fortunate society. They had come to view themselves as invulnerable. After all, with only a haircut and a few interviews, they could at anytime, join the establishment they opposed.

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In the sixties, with the onset of the prevalence of divorce, images of single mothers entered popular consciousness, mostly through television, now that few of the working class read books. Some of them worked, and others were posed as victims of adulterous men who consequently paid vast child support and alimony so the mother and children could continue to live in the style to which they were accustomed. The image of the unmarried single mother, needing not a man, had not been considered quite yet, but would follow. Though many have blamed Dr. Spock for the enabling characteristics of child rearing established during this period, he was but a reflection, a concrete validation of the attitudes that the guilty had finally rooted in popular policy. Many of the hippies became teachers. Most became parents. Quickly, they came to power in the bureaucracy they had opposed. These new principals and boards of education, and the parents who would support them, were a fertile market for a Doctor, who by his own admission, had not the credentials to self-proclaim expertise, as a child psychologist. However, he simply told this generation what they wanted to hear, and he sold a lot of books. This made it official. Let your children make their own decisions, express their creativity without your repressive structure... and If you dare lay a hand on your child, you are an abuser! These became the war-cry of the peaceniks, the huddled masses yearning to make love, not war. Dr. Spocks books are still best sellers, despite his own admission of failure at raising his own children. The methods have become entrenched in the K-12 educational establishment, and now have a variety of very impressive nomenclatures. Inclusion and Student-Centered Learning became catch phrases to justify a variety of enabling behaviors by teachers. The teachers who had successfully implemented techniques, which seemed to satisfy these new standards, were held up as proof of their superiority. If we could only duplicate these models of success, became the goal of the new establishment. The result was many mediocre teachers lacked the talent or intelligence to understand or implement these newfound models. However, they used these terms to justify their having turned over their responsibilities to the students. The NEA (National Education Association) who had become one of the largest unions and political lobbying organizations, was successful at further codification, as these practices were the center of teacher education at most institutions. Those who did not espouse these methods were called old-fashioned or conservative which had become a code word for fascist, just as liberal had become the code for communist. The polarity of factions ran traditionalists out of K-12 public education, and into private schools and into institutions of higher learning, where today they still lecture, test, and exclude students who fail to maintain discipline. Meanwhile, the pipeline of K-12 had become full and began graduating students, who reversed the trend in standardized testing. Walter Cronkite, the most credible and popular news broadcaster in the world, opened a broadcast with, Johnny cant read! as the focus of a report on the fall of literacy and college entrance examination scores. The response of the educational establishment was blame on funding, a lack of required certification by states, and an increase in crime. The latter of which, was at least partially to the credit of the educators who denounced it. In the late seventies, the SAT, the leading college entrance exam, lowered its scale in the form of scoring modifications and question difficulty. Though they had only

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been a reflection of the failure of K-12, they had become the bearer of bad news and the establishment had to kill the messenger, blaming them for racial and sociological bias in their testing. This technique was very successful in vilifying all but the teachers, in this period of enabling that produced a new set of double-standards for women and minorities (which combined had become the political majority.) Student-Centered Learning and Inclusion had become for most, an excuse for appealing to the lowest common denominator (LCD) in the classroom. Excellent students were dominated by poorly disciplined students who had been positively and sympathetically labeled as under-achievers or attention-deficit disorder (ADD), both categories of which, certainly legitimately existed. But, in the name of additional funding, an entirely new and ever-enlarging infrastructure developed. Publishers, politicians, and certified mediocre teachers found a new method to fill their pockets, justify their votes, and guarantee their jobs respectively. New textbooks which consisted of far more lessons and pages, subsequently of a higher price, addressing a variety of interest based lessons, began to dominate the market. The basics were considered outdated and insufficient. Those who supported the teaching of classical material were actually blamed for the failure, as they were assumed to be lacking of the modern methods necessary to compete in the new world order. The modern education regime fell under ever-increasing scrutiny, and they found new ways to firm their hold on K-12. They encouraged lawmakers to raise the standards by requiring certification of a larger number of teachers. Many experienced teachers, insulted by the insistence on re-education, left the profession or moved to colleges and universities to teach and/or advance their own educations for other professional fields. Corporate training became a lucrative field because of the gap left by inferior K-12. Remedial courses were introduced and expanded at colleges as a necessity to make up for the inadequacy of preparation. K-12 public education was left with the miserable enjoying their own company, and a few committed traditionalists who enjoyed a good fight. The inferiors developed new ways to justify their existence, creating new tests, which biased their evaluations. Even less emphasis was on subject productivity as they were scurrying to prove their success despite their failure. However, even on these tests for teachers and students developed by the very people who caused the inferiority, the evidence of comparative decay advanced. In the eighties, computers surpassed books in the educational economy. Books became thicker and graphic appeal, style, became more important than content. The attempt to make reading easier, and more interesting with pictures, drew the educational process closer to making and watching movies, which was far more popular than learning. People were more willing to pay for entertainment than education, as the financial markets would prove. Desktop publishing put more emphasis on the look of the writing. Grammar and spell-check did, in fact, help to confront the failing of education, by increasing the productivity of their now illiterate employees. However, schools were pressured by marketing and popular opinion, to incorporate all of the capabilities of computers and calculators into the classroom. Though corporations would have preferred a higher level of literacy for its employees, it was more expedient in the short term to maximize productivity by replacing people skills with computing power. The educational mediocrity establishment found yet

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another tool to create the illusion they were the leaders in thinking. They could use computers to aid them in subject area, where they lacked expertise. After all, by now, the average teacher needed more and more education courses in order to keep up with the modern trends, at the expense of higher academic degrees. There became a distinct competition and separation between teacher training programs and academic departments. Schools of Education had long ago been created to allow less emphasis on subject areas and more on methodology. The computer was the ignorant teachers best friend. Even a poor educator could create portfolios using desktop publishing capabilities, which made them look like experts. After all, no one included their failures in their portfolios. Poor students could learn to operate computers or calculators and pass tests, justifying their social advancement. However, when push came to shove, they still failed tests that evaluated their long-term learning and acquisition. Today, the field of K-12 public education, and the infrastructure that feeds most of private K-12, is filled with people that have no long-term memorization skills, justifying their failure to teach long-term subject material. The focus is on style over substance. Teachers unions are desperate to keep the jobs of those dues paying members who perpetuate the downward spiral. Publishers and computer-makers continue to encourage that which sells more product. There have been many studies that reinforce the notion of old fashioned, high expectation, disciplined learning. They have been systematically discounted by those incapable of using such techniques. Immediately after the famous, Johnny Cant Read report, the government commissioned the Coleman Report, named for its legislative sponsor, who led the study. The results were pervasive to suggest that expectations were directly proportionate to results. Some examples included an increased expectation of performance on the basis of color, the whiter the higher. There was a correlation between height and performance; socio-economic scale, being attractive, many areas otherwise considered irrelevant to educational performance. Still, teachers had allowed these characteristics to affect their expectations of students, and those on the negative side of these scales, were given less attention, expectation, and consequently, performed disproportionately poorly. After all, this study had only told them something educators had known for a while from an accidental experiment known as the Rosenthal Effect. A teacher in the United Kingdom had received test results for a group of students and was informed the interpretation of the scores were in reverse to the actual findings. She believed the best students were the worst, and vice-versa. The following year, the performance of the best students fell, while the worst students experienced marked improvement. It was only in retrospect that they were aware of the effect of this unintended deception of the teacher, the reversal of institutional prejudice. The political response was that of denial. Many interpreted the results as racist, or unfairly discriminatory in various categories. The most important element of its findings was that expectations increased results. The palatability was skewed by the denial of teachers of their basic institutional prejudices. Politicians did not want to touch it, so they defaulted to the status quo, and changed nothing in curriculum. Instead, they simply increased the practice of standardization of techniques that did not work, and amplified their collection of self-justification with more emphasis on short-term testing and

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portfolios of successes. Still, the classroom time committed to additional learning, comprehension, and long-term acquisition and application, has taken a back seat to the reinforcement of justifying current methods. Recently, the US State Department and Department of Education sponsored studies of the increasing gap between Asian countries and the US in Math and Sciences in particular. The results were astoundingly simple. They found students were encouraged to learn the basic properties of Math without the use of calculators. They analyzed textbooks and found they had fewer lessons but that more time was spent on each lesson, creating memorization of usable structures, which they could readily apply to more specific situations. Instead of learning the various obscure permutations, they learned the basics and assimilated new methods from them. They observed the classrooms in Asia and found distinct differences as well. Teachers in the US, when giving tests, would focus on making the tests easier to pass when students had difficulty with previous ones. During tests, if students would ask questions, they would simply answer them, sometimes actually answering the question of the test, skewing the intended evaluation. During subject communication, they would tailor their demonstrations to the order of questions from the students, rather than offering the material in a logical predetermined order. Asian teachers instead, when asked a question, would ask the question back, or ask the student to think. Before an examination, the teachers would write THINK on the board in the front. If students failed a test consistently, or scored below expectations, the teachers would take this as their own failure and teach the lesson again at a higher level of difficulty. The most notable difference was that Asian curriculum included classical sources rather than having replaced the basics with modern experimental approaches, unlike their US counterparts who constantly used the classroom as a learning laboratory, and their students as guinea pigs. The incorporation of computers in Asia has been a careful process, maintaining the ability of students and teachers to do things manually, while maximizing their presentation interest with graphic appeal. Teachers use the computers to more adequately prepare material, but students are discouraged from using them to substitute their cognitive processes. They are emphasizing computers as tools for communication and research. The Japanese have especially begun to save money on duplication of library resources, supplying most schools with entire libraries on CDs or with networking. The emphasis is on using the computer to find material, but not to think for them. Technology and curriculum methodologies are not the only problems however. Most states in the US have created a huge and sometimes insulting certification bureaucracy. A person with extensive experience in their subject area, even someone who has been teaching at a corporate level for many years, using the highest productivity teaching methods, proven by free market mechanisms, cannot receive appropriate credit for their knowledge and experience. When we add to the equation, Affirmative Action Standards and quotas, bilinguality requirements for English teachers and a variety of hurdles that have never been proven to enrich learning, it becomes even more difficult for someone with even the most blatant qualifications to obtain a position. When these candidates learn of such artificial standards, they are intimidated and insulted. The result is, a person who is bilingual, certified and speaks English as a second language, and may very well score

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poorly in their native language, will be hired over someone who majored in English, has advanced degrees and may very well have taught college or corporate English. That is assuming such a qualified person even applied for the position. The US can learn now, and ACT, as it has failed to for the last forty years. States can liberalize their certification requirements to encourage more subject area expertise and less emphasis on specific teaching methods that do not work. This will attract many professionals back to the grade levels where they are desperately needed. They can give more autonomy to administrators to hire the best person qualified for a position, rather than the person who best satisfies the bureaucracy with their minority status, or lock-step ratification of the state standards. They can learn from the methods of the Asians and Europeans, both of which outperform the US in most categories in K-12. Most of all, they can get back to the basics of providing discipline as a foundation of learning, encouraging individual responsibility of students for self-discipline, and increasing not the requirements, but the real expectations of students by the teachers. Finally, teachers can get back to the job of teaching instead of creating accountability standards and pretentious evidence of their success, which, in the end, reduce learning. Education can once again be truly student-centered and inclusive by approaching subjects with the broadest, most universal components common to lifes real experiences. Math students will once again learn that numbers are things we use to count REAL things, not just digits on the calculator. Liberal Arts students will once again learn how to analyze things as to their human impact, rather than for their graphic presentation on a computer. Consequently, the mind of the student can be once again stimulated with purpose for learning, and have reasons to remember what they learned in the good old days, today.