This was on the Bridge Magazine website and then on Eaten By Ducks, and now hopefully here for the duration.
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In a school…you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.
— George Bernard Shaw, Parents and Children
In America today, the emotion most associated with children is not love or tenderness, but righteous indignation. Indeed, now that it’s no longer acceptable to refer to “our women” or “our darkies,” the phrase “our children” has become the preferred shibboleth of reformers, therapists, politicians, pundits, and other petty dictators. Anti-gun, anti-porn, anti-drug, pro-life — we may not have a chicken in every pot, but at least we’ve got a child on every poster.
Enter Diane Ravitch, education policy wonk in the Herbert Walker Bush and Clinton administrations. One day, Ravitch was going her happy, wonkish way, advocating national tests and excellence for all, when she had an epiphany: standardized tests, she realized, were fucking boring. Soon after, she discovered that textbooks weren’t any good either. She was, of course, shocked, shocked, and also appalled. As she herself noted, with touching naivete:
Like others who are involved in education, be they parents or teachers or administrators or journalists or scholars, I had always assumed that textbooks were based on careful research and designed to help children learn something valuable. I thought that tests were designed to assess whether they had learned it.
I don’t know about parents or teachers or “scholars,” but most students are perfectly aware that textbooks are stupid and that standardized tests are pointless. Ravitch does claim to have children of her own and was once, presumably, a child herself. Like many professional educators, however, she seems to have had those memories surgically removed.
Be that as it may, beneath Ravitch’s innocent veneer lurks a PR juggernaut. Reviewers have reacted to her latest book, The Language Police, with all the grim, self-satisfied enthusiasm of a school counselor diagnosing ADD. Ravitch boasts that she has yet to receive a negative notice, and she must be one of the few authors ever to earn accolades in both Mother Jones and The Wall Street Journal. This unanimity becomes more comprehensible once you realize that Ravitch’s book contains both numerous paeans to free speech and an ostentatious lack of bias, two qualities that appeal strongly to every journalist’s reptile hind-brain. Thus, The Language Police blames the failure of our schools on censorship, and goes on to argue that this censorship has been put in place by two of the most hated groups in our society — the politically correct left and the radical religious right. Meddling east coast do-gooders and ignorant southern Bible-thumpers have apparently formed an unholy alliance to scuttle plans for a rationalized curriculum.
As conspiracy theories go, this one is actually rather plausible. The far left and far right do have a strong negative influence on educational materials, with unfortunate, not to mention bizarre, results. It is in chronicling these that Ravitch is at her best. She explains how, in a national reading test on which she worked, a passage describing owls was rejected by a “sensitivity review panel” on the grounds that some Native American cultures view owls as taboo. A passage about dolphins was rejected because not all students live near oceans. The content of textbooks faces similar restrictions: Houghton Mifflin’s influential 1981 bias guidelines, for example, require writers to give equal representation to men with beards and men who are bald. And both textbooks and tests must avoid any mention of abortion, cockroaches, death, criminal behavior, evolution, politics, religion, etc. etc. etc. According to Ravitch, “Our nation prides itself on the principle of freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment…. Yet the practice of censorship…has been widely accepted for many years within the educational publishing industry as the normal way of doing business.”
Being outraged at this sort of thing is fun for everyone, and certainly the educational publishing industry routinely produces materials that combine the deft prose of appliance instruction manuals with the piercing analysis of a USA Today article. Still, fair is fair, and denouncing these companies for practicing censorship is ridiculous. Anybody who actually writes educational materials – as I do — knows that textbooks aren’t works of art. Nor are tests personal expressions of religious beliefs. They’re work-for-hire, like greeting cards or advertisements. Now, you can argue that forcing someone to read a greeting card for six hours a day is a monumentally inane thing to do. You can point out that making children memorize advertising copy is a fair definition of sadism. But you can’t very well cry “censorship!” because a greeting card is boring, nor can you blame the inanity of an advertisement on a violation of its creator’s Constitutional rights. As millions of Americans discover every time they turn on the Internet, free speech is not necessarily interesting or informative speech. Or, to put it another way, if given the opportunity to say whatever they want, people, and especially corporations, often choose to be vapid.
All of which is beside the point, since nobody actually believes in freedom of speech anyway. Certainly Ravitch doesn’t. As she puts it, “Clearly there must be some commonsense limitations on what people — especially schoolchildren — see and hear.” Ravitch’s caveats are more or less what you might expect: nothing “obviously pornographic,” no scenes of battle-torn bodies, no “sectarian readings,” no vicious racism or sexism. Ravitch justifies such strictures on the grounds of “good taste, judgment, and appropriateness,” and points to daily newspapers as a possible model for our educational materials. The suggestion that our nation’s famously ignorant, mercenary, and cowardly press should be touted as a blueprint for anyone or anything is worth a passing chuckle; even if journalists were in fact the paragons of disinterested wisdom that Ravitch seems to think they are, however, “commonsense” censorship is still censorship, precisely because one person’s “good taste” is another person’s abomination. Fundamentalists see much sex ed as pornographic; on the other hand, pacifists might argue that students should, in fact, be shown graphic images of what happens to the human body in wartime. The question, then, is not one of free speech vs. censorship, but of which career meddlers get to test their theories on the young folk — conservative yahoos like Jerry Falwell, liberal yahoos like bell hooks, or centrist government apparatchiks like Ravitch.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that, despite Ravitch’s claim that she “trusts teachers,” she recommends tighter state and national learning standards, and more government-sponsored testing: all practices which would limit options and stifle creativity far more effectively than do crappy textbooks. Still, it is a little hard, given the frantic jerking of Ravitch’s right hand, to figure out exactly what it is she thinks she’s doing with her left. If free speech isn’t what she’s got there, then what exactly is at issue?
Ravitch seems ignorant of the answer herself, which has the inevitable effect of making her pronouncements somewhat muddled. Often she conveys nothing except a desire to have her bipartisan compromise and eat it, too — as when, for example, in the same paragraph, she demands that history texts condemn human rights violations and avoid moralism,. At other times she is handicapped by not having any idea what she is talking about, as in her blithering, knee-jerk attacks on all of popular culture; or in her belief that our segregated, stratified school system would become an engine of social equality if only students learned more about the Founding Fathers; or in her dewy-eyed assertion that the blandly inaccurate Eurocentric textbooks of yesteryear were somehow superior to the blandly inaccurate multi-cultural textbooks of today. Still, there are moments when Ravitch does rise to rhetoric, if not to a rationale. Check out, for example, the moving statement of faith below, complete with swelling strings and a slow dissolve to the flag:
Not only does censorship diminish the intellectual vitality of the curriculum, it also erodes our commitment to a common culture. It demands that we abandon our belief in e pluribus unum, a diverse people who are continually becoming one. The common culture is not static; it evolves to reflect the people we are becoming. But even as it changes, it preserves the memory of ‘we the people’ in song and story; whatever our origins, we too become part of the American story, neither its first nor its last chapter. We are not strangers, and we do not begin our national life anew in every generation. Our nation has a history and a literature, to which we contribute. We must build on that common culture, not demolish it. As our common culture grows stronger, as we make it stronger, so too grows our recognition that we share a common destiny.
Beneath the overwrought, overfamiliar stump-speech, Ravitch is laying her cards on the table. Education, it seems, is not, ultimately, for the good of the individual student, but for the good of the “common culture.” We make it stronger, not the reverse. And for what purpose are we spending our time propping up this strangely feeble culture? Why, to better appreciate our “common destiny” — a sunlit, democratic future, presumably, in which every American will have the right to answer multiple-choice questions about Silas Marner and feel good about it.
Ravitch, then, is a visionary: as she says sneeringly of the Puritans on right and left, she wants to create a “perfect world.” Unfortunately, like many utopians, Ravitch loves humanity but doesn’t care much for human beings — at least not when they’re under 18. Despite her emphasis on the unhampered interchange of ideas, it never seems to occur to her that a student might have something interesting to say. Thus, she scornfully dismisses the practice of including student essays in literature textbooks, since, of course, no student writing could possibly be as accomplished as that of, say, a hack writer of clumsy thrillers like James Fennimore Cooper. So much for high expectations. Even more invidious is Ravitch’s assumption that each student is an interchangeable, hollow vessel, into which the state must pour expert-approved content, lest the student instead be “molded by the commercial popular culture.” Thus, Ravitch solemnly intones, “A child who is suffering because of a death in the family is likely to gain more comfort from reading a poem by John Donne or Ben Jonson or Gerard Manley Hopkins than from reading banal teen fiction about a death in the family.” To which the only possible response is, says who? And furthermore, is it really the goal of our educational system to proscribe how a child responds to tragedy? Are we now going to start grading our students on how they grieve? If that’s not a totalitarian idea, I don’t know what is.
Schools are, of course, totalitarian places. Ravitch and teachers everywhere always talk about “opening doors,” but it doesn’t take an overly bright child to observe that the doors of the school building are shut. We claim we want students to be creative and intellectually curious, but when they draw graffiti designs in their notebooks, or write about drugs or sex or suicide in their literary magazines, they are compulsively censored and often punished. There is a contradiction at the heart of our educational system between teaching children what to think and teaching them to think. Are we providing students with skills to pursue their interests and think critically about their culture and their lives? Or are we trying to make them think the way we do — to make them into Christians, liberal humanists, or Hemingway enthusiasts? This is one instance where there is no “moderate” position — we can’t have it both ways. If we want our children to be intellectually free, we need better-paid, more qualified teachers who have the time and resources to treat students as individuals with differing interests, aptitudes, and opinions. And if we want our children to be obedient drones, then the least we can do is stop our hypocritical whining about “freedom of speech.” The only thing worse than being managed by a bureaucratic functionary is being managed by a bureaucratic functionary who claims to have your best interests at heart.
I admittedly don’t know much about bell hooks, but what exactly makes her a yahoo, especially a counterpoint within yahoodom to Jerry Falwell?
Frankly, the whole idea that we have a “far left” in the US of any size or power is a tad ridiculous. The San Francisco Bay Area (where I live) probably contains half of the far left in this country all by itself, and even here it’s a minority.
Also, wouldn’t it make for a deeper and more penetrating analysis by far to directly consider teaching as an authoritarian act – as an exertion of authority? If we are to accept the institutionalization of the act of teaching, won’t we be healthier for having first struggled with the inherent problems in the institution itself? It seems to me that simply going straight to better pay and more autonomy for teachers fails to address the root of the problem – and addressing the root is always important, even if the problem turns out to be one we can only mitigate, not really solve.
All this tired whining about “political correctness” and branding of the left and right as dangerous utopians – as though “centrism” doesn’t itself propose a kind of utopia, and as though it’s somehow a great idea to stumble forward without a coherent vision of a better future to work towards – isn’t helping anyone. It’s not liberating anyone from oppression, freeing anyone from censorship, saving anyone from being shot, raped, abused, ostracized, exiled, tortured, providing anyone with healthcare or a safe livelihood.
You’re right in pointing out the utopianism of Ravitch’s blather. In a way, her sort of thinking represents its own fate worse than death: a bland puree of vaguely appealing bits from various political tendencies, blended without regard for any sort of logical rigor and designed not to really address pressing problems at their root, but rather to reassure the privileged numbheads to whom the whole vapid, flashy game of American politics is designed to appeal in the first place.
bell hooks is sort of ground zero for cultural studies. Cultural studies is problematic for some of the reasons Ravitch says — the goal of making everyone equal and offending no one and encouraging the wonderfulness of everybody’s specialness can get hard to take. Having said that, I actually like many of hooks’ classic essays — she has a great piece about Madonna’s appropriation of blackness, for example. I do imagine hooks is the sort of bugaboo ravitch is thinking about in contrast to people like Falwell. I personally have more sympathy for hooks than for Falwell — but I’m a lefty. (I have some sympathy for Falwell too, though. In some ways I’d prefer him to Ravitch.)
Parenting can be considered an authoriatian act too, if you want to go there (as Shulamith Firestone does — have you read her?) I think treating teachers as individuals rather than as glorified (or, really, not especially glorified) prison guards would be a big step towards ratcheting down the authoritarianism. My own son goes to a Waldorf school where there are 12 kids in the class. It’s not completely unauthoritarian…but it’s a lot more flexible and a lot less authoritarian than having him prepare for endless tests or spend his free time after school doing homework, or than just forcing him to sit still for hours at a stretch (as opposed to going outside regularly and jumping rope and etc.) And a lot of that ratcheting down of authoritarianism is, to my mind, because the teacher isn’t enforcing mindless bureaucratic dictates mindlessly, but is teaching a program he believes in, and which he can adjust to the students interests and needs.
I guess the point is — I’m not really an anarchist, I have a healthy respect for tradition. And kids do need to be civilized — which is kind of a violent act, but there are other people in the world and kids need to be able to deal with them with some respect, and there’s only so many ways to get them to do that. So given that, if the choice is between authoritarianism by bureaucratic functionaries with their souls crushed, or authoritarianism by individuals who retain a modicum of self-respect, I will unhesitatingly choose the second.
Waldorf school– isn’t that run by the Rudolph Steiner people?
Noah, I can confirm the depressing news that French pupils’ textbooks now suck as much as their American equivalents, and for much the same reasons…
Alex; yep it’s the Steiner people.
Eurhythmics every morning before class, eh?
More like once a week.
There’s a lot of Steiner’s philosophy I’m not especially convinced by. But for the school…. they have lots of running around outside (Chicago public schools have no recess), no stupid testing, and no homework (often CPS has homework every night even for 1st graders — just on principle I guess.) They’re also not insane about making sure the kids hit a bunch of arbitrary goals on some random timetable — part of no testing I think. And the student-teacher ratio isn’t 40-1.
And he’s very happy. He gets bummed out when school’s out for a day because he likes going so much. So that’s the main thing. Not too expensive as these things go either. I’d definitely recommend it for people looking for alternatives to the lousy U.S. public school system.
Waldorf isn’t still teaching whole language learning, is it? That was a major misstep back in the 70s.
Chicago public schools have no recess? Huh? For ELEMENTARY SCHOOL kids? Are the administrators morons who’ve never spent 5 minutes around an actual child?
Anthroposophy is hardly scientology, so good for your son…didn’t mean to sound critical. Actually, whatever criticism I’ve read of Steiner, none attaches to the Waldorf schools. Is their pedagogical approach similar to that of the Montessori schools?
A teacher once told me that kids aren’t in school to learn so much as to learn how to learn. Makes sense to me…too late to help me, alas.
Hey Charles. They are more or less whole word I think — or at least, they don’t push reading. My son’s basically taught himself to read by what appears to be whole reading method, though, so the debate’s pretty academic as far as I’m concerned.
Caro, I think there are liability issues — and they want to do test prep. But, yes, it’s insane. And CPS is held up as a model for the nation, remember.
Whole reading makes a lot of sense for the English language, which has the most batshit insane spelling ever spawned; would make no sense for Italian, which is strictly WYSIWIG in its spelling.
It’s odd, Noah; you attack Ravitch, but you don’t much disagree with her. Wassup with that?
That’s ‘WYSIWYG’, actually. Lo siento.
I disagree with her fairly strongly. I don’t have problems with right wingers teaching their kids creationism, for example. And I do have problems with the idea that there is some sort of moderate consensus that bureaucratic functionaries can feed our kids which will strengthen our nation.
Moderate pragmatists are as evil, or more evil, than the folks they love to hate on the left and the right. Ravitch is right that our textbooks suck. She’s wrong that she can write a better one. She doesn’t want kids to think. She just wants them to think the way she wants, just like the folks she’s sneering at on left and right. That pisses me off.
Hmm, I do have problems with teaching children creationism: first, it harms the child; second, it spreads falsehood, and I tend to agree with Kant that that’s an evil in itself; finally, it makes them less fit as citizens to make decisions about the world.
BTW, Noah, I’d forgotten you wrote textbooks. I understand better your disgust with the McCleod book, ‘Understanding Comics’. I guess you dislike it for being a) bad cartooning, b)bad theorising…but also c), bad textbook!
I don’t see how it harms the child. People believe all sorts of ridiculous things.
I think evolution is as true as the theory of gravity, which is quite true. But if you think otherwise, telling your kids so isn’t lying. And I just in general think the baseline assumption should be that parents care more about their own kids than nameless government functionaries or random strangers care about those parents’ kids.
Perhaps, but a trained biology teacher knows more than most parents. And yes, I think that inculcating a child with a false world-view is harmful to him/her.
I mean, a parent might sincerely believe the Jews are out to destroy civilisation, as well.
Yes, but that’s evil because it actually is going to directly harm people, or at least can potentially. It’s an ethical question. Creationism is ontological, by definition even. You’re not going to put anyone in gas chambers because you think the world is only 4000 years old. Of course, christianity has been used for evil purposes…but for that matter, evolutionary theory has been used in terribly evil ways.
If you’ve ever actually been taught by trained teachers…well, presuming they know anything in particular is perhaps overly optimistic.
Well, yes, I have been taught by “trained teachers”; this will sound snotty, but I went to the Lycée Français de New-York, the Institut Florimont in Geneva, the Lycée Français de Londres– three of the top schools in the world; then I went on to the Sorbonne.
Yes, it’s privilege, and who can expect an inner-city public school to match their resources?
My point is that there is such a thing as excellent teachers, and knowledgeable ones. They are expensive, which is where privilege comes in, and hence injustice.
When I think of some of the wonderful teachers I had! Signora Auti in Italian, Mr Fielding in English, Monsieur Van der Poel in drawing…my gratitude is immense.
They were both persons of immense culture and pedagogues of the first water. They combined a demanding rigor with a perpetual creative excitement.
Noah, you seem to believe the teachers at your son’s school are first-rate…so why this cynicism?
Incidentally, have you ever heard of Giordano Bruno and the Holy Inquisition? Of Galileo?
Of the many, many teachers denied promotion or forced out because they dared to put truth and service before the political expediancy of catering to ignorant religious bigots?
I’ve read a bit about Galileo, sure, and Bruno. I don’t think the moral of those stories is always necessarily “Church evil; we must fight for scientific truth always and those who don’t believe in it must be shunned.” You’ve heard of Nazi experimentation and Christians hiding Jews during the holocaust, right?
I think conflating scientific questions with ethics is really problematic, and has historically led to bad things. I don’t really care if people don’t want to believe in evolution. They want to opt out of biology classes, that’s fine. (I do very much dislike the idea of teaching creationism in public schools, though.)
There are many good teachers. Even the good teachers in the school where I was growing up were shockingly, almost ludicrously ignorant even in their subject area, though. Science is taught so badly in public schools that I almost wonder if it even matters whether evolution is taught or not. You could argue that the best way to make sure no one knows anything about creationism is to make it mandatory in American public high schools.
Well, see, that’s a joke but it’s rather cynical.
Look at Wisconsin, New Jersey…teachers are really getting it in the neck.
It is cynical; I think it may be true.
The attacks on teachers by policymakers are despicable, and more about anti-union animus than anything. Teachers are in a horrible position; even those who have the ability and inclination to do better basically can’t for all sorts of institutional reasons.
I actually think it would be a big help to make school compulsory only for the first five grades, and provided as a public service after that. That would allow for more diversity and fewer fights about curriculum higher up, both of which would be very helpful. The main thing anyway is to teach kids to read and basic arithmetic (which incidentally we do a crappy job of.)
To be honest, I think at the high school level we could get away entirely without teaching earth science paleontology and paleobiology, which are the most controversial bits. You could probably re-focus almost all the time spent teaching biology in high school period toward a more rigorous chemistry and physics and maths curriculum and wait until the freshman biology survey to teach evolution at all, and the students would be better off than they are now, knowing a cartoon version of biology and not enough chemistry to form even a rudimentary understanding of what the biology cartoons mean…
I keep waiting for JR Brown to show up and lower the hammer; she’s a research biologist…
But lord science textbooks in high school are crap. So, so useless. Why not just have them read popular science books? If students read “The World Without Us,” for example, they’d know more about environmental science and evolution than they ever get in four years of science courses. I mean, yes, they wouldn’t know the equations — but they don’t know the equations anyway!
how long has your kid been in waldorf, noah?
it’s a lot of fun. my experience is that they have an inner circle of teachers and some parents that is somewhat cultish and obnoxiously conservative, and practices anthroposophy, but that doesn’t really filter down very much. i went to waldorf school in princeton nj for 3rd thru 8th. even the cloistered (and somewhat hypocritical) “don’t talk about tv or mass culture” policy they had at my school, i’ve come to view as more damage control than willful sheltering. my experience of public school wasn’t miserable either (mainly because i hardly did any work and got away with a lot of bs that somehow went un-noticed and undisciplined) but my years at waldorf were great, overall.
He went to preschool for several years, and this is his first grade year.
I think different Waldorf schools are different. Ours is quite laid back about media as these things go, and just generally quite reasonable. And yeah, the kids love it, which is the main thing.
Glad to hear you had a good experience with it!
The notion that parents care more about their kids than their teachers do is a nice thought–but wrongheaded in many cases. Kids with caring and attentive parents can teach themselves to read, whole language or phonics be damned…Kids with no books in the house, who have never been to a library, etc. have a much harder (or near impossible) time doing so. Schools are often quite useless for kids with attentive caring parents—It can be a good place to socialize for them, perhaps, but not particularly useful in terms of actually learning things. Kids without any of this at home actually need school as a place to read, write, etc…in addition to (perhaps) learning critical thinking skills. Skills, not information, can actually be taught at schools…but the mania for testing and the fascist overseeing of teachers (trying to script their daily interactions with very different groups of children, for instance), are more often geared for more easily measurable (if basically useless, because easily forgotten) “information.” As Anja points out, way up there–basically good teachers makes for good education–but the low wages, overwork, and basic disrespect for the profession makes good teachers a fairly scarce commodity
I agree with all that…except I think it’s pretty dangerous to assume that parents care less about their kids than random strangers, even if the random strangers are caring, loving teachers.
Some parents can be terrible, there’s no doubt about that. But teachers can be terrible too. On the whole, you just have to assume that the parents care the most until you get major contrary evidence.
noah: “I think different Waldorf schools are different. Ours is quite laid back about media as these things go, and just generally quite reasonable. And yeah, the kids love it, which is the main thing.”
I’m sure there are a lot of differences between the various schools, and it’s also worth noting that I went there a long time ago: I started in 1988. Hope your son’s experience there is as good as mine was.
Seen plenty of contrary evidence over the years…but yes, of course, many teachers are bad…So are many parents. It’s the kids with neglectful parents that most need good teachers, of course–but schools stupidly often put the best teachers in the “gifted” classrooms, or the schools with the most parent involvement….presumably in order to avoid the complaints of “active” parents. Lousy teachers are often relegated to poor schools with disadvantaged students. And, of course, idiotic government bureaucrats legislate in favor of this idiocy by allowing for or pushing private school vouchers and assessment based pay raises. It’s a matter of daily despair…
Noah, if ever you lose your job, this chap’s got the solution:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/