From the Empirical Archives: In Search of a Good Teacher

In Search of a Good Teacher

Jaime O'Neill

Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Empirical

“The teacher is like the candle which lights others in consuming itself.”
—Giovanni Ruffini

“I am not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead–ahead of myself as well as of you.”
–George Bernard Shaw

Not long ago, I stopped at a local bakery for coffee and a bit of pastry, accompanied by my wife and visiting daughters. A woman ahead of me in line said hello, and though I recognized her face, I couldn’t place her.

“Do you know where you know me from?” I asked.

“I took English from you,” she answered.

That comment is always a little fraught with tension because, when I can’t remember a former student, there’s a possibility that person left my class with bad feelings caused by a bad grade. Sometimes, they just didn’t like me, or they hated the fact they were required to take the course I taught, and they blamed me for that requirement.

Over the years, whenever I was at a party where people were making small talk by asking one another what they did for a living, I had grown sheepish about admitting that I taught English because, more often than not, the reply was, “Oh, I hated English when I was in school,” followed by the confession that they weren’t good at it, though they rushed to assure me that they had excelled at other subjects.

In other words, they fell back into the role of being students again, and casting me as the teacher, a person to whom they had to make excuses.

The woman in line at the bakery was kind enough to tell me how much my course had meant to her, and I made the awkwardly appreciative noises one makes at such a time. And, as we talked, I gradually began to remember her, albeit a bit dimly. She was that rare student in community college, one of those who always turns up for class, is always prepared, always does the work. Most probably, her assessment of my skills as a teacher owed as much to her dedication to her studies as anything I did or didn’t do in that class she took from me. Good students are often likely to give the teacher credit for things they did themselves, and poor students are more likely to blame teachers for the things they, themselves, did not do. They would have studied harder if the teacher had been more interesting, or they would have been more conscientious if the teacher had somehow convinced them that this stuff mattered.

I spent most of my working life as a teacher, sharing what I’d learned about language and literature from those who had taught me. I took several dozen classes in order to acquire the degrees that allowed me to presume I had something worth hearing to students who signed up for the courses I taught. By rough estimate, there were 320 of those courses, taught over a span of four decades spent in classrooms at four different colleges. Figuring a low-ball average enrollment of 20 students per class, that figures out to well over 6000 students, nearly all of whom have evaporated from memory. Similarly, the teachers who taught me are mostly forgotten. Those professors who still hold a place in my recollections are a mere handful of truly exceptional people–both exceptionally bad and exceptionally good. The good teachers served as role models for what I should do when I began my own teaching career, and the bad teachers lingered in memory to remind me of what I should avoid doing.

The exceptionally bad were conspicuously lazy, determinedly dull, or utterly unmotivated, dead to all enthusiasm for students or for the subjects they taught. If there had ever been fire in these people, it was lost by the time I sat before them in classes I was required to take, or had signed up for because the material seemed interesting until I learned it was being taught by people who no longer found it interesting themselves.

I sometimes wonder how many students sampled certain subjects and then rejected entire disciplines simply because of one bad teacher who turned what might have been a lifelong passion into an abandoned intellectual exploration.

Fortunately, the truly bad teachers were few, but then so were the truly great teachers. 

My experience on both sides of the lectern has brought me to the conclusion that 10% of teachers are simply awful, 10% are truly inspiring, and the rest can be found somewhere along a sliding scale between those two poles. Those in that broad middle are varying degrees of serviceable, people who can convey information, organize material, administer tests, and evaluate student performance. But few of them are likely to be remembered by former students, and even fewer have the capacity to reawaken curiosity and the keen desire to learn that is so often squelched by the dull routine found in far too many classrooms fronted by sausage grinder teachers who crank out students from whom the natural desire to learn has been successfully extracted. Uninspired and uninspiring teachers inadvertently teach students  that serving the system supercedes substance.

They teach students how to play the game, subordinating learning to racking up points awarded for complying with whatever systems of measurement the teacher or the school have contrived to evaluate student performance.

Rather immodestly, I count myself among the “good” teachers, though I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that self-assessment. But, if I wasn’t as good a teacher as I’d like to think I was, it surely wasn’t for lack of trying. The job consumed me, woke me up nights, made me toss and turn with worries or with ideas for things I wanted to try. Like parenting, teaching can always be improved upon, and each new semester provided the opportunity to finally get it “right,” an elusive and perhaps unachievable goal. If there was a single student I felt I hadn’t reached, or a day when I couldn’t seem to capture their interest, those failures took up residence in the back of my mind, often overpowering whatever successes I may have had. Though it will seem immodest to say so, I think that the nagging sensitivity to the prospect of failure is one of the primary reasons I can call myself a good teacher. I’ve known more than a few colleagues who seemed not to care too much about whether they succeeded or failed at the task of actual teaching, an attitude of indifference that ensured their status as not very good teachers.

Throughout my long classroom career, it was common for students to ask me to recommend other teachers I thought were especially good. Most of the time, I evaded the question, telling them how difficult it was for teachers to assess one other. After all, we were seldom, if ever, in one another’s classes. Someone who seemed interesting in casual conversation in the faculty lounge or at a staff party might turn out to be a martinet or a malingerer in the classroom, one of those who shirk their responsibilities by dividing students into little learning circles and then letting the blind lead the blind while he or she circulates among them like a supervisor on an assembly line.

These are the people who eschew the word “teacher,” redefining themselves as “facilitators” as a way of doing less. There’s lots of stuff offered as rationalization for this approach, anodynes for whatever bouts of bad conscience might afflict teachers who have found this way of evading the time and effort of classroom prep, or the energy required to bring off an engaging lecture or maintain the thread of an engaged classroom discussion. Because it decreases the demands of actual teaching, the “collaborative learning” approach is persistently peddled at teacher conferences, and it’s a pill that goes down easy, eagerly swallowed by those who really don’t like teaching all that much.

Many, maybe most, of the people who make their way into ranks of education management are teachers who didn’t make a good “fit” in the classroom, people who beat a hasty retreat from contact with students in favor of better paid jobs overseeing their former colleagues. In their new roles, they hire consultants, form committees, draft mission statements, attend conferences, count various varieties of beans, and issue occasional documents defining just what constitutes good teaching. At the highest levels of ambition, these former teachers scrambled out of schools entirely, making their way to political appointments, or garnering national attention by proposing “reforms” that nearly always boiled down to less power for teachers, and more “accountability,” which always meant defined “outcomes” that could be charted on graphs. Perhaps the only real purpose those graphs served was to make the case for effective management because, when the “outcomes” spiked upwards, that was always a cause for administrative self-congratulation.

And, in these realms, way leads on to way, ever farther from students and classrooms, ever closer to the abstractions and numbing clichés that constitute the talk of educrats who take as their model the captains of business and industry, and who come to think themselves entitled to comparable pay.

So it is that we have a system of higher education in California, for instance, where university presidents and chancellors command salaries larger than the one earned by the President of the United States, where tuition costs rise along with those administrative paychecks because, we’re told, talent this rare cannot be purchased for less.

And, as these corporatized academic CEOs proliferate, so does the view that education should emulate the business model. As that view gains dominance in “the ed. biz,” the less measurable “outcomes” continue to make themselves plain as we grant degrees to people who cannot find jobs, or who leave their colleges weighed down by levels of indebtedness that will blight the very futures they’d hoped to brighten by seeking advanced degrees in the first place. That doesn’t matter much because the system is still churning out “product,” granting degrees to ever more students.

The fact that the broader system doesn’t know what to do with all that product is of little concern to the people who run the colleges and universities, but maintenance of their pay and perks surely does, and lots of their time seems to be spent schmoozing with their trustees and boards to keep that notion firmly in place that without people like them in charge, the system just might not be so good, and that people like them need to be paid handsomely or they’ll take their balls and go home. And they’ve got some pretty big balls, no matter their gender, because they make these claims in a job market where nearly everyone else is taking hits, and in the face of lots of criticism of just how well their leadership is serving either students or the society that pays their salaries.

If the ratio of good teachers to not-so-good teachers isn’t as high as everyone would like, we might begin by looking at the people who are creating the environment for teaching, and defining just what teachers are supposed to do.

Over the course of four decades spent in classrooms, I’ve known lots of people like Michelle Rhee, the former Chancellor of the Washington, DC school system. Rhee has gained mega media attention as the latest savior of American education. She’s made the cover of Newsweek, won accolades from Oprah (a kind of secular sainthood), and she was the heroine of Waiting for Superman, a well-intended documentary that played upon the audience’s legitimate sympathies for DC area students trying to win a lottery to get into better schools, and out of the bad schools they’re in. Rhee has emerged as the Joe Arpaio of ed. reform, anointed by the media as a tough-talking woman who cares only about students, and who is willing to take  on lazy, incompetent, and indifferent teachers in order to better serve them.

Which is all well and good, I suppose.

Who wouldn’t support that narrative, especially in the current climate, where unions–especially public employees unions–are so consistently vilified and scapegoated for woes we are suffering? Who is not against lazy and/or incompetent teachers? And who is not in favor of giving young people the very best possible education we can provide? Who wouldn’t oppose unions, portrayed by Rhee and the opportunistic politicians who praise her, as special interest advocates for less work, more pay, and bad instruction? After all, in the popular script Rhee reads from, unions do little beyond gouging taxpayers and protecting the jobs of bad teachers.

Americans are suckers for bad narratives, any tale that neatly compacts our problems into a fable featuring heroes, villains, and victims. Ronald Reagan got lots of traction laying the blame for government deficits at the door of “welfare queens” while masterfully overlooking the engorged defense budget. And the debate over health care was muddied by bogus stories of death panels that imperiled “grandma.” Similarly, Michelle Rhee’s rise to prominence has been buoyed by the story she’s telling, one in which she is cast as the brave heroine, willing to take on the bad guys who, unlike her, are not putting students first.

Throughout my own decades of “putting students first”–reading millions of their words, correcting their mistakes in writing, listening to their excuses as well as their legitimate woes, struggling to find ways to engage their interest and keep their attention, attempting to build their confidence, worrying about their attendance, fretting over grades, and sharing what I knew about writing–I also taught classes in literature. When I started teaching, I believed in the power of stories and, after all those years in the classroom, I believe in that power even more. Stories can convey understandings in transformative ways, allowing those who read or hear them to see things in clearer perspective, more refined nuance, and greater depth. But stories can also be used to sentimentalize, oversimplify, or perpetuate misconceptions and lies.

Even big lies.

Each of the years I worked as a teacher began with a series of mandatory meetings in which administrators much like Rhee would tell assembled faculty members their business, providing lectures for people who dealt with students every day delivered by people who’d decided that dealing with students every day was just not their cup of tea. It always galled me to be told to value students by people who didn’t share my experience in valuing them daily. That gall rises in a similar fashion when I turn on cable news to see Michelle Rhee talking about how so many teachers are sub-mediocre, and the standards for teaching so low that “anyone with a pulse” is welcomed to our ranks.

As it happens, my youngest daughter is a middle school teacher in Sacramento. On some nights, while my daughter is grading papers, doing classroom prep, or an assortment of other duties, Michelle Rhee can be found at a Kings’ game, squired there by her hubby, the mayor. While Rhee gains accolades for her willingness to denigrate hardworking teachers, my daughter, and most of her colleagues, volunteer time and money to make up for the budget cuts that chip away at their ability to put students first. These teachers do that work while incurring and enduring the kind of disrespect nourished by ambitious and self-serving people like Michelle Rhee.

Education needs reform. I’ve never known a time when that wasn’t so. But, generation after generation, the calls for reform lead to scatterbrained and scattergun “programs” touted in thousands of conferences for “educators,” forums to which teachers are seldom invited. Led by bureaucrats who mostly stand apart from the process of teaching and learning, these confabs bring up ideas that get discussed, briefly implemented, then discarded in favor of the next new orthodoxy. The leadership circles of the ed. biz promote fads that boost careers, but in the trenches where the teachers are called upon to enact the latest notions and also, incidentally, deal with the myriad personal demands of actual students, the struggle to teach young people is engaged and successes are routinely achieved. That work gets done, often in spite of the burdens imposed by educrats who keep reinventing wheels and finding substitutes for the passion that motivates real teachers and facilitates real learning.

Though Michelle Rhee has a few words of criticism for the often bloated and overpaid administrators who oversee the educational enterprise, her primary message is to blame the troops, not the generals. There’s not much new in that story, though it draws an appreciative audience every time it gets told. It’s difficult to see, however, ways in which insulting generalizations glibly offered by storytellers like Michelle Rhee are going to create legions of better teachers. Sweeping indictments of teachers don’t make the task easier for the people who occupy the ranks of a profession people like Michelle Rhee fled from long ago.

Back in the 1980s, I was asked to serve on a panel of “educators” assembled by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, headed up that agency at that time, and she’d selected me to serve on that panel not because she had any idea at all about my qualities as a teacher, but because something I’d written about education had attracted her attention. That’s usually how it goes whenever educrats assemble panels, whether at the national level, or at the local campus. Administrators gather little posses of the like-minded from their own ranks, add a token teacher or two, people selected either for their qualities as toadies, or because they’ve earned some recognition that usually has little or nothing to do with what they do when they’re with students, and then they have some chats and collect some data based on an agenda set by the “chair,” who then has the results written up in a report never really meant to be read by anyone. 

These circle jerk confabs always involve lots of studies of studies, lots of “breakout sessions,” and more jargon and cant phrases than you’re likely to hear anyplace this side of the Pentagon. Jargon is almost always dehumanizing, and the language used to discuss education is no exception; the phrases are mechanistic and abstract, borrowed from the worst bins of sociology. This specialized language betrays a mechanized and largely dehumanized approach to learning. It’s also mostly stupid in the way that jargon always tends to be stupid, replacing clear and concrete ideas with numbingly pretentious abstractions designed, it seems, to make what is obvious seem more profound and/or scientific. Go to a meeting or a conference of “educators,” and you’re going to hear words and phrases as soul depleting as these: criterion check, differentiated instruction, constructivism, extrinsic motivation, formative evaluation, standards-based teaching, summative evaluation, verbal-linguistic intelligence, visual-spatial intelligence, manipulatives, attitudinal assessment, and cooperative learning.

This sort of language issues from the graduate-level courses in education teachers or would-be teachers are usually required to take in order to earn credentials. Few people in their right minds would take such content-free courses by choice, of course, but administrator wannabes flock to them, nonetheless. Perhaps you’ve heard that old joke that makes the claim that PhD stands for “piled higher and deeper.” When it comes to education as an academic discipline, that ain’t no joke.

So, if you’re looking for what defines good teaching, the last place you’re likely to find such a definition is where good teaching goes to die.

When I was a junior in high school, my English class was assigned to read The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s early 20th century novel about working conditions in the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking plants that galvanized public opinions in ways that ultimately lead to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. We also read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, and poetry by Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and William Shakespeare. This was not an honor’s class, I hasten to add. If it had been, I wouldn’t have been in it because both my grades and my attitude precluded my presence in such a class. I also read the James Joyce story, “The Dead,” that year, as beautiful a piece of prose as I would ever come across in the half century that was to follow. Miss Luebbing, the woman who taught that class, instilled in me a love of reading that would reward me through all of my days after high school, an invaluable gift. Would I have developed the habit of reading had it not been for the stroke of luck that put me in a room with such a teacher? Perhaps. But I know far too many people whose curiosity or love of reading were killed off at the hands of bad teachers to take away any credit away from Ms. Luebbing for the joys I’ve since found between the pages of books.

In the years since I sat in her classroom, I’ve taught college-level English to a couple generations of high school graduates. With each succeeding year, I’ve seen fewer and fewer of them who enter college having read anything as challenging–or as interesting–as that old Upton Sinclair novel, let alone Shakespeare or James Joyce. Many of my students over those years told me that they’d never been required to read a novel throughout their high school years, and some of them bragged of having gotten their diploma without ever having cracked a book at all.

I took a look at Emerson’s essays as I was getting ready to write this little piece, and I also dipped back into The Jungle for a few pages, and I know from experience that the sort of vocabulary found in those texts would confound most college students these days, in part because what they have been asked to read has generally been dumbed down with readability formulas that expunge any vocabulary that is likely to be unfamiliar. And, because it has been expunged from what students are asked to read, it remains unfamiliar.

I’m certain that back when Miss Luebbing was exposing her students to the thoughts of a man then thought to be one of America’s thinkers, much of that vocabulary I encountered was unfamiliar to me, too. But, as I did the work that learning requires, some of those unfamiliar words adhered to me, enlarged my ability to understand things, and broadened by capacity for further learning.

There are, I have no doubt, teachers like Ms. Luebbing in schools across America, though people as inspiring as she was will always be exceptional. But everything I read, see, or hear from students convinces me that it is more difficult than ever for the really exceptional teachers to challenge students in the way Ms. Luebbing challenged–and changed–me.

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From the Empirical Archives: Aldous Huxley Revisited

Aldous Huxley Revisited

Hugh Mercer Curtler

Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Empirical

A few years before I retired from college teaching, I was asked to direct a freshman course designed to introduce new students to the university. It was a one-credit course that met for one hour each week. I was especially excited about the academic portion of the course which focused on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I have always thought the novel was a great book–not great literature, as Huxley himself admitted, but remarkable for its prescience and the well-told tale that holds the reader’s attention and raises so many provocative questions.

My plan was to have a professor from English, biology, psychology, and philosophy each talk about the novel from the perspective of their particular disciplines. I thought this would not only give the students insights into the novel itself, but also give them an idea how different academic disciplines approach problems: killing two birds with one stone.

Well, like a stone tossed into the air, the plan fell with a thud. An astonishing number of the students couldn’t read the novel: they couldn’t understand the words. Many of them bought “Cliff Notes” and some of them complained they couldn’t understand those either. Others simply didn’t bother to buy the book at all; many students just dropped the course. Very few actually seemed to enjoy the experiment. We started with over two hundred students and ended up with a little over one hundred. The course evaluations filled out by the remaining students were nearly unanimous: what does this have to do with me?

I would like to take the opportunity in this short essay to answer that question. I think Huxley’s novel has everything to do with not only those students, members of what some like to call the “millennial” age, but also about all of us and, more to the point, about our culture. The book is set in the future in London, but it applies to all of Western culture and, increasingly, many Eastern cultures as well.

Let me begin by alluding to another provocative book written in 1985 by Neil Postman, to wit, Amusing Ourselves To Death, in which he promises to discuss the question whether Huxley might have been right in his predictions in the 1930s about what was to become of Western culture. In his “Foreword,” Postman contrasts Huxley’s remarkable book with Orwell’s equally remarkable book, 1984. I shall largely ignore what Postman said about Orwell, but will take a quick peek at what he said about Huxley since it is most apt and provides an excellent point of departure.

In America, especially, we love to boast about our freedoms, which we would insist are numerous. But I often wonder if it is possible that this freedom is merely an illusion. Huxley certainly suggests that it is. We have a great many choices, but we seldom think about those choices. Freedom would seem to presuppose some sort of thought process, not just unfettered reaching and grabbing. Is it possible that our conviction that we are a free people is a delusion? Is it possible at the very least that we are bound by invisible chains we are unaware of to the gadgets that make our lives easier?

In Huxley’s view, Postman tells us, “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” Anyone who claims it is possible to remain free despite their inability to think is indeed deluded. Moreover, “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” Further, Huxley feared that we would be so inundated with information that “we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalence of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.” Now we don’t have those specific diversions, but we do have Disneyworld and its imitators; and we have countless games, around the clock sports, and “reality” TV. And if you live in the vicinity and have a spare $150.00 you can enjoy a “simulated killing of bin Laden experience” in a Minneapolis suburb that will leave you so jazzed up you will have trouble falling asleep the night after. Or so I am told.

In a word, “As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’” In 1984, Postman added, “people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we loved would ruin us.” With this as a preface, I will return to the students’ question: what does this have to do with me?

The fundamental similarity between Huxley’s world, and ours is that the sole purpose of human life in Brave New World centers around experiencing pleasure, which we too have come to identify with happiness. As is the case in Huxley’s world everything in our world has been jettisoned that might stand in the way of our enjoying ourselves. Sex is readily available with no strings attached. Marriage is becoming passé. We have limitless entertainment. We are not permitted to suffer. We are rapidly losing the desire to read. History is bunk (or “irrelevant” as the kids like to say); and if we are sick or sad we can just take a pill. . . . or two. Or we party hardy.

The novel predicts a day when citizens can flee from pain and anxiety by popping a pill. The citizens of Brave New World fill their lives with endless diversions and vapid gratifications, immediate and shallow–but certainly not fulfilling. It’s all about doing their thing, whether or not it’s worth doing. Indeed that question is never raised. History is bunk, of course, because the only thing that matters is the present moment and the pleasure that can be milked from that moment. The citizens of Brave New World have “ . . . no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think.”

There are no meaningful human relationships, and communities are tied together artificially by means of community sings, free sex, and heaps of Soma. The community matters because the brave new world cannot stand individuals, that is, those who stand apart. If the individual dares to assert himself, he is deported to an island where he cannot bother others who are intent on making sure they never have time to think or experience genuine human emotions.

Let’s consider the dialogue between Mustafa Mond, the Controller of Brave New World, and John the savage, a late-arriver who has spent his early years on a savage reservation in far-off America trying unsuccessfully to fit in and finding solace by reading Shakespeare. In one of the late chapters of Huxley’s novel John asks Mustapha, “Art, science–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness. Anything else?” 

Mond replies, “Well, religion, of course…” 

And the conversation proceeds apace. But let us pause. Have we also sacrificed science to pleasure or happiness? Of course we have. We have done it in two stages: we first reduced science to technology, ignoring the “why” question that is central to theoretical science and focusing exclusively on the “how” question which is key to the technical approach to solving problems, easing pain, and making our lives easier. Among other blessings, this reduction has delivered to the world in excess of 80,000 nuclear weapons, a fraction of which can end all life on earth. And we have no idea why but we continue to produce them not knowing how we would ever use them. But for most of us the technological imperative translates into reducing stress and avoiding pain at all costs while we mindlessly pursue diversions that will fill our empty lives. In the second stage we have allowed pseudo-science to pass for the real thing and even to be taught in the schools. An alarming number of high school biology teachers, for example, teach their students that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. And then there is “creationism” posing as science in many schools–officially sanctioned in Texas–and the various biological fictions that lead half-witted politicians who deny climate change to speak with a straight face about “legitimate” rape.

We have also replaced religion with “pop” psychology, the analyst’s couch, and the escapist “religion” of the televangelist, and so many of the “free” churches that have sprung out of thin air. The idea here is to get in touch with our inner selves and to replace the uncomfortable demands of traditional religion–which requires sacrifice and self-denial–with feel-good sessions every week in which parishioners are told that all is well with the world and they should climb back into their SUVs or pickups and go on doing just what they want in the name of Jesus who loves them regardless (though we’re not sure about those damned secular humanists. And we sure as hell can’t stand the homosexuals).

But we need to think seriously about the elimination of all pain and suffering in our version of brave new world. We take it as a given that this is a good thing, but the savage may be right: it’s too easy. We might be much better off if we struggled and suffered a bit more, strange to say. Fyodor Dostoevsky, for one, thought suffering made us more human and was the only possible route to real human freedom. If we don’t suffer, we float along on the surface of human experience and never really feel the deprivations and losses that deepen our perspectives and bring us closer to one another and to our common humanity.

Furthermore, as we are now finding out, a society that revels in animal pleasures will rarely produce a Jane Austen, a George Eliot, a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Dostoevsky, a Beethoven, or a Dante. All of these people suffered during their lifetimes and many of their greatest creative inspirations came as a direct result of some of the darkest moments in their lives. Dante, for example, wrote The Divine Comedy while exiled from Florence where his family was held captive. Mustapha Mond thinks the sacrifice of great art and literature is worth it. The savage who knows his Shakespeare disagrees.

In a word, the brave new world we would create which eliminates pain and suffering is worthy of denizens of an ant-heap (as Dostoevsky would have it); it is not worthy of human beings. That, it seems to me, was Huxley’s point in writing this novel, and the fact that young people could read the novel and wonder what on earth it could have to do with them tells us that the chains Huxley points to which bind them are indeed invisible to them. These people seek amusement and are easily diverted; that is all they ask of the world in which they live–just as Huxley feared.

Among the many parallels with Huxley’s world, we too have become a society of people who want what we want when we want it. I have always thought a major step we took in our culture toward the brave new world was the credit card, strange to say. It came on the scene in a large way in the 1950s and within ten years had pretty much become a necessity in every pocket or pocketbook. In itself it is merely a convenient way to make purchases. But its significance is worth contemplating: it translates into immediate gratification. We no longer have to wait for anything, we can have it now. “Have any of you been compelled to live through a long time-interval between consciousness of a desire and its fulfillment?” asks Huxley. No indeed! It doesn’t matter if we can’t pay: we have plastic. But what have we lost in the process? What price have we paid? Anticipation greatly increases the delight from the receipt of a thing long awaited. And the discipline that comes from postponed gratification helps build character in our children. We tend to forget these things.

In the end Huxley saw clearly what was coming; we have realized in so many ways precisely the delights that those denizens of the ant-heap in Huxley’s world reached out for and grabbed with little or no real effort. And we have become just as shallow. It is ironic (but not puzzling) that many who read Huxley’s book fail to see its implications.

I suggest, however, that it is not Huxley’s fault; it is ours alone. In this regard it might pay us to take a closer look at those students who wondered what this novel had to do with them, the representatives of the “millennial” age (or “Gen-Y”), many of whom find novels like Huxley’s hard to read and/or irrelevant to their lives.

A new study of “Millennials” summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education tells us a great deal. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and was conducted by Jean M. Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University. In the minds of many, the newest generation of young people now attending high school and college were the hope of the future, committed to helping others and making the world a better place. They would surely clean up the mess we are leaving behind. Unfortunately it happens that the generation that was supposed to be “we”-oriented turns out to be even more “me”-oriented than the generation that produced them.

The study shows that, contrary to popular opinion, those born since 1982 are increasingly self-absorbed and unconcerned about others or their environment. They are focused on “money, image, and fame” rather than such things as “community involvement or acceptance by others.” Countering the popular image of today’s youth as engaged, high-achieving, confident, and concerned about their world, Twenge rejoins, “I see no evidence that today’s young people feel much attachment to duty or to group cohesion. Young people have been consistently taught to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves.”

The article appeared in a recent issue of the Chronicle because educators were being alerted that the students in their classrooms may not be the least bit interested in what they are being taught. This will come as no surprise to the men and women in front of those students who have become increasingly aware that it’s all about entertainment and dumbing down the curriculum to disengaged students. I saw it happening before my eyes in my 41 years of college teaching. I mentioned above my unfortunate experience with the freshman course, but I can readily recall other examples. As the years went by since I started teaching in 1964, I simply could not ask the students in 1990 to read the same material I routinely required twenty years previously.

Their reading skills were seriously lacking and their interest in and openness to new ideas was practically nil, though there were occasional exceptions that kept me hoping. We should not be surprised if the young people growing up today are self-absorbed. After all, theirs is the world of “self-esteem” in which they have been told since day #1 that they are great and can do no wrong.

Indeed, they have developed an iron-clad sense of entitlement that leads them to the conviction that they are the only ones that matter and they deserve only good things. They are the spoiled product of busy families and our child-care and education system that demands little and rewards greatly. The chickens are coming home to roost.

But this study has important implications for more than just the teachers around the country who must figure a way to get through to increasingly disengaged, self-absorbed young people. It has ramifications for society in general. As Twenge says, “Having a population that is civically involved, is interested in helping others, and interested in the problems in the nation and the world, are generally good things.” But this is not happening. These young people are “more isolated and wrapped up in their own problems. It doesn’t bode well for society.” In a word, the individualism that Huxley hoped would save the Brave New World has in our world turned into ego-centrism, which is not the same thing at all.

At a time when we need people who can see beyond the stunted world of self to others and the larger world, it is unsettling to learn that the trend is in the opposite direction. What the world needs now is not more self absorbed egoists, it needs heroes whose attention is directed outward and who care about the world and people around them. Let’s hope enough of them continue to sneak through the cracks the system has put in place to make a difference.

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From the Empirical Archives: Paradigm Lost by Emmanuel Williams

Paradigm Lost

Emmanuel Williams

Originally published in the January 2013 issue of Empirical

Most of our ways of doing things–our priorities, processes, and systems–are increasingly dysfunctional. We face huge problems environmentally and economically, and we don’t seem to be able to collaborate to solve them, or even agree that they exist. We urgently need to break our habits, to disrupt our patterns. We need a new paradigm.

I’ve spent nearly 50 years working as a teacher with all age groups in countries all over the world. For most of my life I have, like all teachers, been working to create the future. I now believe that if we are to have any future at all then two things must happen: There is a worldwide, spiritual revival. We revolutionize our schools.

A worldwide spiritual revival is God’s business. A revolution in our schools is way beyond my aegis, but I do want to talk about it. I don’t have major answers to propose; I intend rather to raise some issues, consider some possibilities, and include ideas I’ve come across in my reading.

Currently I work as a poetry-teacher member of California Poets In The Schools. Most of the schools I teach or have taught in are organized and run in ways that no longer work. The factory-style school is obsolete. As Diamantis and Kotler suggest in Abundance: “The industrialized model of education, with its emphasis on the on the rote memorization of facts, is no longer necessary. Facts are what Google does best.”

Children learn best when they have at least some freedom to decide what they are doing, when they’re interested in what they are doing, and when they feel safe and valued. Most schools, however, give students little or no freedom to choose what they do, and most students most of the time aren’t interested in what they’re doing in the classroom. (According to the research, boredom is the primary factor behind the rising drop-out rate among American high school students). Most teachers like their students (if they don’t they shouldn’t be teaching!) but at the middle and high school levels particularly, because of the increasing size of their classes, they are unable to give individual students the time and attention they need. Also, most teachers I talk to are less motivated than they used to be. Their freedom to choose what they teach according to the abilities and interests of their students has been drastically curtailed, and their effectiveness as teachers is measured largely by test results, a totally inadequate criterion. Additionally, children are spending more time in the media-rich, addictive world of cell phones and video games and TV than in the much less stimulating environment of the classroom with its tests, grades, and homework assignments.

So our schools aren’t working. I believe that even if they were working within the parameters imposed upon them by schemes like No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top, they’d be failing, because the parameters themselves are no longer relevant. Our systems of education are based on what Sir Ken Robinson, in Out of Our Minds, calls: “… one dominant way of thinking–the verbal, mathematical, deductive and propositional…. intelligence as a linear process of rational thought.”

When I stand in front of a room full of teenagers for the first time I ask them what they think the purpose of writing poetry might be. “You have the right to know why you’re expected to work at something in a classroom,” I tell them. Often someone says that poetry is a way of expressing feelings. I agree, and ask them if their feelings are important–“Yes!”–and if their feelings are often acknowledged in classrooms–“No!”–Then I ask if anyone knows the differences between the left and right brains. Usually someone does, and we put together a description of the two hemispheres and what they do. “Which hemisphere do you think is dominant in school?”–“Left!”–“What happens to any part of your body you don’t use?”–“It doesn’t develop.”–“So now you have two reasons why writing poetry can be of value.”

I talk about answers to left and right brain questions. “A left brain question usually has only one right answer. How do you spell because? Who is the president of the United States? Right brain questions don’t have single correct answers. Here’s a right brain question: What happens on page 27?”

I ask the question, and wait. And wait. Silence. Students gaze at me blankly. “There’s no right answer. You create the answer. You decide for yourself what happens on page 27. It’s no good looking at me and telling me you don’t know. Of course you don’t know . . . ”

Finally someone says something like: “Joe dies.” Laughter ripples around the room, but I take this answer seriously and explore it. “Joe dies” is the opening of a door. Our purpose is to step through the door and find out what’s on the other side. “How old is Joe? Where is he when he dies? Why does he die?” Almost invariably the moment arrives when the student takes charge of the story. Joe becomes real. The tale becomes real in its unfolding, and everyone in the room is absorbed.

The spirit of creativity is indestructible.

But, like curiosity, it’s buried more and more deeply the more time children and young people spend in school. Tony Wagner, in Creating Innovators, writes: “Anyone who has spent time in an elementary school classroom knows that every student starts school with unbounded imagination, great curiosity, and creativity–until he or she learns that knowing the right answer is far more important than asking a thoughtful question.” It’s alive, yes, but its potential is far from being realized. Creating a character, for example, working out how the needs and circumstances of that character generate tension and therefore a story…thinking deeply and writing a poem about a tree or a hand, discovering metaphor or symbol… these are unfamiliar acts for most students, and I find that my students’ early efforts are mostly thin. I remember teaching in an elementary school in North London in the mid-sixties. It was the era of the Open Classroom. I had a big room up at the top of the school; there was an art center, a music center, a science center and a writing center all in the classroom. There was no boundary between play and work.

The level of the children’s creativity was extraordinary, because they did creative stuff every day. They exercised and developed their creative muscles. They got good at it because they worked at it. Such work, I’m convinced, should be an integral part of the school life of all children and young people.

Why? Daniel Pink gives us part of the answer in his book, A Whole New Mind. Work that involves left brain linear thinking, he says, is increasingly being taken over by automation or by relatively low paid, technically adept workers in developing countries like China and India. What the economies of developed countries like America, Japan, and most of Europe need are people who can innovate, who can think outside the box. The success of the big Silicon Valley companies attests to the truth of this. We need young people who ask good questions, who are willing to risk failure, who collaborate rather than compete, who have higher aims than acquisition. Pink adds that “creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving” are the skills that “have been repeatedly stressed by everyone from corporate executives to education experts as the fundamentals required by today’s jobs.

They have become the new version of the Three Rs–the basics of what’s been recently dubbed “21st-century learning.” I often tell students the story of Rene Descartes–one of the pioneers of modern left-brain thinking–waking up from a dream in which he saw (or experienced) himself bent over to the left, as though his left brain with its self-referential–“I think, therefore I am”–was so monstrously developed it pulled him physically off-kilter.

Creative work should be an integral part of our education system, because without it children and young people develop lop-sidedly. I’m always grateful to be invited into classrooms and to be given time to do what I do, but I also feel uneasy, because administrators and teachers are thereby allowed to believe that they’ve ‘done’ creativity. Creativity isn’t a subject, it’s an approach, a way of thinking. It seeks connections, relationships, wholes. “We need a new Renaissance that moves beyond . . . old categories,” says Ken Robinson in Out of Our Minds, “and develops the relationships between different processes rather than emphasizing their differences.”

So, for the sake of their balanced development, AND for the sake of the healthy growth of our economies, we need to give children ample opportunity to exercise their creativity. Just one of these would be reason enough to revolutionize our educational system. But there’s a bigger reason…If the new paradigm is to emerge, I believe it must be shaped by young people. The world has changed too much for middle-aged and older folk like me to see clearly what needs to be done… or, if we do see it, we’re not visionary enough, not idealistic enough, not fierce enough to bring about real change. We’re too deeply ensconced in the box to be able to think outside it. We can see, many of us, what’s not working; we see what needs to be changed, but I really don’t think we can do it. We can pass along some practical, worldly advice. We can, at best, help young people avoid making some of the mistakes they need to make to learn from… but I believe that the most valuable thing we can do at this point is get out of the way.

If it’s true that young people will need the qualities we’ve considered above–creativity, curiosity, collaboration, etc.–to play an important role in shaping the new paradigm, what else will they need? In his book Future Shock, written in 1970, Alvin Toffler looked at how our educational system would have to be modified to meet the challenges and needs of the future. Young people, says Toffler, must learn to trust their inner “steering,” or power of guidance, which will make possible the right choices out of a wide range of new concepts and values. With this firm footing, in a world full of constant change and unforeseen situations, they are able to put information back in order, or in new order; verify information; move from the concrete to the abstract and back again; consider problems from many different sides.

I’ve known many students who had this quality of “inner steering.” They like and respect themselves. They know who they are and where they’re going, partly because they know their talent or their talents. I consider this characteristic of inner guidance to be crucial.

Can schools help young people discover or develop this inner guidance? Is this a matter of respecting what A.S. Neill, founder of the famous Summerhill School in England, calls “the god in each child”? I remember talking to a young Scottish teacher who visited a school in Ecuador years ago because she was impressed by what she’d read about it and wanted to witness it for herself. She said, “Being with children who were so strongly themselves brought me closer to being who I really am.”

I think the inner evolution of children is beyond the scope of what a school can properly influence. This domain is too subtle and, in a sense, too vulnerable for ‘outsiders’ to enter. What’s important is that we be aware of and respect the inner space of the child. As children grow in strength and purpose, as they become familiar with their environment and trusting of the adults around them, then they will be free to follow their will, their impulses. This, I believe, is how they develop the inner guidance Toffler spoke of. “For the activity that makes its way from inside to outside, we as educators must provide a corresponding outer room and learn not to stand in the way in it.”

Rebecca Wild, who, with her husband Mauricio, founded and ran the aforementioned school in Ecuador, wrote a brilliant book, Raising Curious Confident Creative Children. I quote this passage from her book because it crystallizes much of what I’ve been exploring: When children are truly occupied, involved in an activity, each shows his or her individual character; in the manner of movement, in way of talking, laughing, expressing pain, or making contact with others. If we try to suppress the strong sides of a child, to convert it to our adult perspectives as quickly as possible, to get it to become an analytic and reflective thinker, the child comes to lose its natural curiosity. The child’s senses become dull, apathetic, “insensible”; its inborn practical intelligence goes undercover, only to reappear later in undesirable ways.

To sum up: we need to bring about a drastic change in our public education system. We need to nurture creativity and curiosity, the ability to think critically, ask searching questions. We need young people who have developed the ability to think both logically AND creatively, and who have an inner strength, a capacity for self-guidance. We need to awaken (or rather not put to sleep!) what Rebecca Wild calls “the active search for comprehension.” I think this is doable. Reforming the public school system will probably take too long, but establishing schools (or, as I’d rather call them ‘learning centers’) within the Charter School movement is quite possible. They’d be schools based on what I once heard described as the “theory of diminishing crutches”–to the extent that students show that they are able to direct themselves and take responsibility for their own learning, to that extent the supervision and control (but not the authority) of the teacher is withdrawn. We need to be around. They need us there, for support and encouragement. But we need to get out of the way.

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From the Empirical Archives: Homeschooling, Creationism, and Citizenship by Gina McGalliard

Homeschooling, Creationism, and Citizenship

Gina McGalliard

Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Empirical

Education has become the hottest of topics in our public discourse. There is much talk about dropout rates, failing schools, the quality of teachers, and how falling standards in American education will eventually affect our ability to compete in the global marketplace. But absent from the debate is a phenomenon that has grown rapidly over the last few decades: homeschooling. In 2007, The US Department of Education estimated the number of homeschoolers at approximately 1.5 million–a larger population than charter school students, and marking an almost half-million increase from 2003.

Unlikely Roots

Although homeschooling has exploded in popularity in recent decades, prior to the enactment of compulsory attendance laws in the nineteenth century, it was common for children to be taught at home. Today most homeschooling parents are conservative Christians who say religion is a primary reason for not enrolling their children in public school: a survey by the US Department of Education found that 83 percent cited providing religious or moral instruction as a major factor in their decision to homeschool, although other reasons were given, such as wanting to provide strong academics and keeping their children away from negative peer influences.

Oddly, the birth of the modern homeschool movement began with the countercultural left in the sixties. Educator John Holt was an advocate of “unschooling,” which he described as child-directed learning without the use of any specific curriculum. Although unschooling adherents were usually hippie types, a friend of Holt was Dr. Raymond Moore, a religious proponent of homeschooling.

An interview on the Phil Donahue Show in the seventies by Moore alongside Dr. James Dobson piqued interest in homeschooling among evangelical Christians. Christian homeschoolers were much more politically active and numerous than their leftist counterparts, and with the help of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), founded in 1983 by two homeschooling fathers, restrictions on homeschooling in many states were loosened.

However, homeschoolers are by no means a monolithic group. There is a strong minority of secular homeschoolers who have their own curricula, conventions, and organizations. Religious homeschoolers include students who attend secular public and private universities after graduation, those who attend religious colleges, and on the furthest end of orthodoxy you have followers of Christian Reconstructionist or Quiverfull philosophies, who often eschew college entirely.

Today, homeschooling regulations vary widely from state to state. On its website, HSLDA divides states into four categories: states not requiring parents to give any notice to authorities of their decision to homeschool, low regulation states that require parents to notify but have no further oversight, moderately regulated states that mandate parents submit test scores or other evaluations of student progress, and high-regulation states with additional requirements, such as curriculum approval or home visits by officials. The total number of states that have either no notification requirement or are labeled low-regulation is 24, while the number of high and moderate-regulation states is 26. However, in all cases, homeschooling allows parents the most control over their children’s education, more so than any other educational option, by allowing parents to choose which curricular materials their children will study.

The Homeschool Marketplace

As their numbers increased, an abundance of materials specifically targeting homeschoolers was published, particularly for the Christian majority. Curricula advertised as having a Christian perspective–often called “worldview” in homeschool lingo–are plentiful, such as Alpha Omega, Bob Jones University Press, A Beka, Apologia, My Father’s World, Veritas Press, Bright Ideas Press, and Christian Liberty Press. Although not as numerous as their religious counterparts, secular homeschoolers also have plenty of options, such as Calvert, Saxon, and Pandia Press, and some elect to use publishers often used in public schools, such as McGraw Hill.

So what does a Christian perspective mean? “A Biblical perspective of education would depend upon the Bible as its main textbook,” says Ellen Dana of the Moore Institute, founded by Dr. Raymond Moore. “That does not mean that the Bible is the only textbook you would see, it means that the concepts of the Word of God would be drawn into all the subjects that you’re teaching.” For instance, Alpha Omega offers a penmanship course that teaches students handwriting by writing out Bible verses. Many publishers also offer Bible studies along with subjects such as math, English, and history.

A brief survey of more conservative curricula reveals some differences in what would be taught in public schools, most notably in science and history. The importance of Christianity is emphasized in many texts. For instance, the second paragraph on the first page of Heritage Studies 5, published by Bob Jones University Press, reads, “The geographer who is not a Christian can discover the wonders of the world, but he will miss the wonderful testimony of God in nature. He will probably also draw some incorrect conclusions. If he accepts evolution as a fact, his estimation of time will be off by millions of years.”

In New World History and Geography: In Christian Perspective, a social studies textbook published by A Beka, stories of missionaries and the spreading of Christianity is woven heavily throughout the text. “Indians were made in the image of God, and after Adam’s fall they inherited fallen human natures. All are in need of Christ as their Savior. Some of the best friends of the Indians have been missionaries. . . . They knew that there is a God Who made the world and all that is in it, but they did not know what He is like. They thought there was one Great Spirit who ruled over many other gods or spirits. Their ignorance of God’s nature led them to the evils of idolatry.”

History is also told from a conservative political slant, and President Kennedy’s New Frontier program is described in negative terms: “Under President Kennedy, government welfare programs were expanded to gain more votes and expand the influence of liberal politicians. Because it is human nature to try to get something for nothing, Americans saw the government borrow more and more money to try to take care of people with needs.” The Clinton administration gets a worse review: “In many ways, Bill Clinton set the tone for America–one that denied principals of honesty and integrity. Many Americans throughout the 1990s turned to alcohol, drugs, and material goods to make them ‘happy.’ The crime rate increased in suburban and rural areas–where many Americans raised their families. Gambling was made legal in more areas of the country, and immoral behavior became even more popular.”

The issue of evolution continues to be an important issue for many evangelicals, and many homeschool science textbooks are written from a creationist viewpoint, such as Exploring Creation with Biology, published by Apologia, and the fourteen volume Wonders of Creation set and Dinosaurs by Design from the publishing house Master Books. Answers in Genesis is another company dedicated to creationist-themed products–for smaller children there is the The Days of Creation Art Book, and for older ones a complete curriculum titled God’s Design for Science. The company also offers a DVD questioning the validity of global warming titled Global Warming: A Scientific and Biblical Exposé of Climate Change.

In Biology: God’s Living Creation, also published by A Beka, credit is regularly given to God rather than evolutionary adaptations for scientific phenomena. Skin color differences are explained in this manner: Why did God just not instruct people to stay out of the sun? After all, Europeans went to Africa as missionaries and did not die from exposure to the sun. The answer to this question shows even more provision for man by his Creator. . . . There is a great balance between the need to be in the sunshine and the danger of getting too much ultraviolet radiation. God’s purpose in skin color becomes especially evident when all of this is known. 

Advances in science are also attributed to God, as opposed to accomplishments of individual scientists. “Since the fall, man has struggled to conquer disease, one of the curses brought upon us by sin; however, only in the past two centuries has God allowed man to make great strides toward curing and preventing disease.” A few pages later, the concept of disease caused by sin continues: “The Bible clearly teaches that disease and death entered the world as a consequence of Adam’s sin. There is no clearer demonstration of this fact than the existence of venereal disease, which are almost always contracted through illicit sexual relations.” The book also contains chapters devoted to debunking evolution.

More Inclusive Voices

Not all curricula attempts to convey such specific conclusions. Sonlight, a literature-based curriculum created by John Holzmann, cautions parents on their website against purchasing Sonlight if they’re looking for a one-sided slant: Though we base our curriculum on evangelical interpretation of Scripture, we recognize that much of history is open to conflicting interpretations. We can’t present many nuances of historical eras in absolute terms. . . . So Sonlight refuses to speak as if there is only one interpretation of historical events. We do seek to give a fair representation of both (or more) sides of any issues concerning which we ourselves are in some doubt.

Their website also states that Sonlight strives to include views that are not necessarily white, American, and Christian. “We seek to show how things looked from the perspective of the peoples who were displaced by European colonists. And we discuss issues of racism (for example) not only as they may have impacted the American Civil War but in other contexts as well. Over the years, we’ve found that this desire for a balanced perspective sets us apart from a large segment of the homeschool curriculum community.. . . If you are looking for a broad-based, internationally-focused curriculum that is deeply committed to looking at issues from all sides, and if you can overlook some of our (usually unwitting) white American provincialisms, we expect we can provide the kind of educational program you are looking for. . . . But if you are looking for a program that will focus more completely on your particular cultural group–and that will speak more readily as an insider of that group–you will probably want to find another supplier.” A quick look at their high school civics course, for example, does indeed reveal mature selections such as John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

As opposed to other homeschool curricula that may have a more American or European-centric bias, Sonlight aims to educate students more holistically about world history. “While we love America and all the things it stands for . . . we’ve spent a lot of time reading about children who are caught in the bonds of slavery [or] people who got stuck in concentration camps,” says Sarita Holzmann, the wife of John Holzmann. “We want kids to recognize there’s a big world with lot of different things kids have experienced.”

Sonlight has largely had a positive reception among homeschoolers, Holzmann says, but some have responded negatively to their inclusive approach. “We never felt like we would be for everybody,” says Holzmann. “We just did things a little too differently. And not everybody’s comfortable with different.”

Unlike other curricula that is strictly creationist, Sonlight also includes both young and old Earth creationist thought–an issue that is hotly debated among homeschoolers. “Young Earthers believe that the Earth is about six thousand years old, and all the signs of aging that we see on the Earth are because catastrophes that have occurred,” explains Holzmann. “For example, the world wide flood that the Bible talks about in Genesis, that had a huge impact on scraping and shaping the Earth as it is.”

An old Earth view, by contrast, holds that God allowed evolutionary changes to happen over a long period of time. “Our instructor’s guides seek to touch on both of those sides, and for people who are firmly young earth that’s very offensive,” says Holzmann. However, scientists would undoubtedly take issue with creationism and evolution being given equal weight in a science course.

Susan Wise Bauer, a homeschooling mother and wife of a Christian minister who has authored her own history and language arts curricula, also strives for a balanced perspective in her materials. As a result Bauer finds both religious and secular homeschoolers use her work, although she had been criticized for not being “Christian enough.”

“We have been kind of polarizing,” says Bauer, who at the time of the interview had just come from a nonsectarian homeschooling conference that even included self-identified atheist and Wiccan homeschoolers. “It looks to me like now there’s a little bit of a shift going on in that the conservative evangelical homeschoolers were the first ones to really get in there and start doing grassroots organization, and for a long time [it] sort of felt like the movement kind of belonged to them . . . people who feel very strongly that homeschooling is and should be a Christian movement have not had a really positive response to what we do. But I think there have been many–increasingly over the past decade–many more homeschoolers who, even if they are or consider themselves to be conservative evangelical Christians, really are focused more on education and not on homeschooling as a way to keep their kids in this particular religious cultural space. And those parents have really just welcomed what we do with open arms.”

What is Neutrality?

While some curricula may encourage nuanced explorations of issues, others seek to train students to defend particular religious and social beliefs. For instance, Alpha Omega offers a Foundations of Living course that equips students “with sound biblical instruction to respond to tough situations they may encounter. This in-depth curriculum discusses the importance of having a faith-based worldview, including man’s purpose in the world, roles within the Christian family, dating, art, education, politics and more.” 

The more viewpoint-specific curricula would undoubtedly draw accusations of indoctrination. However, some homeschool advocates feel that public schools offer their own brand of propaganda. “Indoctrination, if you want to use that term, is going on everywhere,” says TJ Schmidt of HSLDA. “The government schools [public schools are sometimes called government schools among homeschoolers] have their own perspective and their own agenda that they are providing, just as parents are wanting to provide their children with a foundation. But I think most homeschooling parents are providing their children with the opportunity to question, to grow. The perception that home education parents are raising up robots is I think unlikely. You give a child knowledge, and the tools to gain knowledge, and they’re going to obviously be able to make decisions for themselves. I think what many homeschooling parents don’t want is an environment that is often working against parents or an environment that is pushing an agenda and not in fact being honest about the agenda that they are pushing.”

Dr. Brian Ray, a founding member of the National Home Education Research Institute, also argues that public schools are far from neutral. “Curriculum in public schools is largely driven by university professors and state-run agencies that approve or disapprove what may or may not be in textbooks, in films, and so forth and so on,” says Ray. “After a little over a hundred years of institutional state-run schooling as we know it, the curriculum is clearly coming from a particular worldview/philosophy. There are many out there. There is a Muslim worldview. There is a New Age worldview. There is a secular humanist worldview. There is a Jewish worldview. There is a Biblical and Christian worldview. And whatever’s going on in public schools is not a Christian worldview. . . .A lot of people think public schools have no value system driving the curriculum. Well, that’s false. Every curriculum has a worldview driving it.”

Homeschooling and Citizenship

Many question if homeschooling is actually a mechanism for preventing children from encountering beliefs that conflict with their parents’, a question of particular interest in a country such as the United States, which has perhaps greater diversity of viewpoints and religions than anywhere else. It’s also particularly pertinent in our current fractionalized media climate, where unlike in previous generations, when everyone got the news from Walter Cronkite, people of all political stripes can choose to only consume information reinforcing their previously held opinions.

Rob Reich, a Stanford social scientist who has written about homeschooling, feels that in addition to notifying public authorities of an intent to homeschool and regular basic skills tests, there should also be curricular oversight of homeschooling. “I don’t have a detailed plan laid out, but the simple idea would be that when you homeschool, you have to submit your curricular materials to some body or agency or set of teachers in a publicly authorized agency,” says Reich. “You couldn’t just decide, for instance, not to teach math because your son or daughter didn’t seem to like math, or only teach them the particular religious account of creationism without exposing them to ideas of evolution.” An important note: Reich’s support of homeschool regulation doesn’t reflect a belief that American public schools are ideal, in fact, he’s been an outspoken critic of failing public schools and supports certain voucher programs.

“Parents are certainly permitted [and] free to teach their kids whatever they wish with respect to their own values and convictions,” says Reich. “So if they want to teach their kids that other people believe doctrines that are false or ones that will condemn them to hell or are corrupt or sinful, I think parents should have every freedom to do that. But what they must also do is allow their children to learn, if not through the parents then through someone else, that these other people, however sinful they are, are also their equals as citizens and are fully entitled to a participating voice and ideally to an equal place in deliberation on public policy and political affairs. If kids who are homeschooled only learn that which is in strict accordance with how their parents believe [and] never encounter the diverse views of others, much less engage with them, they seem to me to be at a civic disability because what they’ve not learned to do is interact with their fellow citizens on the basis of equal citizenship.”

Some homeschooling advocates, however, believe that the decision of how to present other perspectives and religions should be determined solely by parents. “[Children] should be taught in their own churches that we need to be tolerant of all those other faiths and to be told something about what they believe, and why we don’t believe that,” says Dana. “It’s [the job of ] the parents and the particular church of that family to do that work.”

Although the purpose of education in a democratic country is to prepare students for responsible citizenship, Ray feels public schools fall woefully short. “There is no research evidence anywhere that public school social interaction makes children better citizens,” says Ray. “Number two, there’s no research anywhere that suggests public school attendance reduces crime. . . . Third, the research shows that [of ] homeschooled children, the vast majority are interacting with people other than mom and dad and their brothers and sisters. If that’s what people are concerned about, they shouldn’t be concerned because they’re almost all doing things like co-ops and scouts and soccer teams and church groups and synagogue groups.”

However, because homeschooling gives parents the ultimate authority over their children’s education, there is a school of thought that holds that lack of exposure to differing viewpoints is actually an impediment to becoming an autonomous adult. “With little or no exposure to competing ideas or interaction with people whose convictions differ from their parents’, children who are homeschooled can be raised in an all encompassing or total environment that fails to develop their capacity to think for themselves,” writes Reich in his article “Why Homeschooling Should Be Regulated.”

“Parents can control the socialization of their children so completely as to instill inerrant beliefs in their own worldview or unquestioning obedience to their own or others’ authority . . . in short, children become unfree, unable to imagine other ways of living.”

Given the sheer number of homeschoolers, homeschooling likely will remain a permanent part of the American educational landscape. And there will continue to be those who believe a democratic state has a vested interest in regulating homeschooling, and homeschooling advocates who feel that individual parents should have unfettered choice as to what their children do or do not learn, free from government oversight.

In this sense, homeschooling represents a clashing of two ideals American culture holds in high regard: the individual’s freedom and right to live their lives and bring up their children according to their beliefs and customs, and the interest of the state in regulating education as a means to maintaining an informed citizenry and an environment of mutual respect of others, befitting of a pluralistic democracy. Only time will tell which ideal will prevail.

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From the Empirical Archives: Is Reading Aflame in Our Society by Joe Asnault

Is Reading Aflame in Our Society

Joe Asnault

Burning of Kopimi (Copy Me) Books in Sweden
PHOTO: mikael altemark

Originally published in the October 2012 issue of Empirical

I feel like a seasoned veteran. Eighteen years on the job as a junior high and high school English teacher. I feel like I’m finally hitting my stride, and then a colleague of mine handed me Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide. The last sentence stuck me, like Jack’s spear into the pigs in Lord of the Flies: “We need to find this courage. Today. Nothing less than a generation of readers hangs in the balance.” This final sentence can be better understood by understanding Gallagher’s main premise and the title of his book. Readicide is a new word which Gallagher feels should be in the dictionary. “Readicide: noun, the systematic killing of the love of reading often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” Gallagher–a high school English teacher–recognizes the problem. His book and his other writings also offer viable solutions. Yet I had to ask myself: Am I contributing to this “readicide” through my teaching practices? Am I contributing to the conscious choice of teens and future adults to not read? I felt sick to my stomach and bizarrely it was a good feeling; a harbinger of change and of awareness that in our world now, deep, intellectual reading is on the decline, and I can convert my painful realization into impetus for change.

From the Empirical Archives: Schooling for Sale by Brian Elliott

Schooling for Sale: A Critique of US Public School Reform

Brian Elliott

PHOTO: Olav Bryant Smith

Originally published in the October 2012 issue of Empirical

What’s wrong with America’s schools?

It’s not hard to find criticism of the US public school system. Both local and national newspapers regularly carry articles outlining a new policy initiative, a school district’s remarkable success or, more likely, the alarming characteristics of a “failing” school.