We’re teaching our kids wrong: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates do not have the answers - Salon.com:
We’re teaching our kids wrong: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates do not have the answers
Our kids worship wealth and celebrities. We've lost track of school's real purpose -- exciting the mind
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs (Credit: AP/Bebeto Matthews/Dima Gavrysh)
Excerpted from "The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools"
Between 1848, when Andrew Carnegie arrived in Pennsylvania, and 1983, when “A Nation at Risk” was published, schools had made a 180-degree turn. No longer a privilege and a respite from work, formal education had become a necessity, considered essential to individual success. What had once been a luxury for those who could afford enlightenment was, by the second half of the twentieth century, a requirement for anyone who hoped to get a job and earn a decent wage. Schools were no longer a path to cultivation and a life of the mind; they were a path to a job. And that was just in terms of the individual. Along the way, as schools became a training ground for corps of workers, they also became a means of furthering national interests. The debate about schools had become part of the debate about national power. Which brings us to the twenty-first century.
When George W. Bush announced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), his purported intention was to encourage a set of practices and institute a set of assessments that would ensure every child got the same good start at school. Implicit in that formulation was the now familiar premise that it was up to schools to close the income gap between the rich and the poor. In its most beneficent form, it could have made a powerful difference in the lives of many children. If NCLB had ensured that all kids would learn how to read and that no child would become disenchanted enough to drop out, it might have been wonderful. But that’s not how NCLB played out.
Within just a few years, teachers were rushing to make sure that each child got a higher score on the standardized tests than he or she had gotten the year before. School superintendents also felt compelled to see to it that their schools got higher scores every year. What had been promoted as a means of ensuring that all children received the fruits of our educational system became a relentless push toward improved test scores. With each year, more and more focus was on the scores themselves and less on the education the scores were intended to measure. At the national level, politicians threatened that if we didn’t educate everyone, once again our country might fall behind. The conversation was less about giving everyone access to reading, thoughtful engagement in civic life, or the pleasures of ideas, and much more about seeing to it that everyone could earn a decent wage.
Nor did that focus change much when Bush finally left office. In 2008 Barack Obama replaced George Bush in the White House and named Arne Duncan secretary of education. Many people interested in schools assumed that Obama and Duncan would shrink or dissolve NCLB, which seemed to cause only problems for parents, teachers and administrators, not to mention for children. But it has not been as simple as that. Once again money, albeit in a slightly disguised form, has shaped the conversation about what children should learn and why they should learn it.
The first thing Duncan did as secretary of education was to announce a new name for our educational agenda. Instead of leaving no child behind, we would now be in a race to the top. This meant, of course, that the United States would be racing to beat out other nations. It also meant that each child would be racing to overcome other students, getting to the finish line first. These twin motives are now embedded in almost all of the public discussion of education. When national averages of test scores are reported, they are typically presented as a table or graph in which our scores are compared to the scores of other nations. In 2009 we ranked lower on the Program for International Student Assessment than, say, China (represented by Shanghai), Finland and Estonia but higher than Latvia, Thailand and Panama. Yet, other than feeling this is a competition, it’s quite hard to know what, if anything to make of such comparisons. In the end they tell us next to nothing about the children we are trying to educate or how our educational system is (or is not) shaping them.
But the national race is only one piece of the story. Take a moment to think about what it means to frame education as a race to the top. At the simplest level, it means that someone is going to have to be at the bottom. A quick look at the way assessments are currently done in this country shows the very real consequences this has for the lives of children. Children don’t simply show that they can read, add, solve word problems, or interpret data. They must do better than other children, and better than they did the year before. Teachers, too, are rated in terms of this seemingly endless competition. Some have argued that it is good for everyone to see that education is a process, that there is always more to be learned, explored, or mastered. All of that sounds nice. But it’s not the way children (or teachers) experience the race to the top. They experience it, for the most part, as a daunting and relentless grind. It pushes children to believe that success comes only when they can outperform others and their own previous performance. An ironic symptom of this orientation is that teachers commonly talk of aiming for low scores one year so that they can show improvement in the next. The implicit belief that education rests on doing better than someone else is just one more way that a money mindset has come to shape our thoughts about schooling.
When it comes to material goods, economists have a term for this worldview: they call it positional wealth. Just as you might expect, it means that you base your sense of how rich you are on whether you are better off than the guy next door. An example will show how ubiquitous such a view has become. I spend August in the village of Sagaponack, New York, where I grew up. Though once a farm community, it is now notorious as a summer playground of the rich and famous. When I was a little girl, the men I knew drove pickup trucks and the women drove station wagons. One notable summer resident drove a green Jaguar; everyone talked about it. As the summer population rose over the years, so did the standard of cars you’d see on the road. By the time my children were born, the summer residents had taken over the island. Now Audis and Jeeps were everywhere, at least in July and August. By the time my children were teenagers, the roads were lined with Porsches and souped-up Land Rovers. Every decade brought a new level of car
We’re teaching our kids wrong: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates do not have the answers - Salon.com:
