A piece of Xtranormal satire on the current education debate and what those of us who are trying to make this argument from the grassroots level are up against. Frustratingly accurate, I’m afraid.
(Hat tip to @DianeRavitch who tweeted out the link.)
A View From the Schoolhouse
A piece of Xtranormal satire on the current education debate and what those of us who are trying to make this argument from the grassroots level are up against. Frustratingly accurate, I’m afraid.
(Hat tip to @DianeRavitch who tweeted out the link.)
I spent the past several days in Lynchburg, VA where my wife grew up. We saw a bunch of her old friends from (public) high school, and what struck me was that not one of them send their children to public school. These were middle and upper-middle class families who were all the products of public school. All of them spoke well of the education they received in Lynchburg public schools, and all of them spoke of the difficulty of the decision to send their children to private schools. We heard several reasons, and among them were:
These were not hippy, lefty, progressives. These were professionals in Lynchburg, VA. And they were all families who would have sent their kids to public schools in the past. And none of them were, mostly because of policy decisions our nation has made about public schools in the past decade. And what’s so scary is that perception has become reality. Despite the fact that every parent I spoke to had a positive experience in the very school system where they would send their child (often at the same school they were zoned for), they didn’t send their kids there. Perception had become reality. Because the US has created a narrative that says their schools weren’t good, families who have the financial ability to make other choices, chose not to send their kids to the public schools, despite their own positive experiences with public school.
And it struck me – how long does this last? If more and more families who can, choose to opt out of the public system, how long will be have one? With so many families making major financial decisions to send their children to private schools and so many more families sending their children to charter schools that do not typically think of themselves as "public school families," how long will we have a public school system that educates the majority of Americans?
It is why I think we will see more and more legislation for voucher programs in the coming years, and while they have mostly been focused at the state level, I think we will see federal legislation for vouchers within the next couple of years. And sadly, I cannot imagine a better way to move Americans toward wanting one than the current national dialogue about school.
We have undermined support for one of the longest standing public institutions we have, and I worry that we are on the verge of replacing it with a franchise model of education where Americans will take their tax credits and shop them to whomever will accept their child. Families of means will take their credit and happily subsidize their children’s private education. Families who cannot will take the monies – minus the necessary cut for oversight of this new system – and find the best schools they can. And the best of the democratic ideals that our public schools were built on will be further eroded in favor of "the market."
Caveat emptor.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Shawnee,United States
About a week ago, Grant Wiggins of Understanding by Design fame wrote an article for ASCD Edge entitled Ban Fiction From the Curriculum. (I’d link to it, but it’s been removed from the ASCD site without any explanation I could find.) Fortunately, arvind grover summed up the article nicely here:
he thinks that the abundance of fiction serves female students better than male students
he thinks that reading so much fiction ill prepares you for an adult life where non-fiction reading is much more essential
I admit that when I first read the article, I dismissed it as deliberately provocative to raise a point about including other kinds of writing in the curriculum and decided not to write about it. But I’ve been seeing it get some traction, and so I feel compelled write about it.
First, let’s admit that the article has some points – yes, English class can be about much more than fiction – and should be. I look at how 9th graders at SLA take so much by reading The Freedom Writers Diary or how many former students still tell me at the 11th grade Poetry Project at Beacon was some of the most powerful reading and writing they’ve ever done, so yes, thinking that fiction is the only reading that should be done in an English classroom is a mistake.
But the first fallacy of the article is that all reading should be done in an English classroom. Yes, Wiggins is 100% right – we should read much more non-fiction in schools. Sadly, much of the time they could be reading powerful non-fiction is spent reading out of textbooks. Why do we continue to pretend that history can fit into a textbook? Why do we think that students will get a better grasp of science by reading a science textbook instead of reading science journals? So yes, Mr. Wiggins, let’s make sure that we give kids many, many more chances to read non-fiction. Let’s give kids access to first-person accounts of historical events… or have students read the actual Federalist Papers, rather than textbook summaries of them. Let’s read more biographies, more scholarly articles, more opinion pieces, more candidate websites and position papers. All of those pieces of reading material have more relevance, more passion, and more accuracy than the average history textbook and certainly more dynamism than the average science textbook. Let’s free science and history from the hegemony of the textbook and let kids really read.
But let’s also remember the power of story in our lives. Every story we read should give us a new lens on the world. How many students have seen themselves in Hamlet – struggling to figure out how to make decisions within the competing interests of family and duty and identity? How many students have deepened their understanding of African-American identity through the works of Toni Morrison or Gloria Naylor or Richard Wright? One only need look at the incredible popularity of the Harry Potter and Twilight novels to remind us of how powerfully kids can connect with fiction. And the list goes on and on…
Stories – fiction or non-fiction – help us create the narrative of our own lives, and they help us make sense of the world around us. The ability to deconstruct stories and create our own is a fundamental part of being human. And that cuts across any gendered lines we could create. For me, the world of fiction got me through high school in ways that non-fiction never could. I devoured book after book, both in and out of class.
And there is one last objection – perhaps the most important one for me – that I want to state. By assuming that we should ban fiction because it is not as "useful" makes the case that all education must be utilitarian in purpose. We still teach art, music and even poetry and fiction because the life of the mind matters. Fiction can remind us that there is more to life than work, more to life than what we can see with our eyes. Stories teach us that we can envision a world different — even better — than the one we have.
Stories remind us to dream… to imagine… to create.
And so, with all due respect, Mr. Wiggins, fiction must stay in the curriculum. Some of us — even us boys — learned more from fiction than anything else we did in school.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad