- MUST READS
- PRODUCTS
- RESOURCES
- MULTIMEDIA
- ENFACTLOPEDIA
- FSM AUTHORS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
- FSM BLOG
- DONATE
- PRESS COVERAGE
SEARCH FSM
- IN THIS SECTION
January 26, 2009
Exclusive: An Open Letter to the New Secretary of Education (Part 1 of 2)
To The Honorable Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education
Dear Sir,
In these days of hope and change, you have an unprecedented opportunity to do something about the sorry state of education in our country by reversing the politicization of the schools and restoring learning to the center of the enterprise.
It’s no news that American students lag behind their counterparts in other countries in the knowledge and skills necessary to keep this country at the forefront of future discoveries and innovations. And it is no news that they are woefully ignorant of their country’s past, the nature of its democratic institutions, and the sources of the freedoms available to them.
I will just remind you that little has changed since the 1980s, when one third of high school juniors surveyed could not identify the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as coming from the Declaration of Independence” and few of those who could were able to articulate the document’s significance. Three quarters of the students did not know when Abraham Lincoln was president, and similarly discouraging numbers could not place the writing of the Constitution or the Civil War in the correct half- century, or locate Great Britain on a map. Twenty-five years later our schools still aren’t doing their job and our high school students remain ignorant of basic U.S. and world history. Fewer than half of American teenagers surveyed recently know when the Civil War was fought or when Columbus sailed to the New World; they cannot identify the leaders of the Allied and Axis powers in World War II. Studies continue to show how little young Americans know. National Geographic found that in 2006 two-thirds of 18- to 24-year-olds questioned could not identify Iraq on a map and 88% could not find Afghanistan.
Among the sorriest failures of the schools from the earliest grades through college is the loss of mathematics skills among native-born American students. The failure to develop higher math skills is reflected in international competitions, in which youngsters from other countries regularly outperform American students, and local competitions in which both male and female high school students and college undergraduates tend overwhelmingly to come from immigrant families with traditions that encourage interests, study habits and goals absent from our public school systems because our culture – which means our families – do not set a high priority on them.
As with mathematics, the high school students winning prizes for scientific innovation today are overwhelmingly immigrants or the children of immigrants, largely of Asian descent. Again, what distinguishes them from their underachieving fellow students is the motivation that begins at home, in the family that values education as a step to a better life. Too many American parents are complacent about their children’s schooling, failing to ask what a passing grade really means or inquire as to what goes on in their children’s classrooms.
What has become acceptable in the teacher-training institutions that used to be called normal schools is a curriculum for prospective K-12 teachers for “teaching for social justice and liberation,” which means liberation from American capitalism and turning the nation’s classrooms into laboratories for revolutionary change. The anti-American stance of most of the country’s educrats is indicated by the agenda in the schools and departments of education throughout the country. Teacher training institutions channel more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms than for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read.”
All this is nothing new. In a book published almost two decades ago and sadly as relevant now as it was then, I wrote that
“the public school, once charged with the task of transmitting the common culture and imparting the skills required to understand it, participate it, and extend it, has come to be seen instead by those who prepare men and women to teach in it as an agency of social change. No longer is there said to be a common culture, but a multiplicity of cultures, each of equal value and significance. The function of the schools is to achieve educational equality as a means to social and economic equity. Not equality of opportunity but equal grading is the accepted goal, and objective standards are agreed to be an obstruction to that goal since not everyone does equally well on them.
“The idea of a common culture stretching from the ancients to our own times, bequeathing a literature, a history, a body of knowledge, and a set of traditions that define our political institutions and are of unique value is said to be a myth kept in place by the powers that be in the service of domination, of keeping the lower classes in their place and of exploiting them.”
An extreme but hardly unique example of where we may be headed is Brooklyn College’s School of Education screening of students for their political views, evaluating teacher candidates on the basis of their “dispositions.” The critical attitude toward white America (“multiculturalism”) and hostility toward merit (“self-esteem” based on group identity, not individual achievement) has by now become part of the admissions process and a requirement for passing courses even in such neutral-sounding subjects as “Language Literacy in Secondary Education.” Students who disagree with the instructor’s political agenda can’t hope for a good grade and complaints to the administration are ignored.
But indoctrination does not only occur in the so-called soft subjects – the humanities and social sciences. Even mathematics is being taught in some public schools from the perspective of the radical social agenda. “Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice” is the title of a course given at Northeastern University’s School of Education in Boston.
According to the course description, future teachers of algebra, trigonometry and geometry will be given “an opportunity to contemplate on [sic] the role of the teacher as an agent of change” as they “develop a pedagogical model for… addressing issues of social justice in mathematics teaching and learning.” A textbook titled Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers includes ideas on “how to weave social justice issues throughout the mathematics curriculum.” Some of the suggested topics: Disparities in Wealth Cartoon; Driving While Black or Brown: A Math Project About Racial Profiling; Corporate Control of U.S. Media Line Graph; The Global Capitalist Economy Cartoon; Poverty and World Wealth: Recognizing Inequality; Unequal Distribution of U.S. Wealth; and Map of Territory that Mexico Lost to the United States.
The authors quote a ninth-grader in a Chicago public school who says, “Now I realize that you could use math to defend your rights and realize the injustices around you.” Let’s hope she will also be able to use math to balance a checkbook, make change, calculate a mortgage rate, and perform other ordinary tasks in this unjust capitalist society.
In the past, math has been a tool to help make scientific and technological advances; the higher mathematics required for an understanding of physics or biochemistry might also be considered a way of improving the world, if not exactly making it “more equal and just” in the way these teachers have in mind.
Whether that level of mathematical proficiency will be attained by pupils being encouraged to think of changing the world “rather than merely regarding math as a collection of disconnected rules to be rotely memorized and regurgitated” remains to be seen. According to a math teacher at one of New York City’s select high schools, his students have a very difficult time understanding and doing math at higher levels. He pinpoints the reason why so many of these brightest of students require private tutoring: the prevalence of the “constructivist” approach that discourages traditional methods of learning and memorizing and practicing rules in favor of encouraging students to “discover” their own methods for solving problems. Both the constructivist and the social-justice approach are flying in the face of centuries of experience of learning in order to pursue ideological goals.
The politicization of the schools has had many consequences. Not least of what has been lost in the redirection of high school and college courses around themes of “social justice” is the literary patrimony. Standard English is the language of oppressors, those dead white males who left behind the creations of genius. There goes the 19th century novel, lyric poetry, drama from Shakespeare on, and all the treasures that have enriched Western culture in centuries past. The present gatekeepers of our culture have little use for imaginative literature or the recorded sweep of history through biography, for tales of early heroism, adventure and tragedy. They decry the study of dates, times, eras as “mere facts.” What used to provide a window on the world for the young has been replaced by a curriculum so deadening and so boring that the country’s young turn increasingly to the purveyors of mass media for their views and their values.
What we have instead of rigorous academic standards is a therapeutic culture that encourages self-awareness over any other kind. One can easily graduate from an American high school without ever having read an entire book, whether a novel or nonfiction, and without ever having written an essay of any length about a subject other than one’s own feelings and experiences – what passes for creativity.
In place of literature and accounts of the past, which always run the risk of giving offense to someone somewhere, our students are given material from which they will learn as little as possible. Popular middle and high school textbooks, as Gilbert T. Sewall of the American Textbook Council has repeatedly demonstrated, present “politically correct” but skimpy and often inaccurate information, and with vastly different standards applied to Western and non-Western cultures. Their publishers, as Diane Ravitch has revealed in various publications, follow detailed guidelines about what subject matter and illustrations are permissible. The religious right frowns on tales of magic or the supernatural, as well as stories about dinosaurs that might suggest evolution. The PC left insists that mothers be shown going to work, briefcase in hand, not baking a pie, and that old – sorry, senior – folks only be depicted as active and full of vigor, certainly never using a cane.
By means of this distorted and sanitized view of reality the mega-publishers who produce the texts insure that California and Texas, the large states that form the backbone of their market, find the material acceptable to all their constituents. The result of removing everything that anyone can possibly find offensive is that the textbooks are so vapid and boring that they all but guarantee that the young will turn to TV and pop music, which are actually a better mirror of life as they see it around them. Nowhere in the books their schools provide do they encounter the excitement and wonder of first-rate literature, just politically correct pap.
Not only do American students fail to learn languages other than English, too many do not even learn English beyond a rudimentary level. Bilingual classes, spawned by pressure to accommodate newcomers to this country, have left too many children stranded between languages with mastery of neither. What kind of favor is this for the immigrant family looking for a wider future for its next generation? Without fluency in the language of the wider culture how can they be expected to prosper in this country?
Part Two will be published on Tuesday.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (0)
| Print This E-mail This |
|
