In the 60’s, in England, when American students were entered into the high school where I taught, they invariably tested about two years below the academic standard of their age group. My friends in other European countries observed the same thing. The students certainly weren’t stupid or unintelligent, but they were terribly uninformed compared with their age group in other countries.
If they had gone to Scotland, Wales or the Isle of Man the difference would have been even more marked. In those three places the profession of teacher was honored even more than it was in England at the time. Nearly every university professor of English that I encountered anywhere was from Wales. Teachers were one of the most valued exports of Wales. And there were plenty left at home, most of them teaching music as well as any other specialty that was their forte.
When a Pasadena education research group came to my own high school in the late 40’s they checked the work that we were doing in the seventeen year old groups in science, mathematics and languages. We were astonished to be told that we were doing what in the USA was equal to that being done by bachelor degree students. And we still had to pass an advanced test run by the universities to even be allowed to enter competitive interviews to get into a college.
This was all brought to my mind by the recent courageous act of a Wisconsin teacher in Madison at refusing to give his class the Bush test ordered by the No Child Left Behind travesty of education. It would be better named No Child Left Unscarred. Like many teachers, he believes the test is a poor way to measure student progress, takes up too much class time and is used unfairly to punish schools. So after years of growing frustration, he said he decided to be a “conscientious objector” this year.
Of course he is threatened with being fired for daring to do that. Conformity is always the first absolute rule of a bureaucratic society. Watch V for Vendetta on a DVD to see what it leads to. Highly recommended. I've seen it about fifty times in a couple of languages.
I have tutored many American students in this country and all of them have been hindered in their education by petty rules and bureaucratic nonsense that have absolutely nothing to do with education…opening the mind…developing the talents of the student.
All the rules seemed based on a philosophy of the school as a Ford type education factory in which the students are supposed to come out as uniform products fit to serve the interests of the business community. Education apparently is about getting a job, not becoming an informed and integrated person. The administrators act as wannabee CEO’s of a corporation, not as the responsible head of an extended family.
My mother said to me “I don’t care what you do when you grow up. You can be a dustman (trash collector) if you want. But be a well educated dustman. Education is for what you do when the work day is over.” And I know three PhD’s from London University, all brilliant men, who drive buses for a living. They each have hobbies that fill their lives with interest and their daily job takes up little of their mental energy.
The first sentences spoken by my first lecturer in my education major were these. “Culture is activity of thought and receptiveness to humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.” He was quoting from Aims of Education by Alfred North Whitehead the great mathematician and philosopher.
In contrast, I know school districts here where the administrators are dedicated to having every child in any academic unit on the same page on the same day. And they are proud of this ambition. Factory teaching incarnate! Educationally this is insanity, treating every student as identical in intelligence, health, confidence, parental encouragement and a myriad other factors that the business trained people ignore in their desire to have a well run factory. Not even politicians would insist that everyone wear the same size shoes. This is not much different.
And then what is called discipline in so many schools is not discipline, it is punishment for disobeying absurd rules generated by minds ignorant of humane feelings or even of children. Order and discipline seem to be confused with one another. Order is important in a community. Order is a natural consequence of self-discipline. Imposed discipline gives a semblance of order but it is fragile and easily disrupted.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by discipline in school. My first teaching jobs were in elementary schools. I was trained for primary and secondary school work but it seemed obvious that working in primary was the way to learn to teach, rather than merely instruct. Someone who has taught children how to read has an advantage over someone who has never encountered people who can’t read.
My first class was of 43 nine year old boys, from what in England was called a slum clearance area. Here it would probably be called a ghetto. After our getting to know each other and what we expected of each other I was taken suddenly ill one evening with a mysterious ailment that produced what looked like a white fungus at the back of the throat and a sudden physical weakness that came on as if it had been switched on.
At that time we had no electricity in my house, neither was there a telephone. I think only one person in the whole street had a telephone. So I could not inform the school that I was not going to be there. Next day the condition switched off as suddenly as it had switched on and I went to school. The headmaster (principal) asked me to drop off in the office as soon as the class was settled.
He told me that nobody knew I was absent until nearly three in the afternoon when a teacher came to my room to borrow some equipment. When calling register time came and I wasn’t there the class captain (elected by the class) took the register and wrote down the names of absentees. The vice captain collected the milk money and took it down to the office as usual. All the standard school chores were performed by the usual monitor. As the periods on the timetable arrived the pupil who was acknowledged as the best in the class for that subject told the others what to read or write. They went out to break and lunch in the usual fashion and came back to class in the same way. The headmaster was very pleased that the boys had learned self discipline and initiative. So was I.
Yet it seems to be a common belief here that students and teachers are adversaries, and when the iron hand of the education Nazi isn’t there then the classroom explodes into chaos. That is not an optimum situation for learning is it? Sitting on a time bomb is not a good place to learn focus on anything except survival.
The education for the benefit of corporations seems to be a bedrock of the system here, and over the past decade there is another factor of what seems to be a deliberate organizing of affairs so that poor and middle class students, no matter how gifted, are penalized by the rapidly increasing fees needed for college work. I suspect, being cynical of politicians, that it’s a long term ploy connected with armed forces recruitment.
I think it is clear by simple staring at the public data that our current President got his place in college and his Master’s degree because his father was a famous and very rich member of the alumni, and not because of his prowess as a scholar or an intellect. He wouldn’t have even a bachelor’s degree from a European university where mastery of at least one language, your own, is an essential component of the equipment of an educated person. Yet his views on what is education are a vital part of the current systematic political attempts to destroy public education nationally as he did in Texas. No doubt he thinks that Halliburton could do a better job.
Obviously examples could be multiplied, but the point has been made. Are there places where children do get a good education? Well, even in this country there are the Waldorf schools where children are taught according to their emotional maturity, and art and music are paramount. Those schools are outstanding. And their work is based on one of us, Rudolf Steiner, a man with amazing psychic gifts that he applied to education, music, herbology, architecture and much else.
In other schools music and art are the first subjects cut out of the curriculum because the business oriented administrators want the children ‘on task’ every minute they are at school. If the machine stops running then production ceases in a factory. They think the same thing applies with children and their learning.
There is no appreciation of the absolute need for children to get out of their desks and run around for times during the day. Apparently some childless bean counter thinks that is unproductive time. I know schools where the break time is cut to almost nothing. That shows an abysmal ignorance of the physiology of young human beings.
You may like to contemplate how much a young child learns in a completely unstructured world of his own, before going to school. All knowledge is one to such a child, the basis of learning during the Renaissance, all knowledge is important. Everything is interesting. Then, all too often, they go to school and their education stops.
But there are places where a really good education is available to every child in the country, rich or poor. And an examination of what they do and how schools in this country do the opposite, will show where the problems are.
For instance we can look at beautiful New Zealand, now famous as the backdrop for the Lord of the Rings movies.The cost of education per student there is considerably less than half of what it is here. There are no school districts run by ambitious business people earning thousands and thousands of dollars more than the front line troops, the teachers. All the schools are community based. They are deliberately organized as a cooperative venture between the teachers and the parents. Both sides know the whys and wherefores. Regulations of a mysterious official origin are not how the schools are run.
Moneys collected for the benefit of education actually go to the schools, not to highly paid administrators or politicians with a hand in the public trough, and a penchant for forcing older, more experienced teachers out of the system so that they can be replaced with the much cheaper new talent. Typical business thinking here. Cut the cost at any cost. Except my superintendent salary of course.
When the schools in New Zealand think they need some advice on particular topics they hire consultants as needed, not as permanent parts of an interfering and unsympathetic bureaucracy.
No testing occurs at all for any students until they get to high school. The teachers are free to teach what they want, how they want. There are Ministry of Education guidelines but they are not Gestapo rules that must be obeyed whatever the circumstances. All the schools are free and independent to work the best for the pupils they have, however they can.
Art and music are considered educational necessities for the development of the mental abilities of the children. Scientific research has shown for decades how Art and Music develop the integration of the left and right brain and make for a much more effective mind. The Bulgarian research has shown how to use specific Baroque music to improve the learning of foreign language vocabulary by a factor sometimes as high as a hundred. Children taught this way can easily learn and retain a hundred new words a day. Every New Zealand student has years of musical training.
In international tests these children greatly outperform their peers from the USA across the board.
Children move up into their grades according to their age. The schools there never keep a sixteen year old in a class of fourteen year olds. It’s bad for both sides. Here it is possible to do that sort of thing because of rules that MUST be obeyed, whatever the circumstances.
Here we are running short of well qualified applicants for teaching posts because teachers know they will start off at a salary that may necessitate their having food stamps, and they will be despised by many of the well to do parents and students for their relative poverty, not honoured for their knowledge and expertise. Not to mention the harassment they will have from overbearing and ignorant over-paid administrators and the great opposition they will have in trying to help their students navigate the shoals of a media dedicated to making them into consumers rather than learners as soon as possible.
In New Zealand however there are always many well qualified applicants available for teaching posts because there they are honored as invaluable members of society, growing the next generation.
New Zealand education flourishes because it is not hampered by an unaware central bureaucracy trying to run everything like a business instead of like a family.
There is another country worth mentioning in the education realm. In this particular country the children do not go to school until they are seven. They are permitted to have a childhood.
The country spends less than two thirds per child of what is spent in the USA, but the results are outstanding. The teenagers of this country are the best readers in the world, according to international testing. They are way up near the top in science and mathematics too.
As in New Zealand, there is a suggested national curriculum, but teachers are the ones who choose what to teach and how to teach it. They don’t have text books imposed on them, usually chosen by ignorant Education Committees as happens here. They can choose their own textbooks or do without them. They can arrange the children as is best for the children, in small groups, large groups, inside or outside the school building.
There is no testing for the children before the age of sixteen. Indeed the only exams the children take are when they leave school at eighteen. And before they do that they have taken seven years of music work. As in New Zealand the people realize that music is an essential factor in the optimum mental development of children through their teen years. And as in New Zealand the children move from grade to grade on the basis of age.
This country is Finland. Helsinki is a city about half the size of San Diego for example. It has five symphony orchestras. The whole country is not much bigger than San Diego county, and currently has twenty-six symphony orchestras and twelve opera companies.
And for the business folks it outperforms the USA economically on a per capita basis.
The secret may be the same as that in New Zealand. Education is not crushed under central bureaucracies run by people ignorant of child psychology and physiology.
I’ll just mention that in the Scandinavian countries students are expected to know four languages when they leave school. Three are obligatory and one they can choose themselves. Here they can get by without even knowing their own.
We who can experience the inner and outer worlds might look at how the national system seems organized to produce trauma and failure in some of our most gifted right brain dominant young people. Einstein would never have made it in an American school. He would have been given a learning deficiency label and taught accordingly throughout his school career.
Look at how music and art are shelved in schools all over this country as though they are irrelevant to the real world. Top class Japanese business executives go home, change into their kimonos and paint or create haiku, the most distilled form of poetry. Here men are despised if they even read poetry or listen to opera with enjoyment.
We have all experienced the prejudice against the very possibility of psychic phenomena and extra sensory perception. This prejudice has its same roots in the way that music and art are treated here. Draw lessons from that about the evolutionary and spiritual level of the country as a whole.
Contemplate why those subjects are considered non-essential subjects here compared to football and baseball,and are of paramount importance in countries that are streets ahead of the USA in every international test or competition, with much smaller populations to draw from. Then make an early New Year’s Resolution to learn an instrument if you don’t have one in your repertoire, and to paint and draw in 2008. At least help your own evolution.
