Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Education has been on the mind a bit lately, both from Blogistan (such as this fine education-centered blog) and from the fact that my kid will be entering some kind of schooling quite soon. It's pretty much an article of faith that our schools don't do well enough, and no, they probably don't. We're constantly being told that test scores are down, we're always hearing horrific anecdotes about the kids who identified Montana as our enemy in World War II or who spell "rabbit" with three M's. We hear about schools being used to inculcate certain values that not everyone wants their kids to have. We hear about sex in schools, and I personally am troubled by all of the arts and sports-program cutting that goes on. (It depresses me to no end to see parents complain to TV cameras at the school board meetings when those programs are cut, when those same parents voted down tax increases in the last election that would have kept those programs going.)

But then, I see America right now, and we're still the world's wealthiest nation, we're still the main economic engine for this planet, we're still producing musicians and novelists and painters and filmmakers. No, kids don't know all the stuff that I'd like them to know. But a lot of 'em know stuff that I never knew. So maybe the kids are morons, and it's just taking them a long time to put our country on the rocks. Or maybe they're not morons at all, and we need to lighten up or rethink what we consider to be moronic. Or maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Most likely, everybody is a moron. Now, that is a democratic view.

Ultimately, I think the proper purpose of education is best described as "minimizing stupidity". Unfortunately, we seem to be in an era in which identifying stupidity just isn't done; and anyway, I'm lately wondering if stupidity is hardwired into the human condition.

I've also been thinking a bit lately about homeschooling, and I'm pretty certain that I don't want to do it. And I get worried when I read things like this post by Holly Lisle, in which she blatantly states that everybody should be homeschooling. I'm sorry, but I can't get behind that. I really can't. I think the option should be there, but I see no reason to assume that the legions of people out there who would be homeschooling are a priori better teachers than the people employed by the schools. Good teaching is a skill, and not everybody has it. I really don't think that a dramatic upswing in homeschooling would really have the effect that its adherents think it would. I don't know if it would be a complete trainwreck either, but I keep returning to a point made facetiously by George Carlin: "Kids are like anyone else. There's a few winners, and a whole lot of losers." Well, it seems to me that would apply to homeschoolers as well. (But not you, if you're teaching your kid at home. You are brilliant. It's the other folks.) And I think that we need to really consider hard the reasons people may have for homeschooling their kids. If the local school system is really that bad, and it could well be, that's one thing. If you don't want your kid learning about evolution, though, that's something else.

(ASIDE: Maybe it's because I am a liberal, but my eyes tend to glaze over whenever someone from the conservative or libertarian sphere characterizes public schools as a massive liberal values indoctrination program. First of all, judging by the political climate these days, it doesn't really seem that the great liberal scheme to use schools to trot out armies of identically-thinking liberals is working particularly well. Secondly, it's not usually all that clear just which "liberal" values are being foisted, anyway. "They just want to turn all kids into little liberals" is, pretty much, twaddle.)

Another odd thing about teachers is that I'm less and less convinced that there's much we can do, quantitatively, to see how "good" they are, except probably through test scores of their classes over time. I remember some teachers fondly because, to me, they were great teachers; they reached me on some level and taught me something I haven't forgotten. Other students, encountering the exact same teacher, might not have liked them nearly as well, or not at all. There were teachers I loved whom classmates of mine couldn't stand, and there was one very popular teacher in my high school whom I absolutely hated. As far as I was concerned, the woman was the nexus of all evil in our county, and I'm pretty sure she thought the same of me.

I also recall my eighth grade English teacher, who was just godawful. She was stiff and dull, she constantly gave us creative writing assignments that were better suited to fourth graders, she did our grammar lessons in robotic fashion, not one of the books she required us to read has stuck in my memory in the slightest degree...just horrible. When I later learned, on my first day of my senior year, that she would be my AP English teacher, my heart sank in the expectation of more drudgery and boredom. It turned out, though, that she was much more at ease with teaching seniors; it allowed her to indulge her real interests in literature as opposed to the stuff she'd done with us four years before. Just four years difference, teaching the same subject, made all the difference to her. I'm still amazed at the difference.

I'm not really sure if I have a point in all this, except that I'd like it if we could somehow find that balance between making sure kids know what they're going to need to know to function in this world, and not choking the love of learning from them. Kids have to be taught to hate learning. If we could somehow figure out how to get them to never ask "Is this gonna be on the test?" or "Why do I gotta learn this?" again, I think a lot of our educational problems might go away. I had a prof in college (just for one class though, which was a pity because I liked the guy) who said he hated the "card game" approach to teaching, which you find everywhere. It's when the teacher throws down a card (test question), and if the student wants to pass, he'd better have the right card to respond to each of the teacher's cards. I worry that in the rush to do all this testing, we're exacerbating the "card game" approach to education.