excerpt from Dr. Andrew Cort's
Return to Meaning: The American Psyche in Search of its Soul - on Amazon.com
His essay gives the philosophy that I believe should be the goal of education. my books and articles explain HOW it can be achieved.
Dr. Robert Rose, www.imaginativecurriculum.com
Education, Wonder, and Eros
To make our economy stronger and more dynamic, we must prepare a rising generation to fill the jobs of the 21st century. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, standards are higher, test scores are on the rise and we're closing the achievement gap for minority students. Now we must demand better results from our high schools, so every high school diploma is a ticket to success.
- George W. Bush State of the Union Address, 2005
Millions of Americans have been persuaded by this kind of rhetoric that the purpose of education is to prepare our children to score well on standardized tests so that we can have more well-trained workers. As the standards movement gets stronger, we convince ourselves that being a useful employee is the key to a happy and successful life. Rather than nurturing a sense of wonder and a passion for learning, our schools are increasingly devoted to standardizing knowledge into lists of data, telling students what is appropriate for them to know and think, and then 'scientifically' measuring how well they regurgitate this data on assessment tests.
What is truly important in human life consists precisely of those things which cannot be measured; love, decency, joy, all the great virtues and passions. This is what the education of a human being should be about. But America no longer seeks
to educate thinking, feeling, human beings. We seek to educate servants. The new rallying cries are "Raising Standards" and "No Child Left Behind," which we all know are just euphemisms for job training.
All of this is just a prescription for an efficient human ant hill. And it is worth remembering that in the ant hill an individual life does not count for much. There are always plenty of replacements who can do the same job.
The corporate world gets involved in education, worried that their
businesses will not be able to compete in the future global economy if the workers being produced by our schools are inferior. They then insist that schools should be run like any other enterprise in a competitive marketplace, and the rules of quality control, managerial efficiency, and good marketing technique, should be applied in exactly the same way. Thus, we need (1) a common set of standards for the end-product, (2) a scientific test for measuring how well the students and schools are meeting these standards, and (3) an advertising campaign to convince the public that a meaningful education of their children means getting them to score well on these tests.
This latter is easily achieved by appealing to parents' worries about the
financial future, and then ceaselessly sending them the message that our schools are in a "crisis".
But the economic system is not floundering because of badly performing
schools. The American economy rises and falls, as it does in every nation and
in every era, in response to numerous and profound market and social forces
that bear no relation at all to the day-to-day functioning of our educational
system. Meanwhile, the insistence on greater "accountability" of schools does
not lead to greater achievement by our students. It leads to greater stress, fear,
and alienation, it leads to a dumbing-down of curricula, it leads to pain and
stigmatization for many children who do not do well on standardized tests
regardless of their intelligence or their classroom grades, and it helps to
deepen the rifts between diverse and antagonistic elements of society.
This certainly does not mean that there is no room for improvement in the
school system. But narrowing our vision and stultifying our minds is not a
very admirable reform, and it is merely degrading and destructive to base our
educational system on the corporate model, treating our children as nothing
more than future workers and consumers who are to be counted, measured,
and evaluated.
Americans are used to the entrenched system of educational experts using
test scores to label us as smart or not smart, worthy or not worthy. Yet such tests have little ability to predict either academic or worldly success: rather, the scores tend to be highly correlated with socioeconomic status, and they reward the superficial learning of meaningless rote data rather than critical thinking, creativity, or depth of understanding. There is ample evidence that these costly examinations tell us little about intelligence or competency. They simply measure one's ability to do well on the test, a worthless skill in the long run.
After a thorough study of the accuracy and usefulness of using SAT scores
as a predictor of academic success, prestigious Bates College dropped the SAT requirement for their applicants more than twenty years ago. Their report
concluded that "there is much in the data that would call into question the
policy of requiring any standardized test scores, given how poorly they predict
academic performance at Bates."
Even a federal government report on Testing in American Schools issued by the Office of Technology and Assessment in 1992 stated that "It now appears that the use of these tests misled policy makers and the public about progress of students, and in many places hindered the implementation of genuine school reforms."
But the general public continues to believe the propaganda that the tests are important indicators of the quality of our schools. The result is the further stratification of society along racial* and economic lines, the further erosion of
individuality, and the further fragmentation of the soul.
Wonder is the characteristic expression of Eros, such as we see in great
art, poetry, music, and literature, and this is the true essence of education: the
wide-eyed longing for wisdom, meaning and completeness. But this has all
been deconstructed and debunked, and we have deprived our children of the
opportunity to take mystery seriously, to yearn for discovery, and to
experience the excitement of not knowing. Our complacent acceptance of
cultural directives that tell us what to think and feel has opened the way for the mass degradation of our children by subjecting them to 'scientific
measurements', as if they were soulless mechanical devices that needed to be
repaired and upgraded. And thus our schools have been forced into the
business of cloning mediocrity, churning out obedient servants for the
economic system. But our schools are not in a 'crisis': it is our souls that are
in peril.
"Moral and Intellectual Inferiority"
This whole idea of testing the intellect began with the Eugenics Movement
in the early twentieth century. 'Intelligence Tests' were originally concocted
as tools for demonstrating the moral and intellectual inferiority of immigrants,
blacks, Jews, Native Americans, etc.
"The nation's pioneers of intelligence tests provided lawmakers with the scientific rationale they needed for policies that are now roundly condemned....Tens of thousands of army recruits, including recent immigrants, were subjected to IQ tests; bizarre but supposedly scientific conclusions about the natural laws of intelligence were drawn; and eugenically appropriate public policies were enacted in several states."
All of this was expected to be useful toward the goal of selecting better people to become citizens, "and even for the right of having offspring," as one of the founders of the movement wrote in 1927.
According to Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University, the developer of
the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale:"Public schools, especially those in affluent neighborhoods, now have incentives to resist accepting students with educational deficiencies, since they will bring down the scores: lowered scores lead to schools being labeled as 'failures', which means that reputations are ruined and jobs are lost.
From this perspective, it is better for the schools if these children drop out. Or perhaps they can be referred to a commercially run 'Job Corps' for a GED, where the corporate degradation of education reaches the extreme of absurdity.
In a Job Corps where I once worked in New York State, the students -- living, human children, most of whom were Black or Hispanic and came from inner city communities -- were officially referred to as the 'inventory'.
"It is safe to predict that in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of
feeblemindedness....
Here was faith in mechanical science gone mad. Today we have altered the
language, of course. We no longer speak of "social defectives", "morons" and
"imbeciles". We speak instead of people who have "special needs", or any
number of "learning disabilities". But the game is the same - the worthy are
separated off from the unworthy.
"The eugenics movement may have faltered, but it nevertheless formed certain habits of mind that have been institutionalized in the American belief system." These habits of thought continue to exacerbate the wide differences between socioeconomic groups.
This is not meant to suggest some sort of evil conspiracy, consciously
spawned by a depraved cabal bent on reducing men and women into sheep.
Rather, it represents an unconscious cultural trend that persists by its own
overwhelming inertia, and will continue to lead us into the appalling
degradation of the human ant hill if we as individuals continue to passively
submit to it.
The development of these mental tests coincided perfectly with the needs
of the newly emergent middle class. The question of how to devise new rules
for allocating wealth, based on merit rather than ancestry, found its answer in
the modern world's fascination with science and technology. Measuring
minds with technology, and using this information to assess merit, was an
ideal solution. The old aristocracy used to perpetuate itself on the basis of
birth and parentage. Now our nation's new elites could perpetuate their class
privilege with tests legitimized by pseudo-science.
This is another example of the ideal of freedom finding itself at odds with
the ideal of equality. 'Freedom' demands that all citizens have the right to a
successful life, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, if they work hard
and do their best. It is then assumed, conveniently but with scant evidence,
that standardized tests of intelligence are a valid scientific way of
guaranteeing this freedom, by assigning people to their proper place within the
meritocracy.
'Equality' then asserts itself in opposition to this economic hierarchy which distinguishes one person from another rather than making everyone equal. So the rules of Equal Protection come into force to balance out the situation, by insisting on new requirements of 'inclusion' in the classroom and 'accommodations' during testing for all children with 'special needs'. Unsurprisingly, the number of kids diagnosed with 'special needs' has grown exponentially in the years since the standards movement began.
The final result is that almost everyone graduates from High School anyway, so that the assessment tests become little more than an expensive annoyance,
distressing students and degrading their education.* The remaining claim that
the tests cause schools to raise standards is also untrue. Just the reverse occurs: a 'dumbing down' is the inevitable result when community and political pressures force schools and teachers to restrict teaching time to details and question-types that are most likely to appear on the standardized tests.
Creativity, innovation, imagination, and in-depth thinking, are all
relegated to the category of 'fluff' so that children's minds can be focused
exclusively on test details.
Of course, there are ways that schools can succeed in raising test scores,
and many have done so. Deprive our children of recess and sports, eliminate
art and music, forego time for interesting discussions, offer less time to read
books for pleasure, cut back on field trips and interesting projects, offer fewer
electives, and waste a lot of valuable time teaching test-taking tricks, and it is
fairly easy to raise scores and thus inspire Presidential speeches like the one
quoted above. But the results are meaningless at best. At worst, they numb our
children's minds, narrow their vision, and kill their spirit, by turning education
into a boring, frightening, drudgery.
Recently there have even been calls for the elimination of childhood summer vacations, since ten weeks of fun and fresh air get in the way of preparing for the tests, and threaten our position in the global marketplace.
Meanwhile, we find ourselves falling into a hellish world in which more and more high school students respond to the pressures of college admission by committing suicide, elementary school children become ill and obese from lack of recess and play, and kindergartners require therapy to recover from stress disorders.
To reform our schools in a meaningful way would mean to restore the
notion that education is rooted in wonder, not economics. Wonder is not merely curiosity. It is a blending of enchantment, mystery, love and respect, with thoughtfulness, willingness, and intuition. It reveals to us the intimate relationship between our inner self and the outer world.
But as we have already noted, our outmoded but persistent scientific viewpoint has led us to take the self out of life. We insist on remaining onlookers, believing that 'real' life only exists in external things, and our 'real' need is to accumulate more of them. In addition to devastating our souls, this has utterly crippled our educational system. Like bits of matter in a laboratory or human beings in a community, it is a fiction to believe that knowledge and ideas can be isolated
and objectively measured. They grow, develop and change as they pass
* Relying on the American ideal of 'freedom' as a justification for testing intelligence and divvying people up into a meritocracy, is a conservative project concerned with maintaining a healthy economy. Relying on the corresponding American ideal of 'equality' as a justification for more rules and regulations to assure identical treatment of everyone, is a liberal project concerned with maintaining social fairness. Neither is primarily concerned with the education of children or the perfection of their souls. through time, they are intertwined with other ideas and interwoven with subjective minds.
Knowledge, intelligence and ideas are not scientifically reducible 'things'. And neither are our children. Children are not meant to be assessed like commercial products on an assembly line. Schools should not be in the business of manufacturing 'things'.
Teaching
Openness to ideas and possibilities, an expanded vision, a willingness to
explore, a passion for discovery, a genuine appreciation for wisdom and
beauty, and a full life of the emotions, body, mind and spirit - these should be
the goals of our educational endeavor. But none of this can be preplanned,
measured, counted, and assessed. Trying to do so is silly and inappropriate.
Planning lessons is a useful tool for teachers: reflecting on content,
comparing alternative ways of approaching the material, considering possible
questions that might arise. But forcing teachers to rigidly adhere to preplanned
"objectives" and specific measurements of "learning outcomes" has the effect of forcing teachers to be insensitive to where children are at that moment, to shun innovation, and to close down inquiry.
Good teachers know that the classroom, like the rest of life, rarely sticks to the plan, and teaching requires improvisation, sensitivity, and countless unexpected turns.
Great teachers use this unpredictability to unlock minds and confound expectations: if Socrates had focused on achieving measurable pre-planned objectives, his Teachings would have been meaningless and quickly forgotten. But under pressure from school boards and regulators to specify "learning objectives"
and "means of assessing outcomes" - that is, to isolate and name in advance
specific behavioral (scientifically measurable) goals - teaching becomes a
mere mechanical transfer of data. But education is not the passing of
information from someone who has it to someone who does not. That is called
'programming'.
The Lost Longing of the Soul
Eros (wonder), as Socrates knew, is the real key to education, but this longing is precisely what is missing from our students' lives -- and this only reflects the reality that it is missing from all of our lives. Without the hopes and dreams
aroused by Eros, children are left apathetic, disrespectful, and empty.
American students are obsessed with the questions: "Why do I need to know
this? When am I ever going to use this in my real life?" Since they have almost never heard that inner development and inner wisdom are important, that their soul is their real life, this kind of dry utilitarianism is all that makes sense to them. They want to be assured that the only things they are being taught are things that will help assure them of a good job. Otherwise, or so they believe without question, they have more important things to do. And as far as their vision allows them to see, adult society agrees with them. Thus, we reduce life to a base minimum.
Among animals, puberty is the pinnacle of maturity. There is nothing to be
accomplished after that. But among humans, puberty is just the beginning of
adulthood. The greater and most interesting part of learning -- emotional,
intellectual, moral, and spiritual -- follows afterward. The energy required for
this endeavor comes from sexuality -- not the sexual act, but that sacred force
within us that links the lowest with the highest in the erotic continuum.
But we customarily think that we, like the animals, have nothing much to learn after puberty, other than the details that enable us to obtain a good job. We are all finished with wonder by the age of perhaps fourteen. After that, we train to
become competent specialists but otherwise do not change very much. We are
content with mediocrity, and smile with a mixture of bemusement and
embarrassment at any mention of our naïve childhood hopes and dreams.
Again, a dejected Eros departs. And why should he stay? Children have already learned everything about love and sex from TV, video games, music, and movies, long before their bodies feel the sensations of puberty. They then attend sex education classes where they are taught about diseases and condoms and respect for one's partner, but nothing about love, passion or Eros - who has been degraded
anyway into a silly cherub on a Valentine card.
As a result, young people no longer feel any guilt or shame about sex, but neither do they feel much genuine passion. Their conversations about love and sex sound about as erotic as a discussion of accounting practices. The pleasure of sex is routine and no longer includes any hint of mystery.
Walking through the halls of a High School today, one is constantly confronted with pretty young girls, barely clad, leaving little to the
imagination. But what is most astonishing is to watch the young boys who pass them by with no hint of notice, who are already so jaded by the environment, so oppressed by political correctness, that there is nothing left to see.
It is all just an actualization of Plato's extreme suggestion in his utopian
Republic that the best way to persuade people to give their deepest loyalty and
devotion to the government rather than their families is to have men and
women exercise naked together, till the whole sexual arousal thing becomes
old hat and boring.
Given the smug arrogance they witness in our 'scientific' society, it is hard
to convince students that theirs is not the first generation to understand the real
truth about the world we live in. They simply do not know that real
intelligence means openness -- not the current vogue that any silly opinion
must be granted the same respect as any other, but real openness to ambiguity,
possibility and wonder, an attitude toward life that combines genuine common
sense with the innocence of a child, that does not bow to the hypnotic
enslaving effects of cultural propaganda and fads, and does not justify or revel
in ignorance, vulgarity, and boredom.
Part of the explanation for the current situation is that our schools are now
scrutinized as if they were totally responsible for the success of their students
-- as if parents and the kids themselves bear hardly any responsibility for this.
The result is that a substantial number of children come swaggering into the
classroom having no reason to be polite or respectful (and thus, 'the slave-girl
has given birth to her mistress'), and no incentive to make any serious effort.
It is the teacher who must be endlessly patient and tolerant of their behavior,
and prove his or her own worth to parents and school boards by coaxing,
cajoling and begging the students to study and do well on the tests. Children
today have been led to believe that they deserve a great deal of respect, and
they are adamant that no one be allowed to 'dis' them. But most of them have
never been taught that they must earn this respect by making serious efforts of
their own.
We have tried so hard to imbue them with self-esteem, that we have
crippled their ability to accomplish anything on their own. And so, instead of
studying and working and taking any interest in learning, far too many of them
sit in their classrooms passively, talking with each other, listening to music on
their headphones, and at semester's end expect a good grade and a good test
score. If these do not occur, teachers and administrators are readily blamed.
They then take all these attitudes and expectations along with them into
adulthood.
In Socrates' time, youngsters flocked to him, aching to share in his
wisdom, wanting to be challenged and taught. Crowds of disciples followed
Christ everywhere, so that sometimes he had to get on a boat and sail away,
just to find a brief respite. Why do we have no such ache? Or do we, but we
have nearly deadened it with what we now call 'education'. Is Eros, the
passionate desire for all that is truly good and meaningful, completely dead in
ourselves and our children? Or is it just too hard to brave the ridicule of
acknowledging that he still lives, hidden somewhere inside our crustencovered
hearts?
Postlude
As we have noted, nothing characterizes 'modernity' more completely
than the loss of faith in transcendence, our arrogant lack of any appreciation for levels of reality above our everyday affairs. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche observed that we have effectively abolished the transcendent world, the world that Plato, Moses, Christ, Muhammad, and many other great Teachers, have always recognized as the 'true' world.
He then asked, "Which world is left? Perhaps the apparent one? Certainly not! Together with the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!" In
other words, by shutting the door on transcendence we have cut off any light
from that world that might have illuminated this realm of Becoming, leaving
us in darkness, leaving us with nothing. Pan is long dead. God, at least
according to Nietzsche, has been dead for over a century.
Now Eros (wonder) appears to have joined them. Humanity no longer understands divine madness, the breathtaking quest to overcome our incompleteness, the longing for eternity.
Since God is gone and the light of meaning has dimmed, and our purpose
in life is to be a conforming worker ant for forty hours per week and then
watch advertisements and go shopping during the time remaining, there is
little time and even less need for actual thinking in any sort of active, creative,
or spiritually meaningful way.
Public opinion, represented by our polling madness which tells us what our opinions are, has conveniently spared us any need to think intelligently for ourselves, by giving us an opportunity to accommodate our beliefs to the prevailing nonsense before we open our mouths and embarrass ourselves. And if we do not have to think for ourselves, then an empty education which strives for uniformity of thinking is both natural and obvious.