Smart AND Good

The Value of College

2011-07-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

From an article in the NY Times two weeks ago (June 26, 2011, SR3) ....

If you have a college degree, you make more money no matter what job you end up in, even if that job does not seem to require a college education. College educated dishwashers make $34K compared to high school grads at $19K. College educated hairdressers make $32K versus those with high school diplomas at $19K. (Interestingly, that $19K figure came up a lot as the likely income level for someone who had a high school diploma).

In some fields (e.g., child care worker, dental hygienist), you made a lot more if you had a college degree. In other fields, you made a bit more (e.g. firefighter, social worker). But in some fields, you made about the same amount of money whether you had a college degree or not: cook, secretary, clergy, casino worker and electrician.

I've been wondering what that is about, especially since I am an educator and am surrounded by folks who believe that a college degree is the "ticket to ride."

We have to ask ourselves whether the learning college affords makes a difference or whether the degree functions the way a letter of introduction worked in the 18th century affirming one's goodness or whether the kind of person who goes to college is the kind of person that employers prefer no matter what the qualifications needed. Of course, maybe it's some combination of factors, the answer I'm inclined toward.

I went to college and I learned a lot -- about life, about other people, about myself, about ideas, but I also missed a lot in the college bubble. So when I came out, I had more and different stuff to learn. And I clearly wasn't qualified for any job. ... except maybe any job that required attention to people, to detail and to communication and to take responsibility for what caught my attention.

I'm trying to remember if I was that way when I went in to college and, despite the years, I think the answer is yes. But college was a gift: time to mature, to let the me I was taught to be all along settle in and settle down. And there's no question that a degree from Bucknell University carried with it a certain cachet (but not as much as a degree from Harvard or Stanford would :-). Is this a system that is fair? that maximizes the potential of each and every young person? I'm not so sure.

So here's my (somewhat im-) modest proposal for today given the current high cost of college:

1) make high schools places where kids are coached to pay attention and take responsibility,

2) offer all students a place to mature for a few years -- mandatory community or military service perhaps? -- and ensure that those places/placements offer some kind of useful skills training as well as increasing social responsibility,

3) recommit to the Emersonian view that we Americans (and all citizens of the world) are morally equal, morally entitled to develop our own unique potential so that our contribution to this world is not lost.

4) revitalize democracy as "associated living" (a la Dewey) and encourage public forums (discussion groups, book clubs, etc.) that are broadly educative.

It would be interesting to see how liberal arts learning and vocational training would sort itself out if all four elements mentioned above were in place.

KIPP and Career Building

2011-07-13T07:04:00.001-07:00

The Hess interview came on the heels of Feinberg’s announcement that his role in KIPP Houston would change. As KIPP continues to go “Turbo” (with a goal to enroll 10 percent of all the students in Houston), Feinberg will shift from operations to fundraising, advocacy and external relations. His new role smacks a bit of “empire-building” though Feinberg describes it differently.

Using FedEx and the USPS as an analogy, Feinberg argues that once KIPP claims a 10% market share, the schools in Houston will reach a tipping point and have to become more like KIPP. His theory is that folks in Houston will become more vocal and demand better schools as they get left out of the KIPP lottery. And that once the public demands better, the public schools will find a way to improve graduation rates, etc. (The implication of course, is that they could do better now; they just don’t because ….?)

Feinberg notes that KIPP schools in Houston turn down 80 % of those who want to come. He seems to think that this is indicative of near universal dissatisfaction with the public schools but his numbers don’t match up. He says that “winning the lottery to come to KIPP is literally winning the lottery.” The undermeaning seems to be one’s life chances are severely diminished if one doesn’t get KIPPed.

I don’t dispute Feinberg’s figures, but I do wonder if those figures say what he thinks they do. If things are so bad and KIPP is so good, why don’t the other 170,000+ parents in Houston want their kids in KIPP schools? I can think of two reasons: 1) parents are generally happy with their child’s education, or 2) KIPP has already tapped the activist get-the-edge-for-my-kid parent population and will stop before they encounter the reality that public school educators know only too well – that too many parents are too busy or too scared or too unprepared to take an active, constructive role in their child’s education.

Of course, Feinberg’s job shift reveals something very important about these publicly funded private schools. They rely not only on state charter subsidies but also governmental grants (“advocacy”) and private donations (“fundraising” and “external relations”) from folks who support the breakdown of the public school system. In an age of decreased governmental spending, Feinberg’s new job is to take a larger piece of the pie away from public schools.

[This is one not so secret secret of Teach for America’s success as well (besides skimming off the cream from the top of the academic jug). Funding from private sources and federal grants has enabled TFA to offer candidates intensive coaching, something that all teachers need but most graduates of traditional programs don’t get.]

So we are left to follow KIPP’s progress toward 10% enrollment and Feinberg’s progress toward his vision of educational success. I wish him well in finding the “right people” to lead and staff his schools. I agree with him that the key to strong schools is inspired leadership and inspirational teachers. But after 30 years in the business, I know how hard it is to find and identify those people. And I am not yet ready to cede the fate of the Houston public schools to his empire. I wish him well as he pursues his career path, but I see no reason to shift public money away from the other 90% of school students to make his dream for himself come true.

Alisha Coleman-Kiner on LOVE

2011-06-02T13:41:00.000-07:00

Please take the time to read this Ed Week commentary by the Principal of Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, TN. BTW was named the "Race to the Top" high school, an honor that earned them a commencement address by President Obama. Principal Alisha Coleman-Kiner explains her "secret" for educational success. Policymakers, attend!

Can "public" survive a (R)epublican attack?

2011-03-09T13:27:00.000-08:00

(Reposted from Social Issues)

Every day now there is a news story about education that jerks me to attention. In my home state of Pennsylvania, the new governor announced a budget proposal that cut state funding for higher education by 52%. Funding for local public schools is projected to be significantly lower than last year, a move that will certainly prompt increases in local property taxes even as districts cut teaching positions. Other cost-saving measures are long past scraping flesh off bone. (And cuts for public schools are being proposed at the same time that a new voucher proposal is in the state legislature, a proposal that will further drain public school funding while enabling students to opt out of public schools in favor of parochial schools at taxpayer expense.)

I’ve already figured out what this is about, even as I work against the defunding of public educational opportunities. However, here’s a story I can’t quite figure out -- or maybe I just don’t believe it. The state legislature in Utah has passed a bill that requires schools to teach students that the United States is a compound constitutional republic. This is true and leads me to wonder what they have been teaching.

Apparently, the need for this legislative action is tied to fears (whose?) about indoctrination with respect to pure democracy and socialism. (We apparently have no fears about indoctrination with respect to free market mania or corporate control, both of which seem to me to be more immediate (and more concerning) dangers than either pure democracy or socialism.

As I understand a republican form of government, it can be captured as “majority rule, minority rights” administered by representatives of the people. While I suppose we might quibble about what it really is, I would argue it’s ultimately not a definition to be stipulated but a political stance to be negotiated. Yes, we have a compound constitutional republic, but what does that amount to? We elect representatives following constitutionally-framed procedures and those representatives decide what the majority wants and which minority rights must be honored. And that too is a constantly renegotiated political stance.

While the Founding Fathers (and what about those Founding Mothers anyway?) were pragmatic in their specification of a form of government that was not purely democratic (in both representation and attention to minority concerns), they clearly had democratic aspirations of the kind John Dewey articulated throughout his career. That is, they aspired to a “mode of associated living” marked by communicative competence. While I think it is ducky that students will learn that they live in a constitutional republic, I think it a shame – and an intellectual error -- that they will learn about democracy only as a threat to the American way of life, rather than as a vision that, while admittedly dangerous*, animated the American Revolution and much of American history since that time. (And do I need to mention that socialist and free market economies can exist in constitutional republics, and that more often, as in our case, a nation’s economy is mixed for pragmatic reasons?)

I have the sinking feeling that the defunding of public schools in Pennsylvania at the hands of one of a slew of newly-elected Republican governors is actually very much tied to this legislation in Utah. Both are part of an orchestrated plan to drive a stake through the very concept of “public,” to stipulate what should be negotiated anew with each new political season. Their private interests, their minority rights, are being written into the fabric of governmental and educational possibilities. This should command our attention.

* A nod to Winston Churchill who noted that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others that had been tried. He appreciated the dangers of “mob rule,” but also the vitality of political structures in which all had a stake.

Free speech, flabby thinking and multiculturalism

2011-03-04T16:02:00.001-08:00

The Supreme Court has confirmed that the odious Westboro Baptist Church members may disturb military funerals in the name of free speech and folks in Orange County are screaming indignities, obscenities and blasphemies at Muslim American citizens as they enter a fundraiser for a women’s center. (Thanks to Salon for this video.) I have always considered myself a near-radical free speecher (believing that open discourse, even if testy, is better than hidden resentment –- and anyway “Sticks and stones …”) , but maybe I’m just not. Or maybe there are once unthinkable lines that have now been crossed.

Either way, I am rendered speechless. I have no idea what to say about this issue, these actions.

But I am not speechless about a claim made by Ed Royce, one of the (Republican) local politicians who spoke at the Orange County rally before the protest. In fact, I share his worry though not his view of the cause and implications of it.

Royce said that kids in American schools are being taught that “every idea is right, that no one should criticize any other position no matter how odious” and this, I fear, has a ring of truth to it. It is a stance I encounter among the highly intelligent, accomplished and caring undergraduate students at my prestigious university; it is a stance that l too often hear articulated by the teachers with whom I work; it is a stance I see in evidence among students in the local public schools I visit.

Royce blames it on “multiculturalism.” I think he and we have conflated flabby thinking and multiculturalism (or at least Royce and others have), making the oh-too-common error of confusing correlation with causality. Yes, we have multiculturalism (a good thing in that it simply is a human reality and also good in that it provides the difference that is the prompt for new thinking). And yes, there is flabby thinking. Flabby thinking is a failure to interrogate (freely but with respect) any other position until (so that) the community (of knowers and actors) can move toward an assessment of which claims are defensible (and therefore warranted) and which are not. There may be more than one position that we can live with, but this does not mean that “anything goes.”

Mr. Royce’s brand of flabby thinking can be detected in his automatic dichotomizing (my way or the highway, right or wrong, Christian or Muslim).

Educators should be about rooting out flabby thinking of all kinds. And, it seems, rooting out flabby thinking might also be the route to clarifying the value of multiculturalism. And maybe too, the demise of flabby thinking might replace the fear that underlay screaming at funerals and fundraisers with the kind of thoughtful confidence that makes dialogue possible and fruitful.

Fomenting a revolution? Who is?

2011-03-04T06:29:00.000-08:00

Update on the situation at McCaskey East High School:

A few weeks ago, I commented on an effort at McCaskey East High School in Lancaster, PA to create supportive homerooms (basically advisory groups) for students of color -- and segregated by gender as well. Somehow the effort in this small Pennsylvania city found its way to CNN. (You may also remember Lancaster, PA as the place where surveillance cameras on the streets surrounding Franklin and Marshall College raised a bit of a national fuss.) You know the formula: CNN = big fuss = noisy school board meeting with "outraged" citizens = school board fails to support a thoughtful experiment on the part of the school administration and faculty. As CNN has later reported "School Scraps Race Specific Mentoring Program."

Typically, the reality is a little more complicated than CNN (or any other news outlet) reports. Based on conversations with folks in and out of the school, it appears that the mentoring opportunities were not "scrapped" so much as they were made open or optional.

What is worth noting is what is behind some of the opposition to this effort. Specifically, some white citizens reported worries about whether a segregated mentoring program might foment a "black power" vibe. I found myself wondering why exactly that would be bad and for whom? It reminded me of the time several women faculty at my previous institution were standing on a street corner on campus, talking as male members of the administration walked to lunch at the student center. It was pretty clear we were making them nervous just by being "huddled" together -- as they commented while walking by.

I suspect we were only talking about our children or our workload or perhaps (horrors!) the next women's studies faculty development meeting. But after seeing their reactions, we immediately started joking about “fomenting a revolution." So let's keep an eye on who's worried about who is gathering and for what purpose. It may be the worriers who are fomenting something.

(An excellent example of this phenomenon can be found on the mashup of Fox New video clips put together by TPM. These collected clips of the supposed “violence” of the Wisconsin protestors point clearly to the source of any violence being done. Check it out!)

Way to take a shot, McCaskey East!

2011-02-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

Cross posted from Social Issues:

In a big high school (so big there are two large buildings located across campus from one another) in a not-very-big city that happens to be my hometown, something is happening that caught the attention of CNN … and then, of course, a host of on-air commentators and bloggers. As one headline put it, “Pennsylvania high school mentoring program resorts to segregation.” LancasterOnline says that Fox News’ Sean Hannity called the program “antiquated, offensive and completely irrational.” Darn, I missed it …

At McCaskey East High School (the newer of the two buildings I mentioned above), faculty and administration made a decision to implement a mentoring program for students of color in the face of a clear and continuing achievement gap between black and white students. After intensive instructional efforts and more than a decade of educational experiments failed to shrink the gap, these educators turned to affiliation and relationship as possible pathways to higher achievement.

The “segregation” is limited to junior class homerooms. For six minutes a day and twenty additional minutes every other week, African American teachers and students gather for a moment of . . . . Well, more on that in a minute.

Buried in the headlines is the fact that this experiment involves homerooms voluntarily divided by race, gender and linguistic diversity, with a homeroom teacher/mentor who is one of them. This is not an unusual experience for white students in most schools around the country, but it is often an unusual experience for students of color and language minorities in a country where the vast majority of teachers -- even in urban areas -- are white and do not speak a second language.

A couple things strike me immediately: first, this is an effort to make homeroom actually about mentoring and not just a place to stand for the pledge of allegiance or a place to sit for morning announcements. Debbie Meier and Central Park East High School (and lots of lesser known efforts around the country) taught us twenty years ago the power of an academic advisor who actually advises, who comes to know students as persons with aspirations too often hidden.

Second, this move comes after significant attention over time to the achievement gap that goes back to the days of Superintendent Vicki Phillips (now the Education Officer with the Gates Foundation) and has continued non-stop since then. A wide variety (maybe too wide, but that’s another post) of well-thought out instructional, curricular and structural efforts (including for example the creation of small learning communities around which the McCaskey East building was constructed) has not made a dent in the test score differences. Perhaps the problem is not only about heads but also about hearts, and about what we do and don’t do when are heads and hearts are not beating together. (None of this is in the news reports of course. I know this because, until this year, I was a resident of Lancaster, PA and a teacher educator who worked with School District of Lancaster staff.)

Third, this program is voluntary. Young men and women who identify as black can choose to be assigned to these homerooms. (It is not clear whether the ELL students are exercising a similar choice). Thus, the school is at least partly bypassing questions around race as a fluid category. In fact, my criticism might be that this option is not available for students who identify as brown or yellow or red – or gay. (Look at the next point to see why this might matter.)

Fourth, adolescents have affiliation needs. Duh! African American developmental psychologist Beverly Tatum, in an engaging book aptly titled, explains Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (Of course, the white kids are all sitting together too, but nobody writes a book about that.) With respect to gender, feminist social scientists have made a strong case for the power of all-female environments in developing leadership and efficacy in young women and I don’t know a single guy who went to an all-male school who doesn’t think it was good for him academically. And Lyn Okagaki, Commissioner of Education Research at IES, has found that students’ ethnic identity is positively correlated with school achievement.

My guess is that the folks at McCaskey East wisely figured out that if these homogeneous groups had power for shaping kids’ self-understanding and identity, putting a similarly-identified adult into that group might create a pathway or pipeline for messages that cast academic achievement in a positive light. And remember, this is for homeroom. It is not about segregating kids for instructional purposes.

Now, I am not suggesting this isn’t dangerous. CNN trotted out NYU’s Pedro Noguera who acknowledged that these educators were “well-intentioned” but fretted that they might be inadvertently reinforcing stereotypes by providing students with “support” in race-based groups (no mention of the gender factor or the idea that this homeroom plan applied to everyone). And frankly, the longer Pedro spoke, the more I realized he didn’t know the specifics of this case; he clearly thought that the purpose of this “segregation” was instructional support. But it’s not. It’s about growing into an identity of oneself as a thinker, as a learner, as an academic achiever. Now that can’t be done wholly outside of the process of instruction; initial success is the key to the grounded self-confidence that feeds more risk-taking and more growth and achievement. But there is good reason to think that this kind of relational intervention can help kids of color (as well as young men and young women) frame a place to stand as a person with a mind and a heart and a future.

Of course this is dangerous. Everything is. Education is tricky business with attendant risks at every turn. But as my basketball commentator sister, Mimi Griffin, is fond of saying, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. (She stole that from either Wayne Gretsky or Michael Jordan, depending on whom you believe.)

The folks at McCaskey East are taking a shot. If their shot goes astray, I trust them to figure that out and adjust the next shot. You should too.

Tiger Mother Meets Oprah?

2011-01-21T06:58:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted from Social Issues:

I’m guessing Amy Chua isn’t gonna show up on the Oprah Winfrey Network?? Or is she?

Is anybody watching OWN? I’m not because I don’t have cable or satellite dish (I moved to a new state several months ago and decided to live without it for a while). I’m not a huge TV watcher so I can’t say that I really miss anything, but I’ve been curious about this new network that sprang into life with the new year. Is it possible to create and inhabit what a New York Times media critic called a “no cynicism zone”?

I’ve been trying to think about Amy Chua in an Oprah-like way, sans “mean-spiritedness” (the same mean-spiritedness that Oprah has banned from the new network and from her programming in general). But it isn’t Oprah that’s really helped me. It’s a mental habit borrowed from rhetorician Peter Elbow described (and prescribed) in a book called Embracing Contraries. Elbow considers the wisdom of practicing “methodological belief” (interpretation through the assumption that the person speaking has good reasons, good motivations and good intentions for what s/he is saying) before employing “methodological doubt” (the Descartes-inspired critical stance that the contents of consciousness -– my own and any other’s intuition and claims -- must be subject to scrutiny). These two habits of mind, practiced together and in the recommended sequence, yield a richness of understanding that just isn’t available with either belief or doubt.

But my colleague Amy Shuffleton, talking about Amy Chua in an earlier post on Social Issues, reminded me that in practice it’s not belief before doubt; it’s belief and doubt and belief and doubt and belief and doubt … practiced in a complementary rhythm. The trick is not to get stuck in belief or doubt.

It seems to me that the Oprah Network could get caught in a broken record of belief, the mirror image of the MSNBC/Fox differently-directed revolving doors of doubt. If Amy Chua’s makes it to OWN, it will be a signal that Oprah and her network team realize that mean-spiritedness and cynicism are not the same thing as doubt. And that doubt and belief can walk hand in hand. Richness of understanding is the result.

I’ll have to get my satellite dish hooked up to watch it.

Teachers, grief and growth

2011-01-15T09:17:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from Social Issues Blog)

When Jared Loughner killed Christina Green in Arizona last Saturday, he disturbed the lives of other children across the country as well, raising questions about the world “out there.” But the children at Mesa Verde Elementary School, the ones who will not see Christina again, are more than disturbed (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/us/11schools.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23). Their parents and their teachers face the nearly insurmountable challenge of helping them to make sense out of this event, and to reconstruct their world as safe enough to move about, sleep at night, trust the other, and think about something other than the possibility that someone might shoot them.

A new rhetorical battle royale has broken out between the adults who think that nasty political rhetoric framed this attack and those who think that Jared was mentally deranged and unaffected by that rhetoric. They are both right and both wrong – as is so often the case in life’s interesting moments. Jared Loughner is mentally ill; his asocial and antisocial behavior is definitive of mental illness. And the use of targets and gun metaphors by political and media figures makes certain things imaginable, especially to the mentally ill.

But the teachers at Mesa Verde and elsewhere are dealing with a different issue. What is the right emotional tone in the classroom now? What does one say – and not say? How can I comfort this child without alarming that one? Where do we draw the line on self-absorption, encouraging students to live through their pain and their questions?

As a mother of now grown children, I appreciated both facets of President Obama’s address at the memorial service at the University of Arizona: healing eloquence and choking silence. He framed a vision for bringing us together with his words and made us feel the unspeakability of it all with one long telling minute near the end of the speech when he simply could not continue.

As a teacher educator, I’m left wondering how we ready our aspirants for moments like this. How do we teach future teachers to value both words and silence? How do we enable and encourage them to be present to tragedy in the lives of their students without being felled by it? How do future teachers learn to respond – always as educators – so that their students grow in mind and heart and action?

Today I have ideas but no concrete answers to these questions -- except to say this: teacher education must always remain education. Technical training, though necessary, is not a sufficient basis for becoming an educator. The Mesa Verde teachers responding to Christina Green’s friends and schoolmates this week will draw on more than “professional development.” They will do with their students just what President Obama called on all Americans to do: “to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” This is growth; this is education.

Keep stretching ...

2010-12-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

I am breathing slowly and deeply this morning, puzzled and saddened by something I heard yesterday on NPR. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery pulled part of the art exhibition “Hide and Seek” on Thursday under pressure from, among others, the Catholic League. Removed from view was a 4 minute video exploring death by AIDS and depicting Jesus on the cross being eaten by large black ants. However, my concern here is not the piece, nor the protest nor even the pronouncement that the Smithsonian would remove David Wojnarowicz‘s representation of his lover’s death, “A Fire in My Belly.”

(Others have had interesting things to say on both sides of this issue if you want to pursue it:

http://riskrapper.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/smithsonian-christmas-season-exhibit-fea)

I am most distressed today as an American educator by the post-game comments of Bill Donovan, the President of the Catholic League. Donovan, reveling in his triumph, is now working to undercut any and all taxpayer supported arts in the United States. What would this do to educational possibility in our present cultural and economic position? What do we lose if we fail to support the images and ideas that stretch us?

Donovan’s case goes something like this. Because there is no taxpayer support for that which “working people” appreciate, specifically the World Wrestling Federation, then there should be no taxpayer support for any other kinds of arts and entertainment. Hmmmm.

[Sidenote here: The government of Abu Dhabi has initiated a revitalization of their economy by importing branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre – a decidedly different take on what impacts a people toward productivity.]

Now there’s a lot of art I don’t understand and a lot I don’t appreciate (including WWF), but even the stuff I don’t understand (sometimes especially that stuff) stretches me (including WWF). And that stretching is part of my ongoing education. Because WWF is widely supported by both people who work and people who don’t, it is available to me. I can be – and very occasionally am – stretched by it. But other arts not commercially viable are nonetheless valuable. Sometimes that which we most need to enhance our collective sensibilities, to expand our abilities to respond to each other with understanding and appreciation, is that which we avoid, resisting enhancement or expansion, because it is uncomfortable. We don’t want to be stretched.

WWF may be one way of exploring the human condition, but it is not the only way. The visual and performing arts have this exploration as their raison d’etre. Videos like “A Fire in my Belly “ are such an exploration, an invitation to feel, to think, to act with integrity in the world.

Now here’s the part that’s tricky. That which is shocking can either prompt or impede educational stretching. Shock is, by definition, experience marked by strong feelings. Such feelings can open us up to educational possibility, but they can also harden into fear (flight, fight and/or paralysis) before reason or reflection can connect those feelings to possibilities for new understanding or action. Mr. Donovan is afraid. Something has scared him. It’s not this particular video (a Christian who has pondered “The Passion of the Christ” has already dealt with images more shocking than these), but there is something that has prompted the members of the Catholic League to flee deeper understanding, to fight those who seek it for themselves, to freeze in the track of past experience rather than renewed possibility. As an educator, I have to name this as fear and resist it – and resist as well any effort to shrink the artistic world or narrow the aesthetic sensibility that is available to me.

Government-supported funding of the arts serves precisely this purpose: to keep in play just those representations and explorations of that human (American) experience that we do not necessarily seek out, that we don’t readily pay to support. It is never time to cut the budget for what educates all of us.

Poems, Picture Study and Beginning Again

2010-01-01T13:58:00.001-08:00

I have long thought that the very best gifts are not those that are most expensive or exclusive or even those you most want in advance; the best gifts are those that demonstrate somehow that the giver knows you. I received many lovely Christmas presents this year and all represented, in one way or another, this spirit of "best gifts." But one stands out: Poem a Day, edited by Karen McCosker and Nicholas Albery. It's a collection of 366 poems (including one for February 29th) organized by date, one for each day of the year.

The book cover says, "In times past, Americans with a love of poetry routinely learned by heart dozens of poems ..." and I was driven backward to memories of my Catholic grade school days in Philadelphia, to an occasional subject called "Poems and Picture Study." This was not a "special." We didn't leave our regular classroom (I and my 70 or 80 classmates never left the regular classroom :-). It was simply a weekly exercise in which each of us learned to recognize some famous work of art (Jean Francois Millet's The Gleaners comes immediately to consciousness) or to recite from memory some well-known bit of poetry (for example, "O young Lochivar is come out of the west ..." by Sir Walter Scott). These exercises in memorization and cultural appreciation seem, from my vantage point half a century later, to have been important. We knew then that they were important because there was a final exam at the end of the year in this study, just as there were cumulative exams in all of the subjects we studied.

Ironically, it is examinations (of the NCLB variety) that are partially responsible for chasing this kind of study out of the curriculum. But it is not only the NCLB mentality that impoverishes the studies our children take up. We are impoverished by attitudes that allow the legitimate need for "relevance" to trump the just-as-important need for perspective, for appreciation for the best that has been said and done. E.D. Hirsch was right about the latter, the Progressives were right about the former -- and John Dewey was even "righter" when he insisted that the two were not mutually exclusive.

Some will say that it is silly nostalgia on my part that causes me to bemoan the lack of poems and picture study in the curriculum. Some will say that both are there but in other forms in regular language arts and visual arts classes. Some will argue that we have no time for this nonsense in an age when literacy is lagging. Some will note that the pedagogies of memorization and site recognition are limited. And I will nod and agree. But even if all that is true, I think today's young children would be better off recognizing and reciting at least some of these kinds of expressive and aesthetic achievements. In such works, there is both intelligence and goodness.

As for me, I spent just a few minutes this New Years morning memorizing the selection for January 1st, "New Every Morning" by 19th century poet Susan Coolidge:

Every day is a fresh beginning,

Listen my soul to the glad refrain

And, spite of old sorrows

And older sinning,

Troubles forecasted

And possible pain,

Take heart with the day and begin again.

Seen, Encouraged and Challenged

2009-12-19T13:42:00.000-08:00

It’s been a long fall with lots to do and not much to say. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’ve had lots to say to lots of graduate and undergraduate students who come to my classes, appear at my door, call on the phone and, of course, email – with questions that run the gamut from “what do you want on this [project, paper, presentation]?” to “what should I do when I grow up?” to “how can I handle this [breakup, challenge, death in the family]?”

There are many more students than in the past. A state budget crunch and a shortsighted political ethos re higher education has resulted in rapidly growing class sizes and many more advisees. In the face of this, I’ve been crunching the faculty/student ratio numbers. I’m pretty convinced by William Ouchi’s claim that any teacher’s “total student load” cannot exceed 80 if that teacher is to be an effective educator. And “effective” includes nurturing the relationships with students that make it possible for kids of any age to grow into smart and good people. My student load this semester is about 150. I’m way past Ouchi’s limit – and I’m not feeling very effective despite steady effort and many constructive discussions and interactions with lots of students.

Total student load is a topic that deserves more of my attention here. But for now, let me make an observation about what kids – and all of us -- need if they are to know much about and do good in the world.

Put bluntly, humans need to be seen, encouraged and challenged. Teachers who are able to do this for and with their students – and who have the time to do this – will have students who flourish.

What does this mean?

To be seen is to be recognized as the person I am, want to be and can be. To be encouraged is to be supported through the myriad fears that often block the effort to learn, to be invited to act with courage despite the sometimes painful and always uncomfortable feelings that accompany real change in one’s worldview and capabilities. To be challenged is to be moved beyond old habits of thinking and doing and understanding by the lure of interest or by the push of personal, intellectual or institutional pressure.

It makes intuitive sense that we would want to be seen first, encouraged second and challenged third, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, I’d say (admittedly stereotypically) that females tend to want to be encouraged prior to being challenged and males respond better to challenge prior to encouragement. What’s important is that all are encouraged and challenged and that each is encouraged and challenged in the order that prompts the richest, most generative response. The latter can only occur when students are known, when their teacher sees them.

I work hard to know and to see each of my students. It’s demanding and there are always a few who slip through because they seek anonymity, I just miss them due to lack of time or personal oversight or some combination of both. My sense is that more are slipping through – in part because there are more of them. I hope that someone else is catching those who slip through my net, that someone else is seeing, encouraging and challenging the kids I’m missing. But my colleagues too have many more than the 80 students Ouchi identifies as the research-based cut-off for effective teaching.

This isn’t directly about class size or even teaching quality. It’s about relationships and their importance to the very possibility of education. We need to see this clearly at every level.

Think you can't trust the President?? At least trust the kids!

2009-09-05T05:40:00.001-07:00

Cross-posted from Social Issues (the John Dewey Society Blog) http://deweycsi.blogspot.com

I was greeted early yesterday morning by a local newspaper article noting that some folks (specifically, "conservatives," but it's hard to know who that refers to) are angry that President Obama plans to give a speech at a public school urging young people to stay in school and take advantage of the education being offered them. Throughout the day yesterday -- and this morning -- I encountered this "developing story" ... on CNN, in The New York Times, and elsewhere.

What are we to make of this?

The Obama folks clearly made one mistake in the run-up to the event. They posted lesson plans that teachers could use in preparation for and after listening to the President's speech (offered live in one school but available for broadcast in any school). One part of that included a question to be posed to the students: "What can you do to help the President?" In context, the question was clearly about supporting the good of the nation, but I can (if I really stretch Peter Elbow's "methodological belief") see why those who do not agree with the "President's ideology" would be concerned. And it seems the President's folks were listening and focused on making this a non-partisan event. That question in the lesson plan was changed to ask how a student could achieve his or her educational goals.

I am struck by the concern with the "President's ideology," because the complaint incorporates the assumption that ONLY the President has an ideology, that the one complaining is speaking the non-biased truth. Of course, the President has views on how to deal with the issues of our time, as do we all. And we don't all agree with each other. But it seems we have lost even the notion that we share one common goal: a desire to educate children to be good Americans (even when we are not in agreement about what that means.) Each of us -- especially the duly elected President of the country -- deserves that benefit of the doubt no matter how hard we fight in the arena of ideas and policies.

We have apparently moved into an era when even the clear election winner, a father of two young daughters, will not be trusted to speak to school children. Have we so little confidence in our children's ability to listen critically and form and frame their own minds that we fear the influence of Barack Obama? If that's so, then I fear no education is possible, certainly not the real education that requires openness to people who don't look and think like we do.

Children who would become democratic citizens need to experience the play of democratic functioning. I remember well my 6th grade Catholic school playground days during the Nixon/Kennedy elections. My teachers and most of my classmates were Kennedy supporters (the result of religioius "ideology"? ) My parents -- and I -- were Nixon supporters (the result of my business executive father's socio-economic status?) I and the few other Nixon supports held our ground when everybody else challenged us; for the most part, we enjoyed it. Whether or not we can trust our President in this case (and I obviously think we can), I am quite certain we can trust our children. Bring the President into every classroom; it will do us good.

“Kids, I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today . . . “

2008-08-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks, USA Today reported on a study by the Foundation for Child Development (FCD) that found that kids today are not all that different from kids of yesterday (or at least the yesterday of their parents’ childhood). Reading levels and appetites are similar, math skills are somewhat better, high school graduation rates are up very slightly, and suicide rates are unchanged.

I was taken with this report because I had just finished two one-week workshops focused on children’s and adolescents’ moral development, working closely with several dozen K-12 educators ranging in age from 23 to 58. A clear majority of the participants signaled a perception that “thing have gotten worse” since they were in school. We spent a good bit of our workshop time trying to figure out the origin and accuracy of that perception. What was worse and what was better, especially with respect to the moral development of the young?

If the FCD study is to be believed, not much has changed in what kids know and are able to do. But let’s consider these findings as well: Kids today are “at much lower risk of death from accidents, violence and disease, are slightly more likely to live below the poverty line, are substantially more likely to be overweight or obese, and are less likely to attend church but more likely to believe religion is important.” “Family mobility is down, teen birth rates are down, and rates of smoking, drinking and drug use are on the decline.”

This suggests that some conditions of kids’ lives have improved (physical safety and community continuity) while others have not (poverty, overweight). Kids have responded to all this by acting in apparently smarter ways with respect to sex and drugs. Other data suggests greater interesting community service as I mentioned the other day. In other words, the empirical picture is mixed but definitely not all bad news.

So why the general moral malaise among educators?

I suppose some of it is just the tendency of the older generation to blindness when it comes to the maturity of the younger generation. Officer Krupke sings the anthem of the elder captured in the title of this entry in “West Side Story.” Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago Socrates commented on the folly of youth and of the inability of one generation to live up to the memory of the previous one. But I’d say there’s more than this generation gap at work in educators’ current perceptions.

Cultural diversity may be one factor. I don’t want to maintain that today’s educators operate in conditions of greater cultural diversity than was the case a century or even a generation ago. In fact, in this land built by the hands of immigrants, cultural diversity has often been a fact of and factor in teachers’ work. But today we demand more of teachers than a recognition of difference; we expect the ability to negotiate dialogue across difference. Teachers can no longer simply demand that students put on the dominant culture; they and their students are expected to navigate multiple cultures. This is a good thing, but it’s a drain on educators’ energy. And any drain on energy can result in less generosity when it comes to perceptions of potential.

For my money, there’s one more factor contributing to the perception that kids are less well off, more troubled, less well-behaved. It is the failure of parents to be parents. This is a phenomenon I’ve observed in my 40s and 50s aged peers. It’s a function of mostly positive factors – greater self-awareness, more openness between parents and children -- but it’s a failure of parenting nonetheless. Parenting is one role in a game that must be played if kids are to grow and grow up. The game is “kids test the limits; parents hold the line.” Kids must test the limits. And we parents must hold the line even if the kids are only doing things we did as adolescents (drinking, smoking pot, sneaking out, dating the “wrong” person, disrespecting a teacher or coach or neighbor, sluffing off our homework or . . . .). We don’t have to ground them or scream or resort to physical violence. In fact, we don’t have to punish them at all. But we do have to call them on the things they are doing that step over the line. And we must hold them to the natural consequences of their actions. (Underage drinking means they cannot be trusted with a driver’s license, for example). Often this means backing up teachers and coaches even when we’re not sure they are right. It means allowing our sons and daughters to lose their privileges – or their driver’s license – without rescuing them constantly. When parents aren’t parents, teachers perceive that kids are running wild.

So I guess this a call to educators to check their perceptions. Be wary of a premature judgment that kids don’t want and need our firm – if gentle -- guidance and direction. But it’s also a call to parents to be parents and to all of us to recognize the sometimes weighty expectations we have placed on teachers to navigate the roiled waters of cultural diversity.

Millennials in service

2008-08-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted on Social Issues

The Millennials are coming! Or are they rising? Actually, they have arrived, says Neil Howe, co-author of the 2000 book Millennials Rising, a volume that has found its way to the shelf of every college admissions and student affairs professionals. And with them has come a penchant for community service. Today’s young people spend more hours in community volunteer work and service projects than any generation before them – and with this service comes an oft-underutilized opportunity for the kind of trying, undergoing, and connecting by reflecting that Dewey described as the organic circuit of learning.

But that’s not my point today. Instead I want to point out that“the service agenda” has become a political message as well. Both presidential candidates are touting the glories of citizens serving others. Time Magazine. The Carnegie Corporation, the AARP, Target and others are together helping to make “The Case for National Service” (see wwwservicenation.org).

I bring this up for two reasons. First, I am an avid advocate for national service. I think it would be swell if every American (or American wanna-be) between the ages of 18 and 22 spent at least one year in some form of service (educational, environmental, military, infrastructure-building, security, emergency-responding, or whatever else we can imagine) in exchange for a subsistence wage, further education credits (to complete GED, obtain job training or attend college), and the right to vote. They would live with other young people under conditions of minimal supervision and have responsibility for paying their own bills (without the benefit of credit cards). (By they way, I’d also be happy to tie receipt of social security benefits by older citizens to part-time service in domains appropriate to their interest and expertise.)

Second, I think it’s important to give credit where credit is due. As far as I’m concerned, the millennials’ interest in community service is not an accident. It’s a function of a push by educators (individuals, schools, districts, state departments of education, and even university professors J) to incorporate service learning, character development and citizenship awareness into curricula and requirements.

I am not saying that these efforts were as widespread nor as well-done as they might have been. Much of the push to service learning followed the minimalist Maryland dictum that students must amass a certain number of service hours to graduate from high school. And I’m well aware – based on the experience of my own children – that service hours do not always prompt constructive reflection and are often fudged. Still, kids listen when we talk even when it seems like they are paying no attention. And the truth is that service is its own reward. Not all kids attend to the people they are serving and the situations that require their assistance – but many do. Once they see that their work makes a difference, they are hooked. Making a difference is one of those natural reinforcers that young people find hard to resist.

So let’s give the schools some credit here. (We rarely do, you know. Consider the blame placed on schools during the Reagan years when our nation was at risk economically because schools were failing. Then think about the relative Clinton “boom times” a decade later. Did you hear anybody acknowledging the difference schools were making???? I thought not.) Schools may not be the only tool for social reform, but schooling does have a significant impact on the quality of community life. The current focus on service is not purely accidental. Kids may not recognize that service supports the development of a meaningful sense of self at the same time that it enables a deeper understanding of the structure and function of the communities of knowledge and action in which we live. It’s up to educators to see and express this lofty goal. But kids know it’s worth doing, and they want to keep doing it. Let’s continue to encourage them.

"I am the one who is talking."

2008-08-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

There’s a parochial school in Philadelphia located in the shadow of Temple University Medical Center and in the center of a neighborhood that most would classify as “troubled.” It is Saint Malachy’s, a school supported by a contingent of Philadelphia Irish Catholics (some of whom are my much loved relatives) but populated mostly by children of color living in that North Philadelphia neighborhood. As a result of a few contributions of my own, I have made it to Saint Malachy’s mailing list and, as a result, have been the recipient of various moving missives and powerful poetic communications from the retiring pastor, Father John McNamee.

My most recent communication was the school newsletter and it included The Students’ Creed. I share it here.

The Students’ Creed

I have faith in myself.

I have faith in my teachers.

I can learn if I study hard.

I respect others and seek their respect.

I have self-respect.

I have self-control.

I love myself.

And loving myself I will be myself.

And know myself.

I am the one who is talking.

I found this creed, recited at the start of each school day, quite moving and I’m still trying to figure out why. It may be the focus on faith, not specifically religious faith but faith as a facet of living well. I cannot live fearlessly without faith. Faith in myself and my teachers seems to be a fine place to start.

It may be the focus on students’ efficacy. I can learn, I respect, I control, I love.

But it’s probably that last line – “I am the one who is talking.” The self who is coming to moral and intellectual and yes, spiritual, maturity is no abstraction but the concrete speaker. It is a concept even the youngest school student can grasp. And I talk not to myself only. I proclaim to my community that I am present and will be accounted for. I talk and will account for myself.

There’s no magic in this creed, but I think there’s power that supports kids’ quest to be smart and good.

Theory-practice and moral education

2008-07-15T06:44:00.000-07:00

The theory-practice puppy is nipping at my heels today as I begin teaching -- for the second week in a row -- “Children’s and Adolescents’ Moral Development.” That’s the title of a workshop for P-12 educators in my region of Pennsylvania. I’m co-teaching this week with my friend and colleague developmentalist Mary Casey.

The participants in this workshop want “practice,” and eschew theory. But practice is not a how-to manual, and theory is not useless. Pedagogical practice involves socially-framed and contextually-determined, sometimes habituated, sometimes thoughtful, but always particular responses to particular sets of educational circumstances.

Particularity matters when it comes to practice and so does the community of agents within which any practice gets its meaning. And that’s why I can’t simply “deliver” specific actions, or even typical strategies, that teachers can put on the shelf and take down and use when they want to put on a “moral educator” hat. What I can do is coach teachers to richly interpret the circumstances and challenges facing them so that their responses fit – intellectually, emotionally, psychically, relationally, i.e. morally. This is a pragmatist view of moral decision-making and action that relies on the work of Christian theological H. Richard Niebuhr in The Responsible Self, one that is clearly congruent with John Dewey’s understanding of valuation and responsibility.

Interpretation is a complicated process integrating attention, cognition, imagination, anticipation, empathy, and self-understanding. Humans interpret all the time in all sorts of settings, sometimes well, often poorly. Limited or inaccurate or avoidably biased interpretation leads to ill-suited, potentially immoral response. Thorough, grounded interpretation enables fruitful, moral action.

The capacity to interpret well is grounded in experience and knowledge. What practitioners refer to as “theory” is part of that grounding. Aristotle’s emphasis on the role of habit in doing the good reinforces most educators’ intuition that modeling matters and reinforcement of constructive behavior results in “good kids,” focusing them on their own behavior and the internal and external reward for apparently good behavior. Kant’s claim that reason yields a universalizable categorical imperative to be obeyed by the well-oriented will pushes us to look for the principles at work in any circumstance. Piaget’s formulation of stages of cognitive development is really a framework for interpreting student learning, just as Erickson’s socio- crises offer a lens for recognizing some social and emotional forces shaping a youngster’s actions. Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning enable an educator to know how to talk constructively with kids about moral dilemmas. Gilligan’s emphasis on relationships in theorizing moral development introduces gender as a potentially important interpretive element. Noddings’ phenomenological analysis of caring as a relationship rather than an individual feeling calls us to scrutinize relationships as interactive.

It matters not for action that someone can accurately recite the stages or categories or principles and connect them with the correct author – but it does matter which stages and categories and principles frame one’s interpreting, even implicitly. It does matter that educators have a richly-developed theoretical sensibility; it matters that they internalize the habits of interpretation that these theories underwrite. It is here that theory is married to practice and cannot profitably be put asunder.

So I have to do more than tell them what Aristotle or Kohlberg or Noddings say. My own practice as the co-instructor of this workshop must model the ways of seeing and understanding that I deem important for their practice as moral educators – and then I have to catch them trying it out and help them recognize the payoff in understanding that will reinforce their new interpretive framework.

“Theory” and “practice” are analytic constructs, pragmatic products of emphasis and point of view. If I am laboring in the field, practice is my lens. If I am laboring in the laboratory or the library, theory is my lens. But either way, both theory and practice are present in my thinking. Dewey of course knew this and said so on numerous occasions. I have to do more than say so in my workshop this week; I have to find a way to help the teachers who are my students internalize this insight so that it shapes what they see and how they interpret the value of our work together.

Christian theologian Paul Tillich asserted that “Morality is not a subject; it is life put to the test in dozens of moments.” His claim fits neatly with Dewey’s distinction (in Moral Principles in Education) between “ideas about morality” and “moral ideas.” Moral ideas are ideas that move us to action. Moral ideas are our answers to life’s tests. Ideas about morality are the medium through which we talk about and reflect on our frames for interpretation. Those frames are central to moral action, but not, in themselves, enough.

So the theory-practice puppy deserves – and will get – my/our attention this week. But along the way, I’ll be trying to shape a concept of practice that will render the theory-practice puppy toothless.

How do children become good?

2008-07-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

This week I begin the first of two workshops devoted to "Children's and Adolescents' Moral Development" with teachers from public, private and parochial schools. In the course of our week-long encounter, we'll think about psychological, philosophical, pedagogical and personal perspectives on how children be and become good people. We'll explore in depth the role of teachers and schools in fostering goodness.

Because it's a good idea to unearth prior understandings (and misconceptions) when beginning any new learning journey, I'm posting this to invite my student/colleagues to share their own perceptions at this point. So have at it, folks: How do children become good?

Life purpose and "moral education"

2008-06-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

The most recent issue of Education Week included a piece highlighting Bill Damon’s new book, The Path to Purpose: Helping our Children Find Their Calling in Life. Damon is a Stanford psychologist and long-time moral development researcher whose earlier work, The Moral Child, sets out a worthwhile vision of what makes a child good.

Damon’s work is a hermeneutically-enriched form of survey research. He is asking large numbers of young people aged 12 through 26, through paper and pencil surveys and selected in-depth interviews, about their lack of direction in life. The work, still in progress, has a comparative dimension in that Damon and his colleagues are trying to determine whether the youth of today differ from past generations in their ability to frame meaning and purpose in their lives.

Damon’s preliminary answer is that more than a quarter of young people are “disengaged” and about a fifth have actually found something meaningful to which they wanted to dedicate their lives. The vast numbers in between have not given up on meaningfulness but haven’t found a way to make sense of their lives either. Damon calls on schools and communities to address this “malaise.”

Damon’s on target here in my estimation, and this may be one of the premier ways that “moral education” can – and must – be integrated with academic purposes in schooling. When a young person (in high school or college) learns biology, the purpose is not that he will know the difference between mitosis and meiosis. One purpose is that he will understand himself in the world as a form of life, as a walking miraculous process, as a complex system, as an atomic unit in a much larger complex system, and so forth. Another purpose is that she will possess the resources (knowledge, analytic skills, skills of appreciation/communication) to respond in a fitting way to the day’s practical issues re health, innovation, nourishment, etc. And if he finds himself fascinated with either the mechanisms of biology or the issues that biological understanding illuminates, he may find a pursuit (of employment or leisure) to which he can commit large amounts of time and energy. Each of these purposes is about life meaning, about one’s way of being in the world, and about the actions that turn meaning into meaningfulness. This is moral education (as Damon’s background and life purpose would portend) -- without the direct weight of moralizing or evangelization or indoctrination.

These are unquestionably educational issues though perhaps not narrowly academic ones. Are our school structures, schedules and curricula designed to make it likely that this work is being done? Are teachers willing and/or able to take up these issues even when time – and administrative fiat -- “permits”? I’d answer no.

The role of relationship

2008-05-27T15:01:00.000-07:00

Earlier today I read a piece in the Austin American-Statesmen (click on the title above to read the piece yourself) describing the dangers facing high school teachers who seek closer relationships with students as a means of developing smart and good kids. A small but substantial number of middle schools and high schools throughout the country are taking advantage of "advisory" relationships in which a teacher takes primary responsibility for shepherding a finite number of students (say 18-20) through their secondary school career. Advisor/teachers and students meet as a group on a regular basis and advisors check in frequently with individuals -- and often their parents.

This is a trend to be encouraged in my humble opinion. And it supplements the kinds of relationships students have long had with mature and responsible coaches and other extracurricular moderators. Students who are regularly seen, encouraged and challenged by a single significant adult in a school setting will flourish academically and personally. They will learn how to see, encourage and challenge those around them and contribute to a learning community in the bargain. However, there are dangers lurking when coaches and advisors don't understand the nature of their relationship with advisees. The American-Statesman article outlines some of those dangers.

In the case described, a teacher/coach/advisor lost his job for talking with a student about sexual identity. The male student and family sued the male teacher, arguing that the teacher convinced the young man that he was gay, inappropriately talking with him about non-academic issues. In a move that's good news for all educators of any kind, the suit was thrown out. It is a fine line between academic and "non-academic" matters when one is teaching adolescents. Good teachers can make use of all kinds of material in enabling learning.

However, there are also limits to the role one can play as teacher, coach or advisor -- and that's the point. One cannot be an effective teacher or coach when the relationship shifts to counselor or friend. Teacher and coach must push and pull and enable and entice students in the process of learning. They must set standards, help students to internalize those standards, and, eventually, to enact them. Acceptance is part of the picture but not the center of focus. Counselors and friends, on the other hand, must be masters of acceptance. In the case mentioned above, the teacher spoke on the phone with this student late at night. Even if, as it appears, the student initiated these calls, this is clearly not the role of teacher. I don't know enough to hazard a guess whether or not it was "fair" that this teacher lost his job. What I do know is that in taking late night calls (it's important that it's calls, plural) from a student, the teacher misunderstood what kind of relations serve (moral or academic) pedagogical roles and goals.

The relation (i.e. the habitual interaction between teacher and student) is, I think, central to the quality of the lesson learned in any educative experience. A student learns to think by thinking with a teacher, to analyze by analyzing with, to judge by judging with, to wonder by wondering with, to write by writing with, to read by reading with, to calculate by calculating with, to discern by discerning with. These "withs" are the kinds of relations appropriate to teacher-student interactions.

Teachers and advisors and coaches will construct the right kind of relation(s) with young people when they remain true to their own roles and goals -- and know when a different kind of relation, a non-pedagogical relation, is needed. So schools must have the people to serve those roles waiting in the wings for referral, and teachers must know who those people are and how to get to them quickly.

Judgment better than "godly"?

2008-03-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in the (Lancaster, PA) Sunday News, columnist Dona Fisher wrote a column about her close encounter with a traffic cop who stopped her for zooming along on a country road that had a 25 mph speed limit. In response to this "sin," she asked "why do godly people do ungodly things?" I found this question in this context incongruous.

I don't know Dona Fisher. I presume she is a "godly person" (she writes a weekly column called "Matters of Faith"), but I'm not sure I consider speeding on a country road an "ungodly" act. It may certainly be unwise or unsafe or illegal, but "ungodly."?? Fisher's view of what counts as "godly" or moral is revealing. I'm quoting at length here:

"It is unfortunate that our courts are filled with people who have broken laws. Even though laws are set for people to be wise in their actions, they lack the power to make people obedient. So how can our behavior and conduct be controlled?

God's laws never change. We need a fixed authority in whom we can follow in obedience. Those professionals God has placed over us have made the rules for us to follow. Laws are rules that take away our personal freedom and are enforced by a controlling authority and meant to be obeyed."

As an educator working in a public institution, I find this rendering of laws, obedience and morality more than a little problematic. As a citizen in a society where "those professionals" are sometimes less than professional (not to mention downright racist, sexist, homophobic or simply inconsiderate and ungodly), I am frightened at a formulation of "goodness" that removes intelligence from the picture.

But this raises a question for educators and parents that is never fully "fixed," never finally resolved: How do I teach my students/children to question when questioning is appropriate, to obey when obeying is appropriate, to resist when resisting is appropriate, to challenge when challenging is appropriate? I teach them judgment -- informed, intelligent, compassionate judgment; that's the answer. And in careful judgment, the smart and the good coexist.

We'll leave just how to do that for another day -- or many other days. For now, let me say just this: judgment is a practice and any practice is learned by having many opportunities to try it (preferably in "safe" conditions), to undergo the consequences of my try, and to connect the dots between my trying and my undergoing. But I can't (usually) do it alone; someone needs to help me see where I have neglected some important information or moved too hastily or failed to consider all perspectives. It helps to have a coach in any practice. Judgment is no exception.

Mounting a Protest

2008-03-09T06:21:00.000-07:00

There is a fragile spirit of student activism rising up as surely as the crocuses of spring poke through in my garden. I don't know whether to thank George Bush for a misbegotten war or Barack Obama for his calculated and eloquent message of youth's possibilities, but it's popping up and taking some pretty interesting shapes. On my campus (and on more than a dozen campuses around the country), a revival of the sixties phenomenon Students for a Democratic Society is planning a Walk Out Against the War for March 20th, the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. I think it's swell. I hope lots and lots of students walk out of class – even when, especially when, they will miss something "important" – to attend the teach-in on the quad. I hope there will be a counter-protest, something that seems likely based on nasty opinion pieces in the student newspaper. I hope that any student who has a strong opinion will find a way to express that opinion without judging or demeaning any one else. They will do that if we teach them how – if we ourselves refrain from judging or demeaning. This is, of course, easier said than done.

It matters how we view the war in Iraq. Whatever your position on its original wisdom or current status, you must acknowledge that when young Americans and even younger Iraqis are in danger, that we are bound to consider carefully next steps. Careful consideration takes dialogue across difference. "Dialogue" suggests speaking and listening. Listening means hearing and wrestling with the position articulated by another.

Adults (faculty members, student affairs personnel) can model the kind of dialogue – speaking and listening – about the protest itself that we hope students can demonstrate with respect to the war issue. And university personnel seem to be doing just that. The administration and faculty union have taken a joint position that encourages free speech while reminding students that any action taken has consequences – and that it's within an instructor's rights to hold students accountable for class absence. This is a wonderful lesson in responsibility, the ability to respond in a fitting way in complicated circumstances. Young people will develop responsibility when they have the chance to practice it. This is one such chance. Whether or not an individual student walks out is not the critical element. The fact that they are confronted with this choice is a good thing. They may not succeed admirably in their decision-making, but I am quite sure they will learn something important, especially if the adults around them are listening carefully and responding thoughtfully.

"Life put to the test"

2007-07-27T13:34:00.000-07:00

"Morality is not a subject; it is life put to the test in dozens of moments." (Paul Tillich)

What comes to your mind when "morality" is mentioned? Do you think of the Ten Commandments? Does morality evoke a sense of sin or "fear of the Lord" (in the person of Yahweh, Jesus or Allah? Do you think of right and wrong actions? Do you think of good and bad results of your actions? Are you worried about rules to be followed and broken? Do you focus on scandal, sexual or otherwise? Are you moved to shame? Hell bent on confession? Craving forgiveness?

Is morality a singular event or a plural one? Does it involve the actions of an atomistic individual careening under or out of control in a world we create by the way that we act? Or is morality a systematic representation of the relations between us?

Who decides?

Christian theologian Paul Tillich calls into question even the questions we ask about morality with the statement at the head of this post. If morality is "life put to the test," then how are our religious beliefs, social conventions and interpersonal interactions implicated in this? Put more simply, who's going to tell me what to do????

I think this good Christian and superlative theologian is telling us that nobody can tell us what "ought" to be done. It is my life that is put to the test, tested with reference to what I value, what I believe about the meaning of my life, who I love (in all the various sense of love), who I understand and express myself to be. And where does the test come from? From everywhere!!! In "dozens of moments" as Tillich puts it, dozens of moments every day.

Morality isn't primarily about scandalous behavior (consider Michael Vick's dog-fighting woes or Lindsay Lohan's addictive behavior or a garden variety extramarital affair). Scandals (micro-sized or macro-sized) occur when we have strayed far outside the frame of social convention. Sometimes we stray so far that the only things others can do is pitt us. However, the morality of particular actions cannot – and I would argue should not -- be judged from a distance.

Morality – life put to the test – is about how we respond to the driver who just cut us off, or how we answer the teacher who asks if we did our homework, or whether we provide our employer value (neither too little nor too much!) for wages through our "work ethic." It's a matter of "what's worth doing" in the context of how I make meaning out of my life. So yes, my religious faith and my political commitments and my understanding about the nature of the world will all impact my enacted and expressed morality. No surprise there.

But what do we do when "what's worth doing" is contested? That's the "everywhere" that the test is coming from. And every one of those tests is an opportunity – to be and become "moral."

Hmmm, but is that too circular? Is there no Archimedean point at which to anchor what is of value, or what is meaningful, or who should and should not be loved? Maybe not. Doesn't that complicate the process of moral education for children? Sure. But maybe it also provides the opening for moral education in a public school setting. And maybe it also supports the value of diversity within schools. And maybe it captures something important about democratic culture that we rarely experience.

No one mourns the wicked

2007-07-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

No one mourns the wicked
No one cries: "They won't return!"
No one lays a lily on their grave
The good man scorns the wicked!
Through their lives, our children learn
What we miss
When we misbehave . . .

The Wicked Witch of the West is dead. In the original film "The Wizard of Oz," there is unmitigated joy: "Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!? But in the contemporary musical "Wicked," a retelling from the putative witch's point of view, there is a kind of polluted glee. The delight at the downfall of this wicked person is a schadenfreude, a joy shadowed by a too-intent insistence that wickedness is easily distinguished from good by those who are themselves good. "Goodness knows" that the wicked get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

But it is, of course, not that simple. And just how complex it is develops in the course of the musical.

Is Elphaba wicked? Or wildly misunderstood and mistreated again and again? Is Glinda "the Good"? Or a whited sepulcher -- handcuffed by self-doubt, fear of failure and a slavish attention to others' opinions -- who sacrifices Elphaba to her own need to be popular? Does it matter if we can determine the goodness of the two?

It does if, as the lyric suggests, the lives of those we judge to be wicked are moral lessons to our children. What do children learn through the lives of the wicked? What do we miss when we misbehave?

If the story told in the first scene of "Wicked" is to be believed, children learn that "the wickeds' lives are lonely," that no one mourns the wicked, that the wicked die early and alone. So children learn to emulate Glinda and not Elphaba. Glinda is a hero; Elphaba is an object lesson.

Glinda is also shallow and self-centered. She readily uses others to get what she wants. She will "grovel in submission to feed [her] own ambition." And in the process, she accepts social givens. Elphaba, disfigured and dishonored by the sin of being born "green," is honest and caring with herself and others. She acts on principle. She does not tolerate foolishness or dishonesty in authority. When she encounters both in the Wizard, she experiences a moment of heightened consciousness that leads her to "defy gravity," to soar beyond the limits that others impose on her. This act of transgression is the source of her "wickedness," as she refuses to tolerate the wickedness (in the musical, the maltreatment of animals) perpetrated by others. Soon she is being accused – by those powerful others -- of lying and spreading fear. The irony of course, is that dishonesty and fear are defining characteristics for "Glinda the Good" and the "Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

Neither Glinda nor the Wizard is wicked; each is weak. But that weakness grounds the judgment that Elphaba is wicked. Wickedness is not Elphaba's trait but Glinda's and the Wizard's reflection. And others -- all of us who need to believe that wickedness is in others -- somehow separate from the one who speaks truth to power, the one who defies social expectation.

This story constitutes a meditation on principled moral action and conventional behavior. (Is adherence to convention ever really moral?) But it is more than principle that motivates Elphaba and it's important to acknowledge that. Her location as a different "other" (she is, after all, green and admittedly odd rather than blond and popular like the good witch Glinda) grounds her experience of injustice and her awareness that the "something bad" happening is not only bad; it is also unfair. And her encounter with the Wizard jars her into realizing what she values precisely by shaking her faith in the Wizard's authority. Elphaba has thought-into-action in response to a situation that shakes up her taken for granted world. She interprets what's going on in the light of her own prior experience, her beliefs about what is fair, and her solidarity with other outsiders. She recognizes the consequences of "defying gravity" but "can't" want what she wanted before anymore. And she lives out the consequences of her action in the context of the overlapping communities of action that shape – but not define – her.

Moral agency is complicated and cannot be described or understood by focusing solely on principles or on consequences or on virtues. But any theory of moral agency and action must make room for principles and consequences and virtues. Is there such a theory of everything?

What social science tells us about children's moral development

2007-07-10T06:15:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago, William Damon (The Moral Child, 1988) offered this set of principles for guiding a comprehensive approach to children's moral education. They were, he claimed, based on current social scientific knowledge.

1. Simply by virtue of their participation in essential social relationships, children encounter the classic moral issues facing humans everywhere: issues of fairness, honesty, responsibility, kindness, and obedience.
2. The children's moral awareness is shaped and supported by natural emotional reactions to observations and events.
3. Relations with parents, teachers, and other adults introduce the child to important social standards, rules, and conventions. Moreover, these relations generate knowledge and respect for the social order itself.
4. Relations with peers introduce children to norms of direct reciprocity and to standards of sharing, cooperation, and fairness.
5. Because children's morality is shaped (though not wholly created) through social influence, broad variations in social experience can lead to broad differences in children's moral orientations.
6. Moral growth in school settings is governed by the same developmental processes that apply to moral growth everywhere.

I suggest that Damon's principles are still valid and that research in recent decades – including new discoveries about neurological function – have supported rather than supplanted these basic principles. Note that relations and emotions constitute the medium of moral development as Damon understands it.

In other places, I have written about the centrality of relation to educational efforts and have begun to focus more recently about educating the emotions with a focus on fear as a feature of educational experience. That may explain why I think Damon has it right.

Moral Maturity?

2007-07-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

Nearly two decades ago, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's Panel on Moral Education published a description of the "morally mature" person. According to the panel, the morally mature person habitually:
1. Respects human dignity
2. Cares about the welfare of others
3. Integrates individual interests and social responsibilities
4. Demonstrates integrity
5. Reflects on moral choices
6. Seeks peaceful resolution of conflict.
The panel's statement closed with this: "In general, then, the morally mature person understands moral principles and accepts responsibility for applying them."

As I review this descriptive list twenty years later, I find it difficult to argue with. Who could possibly be opposed to human dignity, caring, integrity, etc.? And yet…

Note that the description is usefully composed in behavioral terms. I know that it's difficult to define some of these terms, but it's actually not as difficult to recognize a trait when it presents itself as it is to define it. I am pretty confident I can name "integrity" when I see it but I am less confident that any verbal definition will stand up unerringly to lived experience. So I find this notion of "moral maturity" helpful as a target. But still…

I do think the items on the list constitute both necessary and sufficient conditions (as philosophers like to say) for moral maturity. That is, I don't believe one can be morally mature without attending to each of the six mandates (necessary). And I don't think there is any significant mandate omitted in this listing (sufficient). And yet…

I'm sure you can tell that I have some reservations about this description of moral maturity, and maybe you also recognize that I'm having trouble expressing my reservations. My concern is not that this doesn't tell me when I (or others) have hit the target. I think it's quite useful for that purpose. But I worry that the list (even in its unabridged version with "indicators") obscures rather than illuminates the path to moral maturity. How is it that I come to understand what integrity is, to form a concept of integrity, and to appropriate it as a life goal? How do I acquire the habit of integrity? I am not convinced that integrity can be taken on in the same way that, say, table manners can be modeled, coached and practiced.

I also worry that the behavioral formulation of moral maturity obscures rather than illuminates both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of moral maturity. In a social and academic milieu where the cognitive is assumed to be critical, the emotional is suspect and to be controlled, and the two are assumed to be distinct domains – all arguable assumptions, I fret especially that we neglect the education of the emotions in any effort toward developing moral maturity.

And take a look at the summary statement with its attention to the application of principles. I don't doubt the value of moral principles but I am no Kantian. I do not view moral principles as rules to be discovered and obeyed but, like John Dewey, as generalizations about past experience to be tested in present living. Thus principles are not "applied" but "proven," that is put to the test in the here and now. So yes, responsibility must be accepted, but responsibility is more than accountability. It represents an ability to respond in a fitting way to moral challenges. More on that in another post.

And then of course there's the question of whether we should frame the goal in terms of "maturity," a term that suggests, if not implies, the possibility of completion and/or superiority. When one is morally mature, is one also somehow better than other human beings? Better how? More human? More sophisticated? Closer to God?

Puppies and moral possibilities

2007-07-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

We just got a puppy. She is a yellow Lab (a "Dudley" version with pink nose and beautiful blue-green eyes) and her name is Bailey. And Bailey has me thinking about how the young grow to be "good."

Bailey – like any puppy and any small child – demonstrates a remarkable combination of needs that don't always – or even often – match up. First, she desperately wants affection, approval, and a sense of belonging. She opens herself to us, and almost any other adult she encounters. She craves the authority of the "top dog." She wants the security of clear guidance and good habits. She is not good when she is afraid or when the expectations are unclear. (OK, so I admit I learned that watching the "Dog Whisperer" on TV, but I think you can see it in your own puppy – or child -- even without Caesar's guidance.)

At the same time that Bailey craves structure and approval, she is forging her own sense of assertiveness and efficacy. She recognizes small children as others like her and runs to them (and at them!) in puppy-like games that have both a social and a self-testing element about them. "Yes, I am playing with you, but I am also figuring out who I am and where I fit in the animal kingdom I now inhabit." She wants her own bone and bowl and blanket. She likes her crate (as a place of security – see above), but on a daily basis drags her blanket out of the crate to a spot on the floor of her choosing as if to say "Yes, I need a space but I'll pick it." She needs a sense of efficacy -- "I can get it done" – within a context of collaboration – "you come too."

And then there is the sheer physicality of her presence and daily existence. She uses her body in new ways everyday and with boundless energy and eagerness. Her sense of taste is limited only by our discipline (we've made a commitment to feed her only dog food, but I wonder if that will go of the way of the "no TV" plan I had for my children), but her sense of touch, hearing, sight and smell are stimulated in infinite and variable ways constantly. Birds chirp, bugs fly past her nose, sun warms her coat, bunnies and squirrels offer quarry for the hunt. And then there are the physical challenges we put in her path. She learns "stupid human tricks" as much because it is a way to move in her body as because we are offering her a treat for her performance.

She learns so quickly and so willingly. But she must learn to balance the competing calls and lessons if she is to become a "good dog." And it seems to me that she needs clear and consistent direction and limits at the same time that she needs opportunities to test and assert herself and the space to flex her physical and "moral" muscles. What do these puppy needs tell us about how children grow to be good persons? And what are the adult actions and context conditions that will speed this development toward good? More on that later.

"Something Bad" is happening in Oz

2007-07-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

I reside in Lancaster, PA, an economically prosperous, culturally diverse, remarkably safe, and geographically lovely oasis west of Philadelphia and north of Baltimore. But over the past several years, we have awakened to news of brutal murders committed by "good kids." These teenagers have killed adoptive parents, girlfriends' parents, rivals in love, best friends, and other family members. They are middle class, attend good schools and have adults who care for and about them. As Elphaba and Dr. Dillamond sing in the musical Wicked, "Something bad is happening in Oz . . ."

How do we explain this phenomenon? The tendency is to look for something "wrong" in the young person who perpetrates this act. We want to be able to blame them – or their abusive family members or their parents' divorce. If we can place blame, we can isolate the germ. It affects "them" but not "us." But to identify mental illness in this one or bullying of that one or dysfunctional family system for his one is to beg the question. For who among us doesn't experience neurotic patterns of behavior, or hasn't bullied or been bullied, or doesn't have a dysfunctional family? In and of themselves, these are not causes of murder and other violent behaviors.

And, of course, there are those who will explain our lost moral horizon by linking it to a failure of religious faith, usually of a particular brand of faith with its attendant presumptions about propriety and social organization. While I think it right to reflect on the impact of spiritual understanding and religious faith on patterns of action, I am wary of explanations that imply absolute answers to questions of meaning and action.

Instead we would do well to ask ourselves why violence is imaginable for anyone, but especially for any young person. What is it in our cultural patterns, our social interactions, our educational institutions that introduces the possibility of violence? This is, of course, a question for books, not a blog post. Here I just want to highlight a couple of things that we're doing that, in my opinion, do not close the door to violence.

We make more – and sillier -- rules. Last week I read about a Virginia middle student who put his arm around his girlfriend's shoulder (Do middle school students really have girlfriends? I know they talk about "going out" but of course they never actually go anywhere). For this offense, he ended up in the principal's office. He had violated a rule against hugging. Now the actual rule proscribes any touching, any physical contact among students. I can understand why the thought of banning touching occurred to the administration. Middle schoolers, like puppies, utilize touch as a form of communication. And sometimes that touching is inappropriate and they are not mature enough to tell when or to control every response. But middle schoolers' immaturity is not a justification for adults' idiocy. Rules cannot do the hard work of relationships. Efficiency of apprehension, adjudication and punishment will not replace the painstaking (and time-consuming) process of discriminating between touch that is appropriate (and needed and welcome!) and touch that is inappropriate. We have developed all kinds of zero tolerance policies over the past decade in the name of security, authority, consistency, rigor, etc. and none deserve to stand. Such policies defeat their own goals. Security is lost because trust is defeated. Authority is undermined because order outweighs human flourishing.

We create "programs" to fix "the problem." Policy-makers and educators (administrators and teachers) are problem-solvers who have been trained to make problems go away. We want to identify the problem and then fix it. So we create a program and declare the problem fixed. Think here of Head Start or CHIPS (the PA children's health care program) or various remedial reading efforts. These may well be excellent programs but, for a variety of reasons – limited funding, inadequate outreach, inappropriate application or a simple failure of will. the strong strategy doesn't fully address the issue at hand. It does however "fix" the problem; that is, it identifies a problem and sets it in stone as "the problem." This means that the phenomenon that prompted our concern and consideration can be set aside as identified and solved when, in fact, there may be more facets and features to the phenomenon that require our continued attention. Given the nature of human behavior and growth, I suggest that such "problems" are never exhaustively identified and require on-going definition and re-thinking. We not only need new solutions to old problems; we need new formulations of the problem in order to generate novel responses.

I was thinking about this when I read about the United States Golf Association's First Tee Program. It's a good program, one that contributes to what we might call the moral formation of young people. It's also a marvelous example of marketing meeting moral education. Public golf courses make tee times (and fees) and coaching available to youngsters at times when the course is not crowded. Youngsters learn the rules of golf (a "whiff" counts as a stroke) and the values that implementing the rules require (honesty). The program involves connections to life outside the golf course and parental communication. It's all good. And it's good for the golf course owners who are grooming future paying customers.

This is a good program. But any program like this is dangerous because it allows us to think that we have identified the problem (kids don't have the right values) and offered a "fix" (teach them values through participation in sport). We congratulate ourselves because we have these programs – in schools, in churches, and in community settings. And it seems likely that almost all kids have some experience with some kind of program like this. But still we wake up to news of murder by children.

I have some thoughts about what we can do to excise violent reaction as an imaginable response. And I will write about those over time. But those things are more complicated than making rules and developing programs. They involve changing hearts and minds and habits. I better start with my own.

“Doing better”in grammar school or middle school?

2007-01-16T06:37:00.000-08:00

For the better part of a decade, urban districts (Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York – and my own Lancaster, Pa.) have been pondering, planning and, in some cases, implementing a shift back to the grammar school (K-8) model and away from the middle school that has become the educational home of choice for 6th, 7th and 8th graders since the early 80s. Into this policy playground comes a new study by respected Johns Hopkins middle school researchers Douglas and Martha MacIver that claims “No benefit to eliminating middle school,” according to the headline in my morning paper.

I haven’t yet gotten my hands on the MacIver study; my comment here should not be read as a critique of their research. The study seems to be well-conceived to determine whether students experience learning growth – as measured by test scores -- over the three years of a middle school stay. The data support the view that children in middle schools score as well as students in K-8 schools, at least when other variables like teaching quality, curriculum, etc. remain constant.

I don’t doubt the MacIvers research findings but I do question what it means to “do better.” And I do want to question the assumption that we should put students of a certain age either into a middle school or a grammar school. Why not both/and? Before explaining what I mean, a bit of school history:

The middle school was, as those over 40 know, the successor to the junior high school. In 1989, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century, a report that took the developmental profile of young adolescents seriously and designed a school around them. The middle school, already in place in some districts (more because of demographic demand than developmental focus), found its philosophical underpinnings: to strengthen academic demands and to create a caring environmental in which those academic demands could be prosecuted.

And the middle school made sense, at least more sense than its predecessor, the junior high school. In the junior high school, a universe of growing hormone levels, independence needs, and shaky identities came together in a blend that was toxic for many. Shifting the age range and locating learners in teams where a finite number of teachers and students could establish on-going relationships made lots of sense. It still does.

But we forgot something. In the grammar school, big kids could be big kids to little kids. They were in a position to be someone’s role model and to live up to that task. They could reach down and help a smaller child tie a shoe or hang a sign or find the right room. And this aspect of doing better is not as easily addressed in a middle school. Sources as various as philosopher Nel Noddings and recent research on recidivist adolescent offenders tells us that one learns to care by take the role of the carer as well as by being cared for. Middle school children need to experience caring for another regularly, even systematically. I am not talking about the emotions that go with the act of caring for; I mean the habitual mode of attending to and providing for the needs of another. Now, one can care for one’s books and one’s pets and one’s other possessions, of course. But not even pets will respond as the “cared for” (to use Noddings’ phrasing) in the same way that a younger child will. Adolescents need younger children in their lives to play the role of the “cared for” to their “carer.” The grammar school can provide that. Whether or not test scores go up, a grammar school arrangement offers opportunities that middle school structures cannot.

But what of the problems? Don’t young adolescents need something more challenging and more independent than the self-contained classroom? Might big kids not bully little kids? Might little kids not annoy big kids to distraction? Sure. And that’s why we should be thinking both/and, not either/or, when it comes to middle school and grammar school. Why can’t 6th, 7th and 8th graders live in their own section or wing of a grammar school, remaining segregated for many functions but emerging to act as reading buddies, tutors, mentors, guides for younger children and ushers for adult visitors in planned ways? And while we’re at it, why can’t we blur grade and curricular lines to allow those children to move at their own academic pace within the “middle school” that is within the “grammar school”?

The MacIver study is a careful and well-designed study that provides interesting data about a real policy question. Should children of a certain age be in this kind of school structure or that one? Are grammar schools “better” for kids than middle schools? Well, it depends on how you define “better,” what it means to “do better” educationally. If “doing better” is a matter of test scores, as the MacIvers apparently maintain, then teaching quality and curriculum are the critical variables and school structure may be aperipheral concern. But if “doing better” is also a moral matter, if we are concerned with what adolescents do as well as what they know, then we would do well to consider placing middle schools within a grammar school structure. There younger adolescents can learn first-hand what it means to be “older and wiser.” They can practice their wisdom and their caring on the young children in their midst. Then we will all do better.

Welcome to "Smart and Good"!

2007-01-11T11:04:00.000-08:00

This is the opening installment in a discussion that will range far and wide in considering all the ways educational institutions (especially but not only schools) are intended to shape learners as both smart and good. In this age of standards and testing, the focus is -- inordinately -- on what it means to be "smart." But any educators, any parents, who take a moment to ponder what they are doing will find that the images of development they have for the young people in their lives incorporate both the academic (what's worth knowing) and the moral (what's worth doing). In other words, they are always focused on both the smart and the good.