Marion

Florida Today
U.S. schools should teach students to think in order for them to develop full potential

MARION BRADY

"Gifted kids are bored by U.S. schools," said a front-page headline in USA Today.

That's reassuring.

Students who weren't bored with typical classroom work would surely be brain-dead.

If they're bored, they're alive, well and educable.

What's not reassuring is that, when compared with the top students in 13 other countries, those bored students are at or near the bottom of the heap in nearly every subject.

If I were on one of those newly formed school advisory committees, were a member of the school board or a college trustee, here's some of what I'd be pushing:

I'd demand that students be required to think. "Thinking" means recalling, categorizing, inferring, hypothesizing, valuing, generalizing, translating, synthesizing. Of those eight thought processes, traditional schooling emphasizes only the first recalling. I'd demand that the other seven get equal time.
I'd push to get students out of classrooms and into the real world.
Books, lectures and "educational" television (is that an oxymoron?) are third- and fourth-handed images of reality passivity they require isn't a normal human state.
I'd insist that math, science, history and all the other bits and pieces of instruction be logically integrated. Students are never shown "the picture on the lid of the box" that pulls it all together and makes the parts of the reality puzzle make sense. An integrated curriculum would also be compact, allowing students more time to pursue individual interests and strengths.
I'd begin to "dejuvenilize" schooling, especially at the high school level, putting progressively more responsibility for the school's functioning on students.
I'd insist that music, art and other studies that enrich experience and lift the human spirit not be treated as barely accepted stepchildren, to counter our culture's narrow preoccupation with the mundane.
I'd ban standardized testing. Its negative effects far exceed its benefits.
I'd make every academic administrator, including principals and presidents, teach at least one class. No exceptions. The payoffs are too extensive to summarize.

These are, of course, unlikely reforms. Schooling in America has many purposes. Unfortunately, developing human potential to its maximum isn't one of them.

Florida Today 7-18-94
Culturally, just who are we in the USA

MARION BRADY

     Recent news said that Florida's statewide school board association is refusing to get involved in the Lake County-triggered "debate" about cultural superiority.
     Whether we're The Greatest Culture on Earth is a legitimate, interesting question. it's also. however, an extremely complicated one.
    The complexity of the issue begins with the concept "our culture."
    Unlike, say, the Japanese, American ethnic origins are extremely diverse. just who are we culturally?
    The strongest strain is Angle, but even that's confused. English settlers came from four different parts of England at four different times and settled in four different regions of America. They all spoke variations of the English language, but iii fact they were culturally very different from each other, and those differences are still apparent.
    Add to the English immigrants the Native Americans, Africans, Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, Poles Chinese and all the rest, and the cultural picture is so diverse that no one who studies the matter seriously would even use the phrase "our culture" in referring to America as a whole. The United States isn't a coherent culture. It's a political state.
    Then there are the hundreds of difficult questions raised by the phrase "is superior."
    Many good Americans, for example, believe God rewards goodness with material wealth.
    But other good Americans think God has been pretty clear about not laying up for themselves "treasures on Earth, where moth and rust corrupt," and about it being "easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."
    No, the matter isn't simple: What makes a culture superior'' Technological superiority? Military power? Gross national product? Healthy, well-educated children? Concern for future generations?
    Honesty in interpersonal relationships? Kindness and generosity toward the unfortunate? Living in harmony with the environment? A legal system that functions justly?
    A valid judgment about cultural superiority would require asking hundreds of such questions to identify criteria, assigning such criterion a relative weight, then matching the actual behavior of the members of every culture on Earth against the criteria.
    A conclusion only would be possible, of course, if all people agreed about the proper questions and their relative importance.
    An "Us vs. Them" level of dialogue can never move beyond an embarrassing, childlike airing of ethnocentric prejudices. We'd all do well to study The words of those who have earned the right, through a lifetime of study and experience, to speak on the subject of relative cultural merit.
    One of those was Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist who did so much to shape the U.S.' successful post World War II policies toward Japan. She wrote, "... human institutions and motives are legion, on every plane of cultural simplicity and complexity,
and ... wisdom consists in a greatly increased tolerance toward their divergences."

Florida Today 2-8-99
Schools stuck on unexamined assumptions

MARION BRADY     There's an old Appalachian story about a stranger lost on a mountain road. Reining in his horse, he asks a farmer how to reach a town some miles distant.
    The farmer begins an explanation, stops in mid-sentence, says, "Nope,'` and starts a different set of directions.
    The farmer's voice trails on. Again he mutters, "Nope.'
    Two more attempts end similarly. Finally, he pauses at considerable length and looks up at the stranger. ''Mister." he says, "ain't no way to git thar from here."
    For America's education establishment, the farmer's verdict is apt. Education movements, new legislation, novel instructional strategies and fads of all sorts come and go with marginal effect on standardized test scores, dropout rates, student enthusiasm and other indicators of progress. If what we're looking for is performance close to student potential, we're not even close.
    We're stuck where we are primarily because of unexamined assumptions. And until we examine those assumptions and replace them with more valid ones, we're going to stay stuck. Here are some of them:

Teachers and students aren't really trying very hard, so raising standards or threatening to cut off funds will make them buckle down and do better.
Standardized tests are really sophisticated. They measure not just simple skills, but other mutters so important they can be used as accurate indicators of school quality.
Basically, teaching is pretty simple, so two or three days a year of additional training is sufficient to keep up with the field.
The bottom line purpose of education is to prepare students for work. Or help them understand themselves. Or teach them to think. Or mold them into democratic citizens. Or expand their understanding of the world in which they live. Or build character. Or something. No matter. Having a clear idea of the purpose of schooling isn't really important. Knowledge may be a seamless. integrated whole, but students don't need to know that. Schooling is about “covering" subjects and courses that have little or no apparent relationship to each other.
The single most important thought process is the ability to remember, so that's what schooling should emphasize. All other mental processes -- hypothesizing, generalizing, synthesizing, inferring, valuing and so on -- the young can pick up on their own.

Our schools (even the best of them) barely scratch the surface of student potential. Its possible “to git thar from here" -- possible to have schools that keep alive the deep seated human drive to understand that now begins to wither away along about the third or fourth grade. We can do it, but it isn't going to happen until our dialogue about what we're doing, and why we're doing it, moves beyond the simplistic notion that the answers to our educational ills lie in vouchers or choice or school competition or some other concept borrowed from freshman-level economics.

A resident of Cocoa, Brady has written several books in the field education and is a former community college professor.

The Orlando Sentinel

There's more to an education than getting job skills
Marion Brady

    I read with considerable interest Monday's article in The Orlando Sentinel "School Plan Fuels Debate Over Focus." It reflected, of course, philosophical differences that have long pulled the educational establishment in different directions.
    In America, the weight of public opinion on this issue usually comes down on the side of "useful" education -- meaning, ordinarily, an education that allows the student to move smoothly into the work force.
    Our schools and colleges are full of students impatient to get their general education requirements out of the way so that they can concentrate on "what's important" -- meaning the course work in their chosen field.
    I'm in favor of specialized education. I served for a time as a member of the forerunner of the state of Florida's Vocational Arts and Technical Education Advisory Council. However, there's a lot more to a good education than the acquisition of job skills.
    First, narrowly trained individuals frequently lack the breadth and depth of understanding and creativity demanded by satisfying work. Specialized training may get one off to a fast start, hut it's of limited value over the long haul. Whatever the future holds, job success will almost certainly depend on far more than An individual's work skills. Just being able to do something is now almost never enough. One has to be somebody.
     Second, those who allow themselves to be a molded into just the right shape to fit instantly into a specific job sell themselves short. Every person's educational goal should be to become as human, as civilized, as complicated, as interesting as possible. Narrow training often means narrow interests, and narrow interests create bored and boring (and sometimes dangerous) people.
    Finally, everyone should have some understanding of what the late sociologist C. Wright Mills called "the trends of the era" -- should be able to stand back from hi or her experience and put it into a reasonably accurate historical perspective.
    Students need job skills/ it they also need the kind of understanding of themselves and the human condition that a general education attempts to give them. Unfortunately, traditional schooling tends to emphasize one or the other, and generally doesn't do a particularly good job with either.
    The conventional wisdom is that there simply isn't enough time in the school day, so either general or specialized education must be slighted. In fact, there's plenty of time. The problem lies with traditional, discipline-based general education - a hodgepodge of subjects and courses that have little or nothing to do with each other or with life as it is experienced.
    What's needed, and what we could have, is a single block of study welding the hard and soft sciences, the humanities and the rest into a compact, logically integrated whole.
    Students could get a vastly superior general education, in about a third of the time, and have the rest of the day free to pursue studies consistent with their interests or aptitudes.

The Orlando Sentinel
"Back-to-basics" flunks with knee-jerk math reform
Marion Brady

Regarding Friday's Page One article "Law makers pushing to raise high-school graduation standards"
    Recently the Sentinel devoted three of its "Saturday special" pages to those interested in explaining what they would do if they were high-school principals.
     Just about everybody, it seems, is an expert on what ails education. Unfortunately, most
such expertise is nostalgia-driven and simplistic. Its prescription for every problem?
     "Back to basics! if what's now being done isn't working, do it harder, or longer, or do it again." Fundamental change -- the kind of change that real crises demand -- is almost always viewed wish suspicion by the amateur experts, and is opposed.
    Consider, for example, school mathematics. According to the news media, math scores are too low. So, true to the "back-to-basics" response, a bill is introduced in Florida's Legislature to add algebra to the high-school graduation requirements.
    It's a waste of taxpayer money. Tightening the screws may raise scores a few points, but it won't solve the problem. Fundamental change is in order -- the kind of change that would almost certainly pack school-board meetings and trigger wails of protest about "dumbing down the curriculum."
    Math, everyone agrees, is a basic subject. All students should come out of school able to make change, balance checkbooks, complete income-tax forms, check cash-register receipts, and know if they've been had by the vacuum cleaner salesman.
    This is what many think of when they think of school math. And, because this sort of "math" is obviously a good and necessary thing, and because it's hard to get too much of a good thing, the current math curriculum is, ipso facto, a good thing.
    There is, in fact relatively little of this kind of math in the school curriculum. School mathematics has been shaped (as one might expect) by mathematicians, and most mathematicians aren't much interested in balancing checkbooks and checking receipts. Most have been drawn to the held by its aesthetic appeal and make little effort to defend what they teach on the basis of its practicality.
    Now there's nothing wrong with math as art. But to make mandatory the particular kind of math now required is, it seems to me, a werious mistake, akin to making orchestra participation or oil portraiture or dance mandatory, and then getting all bent out of shape when some students don't perform well.
    Math requirements should be changed, not to make math easier but to put the emphasis on statistical analysis -- the primary tool for understanding the quantifiable aspects of our current situation, how we got where we now are as a society, and where we're probably headed.
    American kids are as smart as any. But ours is a pragmatic society, and the "learn this because you're s'posed to" that still works in many traditional cultures rings pretty hollow here.
    I'll bet the farm that, if we'll forego knee-jerk, backward-looking "reforms" and make math a source of insight into the human condition, the scores won't disappoint.

The Orlando Sentinel, Thursday, January 23

The tail that wags the school dog Marion Brady

The Sentinel's attention to education is gratifying. Accounts of murder, may-hem, sleaze and scandal may make
more interesting reading, but those articles are surely of far less consequence than what's happening in our schools. H.G. Wells said, "Human history becomes, more and more, a race between education and catastrophe." If he was right, it's hard to imagine we could direct too much attention toward the teaching of the young.
    There is, however, a problem with the kind of broad citizen involvement that news-media attention often brings. Perhaps because we've all had years of first-hand experience with education, many of us think we're experts on the subject. No profession is more complex than teaching, concerned as it is with altering the images of reality in others' minds. Nevertheless, members of state legislatures and other policy-making groups who wouldn't dream of telling surgeons, computer analysts or aeronautical engineers how to do their jobs have few qualms about involving themselves in the details of educating.
    The law of unintended consequences will never lack for illustration as long as there are "amateur experts" involved in education.
    I would like to call attention to one such consequence. In the pursuit of high-quality education, the news media annually provide the public with information about schools' scores on standardized tests. The assumption appears to be that fear of the spotlight will make them shape up. It seems to make good common sense.
    It's worth noting, however, that what's being held up for public scrutiny is average minimum performance -- the bottom rung of the quality ladder. Only simple skills -- not the student's ability to engage in the kinds of complex thought processes that real life and work constantly demand -- can be measured by tests that merely require a pencil mark inside a bubble.
    Now no one would argue that raising minimum performance isn't important. But in ordinary, everyday experience, if we're interested in real quality, we're not looking at the bottom rungs of the quality ladder; we're looking at the top. "Quality" is what we associate with maximum levels of performance.
    One could argue, correctly, that the    whole ladder should be raised. But in    fact, that's not how it works when so    much is made of minimum performance.    That becomes the tail that wags the education dog. Fearful educators, preoccupied with minimum scores, aren't going to be much interested in minimum performance-- in education that stretches the intellects of students.
    The educational establishment is awash in programs and proposals for   improvement. Most, once the Hawthorne
effect -- the idea that people will do their jobs better simply because new methods are being tried that are designed to improve performance -- has run its course, make little difference. A few, like this one borrowed from long-discredited notions that once steered industrial production, are counterproductive.
Until we abandon our narrow preoccupation with minimum performance, and concentrate on pushing the outer limits of student potential, attempts at educational reform won't amount to much.

Marion Brady of Cocoa is a retired educator

ORLANDO SENTINEL, Sunday May, 31, 1998

FIX WHAT SCHOOLS ARE ALL ABOUT
Marion Brady

     Our schools are stuck on a low-level performance plateau. Even the best of them fail to hook solidly into students' natural curiosity, natural need to know, natural desire to make more sense of the world and their place in it.
     Take away the report cards, certificates, diplomas, attendance laws, parental pressures and community expectations, and they'd fall apart.
     Obviously, when the drive to learn is built into kids, but schools have to resort to threats and promises to keep them inside the walls, something is seriously wrong.
     Equally obvious, merely doing more of what we're already doing isn't going to make what's wrong, right. Raising graduation requirements, playing with schedules, eliminating social promotion, administering more tests, tightening discipline, cutting class sizes, extending the school year, concentrating on "the basics," handing out vouchers, installing exotic technology, setting up magnet schools, staffing in innovative ways—such experiments may bring marginal improvement, but they're not going to bring really significant, lasting gains.
     They won't bring bell-ringing improvement in student performance because none of them address the real problem—the curriculum.
     The curriculum is what schooling is all about, and the familiar curriculum (and its many variations) is a pure, unalloyed, unmitigated disaster. Beyond the teaching of basic skills, it has no overarching aim. It short-changes every thought process except memorization. It treats students condescendingly, as mere passive absorbers of old knowledge rather than as active creators of new knowledge. It ignores vast amounts of critically important subject matter. It disregards the brain's need for a "master" information-organizing system. It has no criteria in place that say what new knowledge to teach, or what old knowledge to discard to make room for the new.
     Worst of all, the curriculum gives students a very wrong picture of the nature of knowledge. The human brain processes experience holistically, but formal schooling breaks it apart into arbitrary, artificial "subjects" with never a clue about how those subjects can be made to fit together to form a single, seamless framework of mutually supportive ideas. Modern life makes specialized study indispensable, but to let it go at that is like giving students a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the lid of the box (and with important pieces missing).
     These aren't insurmountable problems. They are, in fact, rather easily solved if properly approached. But they can't be solved if they're not addressed, and thus far that's not happening.
In fact, most local, state, and national efforts are pushing in the opposite direction. By focusing merely on improving instruction in subject matter areas, they're reinforcing simplistic notions about both the nature of knowledge and about how kids learn.
     Until educators move beyond a preoccupation with their narrow specializations and begin to look at the whole of the curriculum of which their fields are random, disjointed parts, even the best of our public, private, and parochial schools will continue to waste student potential at a scandalous rate.