Do We Care About The Questions?
"Don't be afraid to ask questions." That's what the President of the United States told the schoolchildren of America. Sounds good. But is our public school system one in which students are encouraged to ask questions? In such an answer-obsessed culture -- and, in particular, school system -- do we actually value inquiry?
I wrote "The Death of Why" last year. You can probably get a sense from the title that I have a point of view. As an activist for social and economic justice, or perhaps despite this fact, I have increasingly come to believe that there is no hope for an enduring progressive agenda for this country unless we raise a population prepared to question. Most of the debates we encounter today, from health care to retirement security to the appropriate role of government in our lives, will not be solved tomorrow for forever. No matter how good we are. So the question that increasingly obsesses me is -- are we raising a population that is prepared to inquire?
I explore the threats to inquiry, as I see them, in my book. I look at the answer obsession of our broader culture, reflected in our addiction to self-help. I look at the outsized role of search engines in our lives, and recap the research that demonstrates that the way children search for information on the net is about as far from inquiry as you can get: plug in a term, take the first three results, print them out, rinse and repeat. There is an assumption that search engines can determine relevance. This pattern of behavior leaves me worried that, unless we make a serious effort around digital literacy, young people will grow up without practicing the skills of discernment and synthesis. Answers are not simply to be retrieved, but constructed.
I spend most of the time in the book, though, on education. I often find that the progressive movement has neglected education. We've taken off bits here and there - funding equity, teacher pay, class size, etc. But I think there is a bigger question to ask here: what role should our public schools play in our democracy? Do they exist to produce citizens, or to produce workers and consumers? I contrast the decline in importance of civics education, where you learn to question your democracy, with the rise of the movement for financial literacy in the schools, where you learn to navigate the market as it is. Of course I think it's timely to ask these questions as we embark on a new administration's approach to public education.
Lots more to say here, and I hope to go deeper with your questions and comments and the questions and comments of my fellow participants. Bottom line for me, though, is that all of us must care as much about winning the daily battles as we do about equipping younger generations with the capacity to engage in them.
Can't be sure...but it seems that our public school system has been taken over, by white, southern, right-wing, "Christian" racists and the neo-fascists movement......they seem to be trying to take over our Democratically elected Government and our country, too...another "civil war" on the horizon..?
September 8, 2009 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
"...contrast the decline in importance of civics education, where you learn to question your democracy, with the rise of the movement for financial literacy in the schools, where you learn to navigate the market as it is."
Why is this being presented as an either/or? Both would make sense, no?
September 8, 2009 5:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
good question!
September 9, 2009 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Critical thinking is not something that the majority of US institutions has ever pushed.
September 8, 2009 5:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since teaching in the New York City public schools for the past decade, I see the problem in education as more serious than suggested in your essay here (I haven't read your book yet). I can only speak from my own experience:
I think the NYC Dept of Education is extremely successful. It is largely achieving its goals. But its goals are the savage crippling of our children. The Department is a department of wholesale child abuse of the most extreme kind. New York City schools are as rigidly segregated as Southern schools under Jim Crow. The 'solution' proposed to this problem is to make the ghetto schools just as good as the rich schools. But Brown vs Bd of Ed specifically pointed out that 'separate' schools are inherently unequal. NYC schools provide grossly inadequate education to everyone; those parents with the ability to provide good tutoring for their children make up this inadequacy so their children perform well. Those parents who, through poverty or their own inadequate education, do not provide good tutoring, watch their children fail. In this way the schools perpetuate rigid social class.
The core policy of the NYC Dept of Education is to keep the niggers in the ghetto. Most teachers recognize this, although most only say so in whispers.
But there's more. If this is all the schools did, there would be a mass uprising against them. So the schools also have to do it in such a way that the parents and students blame themselves for their failure. 'My teachers were pretty good but I just didn't want to study.' 'The culture, the rap songs, the TV shows, the celebrity scandals, all undermine the teacher's attempt to instill respect for knowledge.' 'My parents used to make me do homework; today's parents don't give a damn.' All this, and more, is true, but it is whining; the purpose of school is to educate the students as they exist, not as one might wish they were.
And the teachers aren't treated much better than the students. The 2008 French film 'The Class' depicts a Paris middle school far more diverse than almost all NYC middle schools, in which the teachers actually have some control over the education. The problems in the Paris school will resonate with any NYC teacher, but the school reveals the totalitarian structure of our schools. The Paris teachers aren't scurrying around trying to eke out an existence avoiding the wrath of the school administration. They are actually free to teach their students! It's amazing! The head teacher in the film would be given a U rating and fired in New York. I'm not endorsing the teaching in the movie; my point is just that the school is far more democratic than ours.
In short, I think our schools' failure to teach children to 'question our democracy,' as you put it (as if we had a democracy) is very conscious and very deliberate and very class-based. The children of the rich are encouraged to question how best to preserve their rule; the children of the poor are taught to question...how best to stay in the ghetto.
'Uncle Tom's Cabin' put it very well in explaining why slave society forbade educating slaves: 'Yet our laws positively and utterly forbid any efficient general educational system, and they do it wisely, too; for, just begin and thoroughly educate one generation, and the whole thing would be blown sky high. If we did not give them liberty, they would take it.'
True in New York City today.
September 8, 2009 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that asking "why" is the mark of a creative person, someone who doesn't routinely accept things as they are.
Creativity can't easily be measured, but Algebra skills can -- so test kids in Algebra, which is mostly un-necessary in most life circumstances, and then it follows that school time must be spent on the subjects to be tested, so we wind up with creative kids who perhaps can't do Algebra and are then (particularly under NCLB) labeled as failures, and labeling a kid as a failure because of some arbitrary measurement is a crime.
September 8, 2009 7:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Questioning was not encouraged in my youth, during the Carter-Reagan era in a central MA community slowly becoming a suburb and bedroom community.
Not even "why"s about how algebra worked.
Mem-regurg, and FSM forbid that the concept of critical thinking be brought up in any context.
And this was a school system that was considered well above average in the state, and sent kids to the regional high school 2 years ahead of our peers in mathematics(due more to the personnel than the curriculum.)
September 9, 2009 12:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I feel that the American spirit of skepticism and inquiry died a long time ago, perhaps before I was born.
My experience in life has taught me that the truth is not welcome if it is not pre-desired.
Much to my chagrin, I have taken to heart the the optimistic ideals of what America presents as its public face. I am disheartened by the lack of interest of the average person in issues of importance.
America does not care. Look at the courses of discussion here.
Bread and circuses.
September 8, 2009 11:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't disagree with you, just wanted to point out that 'it died' can be true, while avoiding the awful truth of 'after it was bludgeoned repeatedly.'
Death in this case was not due to natural causes.
September 9, 2009 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like Peter, I teach in an urban district; unlike the poster above, I do not blame the schools, per se, but rather an entrenched bureaucratic system slow to change. Our failure to really change the educational landscape is partly due to institutional racism but the same essential problems exist in exurbs as well, wherein the latter suffer a poverty of conformity.
I think Ms Schlesinger is making a case for how our whole society has become an accessory to a business model of life. If so, education has itself become a commodity, to be used, but only to further the aims of consumption. What gets lost in such a world is the ability or even desire for people/students to construct their own knowledge, find their own meaning--instead, we ask our young people to decide what to purchase, or download. And when such behavior becomes synonymous with learning and knowledge, there is no need create one's own, no need to ask the question, why?
I am also not saying we should blame corporations or Wall Street, either. What we live with is the sum total of all of the decisions millions of people have made over several hundred years and even noticing we live in a prefab world is itself a huge accomplishment.
September 9, 2009 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
nowhereman, I don't think the immediate problem is whom specifically to blame. On the other hand, if you spread the blame all over ('the sum total of all of the decisions millions of people have made over several hundred years') the enemy becomes so diffuse you can't possibly defeat it.
But I do know that if you encourage your students to constantly ask 'Whose interests does this serve?' various representatives of whom to blame jump up and object vehemently. When you attack those representatives, their patrons jump up, and so on. You'll need ever greater support from the students and fellow teachers. A great deal of learning takes place.
The problem becomes not whom to blame but how to effectively combat those whose announced aim is to prevent students from asking whose interests are served by what they're being taught in school.
September 9, 2009 1:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Andrea, what role, if any, do you see the current federal law, the No Child Left Behind act, and the various state laws preceding and following it which use its basic approach, playing in creating the concerns you express or impeding efforts to address them?
Does the law make it more difficult for educators to foster inquiry in their students, or are these charges made by some overblown?
September 9, 2009 11:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Andrea, remember that dialogue, even with lowly cafe denizens, can be a valuable aid to inquiry. As it is I am left with offering a few thoughts in response to my own comment.
The accountability approach embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is, it seems to me, both cause and effect of the problem about which you write.
It is an effect of a society and a culture which are rather rowdy and unruly at times and in many contexts tolerate dissent relatively well, but which does not in most contexts seem especially to value inquiry. In fact, the undercurrents in our society devaluing intellectual exchange and work are fairly strong, reflected in comments such as "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" which have penetrated the culture to a widespread and deeply unfortunate degree.
The NCLB accountability approach has also been a proximate short-term cause of movement in the wrong direction in our educational system.
There is a truism in education that what gets tested (for stakes that count) is what gets taught. By accelerating trends already prevalent at the state level in the 1990s, NCLB has led to thousands of schools, prior to the economic downturn that began last year, to drop, reduce, or de-emphasize attention to the areas of the curriculum and school program that do not have the highest-stakes tests attached to them--science, history, civics, other social sciences, phys ed, drama, music, band, photography club, school newspaper, debate club, specific community service activities, other artistic activities, etc. These amount to most every part of a child's school experience except coursework in language arts and math.
It is the so-called "extras" which are much of what gets especially middle and high school students out of bed and into school in the morning. Such engagement as they experience often comes more in these than any other parts of their school experience.
In education policy, it is easy to write about problems. For a constructive proposal that has gotten some attention in education policy circles and deserves much more, see a report issued by an initiative called "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education". The statement in support of this approach has been signed by many of the most thoughtful, knowledgeable people in the world of education policy.
summary: June 25, 2009: New Report
The Accountability Committee of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign has released its report with recommendations for the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, known temporarily during the Bush Administration as the "No Child Left Behind Act," or NCLB). The new BBA report recommends that ESEA expand the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given to a representative sample of the nation's students, to cover a broad range of subjects, not only math and reading, to counteract the narrowing of the curriculum spurred in recent years by NCLB. And the report further recommends that ESEA permit states flexibility in designing their accountability systems, provided these systems include qualitative evaluation of school quality and do not rely primarily on standardized test scores to judge the success of schools.
September 11, 2009 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
No, we don't care about the questions. The public school is no longer concerned with turning out citizens, only the euphemistic "good citizens". A "good citizen" is not someone who asks questions, or seeks to understand, much less disagrees. It's someone who trusts that authority wisely has their best interests in minds. It's someone who never disagrees, because that might hurt someone else's feelings. Even worse, it would be disruptive.
Is this any surprise? We under-fund and under-staff our schools. Who has time to answer questions, or address disagreements? It's become all about getting through the day and preparing for the standardized tests. And the only way we get there is with order.
So we just crank out drones who will answer the questions correctly and buy, buy, buy.
September 9, 2009 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Peter, I like your essential question we should encourage students to ask. In fact, I'd like to borrow it. As for my diffusion of responsibility--I think one of the first steps is still to recognize what we're up against: a culture (Western), a worldview (what's good for GM is good for USA), a complex system (many actors competing for finite resources).
I wonder if this Administration (Duncan, et al) understand what we're talking about here?
September 9, 2009 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
nowhereman, good luck with the question (and your job). As far as the administration understanding these things, my experience is that the (school, dept of ed, federal) administration is far more conscious of these issues than we are. They understand how school is needed to support the existing culture and worldview very, very well, and will do anything to preserve that supportive role. Our only defense is the active support from our students, their parents, and our fellow teachers.
The problem is not that our supervisors (from assistant principals on up to DC officials) are ignorant or stupid; quite the contrary. And they know what questions to ask!
September 9, 2009 6:36 PM | Reply | Permalink