No Child Left Behind--But Where Are We Going?

Test your knowledge of American History at the eighth grade level provided by CNN here.


Now take your turn with an example of a test taken by eighth graders in Kansas during 1895. The Smoky Valley Genealogical Society also provides a link to answers on that same page.

What do students need to know? What do teachers need to learn? Next week, the American Congress is considering the topic again for K-12 students. This informative blog from Education Week outlines the ongoing debates nicely. Costs keep rising, but we cannot put our heads in the sand. No Child Left Behind, in its unexamined consequences, could have put all of our schools out of business. One hundred percent is a nice round number for a quiz grade, but children are not learning objects. I hope we don't shoot ourselves in the collective foot by not thinking about the consequences and building in some opportunities for review and reconsideration. That's the least a thoughtful, well-educated person can do.

I'm off to see CQ/CX a play about the media and plagiarism today. What are you doing for the arts this weekend?

Whatever Happened to Positive Images for Girls?

Well, at least the "I'm too Pretty T-shirt" is coming off the racks at J.C. Penney, but--CLICK!--it's more than a little troubling that the retailers' buyers did not figure this out until people complained:
For those of you who think it's too supid to focus on these incidents, please do your homework. The long-term consequences of ignoring the women's movement for equity have cost us a presidential candidate and equal pay. Women need to collaborate more and keep doing their homework--Intergenerate!--We need to watch what's happening to the generations that follow and do something about it.

Don't be part of the backlash that discourages women from going to school. Did you miss the Gloria Steinem bio, In Her Own Words, on HBO? Do we all need to become bunnies again to get the point?

Priming: The User Experience vs. The Educated Citizen

To prime means to prepare or to make ready, as in painting, to apply a prep coat. Priming also has a special application in psychology: influencing a person’s next perceptions by saying or doing something (stimulus) that shapes a context for meaning. If I have mixed results on my report card, for example, I may lead with the B+ in Biology before I mention the D in math. So, too, consumers of information are primed to hear good news, bad news, and sales pitches.

Advertising helps us understand that we are hungry, or thirsty, or out of style by creating a sense of need. Primers know that people use mental information that is most immediately (or recently) available to make decisions. Anne-Katrin Arnold has an interesting blog post on the subject of priming----and her blog itself offers another example of priming if you take into account how the attractive  photographs and charts bring a sense of control and calm to the turbulent subjects she is discussing; for example, “Climate Change News.”

Why does this matter to an educated person? Organizations invest heavily in priming for persuasion’s sake. Most of our political candidates strive to control the context of our voting behavior. To develop an artful understanding of media and presentations of issues, we need to be able to observe and interpret complicated juxtapositions of information. But our goal as educated citizens should be to exceed interpretation and to be able to act in the interest of our society.

 John F. Kennedy described it so precisely in his address to Vanderbilt University. As I reread his words at American Rhetoric, the online speechbank, I felt a bit ashamed by the condition of our educational system and the merely expedient purposes it so often serves now.  First, disdaining mere economic advantage, Kennedy paints a clear picture of the responsibilities and value of an educated citizen:

“Of the many special obligations incumbent upon an educated citizen, I would cite three as outstanding: Your obligation to the pursuit of learning; your obligation to serve the public; your obligation to uphold the law. If the pursuit of learning is not defended by the educated citizen, it will not be defended at all.”

Kennedy’s elegant defense of the profession is crushingly relevant in our own time:

"
For there will always be those who scoff at intellectuals, who cry out against research, who seek to limit our educational system. Modern cynics and skeptics … see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing."

Last, he clarifies the profound social stakes of allowing citizens to languish in ignorance:

"But the educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that knowledge is power -- more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people; that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all; and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, ‘enlighten the people generally,’ tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

How far have we drifted  from that perception of the value of a teacher and a student? If we pit the taxpayer against the teacher, we are priming people to resent fellow citizens who also pay taxes. How does that help us to focus on the real problem? We agree to scapegoat easy targets because of semantic priming.  If we stopped to think about the arguments, we would realize how foolishly constructed they are.


  Maybe it’s time for the user mentality to take a break. As the economic disparities deepen in our society, we are going to need some highly educated people to lead us back to a more humane purpose, to use the right to vote to vote for the right things. Our future prosperity depends on it.

The Second Question

"Miss, where is India?"

Context is important. It might be everything, as some people have suggested. The second question was asked last year in an urban college classroom. I was showing a video illustrating world population growth since the year 1 AD, and a student saw a reference to India on the screen, which depicted an unlabeled world map. I paused the video so we could establish the location. It occurred to me that the students might not be able to appreciate the video without some knowledge of continents and countries, so I asked about the locations of China (they knew), Japan (most knew), Korea (not many), Vietnam (only one). We didn't do much better on the historical references offered by this excellent video. What to do?

How had they learned geography? Photocopied line maps were labeled by copying the teacher's blackboard drawings. In my experience, labels alone don't help people remember where countries are. How did I learn geography? No student could say what a topographical map was. I remember making those with clay, and I think that if you make the Himalayas with your hands, you are less likely to forget where they are, or which countries sit on either side. That's what art does for you. Scaling the Himalayas with your fingers makes you aware of their awesome height. While you are making those peaks, you might be learning about the Dalai Llama's exile from Tibet or Ghandi's coastal birthplace, and the teacher might also play a beautiful raga. Through art, you are nurturing a hearty contextual soup for your memory so it won't let go of the location of India, and its role in the continent of Asia. At least that's what education was for me.

My students are bright and curious. They operate smart phones with lightning speed, and they know how to use search engines. I need their help when the DVD won’t load. Their education has taught them to act quickly on their impulses, and they are often excellent technicians. These are admirable skills. To get the best value from a liberal arts degree, though, they are going to need to know more. While the No Child Left Behind Act has shined a bright light on some inequities, a decade of enforcement has narrowed the scope of every school’s efforts. Bureaucratic education reforms have reduced us to check box goals: "Student is able to label India on a map." When you walk away from the photocopy and the test of that information, what do you know about the culture of the world or why the monsoon season is important to ecology? You may know how to look up things, but how do you know what to look up? Without an artful experience of learning, this single fact--the location of India--has nothing to connect with in our memories. It's fine to teach people enough about reading and writing and arithmetic so that they can shop functionally, but what about solving problems and understanding the consequences of shopping choices? It's easy to educate a nation of impulse-buyers, but don't we all deserve something more in terms of the quality of our thinking about the world? I'm all for assessing learning, but we need to expand our notion of what students need to know.

On a brighter note, in a high school classroom recently, I watched as a newly arrived student from Latin America ran her hands over the Andes Mountains on a classroom topographical map. The teacher guided the student’s hand slightly east of the peaks, and said, “Bolivia.” The student  smiled and said, “My country?” The teacher nodded, and the student stroked the valley, smiling happily,  sighing, “Home.” It’s all about the context, isn’t it?