The recent night after the Illinois State Board of Education, with much bureaucratic self-congratulation, adopted new academic standards for its elementary and secondary schools, at least one old college professor had a frightening vision.
All the C-minus students from his first teaching years passed in front of his eyes, like frat-boy Marleys out of an academic twist on Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Each carried a blue book scribbled with platitudinous answers to final-exam questions.
Those who were professors or undergraduates in the 1950s and early ’60s may well recall that period in American educational history as the “Golden Age of the Gentleman’s C.” Students then considered it their birthright–campuses were largely populated with the offspring of the upper income-tax brackets–to coast through college with beer mugs uplifted and textbooks uncracked.
They survived by doing just enough so that their profs couldn’t flunk them but not so much as to require studying. Their gambit was to write term papers and answer test questions on a level so dazzlingly cosmic it took a practiced eye and a close reading to see that those essays were filled not with facts but fluff.
For instance, a student might promise that his research paper would “analyze how technological and scientific developments have affected human productivity, human comfort and the environment.”
Another would undertake to relate “how historical trends in population, urbanization, economic development and technological advancements have caused change in world economic systems.”
Waking from his nightmare last week, that old professor realized that the pastrami and pickles of the evening before weren’t at fault. No, that blue-book vision had been inspired by studying the new “Illinois Learning Standards” just before bedtime.
Indeed, the examples immediately preceding are taken from the document that is now the state’s official blueprint for seeing to it that our schools do their job. The new standards are the state’s most detailed description to date of the kind of education it expects local districts to provide for Illinois’ 2 million public school students. The issue is especially sensitive as public, business and government all are demanding educational reform.
Indeed, those high-flying phrases about “historical trends in population” and “technological and scientific developments” are supposed to measure a high school student’s knowledge of history.
But how could they possibly? As Diane Ravitch, a noted educator and historian, has observed, such broad topics are the stuff of which mature scholars make a lifetime’s work, publishing their findings in stout volumes.
Asked to evaluate Illinois’ new academic standards by the National Council for History Education, an alliance of schoolteachers and academics, Ravitch recalled that it once was the case that students were thought to know something about history if they could give the dates of significant events and identify the accomplishments of important figures.
“It is sad to contemplate standards for the State of Illinois that fail even to mention Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson,” wrote Ravitch, a senior research scholar at New York University.
Her critique was based upon an older pedagogical philosophy now seemingly out of favor at many schools. A generation ago, teachers generally shared the assumption that theorizing must be based on a firm grasp of the fundamental facts of a given subject–a perspective they shared with students at exam time. To each question they’d append a b.s.-detecting imperative: BE SPECIFIC. GIVE EXAMPLES.
That approach still is alive and well in other countries’ classrooms. When French students take their baccalaureate, that nation’s exit exam from secondary school, examiners know exactly which books they have read and questions are tailored accordingly. For instance, young people aren’t just asked to write on a broad topic such as “images of nature in literature,” an open invitation to factless filibustering. Instead, a student will be set a specific task such as this: “Analyze Rousseau’s image of nature.”
In the U.S., many schools favor a new educational philosophy–one that essentially holds that children can run before they crawl. According to the new “Illinois Learning Standards,” parents will know that their high school-age children have mastered geography if they can “explain how processes of spatial change have affected human history (e.g. resource development and use, natural disasters).”
Yet troubling evidence suggests that America’s young people haven’t the foggiest notion of where on Earth those “processes of spatial change” may be taking place. A study a few years ago found that many high school students couldn’t find the U.S. on a world map, with a good portion pointing to Brazil as their answer. On another national test, 40 percent of high school seniors mistook South America for Africa.
Indeed, the new “Illinois Learning Standards” display a preference for talking a good game over mastering the facts. Where students are to be evaluated on the level of basic knowledge, the state’s new standards set the bar so low as to be virtually ground level. But when asked to speak or write on larger issues, kids are presented with every opportunity for flights of unfettered rhetoric.
For instance, high school freshmen and sophomores are expected to explain energy transformations via quantum theory–a branch of modern physics so mathematically and conceptually abstruse as to daunt Ph.D. students.
On the other hand, Illinois junior high school students henceforth will be considered masters of the English language if they can “write compositions that contain complete sentences.”
No wonder, then, that a preliminary version of the history portion of the standards set University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill, author of “The Rise of the West,” to wondering whether our state might be headed for a new Dark Ages.
“Does dumbing down seem necessary for Illinois students?” McNeill wrote in his critique.
Illinois’ new educational standards, like those of other states, seem to have been inspired by a disquieting sense many Americans share that our schools are falling behind those of other nations, a thought doubly troubling in this age of global trade and high-tech industry when economic survival hinges on an educated work force.
On every level–from PTA meetings to the White House–the cry has gone up that we need more effective means of keeping our schools on track to graduating students who have been taught a reasonable approximation of what an educated person ought to know.
Yet this new movement for stiffer standards hasn’t been taking place in an educational vacuum. Charles Sykes, a student and critic of American education, notes that a debate has been running about the purpose our schools ought to serve.
Until recently, the predominant view held that students should be put through their paces, forced to memorize historical dates and spelling lists and have the rules of English grammar rammed into their subconscious. A few educational theorists, however, always have argued that schools should be happier places, filled more with joy than the clamor of lessons being recited by rote.
The latter view–which decades back went by the name of progressive education–was in the minority. Now, though, that perspective is increasingly ascendant, championed by the self-esteem movement, an educational philosophy that schools are supposed to teach young people to feel good about themselves.
Almost axiomatically, facts and data become less important when that happens. When transmission of basic knowledge is given a back seat, educational bureaucrats start to feel that they don’t need to consult with working academics who might have expertise in various subjects. Thus in Illinois, professional historians weren’t made part of the process until after a preliminary draft of the
“Illinois Learning Standards” had been written.
When the schools worry about joy, forcing students to memorize seems inimical to their psychological development. Thus, advocates of the so-called “whole language” approach to the teaching of writing believe that drilling students in grammar crimps their creativity. Accept that premise–but give them no tools to use–and it becomes almost reasonable to postpone the expectation that they will be able to write in complete sentences until junior high school.
Indeed, Sykes thinks that the new teaching philosophy dooms educational reform.
“The self-esteem movement has hijacked the movement for meaningful educational standards,” charges Sykes, author of “Dumbing Down Our Kids.”
If he is right at all, real school reform is impossible until the educational establishment changes its standards about standards. Yet if the bureaucrats were only clever enough and had any sense of history, beyond how they may feel about technological developments, historical trends and economic systems, the path would be easy to find: All they need do is heed that old prescription once appended to their final exam questions by their own teachers: BE SPECIFIC. GIVE EXAMPLES.
