We Don't Need Better Teachers

There is a myth out there shared by almost everyone that what public education needs is better teachers. Either pay more money to attract better teachers or break the union to get rid of bad teachers. We don't need better teachers. We need a better public education system.

There was a recent announcement that Minnesota was not among the states chosen to receive Federal grants for education reform. Minnesota's application for the funding failed because of the state's lack of good policies supporting teachers, its inability to dump bad teachers, failure to place the best teachers where they're needed most, and the inability to find faster ways to get teachers into the classroom. They also cited the state's inability to narrow the achievement gap between white students and students of color, and questioned whether Minnesota has the political fortitude to implement changes.

The Governor of Minnesota said he will ask the Legislature to act on a bill that would make it easier for people to find "alternative pathways" into teaching, something he said would give the state "the ability to get the most highly effective teachers" in the classroom, while labeling Minnesota’s education system “a relic of the 1940s.”

If only it were so.

If you believe our world is screwed up, and if you ever wonder what the hell is matter with this country, then you need look no further than our education system. Our education system does not need reform. It certainly does not need better teachers. Our education system needs to be completely dismantled. Public education is not just broken, it is seriously diseased. It is a cancer that is affecting the minds of all of us.

What the hell am I saying, here?

Let me back up a bit. I am a product of public education. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of public education. But, we no longer have any idea of what public education is supposed to accomplish. There is not a unified vision for what Public Education should do and who it should benefit.

There is a belief out there, which many of us share, that Public Education is responsible for our Country’s successes, our innovations and our failures. We believe that when we fall behind other countries in certain economic indicators, we can make up this loss of ground by improving our education system and hiring better teachers. This belief is at the core of the repeated mantra by self-serving politicians, both democrats and republican, that we need to improve our public education so the US can compete with other developed and developing nations. We need to improve math and science scores so we can compete. Reading has to improve so we can compete. We need better technology introduced into the class room so we can compete. Our schools are failing to prepare our children to compete in the global marketplace. So, I ask, how did we get so screwed up? How did our priorities become so twisted?

Math and Science is fine. There has never been a shortage of individuals who are good at math and science. The same goes for reading, history, geography, spelling, auto mechanics, theatre, philosophy, chess playing, knitting, athletics, carpentry, farming, steel work, painting, sculpturing, musicianship, etc. Human beings come in a wide variety of aptitudes and skills.

Why are we so fixated on math and science? I love math and science. I was always good at math and science. I am neither an engineer, doctor, information systems tech, nor a physicist. Math and science have been good to me simply as a pursuit of interest. I know other people who love building things, or history or painting. Public education should not be an institution devoted to one skill over any other. Public education should be devoted to developing citizenship and for it to succeed it has to be developed locally and not through federal initiatives.

There might be a small component of Public Education that emphasizes the federal or national citizenry over the state or local components of education. US citizens share some thing in common that could be addressed through public education. For that matter, Global citizens also have things in common that should be addressed in public education, too. But, by far the greatest emphasis should be on the local community and providing education for students that helps sustain the community and doesn’t rip it apart. What are the economic opportunities within the immediate area of the Public School? What can a student do for work or a living, which will help sustain the community after he or she graduates? We should not be teaching self-interest in schools and focusing on where the student can go to earn the largest wage. Often this means providing the only means for making a living available to most students in the United States upon graduation from our public schools, and that is the through the participation in the US military. This does not sustain the community, but rather tears it apart as it attempts to mend the few who do return to the community, which suffer psychological scars inflicted through wars fought abroad.

This is the reason for the emphasis upon better teachers at the expense of better schools controlled by members of communities. Look, I’d like to be able to dump bad teachers too. But, what is a bad teacher? A teacher whose kids score poorly on math and reading tests? A teacher that falls asleep in front of the class while kids are doing homework? A teacher who is physically or verbally abusive to students? A bad teacher can be anyone of these things depending on the standards. My point is, in most respects, communities should set these standards. I don’t want state or federal governments stepping in and demanding a teacher be removed for failing to meet the state or federal standard if this teacher is considered by the community to be meeting its own standards. Community standards should come first.

If Public Education is going to work it needs to break the bonds of state control and return control to the local communities. Public Education does not need better teachers. It needs better citizens and examples. It does not need teachers who have received accreditations through Public institutions, but rather teachers that are valued members of the community to provide mentorship and examples of citizenship that give back to the community. Public Education does not need federal dollars as much as it needs community support.

People don’t want there tax dollars paying for Public education, because they don’t look at the occupants in the local schools as assets to the community. Rather, the students and teachers are thought of as liabilities. They are drains on the economy and the community would be better off without them. Public schools are thought less of than Public Correctional facilities, as far as their economic worth to local economy.

For this to change Public schools have to be returned to the community and local people have to see how young people and children can benefit the community now and in the future. There has to be a history of local graduates becoming valued members of the community for communities to embrace their Public schools. Public Schools cannot be tools for generating individuals who can compete in the global marketplace. Public Schools need to switch emphasis from developing individuals who can compete in the global market place to developing citizens who are responsible for sustaining their communities.

This is a simple concept that should be easily embraced by all, yet it is assured to be thought of as radical. Damn, it is freaking conservative to the core, and I’m a freaking liberal. But, it’s right. We do need a network of sustainable communities in this country. These communities need to work together. Communities do not need to be antagonistic to state or federal interests. But, the individual community should still come first; otherwise there is no need for the community school. We might as well send all of our children away to boarding school to be prepared to live outside the community, while we watch our neighborhoods, towns, cities, counties, etc. crumble around us.

I will be so pleased if I never hear the call for better teachers again. There is nothing wrong with the teachers. It’s the schools - the Public schools. Take them back. Tell Obama and anyone else that wants to throw their two cents in that the school is your school and you, the community, will decide how best to run it. Those kids in the school are your assets for the community, not someone else’s; least which cannon fodder for our nation’s militaries. Don’t let them take your kids away or brainwash them into believing they have no responsibilities to their families and communities.

Shultz, Meloncholy and the Weather

I left the Twins cities at about 4 pm last Friday afternoon heading up to Jay Cooke State Park to meet a contingent of fools from Duluth to hike into one of the four (Silver Creek) remote backpack sites in the park along the St. Louis river. I was wearing a T-shirt when I left the muggy Twin Cities on the early October afternoon. When I stepped out of the car at the highway 210 exit to Jay Cooke to grab a burger with my co-rider Big Bill B., it was a balmy and chilly evening requiring a quick change into long underwear and several layers of clothing I wore through the remainder of the weekend camping trip with my cronies. I was still bundled up when I stepped out of my car on Sunday afternoon at my suburban sanctuary and was hit with a wave of heat and humidity from an unseasonably warm October afternoon.

On my ride into work this morning the Minnesota Public Radio weatherperson was stating that there is no normal, just variations of extremes. hmmm.

I was reading the paper this morning and stumbled across an article on the reaction of Charles Shultz's family to his latest biography portraying the Peanuts creator as a miserable and cantankerous man prone to fits of depression. The fact that Charles Shultz was prone to melancholy is not exactly a new insight into the famous cartoonist. He said as much on the 60 minutes interview I saw several years ago. Shultz used humor to assuage his melancholy and funny may make us laugh, but it is rarely happy. We laugh at absurdities and to overcome the hardships and suffering of life.

There is no normal, just variations of extremes. Look at the Colorado Rockies. They are far from the best team in baseball this year, but they are currently baseball's hottest team as they ride a streak of 17 wins out of the past 18 games. Despite the American league being the dominant league of the two, if the Rockies sweep the Diamondbacks the world series might be very competitive and exciting whether they play the favored Indians, Yankees or Red Socks. Hitters are usually either in a slump or on a tear and rarely are hitting their average over the season. Basketball players get hot or can't find their shot. Life isn't average or normal, it fluctuates between extremes.

When study statistics, the interesting pieces of data are always the anomalies. What lies within the Bell curve is never interesting. Our education system is all about getting more people to fall under that bell curve whether describing cognitive abilities, behavior, social interactions, or motor skills. Development must also fall into these trajectories based on statistical analysis and God forbid if someone finds themselves outside the range of their age group in any of the above categories. Early intervention is the catch phrase for prodding children back into the range of normal and keeping them from being in the extremes, at least on the lower end of the bell curve.

At the high range lies the gifted, and these become the prodigies who need their gifts nurtured, but often at the expense of the developments of their whole being. But, thats another story. My point here is the lower regions, because I am told my son is below the developmental average in fine motor skills and social interactions (recognition of boundaries, oppositional behavior, etc) for his age group. Obviously, I strive to be a good parent and I want what is best for my son. But, do we really know the optimum way for brains and humans to develop, and if we did, why would we assume that it would resemble anything close to normal or average. Ludwig Wittgenstein did not speak a word until he was four years old, according to his biographer Ray Monk. He would have been found to be developmentally delayed in cognitive functions by today's child psychologist, but without any outside intervention, he arguably developed into one of the greatest intellects western society has ever produced.

It all just makes me wonder what the hell is normal?

Harry Potter

I was reading in my daily scribe, which isn’t much of a daily scribe anymore with the takeovers by Wall Street investment groups and profit speculators and the sell-offs and the layoffs, about what makes Harry Potter a success. It seems there is a formula for the hero that the series follows that has proven effective. I didn’t read it closely, but I was struck by the observation that Harry was orphaned and raised in a school without parents – apparently a common theme for the protagonist of successful tales.

I hate when I have these ideas about family values that make me think the adage about being a liberal when you are twenty and having a soul, while being a conservative when your 40 and having a brain seem true, because I still identify as a liberal. I am not talking about family values though. I am an independent person who is not particularly close to my parents. I appreciate my parents for their role in raising me and bringing me into the world. I just wonder if there is something deeply and inherently wrong with our culture and if there is, since I am a part of this culture, then I can discover it by looking deeply at myself.

My Grandfather left the small town and moved to California during the depression. His family stayed home on the farm. He was part of the first major exodus from small towns to urban areas. Eventually, he returned to the community, but not as a farmer. He ran a small grocery store. My father left the small town and raised our family in the suburbs of Minneapolis. He was part of the last exodus that doomed small towns for good. But, as a child, I made many trips to visit my grandparents grocery store in the small town. It was a four hour drive and I have many cherished memories of time spent with my grandparents and small town living in an agricultural community – albeit a dying one at that. These trips required a 4 hour drive one-way, but still we made frequent weekend drives.

I live less than 30 minutes from my parent’s townhome. My son visits my mother and father about 3-4 times a year at their home. This is much less than I spent with my grandparents. His other grandparents operate the beautiful hay and alfalfa farm near us as well. My son cannot get enough of spending time with my father-in-law and his tractors.

Part of the appeal is the land, I am sure. But, I wonder how long this will last. Eventually, the farm will be associated with work for my son and without a love for work and the time spent with loved ones working together this love for the farm will dissipate as it has over and over again amongst rural families.

My friend is a sixth-grade teacher and he tells me that he tells his students on the first day of class every year that he is going to be spending more time with them than their parents. Public schools have taken over the role of raising our children. Who needs parents anymore? Public schools in rural communities educate the children to be productive members of our economy. This has nothing to do with preserving the community these schools are in. Graduates like my father left the community to work in the cities rather than toil away on the farms in the area.

Myths like Harry Potter only add to this message that parents and families are not needed for the development and maturation of our children. All we need to do is send them to school. I have recently come to believe that sustainable economies can only be found in small rural communities where wealth is produced from taking care of the land and community and not by speculative ventures where profits are made through buying and selling commodities. This wealth has not been appreciated in our present economy, but it will eventually be necessary to return to our rural roots if we wish to live in harmony with our environment and in a sustainable manner.

For this to happen we are going to need new ways of educating our youth and alternatives to Harry Potter for myths to raise our children on.

Opinions over Facts

I have to admit to being slightly uncertain of my convictions. For the most part I am not sure of much. What gets my ire is when anyone proclaims something that they are certain of or dismisses something because it is preposterous and violates some notion they have about the ways of the world they are certain of.

In other words, the only thing I am certain of is that nothing is certain. Of course, that statement contradicts itself and the weight of certainty can be lifted from one’s shoulder simply by shrugging and saying, “Who the hell knows?”

I don’t want the polar ice caps to melt, but do I really know if man is causing global warming? Who the hell knows? I am in favor of some regulations reducing the amount of CO2 being put into the atmosphere because I don’t like the idea of burning fossil fuels and lowering the Earths storage of energy versus using the annual supply of solar energy and renewable resources. I read Buckminster Fuller as a youth in the 1970’s and he always made sense to me.

Here is where we are all confused and lost in this conundrum in my opinion, though. We expect someone else to solve the big problem facing our increasingly global economy. Science tells us that the Earth is warming and CO2 is the likely cause. There is a consensus. I don’t have the equipment or the know-how to verify if this is true or not, so I am just supposed to trust the experts. Fine, in this case I do. However, the experts in science have been wrong on the consensus view in the past. How do I know that this is not one of those cases?

In today’s world we are beholden to the experts. Our education does not teach us to verify the results of scientists, but rather to trust the experts and the work they produce. We are fed these results in the media and by journalists, whom we are supposed to trust can verify the results of the scientists. We are left with an elite group of experts making our decisions for us and arguments or debate usually is just one side spouting facts from one side at the opposing side. We leave for the experts to reach a consensus, then we scream at our opponent, “Science says!” How is this different than appealing to the Priests and the religious icons in the past to settle debate?

I think we often come at debate wrong. Many people think it is ignorant to begin with an opinion as opposed to having facts on hand. I disagree. I think one should begin first with an opinion that is based on ones experience and socially formed morality. For instance, I start most political arguments with a few basic opinions that reflect my morality.

1. We should have concern and compassion for our fellow human beings.
2. War is bad and should always be avoided in almost all instances.
3. We should preserve local resources and strive for a sustainable economy.
4. We share the Earth with other species and we should have some reverence for all species on Earth.
5. We should not take ourselves too seriously.
6. Love is universal and is the closest thing to an absolute humans can experience

There are others, but I begin with these opinions that are not backed up with scientific fact or religious ideology. However, when I meet my interlocutor, I must attempt to understand the opinions that inform his or her views. Once the point is reached where we each understand the others viewpoint, then we can reach for facts on hand supporting out views and work toward common understanding.

I once had a conservative friend in college. We used to go round and round on many issues. Over time we came an understanding. He believed that each person was only responsible for his or herself and his or her family. If everyone would just take care of his or herself, the world would take care of itself just fine. This view contradicted one of my fundamental starting points that we should have compassion and concern for the well-beings of others (#1). He believed that my views often led to people being worse off. For example, the welfare argument that giving a helping hand to someone promotes laziness. Well, we differed in our fundamental beliefs, but we had a starting point for a discussion. Neither of us was going to change the others view, but I did have to take into account the possibility that my compassion could lead to dire outcomes. I had to ask the question “What if I am wrong?” This is what leads to healthy discussions. If all we have is facts at our disposal when we go into a discussion and repeat the thoughts and ideas of experts with the facts they have provided us, we may be well-informed but we cannot have a discussion on important issues that will lead to productive results.

So, I think we should value opinions over facts. That’s my opinion at least

Information or education

Most of my friends and acquaintances are white, middle-class with post graduate degrees. They are also mostly liberals. We agree on a lot of issues and in many ways, I think my friends and associates consider me to have more radical views than they hold. I tend to think this makes me even more liberal, but often, upon reflection, I think my views are actually more conservative.

One of these areas is education. Most of my friends believe that a proper education can prevent the right-ward tilt of the population. They think if people had the right information and enough of it, they would choose to be more liberal and vote in their self-interest. All that is needed is more information. I beg to differ.

In my mind, I think more information solves nothing. We are all bombarded with information everyday from numerous sources. The right or proper information is not only unknowable, it is also not guaranteed to overwhelm other wrong or distracting information. This leaves our education system in a quandary. What is it we want to place in the heads of our little ones, so they can be informed citizens making informed choices?

I think the emphasis on informed is misplaced and we should instead seek to educate children to be morale citizens. Many will argue that morality is subjective to cultures and cannot be given foundations that we can turn to justify choices that we make. My arguments against what is called informed can be quickly turned against me by those who treat morals as subjective. Although morality has no foundations, it is not relative. Rather, we know what is the right way to live in the world and our culture is suppose to support this morality through an education system that reinforces our intuitions for love and respect for all creatures on Earth. Our education system is designed to break down these intuitions through massive doses of information that create confusion by design.

As an example, I offer my own education. My common sense, intuition, and/or morality told me that our economic system was not sustainable. I had an undergraduate degree in economics and I wanted to be an expert who could prove our economic system could not be sustained and then influence policy that would benefit all of humanity. Lofty ambitions, I know, but it felt like a calling. So, I went to graduate school to pursue a PhD in economics and enrolled in an ecological Economics PhD program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

What I discovered was that by pursuing more information and learning techniques and models to prove my position, the best I could do was create more ambiguity that proved nothing. By manipulating the data and changing the assumptions in a model or theory, we are able to prove anything as long as we stay within the parameters of the model. When we went to the real world or the real economy, everything changes and most economic analysis is descriptive and not predictive and even its descriptive role constrained to the parameters of the model. All I wanted to do was confirm my conviction that our economy was depleting valuable resources and polluting our atmosphere and if we kept this up, eventually there would be problems -- if we were not experiencing these problems already. However, graduate school and more information provided me with very little useful tools to tackle this problem.

The problem is the model of education. We have an intuition and we are educated to go through the education system to become an expert, so we can have an influence on policy. However, more information and knowledge often leads us to conclusions that are contrary to our beliefs we started out with. This would properly be an education if our conclusions were right. But, what if our conclusions go are wrong and by wrong I mean morally wrong? If we know that killing is wrong or we know that destroying our environment is wrong, but our models feed us ambiguity by informing us that if we do not secure th oil in the MidEast through warfare or we do not knock off a mountaintop to mine the coal inside, then our economy will suffer and millions of more people will starve. That is the science. The morality, which I argue should take precedence, tells us only that killing is wrong and harming the environment long-term cannot be justified under any circumstances.

It takes only a day or two to teach a human infant or toddler morality and it takes years of programming to undermine this morality through information.