music: Radiohead- The Bends
I’ve been picking at an idea that’s been bothering me on the education front-it’s a philosophical point that has enormous ramifications as far as how I conduct my own classroom on a day-to-day basis. With the end of the first semester around the corner, I’m driving myself up a wall trying to reconcile this dilemma. Here’s the kernel of it:
There are two major movement being batted around in education circles. The first is the standards movement, which is all about the idea that before kids graduate, they should have to demonstrate skill proficiency and verify a certain degree on content knowledge. Here is where things like the MCAS and No Child Left Behind are spawned. Standards demand that students jump through very specific hoops, and that teachers for the most part are accountable for their students’ success and failure. As in they will be fired if their students fail tests. Standards have resulted in educational decision-making power being shunted from the school and district to more bureaucratic political bodies who have very little interaction with students. Standards feed into the idea of the public school functioning as a homogenizing agent, pushing public education towards an assembly-line mass production of citizens who all are proficient at certain skills and possess certain declarative knowledge. While I think that it’s not an entirely bad thing for students to have certain skills and knowledge before they graduate, the implementation of this ethic is incredibly restrictive. Alternative methods of students demonstrating their understanding and displaying knowledge are not really possible under Standards, nor is an education that does not conform to what society deems to be important and proper. No matter how expansive and enlightening an experience may be, it all comes down to standardized test scores Have those decision makers stopped to consider that it is possible their tests don’t measure anything beyond students’ abilities to take a test?
The standards movement is also hating on me personally. I’m technically not “qualified” to teach my subject under the No Child Left Behind Act, because I don’t have a degree in biology. Standards force conformity on all levels; in students’ content and in teacher’s practice, because in the end nothing matters to those in power except how little Scantron bubbles were filled out.
The second movement, especially in science, is the inquiry movement. This is a more organic stance in which the student is trusted to come up with content-rich questions and use their natural curiosity as a fuel to discover something about their world. Inquiry is grounded in the assumption that students are intrinsically motivated to learn and that the resources necessary for discovery are readily available. I won’t even talk about the resources piece here. This stance also sprouts from research in the fields of cognitive psychology, in which children and infants are compared to scientists in the ways they acquire knowledge about the world around them: developing theories and testing them via experimentation. Indeed, true science models the infant or toddler’s empirical reality, but the sad truth is that at the secondary (and even undergraduate) level, no true science is being done. We are just learning about science. Students are discovering things for themselves for the first time perhaps, but it is very, very rare to find new knowledge about the world being created in high school science classrooms.
Science students are therefore reinventing the wheel under inquiry. They are charged with making discoveries that others have already made. Why assume that given an apple and a tree, each and every student in a given physics class would discover and derive the law of gravitation? Why not just dispense knowledge? The hope, constuctivists say, is that people will remember and intuitively understand content better if they build answers for themselves. Ok. Fine. But actual open-ended inquiry is not really possible in a high school setting. There are not enough resources or time to allow stuents to freely explore and develop their own questions.
It seems clear, now, that these two movements come into direct conflict. On one hand, students are expected to explore what is interesting to them about a given topic and generate knowledge via experiments and possibly research. On the other hand, a specific set of knowledge is expected to be gained by the time they graduate. Through some miracle it’s going to turn out that the topics students choose to explore are the very same ones that will be tested by the State department of education. Inquiry and standards. The two can not coexist. You can’t preach both at once. It’s a lose-lose situation.
If I had to pick one, I would pick inquiry. I do believe that everyone is natually curious about the world around them and given enough access would do a decent job of discovering things for themselves. Unfortunately, the way things are set up in our society and at school, there is no time to fool around and tinker. We Americans feel a burning need to maintain or elevate our current rates of scientific progress, and therefore need to churn out graduates that are ready to assume positions that will promote that progress. To embrace inquiry fully is in some ways to swear off that driving force called the American Dream. I’d personally encourage the slowing of progress wholeheartedly, but I am one in a sea of thousands of jaded, hyperconditioned, institutionalized public school teachers. It’s my first year. I’ve always leaned heavily towards nonconformity. I chose to go to a college with no core requirements, after all. I would be ok with adults not knowing Newton’s laws or the photosynthesis equation (how many remember that stuff anyway?); I’d rather adults have a strong sense of analysis, and a working ability to engage in deductive, logical reasoning. In the extreme stance of inquiry, I’d have to be ok with some adults not being able to read (those that chose not to explore written language would not have to) and I think that I’d be ok with that. If they can fix a car or play a saxophone or calculate escape velocities or paint a picture or contribute to the world in some meaningful way it doesn’t really matter if they can understand Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the same way that it doesn’t really matter if I can fix my car (which I can’t really do), speak French (merci), or play a saxophone (never tried). I think it’s less important for us to have such rigid standards for all students, and more important for us to offer the opportunity for students to explore content of their choosing.
This is all contingent upon one’s idea of the purpose of schooling, which could be as cold as the utilitarian belief that school is a tool used to sort, to disperse people evenly into the workforce. From this perspective, people should realize that not only will some children be left behind, but if we want to keep our society the way it is, some children HAVE TO be left behind. This isn’t talked about too loudly because to admit to it is political sucide, but it’s pretty much true: our society depends heavily on a base of manual labor and service-level jobs. Who with a college degree would subject themselves to factory work or be content waiting tables? And if everyone had a college degree, who would work in the factories? From an economic standpoint, the simple and well-intentioned idea that no child should be left behind is just not feasible without a massive, sweeping restructuring of how our society works. Which, for the record, I would support.
Niether standards nor inquiry are going to go away any time soon and the education battlefield will continue to be a tug-of-war between the two extreme cases of each of these movements. I know this much: asking all of my students to conform to a certain mold is an exercise with very little utility and a lot of headache, and at the same time given the opportunity very few would pursue the acquisition of knowledge from their own intrinsic motivation. I’m currently attempting to cross the streams for the sixty-odd teenagers I have been given this year: a sort of guided inquiry in which I pose a question (almost always with a predetermined answer) and ask them to creatively construct an answer (which had better be correct) using their own previous knowledge (often faulty), limited time and resources, and the awareness that they are being asked to disover something already written in many textbooks. It’s a bit like putting someone in a mind-blowing National Park and telling them that they can go hiking and camp anywhere they want, but they have to stay within one mile and they have to stay on the path and they can’t walk any direction except North. The guided inquiry approach isn’t perfect, but it beats straight lecture.
Even this guided inquiry suffers at the feet of the Standards movement, where all personally constructed knowledge not only has to be “correct,” but it also has to match what will be asked on the standardized tests. How to reconcile this? Do people really need to know this set of content? Will American teenagers, left to their own devices, actually try to discover things for their own sake? Are people stupid enough to believe that you can have standards and inquiry at the same time? What is the real purpose of schooling in our society?
Many answers may appear correct. Please choose the BEST answer, then fill in the corresponding letter on your answer key. Make your marks within the lines provided; any stray marks may be scored improperly. You will be penalized for incorrect responses. Calculators and reference material may not be used. You may begin.
Posted by davidtaus at January 13, 2005 11:51 PM