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Blog: FCAR
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Priorities
By Marion Brady
*October 30, 2001
"Now what I want is Facts. Teach
the boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant
nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of
reasoning animals upon Fact; nothing else will ever be of any service to them .
. . In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir, nothing but Facts!" ——
Schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dickens' novel, HARD TIMES.
Schoolmaster Gradgrind has a lot of disciples in the ranks of those who think
rigid standards and standardized testing will be the salvation of American
education. Educating, they’re convinced, is mostly a matter of moving facts out
of textbooks and teachers’ heads and off the Internet and into the minds of
students. And "accountability" is mostly a matter of finding out how many of
those facts are still in memory at exam time.
Because facts carry so much of the educating load, you might think that all
kinds of questions would be asked about them. Responsible teachers do, in fact,
raise questions, questions such as, "Where did this particular fact come from?
Does its source have an axe to grind or a hidden agenda? If so, what’s that
agenda? How do you know? Are there conflicting facts from other sources?"
There is, however, a question that isn’t being asked about facts. It’s a
question which, if thoughtfully considered, could change the whole course of
American education. The question? WHICH facts are worth knowing?
Those in Washington and in state capitols who’re most responsible for steering
education in the direction in which it’s presently going haven’t felt the
necessity for asking that question. They don’t ask it because they think the
question has already been satisfactorily answered. In general, they assume that
the book-facts that happen to be in THEIR heads are the ones the next generation
needs, and they point to their own success as evidence that they’re right.
That the question, "Which facts?" is a lot more complicated than most people
think is a point I tried to make early in the school year at Gateway High School
in Osceola County. I’d been invited to a couple of 12th grade International
Baccalaureate classes, and I wanted to try to push the thinking of these bright
young adults "outside the box."
The students sat in small groups. I asked them to focus their attention, for
five seconds, on the classroom. I counted the seconds silently, and then told
each team to write down the facts that were true for that classroom during that
five second interval.
Very quickly they realized that the task I’d given them was overwhelming.
Thousands of facts—in fact, a near-infinite number—could be stated about what
was true just in that one room for that brief interval. After a few minutes I
told them to stop writing and transfer their lists to the chalkboard.
"You quickly came up with all these facts," I said, "and you’re telling me that
you barely got started. That being the case, what sort of list of facts would be
necessary to take in not just one room for five seconds, but, say, North America
since 1492?"
Incomprehensible.
As a society, we’re not asking the critically important question, "Which facts?"
The present reform movement, with its emphasis on testing "standard textbook
knowledge," is making it less likely that we’ll ever ask it. (Florida’s
"Sunshine State Standards" for grades 6-8 require students to "understand the
world from its beginnings to the time of the Renaissance." No, I’m not kidding.)
Moment by moment, students are being inundated with facts, and schooling merely
adds myriad secondhand ones to the flood. That any school course could come
within a country mile of "covering the subject" is a ridiculous notion,
reinforced by our simplistic reliance on textbooks as major tools of
instruction.
Facts in isolation are meaningless. Taking away truckloads of them isn’t what
students need from schooling. They’ll pick up those that are necessary as life’s
situations require them. What students need is an understanding of how their
minds cope with facts——selecting, organizing, storing, retrieving, relating,
integrating, and applying them to make more sense of life.
They’re not getting that from schooling. But they could.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
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