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Blog: FCAR
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Too busy studying trees to see the
forest
Marion Brady
*May 25, 2002
Change the course of history. That's what a book can do.
Before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, only about a third of the
colonists in North America favored separation from England. The pamphlets
written by Thomas Paine and collectively called The Crisis stiffened colonial
resistance and helped bring on the Revolutionary War.
The Fugitive Slave Act granted Southerners the right to pursue runaway slaves
into free states. The law aroused many abolitionists to action, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe's action took book form in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The characters in
her novel - Little Eva, Uncle Tom, Topsy and Simon Legree - were memorable and
helped convince the public (Northerners, at least) that slavery was inhumane.
Stowe didn't start the Civil War, but she helped make it inevitable.
Before the turn of the 20th Century, Alfred T. Mahan's The Influence of Sea
Power Upon History helped propel the arms race in Europe, the United States and
Japan that culminated in World War I. Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf outlined his
vision of a future that appealed to economically depressed Germans and pointed
that country toward World War II. The roots of the Cold War were planted deep in
a conflict between ideas advanced in two books - Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations,
and Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
World-changing books have something in common: They try to get across just one
main idea. For the books I've mentioned, it was that English rule over the
American colonies was unjust, that human slavery was unacceptable, that sea
power is the key to national greatness, that Aryans are the master race and
should be in charge of the world, that free economies have corrective measures
built into them, that unregulated economies eventually become abusive.
What's true for books that alter the course of history is true for most
effective non-fiction. From where I'm sitting, I can read the titles of at least
a hundred books the major themes of which could be summarized in a sentence. A
main idea is stated, illustrated, turned every which way, elaborated, argued,
defended. Good books are tightly focused.
Which is why most textbooks are a waste of money and paper.
Mathematician, master teacher and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, in his
1916 presidential address to the Mathematical Association of England, said, "Let
the main ideas which are introduced into a child's education be few and
important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible. The child
should make them his own, and should understand their application here and now
in the circumstances of his actual life."
That schooling should focus on just a few ideas is a concept that doesn't
compute for many people. They ask, "Isn't schooling about getting information
into kids' heads? And isn't the information that needs to be gotten into their
heads in the textbook? And isn't the amount transferred from book to head the
measure of success?
That's the conventional wisdom. But as often the case, the conventional wisdom
is wrong.
It's wrong because what counts most isn't information quantity but quality.
Looking around for some simple way to illustrate that much of what's happening
in today's classrooms spreads information a mile wide but only an inch deep, I
borrowed popular eighth-grade textbooks for math, science, social studies and
language arts and turned to the glossaries. That's where the ideas the authors
consider important are summarized.
One-thousand-four-hundred-and-sixty! In less than four hours a day, for less
than 180 school days, 13-year-olds are expected to make sense of amniotic,
asthenosphere, laissez-faire, peristalsis, hyperbole, Kaskasia, presidio,
heterozygous, and 1,452 other concepts.
It can't be done. Information overload is the main reason adults remember so
little of what they once learned in school. We spend a half-trillion dollars a
year on education, and a few years later have so little to show for it that
public officials are afraid to take the standardized tests they force on
adolescents for fear of embarrassing themselves.
We got into this educational morass - this confusing of educating with
preparation for playing Trivial Pursuit - by trying to assemble a general
education from specialized studies. We won't get out of it until we accept that
what students need most is a thorough grasp of powerful ideas that cut across,
organize and integrate not just the contents of textbook glossaries, not just
all school subjects and courses, but life - ideas such as "pattern,"
"structure," "relationship," and "system."
Dump the textbooks. Think "real world." We're graduating generation after
generation of students so busy studying trees they can't see the forest.
*First published in the Orlando Sentinel. Posted here
with permission of the author.
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