Without Change, Education
System Is A Sinking Ship
By Marion Brady
*August 10, 2003
The Rockland Café bumps up against the sidewalk on the east side of Main Street
in Rockland, Maine. It’s a down-home sort of place, not much like most of the
restaurants just up the road in the touristy town of Camden. The restaurant’s
motto is, “Come as a stranger, leave as a friend.”
In the evening, you can choose between Maine scallops, shrimp, clams or haddock
for $7.25. The same, large size, is $10.95.
Hanging on the north wall of the restaurant is an enormous enlargement of a
photograph taken in 1907. It shows the under-construction schooner Mertie B.
Crowley being launched just south of town. A crowd watches as she slides down
the ways into the waters of Penobscott Bay.
What catches your eye about the Mertie B. Crowley—and probably explains why the
picture is on the wall—is that she has six masts rather than the usual three.
What in the world were Rockland’s shipwrights thinking? It’s 1907, for crying
out loud, 100 years since Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, began
providing regular commercial service on the Hudson River between New York City
and Albany. Just 44 miles down US Route 1 from Rockland is the Bath Iron Works,
a company that, by 1907, had been building steam powered ships for years.
Is there a lesson there? Did those Rockland shipbuilders think that doubling the
usual number of masts would make sailing ships competitive again and bring back
the good old days?
Long-time readers will know there are ideas about education I try, over and
over, to hammer home:
* Teachers and students are getting a bum rap. They’re being blamed for the poor
performance of a system not of their making and over which they have almost no
control.
* No instructional program yet invented (including your favorite phonics
program) can erase the differences between kids who show up for kindergarten
with a vocabulary of 1,000 words and those who show up with 5,000. That’s a
PRE-schooling problem.
-- The current test fad is killing real education. Because standardized tests
can’t measure the only educational outcome worth measuring—what kids can DO with
what they know—we’re being distracted from the real challenge.
-- Learning is natural and therefore satisfying. The best evidence that
something is seriously wrong with the current system of educating is that kids
are having so little fun.
-- There’ll be no significant improvement in student performance until the
present separate-subject curriculum is replaced (or at the very least
supplemented) by one that reflects the seamless way the brain processes
information.
-- Every kid’s head is wired differently. We ought to rejoice in that fact and
capitalize on it instead of trying to force them all down the same assembly
line.
-- Those who think choice, competition, privatization and other market forces
can significantly improve schools obviously know almost nothing about educating
and should be ignored.
When I write about these matters, I know what I’m going to hear from at least a
few readers: “There’s nothing wrong with education that couldn’t be cured by
bringing back schools like those I attended.” The writers don’t come right out
and say it, but the rest of their message is clear: “For proof, just look at how
smart I am.”
I read those e-mails and letters to the editor and think about the builders of
the Mertie B. Crowley. Facing a problem, they apparently assumed that the
solution lay in doing what they’d always done, just doing more of it.
I can appreciate nostalgia. I have fairly pleasant memories of the one-room
school in West Virginia I attended from grades four through eight. With just 14
or 15 kids in the school, quite a lot could be accomplished. But it’s surely
ridiculous to think that the answers to today’s educational problems lie in the
past The posts I get praising the good old days aren’t written with quill pens
and delivered by riders on horseback.
What is it that sets education apart from other institutions? Why is it that in
just about every other field of human effort, evolutionary improvements are
accepted—indeed, expected or demanded —but even relatively minor changes in
education are fiercely resisted? Doesn’t it make sense to suppose that, in the
face of major societal change, schools have problems not because they’ve
abandoned practices that work well, but because they’ve clung to those practices
long after they’ve stopped working?
The Mertie B. Crowley went down off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in January of
1910. There’s probably a lesson in that.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
