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How to raise test scores
By Marion Brady
*June 10, 2004
When Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was
published in 1974, over a period of several years I read it four or five times.
I did the same with his 1991 Lila. Both touch on many matters, but what
interests me most are his thoughts on human values in general and on "quality"
in particular.
I dog-ear my books. Turning down the corners of pages makes it easy to go back
and re-read, which is what led me yesterday to Pirsig's contention in Lila that
societies build their beliefs on what they think are facts, but once those
beliefs are in place, there's little interest in new facts unless they reinforce
old ones.
"A contradictory fact," he says, "has to keep hammering and hammering and
hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it.
And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time
before they see it too."
I'm a hammerer (and not-very-patient one) so being reminded that a fact I'm
trying to get people to accept may be rejected for centuries is pretty
discouraging. It's even more discouraging if you believe, as I do, that
continuing to reject the fact will contribute to the decline and eventual demise
of America.
No, that's not an exaggeration. Those in today's classrooms will soon be running
things, and the quality of their education will have far-reaching consequences.
What they don't know, and what they don't do because of what they don't know,
will determine the future of the nation. More than likely, given America's
power, it will determine the future of humankind.
What's the idea I'm hammering? The same idea Alfred North Whitehead was
hammering in 1916 when he told the Mathematical Association of England that
school subjects disconnected from each other would be "fatal" to education.
It's the same idea Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter was hammering in 1948
when he wrote that the main thing wrong with American universities was "the
curse of departmentalization."
It's the same idea John Goodlad was hammering in 1984 when, following a massive
study of America's schools, he said, "The division into subjects and periods
[makes schooling] increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences
subject matter is supposed to reflect."
It's the same idea which dozens of well-known, respected educators were
hammering when, a few years ago, Congress shoved them aside, took over the
nation's schools, and legislated the conventional wisdom. The conventional
wisdom of the 1930s.
The idea? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Throwing disconnected, unrelated school subjects at kids may keep them off the
streets, may give them some minimal skills, may produce good standardized test
scores, but it doesn't teach them how the world works.
That idea is a really tough sell. It's unfamiliar. It isn't logical. To most
people, it doesn't seem important. And, if it is important, doing something
about it is surely someone else's responsibility. Given all those obstacles, if
an integrated curriculum has any chance of making it into classrooms, it
probably has to piggy-back on something else-something everyone cares about.
Right now, that "something" that everyone cares about is standardized test
scores. If integrating the curriculum promised to raise the scores, it might
have a chance.
Raise scores it would. The more kids can remember, the better their scores.
Remembering requires a system of mental organization. To be integrated,
knowledge has to be organized. Integrating knowledge, then, will improve test
scores.
If I'm right, Washington's pressure on the states to write separate standards
for each school subject stands in the way of better test performance.
Merely raising standardized test scores is a poor reason for integrating the
curriculum, but if that's a winning argument, your elected representatives need
to hear it.
The late Trappist monk Thomas Merton gave us a far more legitimate motive for
acting when he wrote, ". . . we break reality into pieces and then wonder why,
after we have manipulated the pieces until they fall apart, we find ourselves
out of touch with life, with reality, with the world, and most of all with
ourselves."
What discourages experienced teachers is the fact that words of wisdom like
those carry less weight with most of the public and the media than a mysterious
number created by a secret test.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
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