In another post, we've moved onto the topic of Intellectual Heritage and its place at Temple University.
Personally speaking, I loved IH. Prior to college, I was just a smart ass from South Philly. Heck, I didn't even want to go to college. Temple, in many ways, changed my life and opened up an entirely different world for me.
One of the classes I took (actually 2) was IH. I did very well in the class and Jennifer was never my tutor (poor girl). I had a number of friends from the neighborhood who simply couldn't grasp the concepts. One fellow took the class 5 times before passing!
Fortunately, I didn't have that problem. But, it was still a challenge. Before Temple, I was never exposed to these notions of "Western Thought." And, in conjunction for my love of the colonial era (not colonialism) and the revolutionary period, it was extremely relevant. Also, for the purposes of my later career, the political/governmental materials retain relevance.
As important as the concepts were, however, the most value I received from IH was a continued emphasis on critical thinking. Something that almost resembles what they do to you in law school's first year, after they crush your soul. They always say, law school teaches you to think like a lawyer, not how to think. As a result, I've always been more interested in the development of thought process rather than knowledge gained relative to IH.
So, let's have an open thread on this topic.
Let'er rip!
I may be off the mark here,
I may be off the mark here, but it sounds like IH at temple for you was pretty similar to Theory of Knowledge for me. Being exposed to thinkers like Plato and Aristotle for the first time is pretty challenging. For me it only got more so wit modern philosophers like Hegel, Hume, Kant, and Goethe. Introduced at a time when I was content merely lifting arguments from others, TOK forced me to think critically and form my own opinions. It also made me a lot more open to the opinions of others.
The one big difference between our experiences, again, if I'm reading it correctly, was that I was fortunate to have this class as a senior in high school. Exposure to that level of thinking was one of the reasons I went to Penn, instead of a smaller school closer to home. It also made me a much better student, as I appreciated the art of argument.
I realize that public schools are strapped. I was lucky in that my public high school had a great reputation and a suburban tax base. But if we can introduce kids to this level of thought before college, if only briefly, it can inspire kids who had no aspirations of college to sign up. This can only be a good thing, right?
I will admit that the majority of philosophical texts come to us from dead white men. But it was reading these works in the first place that led me to challenge their thought, reading contemporary works by a variety of authors.
I completely agree.
I completely agree.
Related to that: to some extent, I wonder (and I'm not an educator) if we should determine our course schedules on items that will benefit students (critical thinking) versus mindless memorization that so routinely occurs in high schools. In addition, to what extent we should consider that, while these subjects may be entirely boring to HS students, that we do not dictate curriculum based on what students want, but what they need. Particularly a general education or college prepatory curriculum.
If would be nice to hear from an educator on these issues?
I am working to elect Larry Farnese to the General Assembly. Unless otherwise expressly stated, this and every comment or blog I post on YPP and any action I take hereon is solely attributable to me and not Farnese or Friends of Farnese
I am running around downtown
and only have a second, but:
When I went to the beach two weeks ago I made the mistake of bringing this Jonathan Kozol book of Dan's. I thought I knew more or less what bad shape the public school system was, at least in poor areas and inner cities. I had no idea.
Kozol's description of the curricula used in some inner city schools trying to raise test scores in compliance with No Child Left Behind is horrifying. He concludes that we are robbing a group of children of the mental faculties to critically engage with society, their social position, and their experiences. We are literally wiring children's brains in a way that limits their capacity to independently think.
The book is "Shame of a Nation," and I'd really encourage anyone to read it (though maybe not at the beach!). We really have to push, nationally, to change the funding structure of schools away from local property taxes and towards some more equitable per-pupil expenditure. I finished that book convinced that the horrific inequities in the schools (white or suburban people would never, ever, be subjected to those curricula because they have greater political power) is causally linked to the persistant racial/economic segregation that in turn supports the continued imbalance in the quality of education between schools in rich and in poor areas.
So does this mean you agree
So does this mean you agree with me, again?
I am working to elect Larry Farnese to the General Assembly. Unless otherwise expressly stated, this and every comment or blog I post on YPP and any action I take hereon is solely attributable to me and not Farnese or Friends of Farnese
Wellll
don't push it! I am glad you are in sympathy with Kozol's position!
Savage Inequalities
One of the thing Kozol focused on in an earlier book--I haven't read this one yet--is that in addition to inequities between suburbs and cities there are "savage inequalities" between schools in one part of a city and another.
All those inequalities are definitely a product of racial / economic segregation. And racism is definitely an independent factor here. I do not believe that whites suburbanties would be as indifferent to the qualitiy of schools in our city if the majority of our students were white.
I'm glad Rendell is pushing his health insurance program. But I wish he would have not given up on the ambitious goals of his education program he advanced in his first year in office.
One piece of good news: kids can catch up. Suburban white kids in IH were at the beginning of the first semesmter of IH, on average, better prepared better able to read and write than black kids from citiy school. But, over the course of two semesters, the black kids pretty much caught up. It seemed to me that they worked harder to do it. And one of the lovely things I saw again and again is the hunger for knowledge they brought to my classes. IH opened their eyes to ideas and kinds of thinking that was unknown to them. While many found it hard, the excitement they showed made teaching them so much fun.
Of course, I was teaching some of the best students from the city. I can only mourn at the thought of so many talented kids in the city schools who miss the chance to go to college because no one is nurturing those talents.
Shame of the Nation
I understand that the two books have similar focus. Shame of the Nation is about the increase in racial segregation after a brief motion towards desegregation post-Brown, and about the stark funding inquality between majority (he focuses on 90-95+ percent single-race schools, of which there are a disturbing number) black/hispanic and majority white schools.
Kozol thinks that racial segregation in schools is a bad in and of itself, and that attempts to hand off inner city schools to black administrators so the black community can fix those schools for itself constitute a shell game that hurts black children. Since, like you say, white people and people with financial and political power can remain detached from and ignore the problem.
The radical thing I took from reading Kozol was that while we bemoan continued racial/economic segregation as this difficult immovable human tendancy, the huge difference in school quality causes the segregation, as well as the causation working the other way around. Since anyone with any financial power will pull their children from underperforming schools, and school quality is clearly an active factor in people with power choosing where to live and buy homes, a real shift in school funding could go far in chipping away at this corrosive and persistant residential segregation.
There's just no political will, in fact, history shows there is incredible will to prevent real funding equity.
PS
This is a place where the courts really could have stepped in and changed the landscape in one swoop for the better.
In the "San Antonio" case, the Supreme Court ruled 5/4 that there is no fundamental right to a decent education that would permit you to fully function as a citizen of this country. They found no reason to overturn a school funding system that was vastly inequitable and gave poor children schools that were pale, underfunded, shadows of those given to rich children.
Any political solutions to this vicious circle?
Bad public schools in cities schools > white flight to suburbs and private schools > lack of political will to improve schools in cities...
I am, I'm sure you know, extremely reluctant to see the courts be the hammer that will overcome this awful situation. But at this point, I just don't know what the alternative is in a society as depoliticized as our own. Maybe I should start thinking of legal action as the price we pay for living in a Lockean society that in so many ways discourages political activity, and the more so the lower one goes down the class structure.
But, I don't know we can count on the courts either. Is San Antonio not a harbinger of the future?
To tie what we are talking about here to another topic: suppose that black and progressives in the city were to make this one issue on which the future of Democratic state wide success rests? Suppose we say, no black and white progressive votes for a Democratic gubenatorial candidate until progress is made here. Is it really that inconceivable that Rendell could not find legislative majorities for a program that raised the state income tax a bit for state education funding that balance spending while also cutting property taxes in rural areas? Rendell got something in his first year without a majority in the House. Can't he do better now?
2007-2008 will, I hope be the year for health insurance. We should be preparing to make the next year the one for education improvement and funding equity. And, we should package a funding proposal with a proposal to radically change the lock-step brain dead education we offer our kids. Isn't that something parents from around the state could appreciate?
The courts totally can't and won't do it on the national level
so I don't even think about it beyond a momentary lament for that 5/4 thing.
IMO, this has to be a federal political solution through Congress. And I don't think that is unreachable: it should be among the very top priorities if we end up with a democratic president and congressional majority.
I think this is a great area for the courts in theory, it doesn't raise a lot of the sticky cultural issues that make us want to look to the legislatures instead for that more democratic, gradual, deliberative decisionmaking. This is an area where there is a legislative failure because of privilege, self-interest, and the relative political powerlessness of the most affected people.
San Antonio was in the early seventies, I think, and while it is out of step with a lot of people's intuitions about the role of the gov't in education, it is not going anywhere. It's tied to this whole artifice of decisions that find that discrimination based on poverty or economic class isn't unconstitutional. A lot of things are invested in that finding.
Courts can and have been phenomenally useful in this fight on the state level, since a number of state constitutions are more hospitable to the arguments. But given the difficulty of pushing the legislature to really act, even given a great court decision in this area, and given the slowness of a state-by-state approach (this fight is not new), I really think the solution has to be federal, strong-armed upon the states through federal school funding conditions.
good point marc
2marc is absolutely right to point out the need for Gov. Rendell to refocus on funding inequities across the state. For too long, legislators have looked at per-pupil costs and used those as an excuse not to spend more state money on education. Luckily, Good Schools PA, which really put the issue of public education on the map in 200, is back with a costing out study.
A costing out study is basically an independent audit of all of the state's 500 + school districts. Last summer, the state House and state Senate agreed to fund a study that will figure out how much it costs to educate a student to meet the basic academic standards put forth by the state itself. Even though legislators agreed to pay for the study, there’s no guarantee that they will be willing to follow its recommendations and spend the base-line amount of money needed per student to guarantee a good education.
The study will be released in November and with our help and attention, can hopefully be used as a tool to propel the issue of equitable school funding back into the spotlight next budget year. After all, knowing the true cost of a good education will should be able to force the legislature--especially the R's--to back away from rhetoric and politicking and actually commit to funding schools more fairly. Learn more at goodschoolspa.org
Good news
Good schools PA did a great job a few years ago and has been at it since.
Let's prepare to push the educational equity issue again. The Governor has been known to respond to our pressure!
We also should be thinking about we want to happen in 2009 when a Democratic President takes office. Congressman Fattah has been one of the most vocal and eloquesnt proponents of the importance of education. I wonder what he is thinking in terms of future plans.
Do you have any ideas, Ray?
Yes, this is a really great and important goal
In every state that I've followed, getting anything has been the product of strenuous activism. And in every state there has been a huge amount of legislative foot-dragging. New Jersey has seen 30 years of lawsuits and push-back between the legislature and the courts on the issue of remedying the huge disparity in funding.
I have some useful materials about strategy and what's been used elsewhere, that I can put up later.
The Question Remains
I confess, I am in unfamiliar waters as far as curriculum reform goes, but how do you get kids to think critically when their basic math and reading comprehension skills are generally regarded as abysmal? This seems a fortuitous conversation topic given the recent shakeup at the SRC.
While I haven't done nearly the amount of research that intelligent discourse on this subject requires, my mother has been a lifelong primary school teacher and administrator, so I can provide hearsay evidence at the least.
When I get into this conversation with her, she goes back to the battle weary argument of parent involvement. The reason I got to take TOK in high school was because my parents applied for a transfer to a school that provided it. Public schools in Philly are a different story; not all parents are as involved as mine were. But shouldn't they be? Should we expect them to be? And another question, is there something here I'm missing?
I don't know how you solve everything
But what they are replacing 'critical thinking' with seems like it gives the kids nothing: not critical faculties and not basic building-block knowledge.
Not to be pedantic, but if you are missing something I think it is that 'critical thinking' is not in tension with basic knowledge, it is a route to that knowledge. The curricula described in that book teach the children to think completely in reference to rubrics and formalistic patterns that have no relevance to the world outside the curriculum or maybe the tests.
One example, totally paraphrased. Kozol asks the children what a word means, say, "inconsiderate," that is up on a board. They say, that is a "box word," and he says, "what does that mean. They say, when you see it you draw a box around it, and they go on in that vein. The back-and-forth reveals that don't even understand the idea of determining meaning for a word, they only understand the word by reference to what they have been drilled they are supposed to do when they see a word of that length/type, as well as some curricular lingo that means nothing to anyone in the world at large.
He also describes schools that are completely structured to push whole classes of students towards a low-level "worker" role in the economy, through types of classes are are available (sewing to prepare kids in LA for factories) and that aren't (ANY science classes in the high school for the health sciences), as well as through curricular activities and language that teach everything through the window of globalized capitalism--time cards and efficiency and success defined as reaching the position of "management".
I don't consider you
I don't consider you pedantic. For my part, not to be argumentative, but you don't really answer my question. Perhaps I stated it poorly, but I admit that critical thinking is a skill that advances basic knowledge. Seems to me the way we get kids to learn today, more to Gaetano's point, is to get them to memorize it and regurgitate it on a test.
Your point about kids learning patterns is well made. However, this is similar to deconstruction strategies that make up the basis of rhetoric. Patterns are the way in which we think. Its a fine line between rote memorization and using a deductive pattern.
As far as my original question, I think your above post on school funding is more to the point. I am curious as to how to get kids learning the right lessons, in order to put them on a fair field, preferably without favor. I completely agree that the courts dropped the ball, and the case you mentioned seems pretty out of joint with what the constitution guarantees each citizen.
But I am still interested in my original question. To those that are more well read than I, what role does parent activism play in this whole boondoggle? And yes, I've always wanted to use the word boondoggle in context.
Yeah, I didn't address parent activism
and I'd be more interested to hear someone's opinions who has worked in the Phila schools or sent their kids there than me, who has just read a couple books.
But since I am talking, a lot of what I read seems to conclude that schools can only do so much as against really damaged home environments and neighborhoods. Mostly, the conclusion seems to be that there is need for intervention as early as possible, through supportive early childhood programs. Assorted articles I've read seem to show these programs do help and that there is great need, though not enough funding to assure places for every child that would qualify (this is charted in the Kozol book too, though I've seen discussions elsewhere).
It's hard: parents should be involved, neighborhoods should be better, etc. And that's not throwing up my hands: all those things have huge effect and schools can't fix them all.
Kozol has one basic point though, in regards to funding: even though schools can't do everything and people argue all the time that money can't fix these huge problems--no one whose kids are at schools with money would ever agree to LESS funding. So it's just about basic equity, and it does seem that more money accomplishes a lot more than less money, class size being one easy obvious example.
(And I remember during the fights about approaches to education policy during the mayoral race, that Sam very convincingly argued that Nutter's focus on the concrete goal of funding teachers to reduce class size would be more dependably successful than piecemeal programs to buy X number of computers or fund a policy-coordination entity.)
It's funny
There's no chance (even aside from the political make-up of the Court) of getting a re-do of the San Antonio decision.
But it is funny, because Kozol (accurately, I think) observes that almost all Americans, left and right, assume that public education is a right of citizenship and something they expect the government to provide. The arguments relied on by the majority back in the 1970s don't match most people's opinions today.
This expectation of a right to public education is certainly a useful common ground to exploit in mounting a new wave in the fight for equitably funded schools.
Critical Thinking
is, in some ways, an idea that is misleading. It implies that there is some topic neutral ability that we then take from one subject to another.
I think this is mistaken. Critical thinking, to my mind, consists of two things:
1. A set of intellectual habits thatvare in fact content-neutral and involve such things as questioning what you are told, asking for evidence, thinking of counter-examples, comparing one idea with another, and respecting the opinions of others enough to listen to them and, if you think they are wrong, refute them..
I'm an Arisotelian in that I believe that these intellectual habits are natural to human beings because we are naturally inquisitive. But they are systematically thrashed out of kids in a lot of our public schools (and in a lot of households as well.) Good schools can do the opposite. And kids don't have to read and write well to develop these habits. You can develop them talking about almost anything. (Listen to kids talk about sports and you will see critical thinking at work.)
2. Aquaintence and familiarity with a set of ideas. This is not content-neutral. You have to know some chemistry to be a critical thinking in chemistry, etc. Critical thinking in this second way is not really some mysterious ability. It is, I believe, a very sophisticated kind of pattern matching. I don't think I have any special skills that enable me to be a critical thinker. But I've read a lot and spent a lot of time comparing and constrasting ideas. So when, for example, I write about critical thinking I have a whole set of ideas in my head drawn from Heideggerian and connectionist critiques of how we think about our mental abilities. I'm not really inventing anything here but putting together ideas I've heard in a fairly uncreative way. If any of this sounds new, it is an utter illusion. I've just read something you haven't and seen how to apply it to this thread.
If I have any natural talent for this it is only a fairly good memory for ideas and an inclination to work on them enough that they become close to hand.
Lot of kids I teach have better memories than I do and would have this inclination, again if it were not beaten out of them. And anyone can do this at some level. You don't need to read or write well, at least at first. In fact, working out ideas by talking is a good way of developing the familiarity with a set of ideas that enables you to read and write well.
That's why class discussion is such an important part of IH and why, for example, we read the books together in class in my IH sections.
So, bottom line, is that teachers have to meet students where they are, especially but not only in grade school and high school. And, if they do, you can teach critical thinking to everyone.
But Jennifer and Kozol are entirely right. Our schools don't make an attempt mostly because they were designed to produce workers in an industrial economy that no longer exists. The growing inequality in the US and racism have left those schools in the same state.
This is leading to a catastrophe not just for the kids who are left out but eventually for US businesses who won't be able to find workers with the capacities for critical and flexible thinking the new economy demands. I'm afraid we progressive are going to have to save capitalism from itself once more.
(Qualification: I may be wrong about the last paragraph. There are, after all, lots of service jobs that don't require workers more skilled than industrial workers. My gut feeling is that our economy can't survive without many more workers who are good thinkers. But I haven't looked this closely in years and I may be wrong. In that case, we are agoing to have fight to restructure work so that we reduce the number of bad jobs and I'll have to go back to the book I once planned on workers control.)
(Qualification 2: One could make an argument that, even after capitalist efforts to de-skill them, industrial workers were in fact much more than cogs in a machine and that they had practical knowledge of how things work on the factory floor that is necessary to making our economy work. And that explains, for example, why workers controlled factories, which allow this practical knowlege more influence, are usually more efficient than traditional factories)
Wants and Needs in Education
and when I was an administrator of the program, we emphasized critical thinking and writing. And we fought for our program on the grounds that it was what students needed even if they didn't necessarily want to take it.
And students mostly agreed. I found at the beginning of each semester students were afraid of IH and some were resentful that they had to take it. Some were still resentful at the end, but most of them found the course enjoyable. (They call them Great Books for a reason.) Despite IH being a required course, it received evaluations that were, on average, on par or a little bit with all the course on Temple.
It is a coures that is incredibly demanding on teachers. No one comes into teaching it with the experience of knowing all the books we teach. And many of us find, that we come to love the books outside our specialities. I loved teaching Genesis and Exodus and Blake and Wordsworth most...none of which I taught before IH.
Thanks, Gaetano, for starting this thread
Thanks, Gaetano, for starting this thread. Issues regading what we teach and how we teach should be concerns for progressives generally—not just for educators.
I agree with all of you who have argued for the importance of Humanities courses in building critical reasoning /writing skills and argued for ensuring that working class and low-income students have access to a liberal arts education.
However, there are folks ( from all socio-economic and ethnic groups) who just do not like academic work, are not interested in developing the kinds of skills which IH is designed to teach ; in many cases, they have other skills of a non-academic nature.
Increasingly our society is making a college degree, which usually requires taking core courses like IH, essential for economic success. This puts a lot of pressure on students and on teachers and leads to all kind of ethical dilemmas for teachers.
Anybody else bothered by this?
A bit bothered. But, since
A bit bothered.
But, since I'm not an educator, I can't speak to ethical dilemmas. Perhaps you can expand on that.
Related to subject matter, right now I'm of the opinion that a college degree means something a bit more than obtaining a skill set. One reason why the core-curriculum at Temple was so groundbreaking in the 1980s was that it was, in my mind, (1) a retrenchement that college students should be somewhat worldly; and (2) that the basic curriculum must have a semblance of diversity. Thus, while IH was required, so were studies in race, urban affairs, hard sciences, writing, art, etc.
I'm not of the mind that colleges should be diploma mills (not that you're advocating that), but that students coming out of college must be aware.
I'd like to temper that with saying, I don't see the largest barrier to students recieving a college degree the classes themselves or any requirements relative to the humanities, but the cost of college tuition and student loans. For me, that is the ethical rub. We are proceeding head-first into an economy where a college degree is required for most economic success. How do we go forward with an out-dated, oppressive and exclusive system for higher education?
In some way, and maybe to different degrees, this affects everyone up the socio-economic chain from the poor through the middle-class. I'd imagine even upper-middle class families feel the rub when they have two children in college. Whether it is parent's who just can't afford it and niether can the kids, or parents who, instead of saving for retirement push $20K a year into their children's higher education--people are stuggling with higher education.
I am working to elect Larry Farnese to the General Assembly. Unless otherwise expressly stated, this and every comment or blog I post on YPP and any action I take hereon is solely attributable to me and not Farnese or Friends of Farnese
We had an interesting
We had an interesting discussion (here, in case you missed it and are interested), that never really got substantive, about some of the problems raised by higher education being a new baseline for employment: specifically, how students are taking on large debt loads and schools are facilitating those loans while often having worrisomely low graduation rates.
There is really a perfect storm to screw people on education: primary schools fail to really prepare for college or decent careers, and college now steps up to fill that gap, but with prices having skyrocketed and the federal government in bed with the loan industry...
And then you still have the problem that I think Karen was partly alluding too: kids in college who have made an investment and need the degree, but are not in a position to succeed academically.
I think the colleges (who let admit people in order to access their loan funds whether or not they can likely succeed, and who have raised prices to ridiculous levels) and the government (who refuses to guarantee access to low-interest loans that cover full tuition costs, or rein in the rampant HIGH-interest subprime loans that have arisen to fill the funding gap) are really, really failing people here.