I am an educator, exasperated already with the system of education. This means less than nothing in some ways; I’m one of thousands – probably millions – of the 8.3 million teachers in America who finds himself insulted and angered by an institution which systematically rewards the tame and marginally effective while weeding out the challenging, the extraordinary, the new, the bold, and the good.
There is an article by Walter Karp titled “Why Johnny Can’t Think” which makes the claim that the real problem with schools is not that students don’t take enough math or science, or that we need a new literacy program, or that we need to be more reform-minded, but rather that schools are constructed to actively tear down children’s will and capacity to think for themselves. For all of the high talk of critical thinking and out-of-the-box ideas, the system itself grinds them underfoot with twelve years of witheringly dispassionate opposition. With trained, military-style response to bells, intercom announcements, and sharp commands from teachers and administration, students stumble through their school days in a sort of mindless haze. Their interest only seems active as they wander the halls between classes, in the ten minutes they have before they need to be in their seat, facing forward. And now, some twenty-five years after Karp’s article was published, even the halls have been cracked down – more schools every year require ID badges, metal detectors, and armed guards.
Safety and order, safety and order. The efficient operation of the system. These are the tried-and-true excuses for everything from random locker checks to school uniforms. But there can be no legitimacy to protecting the order and efficiency of a system that doesn’t work. We aren’t producing students capable of well-reasoned critical thought – we’re producing students who know that the surest way to succeed is to keep your head down, keep your thoughts to yourself, and do exactly what you’re told. It requires an almost Nietzschean will-to-power for a student to express him/herself in this atmosphere, and if the form of expression is deemed at all inappropriate for any reason, the student will likely find him/herself suspended – removed for the efficient operation of the system. The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.
But I don’t intend to focus on the students’ plight here – Walter Karp did a fine job of that. What is on my mind is one level up – the teachers. How can we expect critical thought from the students if we stamp it out of their educators?
Little more than a week ago, I was told that one of the finest teachers I have ever had was being removed from the school in which he has taught for more than ten years. There were no complaints, his personnel file was clean, and he had even won the Educator of the Year award from the county. All it took was a request from the new principal to the director of schools, and he was “transferred” to the other side of the county. Why go through the hassle of finding a legitimate reason to fire somebody when you can simply break their will?
This man – a teacher of government and economics classes – was legendary for his ability to engage a class. Students began hearing about him years before they would have his class, even before they were in high school, through older siblings and friends. Parents finagled their children into his class just so they could know that they would actually be challenged to exercise reason and debate to express their beliefs – not just cough up a name and a date on a scan-tron test. Classroom discussions were famously spirited – students discovered passions they had never known before as they were finally allowed and encouraged to treat their own ideas with respect.
In other words, it was a class begging to come under “administrative review.” When students actually begin to question the object of their education and the effectiveness of their school, when they actually begin to look at their government and wonder if it is disingenuous, when students are actually able to take a hard look at the system and realize things could be better, it throws a kink in the conveyor-belt assembly line of public education. The instigator must be removed like a cancer.
God help me, I just can't figure out why. I do not understand why all subjects of any life and vitality and passion are removed from the classroom. It’s not just Government teachers – it’s any teacher that opens a portal to ideas that matter, whether in English, Art, Science, Theatre, or even Math. Sooner or later, their number comes up, and it’s their time to go. The efficient operation of the system requires they be “relocated.”
So who is left behind? All of the other teachers. All of the teachers you don’t remember when you’re 40 – or even 25 – because you didn’t pay ten minutes of attention in their entire class. They didn’t ask you to, and there was even a vague impression that if you paid too much attention – if you actually looked into the subject yourself and understood just how shortchanged you were by this teacher – you would get in trouble. You sat – or slept – in the room, you didn’t speak up, you didn’t answer the teacher’s rhetorical questions aimed at a fifth grade intelligence level.
These were the classes in which you got an easy A, in which you watched movies like “Gladiator” because they had a tenuous connection to historicity, in which you were given maps to color. These were the classrooms in which the teacher read an entire book aloud over the course of two weeks while the entire class daydreamed or fiddled around with their personal electronic devices. These were the classrooms where the only learning that happened was taking place in the back corner, where a bored student thumbed through a textbook or a library book on his own, and the student next to him scrawled a poem onto her desk.
And these are the classes that will remain forever. Since they raise no red flags, they will never, ever catch the eye of anyone higher up. All the administration knows is that the students go into the room, they are reasonably quiet for an hour, and then they exit the room. 90% of them pass, and the ones who don’t – well, no one is all that surprised they didn’t. On the occasions that such a class is observed by the administration, the teacher is duly warned ahead of time, and actually plans something of a lesson for his class after asking them to be good for the principal. Next week, they’ll get a free day as a reward.
And we still wonder what’s missing in our schools? For God’s sake, we’re missing teachers – they’ve all been replaced by warm, gelatinous babysitters. The real educators stirred up too much trouble to be bothered with – they assigned a book that had a sex scene, they discussed the inherent hazards of capitalism, they challenged a student to defend his or her political beliefs, they questioned the unilateral country-first approach to history, they actually got a reaction out of some of the twenty-seven bodies sitting in their desks – and with a few complaints from a handful of students or parents (or even other teachers, shamefully), the principal threw his hands in the air and cried uncle. Take this teacher somewhere else – we don’t want to deal with him anymore.
Does the whole system need to be scrapped? I hope not. There are some damn fine teachers out there, and they are still making a difference. And they’ve usually got a solid principal behind them – one who has enough backbone to fight for the positions of teachers who take risks, one who has enough personal character to understand that even if he or she has a personal disagreement with a teacher, the students’ educational experience trumps all other concerns. We’ve got a structure in place that could theoretically allow students to be challenged in more directions and exposed to more points of view than in any other time of their life – what we need are the teachers, the principals, the directors and superintendents and school boards with the guts to do it.
