Category: Education

Alternatives to “college for everyone”

Posted on by Suki

Last week I wrote about how I thought the question of why our colleges are turning out less-educated people was pretty self-evident: When we create a society in which everyone has to go to college to get a job, we have a lot of people in college who don’t actually want to be learning.

But what is the alternative to this approach? And why would someone like me, who loves learning and who could actually be happy doing consecutive PhD’s for the rest of my life, advocate that not everyone go to college immediately after high school…or ever?

The simple fact of education is that people learn when they want to. I am reading a thought-provoking book called The Book of Learning and Forgetting. So far, the book is a sort of cultural history of learning. What did we used to think learning was? Why did our ideas of learning change? What do we believe learning is now?

The book’s main thesis is that real learning happens in a meaningful context, within a social group, and is inspired by real, concrete goals. I know that this book has had an immediate effect on me: I have been desperately trying to learn Hiragana, the “simplest” of the three writing systems used in Japan. This is the writing system that every schoolkid learns. Yet there I was with my Android app, trying to slam those darn characters into my head. I gave them names. I made up rhymes about them. Yet somehow, testing myself only on the first four rows (way fewer than half the characters), I was stuck at 54%. It was humiliating and demoralizing. I’d always been a good student. Why couldn’t I learn this?

The Book of Learning and Forgetting inspired me to take a second look at what I was doing. Did I have a social group that was integral to my desire to learn this? No. Was I trying to learn the characters in a meaningful context? I would not say the Android app was terribly meaningful, no. Was it inspired by an immediate, concrete goal? Nope, just a nebulous desire to be able to use a Japanese dictionary when we were lost in Kyoto and needed help.

So I retooled my approach. My social group, like it or not, is my kids. A context that is meaningful to them is reading aloud. And I could think of one immediate goal: I’d translate a Japanese children’s book and read it to them. This week, my Japanese tutor came back to find that I had “translated” the first few pages of a classic children’s story, and was recognizing almost all of the basic set of Hiragana characters.

That long digression has a purpose here: When we send students off to college without a strong social group with a shared interest, a meaningful context for what they’re learning, and concrete, immediate goals for their learning, we just can’t expect that they will learn.

How will they learn, then? Here’s my plan to reshape American education: Get rid of all the hoops and let everyone do what inspires them.

Oh, no! Chaos! Anarchy!

Well, not quite. We wouldn’t have to throw everything out the window. We have a meaningful goal as a nation to have a literate population that can do math enough not to get themselves underwater with their mortgages, understand history and social studies well enough to vote with understanding rather than vote for the guy with the flashiest commercials, and think critically about whatever challenges come their way.

Past that, what we have are lots of people with very different personalities, social groups, skills, and goals. Our education bureaucrats seemed hell-bent on the idea that you must force everyone onto the same path. But we know that a one-size-fits-all educational model will never, ever work.

Instead of “college for everyone,” I suggest the goal of “meaningful education for everyone.” There are those people — probably a good, solid core of our population — whose needs are fulfilled by following the standard model. But for all of us whose needs aren’t filled, it can be disastrous.

Instead of college for everyone, let’s have meaningful training programs in high school for those who want to go and work first. Instead of favoring students who took the traditional path, let’s get rid of all the impediments to students who have gotten to their college application in a less standard way. Instead of making a college education a pipe dream for someone who has just realized at the age of thirty what she wants to do, let’s make it a priority to offer educational opportunities to that newly energized student.

As a college English teacher, I had some fine students who took the traditional path. But without fail, my very best students, the most committed, hardest-working students, had come to college because they desperately wanted to. Of course I worked very hard to inspire the other students, but it was my most committed students who inspired me back. Teaching is really hard work, and the inspiration of dedicated students is the payback teachers need.

Instead of college for everyone, let’s have college for everyone who wants to.

ps: And, as the commenter on my last post just pointed out, let’s not forget that education is expensive and our public universities need to be fully funded, but that’s a rant for another day!

How did I get here?

Posted on by Suki

When I was in college, the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime was popular with students. One of my friends, I vaguely remember, set an entire room full of test-taking students into guffaws by calling out, apropos of nothing, “This is not my beautiful pencil!”

But the part of the song that’s relevant today goes like this:

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself: Well… How did I get here?”

Well… How did I get here?

At the time I heard that song, I was young and rebellious. I listened to dark music (I actually didn’t own any Talking Heads because it wasn’t quite depressing enough) and wore rather outlandish clothing. I dyed my hair various shades that could be described as blood red to putrid purple. My friends called me Siouxsie after my online handle (this was the strange time before the Internet, where I would go to a terminal room and log on to Stanford.arpa). We called ourselves “death rockers,” the people now known to the world as “goths.” Our perhaps most unfortunately famous counterparts were the boys at Columbine.

These days, I know plenty of moms, especially homeschoolers, who will tell me, “This is what I always wanted to do with my life.” They always wanted to be moms, and everything else they did was leading up to that time.

One mom told me that from when she was a child, she planned to homeschool her kids!

I have to say that I’m fantastically envious of anyone who can be so certain about anything. I am still not certain about what color I want my hair to be, even, though putrid purple is out of the running these days.

I don’t know if moms like me are in the majority or the minority. It’s sort of the third rail of parenting: the topic we can’t really talk about. Once you have brought these beings into the world and you are responsible for them, it’s not terribly helpful to think of where else you might want to be, what else you might want to be doing. In fact, spending too much time thinking like that can cause serious ruptures in the parent-child continuum we call “family.”

It’s best not to think of it at all.

But since I’m on the subject…

Last I remember I was a still-rebellious, though more naturally-colored-haired adult, striving to be a writer, making money by teaching and doing graphic design. I don’t remember ever signing up for being a stay-at-home homeschooling super-mom. In fact, if someone had shown me a crystal ball into the future, I probably would have smashed the darn thing and gone back to my notebook.

These days, I don’t even bother to carry my writer’s notebook anymore. No time to write. Too many nosy kids wanting to know what I’m writing.

I know other moms like me. We sometimes get to shout a few helpful words to each other across a room full of ebullient kids. Or we end up at the same homeschooling support meeting, sighing as another mom says, her eyes sparkling, “I always wanted to be a homeschooling mom!”

But I wonder how many of us really know how we got here. Whether for us this was due to choice or just circumstance. And now that we’re here, how do we make the most of it? Can we even bear to think, “What if?” Can we dare to think, “Maybe once they’re on their own…” or even, “It’ll be easier when they’re teenagers.”

It’s just enough to get through the day feeling like, perhaps, we’ve done a good enough job for today. Tomorrow is simply too exhausting to think about.

OK, here goes: I did a good enough job, for today. Tomorrow, who knows?

Education for everyone

Posted on by Suki

I noticed a few pieces that came down the education news pipeline in the last few days decrying the state of our college education system. OK, so we apparently have beaten down our K-12 system enough, and we’re going on to bigger fish. Not only are our kids getting a crappy education leading up to their high school diploma, but they’re just carrying the tradition forward.

Well, I beg to look a little bit closer at what we’re talking about.

As has been very well documented, there was a huge change in American higher education post World War II. Before that, few men had gone to college, and even fewer women. But returning vets suddenly got college offered to them, and it was enticing.

On top of the GI Bill that got tons of vets into college who before would have gone into a trade or their fathers’ business, we had feminism. Suddenly women, who had tasted the independent life when they worked during the War, wanted to go to college, too.

The percentage of our population going to college suddenly skyrocketed. As time went on, politicians started talking about how getting a college education was necessary. Fast forward to present day, and the goal is to get all kids to college.

This seems like a really great and noble goal, but it’s terribly misguided. The huge increase in people who are going to college has not been accompanied by a similar change in our culture. Probably the same number — maybe even fewer — of the kids going into college today as 60 years ago actually want to go to college. The rest — most of the new recruits — are simply going because they have to. Where before they had to get a high school diploma to prove that they were ready to go out into the world, now it’s a Bachelor’s degree.

When I was teaching at Cal State Hayward (now Cal State East Bay), I lived in San Francisco. One day a neighbor invited me to a party. Why minor incidents sear their way into our brains whereas we can forget major important events, I can’t explain. But I remember this red-haired, pimply young gentleman I talked to at that party. He told me he was going to San Francisco State. Trying to make small talk (not my forte), I said, “Oh, what are you studying?”

He positively snarled at me in response. “I’m not at school now. I don’t want to talk about school!”

Clearly, I thought, this wouldn’t be one of my preferred students.

But he was representative of a lot of my students. They were at college because they’d been told they’d get a better job. They largely had no idea why they were at college otherwise, and generally had no interest in their classes. Their ambitions, such as they were, were often terribly mismatched to their abilities. They seemed like rats trying to figure out their way through a maze.

“Gee, maybe if I do the speech therapist major I’ll get out the other end and find a party with good beer.”

I want to emphasize that this doesn’t describe all of my students. But I think it’s way more representative of the general student body than all of the stand-out students that I could rave about. Many of the kids there just simply didn’t care about education. They would have been happier and more productive doing almost anything else.

And so what I can’t understand is why anyone is wasting their time trying to figure out why our colleges are turning out less and less educated people. Our colleges are turning out exactly the people that we’re asking them to turn out: If we say “everyone must go to college,” then college will be yet another holding pen that bored students must wait in until they get to the other side.

This is what education for everyone looks like. There are alternatives, but apparently we’re not supposed to talk about that…

[See my follow-up to this piece, Alternatives to “college for everyone”.]

Mother’s Day Musings

Posted on by Suki

Like most of you, I am spending my Mother’s Day being a mother. What that means to each of us varies slightly by our customs, values, and geographical location. But in basic terms, we create, we nurture, we teach, and then we let go.

ModelingOne mothering task I’ve spent some time on today is one happening in a good number of American households, I suspect: helping my son finish a project that was just a little more of a stretch of his abilities than he’d thought. I’ve heard and read a lot of parents say that this is one part of parenting they hadn’t planned on. They thought that they were going to send their kid to school, the teacher would teach, the kid would learn, and then it’s off to college and a job.

It occurs to me, though, that we modern Americans have got a few things backwards. In recent readings I’ve come across variations on a theme that goes somewhat like this: When our children are babies, we understand how to teach them. We talk to them using the words we want them to learn, we hold their hands as they take their first steps, we praise them for drawings that we could do much better ourselves.

Yet as our children grow, especially when they enter school age, our culture starts to encourage to force kids to learn the “right” way. While before we were showing them examples, incorporating learning into their everyday lives, and praising them for their efforts, as they start to “study” (as opposed to learn), we throw that all out the window. We expect learning to happen somewhere else, we expect them to learn a body of knowledge and skills divorced from their usefulness, and we show them our displeasure through grading, testing, and “high expectations.”

One thing I have especially been aware of has been how our culture looks at parents “helping” their older school children. Just a few days ago I sat at the awards ceremony for the state science fair. You can’t get more positive about learning than a science fair. But when one participant’s first prize was announced and his project mentor had the same last name as him, the man next to me groaned and rolled his eyes. The implication was clear: Oh, these pushy parents reliving their glory through their children.

Now, I agree that there is too much of this. I’ve come across it myself. However, if we agree not to include parents who basically do the work for the child, telling them what to do step by step, not letting the child make mistakes, we’re only ruling out some of these cases of parents “helping.” Clearly this method of helping is not helping at all – it’s inflating the child’s sense of what she is capable of, and setting her up for an awful, self-esteem-smashing fall

But let’s ignore that sort of “help” and look instead at the sort of help that parents give children when they’re very young. All parents want their children to walk, but none of them walk “for” the child. We carry when necessary, we hold hands, but we know that if we never let the child practice the skill with help and encouragement, it won’t happen.

As our children grow, our role in their learning should not become less important. I think it becomes more important. We are still their models and their guides, though the learning they are doing is often what we would call “school work” and not “natural” learning like walking.

Since I started homeschooling, I have really learned the difference between destructive “helping,” where a parent makes sure that a child never fails by simply doing the child’s work and coaching him to make it seem like it’s his own, and constructive helping, where a parent models skills and guides a child.

It’s well-known in the music world that most of the great musicians had musical parents. In the past, this was incorrectly believed to be genetic. In fact, you still hear people saying, “I didn’t get musical genes.”

But really, the reason that children of musicians become musicians themselves is that their parents modeled the behavior and then encouraged it in their own children. (Yes, I will agree with you that some parents go way too far in the encouragement category, but you can’t practice for your child.)

I’ve known plenty of people who have discovered a love of something that was never modeled for them in their families, and those people figured out a way to do that thing that spoke to them. Most of them find a mentor outside of the family, I suspect. Few of us really achieve something all on our own, without some sort of modeling to build on.

So yes, my son decided to do a project that was a little past his abilities. And for the last few days we have been grappling with this. But I hope that my role has been mentoring, so that in the future, he’ll be able to do this on his own. And I know that in mentoring him, I’ve learned a bit more about myself as well.

My children are no longer sustained by the food from my body. They no longer need me to carry them. They speak enough language to get all the basics of life taken care of.

But that doesn’t mean that now I should just let their ships crash on the rocks that I could lead them past. I hope that as I lead them past those rocks, they are watching how I do it. And next time, they’ll be that much closer to independence.

A few words about scientists and inventors

Posted on by Suki

My son won first place in his division in the county science fair this year, and it caught us a bit by surprise that since he’s in middle school, that meant he was moving on to the state science fair. So here we are in LA, mom and son out on the town. Well, OK. Mom and son holed up in a hotel room working on a video project for school. But when we’re not holed up working, we’ve been partaking of a few of the wonderful offerings of LA: the Natural History Museum (excellent), the badly named ScienCenter (really cool except for the name), and great Mexican food.

ScienCenter
The Science Center in LA

Today was the opening ceremony for the science fair. The speaker, Dr. Gary Michelson, was someone I had no prior knowledge of, so I prepared for a snooze. But I found his talk engaging, funny, and wise. At one point he said that he’d gotten the advice that every speech you give should contain something you can’t find on Google, so his offering was a list of the most important aspects of being a scientist. If I publish this tonight, he’ll no longer be able to use this list! But it’s a good one, worth publishing:

1. Be ready to work with others, but willing to stand alone if you must.

2. Be disgruntled.

3. Be a dreamer.

4. Seek perfection.

5. Have great reverence for our home, this earth.

6. Live up to your gifts.

7. Aim high; aim to change the world.

8. Learn. Today’s knowledge is there for the taking, so take it.

9. Imagine.

10. Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary.

11. Everything is connected. Look for the connections.

12. Have a ready mind.

13. Be fearless. You cannot fear failure: As long as you have learned, you have not failed.

14. Dare to deconstruct in order to learn how to construct.

15. Question everything.

16. Think in diverse ways.

17. The walkabout: You don’t need a destination when you set out for a walk, and you don’t necessarily need one to do important work in science.

Dr. Michelson was yet another one of those successful people who says he wasn’t a very good student. People with a drive to create often seem not to be. Or rather: they are good students, but they’re good at it in their own way, which doesn’t always lead to good grades and awards.

I really appreciated what he said about what success is. I think this applies not just to science, but to many endeavors. He said that no successful inventor thinks of his failures as failures, because he learns from each one. And that learning leads to the ultimate success.

He also pointed out that success in science is, as Newton said, “Standing on the shoulders of giants.” Edison, he explained, was twentieth in a line of scientists who worked on lightbulbs. All of his work rested on the work that had been done before. We say that Edison invented the lightbulb, but human endeavors are a river, each one depending on those that came before.

That leads me to thinking about the history of the computer that my son and I read about and learned more about at the Computer History Museum. There were two men involved in the making of the computer who might be said to have failed: Charles Babbage created his Difference Engine on paper, but never saw it realized. John Atanasoff invented the binary computer that ENIAC was modeled on, yet seldom got credit for it in his lifetime. Both of them were important parts of the river of knowledge that has led to today, and that is a success that couldn’t have been measured in their lifetimes.

Kids doing a science fair may or may not see themselves as part of this river. But they are doing the preliminary wetting of toes that leads them to know whether they’d like to jump in. Whether my kids end up being scientists or artists, managers or makers, I think it’s a healthy thing to think of themselves as part of something bigger than their contribution.

Which gets me back to number 1: Be willing to stand alone. In these times, science is hardly a cool pursuit for a teen. But the audience was filled with teens willing to be part of a river that perhaps their friends have never even visited.

It was a privilege to watch them get their toes wet.

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