Can America's Schools Be Saved: How the Ideology of American Education Is Destroying It

By Edwin Benson

Other than students, no group of people has been more affected by the failure of American education than teachers. Tens of thousands of dedicated, hard-working, and intelligent teachers walk into their schools every day with the intention of helping children learn. Usually, those intentions are unrealized, and the teachers find themselves blamed for the failure. But why do they fail in the first place?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543913248

Book preview

Epilogue

Preface

It is foolish for me to want your success more than you want it for yourself.

This statement, which would seem self-evident in any other walk of life is apostasy in education.

The educrats and educationalists¹ constantly tell those of us who actually take on the real work of teaching children that we need to be evaluated by the success of our students. The child, so goes the modern orthodoxy, is a veritable sponge for information. Like a sponge, he stands in wait for the opportunity to absorb. The failure of a student to learn is an indication that the teacher failed to provide the appropriate stimulation that would sufficiently engage the student in order to absorb that information and/or skill.

The end results of such thinking are frantically overworked teachers and an under-educated society.

We in education often forget that one of the key components of humanity is free will. Ultimately, we all get to do what we want to do, any time that we are willing to accept the consequences for our actions. Schools in modern America violate this basic truth in two ways. First, we try to force students to learn things that they do not want to know; and then we remove any sense of consequence for that student’s misbehavior.

Such flaws in reasoning are at the heart of the failure of our schools.

I believe that the book you are about to read is unique. It is an amalgam of three types. First, it is a memoir of a life spent in American public education. It is a system that has fed, clothed, and housed me for a third of a century – and I am grateful. Second, it is a search for the point at which that system began to break down. Third, it is advocacy to return to the methods that were in use when that system still worked.

It is important to point out that this book is primarily, but not solely, about American public education. However, these issues are seen – sometimes even more vividly – in Church-related and other private schools. As will be explained later, the prevailing ideology of American public education, that of John Dewey, spread through the college and university schools of education. This has had a considerable effect on non-public schools as well.

American education is a marvel. We Americans certainly did not invent education, but it seems fair to say that we invented the concept of education for all and were the first to actually do it. In the 1830s, when the system was first being tried, the vast majority of the world’s population was illiterate. Schools existed for those who could afford them. Occasionally, one could find schools set up by some public benefactor to teach those without means. But we were the first to make it a goal to teach everybody.

And we did it. Across the nation, every rural hamlet had its one-room school. Cities developed school systems to meet the various needs of a diverse population. Catholics brought in armies of nuns and brothers and often taught the poorest of the poor. Lutherans set up schools in the German- and Swedish-speaking agricultural areas of the mid-west. Child labor and compulsory education laws took most children out of the workplace and into a classroom. Philanthropists set up colleges and public libraries. With only a minimum of governmental direction, the half century from 1840 to 1890 saw the United States become the most widely educated society in the world.

In 1897-98 the number of pupils entered upon the registers of the common schools — that is, the public elementary and the public secondary schools — was 15,038,636, or 20.68 per cent of the total population and 70.08 per cent of the persons of ‘school age.’²

For another seventy-five or so years, the system (that was really a combination of many systems) successfully continued, and in small increments got better and better.

Then, sometime between 1960 and today, it stopped working.

To say that modern American education is broken is an understatement. It is dead, and to use a hackneyed phrase, doesn’t know enough to lie down.

And that is a tragedy – in the classical sense of the word. A tragedy is not merely an unfortunate chain of events. Real tragedy occurs when defeat happens despite (or even because of) the virtues of the victim.

In this sense, American education is tragic. Throughout our nation, tens of thousands of teachers strive diligently to teach their students despite the fact that modern society fights them at every turn. The teacher cannot be too strict, too lenient, too demanding, too easy, too aloof, too familiar, too rigid, or too chaotic. No teacher’s faults will be tolerated by a society that long ago abandoned demanding anything of its children.

Too many of our students live in a world without foundations. Their families are chaotic. Promiscuity and pornography are everywhere. Drugs and alcohol offer easy escapes. Violence is rampant. Deceit is respected and honor is ridiculed. Honest hard work is demeaned and the clever deceiver is idealized. So many have lied to each other about so much that we can’t even recognize truth.

What do our schools offer to help students deal with this situation? They may be in chaotic classrooms, in which the very idea of authority is abandoned. There are many administrators who place career advancement more highly than making the hard calls that could get a kid back on a path that might lead to a fruitful life. Schedules are dominated by standardized testing. Diplomas are rendered valueless by the fact that they do not mean anything other than the fact that their holders endured twelve years of meaningless experience. Standards appear demanding, but are abandoned the first time a disgruntled parent calls the office. Teachers are trapped into teaching curricula from which the students derive little information and even less inspiration.

My own life in education neatly parallels the breakdown. I entered kindergarten in 1961. My adolescence, high school, and college years were filled with the social and economic turbulence of the late 1960s and 1970s. For thirty-two years (and one more still to come), I have been a teacher. I genuinely care about my students, but I am no hero – merely one of many who use their time and talents to present information and (hopefully) wisdom to students who do not want it. I know my subject very well, and believe it to be important to my students’ eventual success. I like my students, and have reason to believe that most of them like me. My efforts have not been herculean like those teachers in the movies Freedom Writers and Stand and Deliver. I did not enter my profession with a determination that I could change the world.

I teach in a good school. It is in one of the many places where suburban and rural areas meet. For many years, I believed that I had won a small part of life’s lottery when I got a position there. Most of the kids are decent to me and to each other. Even today, I am usually able to complete a lesson without major disruption. I have the supplies and books that I need. I am reasonably well paid. Next year, when my pension and Social Security kick in, I will collect 80-85% of my current salary.

When I first got my current position, about fourteen years ago, my principal told me, If you can’t teach here, there is probably no place for you in American public education. For years, I agreed. I even quoted him to some of the newly minted teachers whose paths crossed mine.

Over the past few years, I have come to hear another, deceptively similar, statement in the back of my mind – if American public education doesn’t work here, then it doesn’t work anywhere.

That is what this book is about.

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¹ Educrats and educationists are used as pejorative terms in this book to describe two classes of people who are often considered to be professional educators, but who do not actually teach anybody. Educrats are those whose work is in the bureaucracy of education on the national, state, or local level. Educationists are theorists in the field, especially those who attempt to change the art of teaching into the science of education.

² Nicholas Murray Butler, ed. Education in the United States – A Series of Monographs (New York: American Book Company, 1910), p. vii

Chapter 1

Life Cycle – How I Became a Traditionalist Teacher

The typical teacher (if there is such a thing) begins their career between the ages of 22 and 25. I started at age 28. I had not intended becoming a teacher when I got my BA in History. During the late 1970s, everybody knew that you could not find a job teaching History. During the Vietnam War, you could get a deferment if you were in the school of education. That swelled the ranks of wannabe instructors, especially in History and the other humanities.

I had a first career in hotels. My longest lasting college job was as a desk clerk, so it seemed to make sense to go in that direction. About three years after college, I took a job as the night manager of a Holiday Inn in Miami Beach, Florida.

Then, in 1983, a miracle happened. The State of Florida made World History a required course. Suddenly, every high school in the Sunshine State needed a couple more History teachers.

This sudden change occurred because of a change in education policy at the highest level – the federal government. The U.S. Department of Education released a ground-breaking report called A Nation at Risk which revealed the very low requirements to get a diploma from most of the nation’s high schools.

During my high school years – the early 1970s – the buzzword in education was relevance. The concept was very much in tune with the prevailing ideology of the do your own thing spirit of the late 1960s and the educational radicalism of the 1970s. The idea was simple, remove as many required courses as possible. Greatly expand the electives offered. The students that choose to take a course will do well in it because he sees it as relevant to his life. In the progressive high school from which I graduated, one needed to take four years of English, but only two years of math, social studies and physical education. Only one year of science was required.

I took every Social Studies course my school offered, including creating a new one – a second year of American History, at the end of which I became the first student in the history of that school to take the AP American History Exam. On the other hand, I got C’s in Algebra I and Geometry – and nobody even asked if I wanted to take Algebra II, which had the reputation of being very difficult. I got a C in Biology as well – but only because my Biology teacher was also my debate coach, and he gave all the debaters C’s unless they earned something better. No fear of that from me. I hated the idea of dissecting anything, and the rest of the class bored me silly.

So, I guess you could say that the whole relevance thing worked for me. I gravitated toward History, and have made my living with it for 32 years.

However, according to A Nation at Risk³ it was not working for the nation. The whole relevance ideology was jettisoned and a back to the basics approach was embraced. Math, Science, and Social Studies requirements expanded. Fluff electives went away. Assigning students to classes that matched their ability levels – all but abandoned during the 1970s in the name of educational democracy – became standard operating procedure. Where everybody in the high school I attended simply took American History, the school in which I taught after 1986 offered four courses - Introduction to American History, Regular American History, Honors American History, and AP American History.

By 1983, I had grown weary of the 24/7 nature of the hotel business, and saw the new requirements as a way that I could spend my life playing with History. Since I had taken no education classes on the way to my BA, I enrolled at the local four-year commuter college in Social Studies Education. A year-and-a-half later, I was ready to go out and teach.

The ideology of progressive education was presented in courses with titles like Introduction to Education. In most of those classes, everyone agreed with the professor’s ideas. There was little attempt to show them as ideas that had developed over time. Few of us even imagined that there were other schools of thought on the subject. Those ideas were simply presented as the truth.

Then came courses in methods of teaching, some general and others related to the subject(s) that the student intended to teach. Once properly immersed, most of us spent time observing actual classrooms, in which the practitioner being observed had been selected by the university’s School of Education. At the end of the process came an internship, during which we taught actual students for the first time under the supervision of a seasoned instructor.

My internship was pure joy – and I am not being sarcastic. It really was wonderful. My supervising teacher and I hit it off, at least in part because we both shared an interest in automobiles. His students were, for the most part, intelligent. I liked them and many of them liked me. I found that I could use all of the tricks from my progressive methods classes – and came to the conclusion that I was pretty good at it. My plan book from my internship remains one of my most cherished possessions.

A successful internship under my belt, I got my certificate to teach Social Studies, grades 7-12 from the state. The job search was relatively easy. Eager to get into a classroom of my own (and make some money), I took the first job that was offered.

Like most teachers, I learned a lot that first year, most of which had never been discussed in those education classes.

Even before I saw the students, I heard the complaints of my more seasoned colleagues. The first week of school, I learned just how difficult it is to direct the activities of a group of students. I learned more than I wanted to know about the home lives of those students. Most of the lessons I taught were not well prepared because I did not have enough time to plan them. Much of the time that I did have was wasted in trying to create experiences that seldom resonated with my students. I spent most of my off hours staying a day ahead of the students, in addition to grading and catching a few precious hours of sleep.

I also learned that most of what we got in our education classes was useless.

I didn’t learn this lesson all at once. It came after years of self-doubt. By the end of the first year, I was collecting brochures from law schools.

My first year was a disaster. I was teaching seventh-grade civics. The newly renamed Middle Schools embraced Dewey’s concept of democracy in education by not separating social studies students into levels. Planning lessons for a wide variation in student abilities was, I came to believe, an impossible task.

Exacerbating this sense was another new program dictated by the federal government. Mainstreaming was taking its first tentative steps in the mid-1980s. For those unaware of the term, mainstreaming requires that special education students be placed in the least restrictive environment, in other words, in a class as normal as possible, given the student’s abilities. There was also a huge cost savings that came from placing special education students in regular classrooms. Therefore, administrators were quick to embrace the practice. This meant that there was always a kind of pressure to assume that each special education student could do well – or at least well enough – in the regular classroom. Those who did not thrive after being mainstreamed were seldom moved back to a self-contained special education classroom.

When I was in high school, there had been special education students in the school as well – but we never saw them. There was a special education classroom off in a corner of the school someplace. There was a special education teacher. Basically, the special education students went into the special education room and were never seen by the rest of us during the day. I think that they even ate lunch in the special education room.

By the mid-1980s, most of the special education kids were in general classrooms, but few of my colleagues really knew how teach them very well. Most experienced teachers hated it, but at least they had some well-developed coping skills, honed through years of practice. As a rookie, I was out on my own.

During that first year, I dreaded fifth period, right after lunch. There were four students in that class who were in the gifted program – highly intelligent, but possessing the level of wisdom that we often associate with seventh graders. Three of the other students were special education students for whom this was their first mainstreaming experience. These students had no experience in a normal class – and one of them sang very loudly when she got bored. One of the normal students was a 15-year-old seventh grader, who was not going to get out of the seventh grade before she would reach the age of 16, and could legally drop out. For her, suspension was a goal to be sought; her behavior helped her achieve that goal on a regular basis.

Mainstreaming was not the only transition happening at that school. It had opened in 1957 in what was at that time an elite, very high-income area. Older teachers said that it was nothing to see a half-dozen Rolls-Royces in the parking lot on parents’ night. It had been one of the highest performing junior high schools in the nation. Then, about 1975, that began to change. A new generation of high earners built new homes in new neighborhoods in other parts of the county. The large, but aging homes around our school were attractive to the large extended families of newly immigrating people that were flooding into Miami during the early 1980s. The school changed along with the neighborhood. The faculty did not. Our principal had been chosen because she worked well with the school’s earlier population. She was an intellectual, wonderful, caring, but very petite woman who grew to be afraid to walk down the corridors of the school during class change.

Now, three decades later, I can see that I was not the only one struggling. Then, with my head barely above water, all I could taste was my own sense of failure. The techniques that we had been taught in the methods classes, the same creative strategies that had worked so well during my internship, did not seem to work at all in this environment.

The beginnings of an epiphany came one day when, out of other options, the students were assigned to read a section and answer the questions in the book. The students’ relief was palpable because they finally understood the purpose behind what they were being asked to do. Some of the other methods that my own elementary and high school teachers used were applied, and many of them worked, or at least got me through the day.

Please don’t misunderstand – it was not a sudden revelation. There was a good bit of guilt because the only things that seemed to work were precisely those practices that the professors warned against.

I also found out that the assistant principals, who were really running the place, prized classroom management above all. The use of traditional methods provided some control, which was the reason that those methods were developed in the first place.

I still struggled with the teachings of