Artem,
It's been awhile since we've last spoken, but I wanted to write to you today to share an idea with you that I've stumbled across after doing some reading for one of my classes at uni. Both you and I have attended public school for much (for you, all) of our primary and secondary education, and we have both acknowledged that we felt short-changed by the system. We attended the same math classes, and yet neither you nor I ever attained a functional grasp of Geometry, Algebra II, or Trigonometry. That isn't to say we didn't try; we studied at each other's houses day after day, and yet we never did much better than a C or a B- on any exam. Although we didn't share any other classes besides math, we also did rather poorly in chemistry, biology, and environmental science.
Somehow, we both managed to make it to university and begin the trek to building our future careers. We are lucky; many of our classmates from New Providence High School are not - as you know, many are gas station attendants, waiters working at Friendly's or the Prestige diner, because somewhere along the line they became disenfranchised with school - with learning. It doesn't take a genius to understand why; after all, our teachers treated us like 5-year-olds, insulting us for doing a problem incorrectly on the whiteboard, and refusing to spend time with us outside of class to help further our understanding of what they were teaching. But that doesn't imply that all public school teachers are like that; nor does it imply that all public schools fail to educate its students. And yet, many schools do fail, so the question i'm trying to answer is, where exactly does public school disenfranchise its students? If we can answer that, then perhaps we can begin to come up with a solution.
Paolo Freire is one author who shared our point of view of the 'f***'ed up system'. He believes that public education has become a transaction-based system, in which teachers are tasked with 'filling' the students with a given amount of information ("four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem") that loses its meaning because students cannot see where (or if) it applies to the real world. Freire calls it 'The Banking Concept of Education', wherein the best teachers are those who most fully fill the 'containers' that are his/her students' minds, and the best students are those who meekly submit themselves to be filled.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and
the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and
makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat… the scope of
action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filling, and storing the deposits.
They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they
store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack
of creativity; transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from
inquiry… individuals cannot be truly human.
(1-2)
What modern education fails to do, for many - perhaps most - of its students, is encourage academic inquiry. However much information students are required to learn and regurgitate, they are not pushed in any way to go above and beyond the minimal standards that are laid out for them. This is why Freire asserts that, although some students might 'catalogue' the information they receive, they are unlikely to do anything new or creative with it. Furthermore, because inquiry is outright stifled by the 'standard curriculum', students are dehumanized; they are not allowed to express themselves as individuals, rather, their minds are 'manufactured' in an assembly-line style of education, such that every American high school senior learns from the same textbooks, and knows (roughly) the same number of things. I know what you're thinking: "If this guy is writing like a philosopher, then yeah, but it's not as bad as he makes it out to be. We're not robots, we can think for ourselves." I agree; the system is not oppressive in the tangible sense that Freire makes it out to be. The point is that kids do not get enough extrinsic reinforcement for them to see school as worthwhile.
A good example of this lack of reinforcement can be seen in the essay "I Just Wanna be Average", by Mike Rose. The essay describes Mike's experience in vocational school, which is a sort of remedial school for kids who aren't yet "bad" enough to need to get a GED, but are not considered fit for regular school. Mike reports that his approach to Voc. Ed. was that of a "somnambulant problem solver... I fooled around in class and read my books indifferently - the intellectual equivalent of playing with your food. I did what I had to do to get by, and I did it with half a mind." The parallel between his and our experiences is clear; that we half-assed it through high school. What isn't so obvious is why we did this; all three of us are reasonably smart people, with a certain degree of intellectual curiosity, so why not apply that to what we're taught in school? The answer, according to Mike Rose, is that for kids who are not marked as 'special' - the kids in gifted and talented classes, A.P. classes or Honors courses, develop a defense mechanism (a way to accept their average status) of seeing learning as uncool. You're supposed to be average, like the rest of the class, and standing out in any way is pointless. It is not, however, very easy to do:
The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own gray matter to make this defense work. You'll have to shut down, have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm, have to cultivate stupidity, have to convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world. Keep your vocabulary simple, act stoned when you're not or act more stoned than you are, flaunt ignorance, materialize your dreams. It is a powerful and effective defense - it neutralizes the insult and the frustration of being a vocational kid and, when perfected, it drives teachers up the wall, a delightful secondary effect. But like all strong magic, it exacts a price.
In order to get by in public school, you have to pretend to have half of a mind. Jock culture, physical prowess, parties and drugs - the least common denominator - are glorified because everyone has access to it. There are no tests to get in. The problem is, going along with it dulls your mind to a point where you can no longer stand it: either you have to eventually PHYSICALLY dull your mind, and give up intellectualism altogether, or do what you and I have done; move away from the culture, and join a new culture (at uni) that lets you learn what you want.
Even though you and I made it through this system more or less intact, we cannot entrust public schools to educate our kids. If NPHS, and other public schools in America, continue to dissuade kids from pursuing careers in the sciences, mathematics and literature, then our only option is to pay for private school - which, by the way, can be as expensive as college tuition. I don't want to do it, and you probably don't either, but what other choice do we have?
In my Writing In Community class, I've been tutoring a high school kid, helping him write a senior-year paper he needs to graduate. The topic he picked is a big issue (the economy), it's something he really cares about, and he puts a lot of work into it. The irony is that he doesn't really know much about the economy, so my role is to fill in the gaps and explain to him why our economy is the way it is - and teach him the different schools of thought that economists use to try and solve the problem. What has grown out of these tutoring sessions is the idea that maybe, just maybe, we can counteract some of the damage done by public schools if we can get more kids into tutoring programs. It can be once a week, preferably twice to three times a week, with peers who can help each other with difficult subjects. I believe that this may bridge the gap between teachers, who have a certain amount of 'canonical' knowledge,- and gifted students, who may be more up-to-date on the latest discoveries in a given field. If tutoring were made to be an integral, MANDATORY part of all public school curricula, maybe we can reverse some of the damage done by 'The Banking Concept of Education.'
Let me know what you think of this idea; I'm going to research it further, develop it further, but here's the initial proposal. And let me know how things are going in Japan! I hope I can visit you in Kyoto sometime later this year.
Best,
Cameron Beaudreault
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