Although it is well established that there is a 'problem' with public
education in America, there is no consensus as to what caused it: is a
lack of funding for critical academic programs? Or is it because many
parents don’t help their children with their schoolwork? Erica Goldson,
who graduated Coxsackie-Athens High School in 2010, argues in her
valedictorian speech that the root of the problem lies in a current
overemphasis on standardized testing. "We are so focused on a goal,
whether it be passing a test, or graduating as first in the class.
However, in this way, we do not really learn. We do whatever it takes to
achieve our original objective." (Goldson) To become valedictorian, Ms.
Goldson had to give up learning for the sake of her objective; the
almighty 'A'. Non-valedictorians must also do 'whatever it takes' if
they want to achieve their original objective, which, according to Ms.
Goldson, is usually "to get out [of school] as soon as possible."
(Goldson). This means that pursuing their passions, whether in the areas
of literature, music, technology or the sciences, must take second seat
to their schoolwork. For Ms. Goldson, the tragedy in this is that
schools are failing to give their students a proper education; by
forcing their students to adopt a "whatever it takes" mentality, they
suppress their natural propensity towards intellectual inquiry. But the
success of Ms. Goldson and others like her seems to contradict this
idea; if some students are able to finish public school with an
education, why can’t others?
Peg Tyre, author of "The Writing Revolution", argues that
public schools fail to educate students by not teaching them how to
write analytically. Backing her claim is the success story of New Dorp
High School, a formerly failing public school on Long Island that
succeeded in improving its graduation rate from 63% to 80% between 2009
and 2011. Observing that its worst students were usually the least adept
at expository writing, New Dorp’s principal changed the curriculum to
make analytic writing a central component of every subject, from science
and mathematics to history and english. Students were taught "how to
turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences
from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts - but,
because and so." (7) Once they had mastered the basics of sentence
construction, they were taught "how to recognize sentence fragments, how
to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on
their own." (7) Although the program is ostensibly a "rigid, unswerving,
formula", it worked: from 2009 to 2011, New Dorp's passing rates on the
English Regents exams jumped from 69% to 80%, and its passing rates on
the Global History Regents shot from 64% to 75% (3). These statistics
support the idea that analytical writing is a critical skill for any
student's education. Although this may be the case, it is certainly not
the whole picture. Erica Goldson would argue that, despite an
improvement in passing rates on the regents, students were still not
really learning, and the unless New Dorp stopped ‘teaching to the test’,
it would continue to fail to educate its students.Both authors are
trying to answer the question of what, exactly, students need in order
to succeed within the education system. But neither Goldson nor Tyre can
hope to find the answer without understanding what schools are supposed
to be teaching in the first place.
Paolo Freire, a writer best known for his work teaching Brazilian peasants, believes that schools aren't
supposed to teach using any form of rote memorization, or lessons that
involve a lecture, because these teaching methods create a disconnect
between the lesson and the real world; something Freire refers to at
“narration sickness” (368). Instead of immersing students in the world
they are supposed to be learning about, the imperative of the lecture
"leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content."
People, places, and events, become discrete facts embedded in the matrix
of the test they are taught towards, and students' minds become
"receptacles to be "filled" by the teacher." (368) Because of this,
public education becomes reduced to a series of business-like
transactions:
Education
thus becomes an action 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. This is the "banking" concept
of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students
extends only as far as receiving, filing, 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, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly
human.
(368-9)
Like
Erica Goldson, Freire believes that the education process provides
negative feedback upon a student's willingness and ability to learn,
which is inherently dehumanizing; if the best that students can aspire
to do with the information they receive is collecting and cataloguing
it, they have been gravely underserved. The daily transactions of
lessons to be received, memorized, and repeated, serve to wear down the
primal urge that all humans share to discover everything they can about
the world around them. If Freire’s assertion holds true, then we cannot
fix our education system without levelling the playing field; a greater
level of communication must be established between teachers and their
students, both in and out of the classroom.
There is one instance, in my mind, where such communication has
happened, which is between Ian Downing, a high school senior at
Humanities Prep, and myself. For the past several weeks, I have tutored
Ian on writing his PBAT, an essay that is prerequisite to his
graduation, and we have often talked together on Skype before and after
our Thursday afternoon tutoring sessions. Halfway through the month of
April, Ian had not yet written the introduction to his paper, when the
final draft was due the first week of May. When we sat down together
that Thursday, I held my breath. How are we going to get this done in time? If
we didn't do any writing that day, there would be no way he would
finish his work by the deadline. I scribbled down a skeleton outline for
the introductory paragraph, before sliding the paper over to him and
explaining the process step by step. "Your first sentence is the hook;
the statement, as in-your-face and controversial as you can make it,
that will get your readers interested. In the second and third
sentences, you expand the idea in question and give the readers a taste
of why the issue is complicated - opposing sides of the 'debate', and so
on. Your last sentence is the 'thesis' - the platform on which the rest
of your paper will stand." I looked him in the eye and asked: "Are you
up for it?" Ian nodded his head. "Sure, I can do it."
Ten, fifteen, then twenty minutes passed. I kept trying to
surreptitiously glance over at his work, but he kept turning the
computer screen away from me. When he finally turned the computer
around, what I read was even more than I'd dared hope for: he used an
analogy to introduce his topic ("Our current economy is like an outfield
in baseball. There is such a large area to cover and only three people
available to do so.") Building on the analogy, he made the argument that
a lack of economic diversity in the U.S. poses a significant risk to
the middle and lower classes. He pointed out that the government
bailouts of the banking and auto industries were largely ineffective in
stimulating economic growth, and argued that greater economic strength
would come from the encouragement of small businesses:
Because
the government does not prioritize these [small] businesses, they are
not only taking a gamble with little industries, but are not motivating
small business owners to grow enough to become major sources of income.
Everything
I would expect of a college-level paper, I found in this first draft of
the introduction. It did need editing, but it showed me that my student
had a firm grasp on the fundamentals of good writing. Although I would
need to continue to push him to write more, and to expand and challenge
his ideas, I did not need to pretend that this was a remedial English
class. When I recently asked Ian via Skype what he thought the most
helpful things I'd done with him in tutoring were, he listed my helping
him with his intro as number one; "since I didn't know what to write for
it exactly." Moreover, the second most helpful thing was "seeing your
reaction to my paper each week, it kept me really motivated to write
more." It seems as if what Ian needed from me was not a lesson on how to
write a paper, but rather he needed me to teach him specific tools he
could use to better express his ideas. As far as I can tell, Humanities
Prep does a good job of educating students like Ian who take the time
and effort to apply the lessons they learn in school in their everyday
lives. However, Humanities prep is a high school that a. uses the New
York Regents exam system and b. is a public school whose curriculum
appears to match Freire's description of "The Banking Concept of
Education." I doubt that Ian was able to Skype with any of his high
school teachers, and certainly not on a regular basis. I can also assume
that he didn’t have any tutors before me, as all students from
humanities prep in this program were graduating seniors. So if
Humanities Prep doesn’t emphasize teacher-student communication, as
Freire prescribes, then why is its program still effective?
What Freire misses, in his attack on banking education, is that there are some things that have to
be learned by rote. Freire assumes that ‘creativity, knowledge, and
transformation’ occur spontaneously, which is patently untrue; students
cannot learn without the proper intellectual tools. In the context of
literacy, those tools include proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar
usage. These tools require rote
memorization, because they cannot be permanently impressed into a
student’s mind after the first exposure. This is why Peg Tyre takes
pains to point out that New Dorp’s success came from the fact that it
abandoned the predominant theory of teaching literacy, which held that
knowledge was “caught, not taught” (Tyre). Schools that subscribed to
this theory, which included most public schools throughout the 1900’s,
typically gave kids interesting, social, creative-writing assignments
where their work would be shared, under the assumption that kids would
“catch” what they needed to become successful writers. What this theory
forgot, much to the detriment of public school students, was formal
instruction in grammar, sentence composition, and essay writing.
Although this theory works for some kids, it doesn’t work at all for
kids who are unable to catch anything from their home environment,
namely, kids who grow up in poverty, or who had weak early instruction,
or have learning disabilities. These kids never learn how to write an
essay, and New Dorp high school had a lot of students who fell under
this category.
To develop students’ analytical skills, New Dorp’s program used
classroom discussion to teach the socratic method. When students speak
in class, they were required to use specific prompts, "I agree/disagree
with ___ because...", "I have a different opinion...", "I have something
to add..." and "Can you explain your answer?" (Tyre). This form of
structured speaking turned classroom discussions into opportunities for
classmates “to listen to each other, to think more carefully, and speak
more precisely, in ways they could then echo in persuasive writing.”
(Tyre) By doing this, New Dorp’s revamped curriculum was developing its
students’ ability to translate lessons learned in the classroom into
real-world actions, or what Sylvia Scribner refers to as ‘functional
literacy’. According to writer Sylvia Scribner, functional literacy is
defined as "the level of proficiency necessary for effective performance
in a range of settings and customary activities." (9) By extension,
Sylvia argues, functional literacy also applies to the ability to use
computers and other now-commonplace technologies, which are forms of
"second-order literacy" (11). In other words, literacy is the ability to
use tools and concepts that you know to learn something that you don't
yet know. This is why Erica Goldson credits her education largely to her
10th-grade English Teacher, Donna Bryan, who taught her how to open her
mind and "ask questions before accepting textbook doctrine." (Goldson)
Knowing how to ask questions before accepting doctrine is part of
learning how to learn, which is exactly what functional literacy entails.
Paolo
Freire would be against the concept of functional literacy, because he
believes that literacy programs are intended to teach textbook doctrine -
not to enable students to question it. If the banking concept of
education is true, then the teacher’s role is "to regulate the way the
world ‘enters into’ the students", instilling in them a mindset where
they must become complacent with the unsavory aspects of the world,
rather than attempt to change them. This implies that functional
literacy is essentially a brainwashing tool used by those in power to
maintain the status quo (373):
The
more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant
minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to
their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to
prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end
quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, the
methods for evaluating "knowledge," the distance between the teacher
and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this
ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.
Literacy
is a notion prescribed by a minority to define what the majority of
society should know, and how they should respond behaviorally to given
situations. Students themselves are deprived of the right to
self-determination in terms of what they learn, and what career choices
are made available for their pursuit. Per Freire, this is accomplished
by putting up an artificial social barrier between teachers and
students, which takes the form of required readings and ultra-specific
forms of testing, shoehorning nearly everyone into the same, narrow,
education spectrum. This is an accusation that toes the definition of a
conspiracy theory; our own government, which is one of the most stable,
cohesive forms of government today, is so divided that there are
factions within political factions - especially among the wealthy. No
real, historical conspiracy has ever been executed as flawlessly as
Freire imagines the ‘banking concept.’ Using Occam’s razor, which states
that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is often the one that’s
correct, we may assume that any grave errors in our education system are
due either to incompetence or to well-intentioned, albeit misguided,
initiatives.
It
must be conceded that there is a certain ready-to-wear approach that
the government has used over the past few decades, which can be seen
most recently in the No Child Left Behind Act. That is what (likely)
Freire is reacting to in this passage;
such top-down education reform acts tend to do more harm than good
because they allow no room for flexibility at the level of the school
districts. The attitude that ‘what’s good for some is good for all’
fails, because not everyone learns the same way.
One barrier to real education reform is coming up with an operational
(read: measurable) definition of functional literacy. Because literacy
is a social convention, it may have different connotations in different
contexts. For example, although economics is not widely taught as a core
subject, compared to history, literature or mathematics, I believe that
it should be. During
one tutoring session in April, when Ian and I first began to work on
the body arguments of his PBAT, I noticed that although he had a cogent
argument, there was a major logic gap between his argument that a lack
of economic diversity would cause the downfall of the middle class and
his main piece of evidence, which was that Apple, Inc. and other major
tech companies played too large a role in the U.S. economy. I stopped
reading to point out the error. "You've got a great idea, here, Ian, but
your discussion about Apple has nothing to do with it... at least
nothing your readers will pick up on their own." Ian frowned a little
and nodded as he re-read the passage. "Uh-huh." I backtracked in case I
had hurt his feelings. "That's not to say you shouldn't talk about Apple
at all; just
not right here." I explained that he needed to find a numerical way to
compare individual companies, as well as their respective industries, to
the overall economy. Ian gave me a puzzled look; "And... how do I do
that?" Both of us fell silent for a minute. Neither of us had taken any
real economics courses, and my only grounding in the subject came from
the fact that my mother is a lawyer who represents major firms on Wall
Street. After a minute or two,I blurted out "Let's find out how much
money Apple and other big companies make in yearly revenues, and then
compare that to the U.S.'s GDP. That'll give readers the sense of
perspective that you're trying to convey." This ad-hoc solution worked,
but it bothered me that we had any difficulty figuring it out. Both of
us should have at least had some idea of what numbers to analyze besides
GDP and company annual revenues. Knowing how and why you get paid a
certain salary, and where that money gets spent - both in retail and on
taxes - is as necessary an intellectual tool as writing itself.
Thankfully, although I was unable to help Ian produce a paper worthy of
Paul Krugman’s critique, we were able to both satisfy the requirements
of the paper and learn something new along the way, thanks to adequate
research. That tutoring session impressed upon me that, whether or not
economics becomes part of the ‘common core’ standards, the ability to
effectively research a topic online is a form of functional literacy
that everyone should master.
There
are too many schools, and too many teachers, for any comprehensive
education reform plan to be feasible. The public education system is
simply too large for any single curriculum, or any one test, to be
applicable to all students; one size simply cannot fit all. But there
are guidelines that can help individual teachers and principals decide
on what is best for their pupils. Peg Tyre's analytical writing program
could help show students how to learn, when
they might not otherwise know how to. Paolo Freire's model of
liberating education could help give an education to students who may
have given up on learning, due to extrinsic factors. Erica Goldson’s
speech could help introduce newcomers to the national, and global,
education forum. Lastly, Ian Downing’s term paper could help teachers
realize that, besides reading ability alone, functional literacy is
something that must
be taught before anyone can do it themselves. The sheer number of
moving parts involved in the education system is staggering, but it
should not discourage anyone’s attempts to fix the parts that are
broken. Like any organic system, if one teacher comes up with an
effective solution for a given problem, other teachers will copy him or
her. The same applies at any level, be it the principals of various high
schools, or the administrators of different school districts; no one is
alone in their attempt to better teach the next generations. But anyone
attempting to start their own education crusade would do well to
remember that inertia can come from the students themselves, and that
one would do well to ask their permission before starting any new kinds of pedagogical movements. Per Erica Goldson; “We will not accept anything at face value. We will ask questions, and we will demand truth.” (Goldson)
Works Cited
Freire, Paolo. "The “Banking” Concept Of Education." Dwc.edu. Daniel Webster College. 11 May 2013 <http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Friere.htm>.
Goldson, Erica. "Here I Stand." America Via Erica. Blogger.com. 11 May 2013 <http://americaviaerica.blogspot.com/2010/07/coxsackie-athens-valedictorian-speech.html>.
Scribner,
Sylvia. "Literacy In Three Metaphors." 11 May 2013
<http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true>.
Tyre, Peg. "The Writing Revolution." The Atlantic. The Atlantic. 11 May 2013 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/>. 
