Our Membership in Groups: How do we fit in?

In the “Basic School” Dr. Boyer writes that the early school child learns they do belong to groups and communities, from the time they are born. There is family, extended family and the community that their family lives in as well as their community at school. These subjects are revisited at the start of every school year. For, as each year goes by increased numbers of groups are available to students or are there for them to become aware of.

The “Goal” for all students should be to understand that everyone is a member in any number of groups. Of course this starts with the family. Students will understand how groups or organizations shape our lives, but also and as importantly – how they can shape and change these organizations. By the time one leaves the basic school there is an understanding of what it means to be a meaningful member in society, or a good citizen, and living productively with a voice, within this greater organization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made and have to accommodate ourselves to them.”

Membership in Groups, the third of eight commonalities, outlined in the basic school, guides kids to explore a host of questions. “Which groups did I get born into?” “Which groups do I belong to?” “Why do we join groups?””Can I leave a group?” “Why are groups important?” “Does the group make me do things I don’t want to do?” “How do groups help my life?” “What does it mean to be a citizen?”

Starting with the family, which many believe is the center of civilization. Kids will understand the family unit’s importance in society, and their own lives. They will talk about informal groups, often times more important to kids; neighborhood groups, even cliques, sports etc. What is the importance of community groups, service organizations, and religious groups? Why do folks come together in these ways, and how can they help their community.

With a spiraling curriculum older kids may journal about the groups they belong to, list them and keep an inventory of the social relationships they belong to, and consider the ways in which the groups they move in and out of affect them. By the end of their schooling students will investigate Civics, at the municipal, state and federal level. They will investigate documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. By the end kids should have a firm understanding of the groups that they belong to – the expectations and rights that they have within these organizations. They will gain respect for the organizations at local, state and national levels. Kids will also gain respect for the democratic traditions and good citizenship within their school and society as a whole.


From "The Basic School" by Dr. Earnest Boyer. Excerpts by Matt Emery

Can we untangle Education's History in U.S.?

I’ve been writing about education more than 25 years. It’s been a fascinating but puzzling journey.

So much in education is counter-intuitive. We would expect that there are quicker, more pleasant ways to do any task; conversely, there must be slow, inefficient and unsuccessful ways to do everything. It’s the second kind that our elite educators (the ones who run the system) gravitate toward. How can we explain this? It’s almost as if our educators merely pretend to believe in universal education. What they seen more deeply committed to is universal mediocrity.

When you consider all the studies, statistics, reports, and books, you realize that they all paint the same bleak and depressing picture. We spend more and billions every year but SAT scores fall. Our better students do not compete well with the better students from other countries. The general public seems to know barely enough to read a daily newspaper. Can most Americans find Idaho on a map? Never mind Japan? And then there’s the really big mystery: 50 million functional illiterates. How could this happen?

To answer all these puzzles, I researched further and further back in history. I tried to understand how the early educators, a century ago, looked at life, at their country, at children, and at this new field they had created. You want to know what’s really funny? These people in fact were not primarily interested in education as most of us understand that term. They were obsessed with ideology, psychological breakthroughs, and cultural transformations. They saw the school as a tool. Education was the factory in which they intended to build a new society. Note that nobody asked them to do this; they arrogantly appointed themselves our saviors. They didn’t do us any favors.

At this point I have more than 120 articles on the web trying to explain how and why our educators got off track. I’ve been especially fascinated by the reading war, which is far and away our biggest, dumbest scandal and a blazing paradigm for everything else. As I understood the damage caused by bogus reading methods, I began to have a clearer sense of what we need to do across the board: simply enough, get rid of all the failed ideas.

Oddly enough, we are engaged in a war with our own educators. I want to persuade people that this is an intellectual war; and we must fight the bad ideas with good ideas. So I’ve collected my 50 favorite articles in a book titled THE EDUCATION ENIGMA (What Happened To American Education). Partly it’s a history book. It’s also a guidebook to the toxic nonsense in American schools. Most importantly, it’s a map to a better future. It’s also entertaining. What other book talks about Pavlov, Mick Jagger, the Tao, John Dewey and robots?

My thesis is that we have no hope of improvement unless we understand exactly what happened to American education: our schools were made dumb by design. Then we have to identify and deconstruct all the gimmicks that have been smuggled into the system. Throwing more billions of dollars at the problem won’t help. Writing more glowing policy recommendations won’t help. Giving money to so-called best practice won’t help. Our educators are set in their ways; they often seem addicted to worst practice. We need an intervention.

So our first job is simply this: we have to grasp that our house is dirty and then clean it. We have to get rid of the overhyped “progressive” innovations that turn out in practice to be destructive and regressive. For example, Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, Self Esteem, Cooperative Learning, Fuzzy Anything, and much more. We need to restore basics and academics to their proper prominence.

Many people are comforted by the idea that our educators are clumsy, inept, or befuddled by fads. No, I’m afraid you really have a much better sense of what happened to us if you imagine a bunch of guys like John Dewey gathered around a table discussing their philosophical goals, devising strategies, and trying to figure out how to keep the public from interfering. I know people who shy away from the word conspiracy. But let’s be realistic. This track record goes back nearly a century. Let’s show respect for those 50 million functional illiterates who spent their lives in a twilight zone thanks to John Dewey and his pals. You can’t create this kind of disaster in a few years or by accident. No, the perpetrators have to keep plugging away, decade after decade.

I should mention by the way that I never criticize teachers. I’m concerned only with the top educators, people with Ph.D.’s at Teachers College and such. These people are responsible for what happens in American education. Teachers are as much their victims as children are.

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For a short, hard-hitting but entirely intellectual critique of American education, please check out THE EDUCATION ENIGMA (on Amazon; or any store can order it for you). The ideas in this book can save our public schools. Please also visit Improve-Education.org.

Bruce Deitrick Price

Can we improve simple math computational Skills?

Three years ago I tried to pay attention to importance of simple mental calculations for success in school math. Now it must be not only attempt, it must be an appeal to all who worried about the future of mathematical education.

My last studies show that the skills of pupils are getting worse and worse. Last year I have tested 106 final-year pupils of primary school in mental addition and subtraction (within the limits of 20), multiplication and division (within the limits of 100). Standard tables including 64 elementary operations on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division were used for determination of the level of the skills. You can see specimens of the tables at my site Prevention of Failure in School Mathematics (Improvement of Elementary Computational Skills, Tables).

The results turned out worrying: 52% of the sample has failed in addition and subtraction; 75% of the sample has failed in multiplication and division. In comparison with the data which had been obtained five years ago there is considerable deterioration (25 – 30 %). My earlier investigations show that all of these pupils have no chances to understand and master more complicated topics. If the trend will not change, very soon school math will turn into “knowledge for minions of fortune” and will become a sort of magic for other pupils.

Can we improve the situation? My answer is yes. I have chosen one class (20 pupils) with next results:

on addition: good – 2, uncertainly – 8, bad – 10;

on subtraction: good – 2, uncertainly – 7, bad – 11;

on multiplication: good – 5, uncertainly – 1, bad – 14;

on division: good – 4, uncertainly – 1, bad – 15.

During half a year we worked with standard tables. In total the pupils have completed eight tables on each arithmetical operation. Besides that the tables were constantly used as homework. In February the class has implemented a control test. Here are the results:

on addition: good – 16, uncertainly – 2, bad – 2;

on subtraction: good – 14, uncertainly – 5, bad – 1;

on multiplication: good – 10, uncertainly – 5, bad – 5;

on division: good – 9, uncertainly – 5, bad – 6.

Success on addition and subtraction is evident. You may say that on multiplication and division the results are not so good. But we must take into consideration that such a work must be implemented much earlier – at the second and third grades. Teachers of secondary school have not enough time to improve simple mental computational skills. It is a job of primary school.

If we want the greater part of our pupils will understand math in future, we must teach them some simple things in present. The first of these things are simple mental computations.

Comment: Great job Victor, but how are we improving these skills?? Matt

Victor Guskov, a teacher of mathematics, Ph.D. Pedagogical Sciences.
http://www.edarticle.com/k-12-subject-areas/mathematics/can-we-improve-simple-mental-computational-skills.html

Symbols, What are they Good For?: the 2nd commonality

The Use of Symbols the second Commonality:

The objective of this second commonality in the “Basic School” is that all students understand that all humans communicate through symbol systems. First they look at the genesis of language. They come to understand the reasons for communicating. There is the technology that moves this communication along; and sometimes degrades its purpose but other times enhances it. In the end kids realize that integrity is of the most importance in human interaction.

Well, following the commonality of life, communication and language naturally follows – as kind of a secondary miracle, if you will. Grade school kids are taught the mechanics and the windings of the different parts, grammar, spelling, parts of speech and writing in blocks of sentences and finally paragraphs. However, not often are they asked to step back and make connections as in a social setting, and how language connects us to others. This is very important.

In this commonality it is important that language history in its many different forms and cultures are touched upon. The who, what, when and where. How many languages are there? Where did they come from? How did I learn to speak? When did writing begin, what symbols did people use back in history? Do languages change? - How do I know if someone is being truthful? Are the impressions I’m being bombarded with real?

Younger students focus on the other materials used to make symbols in other times and cultures; smoke, drums, primitive paper etc., and realize that other life forms use their own symbols to communicate. The dolphins, bees, birds all send messages to each other.
The older students get higher learning exposure and questions such as what are the reasons for communicating, as in, to inform, persuade, entertain and inspire! They think about how words can heal and hurt. They consider different dialects, idioms, and colloquial expressions.

Before kids leave the Basic School they are exposed to Mass Communication and how mass media of all types effects their own lives, and begin to distinguish between the “Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. When the Basic School education is complete, students will have learned not only how to use words, but how to think about them. They’ll have an understanding of the history, social significance and the ethics of language.

The Basic School, Ernest Boyer - Excerpts by Matt Emery