A summary, in my own words:
Anybody ever learned piano, or any other musical instrument? What was one of the first things you had to do? Play scales, right? Scales, and scales, and more scales, interspersed with little pieces by mediocre (or, if you're lucky, good) composers that drill those same scales and arpeggios and chords and fingering techniques and dynamic range and on and on.
It's not a lot of fun -- especially if you resent the drills, and just get through them to get through them, without trying to play them as musically as possible. If you persevere, you find that you eventually get to play more interesting music. But you still have to work, work, work at getting the notes right. You won't learn a new piece unless you go through it systematically, marking and returning to the parts that are giving you problems.
Meanwhile, your teacher is pointing out to you where you are messing up, and suggesting how you can do better, and praising you for whatever you are getting right.
Does any of this ring a bell?
Mark Signorelli goes on to point out that the purpose of all this drill is not to benefit the student solely, but the people who will later have to listen to that student play their instrument.
In the same way, education's customers are not the students, but the people who will interact with them later in their academic, personal and professional lives.
Where have we heard this before?
But, says Signorelli,
A near unanimity of American parents regard a school simply as an institution designed for the benefit of their child, and not also for the community as a whole. As each and every negative appraisal of their child’s performance constitutes a threat to his self-esteem, they will allow his teachers to make no such appraisals. They will allow his teachers to maintain no standards which are beyond the capacities of their child, even temporarily, for fear that the resulting failures will fracture his psychological placidity. Such things confound their cherished conception of education, which is essentially therapeutic – the prolonged cultivation of their child’s emotional ease. As a consequence, rather than holding the students to certain expectations, our schools now frame their expectations to the limits of their students; this is the process of "dumbing down" which has been an unmistakable feature of the American educational landscape for over three generations.
This is not going to change until Americans in general stop thinking -- and teaching their children -- that everything is always about ME. We educators can stand with our fingers in the dike, but it's not going to matter if the water just flows over the top and drowns us.
To get rid of snowflakery, we need to get rid of American radical individualism. Since that's kind of what this country was founded on, good luck, Mark.
Here's the full post, from Front Porch Republic.
Many of my students want to save the world / make the world a better place (their words). I think that those students are the ones most receptive to the argument that education benefits the community, because they themselves receive education and then go on to work in the community...whatever said community might be.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me that student interest in "service," as much as these sometimes misguided efforts make me cringe, might be a wedge for opening a space about education as something oriented toward community.
That's reassuring, BD. I was assuming that the service orientation I see in my students was because of the SLAC I teach at -- church-related and service-oriented, so it stands to reason that such students would tend to enroll here. But if you're seeing that in a larger, more general setting, there may be hope for us yet.
ReplyDelete@BlackDog and introvert.prof: I am seeing students who want to make a difference in the world, not because they care about other, but, rather, because they care about making themselves look good. That being said, I have found that many of my older CC students are here because they want to change themselves to better their families and communities. And that gives me hope that the U.S. education system isn't screwed. Of course, Race to the Bottom takes most of that hope and smashes it completely.
ReplyDeleteMy best students are the ones who've taken a few years off to work between high school and university and thought through what they wanted to get out of it. All of them seem to have grasped that education is about learning something, not about feeling good about themselves.
ReplyDeleteBut this is not a realisation they were likely to come to in high school, I grant you.
It still bugs me when publications use the impersonal he. Like all kids should identify with being a "he" and that's that. It's so easy to pluralize it and make it gender-inclusive.
ReplyDeleteThought I'd share.
@Academic Monkey,
ReplyDeleteYou might read Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker as a counterpoint. Sayers, who was nobody's shrinking violet and would have laughed at any idea of masculine superiority, uses the impersonal "he" to describe the creative mind, even when the description is clearly autobiographical.
That said, the language has moved on: "they" is singular now, as well as plural. It's no more ridiculous than the singular "you."
Back to the Me Plan...this is why I am getting out of teaching at a CC. I simply cannot hack the grade-grubbing, going over your head to complain, harassing, helicopter parenting, etc. associated with MY grade. It's unbearable for me, and I've had some pretty tough jobs.
ReplyDelete> Since that's kind of what this country was founded on, good luck, Mark.
ReplyDeleteBut the country wasn’t founded on concern for self esteem. That is a quite recent concept, which became noticeable only around 1970. We need to get rid of radical over-concern for self-esteem, not American individualism.
Frod's right, of course. Americans rank low in math and science compared to other developed country, but our students are number one in self-esteem. In other words, they are way too full of themselves to realize they are stupid.
ReplyDeleteBumper sticker I have been wanting to make: "Life. It is not all about you."
ReplyDeleteHe's right about music, too. Also, it helps to have parents who think praise and affection make you a softie.
Gladys, if you think that shit only happens at CCs then you haven't been paying attention to the blog.
ReplyDeleteIt can happen anywhere: fancy SLACs, Ivies, R1s, R2s, med schools, law schools, business schools ('natch!), ed schools (double 'natch), religious schools, ad infinitum.
The mileage varies by school (and its culture) more than by school type.