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SCHOOL AS COMMUNITY
The Revolution Is Not Over
Achieving the "Big Idea" in Education
William G. Durden
Winter 2010
Editor’s Note: The following is an edited version of a speech delivered at the 2009 Mediterranean Association of International Schools (MAIS) Annual Conference in Florence, Italy. It is reprinted with permission of the author.
T hank you so much for this gracious invitation to speak here in Florence. I have the distinct honor to be presenting my third opening keynote address before MAIS in the last decade. Either I’m saying something that makes sense or you are all masochists.
As I review what I have said to you in past years — in Seville and Rome — I see that there is a consistency in message. Each time, I urged you to use your distinctive power and influence as independent, international educators to advance significant change and improve teaching and learning. You possess the singular capacity to be sufficiently distant from the revolving fads of American education and spunky enough in disposition (or you would not be living and working internationally) to resist fads and manipulative ideologies and assert what is appropriate education theory and practice for the advancement of your students. You are a repository of hope in education.
SEVILLE
My speech in Seville urged you to see the “useful” aspects of academic subjects in the lives of your students that went beyond strictly “discipline-specific” purposes and those traditional reasons given for such study. I urged you to demonstrate to your students and the public that academic disciplines also introduce students to non-domain-specific knowledge and skills that have direct applicability to securing those leadership skills that permit them a rewarding and successful life. I concentrated specifically on foreign language and culture studies and here is what I said:
“The traditional reasons given for the study of foreign languages and culture in schools is that they introduce one to new people and habits, advance understanding and communication among peoples, ready students for an increasingly global world where one who possesses fluency in multiple languages is at an advantage, and sharpen habits of critical thinking through disciplined study of language systems. These are all, of course, worthy objectives that few people but the most provincial could dispute, but they offer the uninitiated little new incentive to pursue language and culture studies. These are centuries-old stories used to advance study in these areas, and, frankly, they have not been all that successful, at least in the United States, in increasing interest and enrollments in foreign language and culture studies. However, the case for such study is greatly enhanced if foreign languages are seen to advance leadership skills that can be applied to any area of pursuit. Such an alignment expands robustly the desirability of foreign language and culture studies by offering students an extremely useful, tangible human capacity that reaches into many areas of social and professional activity.”
ROME MEANING
"...I have watched the question of life's meaning lose its status as a subject of organized academic instruction and seen it pushed to the margins of professional respectability in the humanities..." |
In Rome, I took the offensive yet again, and called on you to expose three popular educational practices that, when embraced in an absolutist manner, represent severe danger to learning. The three were the self-esteem movement (everyone is “great,” regardless of effort or achievement); quantitative, standardized assessment (only that which can be quantitatively measured is of value in learning, thus devaluing those subject areas that are more elusive to measurement by numbers — the arts, ethics, philosophy, cultural studies, literature, poetry); and either-or thinking about educational practice (for example, homogenous grouping vs. heterogeneous grouping, whole language vs. phonics) that doesn’t allow a blending of methods based on the needs of the particular child before you.
I urged you to oppose these ideas vigorously and to replace them with much more rational, effective, and commonsensical strategies in your classroom that took into account individual difference among your students and that did not reduce you to the status of mindless “groupies” of educational ideology and the commercial interests behind them. I urged you to be a new generation of “educational pragmatists” and to rediscover the “centrist, pragmatic force” that gives you the professional opportunity to apply the instructional strategies that best advance learning in the student sitting before you in the classroom.
FLORENCE
Today, I direct my attention to yet another topic of extreme educational importance. And, as I do so, I realize that my past comments are but the foundation for what I say today. That is, in both of my past speeches, I hinted at an issue that I had left undeveloped. Today, I shall fulfill what I left undone.
What I said in only a most “fleeting” way was this: American education has become partial to “little ideas” — facts and procedure — rather than those “big,” complex ideas that take on the meaning of life, aesthetics, and moral and ethical judgment that cannot so readily be measured by quantitative, standardized tests. Education has repeatedly been short on those big ideas involving the aims of education. The results are evident. If you ask today’s college students — as I have — what “big ideas” they have learned in the classroom that influence comprehensively the conduct of their lives and aspirations, they come up with none. If you ask them the name of a philosopher, a poet, a novelist, even a scientist who influences how they live their lives and define themselves and their interaction with those about them, they are usually silent.
Simply put, the challenge is to re-admit students as enthusiastic and willing participants in the grand narrative that is education.
THE PATH TO PURPOSE
Today, I urge you to reclaim, after decades of neglect and actual scorn, the “intentionality” of education, the “purpose” of education — the truly BIG idea — as is so aptly described in William Damon’s book, The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life. Indeed, Damon defines most acutely the issue before us:
“The most pervasive problem of the day [in teaching and learning] is a sense of emptiness that has ensnared many young people in long periods of drift during a time in their lives when they should be defining their aspirations and making progress toward their fulfillment. For too many young people today, apathy and anxiety have become the dominant moods, and disengagement or even cynicism has replaced the natural hopefulness of youth. This is not a problem that can be addressed by solutions advanced in the past. In fact, the high [academic] standards that I and others have argued for [a decade ago] are not a sufficient answer to this particular matter. The message that young people do best when they are challenged to strive, to achieve, to serve — a message that I still hold with conviction — fails to address the most essential question of all: ‘For what purpose?’ Or, in a word, ‘Why?’…” Would we not expect our schools and our universities to provide the “why” of academic and education pursuit — to indicate clearly to students why they are studying what they are, beyond merely the daily task of mastering the content of the academic subject area? The answer is most disappointing and inadequate. Again, Damon:
“If you visit a typical classroom and listen to what the teacher enjoins students to do, you will hear a host of study assignments, exam instructions, and lots of drill and practice. If you listen for the teacher’s reasons ‘why’ the students should perform these tasks, you will hear a host of narrow, instrumental goals, such as doing well in the class, getting good grades, and avoiding failure, or perhaps — if the students are lucky — the value of learning a specific skill for its own sake. But rarely (if ever) will you hear the teacher discuss with students broader purposes that any of these goals might lead to. Why do people read and write poetry? Why do scientists split genes? Why, indeed, did I myself become a teacher? Incredibly, in all my years as a scholar of youth development and education, I have never seen a single instance of a teacher sharing with students the reason why he or she went into the teaching profession…. How can we expect that our young people will find meaning in what they are doing if we so rarely draw attention to the personal meaning and purpose of what we work at in our daily lives?” In this defense of educating for a sense of purpose, Damon targets those very practices that I previously asked you to fight against. While admitting the usefulness of standardized testing when “advancing standards of excellence in learning, understanding, or gaining useful knowledge,” he sees it seldom used that way. Instead, such testing “draw[s] attention away from other educational priorities, in particular the core missions of encouraging the acquisition of active knowledge and a lifelong love of learning. Often squeezed entirely out of the school day are questions of meaning and purpose that should underlie every academic exercise. In place of these broader goals, the main objective of the classroom becomes a matter of imparting a rapid familiarity with facts, names, places, and formulas that students have little interest or skill in applying to problems beyond the classroom.”
COLLEGES, UNIVERSITIES, AND A SENSE OF PURPOSE
WHY?
We have lost our sense of the "why" of education and the accompanying sense of urgency that motivates both student and teacher. |
This lack of asking the question “Why?” in reference to what is taught in the classroom is not restricted to the schools, but also plagues colleges and universities. Anthony Kronman, a professor at the Yale University Law School, wrote in 2007 a most provocative book entitled, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. After stating his unequivocal commitment to education where “a college or university is not just a place for the transmission of knowledge but a forum for the exploration of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works of literary and philosophical imagination that we have inherited from the past,” he launches into his lament: “…I have watched the question of life’s meaning lose its status as a subject of organized academic instruction and seen it pushed to the margins of professional respectability in the humanities, where it once occupied a central and honored place.
I have felt what I can only describe as a sense of personal loss on account of my own very substantial investment in the belief that the question is one that can and must be taught in our schools. In my time as a teacher and dean, I have seen this question exiled from the humanities, first as a result of the growing authority of the modern research ideal and then on account of the culture of political correctness that has undermined the legitimacy of the question itself and the authority of the humanities teachers to ask it.”
THE K–16 CONVERSATION
So, as teachers and administrators, what are we to do if this essential component of teaching and learning is both missing in our institutions and discredited?
I came to my own solution through conversation among parties that rarely in the history of education maintain sustained dialogue: school administrators and university presidents. The two sectors tend to mix neither professionally nor socially, although they both educate many of the very same students in a continuum. To remedy this disgrace, I and some university colleagues and a group of independent and public school heads — with the assistance of the National Association of Independent Schools and the Annapolis Group, an association of about 130 leading liberal arts colleges — decided last year that we would simply gather, admit that we were all of one profession, and share common concerns about teaching and learning.
During one of our initial conversations in Washington, DC, we suddenly realized that the only connection between schools and undergraduate colleges and universities is on the basis of academic disciplines — course grades and the results of standardized tests. While academic data are necessary, they certainly are not sufficient ground for justifying education continuity and ambition for institutions or students. We realized that there is no “big idea” currently acknowledged and shared by schools and universities that unites our collective concern about the continuing education of a student and that provides students with answers as to why they should engage in learning in the first place. This is a damaging vacuum that must be filled if education is to have any chance of inspiring students to confront the complex challenges of all our lives — the economy; racial, religious, and ethnic discord; terrorism; poverty and disease; the fragility of the environment; etc.
There is a sense of urgency among many educators to reintroduce — and, in some cases, introduce for the first time — the “why” of education into our schools and universities. That is the immense task before us.
THE “BIG IDEA”
The group in Washington was not without solutions. But what struck me as having the best claim to uniting the two sectors of education to a common “big idea,” and to answering the question “why,” is to recommit to the original intention of a distinctively American education. And that unifying principle for American education at its origins after the American Revolution was democracy — to prepare young people through a liberal education to participate in an idea far bigger than themselves, that would unite them with other people and ready them for participation in the new form of government in all its forms — law, medicine, theology, science, education, commerce, public service, and so forth.
MOTIVATION
We have let the academic disciplines and the technology of their advancement totally replace our far more generous, humanistic motivation. |
In the early days of the American republic, there existed no ambiguity for student or teacher in the “why?” of teaching and learning. Liberal education was to create the informed, active citizens of a democracy. It was an incontrovertible equation. There was no sympathy after the American Revolution for an education that was self-indulgent and that celebrated learning for learning’s sake alone or that just concentrated upon a single academic subject. It was against that purpose for which the Revolution was fought. There was a nation to build and a government to perfect and it was towards these noble ends that all of education was to be directed. The task was invested with a high sense of urgency and cloaked in the call for continued revolution.
Students were to hear this call in and out of the classroom. For example, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the founder of at least three universities — including my own, Dickinson College, in 1783 — as well as an advocate of universal free public school education, the end of slavery, the substantive education of women, and the humane treatment of the mentally challenged, said, “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of American revolution with those of the late American war. The American war is over; but this is far from the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government, after they are established and brought to perfection.”
Education — in particular, a liberal education that covered a wide variety of areas of study — was an instrumental component in this perfection of democracy through the participation of its youth. Every single course that Dr. Rush or his good friend Thomas Jefferson proposed for study in school and at the university was introduced with explicit commentary on the degree to which it contributed to a student’s later participation in democracy. Every course had to be “useful” for participating in and perfecting the new government. The accountability for a distinctively American education was not solely located in the competence to which students mastered a particular academic subject, but rather, the degree to which their course of study permitted them to be active citizens.
Sadly for American education, and for our students looking to make sense of it all, we have lost this unequivocal call to democracy through a liberal education. We have lost our sense of the “why” of education and the accompanying sense of urgency that motivates both student and teacher. We have let the academic disciplines and the technology of their advancement totally replace our far more generous, humanistic motivation.
LIBERAL EDUCATION AND INTENTIONALITY
Martha Nussbaum, in her book Educating for Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, underscores the distinctiveness of the American ambition in education, but also points out the nation’s shortcomings in this area — the unfulfilled promise. In the process of calling for the comprehensive reintroduction of the Socratic Method into American classrooms (where students are engaged in a continuous dialogue to answer the question “why?”), she states, “In most nations students enter a university to pursue a single subject, and that is all they study. The idea of a ‘liberal education’ — a higher education that is the cultivation of the whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life generally — has been taken up most fully in the United States. This noble ideal, however, has not yet been fully realized in our colleges and universities [or in our schools]. Some, while using the words ‘liberal education,’ subordinate the cultivation of the whole person to technical and vocational education. Even when education is ostensibly ‘liberal,’ it may not contain all that a citizen really needs to know.”
THE CHALLENGE
It is the very absence of — and strong objection to — educating for democracy that robs our educational institutions of a sense of larger purpose beyond the mere transmittal of knowledge. It is the very absence of educating for democracy and its virtues, complexities, and shortcomings that leaves our students uncomprehending of a larger purpose towards which they are intended to study. It is the “why” of education that remains unanswered. It also leaves students almost totally unengaged in the societal and political life of the greater community.
William Damon sums up the deplorable situation well in a survey he conducted of adolescents’ ranking of what has purpose in their lives: “Of the less frequent contemporary sources of purpose, the one that is most noteworthy in its low ranking in our survey is political and societal interest. Few young people today imagine that they might find purpose in the public sphere as politicians, civic leaders, or community organizers…. [M]any of today’s young show little interest in society beyond the tight circle of their family and immediate friends. This lack of interest can be seen in the state of their civic knowledge. In a U.S. Department of Education assessment a few years ago, only 9 percent of high school students were able to cite reasons why it is important for citizens to participate in a democracy, and only 6 percent could identify some reasons why having a constitution benefits a country.” THE CHALLENGE CONFIRMED
A participant in the Washington meeting, Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College, described the dilemma best in a 2006 presentation on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the college:
“Insofar as citizenship is taught in elementary and secondary schools, the student’s relationship is reduced to that of being a passive spectator, learning the workings of its machinery. The only activity called for is somehow to remember how government works, for reasons that do not include using it oneself or otherwise influencing it. At best one learns how to keep score.
“This is a devastating loss when we consider that educational institutions are uniquely capable of providing an especially fertile soil for the growing of citizens. Civic consciousness and behavior are formed at the intersection of study and engagement — reflection and action — and in public settings where difference and conflict are plentiful and treated as assets, instead of liabilities.
“We do no better in colleges and universities when it comes to nurturing the habits and values of an active citizenry. For the last century, there has been a growing emphasis on technical virtuosity characterized by its incomprehensibility beyond a select few; a drastic limiting of the idea of truth (if it has any currency at all) to mere technical competence; and an assumption that the expert is the one and only model of intellectual accomplishment….
“In short, the trajectories of specialization, an emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of intellectual integrity, leave us unable and disinclined to take on the real-world obligations of citizenship. Such obligations are too open-ended, contentious, messy, value-laden, and dependent on capacities radically different from those of a narrowly conceived and technical expertise. The challenges of citizenship are not akin to those of choosing a major nor are they compatible with a view of life in which the highest activity is pursuing research in one’s area of specialization.” CIVIC COMPETENCIES
There are numerous suggestions of what should more concretely comprise those competencies of which educating for civic literacy is a part. The original civic competency provoked by the American Revolution is, of course, the ability of students to distinguish truth from falsehood — honest, cogent argument from that which is deceitful and, in so doing, recognize and thwart tyranny and oppression. But other competencies have been suggested since 1783. For Hal Saunders, a former Assistant Secretary of State, participant in the Camp David Accords, and founder of “Sustained Dialogues” on school and university campuses, education is bereft a set of “civic competencies” that should be made explicit to students and accompany their course of study in and outside the classroom.
The competencies are: - Learning to learn from the experience of interaction with others; developing emotional and social intelligence;
- Learning the art and practice of dialogue as the medium for developing and conducting productive relationships;
- Learning the tools (e.g., listening, questioning with a purpose, dialogue, deliberation) for probing and analyzing experience in ways that produce defensible conclusions;
- Developing and internalizing a sense of respect for others, fairness, decency, justice, right and wrong; honing the ability to judge; cultivating the courage to act fairly;
- Learning how to create spaces for dialogue on difference and for the peaceful resolution of differences;
- Learning to develop information about how members of a community define community problems, talk about them, frame options for dealing with them, and decide on courses of action.
Martha Nussbaum, in Educating for Humanity, lists some of those capacities that must be developed in education to advance what she calls “the cultivation of humanity.” Her capacities are: - The capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions — for living what, following Socrates, we may call “the examined life.” This means a life that accepts no belief as authoritative simply because it has been handed down by tradition or become familiar through habit, a life that questions all beliefs and accepts only those that survive reason’s demand for consistency and for justification;
- An ability for students to see themselves not simply as citizens of some local region or group but also, and above all, as human beings bound to all human beings by ties of recognition and concern;
- The ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of a person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have;
- Scientific understanding;
- Economic understanding; and
- Knowledge of oneself and others offered by engagement in the humanities and social sciences — philosophy, political science, religious studies, history, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, music, and the studies of language and culture.
RECLAIMING EDUCATION
So what do I recommend?
Let those of us for whom an American notion of education is relevant commit to reclaiming the original intention of the pre-K–16 experience in which educating for democracy is the intention — not just educating to gain academic knowledge without larger purpose. More simply stated, I challenge educators to reclaim intentionality — to educate for meaning — so as to inspire students to learn and be vibrant participants in the global community.
I suggest a commonality of purpose for both schools and undergraduate colleges and universities — a commonality that guides and inspires educators and students. I suggest it be intended to compel teaching and learning inside and outside the classroom to be infused with both a sense of purpose larger than the acquisition of academic knowledge merely for learning’s sake alone and to engage both teachers and students with a sense of urgency to complete something that answers the” why” of formal education.
At least for an education based upon an American notion of education, I suggest that commonality of purpose — that “big” idea — is a useful liberal education for democracy and the knowledge and skill necessary for a student to be an active and informed participant in it — to be a citizen. A student must know at every stage of study that what he or she is learning contributes to a democratic way of life that might manage well the tremendous opportunities and grave responsibilities to be faced in the world.
A student and his or her teachers must also appreciate that, as Dr. Benjamin Rush so eloquently stated at the end of the 18th century, the American revolution is far from over and remains so now and well into the future.
While we have accomplished much, American democracy remains painfully incomplete. It is the urgency of that comprehensive task that should still energize our students and their teachers to learn.
William G. Durden is the president of Dickinson College and a former Klingenstein Fellow.
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