We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make — and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Sir Ken Robinson
In my experience as a teacher, early in the school year there is always the assessment and goal setting meeting. We are given statistical information that needs to be addressed during the next nine months.
- Our graduation rates are too low.
- Too many students were expelled or suspended.
- Math scores are still declining.
- The gap between minorities and white students grows.
- …and the problems go on.
Then the lamenting and whining of teachers begins.
- Whatever happened to good parenting?
- It’s those d*@&*#d smartphones fault.
- We could teach better if the District paid more.
- We absolutely need smaller classes.
- If I didn’t need a second job, I could teach better.
- How can you teach when kids don’t give respect.
Eventually, the District or State decides to adopt the newest “shiny object” program to solve all these problems. Publishers of revamped or politically motivated programs encourage adoption of their “new” ideas and techniques, promising great change… and massive profits.
- “Johnny can’t read” may have started it.
- Then came “No Child Left Behind.”
- “Every Student Succeeds” soon followed.
- We need “Professional Learning Communities.”
- Let’s try doing “Social-Emotional-Learning.”
- “Common Core” will work
Now new acronyms DEI, CRT, SEL and other progressive ideas.
To achieve credibility, all the new programs must have the requisite acronym to make it sound important and memorable. Sometimes I suspect there is a federal or state division whose purpose is to create programs to go with the newly formed acronyms.
There is a major problem:
It isn’t obvious, but almost all the recognizable problems inherent in the education process are the results of more fundamental failings of education itself and inherent problems in the broader culture of living. It isn’t just the world of education feeling the brunt of these failings, but these difficulties have a profound effect on the broader scheme of culture.
There are some illnesses where a physician will treat the symptom only. This gives some relief but doesn’t necessarily solve the real problem. It is my opinion we need to look more deeply into the root causes of problems in our school system and the negative components of everyday living. We need to start treating causes, not just hiding symptoms.
The Subtle Causes of a Quiet Chaos
John Wooden, the highly successful coach of UCLA basketball, said, “Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.” His words were within the context of basketball, but resonate powerfully for both an individual life and the existence of a broader culture.
In the world of chaos mathematics there exists the phenomenon of the strange attractor, a point of infinitesimal magnitude towards which plotted functions tend to converge. Interestingly, in some of these functions, a point of radical divergence occurs, and the plotted function goes screaming off into a new abstract universe where the nature of the graph changes radically.
The historical educational pendulum has always behaved itself, oscillating around its own fairly well defined attractors. Fundamental academic ability, universally accepted social values, concepts of thinking, all eventually attracted the swinging pendulum back to an acceptable modicum of educational performance.
I fear the current educational pendulum isn’t coming back! I think we’ve reached the point of subtle, quiet chaos where the system is defining its own intrinsic principles and rules of education. As educators, we cling to a pendulum, but one whose path is no longer predictable and defined.
At times I picture educators in our own carnival of learning, standing at one of those game booths where obnoxious stuffed animals pop from various holes. We smack them back down with a wildly swung mallet, only to have another beast emerge from the next hole. In education we exist as symptom-smashers, blasting can’t read animals down with our acronym labeled hammers only to have the “can’t do math” animal emerge.
The simple fact is, we exist in an environment with high-potential kids, but with socially molded hearts. They come to our schools with unlimited potential… but polluted promises.
Have you ever noticed how disconcerting it is when someone else has the TV remote? Visual and mental chaos is created as they switch channels just as your mind is focusing in on your own interest.
That’s how I’ve felt dealing with the students of our remote-control-generation. Just a momentary glimpse, then CLICK!… and a new event, a new deficiency surfaces.
“I hate that teacher” CLICK!
“This course is hard” CLICK!
“My job sucks” CLICK!
“We aren’t in love now” CLICK!
“This is boring” CLICK!
My fear is simple. Our students come to us with no solid conviction of the greater purposes of life. Even more ominous, the remote is in their hands. Compounding that fear, Dad and Mom keep supplying fresh batteries for the remote. In their quest to provide a good and safe life for their children, parents have acquiesced to being constant enablers.
“That assignment too hard? Okay, I’ll call the teacher,” they say.
“You missed the deadline to sign up for the field trip? That’s okay. I will give them a call and I’m sure they’ll still let you go.” and once more the child is not given the opportunity to learn from the results of natural consequences.
Life is lived with the remote in hand. If an event or encounter isn’t one I like, a simple push of the excuse button and on to the next more enjoyable event.
Booze, gangs, pre-marital sex, and drugs are certainly difficulties and evils that need to be avoided by teens today. In my opinion, however, there are more insidious evils that need addressing. More insidious since they’re quiet, appearing almost safe, yet corporately those evils join to produce a growing generation of students almost devoid of the most critical skills needed to live a productive and successful life.
The Flat Screen Generation
Students today are being raised by flat screens. TV, videos, computers, movies, video games, and cell phones create a concentrated culture of flat screens carrying messages requiring little thought or meditation. Almost everything kids watch today is at the shallowest, most emotional, level of interaction. Car chases, dragons to slay, and videos with startling images enter the eyes, titillate the emotions, and quickly transition to the next intense image. Nowhere does the watcher have the time to relax, muse, ponder or repeat.
Should we wonder then, why students struggle with critical thinking issues, panic when in-depth analysis is required, or shut down when readings contain polysyllabic words?
Flat screens rule. Not only do they rule, they consume. There was a day when little children woke up in the morning and did something. They played, they read, maybe even went and bugged mom and dad. Now, even very young children slip quietly from their bed, find the remote and sit transfixed on the floor as the every-morning cartoons (or worse) enter their eyes and infiltrate their minds.
As kids consume a continuing diet of visual stimulation followed by emotional reaction, they can kiss thinking goodbye.
Ray Bradbury predicted it. In Fahrenheit 451. The elimination of books had essentially demolished thinking. The burning of books had removed the concept of vision from the minds of people. Hope arose when Bradbury writes, “…Then he met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think…and Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do!”
We don’t need to burn books to keep kids from reading. We don’t even need to hide them. Just give the kid a TV-remote, iPod or video game player and the books go unread.
Francis Schaeffer warned us in The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century that “… men will end up owning only two values…personal peace and personal affluence.” By personal peace he meant that men would hold to the concept of “let me do my own thing. Don’t bug me.” In Schaeffer’s mind, personal affluence meant that men would have the economic ability to make entertainment and easy enjoyment very affordable.
The movie Star Wars launched an exciting new generation of graphics, and in so doing, may have generated a whole new way of absorbing information. One amazing special effect after another kept us on the edge of our seats, not thinking, but reacting. Movies started advertising special effects, often more than plots or story lines.
So, what’s the big deal? What’s intrinsically wrong with great action? What can be harmful about amazing car chases or explosions?
For starters, God wrote to us. He really did. And books require reading. I know that’s a simple thought, but it’s true. It isn’t just God-words, either. Ideas are communicated by rather lengthy written discourse. For example, the philosophies and ideas of an American Revolution did not occur by a series of ten-second sound bites on the evening news but were transmitted by extensive publication and distribution of revolutionary pamphlets.
People read books and pamphlets… and the world has changed. Now, movie stars, musicians and famous athletes promote often harmful ideas… and our kids listen and believe.
Having Learned the “Not”
Once upon a time, in a land that’s gone forever, kids knew about responsibility and acted that way. Not all, of course, but most seemed to understand and accept the absolute worth of appropriate behaviors in accountability, work ethic, and accepting consequences of actions.
Then society progressed. Mom started working outside the home, and the number of kids who acted responsibly shifted slightly. Many kids still acted properly, but an ever-increasing number began to act counter to what they knew to be right. Their behavior was frustrating, but because they knew the right way, that behavior was easily fixed.
Then came the nineties. Entertaining technology grew exponentially, single parent families became more common, radical-isms and political correctness were socially imposed, and comprehensive acceptance of a broadly defined diversity changed the way we looked at the idea of right and wrong. Now in the twenty-first century we have students living lives counter to the positive characteristics that have been philosophically and historically based.
Students now come to school having learned how to be NOT responsible, NOT polite, etc. Profoundly more important than what’s not taught is the inevitable learned lesson.
Let me illustrate with a basketball lesson.
One day on lunch duty I watched three of my basketball players doing some mild practicing in a one-on-one game on our outdoor court. When they finished, I called them over.
“Good job, gentlemen. Nice shooting practice.” I said.
“Hey, thanks.” they replied, pleased that I had noticed.
“By the way, you were very effective at practicing two things other than just shooting.” I continued.
“Really. What’s that?” they asked, surprisingly intrigued.
“Well, for one thing, you did a great job at practicing not blocking out your opponent when he shot. Furthermore, you also really perfected the technique of not following your shot.” I said.
The point is simple. Our students come to us knowing how to use their “remotes” to make life choices easier, and they also come having learned their lessons well. Too bad it’s the WRONG lesson. They have learned that NOT doing homework is okay, that NOT studying for a test the first time only leads to “credit recovery” systems, and almost any other NOT characteristic you can think of.
CRITICAL THINKING can be learned. That is a fact, and one that many, if not most, teachers ascribe to. Considerable energy and effort is expended in classrooms trying to impart that skill into students. The trouble is, all those negative attributes contribute to a lessening ability of students being able to learn how to think critically. Unfortunately, there are also some subtle characteristics that can exist in teachers, administrators and the entire system that compound the difficulty of teaching critical thinking even further.
Recent protests in colleges and universities across the nation contained an event proving critical thinking is missing in many students.
In one university the students were going to make their point by holding a hunger strike. During that portion of the protest, they submitted a list of many demands to the administration. One of the demands was for the administration to supply them with several non-gluten meals!
Approval by Acquiescence
Sometimes my neurological synapses operate slower than I would hope, so it’s taken me a while to verbalize some of my thoughts about trash.
It all started with another of my many days on the ever-present lunch duty. I was on one side of the outdoor lunch area and observing the other teacher on duty as he was telling a table of ninth grade boys that their table trash was unacceptable. Having given the appropriate reprimand, the teacher turned and walked towards the gate. From my vantage point, I watched one of the boys deliberately and flauntingly flick a piece of garbage from the table to the concrete floor.
Old bones moved faster than I’d prefer, and momentarily the gentlemen and I were discussing the matter in a rather adversarial mode. The boys soon realized that they were, in fact, going to police the entire area, and as they worked, my thoughts slowly started crystallizing.
My next class after lunch was normally rather talkative before class began, and this day was no exception. Three or four mini conversations were occurring, and just as I began telling them to focus in on the thought for the day my mind went into Far Side cartoon mode. Suddenly it seemed to me that their words in this time of chatting became like pieces of trash emanating from their mouths and falling randomly to the floor.
For some reason the following thought flashed through my mind.
By acquiescing to that which is unacceptable, we give tacit approval to that action. We give approval not only to those doing the unacceptable action, but an implied approval to those who only sit and watch. Approval is granted to their “sitting and watching” as much as it is to the unacceptable act.
By ignoring a problem, we are proactive in teaching a message, and the message is that corporate responsibility is not in the domain of individual activity. Thus, that which is individually unacceptable suddenly becomes acceptable in the greater, corporate sense. In the lunch area event, I’m confident that everyone would agree that it’s wrong to throw their trash on the ground, yet by acquiescing to letting it happen, we have approved and taught that as an acceptable action.
Even more importantly, had I done nothing, and other students watched me do nothing, I would have taught the lesson it’s okay to stand by and not address things that are wrong.
Law of Unintended Consequences
One of the standard safety practices when hiking or backpacking with a group is that the weakest hiker, the one who will lag, is always accompanied by a stronger, more experienced hiker. The weaker hiker is never left to fend alone at the back of the group. In accompanying the weaker hiker, however, the more experienced person must operate at a diminished level of skill to accompany the novice. In this case, the stronger hiker willingly stays at the back as a protective measure.
In most things we do there is an obvious distribution of skill and ability level, and the obvious observation in the backpacking world is that at some prior time the stronger hiker had been given the opportunity to risk… to venture ahead… unfettered by acquiescing to the norm. Someone somehow had enthused the stronger to become just that, to learn the techniques and acquire the stamina to lead the pack. And now the stronger can help the weaker become better.
In an ideal world, no one would ever be left behind. Life isn’t ideal, however, and a normal distribution of skills and abilities naturally occurs. Someone is always the fastest, another the slowest. Some do calculus, others are hard-pressed to multiply double digit numbers.
The national intent to leave no child behind was well-intended, but statistically impossible to attain. We attempt that Herculean task by establishing curricular “STANDARDS” that can hopefully be achieved by everyone. Then we attempt to measure the successful attaining of those standards by using the oft worshiped and frequently cursed Standardized Test. (notice… said with appropriate awe)
For the sake of economy and speed, those standardized tests were almost totally multiple-choice questions. The Number 2 pencil and the Bubble Sheet became the implements of war in the fight to achieve an acceptable level of academic performance. Not only are individuals measured by these exams, but also the performance levels of individual schools and teachers is directly tied to how well the students perform on these semi-sacred tests.
The commendable emphasis on establishing academic standards and measuring performance by standardized tests may have resulted in an unfortunate and insidious unintended consequence. Just as our students think at the flat-screen level, they analyze in the multiple-choice mode.
Kids are not stupid. They might not pass math or be able to write an interesting paragraph, but they sure do know how to take multiple-choice exams. The trouble is their idea of “taking” a multiple-choice test isn’t what the testers envisioned. Students have learned how to do a cursory reading of the question, quickly eliminate two answers because they “look wrong,” and then make a supposedly reasonable guess at the right answer.
For the past several years I have conducted an interesting exercise which substantiates that hypothesis. I selected several questions that would normally be multiple choice questions on standardized tests. These selected questions all have answers that are definitive or can be calculated precisely using the proper formulas. I then blacken in all the choices but leave them on the test so it’s obvious that they are of the multiple choice variety. Sadly, many of the students react with, “We can’t do these! The answers are all blocked out!” And unfortunately, they’re right! Most of them are literally unable to perform at a passing rate on this type of doctored exam, even though the basic knowledge to do the questions is within their framework of learned material.
The importance of doing well on these exams can’t be ignored. Graduation, acceptance into college, school evaluation and teacher performance are all evaluated based on often ill-prepared students taking curricular exams using faulty methods.
Life is decidedly not ideal.
Teachers are apt to fall into the mode of testing almost exclusively in a multiple-choice fashion. The extensive practice on weekly tests is thought to produce a comfort level for the students when they take the standardized exams. Another compelling factor encouraging multiple-choice testing is the efficiency of grading when class sizes approach the imponderable and unworkable in many schools.
Having lived with and experienced this syndrome as it developed through teaching in five different decades, I am led to the conclusion that an ironic result of creating artificial standards and testing incessantly with multiple-choice questions has inadvertently resulted in an overall lessening of critical thinking and analytical abilities. Ironically, emphasizing a multiple-choice style of testing ultimately results in a lessening of the very thinking and learning processes the system was intended to improve.
Internet Information Ignorance
Several years ago, some studies indicated that the amount of knowledge was doubling about every ten years. I suspect it might take less time in our present age of research and discovery. In fact, Peter Large of Information Anxiety says, “More information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000. About 1,000 books are published internationally every day, and the total of all printed knowledge doubles every eight years.”
I do know that the amount of knowledge immediately available is vastly greater than the nostalgic era when many homes had at least one shelf of the living room bookcase filled with a neat arrangement of the encyclopedia just purchased from the door-to-door salesman.
To illustrate the preponderance of information, a few years ago, I gave a physics assignment in which the students were to choose a common technological device, investigate the primary physics principles on which the device depended, then write an analysis of how that device had influenced societal behavior, either positively or negatively.
One student selected the flush toilet as her technological focus. After finishing her Internet research, she cited six separate sites devoted entirely to the operation of the flush toilet.
I’m going to suggest that you won’t find six pages of information about toilets in any of the shelved encyclopedias.
This girl was a unique student, however. She actually read and analyzed the downloaded pages.
The norm of student Internet research is a bit different, as illustrated in the extreme by another student who wrote a social studies paper on the city of London, England.
His paper consisted of a Title Page and then twenty-six pages of downloaded and printed Internet information stapled together. When the teacher confronted him about this rather simplistic method of writing a research paper, the student defended his work by saying, “But I did the research. Look at that. I’ve got twenty-six pages of stuff. What more do you want?”
Obviously, that’s the extreme, but it’s more representative of the kind of research and analysis many students perform. They Google a topic, take a perfunctory glance at the first few hits, then copy and paste some marginally relevant paragraphs. Of course, the paper isn’t complete until they paste in a few totally plagiarized and un-cited pictures or diagrams from the website.
Partly because of Approval by Acquiescence, Students have learned the not of a click-and-copy mode of research at the same shallow level of learning they use to take multiple choice examinations.
Avoiding Institutional Inertia
At some point in time, kids started going to a place called school. These places of learning strongly reflected the societal wishes of the historically traditional family. Times were simpler, and learning consisted of the mastery of a closely defined body of knowledge generally considered intrinsic in educated people.
Knowledge entwined with education often promotes activism in thinking. Certain aspects of this educated society then began to create a technologically based culture, the primary result of which was a rapid growth in leisure time. This richness of leisure time suffered the inevitable perversion into a selfish, radical individualism as described by Charles Colson in his book, The Body.
The decades continued and are summarized as follows.
1940 – 1959 “Yes, Sir. I understand, Sir.”
1960 – 1970 “Peace, Man, peace.”
1971 – 1982 “Listen, who really cares?”
1983 – 1989 “Hey, Dude, chill out”
1990 – 1999 “It’s mine, Baby, it’s mine!”
2000 – 2010 “I’ll text you when I get there.”
2011 – Present “My pronouns are They, Them”
Somewhere in this chronology, radical visionaries (actually, reactionaries brave enough to be vocal) began what we now call the Christian School Movement. Back to the academic basics, something called integration, short hair, classes started with prayer, and dress codes all became identifiable attributes of this exciting phenomenon.
First perceived as a non-Darwinian joke, the Christian School Movement slowly began forcing the public sector to consider change, at least publicly and politically. If you can’t change the heart, at least you can put a cop in the corridor.
And finally, with the slow terror of a Poe-like pendulum, much of the Christian school movement is quietly acquiescing to the historical virus of mediocrity that has dulled the public sector. The safety of a dormant Christian status quo threatens to send this movement into the oblivion society reserves for the harmlessly eccentric.
Christian schools, secular private schools and Charter schools began to represent a serious threat to the government funded local schools. Teachers’ Unions aggressively attacked any form of education threatening their monopoly on education, but a stronger, more effective counter began to lessen the impact of competitive education systems. The same creativity-killing syndrome turned many entrepreneurial ventures into mundane and boring businesses.
No longer new enough to be interesting nor radical enough to be exciting, a growing number of Christian schools are illustrating what I believe to be a foundational law that governs many societal institutions.
I call this phenomenon the Law of Institutional Inertia.
Radical Ideas acted on with enthusiastic energy give rise to visionary institutions. Those institutions then tend to produce rules and structure designed to protect their own existence, thus stifling the production of further creative thought and radical ideas which created them in the first place.
There is a corollary law that applies to individuals.
Creative individuals who dare act on their creativity reach levels of success which become comfortable and secure, thus lessening the likelihood of further creative action.
The First Law of Motion as described by Isaac Newton discusses both the static and dynamic law of inertia. Both Institutional and Individual Inertia are static in nature. Creative ideas and enthusiastic energy allow an institution or person to reach a comfortable level of operation, but staying at that level eventually and inevitably turns a groove into the proverbial rut. That rutism can be avoided by choosing to live by the third law of Dynamic Institutional or Individual Inertia.
The willingness to risk failure…or the perception of failure… by fostering and acting on creative ideas is the only way to produce dynamic inertia and to develop a continuing and expanding acquisition of Radical Excellence.
To say it simply, be willing and anxious to enjoy the risk of becoming radically excellent.