Studying the right things

So the chancellor of the University System of Georgia, Hank Huckaby, caused a slight kerkuffle among my alumni community this past week, when he said, in reference to the fact that apparently large numbers of jobs in Georgia are going unfilled, that “students are studying the wrong things,” and that “If you can’t get a job, and you majored in drama, there’s probably a reason.”

Where to even start.  Oh, I’ll just start.

1.  The point of a university education is not to fill a quota of jobs in particular industries that just happen to be available in the state.  The point of a university education is to support and fulfill a student in the long term, not simply as a worker but as a learning, thinking, creating person.  College education should enrich an entire society with a liberal range of thinking skills, not simply enable young adults to fill available jobs.

If industries with jobs to fill are failing to attract students and applicants by making a reasonable case that the work is worthy of their dedication for the salaries they’re offering, that is not the student body’s fault.  Industries with jobs to fill are not entitled to students’ lives or attention.  A graduate has no particular duty to take any given job, anywhere, or to train for any given job just because it’s available.

2.  It is so easy to take the stereotype of the undisciplined, flighty, starving actor or artist and say if you studied drama and now you don’t have a job, maybe you studied the wrong thing.  But who would look at an unemployed graduate who studied business, marketing, or biochemistry, and say “Maybe you studied the wrong thing.  Maybe you should have studied photography or playwrighting?”

But maybe they should have.  Maybe a kid who sacrificed their true interests to what they were told was more practical, responsible, stable, or lucrative, would have been better off pursuing what they were a natural at.  Maybe they would have found that being educated where their strengths and intuition lie is actually more reliable and life-sustaining.

3.  People do work in the arts!  Maybe this is overly obvious, but I really think that some of these bigwigs who run their mouths off overlook it.  People work in the arts.  People really do make their livings in the arts.  People who quite possibly couldn’t sustain employment in more conventional career fields do so in the arts.  People with very specific and uncommon talents find a life in the arts.  People study for and work in the arts who damn well know that that path is their best bet.

And it’s not like the only thing to do with a drama degree is act or direct.  There are jobs in management, administration, development, and design, just to name a few areas.  There is such a profound ignorance of what it really takes to run the theater world, that, just for instance, I had not even heard of what would become my own job until I was in college.

Do too many people study drama expecting to be able to find jobs, or sustain themselves by performing, who then can’t?  Sure, probably.  But so what if everyone made more practical choices and studied dentistry or engineering instead?  Would the economy then have the jobs available to support all of those people?  A society can’t absorb an overabundance of nurses or computer scientists any more than it can a glut of theater artists.  There aren’t a limitless number of jobs for electrical engineers, either.  If everyone who hears Chancellor Huckaby’s speech takes his advice and chooses their field of study based on where job openings in Georgia currently are, who says those jobs will still be so plentiful, or even exist, five or ten years from now, and what happens to those students then?  And in the meantime, what happens to a society that decides it doesn’t value the education of its artists and creators?

4.  Make no mistake:  I am employed because I studied drama.

Beyond the fact that I still actually work in the specific career which I chose in college, my education in theater gave me opportunities to develop communication, interpersonal, collaborative and analytical skills that I just would not have had access to otherwise.  I found a world in which the kind of person I was at heart wasn’t considered a fundamental problem.  I found a niche that demanded my natural skill set.  I got told for the first time that the way I learn is a strength and not a weakness.  I deeply understood how my own mind worked for the first time when I was taught to use a two-scene preset light board.  Somebody taught me how to yell.

I really and truly don’t like to think about where I’d be right now if I hadn’t studied drama.  And there’s almost nothing for which I’m more grateful to my younger self than the fact that she had the foresight to not listen to people like Chancellor Huckaby.

Let’s talk about sex (education)

So apparently school started again this past week, and (in)appropriately, I ran across this article on Salon.com (Americans Want Sex Ed), summarizing a report from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.  The report presents the seemingly paradoxical findings that while a solid majority of both adults and teens in the United States believe that teenagers should be taught about birth control, and also that anti-abortion leaders should support the availability of birth control, and also that they (teens) themselves have the information they need to avoid unplanned pregnancy…a somewhat scarily large percentage of teens then go on to report knowing little to nothing of contraception methods.

But I suspect that the discrepancy obscures, at least in part, a disconnect between the fairly binary way in which we conceive of what “sex education” can and should be–either abstinence only or abstinence plus safety and contraception–and the nuances of students’ real lives, or how well what students are taught about contraception does or doesn’t match up with how they really need or want to be educated about sexual relationships.

If, for instance, you’re a 15-year-old lesbian, it may be true that you know what you need to about contraception at the moment even if that isn’t very much.  Or if you’ve genuinely decided to wait for sex–till marriage or just till you’re older–you might not be wrong that you don’t need to know everything about possible contraception methods right this minute.  Or if you’re on the asexuality spectrum and not seeking a sexual relationship…this information might not be taking up space on your hard drive, but you know where to find it if or when you want it…or if, like some students taking this survey, you’re 12 years old.

Or imagine how profoundly unhelpful a group role-playing game full of scare tactics about the dangers of promiscuity is to someone desperately trying to figure out how to have one good, safe, physical relationship.

It’s also easy to mistakenly think you know everything it’s possible to know, when what you don’t know is what you aren’t being taught.

I was, probably unsurprisingly, one of the kids who thought that I knew what I needed to know.  I’d been through fairly decent classes on what to expect from puberty.  I’d been given information on available contraception.  (In a totally brilliant move on my mother’s part, one day she had picked me up Seventeen magazine’s Environment Special Issue, which she said she thought I’d enjoy, environmental activism being my primary obsession at the time.  It also had Your Complete Guide to Contraception in the back of the issue.  It was years before I realized that handing that over had probably been deliberate and not an oversight on her part.)  I was a biology wonk and already knew more about disease transmission and risk than what was in the health class videos and graphic slide shows.

And, for reasons that turned out to be a good deal more complicated than I even thought they were at the time, I’d taken a stance that I was delaying sex…pretty much indefinitely.

In this state of affairs, I wound up, despite my protestations that the requirement was insulting, in my school’s “Health and Family Wellness” class.  In which I somehow managed to be continuously stigmatized for the very choices that the class purported to be encouraging, because the ways in which I’d made them did not comport with the core presumptions of What Teenagers Are Like or How Dating Works.  At the same time that I did indeed think I knew what I needed to, as far as what I saw available, I felt this gaping absence of anyone anywhere accurately describing how I actually experienced myself or my desires, and how to build a life or be safe and respected in those things.

Now I look back and know that I cannot have been the only one experiencing this, because people who were not represented as having sexual or romantic relationships worth talking about included gay people, queer people, trans people, disabled people…so also disabled queer people…any kind of gender fluid or gender variant people, people on the asexuality spectrum, or now that I try to think of it, very many people of color or of cultures other than Normal American Teenager.  Let alone any of those people having relationships with each other.

What worked for other people was clearly not going to work out for me, but there were no examples of what would.  Or of how to talk about what was true for you, if that wasn’t what was presumed to be the default.

There’s a quote from Adrienne Rich that I think of more and more often:  “When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”

So…not getting pregnant was actually not my biggest problem.  The ways in which our school’s sex ed didn’t have much to offer me went way deeper than “I already know all about contraception, this is a waste of my time, and I’d rather be taking art.”  But that was all I was able to express—in no small part because of the poverty of education or language available about relationships, sex, and gender that went beyond the very superficial.  And so I sat in class day after day, feeling more and more alienated from my peers and from how adults presumed I should be treated based on the fact that I was 15 and not much else, being told by unqualified teachers “I’m sorry you think you’re too good to be here,” rolling my eyes at badly produced educational videos, and learning most of what I really knew about love and respect from Mulder and Scully at home alone on Friday nights.  (And I’m not the only person I know who says that I learned what love was supposed to be from those characters.)

How would I have answered a survey question “Do you feel that you have all the information you need to prevent an unplanned pregnancy at this time?”  Yes.  But it would’ve been a stand-in answer for the fact that the question didn’t address anything real in my life.

I can well imagine that if you go to a school in which the name of your sexual identity is literally a bad word (“Don’t say gay” bills have been introduced in both Missouri and Tennessee), or a subject that faculty feel forbidden to address, up to and including when you’re being violently victimized for it, that you might reasonably feel that your ability to name risks and benefits of five different kinds of contraception is a little bit beside the point.

It isn’t that we shouldn’t teach comprehensive information about birth control, obviously, or work to ascertain whether kids feel they have the information they need about it, but I think in the common conception of what sex education is, this is widely thought of as the ultimate question: whether to teach abstinence only, or whether to teach risk management methods.  But even the seemingly right answer to that question is misleading and even counterproductive when contraception as risk management is taught without a bedrock of positive and healthy attitudes about sex, real-life examples of all types of healthy sexual and romantic relationships, a vocabulary to describe what’s true and desirable for yourself individually, and knowledge and respect for your own sexual identity and those different from you.

Without that kind of knowledge, which should be basic and not controversial, I suspect it may be hard for students to draw easy conclusions about whether the health information they have matches up to the realities of their lives.

Reason to consider unschooling, #374

In Suburb, Battle Goes Public on Bullying of Gay Students  (New York Times, 9/13/11)

It seems that teachers and principals in Minnesota aren’t totally, completely, 100% sure about protecting kids from bullying based on their sexuality.

After years of harsh conflict between advocates for gay students and Christian conservatives, the issue was already highly charged here. Then in July, six students brought a lawsuit contending that school officials have failed to stop relentless antigay bullying and that a district policy requiring teachers to remain “neutral” on issues of sexual orientation has fostered oppressive silence and a corrosive stigma.

….

School officials say they are caught in the middle, while gay rights advocates say there is no middle ground on questions of basic human rights.

School officials say they are “caught in the middle.”  Between allowing students to be hounded–occasionally to death–by abuse and misinformation, and stepping in to stop it.  Somebody here missed a lesson on what it means to be an educator.

Mr. Carlson, the superintendent, agreed that bullying persists but strongly denied that the school environment is generally hostile.

I have no words.

Talking about bullying makes me less reasoned and mellow than usual.

Under a recent law, the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, New Jersey now has the most stringent and extensive anti-bullying policies of any state.  The Times has an article today about the administrative and enforcement hardships that the law will impose on New Jersey schools (Bullying Law Puts New Jersey Schools On the Spot).

I’m pretty unsympathetic to the perspective expressed by one Richard G. Bozza, executive director of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators: “I think this has gone well overboard,” he says.  “Now we have to police the community 24 hours a day.  Where are the people and the resources to do this?”

School administrators…. Don’t think you need a law to force you to keep students safe in your schools?  Then you need to prove that you can do so without one.  But you haven’t.

When you create and preside over an environment that invites abuse of the vulnerable, then yes, you’re actually accountable for what happens to them in that environment.

When you claim to be acting in loco parentis, in the place of students’ parents while they’re in your power, then yes, you’re responsible for protecting them from abuse.

I don’t know how representative Bozza’s opinion is of other members of the Association of School Administrators, but he sounds downright flabbergasted and resentful than when you claim to be responsible for students’ learning and living environments (and I think it’s fair to call school a living environment, when students spend a third or more of their time there), you are actually responsible for students’ learning and living environments. 

You can’t have it both ways.  You can’t claim the ability to legally compel students to spend eight hours a day in your facilities, to legally be acting in place of their parents, and then abdicate actual responsibility for their well-being.

Where are you supposed to get the people and the resources to enact this?  That’s not the problem of the bullying victims in your districts.  Get it together.

Not up for actually protecting kids?  Then you’re in the wrong job.

Does the New Jersey law go overboard in its requirements?  Yeah, maybe, but then you should’ve proven that you can do your job without it.  If kids are still being abused in your schools while staff turn a blind eye or claim powerlessness, you haven’t.

A hope for neurodiversity in education

Sometimes when I’m feeling frustrated and pessimistic, I get to wondering if humanity is irredeemably stupid.  Sometimes I look around at some of the things we do to each other and the immensity of the problems we’ve created for ourselves through greed and short-sightedness, and the state of politics in this country, and just can’t fathom how we’re ever going to find the unity, compassion, and concerted problem-solving to get ourselves out.

But I’ve been watching TED talks lately…and this conference has found a really astonishing number of people who have totally brilliant ideas and things to say.  You can really click randomly on just about any TED talk video, and people you’ve never heard of before in a hugely diverse range of disciplines are saying and doing incredible things.  Which makes me think, instead, that we actually have a nearly infinite number of wise and brilliant people on our side.

This talk by Sir Ken Robinson is actually about 5 years old, but for that I think what he says is actually more urgent now and not less.  He says that we’re actually educating kids out of their creativity and natural genius, to our own impoverishment…that we actually stigmatize many kinds of intelligence that simply don’t perform well in a confined classroom environment or on a standardized test.

Creativity isn’t just about making art; it’s that misunderestimation that makes it easy to marginalize as impractical or financially untenable.  We have environmental problems, health problems, food problems, and budget problems, and they’re all going to require creativity to solve.  Balancing our budget will take creativity.  Making alternatives to fossil fuels safe and affordable will take creativity.  Finding ways to teach kids from the most difficult of life circumstances takes creativity (like setting up a pirate supply store as a front for a free tutoring center, as Dave Eggers explains here).

“It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp,” Robinson says, noting that we’re trying to educate kids for the next 50 years of their lives, but we have no idea what the world will be like in 5 years.  We have absolutely no basis on which to say that one kind of thinking, one curriculum or set of skills or knowledge, will be the most important one in the future and therefore to stigmatize all the others.

It’s here that I’d like the educational establishment to consider borrowing an idea from the autism community:  neurodiversity, or the conviction that there is very broad natural variation in human neurological wiring, in which even difficult differences should be valued on their own terms.  It’s become a somewhat contentious term and there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of it, but I don’t believe that it’s a denial of the reality of the disabling aspects of this condition, or a denial that people need and deserve help with things that really impede their quality of life.  I see neurodiversity as asking us to understand and accept a way of thought and a way of being on its own terms before we devalue it or decide it should be eradicated from the human experience, to see people first for their gifts and the ways in which humanity needs them.

As Temple Grandin says, “the world needs all kinds of minds.”

To me, neurodiversity’s not just about how we value autistic people, but how we value everyone who thinks differently, anyone who’s out of step with what the culture has decided it values and doesn’t value, and whatever is distinctive about every person.

Very much echoing what I interpret to be at the heart of the neurodiversity movement’s goals, Robinson says “Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.  At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.”

Robinson talks specifically about how dance and performance arts are devalued in the educational system, and I think of the League of Extraordinary Dancers, as well as all the dancers I’ve worked with, who never stop amazing me with how their brains work in ways that mine doesn’t.  Skills like these are probably not measurable by standardized test, but, I mean, they only have the potential to revolutionize assumptions about what the human body is capable of and the artistic potential of technology and the internet.

No one gets better or stronger or smarter by being defined and valued according to their weaknesses, but that’s exactly how we educate kids.  We sort students out by what’s wrong with them instead of allowing them the resources and freedom to nurture what’s right with themselves.

I think of Hogwarts, by contrast, which begins the process of formal education by sorting students according to their most basic strengths: Gryffindor students are courageous, Ravenclaws clever, Hufflepuffs hardworking and fair, and Slytherins cunning and ambitious.  Notice how the Sorting Hat doesn’t sort anyone out by their deficiencies.  And how it required the gifts of every single House to save the world from Voldemort.  (Even Slytherin, reviled by all the other houses…Snape’s cunning obviously being what allowed him to act as a double agent for the Order, and it was Narcissa Malfoy’s loyalty to her own family first and foremost that led her to betray Voldemort.)

We all need each other.  We all need each other’s brilliance.

{I couldn’t exactly weave this in to my thesis, but it’s just beautiful and I wanted to share it: spoken word poet Sarah Kay talks about how she found out what she wanted to do, using poetry to solve problems, and teaching self-expression through performance poetry.}

All you have to do

I am in love with this passage I came across from Sugar, who is consequently my new favorite advice columnist.  She writes in The Rumpus.

“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth.

But that’s all.”

Long live the written word

I got busy and haven’t had much time for writing lately, though I was following with interest the debate that broke out over the course of a couple weeks, across internet news sources, about, of all things, writing.  Specifically, on the value of cursive.  Whether we should still be teaching it, what its value is, whether it’s effectively a dead language, an art form but with little practical utility in the age of ubiquitous keyboards, a waste of teaching time or whether it’s still a necessary skill.

The Case for Cursive (New York Times)

The End of Cursive (The Responsibility Project)

Cursive is Dead, Long Live Typing With Our Keyboard Pushers! (The Village Voice)

Handwriting is a 21st Century Skill (The Atlantic)

Dozens of commenters attempted the argument that we shouldn’t waste time on cursive anymore because they never have to use it in their work.  But that would be like me saying that because I don’t use calculus on a day to day basis, we should stop teaching it.  I don’t use calculus; that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who need to use calculus.

And I need to write by hand on a nearly daily basis: Aside from this blog, I still keep a personal journal.  At rehearsals, while I mostly type notes immediately into my laptop, I can’t always have it with me, and the ability to write notes quickly and understandably is indispensable.  In college, I never took class notes on my laptop, even though I can type faster than writing, not only to avoid carrying a computer around all day but because somehow the physical act of writing makes me visually absorb and retain the information better than typing it does.  I still keep a paper planner for the same reason despite the easy and free availability of a number of computerized options.  If I haven’t written it, I haven’t actually remembered it quite the same way.  I write to my grandparents–both of my grandmothers have gorgeous cursive handwriting–and also to friends.  A Facebook message, fantastic as I think Facebook is, can’t beat the time and attention inherent in a real letter for some kinds of personal communication.  I love the idea of something being physically carried between two people, an artifact of affection.  There’s note-taking in circumstances where it would be rude to whip out a computer, but I can do so discretely and quietly with a notebook.

But more importantly that all of that for me, none of which is totally insurmountable without cursive, is this.  Most of this debate has been conducted as if the content or quality of writing or communication exists independently of its format or medium, and I don’t think that’s true.  I think that the physical process by which we communicate deeply affects the quality of the communication.  Not only do I write much differently than I speak, but there are things that I actually cannot speak, that I can only write.  Someone once described the phenomenon very succinctly when she wrote of her own daughter, “It’s like her hands know a language her mouth doesn’t.”  (Laura, this happened somewhere on your blog, but I cannot for the life of me find the post or the comment to link to it.)  Most people apparently can talk through their problems and uncertainties; I can’t.  Speaking is too much work for me to engage in problem-solving at the same time.  It requires a level of translation that writing somehow doesn’t.  I can’t problem-solve by speaking, but I can problem-solve by writing.

And within the realm of writing, I not only write very differently when I’m typing as opposed to writing by hand, but there are things that I cannot articulate by typing, only by handwriting, and vice versa.  There are thoughts that I can only will into existence with pen and paper.  Almost any creative, emotional or personal writing, I must do by hand.  When I write poetry (which I still do very occasionally), I can only do a first draft by hand.  I literally can’t type it; the words and the meter won’t come.  And something about the quality of thinking that requires complex or deep reflection matches the speed of writing in cursive for me.  Printing is far too slow to be useful for much of anything to me.  Typing is too fast; my fingers can get ahead of my brain to the point that what I type is meaningless.  Writing in cursive matches up to the speed of my train of thought.

It’s like how in Harry Potter’s universe, wizards require a wand to do magic.  Children can express a kind of vague and disorganized magic by will alone, but a real wizard has to use a wand for any purposeful, articulated magic.  For some kinds of writing and some kinds of thinking, my hand needs a pen the way a wizard needs a wand.

(But for other kinds of writing, typing is much better than writing by hand: anything fairly factual and straightforward, requiring the transcription of a large amount of information or detail, or when I basically already know what I want to say and only need to fine-tune it, such as when I have a longer paper or essay already extensively outlined.)

For me, the ability to write in cursive isn’t just a technical one, a compromise in speed between printing and typing, or an artistic one.  Cursive is a key to my own mind and my own creativity that’s granted by nothing else.  For me, saying that we shouldn’t teach or use cursive anymore is like saying that an entire mode of thought, practically an entire language, and one I think we can ill-afford to lose, should be eliminated.  And I think that’s something worth resisting, for more than aesthetic or romantic reasons.

Why unschooling….

I’ve sort of been looking out for an excuse to write about this topic, and lo and behold, I got a request (thank you bbsmum!).

One day in college I was sick in bed, and asked a friend to bring me over some tea and books.  One of the books she brought me from her personal stack of library books was Grace Llewellyn’s Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life & Education.  As evidence of how much she said she’d loved it herself, it was already weeks overdue.

I’d never heard of unschooling before, but I was a convert.  I mean, I sort of understood, with that book, how people become religious zealots.  It so succinctly and vividly captured everything that I felt was Wrong with the public education system.

At its most basic, the concept of “unschooling” contests the premise of the traditional school system that children best learn what they need to know by being forcibly confined to a classroom for 7 hours a day, 9 months a year, for 13 years, and mandated to learn all the same things at the same time in the same way as everyone else for most of those years.  I’ve come to think of it as “factory-style schooling.”

Rather, the premise of the unschooling movement is that children come as they are desperate to learn, they don’t much have to be coerced or threatened into it, that people learn best by doing first-hand what they’re truly interested in.  That the wide world is full of educational opportunities free for the asking and people should be able to use whatever resources work best for their own purposes.  And that, intrinsically, children deserve no less than adults to be taken seriously as people worthy of respect and of having a say in the conduct of their own lives.

Some caveats: I’m speaking of the American compulsory public school system in its predominant form.  I’m not against the idea of any schools ever, at all.  I have no personal experience of charter schools, specialty schools like Montessori or Waldorf or schools designed to accommodate specific disabilities or special interests, so I don’t have any basis on which to make generalizations or criticisms of them.  I know that people choose those educational options for a whole variety of reasons (the operative word being choose).  And I know that some public schools are doing really wonderful things (one of the coolest in my opinion being the New York Harbor School) to give their students greater opportunity for self-direction and creativity.

I’ll try to be brief (ha), as there are many good books on this subject, about some of the reasons I think unschooling is worthy of consideration as an alternative to how we currently educate most of our kids:

1. The school system does not have students’ best interests at heart.  It can’t.  It’s incapable of having any respect for individual learning needs, life needs, passions or ambitions that fall outside the narrow parameters it’s designed to allow.  Because the system isn’t designed to give impassioned minds as free a reign in their own highest development as possible, but to keep as many young people under control in as small a space as possible.  The convenience of the system will always take precedence over individual well-being.

2. The school system is dishonest.  It lies to students about what life is really like and what will be required of them.  The traits most required for success in school are obedience and credulity, whereas the traits most required for success in life are creative problem solving, courage and critical thinking.  Rather than discouraging immaturity, ignorance and short-sightedness, it exploits those traits to keep students under control with fear of the future.  Adults with any self-regard wouldn’t put up with a fraction of the disrespect, humiliation and absurdity that school kids do every day only because they don’t know that they have a choice.  By isolating students from working adults and from the world as it really is, schools create the impression that the knowledge they offer is all there is, and the way they require learning is the only valid way.  The system calls people failures who simply can’t do things the way it demands.  It says that education is something separate from real life by cutting students off from the world around them and from genuine experience.  It says that life is something you’re preparing for, that you’ll be qualified for upon graduation, not something that you are living.

3. Age grading reinforces immaturity.  It deprives kids of older classmates to be role models and mentors, younger classmates to be models and mentors for, and pathologizes healthy and helpful relationships between students of all ages as developmentally inappropriate or undesirable.  It demands that there’s a right or a wrong age to learn any given subject or skill.

4.  I’ve made this argument before, so I’ll truly keep it short here: the main values instilled by the school system are obedience, conformity, and fear of authority.  Those are not the traits we most need citizens to have to fix our democracy, our economy, and our environment.

5. The real world is so much better, so beautiful, wondrous, strange, astonishing and so full of things to learn to do.  Thirteen years is too long to spend locked up.

Though I’m tempted to try to anticipate and preemptively answer some of the more common objections to the unschooling movement, I’m curious to see what will naturally come up in discussion.  So comments section, take it away!

Evolution FAIL

I’m not a big fan of mandatory schooling, as most of my readers will already know.  Okay, I’m not a fan at all.  But I’m starting to think it’s about time to require everyone to read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

And I mean everyone.

I read it myself last year, in a campaign of reading stuff that we should’ve been assigned in school but weren’t.  I was a little bit (okay, a lot) appalled that as much as I thought I knew about evolution, I had actually attained a degree in biology without ever having read the seminal work on the subject.

If you need evidence that our schools are profoundly failing to educate, consider that.  Most biology students never have to actually read On the Origin of Species.

Or that, according to a Times article (On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan) on a survey published in Science magazine last month, 86 years after the Scopes trial, only 28 percent of high school biology teachers are actually teaching the straight facts about evolution, the foundational principle of modern biology, while 13 percent are still explicitly teaching creationism.

Srsly.

The article shines a light on what the study calls the “cautious 60 percent” of biology teachers who in some way, shape or form, compromise on teaching evolution outright.

In what other discipline would it not be outrageous to allow 73 percent (the 60 who don’t teach evolution straight up + the 13 who openly teach creationism) of our educators to bow in deference to religious fundamentalism?  But that’s what we’re doing in biology.  Wouldn’t there be nationwide outraged panic if it were found that an authoritarian sect of some religion other than Christianity were managing to seriously compromise how our kids are being taught?

Yet this is what’s going on in the overwhelming majority of our biology classrooms.

One professor quoted, Randy Moore, doesn’t think that better science education for instructors will help.  “They already know what evolution is,” he says.  “They were biology majors, or former biology students. They just reject what we told them.”

But do they really know what evolution is?  I doubt it.  If nearly three quarters of biology teachers aren’t really teaching evolution or teaching it in a half-hearted way; or if they, like me, got through school as high-achieving biology students without ever reading first-hand the definitive books on the topic, then they really might not.  And fundamentalist churches aren’t simply rejecting evolution; they’re lying about what the theory actually says and does not say.  So when someone who hears about evolution in school but rejects it for religious reasons, are they honestly rejecting an accurately presented representation of evolution, or are they believing their pastor over their science teacher when it comes to what evolution by natural selection really is?

So I come down, cautiously hopeful, on the side of the slightly more optimistic Dr. Eric Plutzer, who says that “We think the ‘cautious 60 percent’ represent a group of educators who, if they were better trained in science in general and in evolution in particular, would be more confident in their ability to explain controversial topics to their students, to parents, and to school board members.”

This is a cycle that can be broken, if educators know how to stand up for the facts.

Literature class outlawed in Arizona

This makes me so upset that I somewhat doubt my ability to write coherently about it.

Arizona Orders Tuscon to end Mexican-American Studies Program (New York Times)

The attorney general of Arizona has decided that a Tuscon magnet school’s Latino literature class an illegal propagandizing and brainwashing program, under a law which he himself wrote, seemingly for the specific purpose of targeting the Tuscon school district’s ethnic studies programs, after a perceived personal insult by a high-profile guest speaker:

It was Mr. Horne, as the state’s superintendent of public instruction, who wrote a law aimed at challenging Tucson’s ethnic-studies program….Mr. Horne’s battle with Tucson over ethnic studies dates to 2007, when Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, told high school students there in a speech that Republicans hated Latinos. Mr. Horne, a Republican, sent a top aide, Margaret Garcia Dugan, to the school to present a different perspective. He was infuriated when some students turned their backs and raised their fists in the air.

According to the Times article, the law explicitly forbids programs that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” suggestions that “portions of the Southwest…once part of Mexico should be returned to that country,” “promotion of resentment toward a race,” and programs that “are primarily for one race or that advocate ethnic solidarity instead of individuality.”

I’ve long had mixed feelings about ethnic studies programs.  And I haven’t attended Tuscon’s Latino studies class, so I can’t claim to know what’s going on.  But I doubt very, very, very much that students in a high school literature class are actually being indoctrinated to support the overthrow of the government of the United States.  And if denigration of individuality is the real problem, well, AG Horne, you might as well outlaw high school.

It seems far more likely that Horne is terrified by the prospect of a minority group, which he sees as a threat to his version of Americanism, taking justifiable pride in the literature of their own heritage, examining their place in American history and their hopes for its future, and that those hopes might conflict with his own.  He’s not afraid of a bunch of Latino high schoolers plotting to topple the US government; he’s afraid of them having a narrative of their place in society that’s valuable, unique, and powerful.

And he’s counting on misinformation, ignorance, apathy, and xenophobia to protect him from any real consequences for his astonishing and vindictive attack on students’ First Amendment rights and academic freedom.  He knows he probably won’t face any appreciable outrage from the state’s citizens, because not many people will see themselves in the group of young Latinos he’s maligning.  Not many people will perceive any threat to the freedoms or safety from intimidation that they take for granted in this action, because they aren’t part of a controversial literature class alleged to be inciting disloyalty and racial discord.  But they should.  Because if this can be done to any of us without the protest of our neighbors–being legally targeted for what we are, read, or learn–then it can be done to all of us, for any reason.

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Citing Individualism, Arizona Tries to Rein in Ethnic Studies in School (NYT)