Teach your children well
New England Primer, 1690
In 1647, the Massachusetts legislature passed the "Old Deluder Satan Act," which required selectmen to make sure parents educated their children. To help in that endeavor, the New England Primer was issued in 1690, whose goal it was to help children "define the limits of self by relating life to the authority of God and parents." This echoed the ancient commandment of the Torah to "honor thy mother and father." The first publicly funded school in America opened in Massachusetts in 1639 to help their citizens promote these values. They deemed the education of children crucial to sustain their culture.
This changed not in intent but rather in values with the establishment of the new country at the end of the 18th century. The emerging nation was a blend of different faiths and classes, and so a primer for all could not be predicated on a religious basis. Noah Webster, who would go on to participate in the writing of the Constitution and the publication of the first American dictionary, issued his Speller in 1785, that anteceded the work of the psychologist Jean Piaget by more than a hundred years, insisting that children passed through developmental stages, both physically and emotionally, which made it important to teach them certain things only when they were ready. Reading, for example, he recommended not be taught before the age of 5. Webster was entirely secular in his approach, reflecting the deism that was widespread in his generation. He made no mention of God in his speller; rather, he said its goal was to give children "the intellectual foundation for American nationalism."
He reflected the understanding of the founders that the system they had worked so hard to create was a complex set of rules designed to achieve a balance of power between competing systems – judicial, executive and legislative. This was not something that could be gleaned intuitively – children had to be 'educated.' If the balance couldn't be maintained, then the new republic would fall prey to the many despotic nations that surrounded it, nations ruled by men (kings) not laws. That is why the call was to "defend" the Constitution.
The state of Massachusetts made primary education compulsory in 1852, casting Webster's beliefs in law, to be followed by all the other states over the following century. It was commonly accepted then that the system of democracy was new and therefore had to be taught, more or less like operating a car – it is not a skill you are born with. Better informed kids would make better decisions when they were adults and took over the reins, and even more important, that this should be done by public monies.
The Americans thus decided that their children must learn how life works in order to manage the country they were to inherit from the founders, and the public should foot the bill. This varied from region to region, but every region had a system of values that it wanted to pass on. In this way, the United States is far from unique; all modern democracies have made compulsory education a requirement for their citizens, all with the firm belief that knowledge is critical to self-rule. Most fledgling democracies believed that if they didn't do this, their systems would be vulnerable to despots and corruption.
In America, however, the course of public education – that is, what values are taught - has taken many twists and turns. In the 1930's, John Dewey put forth a new idea that the purpose of education was to help the student realize his full potential so that he could use this ability for the greater good. He emphasized that this could best be done not by training them to memorize and repeat but by placing them in what he called 'laboratory' situations in which they had to work out problems with the skills they were learning –in other words, they had to learn for themselves, and incorporate the possibility that the solutions they might find could differ from those that had come before them because of advances on technology and knowledge. It is an idea that makes room for error and is at peace with a basic truth – humans are fallible, so basic problems may need to be addressed over and over again. Again, the emphasis is the same – the contribution to the community - but the ways and means may change.
Realizing one's full potential involved exposure to as many different kinds of knowledge as possible, and following on from Dewey's influence during the following three decades art, music, drama, history, science, and physical education were added to public school requirements. As late as the 1950's, high school students were required to take three separate courses in civics during their tenure. Think of the approach as positing the idea that knowing about chemistry might help you find better solutions for social problems – what E. O. Wilson calls "consilience." It makes you think for yourself, and offers the exciting possibility you might find a connection between two very different kinds of thought that no one has seen before you. It is a real turn-on.
By the mid twentieth century, Dewey's approach had developed into a need to maximize the creativity of children, and arts and science courses were integrated into the curricula. Mr. Wizard was a hit TV series on NBC in 1951, and children were doing lab experiments at home under his (Don Herbert's) direction. The Young People's Concerts, with Leonard Bernstein on the podium, were televised live on Sunday afternoons from Carnegie Hall, in New York, and millions of kids watched and learned how music could communicate just as well as words.. Anyone who attended school at that time remembers being taught to play an instrument, and class sessions listening to classical music were routine. Without doubt, this investment paid off in the cultural explosion that followed in the 1960's.
This approach reached its apex with the establishment of The Children's Television Workshop and its classic program Sesame Street in 1968, specifically aimed at a pre-school audience with the clear goal of influencing both cognitive and affective ability. Initially, its producers and researchers focused on their young viewers' cognitive skills, while addressing their affective skills indirectly, because they believed that focusing on cognitive skills would increase children's self-esteem and feelings of competency. This changed after their first years, and the development of social skills was pursued with equal vigor.
But this all gave way in the 1980's when, for the first time, the goal of education changed from contribution to the community to the need for an individual to succeed financially. A movement began to emphasize test scores in subjects that were seen as prerequisites to the acquisition of a well-paying job. Subjects that could not be evaluated by objective test scores – art, drama, music, history – were downplayed. This movement came to a climax in 2001 with the passage of the NCLB (No child left behind) laws in the United States congress, which stripped federal funding from any public school subject that could not be measured by standardized testing. The fact that was overlooked was that this emphasis is individual – not communal. The objective was to escape something, not improve it, in this case poverty, but to do it individually, not collectively. The values of different communities therefore played no part in the equation, because the goal was to get out of the community, not strengthen it. Remember that the 80's were the age of Gordon Gekko, the iconic hero of Wall Street, who famously said 'greed is good.'
Curricula in public schools narrowed like an avalanche. In the Los Angeles school district, for example, one-third of all art teachers were fired between 2008 and 2012. In the five year period 1999-2004, the number of students involved in music education in California schools dropped by 46.5% and more than a thousand music teachers were fired. Today it is the rare public school that requires children to learn how to paint, to learn to play an instrument or to do lab work. In place of creativity, the emphasis has become social interaction, fueled by media, and managed on an individual basis, not collectively, and therefore vulnerable to people who had little knowledge. Arguably, children completing high school today are far less creative than those that went to school half a century ago, but they chat more.
But more than this – it is no longer compulsory to learn how the system works. Only nine states today require their schools to teach civics for a year; 30 require a half year; and 11 have no requirement at all. On the NAEP civics assessment in 2017, it was found that only 25% of US students enrolled in public high schools were proficient in civics. These are the people that are supposed to run the country in a few years. When you talk to them about how important it is to defend the Constitution they have no idea what you are talking about because they never learned. The same NAEP assessment found that wealthy white students are six time more likely to have a grasp of how the system works than poor students of Latino or Black heritage.
Half of Israeli children have no idea who David Ben Gurion is, and a recent publication honoring a commemoration of his life was published with a picture of someone else, which nobody noticed. Most Israeli children cannot name the first president of the country, not to mention those they came after. Instruction in how the Israeli parliamentary system works is not required in high school, and, of course, there is not a body of law like a Constitution, to inform people how to vote when they go to the polls. Political parties, which have no formal role in government, have become the only anchor for the Israeli electorate, meaning that vote is cast by affiliation, not by understanding. The idea is that you hire somebody else to run the country rather than learning how to do so yourself.
Last month the PISA report (Program for International Student Assessment) for 2018 was published. These tests, sponsored by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), have been the most reliable measure of scholastic achievement in the world for the past two decades. They measure the performance of 15 year olds by nation across the world. The current report was a shock for nations in the west.
The top countries in reading (English) are the four easternmost provinces of China, then Singapore and Macao; the leaders in Math are the same three nations; and the story is repeated again in Science. The USA is in 13th place in reading, 38th place in Math and 18th place in Science, but this beats Israel, which was ranked 37th in reading, 42nd in Math, and 41st in Science. The income level of students tested in China is below that of all OECD, yet they outperformed all OECD countries.
In Israel, the 10% most economically advantaged students outperformed the 10% least economically advantaged students by 141 points in reading (equal to 3 years of schooling); the results for math and science were similar, and overall the gap between high and low income students was an average of 170 points (equal to 4 years of schooling) , the largest in the world.
Class size turns out to be insignificant in performance – class size in China can average as high as 50. Income is also not an indicator, as most Chinese students come from a lower income bracket than their western counterparts.
What are significant are the length of a school day, and the length of a school year. The average school day in China is 9.5 hours; in the USA it is 6.5. The average number of school days per year in China is 220 (in Japan it is 230 and Korea is 220). In the USA the school year is 180 days. There is no summer vacation in East Asia – they learn the year round.
You take out what you put in. When you invest less in education, you end up with a lower skilled population charged with helping your country succeed, however you define that. And, let's be clear, investment is not measured in terms of money. The budget for public education in the USA has more than doubled since the 1970s, but, like the health system in America, throwing money at the problem has not provided a solution.
No, the investment here is personal – it is measured in time and in values. 30% of American kids today fail to complete high school, and in urban settings it can be as high as half. Chinese students spend an average of three hours of homework a day, twice the global average.
It is no accident that the decline of public involvement in education in democracies across the world goes hand in hand with the growing gap between the rich and poor. When people have individual wealth, they do tend to invest in the education of their own children, but, at the same time, they become less willing to invest in the education of other people's children. It becomes a vicious cycle in which the well-off have the opportunity to become increasing better educated, and therefore gain the advantage in competing for skilled occupations, while the poor become increasingly less educated and confined to minimal skill employment, or worse, no employment at all.
When you create a culture that places a low value on knowledge, then you inherit a decision-making constituency that can be reckless, unaware of precedent, lacking in patience, and unwilling to learn – and that's what has come about in America. Immediate gratification, a product offered by social media, suggests that you can have what you want by learning little. But this is untrue, and the fact that America is losing the battle for the future to nations in the East is evidence to that fact.
In the Canadian film, The Fall of the American Empire, a professor of history from McGill University explains that empires fall when the individual agenda takes precedence over the public one. When concern for the community becomes far less important than concern for self, then a heterogeneous republic cannot be sustained. The trend will be to break apart larger units into smaller ones, what happened to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and what now threatens Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom.
We live in a world where capital is more valued than labor and social interaction is more valued than knowledge. Conversing with people is more important than truly knowing what you are talking about, and that sets a dangerous precedent. When people don't know, they think small.
The United States now has a president with literally no experience in public service and flaunts a culture in which all opinions are considered equal (Facebook' s policy of posting all ads whether they are true or not).That simply is not true – not all opinions are equal – informed opinion is more valuable than uninformed. Placing your trust in people with no education is like agreeing to be operated upon by a surgeon who learned the trade by watching Grey's Anatomy – it's stupid.
Perhaps we are moving into a future when decision-making will be carried out by artificial intelligence, in which case we can all be stupid and it won't matter. But on the off chance that humans may still come up with a creative approach if they learn all the data, something that so far AI can't do, it would be worthwhile to keep the pedal to the metal when it comes to learning.
And the process can be enlightening. If we are to publicly fund educating children with a set of values, like the Puritans did, like the founders of the Republic did, then we, ourselves, must be clear about what values we want to impart. That is the real advantage of education – to clarify what is important, and to realize that what is important will change over time, so that every generation must weigh in anew.
Teach your children well.
Tony Gregory
December 2019