What's Good for Kids

I love my profession.  I love working with students and with people who are passionate about kids’ well-being, whether they are my fellow teacher educators, teachers, administrators, 4-H sponsors, social workers, or parents.  While I fell into teaching by accident, it is no accident that I am still passionate about education 20 years later. 

That’s why the steadily deepening divide between teachers and policymakers is so dispiriting.   I believe that as wide as this gap is, we all want “what’s good for kids,” as my former principal, Chuck Holloway, used to say.  We just have different interpretations of what that means.  It seems to me that the central argument is linked to two competing theories:  positivism and critical theory.  The current testing and evaluative culture comes from the positivists, who believe that knowledge accumulation comes from the development of “building blocks” adding to an “edifice of knowledge” (Lincoln & Guba, 2003).  Quality criteria are judged by “conventional benchmarks of ‘rigor’: internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity.”  This is an example of what Paulo Freire famously named the “banking system” of learning, where the teacher deposits the knowledge in the student’s head, and s/he then dutifully reproduces it.

In contrast, criticalists believe that knowledge is situated and historical—that as culture shifts and changes, knowledge also changes; that who we are and where we come from influences what we come to know and how we know it.  Criticalists attend to the diversity of human experience by valuing individual knowledge AS MUCH AS they value communication, literacy, and numeracy skills.  The trouble is, it takes time and thoughtfulness to evaluate projects that require multiple drafts, collaboration, creativity, independent thinking, and critical analysis. The evaluative process is necessarily messy and complex to match the messiness and complexity of the learning. 

I have heard from multiple teachers in a variety of districts who have had to give up projects that required just these skills in order to meet impossibly long lists of objectives.  Some have to follow curriculum guides requiring classic texts be taught in lock-step (be on p. X on Wednesday).  Lesson and unit planning are foundational to teaching, and should include space for dialogue and “wrestling with the text,” as one of my professors put it.  It takes time—and often repetition—for students to understand academic discourses in any depth, no matter what the subject.  As an English teacher, it pains me that texts are positioned as items to “get through” before going on to the next.  Literature shapes our consciousness and our identities; and as such, deserves rich discussion guided by thoughtful and knowledgeable teachers.      

Clearly, I belong in the critical camp.  However, I am not going to demonize the educational positivists (well, I’ll try not to, anyway).  The same thing is happening in business culture.  Friends of mine have left (or been fired from) their professions because emphasis on the bottom line precluded the innovation, relationship-building, and risk-taking that made their work worthwhile. This relentless by-the-numbers game—whether it is test scores, sales figures, or any other narrow measures of success--diminishes us all.

In this time of great technological and cultural change, there is more and more attention paid to children’s physical safety (bike helmets, sitting in the back seat, locked schools, etc.) and after-school enrichment activities (every kid I know is in gymnastics, T-ball, soccer, and/or music).  Attention is being paid to developing the whole child.  Why then, is intellectual development being narrowed in the schools?  It is an interesting question.

When positivists and criticalists use negative rhetoric to target the other, the argument becomes personal, when the larger picture is about philosophical differences.  If leaders would take the time to hear, understand, and appreciate the other’s perspective, perhaps we would find that there is room for multiple kinds of teaching, learning, and evaluation.  Actually, I would just settle for hearing one another’s ideas on what is good for kids.  Surely, there is some common ground there.