A Presbyterian Approach to Education

The title will make sense in the second half of this post…

A couple of weeks ago Laura at 11D had a post up where she talked about some ‘alternate’ concepts for the classroom:

In yesterday’s comment section, Wendy pointed to an op-ed in the New York Times by Susan Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College. Engel writes that as policy talk shifts from health care to education, we should consider designing “a curriculum that teaches what truly matters.”

Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on.

So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.

She says that teachers need to be freed up a laundry list of goals for every period. They should immerse the children in a reading environment. Children should have the time to thoroughly read and discuss books, rather than marching from one subject to the next.

Children should write essays or creative stories for ONE HOUR EVERY DAY. Does your child write for one hour every day? Mine doesn’t. I just forwarded this article to my son’s principal and said that I agreed that this was an important goal.

Engel also writes that kids shouldn’t be memorizing useless math formulas and scientific terms that aren’t grounded in experiments and experience. They should have time to explore through play.

I liked Engel’s opinion piece a lot. Kids should be reading all the time. Kids should be writing and exploring all time. And they’re not.

Nothing really to disagree with here. I think almost anyone who takes an interest in education policy realizes that the system has become hopelessly over-complicated. Teachers lament, with good reason, the rigid structure of mandated curriculum and the sheer volume of knowledge we are trying to stuff into our kid’s brains. Parents agree.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we approach education in our household lately. My wife and I are both college graduates and big believers in education being important. We come from pretty different backgrounds though, with my wife being a great student in high school and an even better student in college and me being an extremely mediocre student until I hit college and finally got my act together. The interesting thing though is that we turned out to be pretty much on par with each other intellectually (in my humble opinion). So what got us both from point A to point B with completely different academic performances? I think it was reading.

My wife and I are voracious readers and we both love fiction. I also love non-fiction in the form of history and other semi-academic subjects. When I was growing up I would spend much of my summers lying on the living room floor and reading our set of encyclopedias. I would pick random subjects and just plow through them, probably only understanding a fraction of the information. During the school year I would also rush through my homework so I could read through my grandparents’ huge collection of National Geographic magazines. So it wasn’t that I didn’t like to learn – I just wanted to learn in a more self-directed way. I think my reading helped me stay on track intellectually even when I was falling behind my fellow students in my classroom performance. When I finally got to college and was taking classes that allowed me to draw on the knowledge I had built independently, I was able to shine.

So back to our family… We have two daughters that present two different problems for us as parents. With our youngest daughter the problem is that she hates reading with a passion that burns like the sun. She’s not a bad reader, she’s just a disinterested one. My fear with her is that I believe a love of reading leads to an intellectual curiosity that still hasn’t seemed to spark for her yet. We keep hoping (and praying) it will happen, but so far it has not. She can study well, pass a test, clear the hard drive and move on to the next task. So far though I don’t know that anything has really grabbed her intellectually for more than a passing moment. She’s just kind of in her own little world, which may also be as much a product of her age as anything else.

With our oldest daughter the sparks are there. They are all over the place. She reminds me so much of myself with varied interests in a lot of things, a bit of intellectual ADD. The internet has no doubt contributed to this state in the way that 20+ volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica did for me. She reads and reads and reads and even when she’s watching TV she seems to be thinking about what she is watching and not just letting Hollywood download content into her brain. Unfortunately I also see myself in her with her academic performance. Completing her assigned work seems to be of less and less importance. She seems to be content to be a C student and while she certainly wants to go to college, she has convinced herself that is still light years away. We have had battles this year over her studies and it’s to the point where my wife and I have made a tactical withdrawal to save our own sanity.

So two different kids, two different needs. One needs to develop an intellectual curiosity and a love of reading, the other needs to narrow her focus and realize her assignments are not optional. What do we do as parents to deal with this? Laura mentions one of my favorite movies and a contrary approach to education it briefly touches on:

A River Runs Through It is one of my favorite movies. In the opening scene, the narrator talks about his father, a Presbyterian minister, and his method for educating his boys. In the morning, they wrote and rewrote and rewrote essays making them as lean as possible. In the afternoon, the boys were let loose to fly fish until dinner. Sometimes when I’m working with Jonah, I channel Norman’s father and emphasize the importance of perfection, hard work, and playing outside in the sun.

Yes, I have an inner Presbyterian minister.

This is the way a perfect school would be run. However, few schools can operate that way except for in very affluent communities. This system relies on certain assumptions. It assumes that all children come prepared to learn. It assumes that all teachers have a love of learning and are themselves readers and writers. It assumes that state legislatures haven’t imposed rules about time spent in health class or on mandatory lessons on bullying that the children promptly ignore. It assumes that all children have done their homework and show up for school on a regular basis. It assumes that parents are encouraging these same goals at home. It assumes the teachers aren’t burnt out from the last round of curriculum reforms.

I have to admit this is pretty appealing. I occasionally have fantasies of home-schooling my daughters. I would follow a similar program to that of the Reverend Maclean with a heavy emphasis on reading and writing, ample time outside with the end-goal being not a brilliant child but one full of intellectual curiosity and the ability to self-direct their learning. That would serve them better than anything else in college. It certainly did for me. In the meantime and with homeschooling only a dream, the question is how to work within the current system while leading your child in a direction you think is a bit more productive and I dare say natural.

For me I think the best path forward is to keep exposing my youngest to good books, to keep presenting her with new ideas and concepts in the hope that something grabs hold (if I could pick a career for her it would be as a vet – because she does seem to love animals).  With my oldest I think we have to emphasize completing her work and doing it well as part of the path to being a responsible member of society (if she wants to stay employed). Outside of that I want to encourage her to use her free time to turn her brain loose and dig in to whatever subject strikes her fancy at a given moment. I just hope this is what’s best for both of them.