Opting In to Open-Minded Learning: A Fantasy

I never realized just how much teachers have in common with politicians until I wrote this post. Bottom line: they both need to avoid alienating the voter in order to keep their job. Yet by succeeding at that, they all-too-often lose their original meaning and purpose for seeking that job in the first place.

The life-blood of democracy? Another reason tenure matters:

First-time commenter Lana M. left this gem on the "U.S. Schools Work Teachers Smarter, not Harder" post a few days ago:

We have so much to learn from other countries rather than touting how great we are that it is pathetic. As James Loewen demonstrated in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, textbooks deliberately suppress facts believed to reflect poorly on the country so that students do not have the facts to understand how we got here nor why we need to change.

ALL public text books must meet the standards of the Texas State Board of Education before being manufactured.

Thus, whatever changes that board, controlled by conservative fundamentalist Christians, ask for, they get or the book won't be bought. This is how ideology gets built in to our texts. The Organization of American Historians have protested to Congress over the skewing of American History in education.

And ideology holds too much sway over the classroom; conservatives want to get destroy tenure to get rid of professors whose ideas they find dangerous. Freedom to question, to investigate is at risk; I know, not only from studying the oppression of teachers with critical ideas, but also from having spent 30 years teaching at both the college and h.s. level. [Emphases added.]

Lana's connection here of teacher tenure to true critical thinking is so important. It draws out how critical thinking is put at risk by the current union-bashing campaigns of the Business Roundtable, Bill Gates (good grief, see his latest TED Talk on how he's going to spend his money "creating good teachers," and be very, very afraid), KIPP and other charters, Teach for America, and the rest. Teachers need tenure to protect them from people who don't want students to be taught how to think.

(Reading is not thinking. It's often the very opposite. Many people think what they read, without ever thinking about it. That's dangerous. Reading is not thinking.)

Cut to: the following keeper from Deborah Meier, who entertains Diane Ravitch's question,

"Why are people so gullible?":

[W]hile we all have a “right” to our opinion, it’s an empty right if that’s all it is, or maybe a dangerous right!

In a democracy then, you and I might argue, learning how to reason (or empathize) our way into enough of the truth, with enough uncertainty to be open to new truths, needs to be “learned.” (Is that sentence too loaded?) Where might we learn such a mindset? In family, neighborhood, on TV, and above all, in those 12-13 years of schooling that are universal and free. And even required!!

The question for educators then is how to use those long years toward such ends. And, simultaneously, how to educate the larger public, as we learn more ourselves, as to why these newfangled innovations are worth doing. They cannot be imposed upon an unwilling public, or parents—because that in itself can’t happen in a democracy for very long....

It’s also tricky to “experiment" on children—to admit that we truly don’t entirely know whether our new approach will get us where we want to go, but bear with us!

That’s why I’m for such experiments not being imposed, but being studied carefully and applied to volunteers. The voluntary part goes against “random sample experimenting,” etc., but that’s a limitation we need to accept. Of course, since the “traditional” paths are in fact still unproven experiments, I want the right to opt out of them for my kids, too. (That’s where some form of controlled choice enters into my equation.)"

As I see it, both Lana M. and Ms. Meier are dancing around the issue of adult tolerance of open inquiry in schools. Of thinking. Of following questions and possible answers wherever they lead, regardless of our emotions about those destinations. For far too long - since Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, on and on - haven't the least intellectually-open adults been the brake on new ideas?

And in schools....

....aren't closed parents a retarding influence on the education of everybody else's children?

(More below the fold....)

So I love how Meier toys with the idea of parents "volunteering" for, or "opting in" to, classrooms in which their children are encouraged to *gasp* be skeptical - to not be, as Ravitch puts it, "gullible." To think.

What a wonderfully elegant idea. Allow the closed parents to opt out, so those parents wanting their children to receive open, no-nonsense, intellectually fearless sex ed, evolutionary science, religious inquiry, critical national history, and so forth, can get it - and not be held back by the members of the school community who fear their children will, through education, think differently, and perhaps understand more, than them. It's "medieval studies" and "modern studies" with a twist.

Really Kool Kreationist Graffiti: Creation Museum display, Kentucy, USA.

Opt-in to Open-Minded Education, the alternative take:

Michael's recent post on the Gay Rights blog raises the same issue in a specific context: "Should parents be notified if a teacher wants to discuss sexual orientation in class?" It made me float the same idea of "opt-in to open-thinking education" in a comment there, only with a little more sauce:

Since there are always, at least for another century or two, going to be parents who consider ancient books as the Only Word on science, ethics, race and gender and sex relations, metaphysics, philosophy, and the Key to Everything, I fantasize that The Rest of the World can get on with its children's learning through a parental permission policy of sorts.

Progressive, modern parents, who realize that the international community of scientists, for example, has better and more evidentiary answers than Iron Age books, can elect to have their children learn these things. The unfortunate kids of Parents Who Know Better Than Scientists can sit in separate classrooms puzzling over the moral implications of forced incest when Adam and Eve's children needed to propagate the species, how Satan could manufacture fossils, how Noah could possibly have traveled the tens of thousands of miles to collect a he and a she of each of the 5-to-30 million species on the planet and house them on his ark before the rains began - and how he led them back to Palestine from, say, Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America.

Or whether martyrs can choose the hair color of the virgins they're rewarded with in Paradise. And how that deal works for woman martyrs.

Mind you: I'm aware that many, many people of faith are beyond this literalism. They're not the ones calling for teachers' jobs at the pop of a real question mark. Their kids wouldn't be in the "opt-out" class.

The cafeteria conversations between students belonging to the two groups would cross-pollinate the modern ideas into the pre-modern minds of the second group.

And eventually, the second group would wither away, and there would be no need for parental permission to have children explore questions freely.

....at a certain point, we have to at least confront the fact that being a parent doesn't make us all-knowing, and that it's problematic to insist that our children are not exposed to ideas of which we disapprove.

If every parent was a genius - or even abreast of the state of knowledge in all subjects - schools woudn't be necessary. But your average parent was your average student - which means a "C" student - and so wouldn't necessarily make the best intellectual guide for a child.

The "Opt-out of Open Inquiry" model is something I'd love to see. Teachers can't possibly inform parents before-hand of every topic that will come up in a week of school. And if they tried, it would be like trying to herd a hundred cats: Johnny's mom says he's okay for birds and bees on Tuesday, but not Darwin on Wednesday. Janie's mom says....

This all seems doomed to remain fantasy, which is sad. Because the idea of a truly advanced, "open" education, unbothered by parents who insist their children be closed - and who threaten the jobs of teachers who slip up with a good but unpopular question - isn't that sort of what education is supposed to be?

In any case, it's one more reason to support tenure. Without protection from unfair dismissal, teachers will be afraid to encourage kids to think at all. And everybody but a small minority loses out.

Creationism Museum Graffiti photo by rauchdickson