Irony on the rocks with a twist...

The Outside Looking In – Societal Perceptions

Public education for the majority of the Twentieth Century was modeled after the Industrial Age assembly line and behavioral psychology, which equated every student as merely a set of stimuli and responses, rather than as individual human beings with individual wants and needs. Students were “tracked” according to whether they were considered bound for further academic, general, or vocational training. Students who were unable to “fit” within these three areas were hidden away from view. Students were expected to behave, sit in rows, take notes, respond to teacher-led discussions, and come up with identical answers to problems. Deviation was not tolerated. Corporal punishment was permitted, as were other severe methods of forcing conformity. Students learned a much regimented curriculum that was considered to be more than adequate preparation for a male to spend a lifetime working in a factory, an office building, or further training at academic institutions. Exceptional males might become doctors, lawyers, or engineers. Female students were trained to be home-makers, secretaries, or teachers. The exceptional female might rise above these more common occupations as a nurse.

War changed many things. World War II in particular, saw women leaving the homes and the “traditional roles” to fill in for the men. Women got a taste of what it was like to earn a paycheck and do all the things that society normally proscribed for men. When the men returned home, women were again strongly encouraged to return to the home and leave “everything else” to the men. For a time at least, women seemed willing to reprise their previous roles, (but the times, they were a changing).

The “Baby Boom” that followed WWII would have a dramatic affect on public education. This dramatic increase in population would lead to the development of suburban housing tracts, which in turn encouraged the production of more roads, more cars, more home appliances, more babies, and of course, more schools. Everything about the Baby Boom would require the “assembly line” model of schools be rigidly enforced. There were simply too many kids for schools to cope, let alone experiment, with any other model. Besides, parents, teachers, politicians, and administrators were all of one mind when it came to education in this era. They worked together for the benefit of each student, so long as each student complied and conformed. Non-compliance and non-conformity was, by necessity, a punishable offense.

The evolution of public education from this very rigid model in the 1940’s and 1950’s would play an integral part in the social upheaval and backlash of the 1960’s. With the advent of the birth control pill, women were once and for all freed from their traditional roles. They could finally be as promiscuous as men without the constant fear of pregnancy. Women began to desire a larger role in society than that of the few professions open to them, and the one their wombs designated for them. This along with the anti-authoritarian backlash of the Vietnam War caused a major distrust of our government leaders and government institutions, of which public schools were. The new “liberated” parents of the younger generations would carry their distrust and disdain for authority to such an extent that it readily boiled down into their children, who became increasingly more unruly and undisciplined. The powers that were given to schools to enforce rigid conformity and discipline were taken away and replaced with no power at all. The Post Baby Boom generation, Generation “X” (my generation) would be passed the torch lit by the previous generation, and it would forever change public education.

By the time I was of school age, television was no longer a curiosity, but an influence to be reckoned with. New technologies were emerging that would bring motion picture special effects to never-before viewed levels. We were on the edge of the computer explosion, and the seeds of the Internet were already being sewn. By the time I was in sixth grade, (1981) cable television was becoming the norm (those who could not get cable had satellite dishes). The rotary telephone was rapidly being replaced with the touch tone. Answering machines were starting to be seen, and the first generation of affordable personal computers was flying off the shelves. VCRs, microwave ovens, and Compact Discs would soon follow, as the promise of the emerging Information Age began to gather steam.

Nobody could have predicted how far we would come from a technological standpoint, but this was one “Pandora’s box” that nobody wanted to close, and no institution would feel the brunt of this dramatic change more than public education. At the time, there were very few teaching jobs to be had. Teachers were often not well-paid, but they had good benefits, plus they had excellent vacation time. Most teachers taught their classes based upon the classical training given them using methods that were valid in previous Industrial Age era classrooms, but these methods were no longer valid in Information Age classrooms. The knowledge gap between teachers and students was no longer the same. Most teachers knew more about their content area than students, but they lacked the added dimension that technology could have offered them; students began to have an ever-widening edge that left most teachers behind. This phenomenon has continued to the present day in many ways. The older generations do not, as a rule, truly understand or comprehend technology, and have been intimidated by it, whereas the younger generations have grown up immersed and inundated by it. The Information Age has caused us to view “literacy” in a whole new light. Once this meant merely the ability to read, now literacy is applied to a much broader spectrum of abilities and understandings.

The New Student is not as challenged by the ideas of the past, not when they have the ideas of the future all around them all the time. They cannot relate to the written word the way previous generations did, for them, the written word is something one does only when one cannot use some other means of communication; and then usually it is truncated for use in text messaging over cell phones or the internet. Young people are constantly entertained by high technology means to the point that they find any other means of entertainment dull by comparison. Getting their attention and keeping it, takes far more effort than most teachers are capable of providing. It is not just that we are in an Information Age anymore, but that we are in a Digital Information Age that continues to elude educators and administrators alike. For young people who can not imagine a time before 100+ channels on TV, VCR’s, DVD’s, Cell Phones, Personal Computers, and so on, how can it be that we’re still using essentially the same methods of teaching and learning that haven’t been valid for more than 50 years?

We have a large amount of schools spread out over a large area. Not only do these schools have to contend with the fact that they are outdated in a period of rapid technological and social upheaval, but they have their own regional issues to deal with. Nearly all public schools have fluctuating student populations, and many face the lack of adequate resources to contend with this. Many formerly industrialized regions have seen those industries dry up and blow away (along with the funding these organizations provided). Severe poverty in these regions results in low teacher pay and even higher teacher expectations. Schools are seen as the “only way out” for many young people. Involvement in scholastic athletics is for many, their only way to afford a college education. For the relatively few who are talented enough to go beyond collegiate sports, there is the allure and dream of professional sports. Academics thus become a second-class citizen in this lofty pursuit; seen only as a means to an end, rather than the end in itself. The “heroes” of the school become the stereotypical male athletes and their cheerleader girlfriends. Hierarchy is determined not by who is the smartest, but by shallow concepts of popularity and vanity. The smart kids, who might someday actually have something to contribute to the world, add very little to the reputations of the schools, are given extra “brain teasers” to work on. Academics are devalued in our society. Intellectuals are considered “radical liberals” and “socialists” by adults, so why should young people view them as valuable? Smart people are viewed with distrust and distaste. They are given labels such as “geek” and “nerd.” They are often viewed as social outcasts because they aren’t a part of “the norm.”

Another group outside the norm is the “rebels,” who are often very smart, but use that intelligence to rail against rigid authority. Many of them come from broken homes, where they experienced firsthand the imperfections of the most important adult authority figures in their lives. Without being able to trust their own parents to be consistent and make them feel secure, it is no wonder why so many young people have an intense distrust and dislike for all authority figures. These are the ones who spend an inordinate amount of time in detention, in suspension, or waiting for more punishment to be meted out just outside the principal’s office. Their emasculated (and often split) parents just shrug and throw their hands up, not knowing what to do to correct the many problems their children encounter. Parents who can barely own up to their own irresponsible behaviors are unable to force their children to face them. The parents are victims of poor choices, and it is their children that ultimately suffer for them. This is too much for most parents to accept, so they want someone else to blame. Send in the teachers.

Public education in America has suffered through a social and technological crisis that is difficult to understand. It has its roots in the anti-authoritarian movement of the 1960’s which led people to see anything that had ties to the government as “the enemy.” Young people then became the parents of a generation of kids who were not subject to the same rigid discipline at home, and thus did not behave as such when they entered school. The children of the 1970’s also had an advantage over their predecessors, thanks to television shows such as Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers; they came to school with what were considered advanced skills and knowledge at the time. Schools had to adjust their curriculum to deal with a generation of kids who learned more and more from visual media rather than the written or spoken word. Schools did not adjust well. Many of them tried very radical changes that inevitably failed and the response was to force them to go back to what had worked before, but which couldn’t possibly work on a generation of students that lacked the same set of social and academic backgrounds as the students before them.

The Inside Looking Out – Teacher Perceptions

The law of averages seems to indicate that a given classroom of kids will spread out over a bell shaped curve that describes their grade level, skills, and abilities, but cannot assess potential. The highest number of children in the class will fall into an "average," whereas a minority of them will appear in the "low-end" and "high-end" portions of the curve. Because of the large numbers of young people there are in the public school system, it becomes a "numbers game," in which the most popular strategy is to "...teach to the middle" and hope that the "low-end" students can somehow keep up and the "high-end" students can somehow occupy themselves.

Then we use “one size fits all” standardized testing to score the performance of a school. These tests lack any incentives for the students to take them seriously, (and many of them do not) but are taken seriously in the assessment of the performance of the school. In our score-driven society, public schools are being tried, judged, convicted, and condemned, all based upon faulty criteria which seeks to vindicate parents and politicians of any wrongdoing in the matter, thus leaving the blame on the schools, (which eventually filters down to the teachers). This, of course, is only the academic portion of the story.

From a behavioral point of view, we have students with all sorts of issues and problems, many of which have nothing to do with school. The vast majority of them are likely due to issues with their family, and a good portion of them are the result of physiological, psychological, and neurological abnormalities that range from minor to severe. It used to be that those who demonstrated a severe threat, whether behavioral or academic, to the progress of the class as a whole were segregated from the "normal" classroom. This led to an outpouring of parental complaint that has now created the "multicultural" or "inclusive" classroom environment. By law child must now be placed in the least restrictive environment in which he or she can achieve according to whatever limitations they may have.
The problem with this concept is that the classroom teacher is not adequately trained, nor prepared to handle children with everything from minor to severe developmental delays, lack of ability or skills, behavioral abnormalities, and the various accommodations these children may require. Some children with these sorts of problems are "shadowed" by a special education facilitator, but this sort of assistance is generally hard to come by.

What we have is a veritable pressure-cooker of problems being compounded by political, economic, and social pressures which make heavy demands upon an institution without providing it with the necessary tools and resources to properly enact them. We then have the same political and social pressures blaming the institution for its inability to carry out the impossible tasks for which the pressure was brought to bear in the first place. In the vicious cycle of events, everyone blames the other, nothing ever gets done, and the students are the ones who ultimately get short-changed, by receiving a mediocre education at best.

The result of these two dissimilar images is one of anger, frustration, confusion, and disillusionment. Both are no more than reflections in a mirror; the perceptions of the people who are looking into them for the truth, and seeing only what they want to see. The current negative perceptions of teachers will eventually reach a point where there won’t be enough of them to go around. While this may benefit the current crop of teachers, it is certain to have a negative outcome on the student population. It is up to every part of the educational process to recognize their roles and responsibilities if we are to cure what ails public education. Only when parents, teachers, administrators, politicians, and students throw away their mirrors and start working with one another will things improve. As long as everyone remains locked in a constant battle to deflect the blame, there is no way the false images can be changed.

TANSTAAFL!