According to Francis Schrag the correct answer is (e).
Who’s Schrag? He’s chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies and a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin. Among his numerous writings is a book entitled Back to Basics.
There’s a "back to basics" movement. But Schrag is having none of that. He really means basics! Why do we have schools? What are we trying to accomplish? Why do we care about teachers, curriculum, and standards? If you like thinking about education issues, read it. No column can do it justice.
Schrag says we want students to: (1) "care about arguments and evidence," (2) "be disposed to continue their own learning," and (3) "have developed the capacity" to do so. Period.
You can argue with that, and I do. But he’s persuasive. In part, because he has the philosopher’s beguiling habit of stating (and demolishing) the arguments against his positions.
A mere focus on sufficient memorization to get "good grades," and the entrance exam test scores for college, doesn’t prepare a student for either a happy life or a productive profession.
(Indeed, a part of my motivation for running for school board is the failure of K-12 schools to prepare students very well for law school and practice.)
Flash back to over 30 years ago. President Lyndon Johnson asked me to make a one-man trip and report about Southeast Asia. The Viet Nam war was heating up. He just wanted one more independent view.
There were a lot of troublesome things about that war in my report. But one was how hard it is even to conduct, let alone "win," a war if you don’t know your enemy’s language and culture.
I had long since forgotten that experience until last week back in Washington for a VITA board meeting. The Iowa City Press-Citizen isn’t delivered in Washington, so I had to settle for the Washington Post.
It contained a book review of Kai Bird’s The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms. "Mac" Bundy, as we called him, was Johnson’s National Security Advisor. He was a brilliant, well-educated man, formerly dean at Harvard, later president of the Ford Foundation.
And yet, the book suggests, he could not imagine a Vietnamese victory. What was lacking was a "curiosity deriving from respect for a deeply alien culture." And because he had "no understanding . . . this marriage of intellectual self-assurance and condescension toward other cultures was ill-fated."
Most would envy this Harvard dean his Groton and Yale education. But it did not (in this instance) meet Schrag’s test. It had not prepared him to be curious about another culture, to seek out more evidence, and to continue learning.
Schrag’s point is if we really want to prepare our students "for the Twenty-First Century" the information we provide them today (including information about Vietnamese culture) won’t be of much use 20 years from now. It’s their attitude toward learning, their passion for research, evidence, and arguments, and their disposition to continue learning, that will save them – and perhaps the rest of us as well.
There’s no end of movement books about K-12 education. Each has a different take. All offer integrated approaches, are instructive and thought provoking. Weber Elementary uses Ernest Boyer’s The Basic School as its blueprint.
Implicit in Schrag’s thesis, however, is the importance of thinking about "basics." What are we trying to accomplish? If Schrag is right, and it’s not test scores, what accountability do we want? What are our measurable goals? How would we know if we were ever successful?
It is not obvious what our schools should be doing, especially if you’re willing to rethink Schrag’s "basics." And, of course, those basics include the possibility of pilot projects, or differing site-based missions.
What is obvious is that (a) there are lots of options,
and (b) the vision, long range planning, accountability and oversight the
Board alone can provide requires more precision and community consensus
than we have now.
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Nicholas Johnson is an Iowa City School Board member.