Bricks, the building blocks.
written by Julie R. Neidlinger 13 comments link this post::This is a follow-up to my earlier post from today.::
I received an email from a reader who has many years of experience in the education field. The reader responded to both the original article by Mark Morford as well as the post by Dan Edelen that I linked to.
I've been a teacher for far too many years and have seen quite a number of changes in public education. I've also had the benefit of some private education. My feeling is that both the Morford article and the Edelen piece are somewhat simplistic in their views and conclusions. That's not to say that I don't agree with some of their observations, it's just that there are circumstances they don't address.
There is no question that parental involvement is a significant factor in a child's success in school. But it also is true that many children with less than ideal home circumstances are able to achieve much. I don't agree with Dan Edelen that a "6 out of 10 parent can't hope to produce an 8 out of 10 child." I have seen that very outcome many times over the years. What is crucial is how the parents address education, not just in words but in deeds.
What I have observed over the past 20 or so years is not that children are any less capable but rather that they are moving through the system less and less prepared. The skills that were taken for granted that a high school freshman should have are just not present in ever increasing numbers of students. Fewer kids appreciate good literature in part because fewer kids spend much time reading. I cannot expect the level of discourse in an essay today as I did even 10 years ago. Again, it's not that the students are less intelligent, it is simply that they don't approach education in the same manner as I and my peers did.
There are far too many distractions in the average child's life. One of the most frequent complaints we receive from parents is that their children are given far too much homework. I can tell you that I and my colleagues give far less homework than we did 5 or 10 years ago. The truth is that many of our kids are over committed to a wide variety of after school activities, and parents are increasingly reluctant to deny their children any experience.
I am not blind to the fact that public education is not fulfilling its responsibility to the children. In this I fault the propensity of our profession to swing from one fad to another without giving due consideration to the impact it may have on the education of our children. There is no question in my mind that the worst offenders are the education schools that perpetuate this mindless pabulum. My biggest lament is that we find ourselves increasingly teaching to the lowest common denominator, rather than challenging everyone to their highest potential.
Finally, I am not pessimistic about the future. There are far too many young minds who excel in spite of the deficiencies of public education. I still have the thrill of seeing young minds, with little life experience, struggle with weighty issues and form their own opinions after much due consideration. Mostly, I am happy to say that if challenged, most rise to meet the challenge.
After receiving this email, I received a few comments on the original post. Edelen left a comment in my original post that struck me as... well...it struck me.
I wish I could be more sympathetic to the case that rural kids are just as smart as their "sophisticated" West Coast and suburban counterparts, but in my rural area that's definitely not the case. (And yes, I lived in the Bay Area a few years, so I can honestly compare.)
Just yesterday we went to the polls to vote on funding the libraries in our county (since the state of Ohio has cut their funding so drastically most can barely even buy books). The modest levy, which would've cost most families about $30 a year, was defeated 56% to 44%. What stunned me as an enormous supporter of our libraries is that in the course of the run-up to the vote, I'd not talked with a single person who opposed that levy.
Only after the levy failed did I realize my perspective was off. I didn't talk to levy opponents because I don't run with the numbskull crowd in our county. Most of the people I talked with were erudite, intelligent people who understand the value of education and the great need for public libraries. I didn't talk with Cletus Sixpack who would much rather the government ensure free satellite access to every NFL game than toss a month's worth of cigarette money to a library. And guess what? Our county is full of Cletus Sixpacks.
While I don't run in Cletus's social circle, I do bump into Cletus a lot. The Sixpack household tends to be fertile, so I run into all his kids, too. Once you meet the kids, you realize Morford may be more aware than we know.
The line that caught my attention first was "I didn't talk to levy opponents because I don't run with the numbskull crowd in our county. Most of the people I talked with were erudite, intelligent people who understand the value of education and the great need for public libraries."
There's a lot in those two sentences that I could comment on, but I'd much rather just pick it out and say "look at this."
My response to his comment was that I hadn't attempted to make any case for "ruralism" and, in fact, tried to avoid the trite country mouse vs. city mouse debate that seems to arise in far too many discussions, education or otherwise.
I'd hesitate to say that I was trying to make any case regarding regional intelligence, but instead was saying that Morford's simplistic cause/effect limitation on what makes a non-dumb kid with all exceptions just being "lucky" was a very poor theory.
[...]
I think throwing in a reference to Cletus Sixpack is a kind of lazy way to discount that Cletus has his counterpart in urban areas, though the counterpart is often better dressed and has more electronic gadgets.
I am certainly not familiar with Ohio or any of its funding policies, nor do I want to make this a long and in-depth debate on funding policy. However, I can attest to one reason why reasonable people Not Named Cletus But Still Rural in a Rural State Like North Dakota tend to not support "minor" mil levies to fund schools and such: unbalanced reliance upon property taxes to do the funding of all things educational. Farmers and other landowners get tired of being called on to constantly fund the school expansion or new computer lab, particularly if they are part of a district that has an odd mix of students mostly from the cities while landowners fund schools that don't directly benefit them or their families. This example doesn't necessarily address Edelen's point, but the reason I noted this example was that there are sometimes reasons that people don't vote to fund things that seem "reasonable" beyond wanting NFL or NASCAR pumped into their home by the government, i.e. there are more complex explanations than simple Redneck-ism.
Obviously, that is a specific example which can be negated by someone else's specific example. My point, here, is that our personal examples and personal experience is limited. This makes Morford's column simplistic and out of touch, just as Edelen's comment revealed something very disheartening and just as out of touch. My own experience with the definition of "rural" is as equally out of touch as perhaps the reality of "rural" that Edelen has evidently experienced where he is from. I can't say that Morford has ever experienced "rural" since it didn't even come up as a consideration in his article.
All this talk about being dumb assumes we know what makes a person qualified as dumb. Inevitably, someone brings up people who can't make change. I will hereby admit that I loved geometry and calculus but that, when pressured to make change with a person standing in front of me, I absolutely cannot add and subtract. Oh yes, I understand how it should be done, but I can't do it. I take great comfort in Madeleine L'Engle's quote about math:
"Six months after I started to write Wrinkle, I discovered higher math. And for me, higher math is much easier than lower math. Lower math lost me in 4th grade when I was taught that 0 x 3 equals 0. Now, I understand that if I have nothing and I multiply it by 0, 3 something's are not going to appear. But, if I have 3 apples and I multiply them by 0, why are they going to vanish? So I wiped out lower math as philosophically untenable."
- Madeleine L'Engle
There is much to be said for different kinds of intelligences. In the comments section of Edelen's post, by Edelen himself, is the agreement that there are different kinds of intelligences:
Now I expect a person to be able to read and do math to at least a junior high school level, but some seemingly less educated people know things you and I don’t. Quite a few of the farmers in my area can’t keep up with some of the things I know about tech, but when it comes to knowledge of agriculture and animal husbandry, they make me look like an idiot.
I am having some difficulty reconciling this statement with the Cletus Sixpack juggernaut. I don't doubt the existence of some forms of Cletus Sixpack -- stereotypes exist for a reason -- but I doubt the simplistic take on the who, why, and what of Cletus' actions.
I would assert that many urban people have come off as very dumb to me because they have priorities that seem disconnected from the reality of the earth and nature and the basics of things like the origin of food and what farm equipment is. Though they seem erudite and able to discuss literary theory or list their favorite Handel pieces, or are able to list the obvious poor qualities of those not like them, the lack of understanding in what I consider fundamentals astounds me. But, rather than throw a name like Gregory Metrosexual at them and make jokes about men who are unable to change the oil in their own car, I chalk it up to different intelligences.
In the end, out of concern for showing disrespect for Morford or Edelen, I want to say that the email that I received from the reader and shared at the beginning of this post is the most heartening. And that's why, after getting permission, I needed to post it in its entirety.*
*(UPDATE: Last sentence reworded. See comments below.)
Labels: current events, education
Copyright (c) Julie R. Neidlinger 11/07/2007 10:28:00 PM
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13 Comments:
men who are unable to change the oil in their own car
Now that hurts.
By 
, at
8/11/07 00:20
From what little I've read of Dan Edelen (and for various reasons, it's not much) I don't think he was actually trying to take a swipe at rural people in general--I believe he advocates agrarianism. What I think he was suffering from in his unfortunate quote was the tendency to assume that everyone who votes differently than I do is an idiot. One need only listen to NPR or Rush Limbaugh to hear variations on this theme. As you point out, there are reasons why people vote in ways that seem incomprehensible to us.
BTW, it took me a while to understand your last paragraph. I didn't realize at first that you meant the email from the reader that you referenced up at the top of the post.
By 
Keith Schooley, at
8/11/07 06:06
Julie,
Wow, I think this is the longest thing I've ever seen you post.
For me, the distinction is clear, and I think where we're having problems is in the labels. I'm not a fan of labels because they cause these kinds of misunderstandings.
I will never denigrate someone because they haven't read Sartre. Heck, I haven't read Sartre. Nor am I calling the "salt-of-the-earth" guy with the "farm smarts" Cletus Sixpack.
Cletus is the kind of person who rejects all learning and denigrates those who value education. Cletus has virtually no skills at all for this reason. His primary goal in life: get hammered on the weekend.
Cletus single-handedly poisons the well. Often.
You might argue that Cletus is the kind of person who doesn't vote anyway, and you may be right. (Then again, Cletus is also the most vocal about paying more for anything, so he may just come out to vote down tax levies. I've seen that happen.) But Cletus is also the one reason why each tiny hamlet around here needs its own tax-funded police department. Cletus is the major reason why county leaders want to bring Wal-Mart to town: to fund a bigger jail.
As a Christian, I still must love Cletus. But it's real hard love to come by when Cletus makes up the bulk of problems in my county. I live near a T-intersection that gets driven through all the time by drunk Cletus. The Lifeflight helicopter pilots know just where to land by us, if you know what I mean. And don't get me goin' on the meth labs, either.
Enough about Cletus. I don't think that you and I are talking about him when we talk about the hard-working, community-loving people out there.
As for people like that who still vote against libraries--well, like I said before, a library used to be a source of civic pride for a community. Now, it's like, "So what?" I hate more taxes as much as anyone, but c'mon, $30? What household doesn't have $30 for public access to a library? They've got $30 for cigarettes and lottery tickets, but not for the library? That makes no sense to me at all.
As for my comment about parents and teaching, the "6 smarts parents are not going to teach their kids to an 8 smarts" was meant to apply to homeschooling, not any other kind of schooling. That was my original context. I know plenty of "6 smarts" parents who let other people teach their kids to an "8 smarts" level. But most didn't do it themselves. That's a big distinction. I don't think I've ever met a homeschooling family that strictly homeschooled where the kids were significantly smarter than the parents when all was said and done. Such households may exist, but in all my years of dealing with homeschoolers, I've never once encountered that scenario.
On the other hand, I've encountered plenty of households where the kids had more book smarts than their parents because the parents sent those kids to solid public or private schools. In many cases, the parents slacked off themselves when they were in school and saw how much that had hurt them. They're not going to let their kids slack off. Good for those parents.
But those where not the kinds of parents I was referring to in context.
That's all I'm going to say for now because it seems I'm only lessening the force of my original comments by saying more.
By DLE, at
8/11/07 07:39
One more thing:
As to what the quoted teacher said in your post, I agree with everything said, especially about being forced to teach to the lowest common denominator rather than to excellence. I will say again that the issue there largely reflects what's going on at home and is, in large part, outside the role of the educator, instead firmly rooted in parenting issues.
I will also add that poor parenting often comes about when both parents are forced to work outside the home. It pains me to no end that we will rant and rant about declining societal this and that in our churches, yet no church leaders are speaking out against the economic problems in this country that are forcing many households to become dual-wage-earners. The number of single-wage families I know is now close to zero, and that has changed drastically even in the last five years. In nearly every case, pressure on the primary wage-earner forced the other spouse to go back to work. Not by choice, not by a desire for more stuff, but because our bad economy is forcing that change. And we're far from plumbing the depths of a bad economy right now, sad to say.
So yeah, let's start talking about fixing this problem by putting more parents back into their homes. That's a job for Focus on the Family and some of these other paragons of family virtue that none of them are willing to address. They'll bind heavy millstones around the necks of parents who were forced to capitulate on this issue, but they're doing nothing to eliminate the source of the problem.
But that's another comment altogether.
By DLE, at
8/11/07 07:51
1. Deniro: I wasn't trying to be cruel. 'Twas an example that used a kind of stereotype that men know cars and the reality that it is a knowledge not based in gender but in experience and interest.
2.Keith: I don't think Edelen was taking a swipe, either, though I was surprised at what seemed like an overly simple assumption coming from a writer who generally goes a lot wider and tries to cover ground more fairly on issues on his own blog. I will also reword the last paragraph.
3. Dan: "I think this is the longest thing I've ever seen you post." -- You clearly missed the Jesus Camp debacle on this blog.
4. Dan: The forced teaching to the "lowest common denominator" element in education is a huge issue ("no child left behind, but no child gets ahead, either"), much bigger than any of the reasons, I, Morford, or you gave it, and really should have it's own post sometime. That concept alone is, in my opinion, among the most weakening things happening in education today.
By Julie R. Neidlinger, at
8/11/07 09:34
As someone who formerly lived in the south suburbs of Chicago during an economic downturn (steel mills closing right and left)and who now lives in the rural midwest, I see some of the problems you and Dan mention in both places. They actually mirror eachother, and, I think, much of it is caused by people's cultural mindset, for lack of a better term. Both places had intelligent people, but not people that were much aware of the rest of the world. The suburbanites felt no need to go outside their suburb to visit the vast resources of Chicago, museums, cultural events, etc. I often heard them say, "The only good view of Chicago is in the rearview mirror." It's much the same in the rural area I now inhabit. There is little sense that they way things are done in our area are not done everywhere else, that we are not the center of the universe. In other words, their world is very, very small. It has a huge impact on the young people. Many have gone off to college only to retreat home when they discover that being at the top of the heap in their little world didn't amount to much in the "real" world. They've thought they had competitive skills, thought they'd take the world by storm, only to find out that the competition is farther ahead than they ever could have imagined. Some overcome it, but many don't and return home to become Mr. and Mrs. Cletus Sixpack because, at least, that's something they understand.
By , at
8/11/07 10:25
I am skeptical about this whole discussion. I mean, has anyone ever actually met someone named Cletus? And what kind of last name is Sixpack? Slavic? I think it's all made up.
But seriously, I spent last week hunting with a couple guys from the Pittsburgh area who total over 60 years teaching. They said a big change happened in the 80s when kids just stopped taking responsibility. Namely, they argued, because their parents let them get away with it. In the 60s, when these guys started teaching, you could count on back up from home when you disciplined kids. Now the parents accuse the teacher of picking on their kid, who clearly is an angel.
BTW, I lived in Chicago for five years. I coached youth baseball there. I remember those kids walking around quoting Shakespeare and doing high order math in their heads. Because schools in large cities are so much better than rural schools.
By , at
8/11/07 13:36
I met someone named Cletus, once. I really did.
I had a hard time getting past the existence of that name as being real.
I don't remember anything else about our conversation. I just remember thinking "Wow. Cletus."
By Julie R. Neidlinger, at
8/11/07 13:50
So, are you trying to say that a rural education is better than a city one?
By , at
8/11/07 13:54
No, Jeff, I am specifically not saying that.
Trying to frame a discussion into warring factions and then limiting each side to either/or positions is like a comment (on a totally unrelated subject) on this post, in which it is suggested that abortion protesters would do well to stop protesting and address the root cause of why a woman might find herself in the position of getting an abortion. This is an argument which seems to only allow a person protesting one mode of existing or acting, i.e. he or she can either protest abortions or can support poverty aid or pregnancy centers, but not do both. It is too simplistic and all it does it get people lined up at their favorite place of yelling instead of thinking.
It's a kind of abuse or twist on Occam's Razor, in that assuming the simplest explanation to be the correct one is used to form opinions when, oddly, the simplest explanation is merely the simplest one and usually the foundation of a stereotype that prevents a view of the root of the issue.
Framing a discussion on education in terms of rural vs. urban is foolish for similar reasons.
By Julie R. Neidlinger, at
8/11/07 14:03
Cletus. That's funny. I've never heard the name used that way as a stereotype. Maybe Jethro or Huckleberry. Never heard the name Cletus.
But isn't there a little Cletus inside all of us? For example:
Five Places Flatulence Is Still Funny:
1) In church
2) A ballerina, as she's being tossed through the air.
3) A golfer, as he's bending over to putt.
4) A weightlifter, during the Olympics.
5) Peter Griffin anytime (esp. v. Michael Moore).
By , at
8/11/07 17:47
That is a list I never would have even thought to come up with.
Shame.
By Julie R. Neidlinger, at
8/11/07 17:51
I understand the right to bear arms. But how do you remove them from the bear?
By , at
9/11/07 19:11
