Maybe we should stop drilling

You’ve probably seen the old cartoon about the guy whose leaky boat is filling up with water. He decides to solve his problem by drilling a hole in the bottom to let the water out. In the last frame, as the boat goes down, even the guy with the drill recognizes his mistake.

Regrettably, many education reformers still haven’t recognized theirs. Nearly half a century after they recast public schools in their own content-light, student-centered, permissive, self-esteem driven image, and 35 years after A Nation at Risk blamed their innovations for a “rising tide of mediocrity,” the holes just keep on coming.

Never mind that Risk condemned schools’ preoccupation with “personal, social, and political problems” at the expense of academics. Never mind Risk’s 1983 warning that schools were assigning too little homework and putting up with too much misbehavior. Never mind that Risk blasted the prevalence of inflated, subjective grading, or its verdict that allowing students to choose what to learn had turned curriculum into a “smorgasbord” with “appetizers and dessert mistaken for main courses.” Never mind Risk’s charge that we’d “lost sight of the

basic purposes of schooling and the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them.”

Never mind that Risk was right. And never mind that most reformers endorsed its conclusions. Unfortunately, their next move was to reach for their drills. Today, despite Risk, schools increasingly function as social services clinics. Reformers continue to call for studentcentered classrooms where “empowered” children make the rules and decide what to learn. Experts demand an end to homework, reject objective standards, and denounce suspending disruptive students as excessively punitive.

All this has come at the expense of children, public education and society. The proof is that after almost five decades of their reform regime, we’re still talking about how to fix our schools.

Rather than abandon the bright ideas that led to the academic decline of the late 20th century, reformers still promote them as the key to

preparing students for the 21st century. They cite Business Roundtable press releases predicting a strange new workplace where carpenters will read “blueprints and diagrams,” and retail clerks will be “solving customer problems and complaints.” Farmers, allegedly for the first time, will “make decisions about feed programs and fertilization” based on “data,” while nurses break new ground by “communicating with patients, families and doctors.”

Wow. Apart from their apparent ignorance of what workers have been doing for years, reformers and the captains of industry are missing the point. Yes, some of us will need new skills as the workplace changes. But our overall problem isn’t that today’s graduates lack new 21st-century skills. The problem is too many lack the old 20th-century skills like literacy

and a working knowledge of mathematics. They’re also unprepared for a world that isn’t “student-centered,” where working for somebody frequently means doing what you’re told.

I’m not saying we just need to teach children the alphabet and the multiplication tables, though they need to learn these things, and too many don’t. Students should also learn to think critically and creatively. But ingenuity doesn’t spring full-grown from an untutored, undisciplined mind. If we’re looking for productivity and imagination in the workplace of the future, we need students who are grounded in the fundamentals, equipped with knowledge, and prepared to persevere in the face of adversity and the absence of instant gratification.

What we don’t need are middle schools that persist

in stressing social development ahead of competency. We don’t need experts who object to schools that focus on academic content and skills.

We don’t need an “unschooling” movement where “everything is a learning opportunity” but nothing is required unless it suits the child’s “interests.”

We don’t need 1970s rhetorical tirades about how schools run like factories, or how they’re outmoded hierarchies because some adults who work there still think they’re supposed to be in charge.

We don’t need to worship technology. We don’t need to bill “teleconferencing” as an education breakthrough because we’re sending work home to a sick kid by email.

We don’t need vapid sermons about “paradigmshifts” and “free-thinking.” Our present age isn’t that special, and our thoughts aren’t that lofty. We don’t need facilitators. We need

teachers.

We need to remember why we have schools. A science teacher isn’t supposed to “teach adolescents about life and how it relates to science.” He’s supposed to teach them science.

It’s true that in my conduct and my dealings with my students, I serve as an example for better or worse. And I enjoy that part of my job. I also hope that from time to time I pass along a little of what I’ve learned through experience on my way to middle age. But that’s not why I’m in my classroom.

I’m there to teach my students how to read. I’m there to teach them history. When it comes to preparing them for life, that’s my small part of the job. It’s enough.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.