Intellectualism

This opinion column in Inside Higher Ed today is pretty interesting. Scott McLemee is responding to an essay by Washington Post fiction critic Ron Charles. Said fiction critic is attacking college readers for choosing the popular vampire Twilight books over more intellectual reading endeavors.

Charles, I fear, is making the mistake that McLemee says he is. It might be true that juvenile fiction like the Gossip Girl books are popular and low-brow, but that is no different from other forms of popular culture at any point in history. Intellectuals have always been a small and elite segment of society. It may be that popular fiction produces low-brow things like vampire romances, but is that really any different from the yellow journalism or other popular music of the past? If you took a look at everything, and not just the classics that survived time, I think you'd end up with roughly the same proportions of high-brow to low-brow that we have today.

If anything, access to high-brow literature, music, and other forms of entertainment has become easier over time. There are fewer barriers to entry for becoming an intellectual than there were in the past, although intellectuals still tend to be a fairly homogenous group. Rather than criticizing the masses for their love of vampire fiction (some of which intellectuals read as a "guilty pleasure") I think we ought to spend our time thinking about how to increase access to the so-called intellectual society.

Learning to Cook

Okay, so it took me a couple days, but I just finished Michael Pollan's long essay in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine about food policy. Matt and Ezra have good points, but there is one I want to add. This particular passage about schools seems significant:

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

The components to this proposal are twofold. First, that we are going to extra lengths to feed our children crap instead of delicious, nutritious food. As Eliza Krigman pointed out in her review of School Lunch Politics, what passes for nutritional standards for school-sponsored lunches is a joke. We all remember the scene in Super Size Me where Morgan Spurlock looked at the low-grade quality of meat served in schools. Rather than viewing schools as a dumping ground for bad food, children should be served some of their best in the formative years where they spend the majority of their waking hours.

The second part of that is proposing a shift to including valuable life skills in part of a standard public education. Rather than taking a home ec class where students are asked to make a pan of brownies in one week of a six-week class, why not take a life skill like cooking seriously as part of a comprehensive education? After all, the default has be come that people need to opt in to learning how to cook rather than opting out.

I'd actually like to see schools take on other life skills as part of a required education: learning basic financial skills about how to use a credit card, comprehensive sex education, and learning how to buy for and cook healthy, balanced meals on a budget. After all, these are skills that everyone can use. Rather than assuming everyone pick them up outside of the education system, why don't we make them part of a required education along with math, English, and physical education?

Image courtesy Flickr user Joshua Davis (jdavis.info) used with a CC license.

The Burgeoning Education Reform Movement on the Left

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had an article by Paul Tough on the division between teachers’ unions and education reformers. It seems that President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, while problematic, is shining light on some pretty significant achievement gap that falls along racial lines.

As Dana Goldstein reported in a piece on an education reform event at the Democratic National Convention:

In the United States, about half of all black and Latino students drop out of high school, while 78 percent of white students earn a degree. And while No Child Left Behind is regarded as deeply flawed legislation in every quarter, it is also almost uniformly praised by policy wonks for shining a light on the achievement gap and for instituting the first national collection of education data correlated by race and family income.

Tough pointed out that there “is evidence that schools can do a lot to erase that divide, but the reality is that most schools do not. If we truly want to counter the effects of poverty on the achievement of children, these advocates argue, we need to start a whole lot earlier and do a whole lot more.”

But while education reformers love to paint teachers unions as standing in the way of real reform, Kevin Carey’s piece (sub. req.) in latest issue of The American Prospect notes that while teachers’ unions tend to be resistant to change, the reasons are more structural than attitudinal:

[A]s unions’ ability to garner pay increases has slowed since the 1970s, their agenda became more focused on two key goals: job security and classroom autonomy. Unions also focused on school security, seeking to maintain the status quo. They weren’t interested in letting other public schools compete for the same children or letting outside agencies judge school results. Classroom autonomy, meanwhile, was seen as a key element of elevating the teaching profession into the realm of respected, self-directed professionals. This, too, argued against uniform standards. [emphasis his]

So the answer, it seems, lies somewhere in the middle. Rather than the left’s old solution of “throwing money at the problem,” there does seem to be a need for achievement standards. That way, at least, there are measurable ways to see which students are lagging behind. Then educators can begin to look at why. But there’s also a need for real investment in school infrastructure, teacher compensation, and early childhood education. It seems that both sides need to open themselves up to criticism and then work together to come to a solution.

Cross posted on pushback.

Inequality in Gifted Programs

A NYTimes story today about New York gifted programs is interesting. It identifies that although there has been a push to close the inequality gap, low-income students make up a tiny minority of gifted programs, even in districts where poverty rates are high:

Students in 14 districts where the poverty rate is more than 75 percent account for more than a third of enrollment but received only 14.6 percent of the offers for spots in gifted programs this year, down from 20.2 percent last year.

This is because although intelligence is often considered to be genetic, a lot of qualifying for gifted programs has to do with other factors, and "standardized tests given to young children were heavily influenced by their upbringing and preschool education, and therefore biased toward the affluent." As long as problems of poverty and inequality persist, it will be difficult to provide a quality education to those who are lagging behind.

Gender-based Education

Sara Mead responds to this very strange article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the first half of which, as Sara said, reads like a puff piece for Dr. Leonard Sax's approach to gender-based education which includes using different light levels to help educate young boys and girls. I'll let Sara's own words make the argument:

In the NYT magazine piece, author Elizabeth Weil profiles Dr. Leonard Sax, a family doctor from Washington, D.C.'s Maryland suburbs and a leading advocate of gender-based schooling. She also describes 3 different public schools implementing single-sex education--an all-male and an all-female New York City charter school, as well as a coed district school in Alabama teaching children in sex seggregated classrooms. And she does a decent job in laying out some of the key critiques of Sax's work. Sax and Gurian exaggerate the neuroscience and get some of it flat-out wrong. Much of the science they do cite is primarily descriptive--it's not adequate to serve as a guide to making decisions about teaching or policy. And they ignore the fact that variation among both males and females often far exceeds average differences between the genders.

But, since the critiques don't appear until roughly halfway through a very long article--the first part of which reads like a puff piece on Dr. Sax--many readers may miss them. Moreover, while Weil's airing of critiques gives the article an appearance of balance, she glosses over a bigger issue: There wouldn't be a "controversy" over gender-based public education at all if Sax and Gurian weren't aggressively marketing their idiosyncratic--and flawed--notion of gender-based education.

I thought a less sophisticated version of this as I read the article. There's no problem with noticing that boys and girls do things differently, but the trouble comes in when you start pretending that that's the only variable in education and making broad generalizations about how all girls or all boys are alike. What's next, girls learn better in pink classrooms and boys learn better in blue ones?

Cross-posted.

Radical Home Schoolers

While I was on vacation in snowy Minnesota, I finally had time to tear through my latest issue of Bitch (luckily it's a quarterly so I feel less bad about not getting to it right away). Unfortunately, Bitch is still in the process of re-launching their website, so I can't link to the article, but they had a story in this issue called "Learning Curve" about radical homeschooling feminists. These women are disillusioned with the school system, finding it lacking in gender studies analysis or not sensitive to their children's special needs or interests, so they choose a path they call "unschooling," or breaking down education and tailoring it to individual student needs.

I have to admit, I was a little jealous of the zine making curriculum one hip mom designed for her kid, but the whole article was framed in a way that focused on how these women square being a feminist with quitting their job to stay at home with the kids to teach them, even if it is a radical kind of teaching. The article's author, Maya Schenwar, asks, "Does being a feminist mean you have to have a paid job? What does it mean to raise a feminist kid? Is there a feminist definition of success, and should there be?" These are all certainly relevant questions for feminists to answer for themselves, but I was surprised by the questions the article didn't ask. What's wrong with our current educational system, and how can we fix it? If these women have lost such faith in public education -- a pretty popular position these days -- then there must be something pretty wrong. By taking their students out of the educational system, it's a little like a frustrated voter saying he's going to protest government by not voting. Then, nothing will ever really change.

Granted working on altering education can be frustrating. Between all the regulations and federal, state, and local funding perpetually hanging in the balance, it can be a depressing thing to try to change. I tend to have faith in the ability to customize education. After all the school district is one place where thoughts of parents are taken very seriously. These women could start and after school zine making club, and open up the opportunity to explore alternative disciplines to all students, instead of catering only to their own children. They could go to PTA meetings to ask teachers to include some feminist, race, or gender studies texts in English or history classes so students get a more diverse experience in the classroom.

I don't pretend that these radical unschoolers alone can change the way we do education, but I guess I'd like to see the discussion framed in a perspective that includes all children. After all, the unschoolers are women that can afford to stay at home and take charge of their children's education -- and children's education is extremely important. There are many women that cannot afford such a luxury and I'm sure lots would like to see the school system changed for the better.