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NCSPS: Education and Social Changeby Bel Kaufman - 1966 The National Committee for Support of the Public Schools is a committee of citizens concerned enough about public education to work for its support in communities throughout the United States. The Fourth Annual Conference of the NCSPS, held in April 1966, assembled a number of representative speakers to discuss the theme, "Education and So¬cial Change." We have selected for presentation here some of the discussion which took place during the two day meeting, especially at the session on "Teaching in America" and the one dealing with "The Problem of National Standards." The National Committee for Support of the Public Schools is a
committee of citizens concerned enough about public education to
work for its support in communities throughout the United States.
The Chairman of the NCSPS Executive Committee is Mrs. Agnes
E. Meyer, who says that community support of authority, "even that
of the President, must be created to arouse interest and support
for federal leadership, however capable." She speaks of the
particular significance of salvaging "the independence of the
individual and of the individual school systems" at a moment
when federal planning and federal spending are increasing so
dramatically. "That explains," she points out, "the importance of
our nationwide membership, represented as it is in every state in
the Union. It is for them to make a reality of the program
presented by our federal leadership...." The Fourth Annual Conference of the NCSPS, held in April
1966, assembled a number of representative speakers to discuss the
theme, "Education and Social Change." We have selected for
presentation here some of the discussion which took place during
the two day meeting, especially at the session on "Teaching in
America" and the one dealing with "The Problem of National
Standards." Because of space limitations, we cannot reprint the
complete text of the Proceedings; but, although there has
been some arbitrariness in our choices, we have tried to make our
selections with the special interests of our readers in mind. Also,
we have tended to select the kinds of statements not ordinarily
available to the RECORD with the hope of extending a universe
of discourse whichcan never be wide
enough. To choose, of course, is to exclude. Such omissions as the
keynote address by Richardson Dilworth, President of the
Philadelphia School Board, and the address given by Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare John W. Gardner do not signify a
lack of regard for their relevance and importance. Mr. Dilworth
said some significant things about "the reshaping of the urban
school's mission"; and, in responding to him, Professor Philip
Hauser (of the University of Chicago) threw down a determined
gauntlet to Boards of Education, school superintendents, and
various apathetic citizens'' groups for lagging behind in their
recognition of the educational inadequacies demonstrated in
recent years by the Negro revolt. Paul Ylvisaker, of the Ford
Foundation, issued a call for indigenous political leadership to
meet the problems of public education; and Secretary Gardner
advised the audience to concentrate on a few meaningful activities
consistently—to avoid "the glancing blow."
The 3rd Session, on "The Citizen and Public Policy,"
consisted of five panels andinvolved such people as
Processor Frank Riessman (a contributor to our November
issue), Dean Theodore Sizer of the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, Professor S. M. Miller of New York University,
Superintendent Herman R. Goldberg of the Rochester schools, and
Superintendent Grant Venn of WoodComity, West
Virginia. The panels were followed by the banquet session, chaired by
Jules Feiffer, during which the following statements were
made on "Teaching in America": Bel KaufmanMost of my life, I have been a teacher in the public high
schools of New York. I'm like the Puerto Rican boy in my book* who
was asked to play the role of judge in a class playlet, and who,
when challenged on court procedure, says withquiet authority, "I
ought to know. I been." As far as the high schools of New York are concerned—I've
been. I've run the gamut of every kind of school from the toughest
to the so-called best. But whatever the class, whatever the
student—whether he was a window smasher or an apple
polisher—each one, it seems to me, in his own private
wilderness, was saying, was crying, "Listen to me, look at
me, pay attention, care about me." And that is one thing that
teachers—burdened as we are with mountainous clerical work
and with miles of paper, strangulated by red tape, involved in
nonteaching assignments, like patrolling the lunch rooms—have
no time to do. One of the saddest notes I received was from a girl
who said, "I'll never forget you and the time you talked to me on
the subway." And frequently the subway is the only place teacher
and student can make that person-to-person contact. In the public
schools of our country, it seems to me, we are all shortchanged.
There is no villain—except perhaps the system itself.
There are the frustrated teachers who have no time to teach, no
place to teach, no equipment, no dignity. Then there is the
helpless administration—with pressures from above and from
below and from the side—involved in trivia in triplicate,
sending down directives from some gigantic mimeographing machine.
Oh, they're familiar to you. "Disregard previous notices about
disregarding bells." "Bells will ring at 3:05 sharp. This, however,
is uncertain." "Excuse Peter from being late. He was kept in the
late room to make up his lateness." "Teachers must not punch each
other out." Or, "Detained by me for going up the down staircase and
subsequent insolence." This, of course, is the genesis of my title. The most
amusing variation of my title appeared in the Russian newspaper,
Pravada. It gave my book a whole new dimension:
Upside Down on a Staircase. We are involved, we teachers, with percentile curves and marks
and reports and pupil personality profiles. But we know, we really
know, that that is not what education is. It is not a product. It
is not amassing information. It's a constant process. It is
not achieving something; it is getting there. It is a child tying
his shoelaces. His mother could do it better and faster, if the
shoelace itself and the tie itself were the important things. But
it's the attempt and the frustration and the beginning again that
is important. It's questions being asked for which there may be no
answers. It's a constant seeking for something which one may never
find, and from that first tentative shoelace to the ultimate
unanswerable. Why, this is a never-ending pursuit.
While this is difficult to achieve in the public schools, I am
not offering any solution; that would be pontifical or glib. But I
think that if there is any solution it must begin and end with the
teacher. We should get the most talented and gifted teachers into
our school systems, train them and give them the maximum
opportunity to teach—i.e. fewer classes, smaller
classes, more equipment, no non-teaching assignments, and a
clerical staff to do things that highly-trained peopleshouldn't
have to do. * Up the Down Staircase Ralph Ellison When I first went to Douglas School in Oklahoma City, which was
the main school for Negro children, I had to walk across a viaduct.
Being six years old and very dubious about the whole adventure, I
found myself almost crying as I looked down through the planks and
could see trains and railroad tracks below. (I had to cross the
Rock Island tracks there.) Also, in order to get to this school I
had to walk through a manufacturing district of warehouses and a
red-light district. I'm not complaining, just describing terrain.
But somehow I am connected with that public school and shall be for
the rest of my life. Like most Negro schools in the South and
Southwest, my school suffered from a lack of money. It also
suffered from a deficiency of prepared teachers. That'sone
part. The other part of it (and this is something I discovered years
later, after I became a man and began trying to unscramble
some of the meaning of what had happened during that particular
period**) was that it also had a few very good teachers. And these
teachers represented a continuity of that stream of New England
education which had as its carriers those young people who went
South during the Reconstruction to staff the schools for Negro
children. Some of the people who taught me had been taught by those
who had gone South and were still alive. That stream of education,
bearing with it overtones of the true history of a repressed
period of American life, got into the Negro schools—and to a
certain extent this was compensating. And just to keep the record
straight, the Negro schools in Oklahoma City during the twenties
taught a course in the history of the Negro American. This
was not usually done, and it isn't usuallydone today, I
understand. I stand here tonight supporting the public schools, even the
distorted and bad public schools—not out of sentimentality
but because I feel that the most important impact ideas can
have upon a child comes at a time when he is close to home. I'm not
talking about "the neighborhood concept." I'm talking about the
wonderful thing which occurs when you learn a new idea, when
you have a new intellectual experience, and it becomes
mingled with all the intimate associations, with all the emotions,
that have accrued around the objects and the people and the climate
within which you live. I am very happy, for instance, that I discovered T. S. Eliot and
Joyce and Pound in a school where they weren't taught. I'm glad,
because Pound and Joyce and Eliot and a number of others will be
forever associated in my mind with Macon County, Alabama—with
the weather there, with the wisteria and the spring, with the hot
nights, and with the anguish that gets into an adolescent heart
when the moon is low and the sky is deep magenta. Now the ideas I
learned in public schools ring with memories, they ring with
smells, they ring with conflict, they ring with all the
incongruities of an environment wherein the house of education was
almost adjoining the house of prostitution. The public schools form a center and if they work well (in fact,
it's almost impossible for them not to work) they do
something else. They prepare individuals who, through their
own awareness of their own particular backgrounds, are able to keep
the old American values alive and who can be critical of them and
can feed into the consciousness of the nation, a better sense of
who we are and what we are, and what we have to do to come up to
the standards we set forourselves some one hundred sixty years
ago. **Invisible Man Leo Rosten
I'm entirely a product of the worst schools in the city of
Chicago (up to college) and I loved them, and I learned a great
deal from them. But American public schools will never, never,
never be as good as they ought to be—for a simple reason. In
a free society, which means a society that asks questions and
argues and is discontented, the standard must always be higher than
current performance. American schools have room for improvement
about as great as that of American hospitals. And their need to
improve is almost as great as, say, American
automobiles. Let me tell you the things I wish I had not been
taught—because these are things I had to unlearn at great
pain. First: that facts speak for themselves. Madness, madness.
Facts don't speak at all and are utterly meaningless unless you
interpret them and arrange them. I was taught that you should
always tell the truth. A horrible thought. Life would be unbearable
if we went around telling each other the truth. I've made myself
very unpopular by saying to people, "You're wrong." And they were.
Or, "You'll never make it." And they didn't. I wish I had never been taught that during an election it is
your duty to vote— that it doesn't matter whom you vote for,
get out and vote. Madness! If you don't know whom to vote for,
don't vote. Let the people who are taking the trouble to find out,
vote. It is democratic heresy to vote stupidly and blindly. I wish
above all (and this is a heresy so horrid that I appeal to you not
to think me wicked) that neither I nor all the generations since
had been taught that the purpose of life is to be happy. I wish
that mothers wouldn't tell you that all they want is for their
children to be "happy"—because if you want that, for God's
sake feed them tranquilizers. I wish I had been taught that what
one learns is learned at great pain, that the purpose of life and
of living is not to be happy. It's to be useful, it's to be
honorable, it's to be compassionate, it's to matter—to have
it make some difference that you lived at all. I wish we would learn to meet absolutism of any kind with
skepticism, and even idealism with very great care. We must be
skeptical in this world of words promised, even by virtuous men. It
is one of the ironies of history that the cynics have done
relatively little harm compared to those who were sure they were
right. We must learn to be strong enough to be gentle. We must
learn that life will always have unbearable stretches of loneliness
and uncertainty and pain. And we may as well stop running around
insisting that everyone understand us, because you will never be
completely understood by anyone, no matter how much they love you
or try—and you can never completely understand anyone else,
no matter how much you love them or want to or try. So we must learn to moderate our demands on other people and on
ourselves.We learn to have the courage to live without easy answers
and without that scourge of mankind—absolutes. We must seek
escape from the straitjackets of conformity, knowing with Emerson
that "Whosoever would be a man must be a
non-conformist." Above all, I wish we could teach people early that you can only
meet life in a series of tentative and impermanent approximations;
that the final goal may never be reached; that the last truths are
probably unknowable—but that life holds nothing more precious
than the sacred process by which you stretch your mindand your
heart. "The Problem of National Standards" was introduced by Congressman James Scheuer of New York, who explained the present concern with testing and criteria by saying: I think it is because we have found out (not this last year or
the year before, but surely since World War II) that in a rapidly
changing and evolving urban civilization—one that
places enormous new demands upon workers and upon citizens, one
that has been burdened with mass migration of an impoverished,
unskilled, illiterate population from the southern part of the
United States and from Puerto Rico and Mexico to our northern urban
centers—we have found that, under these burdens, the public
school system, or at least a large part of the public school
system, isn't doing the job. He went on to qualify this by asserting that the school system
is succeeding well "in our affluent suburban communities." But, he
said, it is failing "in the great downtown ghettos" failing in such
a way that "basic structural alterations" are required. In order to
effect such alterations, more must be known, and priorities must be
established. "Now, obviously, if we are going to be selective, if
we are going to have a descending order of priority, we must have
some kind of rule of thumb, we must have some kind of help and
assistance in our decision-making. We must have an assessment and
criteria of some kind." At this point, he introduced Dr. Ralph W. Tyler, Director of the
Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford,
who is Chairman of the Exploratory Committee on Assessing the
Progress of Education, appointedin 1964 by the Carnegie Corporation
of New York. Ralph W. Tyler The need for dependable information on the progress of education
is now widely recognized. Because education has become the servant
of all our purposes, its effectiveness is of general public
concern. The educational tasks now faced require many more
resources than have thus far been available, and they must be
wisely used to produce the maximum results. To make these
decisions, dependable information about the progress of education
is essential, otherwise we scatter our efforts too widely and fail
to achieve our goals. Yet we do not now have the necessary
comprehensive and dependable data. We have reports on numbers of
schools, buildings, teachers, and pupils, and about the moneys
expended; but we do not have sound and adequate information on
educational results. Because dependable data are not available, personal views,
distorted reports, and journalistic impressions are the sources of
public opinion, and the schools are frequently attacked and
frequently defended without having necessary evidence to support
either claim. This situation will be corrected only by a careful,
consistent effort to obtain valid data to provide sound
evidence about the progress of American education. In recognition of this need, Carnegie Corporation of New York, a
private foundation, in 1964 appointed an Exploratory Committee on
Assessing the Progress of Education. I was asked to serve as
Chairman. The Committee's assignment is to confer with teachers,
administrators, school board members, and others concerned with
education to get advice on the way in which such a project may be
constructively helpful to the schools and avoid possible injuries.
The Committee is also charged with the development and try-out of
instruments and procedures for assessing the progress of education.
The Committee has been working on these assignments for nearly two
years. The discussions with administrators, curriculum specialists,
teachers, and school board members clearly recommended that the
initial assessment include more than the 3 R's and that it
ultimately cover the range of important educational tasks of the
modern schools. In harmony with this suggestion, we have contracted
with agencies to construct assessment exercises in the fields of
reading and the language arts, science, mathematics, social
studies, citizenship, fine arts, and vocational education. In
subsequent years, other important areas will be included.
Because the purpose of the assessment is to provide helpful
information about the progress of education that can be understood
and accepted by public-spirited lay citizens, some new procedures
are being developed. In each field, scholars, teachers, and
curriculum specialists have formulated statements of the objectives
which they believe faithfully reflect the contributions of that
field and which the schools are seriously seeking to attain. For
each of these major objectives, prototype exercises have been
constructed which, in the opinion of scholars and teachers,
give students an opportunity to demonstrate the behavior
implied by the objective. These lists of objectives and
prototype exercises, which help to define them, have been reviewed
by a series of panels of public-spirited citizens living in various
parts of the country in cities, towns, and villages.
Each panel spent two days reviewing the material and making a
judgment about each objective in terms of the questions: "Is this
something important for people to learn today? Is it something I
would like to have my children learn?" This process resulted in
some revisions of the original listing of objectives and some
eliminations. However, the procedure was designed to insure that
every objective being assessed is: (1) considered important by scholars (2) accepted as an educational task by the school (3) deemed desirable by leading lay citizens This should help to eliminate the criticism frequently
encountered with current tests in which some item is attacked by
the scholar as representing shoddy scholarship, by school people as
something not in the curriculum, or by prominent laymen as
being unimportant or technical trivia. A national assessment to identify kinds of progress being made
in education, and problems and difficulties arising, will not be
very meaningful unless separate measures are obtained for
populations within the total country—populations which vary
among themselves and thus present different degrees and kinds of
progress and different problems to be solved. The particular
populations that need to be treated separately may change over the
years ahead, but for some time, age, sex, socio-economic status,
geographic location, and rural-urban-suburban differences will
probably be significant. Hence, the present plan is to assess a
probability sample for each of 192 populations defined by the
following subdivisions: boys and girls; four geographic regions;
four age groups (nine, thirteen, seventeen, and adult); three
divisions by urban, suburban, rural classifications; and two
socio-economic levels. The fact that populations are to be assessed, and not
individuals, makes it possible to extend the sampling of exercises
far beyond that of an individual test in which each person takes the entire test. It may be that a
comprehensive assessment would require so many exercises, that if
it were to be taken by one person he would need ten hours, or more
to complete them. With a population sample, 20 persons, each
spending 30 minutes, would together take all the exercises. In this
case, a population of 10,000 persons would furnish a sample of 500
for each of the assessment exercises, and no one would have given
more than 30 minutes of histime. Assuming that an assessment would be made every three to five
years in order to ascertain the kinds of progress taking place, it
is very unlikely that many of those individuals who participated in
the earlier assessments would be involved in any of the subsequent
ones. Hence, from the point of view of the child or adult, no
serious demand would be made on his time. Furthermore, it is
unlikely that the children taking exercises in later years would be
drawn from the same classrooms as the earlier ones. Therefore, the
demands made upon the teacher in releasing a child for half-an-hour
will be minimal. The assessment, though costly, should be feasible
and should involve little or no inconvenience to individuals or to
schools. This project is encountering some difficulties in getting
itself understood. It is being confused with a nationwide,
individual testing program, and several common fears are
expressed by those who make this confusion. They note that tests
used in a school influence the direction and amount of effort of
pupils and teachers. In this way, if national tests do not
reflect the local educational objectives, pupils and teachers are
deflected from their work. This criticism does not apply to the
assessment project because no individual student or teacher can
make a showing. No student will take more than a small fraction of
the exercises. No scores will be obtained on his performance. He
will not be assessed at any later time and can gain no desired end,
like admission to college or a scholarship. A second fear is that such an assessment enables the Federal
Government to control the curriculum. This is also a
misunderstanding. The objectives to be assessed are those
accepted by teachers and curriculum specialists as goals toward
which they work. They have been reviewed by lay leaders throughout
the country so as to include only aims deemed important by
public-spirited citizens. This project will report on the extent to
which children, youth, and adults are learning things considered
important by both professional school people and the informed
public. It promises to provide constructive information that will
guide the formulation of sound public
policies. Congressman Scheuer then introduced Martin Mayer, author of
the schoolsand other books relevant to
education. Martin Mayer
Dr. Tyler says something that gives me the horrors: that is, if
a question comes up where the educators can say, "That is not in
the curriculum," you can't ask it. And meanwhile, if the public
thinks it is trivial, you can't ask it. And if the scholars think
it is of no relevance to scholarship, you can't ask it. When you
put these three criteria together, and you put a lot of people to
work making up statements of objectives that they can all
agree on, I think you have a guarantee of triviality and
obsolescence in the list of objectives that you are making, once
you get beyond the basic skills level. If we must do this sort of
thing, why not have three different tests—one developed with
school people, one developed with university scholars, and one
developed with the lay people—to see how well we are doing
with presumably divergent goals? You might know something when you
were done with that. If you have to make up one list that reflects
all three, I can't see the value of this sort of consensus. All
other things being perfect, I can't see what the value of it
is. Second, how will we know what we have, once we have it? Somebody
during the radio days, when Goodman Ace and his wife had a radio
broadcast, ran into Goodman Ace on the street and said to him,
"Hello, Goodie. How is Jane?"He said, "She is all right, if you
like Jane." (Laughter) Now, whether one likes it or not (and I don't much), there is
some sense to a scheme which sets up a national norm and measures
an individual against it. But by what standard do you measure a
national norm? Where is your reference point? This periodic
assessment that we are going to make—how do you keep a
reference standard for the population as a whole? What significance
are we talking about here? Are you going to give the same test to 2
million people every three years, with secure keys? No, sir. Don't
you keep this one secret. This is a matter of legitimate public
interest. This test has to be published, and the answers which the
testers think are the right answers have to be made known to the
public, so the community can say, as a whole, "What sort of castor
oil is this, what are we doing here?" So you will have to make a new test. You really must. And I hope
Congress will insist on this. We have tests with secure keys now
about kids' psychological adjustments—which is one of
the worst scandals in this country—and I don't see howyou
avoid cheating. In New York City we have been big on tests, and the junior high
school principals were, for a long time, in a situation where
the way you got brownie points downtown was if the reading score
went up more than the IQ indicated during the three years that the
kids were in junior high school. It was a 4o-minute test in the
ninth grade, but you gave him an hour to do it. He looked better.
You looked better. That is what counted. So every high school in
New York completely re-tested every kid who came in, because they
knew no test scores from the junior high school had any meaning at
all, because typically the schools cheated. Now we have a national assessment scheme run by educators to
convince the Congress that it is getting its money's worth, with no
known reference standard. Is there anyone in this room who can
imagine that from one three-year period to the next these scores
might conceivably go down? Could this happen? No, it couldn't
happen. You know perfectly well it couldn't happen. This is an
infinitely manipulable system. Ralph is an honest man, but
even Ralph doesn't liveforever. And even he may not know what is
being done. Nancy Larrick, who writes for the saturday review and other
publications andis a well-known expert on children's
literature, was next. Nancy Larrick
What can a national assessment of education tell us about
children and young people in these deprived situations? It seems to
me it is like assessing the yield from worn-out land and comparing
it with that from soil that has been properly cared for and
fertilized. We know that if the right ingredients are not provided
in the soil, we get poor crops. The proposed assessment will show
that the same thing holds true in education. We know that children
without books read less well, and less eagerly, than those who have
books. We know that children from deprived situations are
less likely to flourish physically, intellectually, and socially,
than those who have had greater opportunities. On any program of national testing or national assessment we
know that children from suburban schools will make a better showing
than those from the slums. Why not? For the most part, the suburban
children have better food and rest. They are in smaller classes.
They have better teaching materials. Their teachers understand
their interests, their goals, speak the same language. Whereas
children from the poverty-racked families, with less than $2000
income, will surely make poorer scores. Again, why not? There is no
money in those homes for proper food, much less for magazines and
books. Family life is tense and uncertain. At school these children
face what seems to be a hostile world, where the language and the
customs are different. How can those youngsters learn?
The proposed national assessment is not seeking what
statisticians call input data, meaning in the case of the schools:
the training of teachers; the size of classes; the nature,
availability, and use of teaching aids; the size of the school
library and whether the books circulate; the climate for learning.
It is seeking to evaluate what Mr. Keppel said—how much the
kids know. This, to me, is a major weakness in the proposed assessment
plan, for it seeks to measure the outcome of student performance,
not to assess the factors that contribute to the outcome. To
be a real assessment, not simply a massive, random, sample testing
program, it should certainly report on the whole picture—for
example, how well teachers are teaching; how well principals
are helping teachers and children; how well superintendents are
cultivating the creative leadership of teachers, principals, school
board members, and parents; how well school board members are
serving children as distinguished from serving the tight-fisted
taxpayer; and how well the community is serving children of
all economic levelsthrough schools and other community
agencies. I would like to ask, too, how well the teachers colleges are
teaching school administrators and classroom teachers to
approach education creatively and humanely. I think we would learn more from assessing the performance of
the adults who are responsible for our children than from
questioning children about how much they know. But no one has the
nerve to force a random sampling of adults to complete a
3o-minute segment of an objective test. (Applause) Or a 3o-minute
interview in order to evaluate their way of helping children.
How then can we do itto children and young people and only to
them? I think any nationwide project which is intended to contribute
ultimately to quality education must be evaluated in the light of
major soft spots in our educational program today. Will the
proposed national assessment help to eradicate, to overcome certain
weaknesses—or will it encourage their spread? Let me mention three which concern me particularly. To me these
are major weaknesses in our education program at all levels. One is
the tendency to stress isolated facts and slight the child's
understanding and commitment. Dr. Rhoda Dorsey, a history professor at Goucher College, was
telling me recently that in freshman history classes
nowadays, the students come in, as she put it, "knowing more facts
than I will ever know." But when they start discussions, she
says, "I can immediately tell whether these people studied a
textbook written by an old New Dealer, or a New Goldwater
Republican, because these youngsters, while they have gotten facts,
have accepted uncritically the bias, the point of view of either
the teacher or the textbook writer." Now, these are students who for twelve years have been taking
more tests than any generation previously. The ones that
Educational Testing Service refers to as STT's—Sophisticated Test Takers. The second weak spot that I am concerned about is in our
learning, which is over-compartmentalized. We study reading in one
compartment, but literature in another. Even in science, in the
elementary school, children will study plant life here and animal
life there, without any understanding that there just might be some
relation between the two. The third weakness I would like to mention is our increasing
reliance on gadgets and devices—instead of what I think of as
the dynamics of learning. You doubtless heard the story from
Scotland, where a group of youngsters, classified by their i
i-plus exam, had their scores run through the computer, which got a
minor case of indigestion. The computer mistakenly classified 2500
"A" (academic) students as "B" (vocational) and labeled 2500 "B"
students as "A"s. So the "A" students were sent to the vocational
program and they behaved as the vocational students are supposed to
behave at the "B" level. The "B" students went to the "A" program
and they behaved like "A" students and took the academic
program. From the report I had from a British teacher at the NCTE
last year, it took two years before the administration found out
that the computer got mixed up. The children performed the way the
teachers—and the machine— said they would. Thus the
tyranny of testing was compounded by the tyranny of
labeling. By the nature of its concept and structure, the national
assessment, as proposed, it seems to me, will tend to perpetuate
these shortcomings in American education. It will not permit one
child to be compared with another, thank God, or maybe thank Ralph
Tyler, but it will publicly label starvation-level children as
intellectual failures. It will bring prestige, political
power, and ultimately federal money to strengthen the fact-packed,
segmented, mechanized kind of education that is more concerned with
averages than individuals. Measuring "how much the kids know"
alludes, it seems to me, mainly to those phenomena of their
physical environments which come under the heading of
knowledge. But the child or the man has another environment of
equal significance to education. This is his innerlife, emanating
from the things of the spirit. John Holt was then introduced. He is the author of how
children fail andpresently teaching in a private school in
New England. John Holt
I think, first of all, we have to keep in mind what the purpose
of all this is. If there is any reason for all this testing, it's
presumably to help us teach better or educate better. And I think
of the old story, perhaps too well known to be worth repeating,
about the farmer who was asked by a county agent if he was going to
come to a conservation meeting, and he said, "No, why should I? The
agent said, "To help you learn to farm better." And he said, "Hell,
I don't farm as good as I know how right now." I want to second very strongly what Miss Larrick says. We are
not really mystified about a lot of the things that we need
to do. We don't at this moment need a whole lot of new information
to know what needs to be done in big city schools, and so forth. I
think her point about considering not what children supposedly
know, but the environments in which their learning takes place
would be muchmore to the point. In all that has been said about education here, I have gotten a
feeling which is a little difficult to put into words, but I will
put it this way. Generally speaking, we talk as if education and
our school systems were some kind of gigantic machine, and as if
teachers were a kind of factory labor running this machine, and as
if children were a sort of inert raw material which gets run
through it and processed into some kind of product, which society
thinks it needs or wants. I don't think we are going to make any progress as long as we
think of education this way. I am a school teacher, and in the past
months, as a result of my book, I have done a good deal of talking
to other school teachers. And you have no idea how much the average
school teacher, who ought to be at the summit of the
educational profession, feels like a buck private in a very
large army. They say to me, "We would like to do better, but what
can we do. We are hemmed in by directives. We are told what
books to use, what workbooks, how much time to spend on this and
that." They are perhaps somewhat less powerless than they think
they are but everything they hear about education must make them
feel like, as I say, the lowest buck private in a very big army, or
the lowest employee in a very large corporation. If education is going to be improved, I think we are going to
have to realize that the most important people in it are, in the
first place, the children and, in the second place, the
teachers—with curriculum-makers, administrators,
superintendents etc., coming in a very poor third. Congressman Scheuer said to us that the schools in the suburban
communities are doing the job. I think this is part of the folklore
of contemporary thinking about education and most of what is said
and written about our city schools seems to me to be pursuing the
notion—"If we could just make them like suburban schools, our
problems would be over;" and "If only we could find a way to do in
our inner cities what we are doing in Scarsdale or Newton or
Winnetka." Or you name it. But my experience, both as a student and
as a teacher, has all been in supposedly good schools, and you have
no idea how bad good schools are. (Applause and laughter) The
learning that goes on in them is 90% fake, quickly forgotten,
hardly ever applied, not relevant to anything. And, as a matter of
fact, I think our problems in our cities arise from the fact that
you can get away with bad education in the suburbs, because
these kids are pretty docile and they can play the game—they
very quickly learn what the school game is about. There is a big
fat carrot out there in front of them, and a stick behind them. But
this won't work in your inner cities. This won't work for your
really deprived children. They don't believe in the carrot and they
are not afraid of the stick. The schools can't do anything to them
that is any worse than what happens to them everyday, and they very
quickly know that—they won't play this silly game. It is all
so foreign from their own experience. They don't understand a lot
of the language in which the game is conducted, and they are thrown
off by the quite obvious hostility of a lot of their teachers. But
in any case they don't play, they won't play. I think our situation
could very well be put this way: the only way we can "solve the
problems of our inner-city schools" is by beginning to do some very
hard thinking about what education really is, particularly for the
child growing up in the city. I would like to take a good roundhouse swing at testing in
general, mostly just to make myself feel better. I know of no
legitimate educational purpose that is served by testing of any
kind. It seems to me that they are inherently useless, and more
than that, bad. Winston Churchill said of his teachers at Harrow
that they weren't interested in finding out what he knew, but what
he didn't know. This is obviously true of a test. In order to get
results that are of any use to you, if you want to pigeonhole
people, you have to test ignorance, not knowledge. In an hour or
100 hours, a child can't express everything he understands, and
everything he knows about the world, so you have to find out what
he doesn't know. This is one part of it. These tests test glibness;
they test an ability to put your understandings into words, or even
worse, to say things whether you understand them or not— and
college and graduate students know that as well as anybody else.
That is what pays off. They test speed—that is, how fast can
you get all this kind of stuff down. And they test the ability to
read somebody else's mind. Part of being successful at taking tests of any kind is this
ability to outguess the tester, to try to guess what he wants. In
fact, this is a large part of what the school game is about, but
this has nothing to do with real knowledge and understanding. So,
generally speaking, I am in favor of throwing them out. I say they
impede learning. When you are learning something, you are really
pursuing your own curiosity and the things you learn seep down.
They take a long while to make some kind of coherent pattern of
things. When you are continually obliged to be repeating back for
somebody else's benefit, this kind of real learning does not go
on. Harold Taylor, Vice Chairman of the NCSPS, summarized the
proceedings at theend. In the course of his summary, he
said: I have three points to make. The first is that in my experience
this has been the hardest group to stop talking that I've ever been
connected with. Every session we had, we had trouble closing, and I
suppose if we're going to run into defects, that's the kind to run
into. Anybody who is worried about the vitality of the interest on
the part of American citizens in public education should have been
here. Jim Scheuer had trouble shutting us down this morning when all
we were trying to do was show Ralph Tyler that his project was
either useless and would produce no results worth having, or
that it would produce results which were therefore dangerous.
We did hear some marvelous talk this morning particularly, with
Ralph Tyler, John Holt, Nancy Larrick, Jim Scheuer, and Martin
Mayer giving an absolutely first-rate discussion of the content and
philosophy of education— regardless of whether or not we
helped Ralph change his mind. Secondly, I would like to point out that as was the case with
the poor confronting the semi-rich last week, when Sargent Shriver
came and tried to subdue the poor, we have our own version. When
the discussion of citizens making public policy came up yesterday
in Panel 2, Dr. Hypps pointed to the incidents of last week here
and said that it was perfectly natural for the hostilities and
feelings of aggression to appear in public. Let's take it for
granted, she said, that the hostility was not directed at any one
person. It was just hostility that had to find its own target. Well
this time, there was an absolutely extraordinary degree of
criticism of the schools starting with Richardson Dilworth's and
Phil Hauser's remarks. You will recall that Dr. Hauser said that
the superintendents are authoritarian and useless, the school
boards are antiquated, the principals are venal, and we've got to
keep an eye on the government. And he cited references, usually in
Chicago, to support every one of his
generalizations. That started it off and if you look at this with a
psychoanalytic eye you find that the membership of our Committee
has a collective unconscious of extraordinary proportions. This
collective unconscious which has been bubbling now for four years,
with the help of new members each year who added their own
unconsciousness to the general welter, really got bubbling
this time, and in almost every session there were people expressing
downright hostility to the condition of the public schools. It
reached a high point with Phil Hauser, but another point wasmade by
Jules Feiffer last night when he was talking about what he learned
fromgoing to school. "I learned," he said, "a number of useful things. I learned to
stay out of the way of grownups, while at the same time desperately
wanting to be one. Grownups, as I understood it, didn't have to take gym." Mr. Feiffer learned how to fold the New York Times as a
preparation for life in the subway. The kind of deep criticism of
the content and quality of public education in the United
States, which we have heard, would raise the hair on the head of
any superintendent, principal, or chairman of a school board. My
third point is this. The strength of interest, the degree of
knowledge, and the quality of determination which I have seen here
over these past two days has been extraordinary. I believe the
Committee, after its first four years, has reached a level of
strength and devotion to the cause which now has its own inner
momentum. I congratulate you on everything you have done to
create that momentum and to keep it going.
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