There’s a
rock in my shoe, a small thing, a really small thing that I started
noticing years ago and can’t shake loose. An irritant that has grown in
significance. Over the last 20 years, The New Yorker magazine has
published 60 articles under the banner “Annals of Medicine,” and 38 of them, 63%,
are written by medical doctors. During that same period, the magazine has
published 17 articles under the banner “Annals of Education,” and not a single
one of them is written by a professional educator, nary a classroom teacher or
educational researcher among the authors. To pick two examples of omission,
life-long teachers and writers Deborah Meier and Vivian Paley, both recipients
of door-opening MacArthur “Genius Grants,” have never graced The New
Yorker’s pages.
O.K.,
I told you it was a small thing. I mean, after all, who cares who this toney
magazine contracts to write its articles? And let me admit that I’m a
subscriber, and I’d happily read Jelani Cobb or Rachel Aviv or the other
regulars who produced these education pieces. They are terrific writers. But
this disparity in authorship, this absence of people closest to the remarkable
act of educating, has come to represent for me a much bigger issue having to do
with the place of education in our society, for the example I offer with The
New Yorker is, to some degree, replicated in other elite media outlets. I
realize that with the proliferation of new media and Internet platforms, there
are many, many venues for educators —from the primary grade teacher to the
college professor to the neighborhood parent activist— to make their voices
heard, and in some cases to influence the public conversation about education.
The backlash against widespread standardized testing and the recent wave of
teacher strikes provide rich examples. I’m focusing here on traditional high-
and middlebrow media, for they still have strong influence with government,
think tanks, philanthropies, high-profile opinionmakers, and other decision-making
and gatekeeping entities.
To
begin. I and others have been writing for some time about the negative effects
our nation’s education policy has on the way we think and talk about school, and
the central ideas and vocabulary of that policy reach the general public
primarily through traditional print and broadcast media. For a generation, education has been
justified primarily for its economic benefit, both for individuals and for the
nation, and our major policy debates have involved curriculum standards,
testing and assessment, the recruitment and credentialing of teachers,
administration and funding, and the like. This economic-managerial focus has
elevated a technocratic discourse of schooling and moved out of the frame
discussion of the intellectual, social, civic, and moral dimensions of
education. If the dominate language we hear about education is stripped of a
broad range of human concerns, then we are susceptible to speaking and thinking
about school in narrow ways.
But
I believe there’s more than sterile policy talk at play here,
and let me admit that though my thoughts are based on a long career in this
business, I am speculating about a cultural phenomenon, something that even in
the best, most empirically grounded of circumstances is a risky thing to do.
When
we survey other monumental spheres of human endeavor —medicine,
the law, the physical or life sciences, religion— we find cultural space for
the practitioners of these pursuits to not only engage in specialized research
in their disciplines, but also to reflect for the rest of us on tending to the
ill, or on the place of the law or religion in our lives, or on the
breathtaking complexity of human physiology or quantum mechanics. We rarely see
this treatment of education, which seems to have become an extended and
engulfing institutional rite of passage, increasingly crowded with assessments
and benchmarks. There is no majesty or mystery here. Publishing houses produce
tips for teachers, or guidebooks for students, or recipes for school reform.
There is an occasional journalistic account of a colossal policy failure, or of
a day, week, or year in a beleaguered inner-city school, or a memoir of a
child’s heroic ascent from the ghetto or rural poverty to the Ivy League. But you’ll
be hard pressed to find reflections on the extraordinary human drama that daily
unfolds as people, young and not-so-young, ponder and struggle to understand
told by those closest to it.
Consider
this observation by the eminent American philosopher, John Dewey:
The child of three who discovers what can be done
with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and
five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though everybody else in the
world knows it.
I want to hear from people who have spent a
professional lifetime in the presence of such discovery —or discoveries of
similar magnitude in the lives of adolescents or adults. What can they tell us
about fostering discovery, reading the blend of cognition and emotion in it, judging
when and how to intervene, what to do when discovery falters? What are the
beliefs and values that shape their commitment to this work and what is it
about the subject they teach —what core ideas or ways of knowing or exemplars—
move them to want to teach it? How do they experience the weight of history on
their work, the history of the communities in which they teach, the history of
the students before them —and how do they engage that history to enhance the
growth of those students? And what inspires or vexes them about the human
condition after years of participating with people as they come to know
something new about themselves, about others, and about the world opening up
around them?
I
acknowledge that with some exceptions, classroom teachers are not trained or
encouraged to do this kind of writing, and that a lot of research in education
suffers from the opacity that plagues academic scholarship. But in my
experience, there are also beliefs and biases about education—about the people
who do it and those who read about it—that are barriers to the production of
first-hand accounts of the everyday wonder that so moved John Dewey.
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