My mother, Margaret "Peg" Markham, was a proud graduate of Brockport State Teacher's College in 1942 the first year that the Brockport Normal School which gave three year degree teaching credentials had become a 4 year Teacher's College, which required a four year Bachelor's degree to obtain a teaching certificate in New York State.
As a proud graduate of Brockport State Teacher's College my mother sent all her children to the BSTC Campus school. My siblings and I received a very progressive education in a school on the cutting edge of teaching student teacher's the latest techniques in teaching and classroom management.
Later in life my wife and I had 9 children all of whom we also sent to the Campus School until in closed in the early 80s. In 1985, Angela and I started homeschooling our children after the oldest three went all the way though Brockport High School. Prior to making the decision to homeschool I spent a year reading and studying everything I could find on educational psychology, child development and education. Having received a Master's Degree In Social Work and working in the mental health field I was already very familiar with various theories and research on child, adolescent, and adult development. I became convinced that my wife and I could provide a better education for our children than what they could receive in government run public schools.
I have shared some of my personal history and life experience to provide a context for the new column which is being started on the Brockporter which will deal with the philosophy, psychology, and practice of education and schooling and will appear almost every Tuesday. For someone to question the viability of government run public education is almost to be accused of being unpatriotic and unamerican. Back when we started homeschooling in Brockport in 1985, we were one of the first three families in the district. Now over 2 million Americans homeschool their children for various reasons and it is legal and recognized in all 50 states. Mark Twain said one time "Don't let schooling interfere with your education."
The whole discourse of government operated public schooling is rarely called into question. There are many controversies and recommendations about how to tweak the model, but rarely is the model itself questioned. Schooling developed in the United States as the country was moving from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy and government run central school systems were developed on assembly line manufacturing models which became increasingly bureaucratized into what we have today. This assembly line bureaucratized institutional model doesn't work very well and manifests myriad problems which are endemic to the model. As Albert Einstein, a government run public school drop out and homeschooler, said "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." The Brockporter column on education intends to move the discussion of education to a whole new level of consciousness. There are millions of people who have already made this move to a new level of consciousness, but the dominant educational discourse in the United States is heavily invested in conserving the assembly line manufacturing based model.
Almost, every Tuesday, the Brockporter will feature an article on education. Some of the ideas will be controversial and signed comments are always welcome. If any one would like to share an article or essay of their own, please forward it to davidgmarkham@gmail.com
This week, the idea to be considered is the one mentioned by Alfie Kohn in his book "Feel-Bad Education" in which he writes "Most of the material that students are required to memorize is soon forgotten." As Simon and Garfunkle sang in their great song, Kodachrome, "When I think of all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can still thing at all."
The United States is in serious trouble if it thinks that regurgitating facts is what makes people smart or will prepare our society for the future especially in the age of computers. What is much more important than memorizing and regurgitating facts is to be able to connect the dots in some sort of meaningful way that is significant for the learner, and to be able to apply this contextualized understanding in real life.
Communicating information that is to be memorized and regurgitated as some later time is not education. It may be schooling, training human animals for performance in manifesting short term memory skills, but it begs the main questions about whether it is education because we fail to question who chooses what information is to be memorized, how it will be communicated and memorized, and why it is significant to whom for what purpose? Until the learner knows the answers to these questions, the activity of memorization and regurgitation is a banal exercise that has no meaning and significance other than for immediate performance on a test after which it is usually mostly forgotten. The process is tedious and boring. Rather than life giving and exciting, schooling is stressful, enervating, competitive in the negative sense of there being "winners" and "losers" and not conducive to good mental health and spiritual well being.
When I started homeschooling my children I started examining curriculum materials (textbooks, workbooks, worksheets, etc.) I was shocked and horrified at most of these "adopted" curriculum materials. Frankly, a lot of them were garbage. I remember asking the curriculum teacher in the Barclay school at the time in the mid 80s why they were using the Scott Foresman books that they were in the fourth grade and was told, "We know they're not the best, but the district got a break on the cost at the time they were purchased." It was the last time we used the curriculum materials from the school. After that I would take the kids to the library or shopping and we would decide together what materials they found most appealing in studying the topics at hand. When was the last time anyone in your child's school asked him or her what curriculum materials they would like to use in their study, and what it is that they are interested in that they would like to study?
Education comes from the latin word educere which means "to lead from" and when it comes to the meaning of the word being used in education I prefer to translate it "to call forth". To educate means to help the person grow from the inside out not from the outside in. Education is to "bring out the best in the person" and to help him/her actualize his/her potential capabilities. Modern schooling has become a coercive means of subjugation and domination with the goal of conditioning primarily cognitive performance to achieve externally developed standard academic goals. While there may be some overlap, schooling and education are basically two different things which are often confused and muddled in our modern conversation about schooling.
Most educated people in the United States are well aware that the modern drive of "No child left behind" and conditioning students to pass core curriculum exams is not education. "Teaching to the test" is a counterfeit proxy for what real education should be about. Schooling has become increasingly politicized as law makers and regulators attempt to improve schooling by insisting on performance standards for teachers and their students. While this political insanity ensues our children are still not getting an education they deserve because true education is self directed not imposed by oppressive, misguided government standards. Homeschooling parents already know this as they have made the shift to the new level of consciousness with their children. Would that other parents would begin to make this shift as well by educating themselves about education, and then advocating with State governments and local school districts to develop programs and services that are truly educational and not just more of the same relying on the memorization and regurgitation of trivia.
Editor's note: The Brockporter, Brockport's online news magazine, will feature an article on education almost every Tuesday. If you have ideas, a topic, and/or an article you would like to share with readers of the Brockporter, please leave them in the comments or forward them to davidgmarkham@gmail.com
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