POINT OF VIEW

Oy! Education!

The author wonders just who the slow learners really are.

By Mimi Brodsky Chenfeld

OY! EDUCATION! What are we going to do with you? Where are we going in this faster-than-ever, high-tech pressure cooker of a new millennium?

We're so frustrated. We have problems to solve, but we don't know how. We have a plethora of research studies to steer us, but we ignore them. We demand measurements, assessments, statistics, benchmarks, and standards! We're fighting over funding and over fundamentals, but we're forgetting about the first syllable: fun.

We make promises we can't keep: 3-year-old toddlers will learn their letters and numbers by age 4 or be held back; third-graders will read on grade level by June (from our mouths to God's ear). The promise of kindergarten as a "garden of children" no longer holds for too many youngsters who find obstacle courses of thorns.

The polarized dialogue is sharp and stinging. Test kindergartners. They need more seatwork, worksheets, homework. Downplay play. Forget the universal wisdom that play is children's work. Cut the arts and slash the field trips. Frills steal time from drills!

One method fits all. Shape up, you fourth-graders, because you're ruining our scores. Why wait till fourth grade for standardized tests? Let's test every year! That will change enchanted education into a disenchanted school daze.

Teachers are on the front line, fair game for all verbal assaults. Why are so many gifted, experienced teachers taking early retirement? Why are so many beginning teachers changing careers? Ask them. They'll tell you that they didn't go into the profession to teach to test-driven curricula, to use a single ordained reading method. They didn't expect to whittle away their precious days with the children with so little time left for exploration, discovery, excitement, and the joy and fun of learning.

Some folks call teachers "whiners" and blast them for complaining about the anxieties caused by test-craziness. Most caring and competent teachers who are not suffering burnout are burnt up by the relentless attacks on their integrity and commitment. They are not whiners but winners who should be wined and dined and honored for their loyalty -- not to materials, not to methods, not to test questions, but to the sacred spirits of the children who come so eagerly to start school and too often slump away in disappointment and defeat, like balloons with the air squeezed out of them.

Our teachers, unheralded heroes and heroines, stand strong in the eye of the storm when the raging winds of threats and accusations whirl around them. With their students, they keep their focus on their daily lives together, playing the game, juggling and manipulating time so they can try to meet the expectations of the nation, the state, the community, and the families they serve. They work within often misguided guidelines to keep faith with the children and maintain the joyful celebration of ideas.

I compare our stellar teachers in these tumultuous times to the brave teachers who kept learning alive during slavery, wars, and natural disasters. Sometimes, through history, the lights of learning dimmed or were hidden away, but because of such teachers they continued flickering and were never extinguished.
How easy to forget that education is a journey that we embark on together. It's not a race! We have our maps to guide us, but sometimes we hit detours, construction areas, and traffic jams. We reroute, make new connections. The highway may be the straightest route, but, often, the scenic route is better, if slower. Don't we want to stop for historical markers, for observation points? Don't we want to sketch and write in our journals? To take pictures? To take time to talk about the journey?

Our children are more than their scores on standardized tests. They are complicated and amazing individuals who learn in their own ways and at their own paces. We diminish their value when we box them into graphs and percentage charts. We diminish ourselves and our highest beliefs when we use the language of the marketplace, the language of business, to define education!

We learn in so many different ways -- all of them valid -- too few of them acknowledged. Children make meaning about the world through song, music, movement, the arts, play, story, poetry, nature. How and what do they learn through constant drilling, worrisome test preparation, isolated skills disconnected from meaningful concepts and materials?

Oy! Education! Where are we going in this faster-than-ever, high-tech pressure cooker of a new millennium? The children will tell you if you listen to them: we want to learn things by heart; we want to fall in love with school and learning; we want to be smart and full of the excitement of discovery and knowledge; we want to run into school, not drop out.

Perhaps we adults are the slow learners.

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Kappan Professional Journal
Last updated 7 December 2001
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0111che.htm
Copyright 2001 Phi Delta Kappa International