What do we mean by “smart”. Education is about being informed in order to make smart decisions, or debate the information. Far too often our current methods, do not encourage thinking and sharing of information. There is an apathy and a fear that our recent generation and current students have adopted. Whereas some thirty years ago, education was a place for learning not only your ABC, but your values were tested and challenged. We now apear to ridicule those who question. Our work places are technical competent, yet lack excitement and risks. Our education system is contrived to control, rather than express and learn.

@dihey: Wow, love your post! I’m speaking as someone who’s been through both those great systems (Montessori and Chicago), yet finds herself somewhat lacking in the post-school world.

My earlier point was—what do we do with the people who didn’t outgrow curiosity by grade 1? What about the smart adults in the world who did pretty well until they entered the real world? Being smart is really no reward but its own. It may or may not help you get a job. It certainly won’t be valued once you have that job.

We say we want kids to do well on tests, in school, etc., but when they do society really could not care less about them.

Just sayin’!

Many of the comments here point to the need to have critical and imaginative thinking skills in order to become more than another servant for the corporate profit machine. In my experience, after working with Waldorf School graduates, that is the one place where a true love for learning is fostered and is the farthest thing from the mindless teaching to the test model. If you really care about your child, visit a Waldorf school school before you make this very important choice.

Can education overcome the Fox News propaganda machine?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/233890

Well said, as usual Mike. As the corporations continue to suck the country dry (Wall Street), and as our politicians help them (little meaningful legislation passed), we might wake up and see even more clearly the importance of a well rounded education that fosters caring, relating to each other, and the joy of working for the common good.  PE, music, dance, art, and a humane and problem-solving approach to the 3 R’s can only help us. Mindless number crunching, memorization, and training for money grubbing aren’t the answer.

Education in North America right now is a joke. One doesn’t study for knowledge - one studies for a piece of paper. One doesn’t study subjects - one merely tries to figure out how to pass tests.
High school is a hybrid kindergarden/jail. Its purpose is to bore and indoctrinate kids. The only thing you learn in high school is how to be a good cog in the corporate machine. Listen to authority figures of questionable credibility (teachers, and later politicians/ TV talking heads), and follow the instructions at your boring, demeaning job. You learn to stay in line - or you’re thrown out of the system and you lose its perks - up to 18 the system is education, after that it’s the corporate/government state.
University’s purpose is to put shackles on the middle class. You have to have a degree to get a middle-class job. To get the piece of paper that proclaims you a human being, you sink into debt, and suffer through 4 years of immense boredom.
Grad School is more boredom and indoctrination, designed to produce sheepish academics who avoid dangerous topics.

It’s impossible to learn anything when all one is taught are algorithms and dry facts. I’ve had too many courses where I scored A, but couldn’t remember anything two weeks after the final exam. Furthermore, the imposition of a schedule on the learning process is counterproductive - one can only study at one’s own pace. If you don’t feel like studying history on the week of your history midterm - tough luck! You fail, you’re scum, you’re a moron, you’re no good.

In my experience, any real studying is done on one’s own. If you are sufficiently motivated, you can learn practically anything. The problem is that school kills motivation, by equating fun subjects like mathematics and literature with spectacular tedium; worse, school sucks one’s time and energy. After 7 hours of school and 3 hours of homework, one wants to relax with a joint or a computer game or idle chatter.
I contend that any eager student can score 1500+ on the SATs with a couple of years of reading books for an hour or two a day, and a summer of serious (2-3 hours a day) math study. A solid background in language and math readily translates into fluency in history, foreign languages, and physics.
With hindsight, if I had had a kid growing up in the America of the last 20-30 years, I’d advise him to drop out of school as soon as possible, and then get the GED and a high score on the SATs.

The result of the schooling system in North America is an under-educated, over-schooled, uncritical and apathetic population, which has allowed its powerful elements to drive the whole country into the ground over the last half-century.

What steps should be taken to fix education? First, there should be less schooling. 5-6 hours a day ought to be quite enough. Schools should go easy on homeworks and depersonalized standardized multiple-choice tests. Students should be given enough time to pursue their own interests. Students who don’t want to go to school shouldn’t be forced to attend. University education should be cheap and should focus on serious subjects… Why is ‘business’ the most popular degree nowadays? What’s ‘business’ anyway? Why is marketing taught at universities? What’s with psychology?

I expect the next shift in education to come soon, when American society collapses completely and people realize they’ve been duped, and make the effort to figure out where everything wrong.

Thank you, Mr. Rose, for another insightful article. Reform based foremost on the needs of the economy, businesses, and politicians rather than the needs of the individual student will inevitably fail. Such reform situates the locus of power outside of the learner. Schooling becomes something that is done to the student, a tedious chore thrust upon them from without whose immediate purpose and usefulness are entirely opaque. The benefits of education are projected into an abstract future that seems too far off to be relevant. Activities should make use of a child’s natural curiosity, encouraging them to ask questions that satisfy a clear and immediate need, rather than absorbing inert facts from a textbook which may or may not be of use as a member of the workforce. Individual interests should be cultivated, not brushed aside as irrelevant to the high-stakes tests on which the school’s funding depends.The classroom should be an active, exciting, and engaging environment that rewards exploration, self-motivation, self-discipline, and meaningful inquiry - not a series of seemingly pointless exercises of pure drudgery that teaches the student either to hate school or to become good at gaming the system. And if this game is framed as race, then winning by any means - cheating included - is all that matters. Real reform should focus on the value of education as a means for individual empowerment, not as a means to empower administrators, school board members, politicians, and business interests. In short, school should instill a love of learning which will benefit the learner into throughout the whole of their lives.

#@*&% this Barack is a race to th Obottom of everything he touchs.

Schools and employers say they do but don’t really like smart people. In school—yes grades are good but we quickly run out of classes and opportunities for smart kids. In business—try being smarter than the powers that be, you won’t be there for long. So, what do we do with educational values that say “be smart” then kick you to the curb if you are?

Hey, is this the Mike Rose from my old WaPo blogging days?  If you are, are you on twitter yet?  FIND ME Mikey

IF it’s you….

I have long maintained that the most important goal of education in a democracy is to have an educated citizenry.  I went to a liberal arts school for undergraduate work and that was the main thrust of their education as I perceived it.  When, in the 80’s the schools I worked at started to write up their goals and purposes, I always tried to serve on that committee.  It was a voice in the wilderness to bring that up and fight to get that into the purpose/mission statement.  Even the Grundtvig /Danish folkschool centered philosophy of John Dewey, who was supposedly the father of modern education, maintained this was a core purpose of our educational system.  Yet educators throughout the 20th century paid homage to him and went about essentially ignoring his philosophy.  In the 70’s , the “bean counters” took over in education, and educational philosophy went out the window totally and economics ruled the world with no intention of “educating for life”.  I’m discouraged!

``No child left behind`` guarantees that many children wld be left behind.

If one rates childrens abilities as A,B,C,D, one is not only vitiatingly divisive; i.e., uses divide et impera artifice, but also discriminatory.

If cows are rated as Prime A, B, etc. cows don`t mind since that it does not cause them envy, anger, frustration, etc.

In add`n to that, schools manufacture serfs; most for a life time. That`s why schooling is mandatory!

Get them!! Get them early! Render them angry. Shame them. Make them feel stupid; while preparing few for governing; i.e, dictatorship.

So,working people shld warn their children ab these crooks who are out to hurt and debase beautiful work of nature. Shame on all teachers who approve and apply the animalistic training of children.
I self have finished last in my class but am proud that the crooks never got to me! tnx

I haven’t read Mr. Rose’s book, but I’ll add a few words on behalf of American education.  How can you get people see the value of an American education, when we don’t value what an American education already brings?  We spend billions on American education (and this is not an argument not to), but then, we ship jobs overseas to people who are from third world educational systems, and we ship people in to do jobs Americans most certainly WOULD do, and do a lot better, than the outside labor shipments are doing (since they are mostly shipped in, legally, to protect and provide for the vast illegal pools of labor brought into the U.S.).  American workers ARE better educated and better trained and better able problem solvers and workers.  If you don’t believe me, call a cell phone company or a credit card company or a computer company - and have your call routed to one of their workers in any number of places they get it cheap, e.g. Thailand, just for starters.  Then have your call routed to someone in the U.S.  The difference in problem solving and professionalism—even with an American who only has a high school or technical school diploma is huge.  Now, too, also consider all the people out there pounding pavements or having given hope of finding anything—with all those guaranteed student loans—going to waste.  You’re fighting a losing battle on this front, if you can’t see that all the investment we’ve already made in our nation means something, and isn’t appreciated.  The problem with educators is that they’re just trying to keep the education business going for themselves alone.  So their sales pitch doesn’t resonate with many people who no longer see the point of putting into something when we don’t see fit, as a nation, to make good on those returns, to begin with.  Nice article, otherwise.  Yes, education is important.  But how do we REALLY show that we understand that?

I am happy that people like Mike Rose will take the time to express views like those in this article. As an engineer I struggle with each word so I have posted essentially the same following comments in other places, but I feel strongly concerning this subject.
    Many of the current problems in K-12 education involve developing long term budgets free of political turmoil, a general acceptance of the tangible and intangible benefits of education, and the desire of some groups to interject their ideologies into public education.  Rather than solve these underlying problems it appears that we are going to pour money into the assessment business, and rely on Federal programs like Race To The Top (RTTT).
    Aggressive testing and assessments programs, like RTTT, when applied nationwide involve large amounts of money, which provides many opportunities for distorting the results.  Also, I disagree with the concept of distributing Federal education funds based on competition as opposed to need.  RTTT, with its competition between States, holds children hostage to a State’s political philosophy and to any peculiarities in judging the competition.  In recent years we have also heard from many, including a Supreme Court nominee, the Newtonian concept that the umpire, in this case the assessor, is independent of the system.  Both modern logic and experience tells us this is a false concept, and the educational system will be significantly affected by any assessment and testing, often in unpredictable and undesirable ways. 
    As to the tangible and intangible benefits of education, according to President Obama, in recent speeches, the benefits of a better education are to earn 60% more, eliminate an achievement gap that can cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, and provide success in the global workplace.  I find it sad that he did not mention ideas like improvements in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  In the big picture, is there data that directly correlates aggressive assessment and testing with lifelong creativity, happiness, and social harmony?  The Japanese have had very aggressive educational assessments over a long period of time, and they are now concerned about high teen student suicide rates and creativity. 
    I would suggest that the first steps in fixing our system would be to insure that every teacher has appropriate sized classes, a first class educational environment, and a reasonable wage. For students I would recommend a TLC environment with proper nutrition, parents with jobs that provide a reasonable income for the hours worked, and a home not in foreclosure.

Horace Mann and the early founders of public education had studied the
Prussian system of education, which had the overt goal of creating an elite
highly educated ruling class, a mid-level bureaucratic and managerial class,
and a much larger lower class of unthinking, barely literate menial laborers and
foot-soldiers whose main training was in obedience.

Our education system has always performed this function admirably—except
that today the bottom of our pyramid is filled by a barely literate, dysfunctional
class of people whose main training is in easily manipulated political fanaticism
and unthinking consumption.

45% of American public high school graduates do not understand that the First
Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.  33% believe
that the government should censor the press more than it does. 

The largest product of public education in America’s major cities is failure—
the high school failure rate in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City,
Detroit, runs over 50%.  (School systems like to cook the books by only
counting the kids who drop out in the last year of high school—but if you
look at how many of those who enter high school in our major cities actually
graduate, it’s less than half.  Look it up.)

We need to stop fantasizing about what we think public education should be
doing for our society and start taking a look at our kids—not just the
successful kids, but the millions we are hurting.  For every kid who is
“intellectually stimulated” by middle school I’ll show you ten who are numb with
boredom or made to feel stupid in a way that damages them for life.

There are structural reasons why a system based on obedience and conformity,
a one-size-fits-all curriculum, and a grading system that makes kids who
don’t fit the mold feel stupid—especially when it is well-documented that
those who don’t fit the mold are often our most creative, talented, and
motivated children, and especially when it is extremely well-documented that
grades and test scores correlate better to family income than to any other
factor—will never foster either democracy or a humane, enlightened society.

Stop focusing on the teacher’s pets, Mr. Rose, and take a good hard look at the
kids in the back row.  They are the casualties of a system that was never
intended to serve all of our children and never will.

Thank you, Mike Rose, for telling what needs to be said.  Education is about far
more than getting a good job.  As a former teacher, I can vouch for all of the
humanitarian aspects of education: setting of standards, joy of accomplishment,
the social aspects of growing up, the nurturing of each student’s persona,
character education, acceptance of differences among students and teachers,
appreciation of nature, history, and the arts, the value of performance, and lots
more.  If only educators, students, and parents could write the reforms and the
politicians could watch from the sidelines—that would be real education reform!