Finding Clarity Beyond Education Fads
Thoughtful reflections on education, autonomy, and reason beyond passing trends.
A Voice of Reason in Group Dynamics
One evening in a course on stages of human development, I noticed a classmate briefly wincing and groaning at the spectacle of somebody’s foolish and talentless imitation of the state of human infancy in a group performance in front of the class—a performance nobody seemed to find entertaining. The vexed observer and I were part of an upcoming group presentation. In a meeting to plan for this, he urged that we merely take our separate five-minute turns presenting our chosen topics and leave it as sensibly simple as that. His words exactly: “Five minutes up and down. Nobody gets hurt.” A voice of reason at last. It carried the group.
Late Adolescence and the Barbados Success Story
Our general group topic was the phase that is known as “late adolescence.” A relevant subtopic would have been that gang of party-school royalty who’d managed to gain the upper hand at the other school by living up to the platitude about the value of knowing how to work in a group. However, I chose for my topic the high school dropout phenomenon, but then took the liberty of digressing briefly on something far beyond our shores and very upbeat—namely, the remarkable rate of high achievement on the SAT on the Caribbean island of Barbados, a Black-majority nation with an outstanding literacy rate obtained from straightforward education.
According to education professor Pedro Noguera: Barbados has a higher adult literacy rate than the U.S. Recently, 300 students from Barbados signed up to take the SAT, and they averaged 1200. (From “Why Johnny can read (he lives in Barbados),” Commonfund News—CFQ, Spring 2001) Similar claims are made by James Beard in the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel in his 6/16/1997 article titled “Traditional Teaching Vindicated.” Students in Barbados Outshine Americans.”
Excellence as Rebellion
A faraway place exists where descendants of slaves are now surpassing achievement norms of American whites. As well, they should. This counts as justice at its most poetic, rebellion at its most profound, and the SAT at its most ironic. Something new on the face of the earth. It's strange that it mostly goes overlooked. Pursuit of excellence as an act of deep rebellion is a thought that I, a white American, would like to offer to African Americans for its value as a means of telling off the closet bigots and the white supremacists who still inhabit our society. End of Caribbean digression. To the messy American issues previously raised, we must return.
The Rights of Disentanglement
Messy demoralization almost seems at times as if it were a progressivist educational principle—a way of life, a regimen, a crucible, a sanctimonious growing pain, a group-life skill of a sort, the high-flown rationales of which resound with arcane refrains, pat abstractions, oft-recited buzzwords at their emptiest as in such wonderments as learning how to learn constructivistically as merrily thematically reflectively discovery-oriented learning-now-made-whole-inspired meaning makers learning how to carry on with roles designed to serve the greater good of a learning group experiencing holistic interrelations between the cognitive and psychomotor as well as affective learning domains, the better to satisfy criteria for authentic assessment of course. Educationspeak. The English language could use a break from it.
Against the "Pseudo-Humanist" Mold
Empty is the word “education” itself when people are taken for granted as toys of confused educational fads, when human individuals are taken for granted as plastic raw material to be injected into the latest pseudo-humanist molds. A smidgen of humane intuition alone would go a long way to avoid inflicting the unlovely distortions of human relations of the kind recounted herein.