Bird Droppings June 6, 2024
This thought has crossed my mind lately. Are we experiencing genocide of learning?

Lately, in the midst of my daily journal entries, it has been getting hectic. I am trying to finish my dissertation, an eighteen-year project. It has been a few years since the Foxfire teachers program was discontinued. I no longer run back and forth to North Georgia to visit with friends, research, and sit in on Foxfire Teacher Classes, reading and discussing John Dewey, maintaining some semblance of order in my herb gardens and my work on my writing, of course. So here, early in the morning today, as I write, I am working on an idea that has been bothering me for some time. I used the harsh word genocide in my title as I am working on this idea, and some will perhaps object to the concept that we as a society are killing off real learning in our schools. All the talk of increasing rigor, combined with budget cuts, increased class sizes, and massive standardized testing, will help you decrease what is truly learned. I have, over the past few days, used Carl Rodgers quotes, and he uses the term significant learning that which stays with us. I will allow a student in school to memorize answers for a test, and some might be learning, but the joy and passion of learning are stripped away far too many times by overzealous teachers trying to succeed with their students on test scores. I have offered numerous times that a test at the end of a class or subject is not a valid measure of what a student learned with that teacher or in that subject without a baseline point of reference.

I am currently reading a book that is a compilation of essays dealing with Indigenous spirituality. The Inner Journey was edited by Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw writer and environmentalist. As I opened the book, the first essay was by Vine Deloria Jr., a Native author and activist. The title of the essay is Out of Chaos.

“Whites acquire land through purchase and sale, and land is a quantifiable, measurable entity; their primary responsibility as landowners is simply to prevent loss of value; hence, any responsibility the land owner may have is only to himself. Indian tribes acquire land as a gift from higher powers, and in turn, they assume certain ceremonial duties which must be performed as long as they live on and use the land. Removing an Indian tribe from its aboriginal territory, therefore, results in the destruction of ceremonial life and much of the cultural structure.” Vine Deloria Jr.

I just watched a trailer from a movie with actor Wes Studi as Geronimo in discussion with a Senator and several other politicians trying to get him to go to the reservation. He was told he would have a better life and responded, but I like my life. He was told they would each receive a partial of land from the government. He responded that the government buy the land, did they trade for it, then how do they own it? The politicians were unable to respond to his answers and questions. Eventually, he was forced to the reservation and literally prison at Fort Sill, where he died after being refused by Teddy Roosevelt to return to the sacred White Mountains of New Mexico to die.

To put into another perspective, the author, Capitalist, and Libertarian hero and favorite, Ayn Rand, at the 1974 West Point address, had this to say about Native Americans.

“They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using… What was it that they were fighting for when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their “right” to keep part of the earth untouched, unused, and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.” Ayn Rand, Address 1974 West Point

One might ask what does this have to do with learning at all. I would respond that it is a good question if I had not witnessed a similar situation within the learning field. If we can substitute learning for land, perhaps it will be somewhat clearer.

Over the years, my former room at the high school had been the school field trip for the Early Childhood classes of four-year-olds and their high school student teachers. My collection of various snakes, lizards, and turtles, not discounting spiders and hissing cockroaches, always amazes kids, and questions can be almost infinite if allowed. On one occasion, a four-year-old little fellow asked me how snakes go to the bathroom. Almost immediately, his student teacher said that’s a silly question hush. I jumped in before another word was said, not embarrassing the high school student but offering some advice that no question is silly, especially from a four-year-old. We proceeded to learn about the snakes’ cloacae. So often, children are stifled by time and by constraints imposed with standards and a teacher’s understanding of what is to be accomplished in a given time.

“The gap is so great that the required subject matter, the methods of learning and of behaving are foreign to the existing capacities of the young.” John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938

Children come to school as avid learners. I often use the term sponges, having just recently learned to talk, walk, play, and laugh at humor. Little children are truly sponges absorbing all about them. Far too often, we approach these children with our adult understandings and views and miss the fact that perhaps, while avid learners, we have gone beyond their understanding and even instinctual capacities to learn. We want straight rows and hands on the desk, quiet, and no questions. It takes only a short time for children to become robots, and those that do not conform are labeled as behavior problems. I cannot help but think of Geronimo when he petitioned Teddy Roosevelt to go to the White Mountains of New Mexico to die amongst his homeland and birthplace, his ceremonial home, and was refused. A child comes to school with few rules, yet morals are established and understood. However, the conforming rules of society and times are deemed appropriate for eating, napping, and reading. No more reading because you want to but now because you have to. John Dewey wrote about this in 1938 and was considered a progressive at that time.

“… All experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades forever and forever when I move.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It has been a few years since I have been and would be involved a day here and there with the Foxfire Approach to Teaching courses up in Mountain City, Georgia, on the Foxfire Property. I tried to attend as many days as I could so that I could recharge and learn rather than add to the class selfishly. One evening, a few courses had passed, and I invited former Foxfire students to dinner with future and current teachers who were learning about Foxfire. Sitting around a table, we were discussing the impact of this specific teaching approach on their lives. The former students had been in the Foxfire program from 1970 to 1995. All saw their experiences as life-changing. They carried a love of learning forward with them. What amazed me was the anonymous overwhelming praise for this style of teaching and not just one teacher. Still, these former students have had several different teachers all using the same approach, which allows me to say it was the approach, and yes, teachers do matter. We had a great evening as conversations drifted from today to the past and back. The teachers were to be videotaped as they asked questions of these former students and gave their responses. Last year, I had the great privilege of meeting one of the former Foxfire instructors from the early days, Mr. George Reynolds. In only a few minutes of talking to the group, his passion for learning and teaching was evident. He had been in Mountain City for a reunion of sorts, visiting several former students who had made music their careers.

“The best reason to give a child a good school …. Is so that child will have a happy childhood, and not so that it will help IBM in the competing with Sony … There is something ethically embarrassing about resting a national agenda on the basis of greed.” Jonathan Kozol

Within our society, Education has become a business. If you are watching the news on any given night, school board budgets and teacher cuts are literally daily. Charter schools for profit are being formed, and profit-making corporations are trying to get their way into public Education. With that in mind, what is the result when only profit is a goal, and the success of a given student is no longer an issue? We have been fortunate in our county not to lose teachers but to make adjustments in other areas. Class sizes and numbers of students per class have been adjusted, our school day has lengthened, and the school year has shortened.

Money is obviously a driving force. Going a step further to a state level and a curriculum change, for example, the math curriculum in Georgia was radically changed a few years ago, and this offered hundreds of millions in textbook purchases to someone in the publishing business. This year, the Math Curriculum is changing again and more books. Education is a big business when you get to this level, and literally, someone owns it, being a bit sarcastic. So, when looking at the monetary aspect of Education, it is very similar to land, which someone has possession of. Economic issues drive national education policy. Most progressive educators would say the industrial complex is educating consumers. Our

 “Native” culture has been stripped away and replaced with a planned and orchestrated day-by-day blueprint within Education to make good consumers.

“Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge. Knowledge is truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence Education should be everywhere the same.” Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America, 1936

Hutchins would be happy in today’s educational world, where you hear such phrases from administrators daily: “If I walk into a biology room in Georgia, it should look like a biology room in New Jersey.” With common core standards and standardized testing, norms and curriculum maps, and every moment choreographed, Hutchins would love to know where Education has gone. So perhaps I can blame Hutchins for the genocide of learning thought. The great educator Maxine Greene, in her essay reflecting on John Dewey, offers to refer to this passage by Hutchins.

“Emphasizing absoluteness and universality, he (Hutchins) insisted that the idea of progress was meaningless. Education had to be properly understood as the cultivation of the intellect. It could only be contaminated when windows were opened to the social, public, and political world outside.” Maxine Greene

John Dewey bases much of his thinking on experience, whether it is current or past. We build on past experiences, and if done right, these flow into future experiences, building a learning-for-life scenario. Over the past few days, I have been working on a simple formula along the lines of if we have an experience that, combined with thoughtful reflection, provides learning we can then build upon for future learning. Many hours can be hashed around deciding what learning is and what experience is. To that matter, what is thoughtful reflection?

“Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into.” John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938

As I think about Dewey and Education and how we are increasing rigor, I was reading Alfie Kohn’s book, What Does it Mean to Be Well Educated,” and found an interesting thought.

“To judge schools by how demanding they are is rather like judging opera on the basis of how many notes it contains that are hard for singers to hit. In other words, it leaves out most of what matters.” Alfie Kohn

It has been nearly eleven years since a good friend and former principal introduced me to Alfie Kohn’s books in a book club meeting. I miss that sort of philosophical endeavor. It seems more standardized reading is the norm these days. I use the idea of increasing rigor, which is much like demanding everyone break the world record in a high jump. In simple terms, it ain’t gonna happen.

We increase rigor to a point where a few students are lost, and many struggle to be successful. I read a recent front-page article on the number of students in remedial classes prior to getting into college math and Literature. It was costing the state a lot of money. Colleges accept students based on test scores and GPA, and some students may need a refresher course. I admit I had remedial Literature in my freshmen year in college, and I think I failed it. Of course, my rationale was that the beach was an hour away, and it was warm, and listening to some old bat in a literature course was not very much fun. I did turn it around eventually and was on the dean’s list my junior and senior years, although there were numerous colleges and many years past the normal four.

So, is there a solution to this issue of improving schools and the Education of our children? What is it we need in teachers? What do we, as parents, expect from the Education our children receive? I recall a friend who went to Korea to teach English, and in her year in Korea, several issues came to the front. First, families would only accept the best from the kids. They expected their children to work hard in school and at home on homework, and my friend emphasized that three hours of homework was considered light. So is it that in some countries, more emphasis is put on Education than in the US? You will find from the data that many Asian countries have very high test scores on international standardized achievement tests. But what are the side effects of this pressure? Some of the highest suicide rates among teenagers are in these countries. We need to address our system, and we need to go beyond the test scores that are meaningless from a validity standpoint. On the front page of our local paper was an article on test scores in the county comparing our local system, which generally does well.

We need good teachers, and good teachers are not easy to find. I have titled a paper I am working on, Attitude is the secret to teaching: Active, Tangible, Total, Intuitive, Thinking and Understanding of Developing Experience. I do believe Attitude is a key to successful teachers. We need a philosophy of Education that is fluid and not static that one size fits all. We need to provide relevance and context, and all research points to this as being key to learning and the retention of learning. However, one of the elements that is critical for me is that we need to have empathy as teachers. Sadly, there are few with empathy, and it can go a long way. Intuition and understanding can be of great assistance in learning. I ended a short article the other day with the word conversations, there needs to be conversations between students and teachers in both directions, and there needs to be conversations between parents and teachers. As I head into more Foxfire ideas, I have been pondering Education as a stream and the Foxfire Core practices as stepping stones to gain momentum. So solving quickly is a near impossibility, but the idea is there. Hopefully, after three weeks of being embedded in the Foxfire Approach to teaching, I will be ready for another school year. Please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart, and always give thanks namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

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