Well, that didn’t take long. As America’s (the term “United States” having now become an oxymoron) newly elected president blundered his way through the first week of his term of office, fingers were already being pointed at deficiencies in public education as one cause of the troubling electoral result.
Unfortunately, the critics might have a point.
As columnist Rick Salutin, writing in the Toronto Star, suggests: “A chunk of the answer lies in the state of public education in the U.S. and its obsession with testable, measurable skills in reading, writing and math. But isn’t that what schools there were always about — the 3Rs?”
Opinion writers at both ends of the political spectrum point to public education, mostly in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, and its obsession with standardized tests in math and reading to the exclusion, often literally, of everything else — including thinking.
Not that a lack of effective educational vision and leadership are being held solely responsible.
Other writers point to the increasing influence of billionaires such as Bill Gates on public policy. Big money seemed to have fallen into a pattern of discrediting public education in favour of the growth of charter schools and education for profit.
There is a timely pushback to all this among Canadian educators, and as evidence of this reaction Salutin points to a project called Measuring What Matters, which, according to Annie Kidder, founder of the group People for Education, aims to expand the concept of education as being more than just “the basics.”
The measuring project re-emphasizes, beyond a respect for education’s main goals, the need for schools to refocus on broader growth and development needs: health, citizenship, social-emotional skills and creativity, without losing touch with traditional fundamentals.
Those characteristics, while more difficult to measure with pencil-and-paper standardized tests, would lead, according to advocates such as Kidder, to a better-informed, better-prepared and more analytical citizenship.
Writing in a publication from the Alberta Teachers’ Association, Kidder suggests that “there is less public information about student outcomes or school processes in other domains.”
Some of those “other domains” echo the Conference Board of Canada’s 21st Century Vision for Public Education in Canada.
The board stresses the need for a learning model that “naturally and authentically improves student achievement in literacy, numeracy and science, and [also] provides our youth with modern competencies and life skills needed to succeed in a future we can only imagine.”
Those 21st-century skills, those “modern competencies” include self-management, where students learn to monitor and manage their own academic goals while developing perseverance and self-regulation.
The Conference Board also advocates the development of social awareness in students — the ability to understand others’ perspectives as an important factor in developing collaborative skills whereby students learn how to identify problems and generate alternatives when making decisions.
None of this suggests the exclusion of fact and basic knowledge, or that learning to think somehow excludes the importance of being able to recall and apply what has been previously learned.
Quite the contrary. What is suggested by critics of the test-dominated narrow view of education is that living in a democratic society will continue to demand more of public education than simple dependence on that which can be easily and empirically measured.
If the spectacle of the U.S. presidential process demonstrates nothing else, it is that half-formed opinion and constant repetition of disingenuous information, so-called “gaslighting,” with no regard for or basis in fact can lead an entire nation down a perilous path away from truth.
And so maybe that’s it, that’s the big 21st-century goal of public education, that along with everything else in the traditional curriculum students begin to learn the value of truth and the role objectivity plays in the pursuit of truth.
Based on their study of arithmetic and mathematics, students should also learn, along with times tables, the value of exact thinking.
With science there are periodic tables and formulas to remember, but there is also a requirement for integrity and objectivity of thought.
Literature, with its compilation of human experience, is a review of human interaction for better or worse. With history, where “alternative facts” have deceived entire populations and led them to catastrophe, students should learn that opinions in the absence of supporting fact are not opinions, just evidence of lazy or even deliberately deceitful thinking.
So the critics do have a point; education needs to be more, much more than getting the answers right on a standardized test.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
