You may not believe it but there are a couple of things that still need to be said about our public schools. Things that while they are being said, not just by me, but by many other blog voices on the internet, are not widely listened to, and certainly not heard by the educational establishment.

First that the educational establishment needs to welcome an injection of common sense into their discussion, that which is not always present when they talk about the schools. For example it needs to be said and heard by the establishment that the schools will significantly improve, student proficiency, student achievements will rise, only when the students themselves simply work harder at their assignments, when they become more responsible for their own learning.

For common sense tells us that student learning, in particular students being held accountable for their own learning, ought to be the centerpiece of all our conversations about the public schools. Instead we talk about other things, much less important, about money, common core standards, the curriculum, testing and student data keeping, and lately, perhaps, most of all, about the importance of the teacher in the classroom.

It’s true that our best and brightest do not go into teaching (if they had we might have avoided Vietnam, and Iraq?). It’s true that the quality of our teachers is not up there with that of the other professions. Why is that?

Is it because teachers are not paid enough? I don’t think so. I would say, much more, that it’s because too many students, and in particular too many of those in our inner city schools, show little interest in classroom learning.

I say “classroom learning” because these students, like all young people are learning all the time, probably most of all out of class and out of school. And, because of their minimal participation in classroom learning, the teacher loses his or her interest in being there.

I know I left the public school classroom myself because my students showed little interest in what I would teach them. At best the best of them wanted to know what they had to know for the test. The others, well if obliged they did for the most part attend my class. Although when I gave them a choice they didn’t and I lost my position in the school.

The other thing, or things, that needs to be said about our schools is simply that the present structure neither corresponds to what society needs, nor to the way kids best learn, and should be abandoned.

I read this early on in my own career in the brilliant writings of Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, John Holt and many others, who were not at the time, and are still not, alas, listened to by the educational establishment.

I read it again just yesterday in comic form in a Blog piece by Frank J. Fleming, entitled: Why Every Kid in America Doesn’t Need to Be Educated.

Here is the gist of what Frank Fleming says, leaving out much of the humor, and the exaggeration, but with, I hope, the substance of his message:

Why do we spend so much money on education? I think a lot of people would answer, “Because educating our kids is important.” Really? Why? ….

We have 7.2 million teachers in this country and about 76 million students. Children are taught for 13 years in grade school, and many people want everyone to get at least 4 years of college on top of that. And what exactly do we get out of all this? ….

What is our goal? …. The future still needs people to cook, clean, and manufacture goods — and it doesn’t take a decade of education in math and science to be able to do those things. So why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure every fry cook at one point in his life knew what a gerund is?

Is there a benefit to educating everybody regardless of actual need? We keep hearing that we’re falling behind the rest of the world in our average math and science scores, but let’s look at some of the countries ahead of us: Finland, Lichtenstein, the Czech Republic. I’m sorry, but did I miss all the huge technological innovations that came out of these countries? ….

Now, obviously some people …need education…. But is the most efficient path to that really to teach absolutely everyone and hope a small percentage actually retain some of what they’re taught? …. why don’t we just focus on what the average citizen actually needs?

Everyone needs literacy, as you have to have some reading skills …. And then we should also teach everyone how to use Google, as that will cover science, history, and math whenever those come up. No reason that basic knowledge can’t be knocked off in a year for each kid…..

So there’s our solution to the education problem: Instead of trying to make a lot of bad education for everyone when most aren’t even going to use it, let’s focus on making the absolute best education to give to the few who will. Everyone else gets to learn useful skills, and as a bonus we bring manufacturing jobs back to our country.

His message, like the earlier one that the students themselves need to be held accountable, is also not new, and also not widely heard. For we go on insisting that if not everyone, most everyone be prepared for college, that which means for lives most of them will never lead.

For example we know early on that not everyone will take the calculus in the senior year of high school but continue promoting a mathematics program that is by and large a preparation for the calculus.

And the same is true throughout the program. Kids, if they remain in school through high school, all but about a quarter of them (and what have our schools done for this quarter?), will take subjects such as math (as I’ve said, a kind of precalculus) and science, language, literature, and history, in a form that is mostly irrelevant to their lives, and for the most part they will not achieve a college ready preparation or readiness in any one of these areas (that which makes it necessary for so many entering college freshmen to do remedial work before, too many of them, dropping out).

And while giving all those years as Fleming points out to not learning anything useful to them, students (better, kids) will therefore not have learned all those really useful things not in the program, the skills and knowledge regarding just about everything else that does go on in our society, the jobs and work and other activities needed by society, all those things they might have learned in school most useful to their own futures.

I’ve often written about just how little is learned in the classroom. Well, here’s the best explanation I’ve seen as to why this is so. I take the text (and explanation) that follows from the Introduction to R. Barker Bausell’s book, Too Simple to Fail.

Introduction: Obsolete from every perspective

Thirty-five students sit facing a single teacher. The teacher has just provided a brief but coherent introduction to a new topic, but one portionof her class couldn’t follow what she was saying because they have had too little previous instruction on the subject at hand. Another portion of the class is terminally bored because they had previously learned 90% of everything the teacher said (or will say during the upcoming school year). A third contingent is distracted by two misbehaving boys seated at he rear of the room.

Recognizing these problems, and hoping to reinforce the main points of her lecture, she reseats the two boys on opposite sides of the room and has all the students open their textbooks to read the same page. Unfortunately, the same part of her class who  couldn’t follow her leture along with a significant portion of the students who were distracted, also has trouble reading the textbook. And of course the students who already knew what she was talking about already know everything contained on that particular page in their textbook.

Sensing that something is amiss, the teacher decides to vary her routine a bit and have everyone come to the front of the room and sit on the floor surrounding the chalkboard. Following a few minutes of jostling and confusion, the class then watches a student attempt to solve a math problem based upon what has just been taught and read about (by some). This particular student fails miserably and can’t follow the teacher’s attempts to help him “discover” his error. The remainder of the class isn’t at all interested in this process since some of them would have never made such an egregious mistake, some of them can’t follow the teacher’s explanation, and some simply  aren’t paying attention.

Later, with the students back at their desks, the teacher poses a question to the class on the topic. Some students raise their hands whether they know the answer or not; some wave their arms frantically because they are sure they have the correct answer (or simply want the attentionn); and everyone else waits for either the correct or the incorrect answer, or pays more attention to the myriad other competing activities that are constantly  going on in the classroom, somewhat analogous to a cocktail party in which we stand in a crowded room with  sounds and conversations going on all around us and must decide to what we will direct our attention and to what we will only pretend to do so.

What these and most other classroom instructional activities have in common is their mind-boggling inefficiency, the amount of time they consume, and the fact that at any given point in time only a portion of the students involved will be a actually attending to them—either because the instruction isn’t keyed to their particular needs or they are free to attend to competing activities that they find more interesting. And as if all of this were not enough, the teacher herself is most likely ill trained for her job. She probably graduated from a university-based school of education, which may have been staffed by faculty  who knew very little about how to maintain order in a public school classroom, make instruction relevant for as large a percentage of such a classroom as possible, foster learning under typical classroom conditions, or even how to teach the types of content she is now charged with conveying. And if teaching children to read is part of our teacher’s duties, she may have never even been given a cursory lesson on basic phonics instruction. In fact, it is possible that this teacher may never have enrolled in a single course that actually prepared her to teach children to read, to  write, or to understand mathematics—perhaps because her faculty were never taught that themselves. An accident of history, perhaps, due to the discipline’s early thinkers (such as Herbert Spencer, John Dewey) who were less concerned about increasing the amount students learned than they were about the philosophical and social implications of schooling. Or, of later popular theorists such as Jean Piaget, whose work would ultimately  wind up having no recognizable application to classroom instruction.

But returning to the 35-student classroom, our intrepid teacher realizes that she can’t spend any more time on this particular lesson and must move on whether everyone is ready or not….

The sad truth is that no one knows just how little value classroom instruction adds to the children’s education….

I would encourage you to read the entire introduction, if not the book. The Introduction is included in a free “sample” download from Amazon’s Kindle App, either on Android or iphone smart phones.

Now you’ve all probably had the classroom experiences that the author, R. Barker Bausell is describing. Did you at the time, or have you since, asked yourselves how this sort of thing could still be going on, at least since my own experience in one of the “better” classrooms at a prestigious private school some 60 years ago?

OK, perhaps not the “horror” of it as Marlow might say, but the inefficiency, the horrible waste of one’s time, in many instances one’s best time, that time of childhood that could have been so rich in learning experiences.

How children might best learn, and what they are learning, with or without us, ought to be at the very top of our educational agenda. But instead, perhaps because we had to do it ourselves, we go on placing our children during some twelve years of their lives, the very formative years when so much could have been accomplished, into the very same classrooms that Bausell is describing. Hélas!

Talking about the schools is a lot like talking about the weather, what we say in regard to both depending a lot on where we’re standing. And, there being probably no two of us standing in the same place, our differing perspectives lead unsurprisingly to our widely different conclusions.

Still at present there are those who cling to certainty, who are convinced that it’s within their power to control the weather, say by regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. And no less remarkably there are those who think we can change, and improve the schools by one or more reforms, such as holding teachers accountable for the achievement or lack of achievement of their students.

But no successes have yet been recorded traceable to the efforts of either group.

Why? Well in both, the weather and the schools, the variables are just too many, too complex, still in good part unknown, to be entered into any equations of explanation, let alone made a basis of any remedies for correction and improvement.

In regard to both humility is called for. And by reaching for much less we would grasp more.