A little more than a year ago now, I decided to drop off the grid. I had been making a long slow escape from my previous life of working in politics, and I had finally truly crossed the Rubicon: I bought a cabin high up in the mountains of Colorado, hidden in the woods, beyond a locked Forest Service gate, and down a steep dirt road. I originally looked at it as simply the culmination of a dream—a single-family home in the middle of the forest on a stream. After this past year, I now understand it was all about educating myself.
My mother, Karen Laub Novak (whose work has been discussed in these pages before by writers far more talented than I) is to blame. She was always fully focused on the concrete, the here and now, the tactile—even as she embraced the abstract, the theoretical, and the imagined. As must be obvious, she was an artist, and this balancing act came naturally.
When my two siblings and I were children, she emphasized this trick of high-wire talent from day one. She believed that, “In school, the emphasis on teaching the child cognitive skills is nearly total. Intelligence is very narrowly defined.” As she noted in her article, “Children and Creativity”:
Artistic perception is the symbolic base of all practical thinking. … What I am proposing, for lack of a better word, is an aesthetic view of life. … The family first acknowledges that there are other habits of intelligence of equal importance to verbal and conceptual habits. These habits of nonverbal reasoning and intelligence demand equal development and training. In school, they need to be incorporated into every subject, not only reserved to a special class.
She understood that education—life!—is not about creating self-esteem, it is about nurturing the soul so that self-esteem comes about naturally. As she pointed out, when a child does something for him or herself, their joy is immense: “Godlike. A creator. The child is ecstatic; it has come from her hand, her eyes, her experience, her mind—and in her delight she knows it.”
Her article appeared in 1975—and 36 years later we have only moved further away from her simple yet profound points, and closer to her criticisms. Then, it may not have been labeled as “self-esteem focused,” but it was the same thing.
As education has embraced psychology—whether pop or profound—it has moved away from its fundamental mission. My mother noted that:
Each time a child acts out an idea, makes something related to it, it is further impressed in her memory. What we act upon becomes part of us. Too much learning is rote learning and we wonder why it didn’t stay with us.
She was right. It is not about rote learning, and certainly not about others doing it for the child (or us), it is about exploring, investigating, discovering for yourself, and truly experiencing the learning.
Which is probably why, exactly one year to the date my mother passed away, I went under contract to buy this remote mountain cabin—the type of place my mother discussed as the perfect artist’s retreat; the perfect place of learning and discovery—and why just two days after what would have been her birthday, I completed the purchase.
It was not enough for me to desire to get away from the hustle and bustle and constant distractions of modern life; not enough for me to want to escape the call of the Blackberry and the burden of constant meetings to “discuss” (discuss what? I never did figure out). It was not enough for me to move across country; and certainly not enough for me to read and memorize and hero-worship with shining eyes the independent, difficult, and entrepreneurial lives of those in the mountains, and especially of the frontier men and women who had opened up the West—I had to experience it.
Just as my mother, to teach us the letters of the alphabet, instead started by cutting out the shapes for us to play with and explore as nothing more than shapes, long before we understood what they were or stood for—I have had to play with the shapes and forms of life in the mountains long before I understood what they were. I have stumbled by myself through replacing a septic tank, moving electrical wires, opening walls, facing record-breaking (and back breaking!) snow, mitigating wildfire, managing wildlife, and juggling “handshake” payment plans as expenses went beyond erratic freelance income—as I did all of this, I slowly came to realize the shapes, the difficulties, the trials, had meaning.
They were all meaningless in theoretical—and my detailed notes of instructions, suggestions and advice were useless. Nothing made sense, nothing mattered, nothing could be handled until I actually “buckled down to work”, and I actually “acted upon” it. Every failure only reinforced my determination (well, admittedly sometimes only after a good cry, a good bourbon, or both). Every set back was, through either hardheaded stubbornness or lack of choice, simply encouragement to keep exploring, investigating, and discovering for myself.
And needless to say, every subsequent victory, no matter how miniscule, was a victory of greater pride and joy than anything else I have experienced. I did it. I was Godlike. A creator.
If I had been brought up under this new mis-education of self-esteem, I would not have survived. Even worse, I would not have discovered so much about myself—and I would not have boosted my own self-esteem. The old-fashioned way: naturally, because I did it myself. Something our educational system and our culture would be wise to learn.
So as I come up on the first anniversary of owning this cabin, and living at 10,000 feet, I am happier, healthier, and wiser—all by doing it myself.
I blame my mother.
Jana Novak, who spent more than a decade working in politics, is a freelance writer with two books—and several renovations, repairs and natural calamities—under her belt.
RESOURCES
Karen Laub-Novak, Creativity and Children
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Comments:
Joe, we all benefit from an educated public. To simply stop supporting public education would be disastrous for our country, our corporations, and our children. The current situation is not awful -- students have lots of options with charter schools, online schools, dual enrollment in community college, etc. Education could certainly be improved, which doesn't mean it should be abolished. I think we should get rid of NCLB with it's insane testing requirements and adopt the approach that Finland is using with such success of hiring highly-qualified teachers, moving toward a more individualized, child-oriented approach, and de-emphasizing testing. We could also look at incorporating imagination and sensory learning to a far greater extent than we do currently. Let us hope that people like Jana Novak and her mother will prove inspirational.
Joe's point was about the US Department of Education--a Carter era invention. The proof that it's unnecessary is that it has little or no positive academic results to display. In American public education, the positive results come from small homogeneous student populations (like your precious Finland) and from small entrepreneurial groups like KIPP. The more centralized and unionized the education, the more mechanical, unresponsive, and inferior it is. Create a Soviet-style car factory, and you'll produce Soviet-style cars--uniformly inferior. I don't want it to cost less. I want private people to run it and compete with each other for students, based on customer satisfaction (as judged by parents.)
In my classroom guild, creativity is the head teacher. We don't simply equalize the RRRs and the arts. We ground the RRRs in the arts. There is much to glean from the creative process— vast academic skills that transfer to all subject areas.
Each day, 40 to 50 students K through 12th grade eagerly participate in activities that require them to problem solve, to formulate, to actually participate in becoming educated in ways that are meaningful, in ways that have purpose. The outcome is rich, transcending traditional outcome goals.
I have young writers being published, young painters collaborating with storytellers, mathematicians who investigate, musicians who compose for film, scientists who observe and hypothesize, on and on.
I am privileged to mentor students to not only listen for and respond to their creative impulse, but also to care about the work of bringing shape to their ideas across a broad scope of subject areas.
How do we reform education?
Embark on the journey of mentoring individuals.
I have documented snapshots from my journey in Habits of Being: Artifacts from the Classroom Guild.
My point is that Federal meddling only harms, does not help, a difficult situation with public education in America. We'd save billions AND help education by abolishing the Federal department.
You're right in saying that an educated public benefits us all. However, a mis-educated public hurts us all. And mostly that is what public education does nowadays.
Public education everywhere is a broken system, and not only (and not principally) because of Federal meddling. Public education can only work when we have concensus on all these factors: what is education, what is moral, what is decent, what is acceptable behavior? Since we have no concensus on any of that, we have a broken public education system. It can't be fixed with more spending, whether it be Federal, or state and local spending. In fact, there seems to be a negative correlation between $ spent and educational success. Spend more on an inherently broken system, and you simply help it to fail faster!
No, I wasn't suggesting abolishing public education in toto. However, I assert that it is a broken system. It is a drain on our treasury and a cancer on our culture. Whether we abolish it to replace it with a working system, or do something else, nothing but a drastic re-direction will help.
"What about education?" I asked. Celia, the middle daughter, had been homeschooled from the start. Melinda is decidedly unstructured. "I don't do a formal grade-level kind of education. I take what they are interested and weave in math and science...
...I was skeptical, more of homeschooling in general than Melinda's particular version of it. I had tried a couple of simple arithmetic questions on Celia a few minutes earlier, and she was hopeless. Perhaps she was nervous. "She says she can't read," Melinda told me, "But she can look at the words and see what they are, and I try to explain to her that if you look at the word and see what it is, that's reading."
Walden-style experiences and character building tend to work when the raw material is the very best. Thoreau studied at Harvard and had Emerson as a patron before disappearing into the wilds. For people that can't, it becomes deprivation and hardship of a high level. Public education was in response to that, and for all its faults it worked pretty well.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html
I have to agree.
Thing is, any change involves a bit of risk and risk pricks fear and fear says, “No, no you can’t.”
For the past 15 years I have been individualizing education corporately. I’ve developed a prototype model that works. My school is at once a school and not a school. Once, someone asked me, “Wow, your kids are being published? Great stuff Kimberly, but are your students able to score high SAT?”
“Of course. But does this define education?”
My students excel in calculus, read, comprehend, and respond to Tolstoy. They also know what it means to be a creator.
I am not out to abolish national standards, but to enable my students to transcend them. My book explores the philosophical shift—protecting and promoting individuality—that allows me to reach this goal. But philosophical shifts often times need revolution to gain momentum.
So I participate in revolution, bit by bit: I’m founding partner of a small educational press whose purpose is to empower students to “have an idea” and to do the work of developing that idea. Inside my guild, I ground all subjects on this premise, but reaching out to the wider field of education, the vision began with language arts—books as mentors. We’ve embedded in our curriculum the scaffolding that allows the student reader and writer to discover their creative impulse and to do the work of shaping ideas. I have provided in-service workshops to enable teachers to best utilize this approach in public, private, and homeschool sectors. I contribute thoughts to blogs and educational publications.
My work places me somewhere in the no-man’s-land between private school and homeschool. Education is a vast “mission” field. What about raising support for the mission? I have long envisioned this approach catching hold. And that is exactly how I operate my guild.
So can this method work on a national level? Yes, yes it can. But it won’t look or act the same as traditional education, and the really good news… ? It costs a whole lot less.
It strikes me that you are both arguing about the wrong thing. The question need not be public education versus private educatio—that is a false dichotomy. It seems to me that the real issue is the needless conflation of education and how it is financed. Consider the following as a possible alternative:
Deconflate education from financing. We could have publicly-financed education while at the same time allowing parents at least three options: publicly-operated schools, privately-operated schools, and home schooling. For the majority of my life, there was no Federal Department of Education." But during that same period every public school district in every state was funded publicly, primarily through the local property tax. If we separate the financing mechanism from the role of the school, we could have a system in which every student is funded by giving his or her parents a voucher redeemable at any accredited school offering appropriate education to children at that age level. If the particular private school that a particular child's parents choose to educate their child charges the same as, or less than, the child's public school, the voucher is redeemed for the actual cost. If more, the parents would have to make up any difference. If the parents decide to home school, they could redeem the voucher for the cost of textbooks, basic school supplies and some amount of tutoring as the growing child proceeds to more specialized educational topics, but not to exceed the cost per pupil at the public school. If the parents choose the public school, the public school gets the full amount of the voucher.
Such an approach would cost no more, and probably less than, what the (often inadequate) publicly-operated schools do, and would provide the benefits of competition to actually educate our children (or in my case grandchildren). My only reservation is that if we retain the DofEd at the Federal level and fail to restrict its activity solely to maintaining standards of performance that are objectively measureable, we will end up with the same one-size-fits-none education El-Hi system we already have and which is producing objectively measureable results that are in the less than satisfactory range.
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante
The sentence "Nothing made sense, nothing mattered, nothing could be handled until I actually “buckled down to work”, and I actually “acted upon” it" caught my eye as perhaps the essence of Jaime Escalante's demands on himself, and on his students. Oh well, I can't resist it, the below is in memory of, and a tribute to, this great educator:
ln(x) dx = ...
Nevertheless, education in this country has become an egregious exercise in group self-stimulation, and mass, induced contraception. The fondest desire of every educated kid is to be permanently hooked up to the twitching joystick of a schwartzenegger-style killer android.
The simplest answer is to put educational values at the end of a long equation: sex=marriage; marriage=kids; kids=a good job; education -> good job. This would result in a much more effective and useful educational system. Cheaper too.
Our wasted economy is a direct result of wasted life. And wasted life is a direct corallary of our educational system. That profligate education is a necessary adjunct of an entire culture of wasted life hardly lets our teachers off the hook. It's a case of guilt by association that sticks. The economy is doomed unless we stop wasting our most precious asset: life.
But try telling that to our political, financial and educational leaders. They're bought into a system where educational excellence means 20 years of post-secondary education, marriage at age 35, and 1.6 (live) births. True academic excellence should be graduation at age 20, marriage at age 21, with (many) kids to follow soon thereafter. There's room in this scenario for advanced degrees as well - in between bottle-feedings and gainful employment.
As Shakespeare artfully noted, "From fairest creatures we desire increase, that thereby beauty's rose might never die." I can't help but believe we're letting the bard down, despite the magnanimous treatments we afford him in swooning academic symposia.
The way things are going: say goodbye to beauty; say goodbye to the rose - say hello to the contentious fingerpointing of oblivious politicians, say hello to artists checking in from the fringe with wispy prophetic whisperings. Say hello to the veritable thief in the night! Hello!
There is great satisfaction in Making. And even in Making Mistakes. I encourage my four young kids to do both (at home and school). I've seen proof that the lessons run deeper that way. And the resulting confidence, which leads to greater maturity and accomplishment, is otherwise unattainable.
Keep throwing more money at mis-education, and you get more highly mis-educated people. The false precepts of our government-education-monopoly today are poison to culture and to the body politic. We spend too much in Washington, it is clear. Should it be shocking to propose we simply stop spending that which causes, rather than cures, problems?