First thoughts about Diane Ravitch's changes of heart on school reform

I'm planning to purchase Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System as soon as possible - it sounds like a fascinating and heartfelt book about a great educator's rethinking of long-held positions on school reform. The reviews have been mostly glowing. (For a kind but critical review, check out Chester Finn's take in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/diane-ravitch-education-schools-opinions-book-reviews-chester-e-finn-jr.html)

However, the tone of many of the stories about Ravitch's change of heart suggest to me that the politicization of education and school reform has become a serious problem. We need to refocus on whether a particular idea or a particular reform will strengthen student outcomes, and we should be less concerned about whether the proposal comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum.

School reform is not just another political issue: it is an issue that directly affects the lives of millions of students and their communities. It affects the social and economic future of society and the health of democracy.

Those who wade into these debates bear an especially heavy burden, and to handle that burden responsibly, we should read widely and listen with an open mind to ideas and proposals from as many perspectives as possible.

It seems to me that there may be more common ground than the current political lines-in-the-sand suggest. For instance, the progressive vision of small, personal, relationship-driven schools (advocated most prominently by Deborah Meier) seems more compatible with a flexible and choice-driven school structure than with large-scale, one-size-fits-all models of schooling.

Above all, perhaps, our education policy debates might become more sane if we stood back for a moment from debates about means - how and by whom education services are to be delivered (by public or private schools, charter schools, virtual schools, home-based schools, etc.) - and agreed first and foremost that educational outcomes (what knowledge, skills, habits, and dispositions students walk away with at the conclusion of their schooling) are what matters most.

It seems silly and shortsighted to pick a fight with a school that is truly serving its students and community well just because it is a particular type of school. Likewise, it seems wrong to stand up against any and all reform measures that target schools that are clearly not serving their students and community well simply because one is concerned about the broader implications of the reform or the political affiliation of those who are promoting the reform.

The simple reality is that there are excellent public, private, charter, virtual, and home-based schools, and there are extremely poor public, private, charter, virtual, and home-based schools. The means of schooling are less important than the outcomes.

(Image sources: Education Week (www.edweek.org) and Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com)).

Further reading:

Diane Ravitch's homepage: http://www.dianeravitch.com/

Diane Viadero, "In New Book, Ravitch Recants Long-Held Beliefs," Edweek.org, 3/5/10.

Steve Inskeep, "Former 'No Child Left Behind' Advocate Turns Critic," NPR.org, 3/2/10.

Chester E. Finn, "School's Out: On Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," Forbes.com, 3/3/10.

Interview: Self-educator Hoossam Malek

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl

Featured self-educator: Hoossam (Sam) Malek

Self-educator’s location: Baltimore, Maryland

Date: 4 March 2010

I met Sam Malek three summers ago, when the two of us were summer interns at Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, in Chicago. Sam has one of the most incredible minds I have ever encountered: his worldview is informed by a deep understanding of mathematics and economics as well as an insatiable curiosity and drive for growth, understanding, and academic and professional excellence.

The son of first-generation Syrian immigrants, Sam is proficient in Arabic, English and French. After earning a B.A. in Economics at Princeton, Sam spent a year working with the American Red Cross through AmeriCorps VISTA in West Baltimore City. He then worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, VA for three years while taking advanced courses in mathematics. He enrolled in the full-time M.B.A. program at the Chicago Booth School of Business and graduated towards the top of his class while also earning an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies. He began a career as an emerging markets bond analyst at Lehman Brothers in the turbulent late summer of 2008, and has since moved on to another firm where he focuses on high-yield Middle Eastern bonds.

WAM: On Wide Awake Minds, I promote a vision of education as a lifelong process in which certificates and degrees are important thresholds or signposts, but not signals that we have become "educated" persons with no need of further intellectual growth. You are someone who has gone far beyond the requirements of your profession and continued to pursue new learning opportunities at every stage of your life.

SM: What you are saying about thresholds - that you don't just cross a threshold and then be done - is, I think, very important. Human beings, especially here in the United States, are sometimes encouraged (unfortunately) to see life as a series of doors that you go through for whatever reason. Even that - to stop and think about that and reassess it may be very uncomfortable for some people.

Why learn? Why have a job? We have to put food on the table, we need to exist. We need knowledge to do our work as human beings. God puts you on this planet, and if you're lucky you have health - but education is supposed to take us beyond that and help us thrive in a difficult world. We don’t just get an education to check it off the list, but to survive and thrive.

It's kind of like the saying: "The truth can set you free." Life can be pretty oppressive at times. But education can prepare us for that by giving us foresight, the ability to be proactive, the ability to manage our passions, and the ability to see clearly in spite of whatever is going on around us. We are sentient people, not just rational creatures that see everything clearly - education can help us channel our emotions and not be slaves to them.

For example, you and I both do some of our work remotely, over the Internet, and I sincerely believe that that's the future of a lot of labor markets. This idea of making a living without waking up and going to a physical office building will be very uncomfortable for a lot of people. But there are ways to make the prospect of an uncertain future and new work environments more manageable and exciting; some of these ways include being aware of the world, seeing things, reading things, knowing things - in short, education.

And some people seem to be driven to go beyond the basics of what they need to know. Earlier tonight I was reading a friend's blog - he is in the field of bioengineering, but he really wants to be a philosopher. His post was explaining to his readers what an "axiom" is. Not everyone wants to be that thoughtful about the world around them, but some people need to - for these people, learning itself is a powerful need.

WAM: What you said about your friend's blog is very interesting - do you see anything significant about the fact that he was using the format of a blog? For example, was he "working" as a philosopher or exploring his identity as a philosopher? Was he self-educating by clarifying his thoughts on an issue and distilling these thoughts into a blog post? Was he performing the function of an educator, teaching his readers about a topic important to him?

SM: Absolutely, his use of the blog format is very significant. He has 800 friends on Facebook and seems very Internet-savvy - not only can he test the waters as a philosopher or public intellectual, but he can try to create a market for his ideas and attract a readership for his views. If readers with limited time feel compelled to go to his blog and read his writing, then he may be on to something that he can use to build new opportunities.

One good thing about technology is that it creates these marketplaces of ideas - not just for testing ideas, but for communication. If you feel passionate about something, you can go online and talk about it with others. Passion and sincerity are contagious - people will sense them in your writing and respond. My friend is lucky because the invention of blogs and the Internet gave him the opportunity to experiment and branch out beyond the narrow function of his career.

WAM: Right - it's not just about making money, but about finding yourself, finding your voice and an audience.

SM: Yes, and there is plenty of space for experimentation. Technology really matters a lot. For instance, Facebook really facilitates networking - it's an efficient way to connect one set of resources, human resources. I get ideas from Facebook by scrolling through what my friends are writing and discussing with each other. I've recently become interested in networking - have you ever studied network theory? The whole idea is that you can have normative ideas about what a "smart" or "efficient" network looks like. Basically, a smart network links as many people as possible who would not automatically have any connections; it also places a premium on building strong ties. I studied this at Chicago and really took it to heart; I started to think about how I can add value by connecting people I know who would not otherwise be connected. This is something that I am starting to have a lot of fun with - which is surprising, because I had thought of myself as an introvert, and I think at business school I was seen as a bit of a recluse. Using Facebook is a great way to strengthen your ties with others in an efficient way.

Another example of technology's importance is Wikipedia - it's the essence of what you are talking about in your work on self-education. It's one of the most valuable inventions of the past two decades – I’ve learned so much from it. I use it all the time. And I don’t sweat whether each thing I read on Wikipedia is fully accurate - when I turn to Wikipedia, it's because I want to get a quick grasp of a subject or idea, not because I am doing a complete, thorough research project.

You know the concept of marginal return in economics? Well, I don't turn to Wikipedia to read about subjects I have expertise in, unless it's to fill in a forgotten or hazy detail - I turn to Wikipedia when I am totally ignorant of something, and it's free and it takes a minute or two. The bang for your buck when you visit Wikipedia at that early stage of total ignorance is huge - suddenly, at no cost, you have a basic understanding of something you knew little or nothing about before. This has the potential to democratize learning; you don’t have to go to a university and pay tens of thousands of dollars to get an overview of a subject, you can just do some reading online.

WAM: So what value do universities add?

SM: They can and do add value, but I think they are trying to do too many things. You go to school to learn, to be instructed, to grow up - not to worship some professor doing famous research. I think the universities are trying to do too much, and the economics of it are getting all screwed up. There is a mismatch between what I invest in a college education and what I am getting.

One of the best educational experiences of my life was working at the Virginia Fed while taking math classes - the clear purpose of those classes was to learn math. But at universities, so many people are paying $40,000 a year and studying crazy things - I don't think it always makes sense. I'm not saying I don't think people should study the humanities or gender studies or whatever. But if a person is 18 years old and has declared that they are majoring in Near Eastern Studies - that is B.S., it doesn't make sense to me. You probably can't even write or do real independent thinking, and suddenly you've decided that you are going to be an expert on the Middle East? That you’ll commit at least two of your formative years to studying one small aspect of the world? University education should either be more general, or more specific to learning a marketable skill. You have the rest of your life to indulge in different topics but I am not so sure that should be the thrust of your college years.

I wish I could have taken time off before college to get some life experience - to go work and see why we do what we do. Take a kid who is 18 and gets into Harvard or Chicago or wherever, who doesn't really know anything about life - about relationships, about why we work - and you load him up with hundreds of courses and specialties to choose from. How could an 18-21 year old person really know what he wants to specialize in? And worse, half of these don’t even empower him to make a decent living. I'm sure he knows he's interested in that subject, but is that the same thing as wanting to become a specialist?

This is why many countries have service programs. The year I did with AmeriCorps after graduating from Princeton was very, very helpful for me - it really made up for a lot of the sheltering that took place in my life before that.

Some of my best educational experiences took place during my high school years - there is a certain honesty to the learning that takes place in those years. It's the honesty of studying things because you are interested in them and want to learn them, and you can learn a pretty decent range of stuff.

For me, the value of going to college at Princeton was exposure to things I had never thought about; but it was too much, too soon. If my undergraduate classes at Princeton could have been stretched out over the course of my life, they would have been much more useful.

WAM: Earlier, you used the economic concept of marginal return to talk about a non-economic issue - namely, the value of consulting Wikipedia for answers to our questions. I wanted to ask you about your ability to draw on your knowledge of economics, math, and finance and use that knowledge to solve problems and inform your understanding of the world around you. Your academic knowledge seems to be very "real" and active to you - you seem to perceive a lot of connections between the work you did in school and the problems you think about today.

SM: That question made me think of a writing professor at Princeton who assigns essays with tight constraints. Constraints, even if they are artificial, can force the brain to be more disciplined about what it is doing. They can make us better thinkers. So I do have a tendency to impose constraints on my thinking - to think within the discipline of economics.

And some of economics really does seem to be useful to me. Economics provides me with heuristics, quick ways to explain what I mean - for instance, you understood what I was talking about when I discussed Wikipedia in terms of marginal returns. Economics has also informed the way I live my life: I try to get quick wins from very diverse experiences. On Wednesday night, for example, I am going to a networking event in Baltimore City. I won't know a soul there - it could be a little intimidating and difficult. But I know that I am early on in the curve because it is a difficult experience. You know the cliché, "get outside of your comfort zone"; when you feel fear, you should also get a sense of opportunity. The fear lets you know that you are confronting a new experience, an experience that is more likely to be valuable to you because it is new. It's kind of like the network theory idea: there are gaps in your network that prevent it from being as efficient and high-value as it can be, and you are most likely to fill those gaps by meeting some entirely new people - and that might involve some feelings of fear.

I guess I am using technical concepts to talk about these things - possibly I am overeducated and it's just easier for me to talk in these terms. But I encountered these ideas in the classroom because they have stood the test of time.

WAM: Most people encounter plenty of ideas that have stood the test of time in the classroom, but these ideas do not seem to gain the same hold on most people's minds as they have on yours. We all encounter at least some of these ideas, but you have made them your own - you have made them part of your worldview, part of the way you perceive and make sense of the world. How can educators bring these ideas alive for their students - and how can self-educators bring these ideas alive for themselves?

SM: Earlier in our conversation, you talked about the importance of getting students to "buy in" to the learning experience. It's easier to get that buy-in or commitment when the value of something is self-evident - and a lot of what makes the value of something evident is more experience. There's something about experience that makes you more convinced by ideas, because ideas help you explain and make sense of your experience. As a student you haven't experienced a lot - even someone in 12th grade really hasn't experienced a lot of the adult world that these ideas help to explain.

I would suggest that teachers not push a student beyond the capacity of what's reasonable unless the student has a certain amount of drive or interest in a subject. Trust and personal relationships can also be a big factor - if a student trusts you as a person and an authority figure, he is more likely to listen to you when you tell him something is important. When I was in high school, the one subject I struggled with was science. Science didn't really enter my world - I don't see the world of science as clearly as I see other academic worlds, and its value and relevance was never as obvious to me. Now, as a highly educated person, I see science's value and am ready for it - but back then it wasn't personal enough. It's kind of a hard subject to self-educate on, but I bought a couple of books, and I love to go down to the American Museum of Natural History and hear others talk about it.

Childhood experiences are very important. I come from an immigrant household - I grew up seeing how my parents interacted with other adults and reacted to the nightly news. My parents are from Syria; I remember watching my dad's reaction to Peter Jennings on the nightly news and not really knowing why he would get riled up about some of the things Jennings said - that piqued my curiosity and desire to explore. It's no accident that I am a bond analyst studying Middle Eastern bonds; it's no accident that I was on a business trip to Saudi Arabia last month or got an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies. These interests don't happen by accident.

Different people have very different backgrounds. But teachers have to assume that there has got to be something in the makeup of who their students are that they could speak to or draw on - there have to be ways to connect the things you are trying to teach to students' lives.

WAM: Thank you, Sam, for your time and for the good work you do.

---
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Teacher licensing tests don't tell us enough about quality

An education policy article of mine appeared today in the Michigan Education Report, a publication of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

The article - "Teacher certification tests don't tell us enough about quality" - can be found here. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Charles D. Hayes on self-education in the "September" of life

Self-education advocate Charles D. Hayes just mailed me a copy of his newest book, September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life. He argues that self-education can help people find purpose and meaning later in life by "erasing the concept of retirement." Hayes writes: "The more we learn and expand our knowledge of the world, the more meaningful our understanding becomes."

You can read more about the book and support the work of a great self-educator by purchasing a copy here. I am planning to interview Hayes on Wide Awake Minds this spring.

Reflections on my first three weeks of full-time teaching

I am currently in my third week of full-time preservice teaching, and I have been fully immersed in planning, designing, teaching, and grading three 10th-grade World History and Geography classes (one course or "prep," three classes of 26-34 students). I am having a blast so far - I've never enjoyed any job so much, and the experience has been very challenging, rewarding, and educational. The school day flies by, but for the first two weeks, I found myself putting in ridiculously long hours planning and grading at home. Finally, I am settling in - and today, the school is closed due to a snowstorm (I had forgotten how much anticipation and joy a snow day can create), so I am taking the opportunity to update Wide Awake Minds for the first time in a few weeks. Thank you for sticking with the blog through such periods of silence. (If you haven't done so yet, please consider joining the Wide Awake Minds Facebook page as well).

Curriculum: reading, writing, and ideas

One of my teaching goals this semester has been to push back against what I see as low expectations about the quality and quantity of reading and writing thought to be appropriate for non-honors/non-AP high school social studies classes. I am building a lot of writing into my world history curriculum, including making highly-structured extended essay prompts account for around 1/3 of each unit quiz grade and offering a lot of writing-intensive extra credit opportunities - but I'll save the details on the writing dimension for another post.

Reading tasks in my World History class take several forms. It is crucial, I have learned, to pair practically every resource (reading, video, visual image, audio, etc.) with some sort of assigned task to actively engage students and ensure that they take what you are asking them to do seriously.

First, I give 2-4 page (usually closer to two, and often including visual images with explanatory captions) take-home assigned readings, and I assess whether students have done the reading (and been paying attention in class) two school days later with a somewhat informal, generously-graded short-answer "warm-up" quiz that also offers opportunities for students to earn bonus points if they have been paying attention to current events (on some occasions, they can earn even more bonus points by drawing connections between current events and the World History curriculum).

Second, in the final days of each unit, I distribute 3-page summaries of the textbook chapter covered by the unit; these are created by the textbook company. I pair these chapter summaries with a multi-page, short-answer assignment (due roughly three school days later) I create that focuses on core concepts and is aligned with the shared, district-wide marking period final exam in World History and the Michigan state standards (HSCEs) in World History. I ask students to complete these chapter summary assignments as independent homework in order to study for their unit quizzes, and I ask them to take responsibility for themselves to ensure that they have a solid understanding of the core concepts we have covered; I do not assign the textbook itself, but I regularly suggest that students check a copy out voluntarily or access it online if they would like to deepen their understanding.

Finally, one of my goals as a high school history teacher is to bring a little bit of the intellectual excitement and engagement with the history of ideas that I have experienced into the sometimes boring and sterile world of the standard high school curriculum. I believe that this can be done within the parameters of standards-and-accountability systems such as the Michigan state standards. While not every necessary building-block of knowledge is destined to be experienced by high school students as equally exciting or relevant, none of the core academic content areas, when they are taught passionately and creatively and received by open minds, should be the least bit "boring."

I have experienced the social sciences not just as a student and teacher, but as a reader who has struggled through many challenging and provocative political and historical documents, as someone who has had many spirited discussions about politics and history with intellectually-inclined friends, as an alumnus of the University of Chicago with fond memories of discussing the Great Books in my first-year humanities and social science seminars, and as a former graduate student of international relations who has engaged in intense, high-level seminar discussions and thesis-writing with some of the greatest political thinkers in the country. In short, I have experienced the study of history (and the pursuit of knowledge, the research and writing processes, and the acts of non-fiction reading and writing) as an exciting and high-stakes activity, and I want to give my students some sense of what that experience feels like.

To that end, I am trying to sneak high-quality reading and viewing materials - the Great Books, "good books" on the outskirts of the established canon, and excellent contemporary writing and other media - into my students' hands and minds as often as possible.

In the first week of class, the take-home reading on nationalism I assigned them included excerpts from a recent debate between bloggers Jonah Goldberg (National Review Online) and Ilya Somin (The Volokh Conspiracy).

In another in-class activity, I asked students to write down examples of how they saw nationalism expressed (through flags, rallies, music/anthems, heroes, traditions, rituals, love/hate passed down across generations, "us vs. them" mentality, exclusivist behavior, love of the "homeland," etc.) in a series of YouTube clips that included a Michigan vs. Ohio State pre-game "hype video," a clip from a British documentary about Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War, a clip about Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian War, a news story about recent controversies surrounding the issue of nationalism in Japanese schools, a CBS feature story about ultranationalism in contemporary Russia, and a patriotic American slideshow set to the music of Lee Greenwood's post-9/11 anthem "God Bless the USA."

Last week, I had my students read and answer a four-page questionnaire about excerpts from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto - the central ideological documents of capitalism and communism, respectively. I assigned the students into groups (I randomized this process rather than allowing students to choose in order to ensure (1) that the class activity would be the primary thing bonding each group together and (2) that the most advanced readers would be distributed around the room rather than clustered together in a single group), and each group chose to either read the readings aloud or individually and then worked together to proceed through the questions and discuss possible responses.

We are currently wrapping up our unit on the Industrial Revolution. Then, we will move on to study the late 19th-century social reforms aimed at ending the slave trade, banning child labor, promoting women's rights, and creating free, universal public education. In every case, instructional time is very limited, but I hope to be able to bring in excerpts from some of the most important documents that fueled each debate. I want to find new ways to promote student understanding of these documents (even among my struggling readers) through creative scaffolding, and I want to steer students toward high-level, idea-conscious historical thinking.

Trying new things and seeing what works

This semester is a time for experimenting with different instructional methods, and I am thoroughly enjoying the process of trying new things and seeing what works and what does not. I plan to share some of the success stories on this blog and post some of my course materials on my website for those who are interested. Many of the ideas I generated before I began full-time teaching did not pan out for one reason or another, but some ideas have seemed to work - and the act of teaching and reflecting on teaching has helped me generate many new ideas every day.

Renewing our commitment to public libraries

I am writing this post from Loutit District Library in Grand Haven, MI - one of the most beautiful local libraries (and towns) I have ever been in. As a high school student in neighboring Muskegon, MI, I came to Loutit on a weekly basis with my grandfather or my friends to purchase grocery-bags full of books in Cheapstacks, the used book store in the library's basement.

Once, some friends and I chipped in together to purchase a $5 bag of books and calculated that we had just paid 8.6 cents for each of the books we had bought - books that would go for five, ten, or fifteen dollars each in a for-profit used book store and for much more in a new book store. Many of the books that have set the course of my life, my thoughts, and my writings originally made their way to me through Cheapstacks or from the shelves of Loutit Library, the Norton Shores Branch Library in Muskegon, or the Lakeland Library Cooperative's inter-library loan network in West Michigan.

When I return to my family's home in Muskegon, I always sift through the shelves and boxes of books that I have so far been unable to bring with me, and I am constantly finding something new or forgotten - some book that I purchased on a whim, usually from Cheapstacks, many years ago - that has suddenly taken on new meaning and relevance in my life and my self-education. (My most recent post, on the out-of-print book High School Subjects Self-Taught, described one such find). Today, I purchased a stack of classic books by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and others to make available to the high school students I teach in a school near Detroit: I'll place these on my desk and trade students a book for a promise that they will read it.

I cannot express strongly enough my belief in the importance of public libraries. I hope that the digitization craze, whatever its benefits and efficiencies (and they are many), does not delude us into thinking that our public libraries are expendable, or that Google Books, however amazing it is, will meet all our needs as readers and lifelong learners.

The truth is that many small, local public libraries in America have found themselves out of step with the times and with the needs of their communities; they have found themselves pushed to the margins of their communities, with sharply reduced hours and few new acquisitions. They are fighting a constant battle for financial survival - and they risk losing the debate about their relevance.

But a visit to Loutit Library can renew one's faith in the importance and the possibilities of local public libraries as integral parts of the educational infrastructure of communities. A few years ago, the Grand Haven community decided to make a massive investment in the library - completely renovating the building and building a new library almost from scratch. The community also fought against a proposal to tear the library from the heart of the community and move it to the outskirts of the city, leaving a hole in the historic downtown.


Today, I saw the results for the first time, and they are staggering: beautiful, spacious reading areas with ample natural lighting, well-designed artificial lighting, and comfortable chairs; a large public computing area; free wi-fi throughout the building; a fireplace; private study rooms; a "teen room"; a reference librarian; conference rooms where local groups and book clubs can meet; a filled calendar of free events; a large and well-stocked genealogy and local history room; and, of course, a remodeled Cheapstacks. Since the renovation, use of the library has surged by 35%. And the vast majority of what goes on in a library is self-education.

I have always liked the idea, expressed in the title of a recent book, that "good design can change your life"; the case of Loutit Library demonstrates that good design in libraries (and schools) - made possible by a commitment to invest the resources necessary to make good design possible - can change the educational life of a community.

See also:

Chad D. Lerch, "In a bad economy, residents are flocking to libraries," Muskegon Chronicle, 1/4/10.

Myron Kukla, "Library traffic surges as economy struggles," Grand Rapids Press, 12/27/09.

Cathy Runyon, "Hard choices ahead; local libraries face state revenue shortfalls," North Ottawa Weekly, 1/16/10.

Loutit District Library Homepage.

American Library Association.

Ryan McCarl, "Building the Educational Infrastructure," Wide Awake Minds, 11/13/09.

"High School Subjects Self-Taught"

Whenever I return to the home I grew up in, I sift through the shelves and boxes of books that I have so far had to leave behind in my transitions from city to city over the past few years. I recently stumbled upon an old, out-of-print book on self-education: High School Subjects Self-Taught by Louis Copeland, with an introduction by the late mathematics educator William L. Schaaf.

In fact, since I started this blog and began my project of researching and writing about self-education last year, I have started noticing references to self-education - direct and indirect - all over the place. I am beginning to collect these as I find them in the hopes that they might be able to inform the book I am working on.

A few things to notice about the following quotes:

--Learning is presented as a valuable end in itself as well as a means to other ends; schooling is presented as an opportunity for learning.

--The ultimate responsibility for learning rests with the learner himself or herself.

--The learner's motivation and desire to learn is critically important.

--It is never too late to learn: the fact that one's schooling is complete, or one's experiences in school were unsatisfactory, does not mean that the opportunity to get an education has passed. For self-educators, there is always a "second chance" to learn.

---
From William L. Schaaf, "Introduction" and "Suggestions for Studying this Book," in High School Subjects Self-Taught by Louis Copeland:

Modern life and contemporary events make a heavy demand upon the education and resourcefulness of the individual. In dealing successfully with personal, social, and vocational problems, a basic education is an unquestionable asset.

The primary value of an education is not simply the attainment of knowledge, but rather, though ideas as well as information and skills, to develop the power of thinking and to cultivate understanding and appreciation that will serve many purposes. These purposes may concern self-improvement and advancement in your business or vocation; efficient conduct of your household and personal affairs; intelligent consumer activities; adequate participation in civic and community life; helpful guidance where your children are concerned; effective and enjoyable use of your leisure time, devoted to recreation, hobbies, or other avocational pursuits.

Possibly you never had an opportunity to attend High School; or, having begun your studies, you were, for one reason or another, unable to complete them. Perhaps you finished your high school course some years ago, but since graduation you have forgotten a good deal of what you once learned, and have come to appreciate its significance somewhat more fully than you did when you were in school. In any event, you now wish to refresh yourself on many of these matters, and perhaps may even want to strike out in one or two new directions.

One is never too old to learn if one has the desire to do so. It is an accepted fact that, under ordinary circumstances, you can learn just as well at 25 or 30 as you could at 15 years of age; indeed, there are good reasons why you may learn even more effectively as an adult than as an adolescent. To be sure, it isn't always easy to stick to it. There are pressing demands and inevitable distractions - the business of earning a living, the fatigue at the end of the day, the need for relaxation, the desire for recreation. But that is just where your determination comes in; if you want to badly enough, you will be amazed at how much you can learn, even at 40 or more!
...
A moment's reflection will reveal that there are, in all, but a half dozen or so large fields of human learning and achievement into one or another of which virtually all subjects fall. These fields includes: (1) the social studies; (2) language and literature; (3) the fine arts; (4) foreign languages; (5) mathematics; (6) the physical sciences; (7) philosophy and logic; and (8) the practical arts.
...
No matter how great the sacrifice or how considerable the effort in mastering these subjects you will be amply rewarded. No one can ever take your education away from you.
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Merely reading a book may no more result in learning than listening to a lecture. To learn something requires active effort on your part. You must have a goal. You must know how you are progressing. And above all, you must want to learn.
...
Here are some additional hints on how to study effectively:

1. Try to understand the general scheme of what you are trying to learn. If it is fairly complicated, make an outline of the main terms.
2. Several short periods on successive days are usually better than one lengthy period of study.
3. Use various ways of making yourself think over what you are studying.
4. Try to associate new facts or ideas with something you already know.
5. Form the habit of reviewing mentally every paragraph or section before you go on to the next one. See how much of it you can recall; this will help you to remember it.
6. Sometimes reading aloud helps one to remember material; it is better to read rapidly rather than slowly.
7. When you have to stop studying, interrupt yourself at a logical point, but make note of some cue which will enable you to pick up the thread when you begin again.
8. When you have learned something new, try to make use of it as soon as you can; the oftener the better.
9. When you have completed a reasonable amount of material, take time out to summarize what you have covered. You may want to write out your summary.
10. Always have a good dictionary handy. Make frequent use of it. When you have discovered the meaning of a new word, try to use the word yourself.
...
The important thing is to adopt a plan and then carry it out regularly and faithfully; success is never achieved by good intentions or casual activities.

William L. Schaaf
--From "Introduction" and "Suggestions for Studying this Book," in High School Subjects Self-Taught by Louis Copeland (Garden City Publishing Co., 1946).

The reading habits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Where do the allusions, ideas, images, and thought-fragments that populate the mind and the writings of a great thinker come from? We can often find out by consulting a biography:

From John Livingston Lowes' The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination:

How did Coleridge actually read books? Few more significant questions can be asked about any man, and about Coleridge probably none. Coleridge...was reading Maurice, but he was doing more: he was also going back at first hand to the sources of Maurice's information. He made, accordingly, a memorandum of another book to read.

Coleridge (at least during the years of the Note Book) read with an eye which habitually pierced to the secret spring of poetry beneath the crust of fact. And this means that items or details the most unlikely might, through some poetic potentiality discovered or divined, find lodgement in his memory.
...
Coleridge not only read books with minute attention, but he also habitually passed from any book he read to the books to which that book referred. And that, in turn, makes it possible to follow him into the most remote and unsuspected fields. And his gleanings from these fields, transformed but recognizable, will meet us again and again as we proceed. For to follow Coleridge through his reading is to retrace the obliterated vestiges of creation.
...
When Coleridge once started on a book, he was apt to devour it whole.
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We have to do, in a word, with one of the most extraordinary memoires of which there is record, stored with the spoils of an omnivorous reading, and endowed in to the bargain with an almost uncanny power of association.
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Even you and I, at vivid moments, know the sudden leap of widely sundered recollections, through some flash of association, into a new and sometimes startling unity. And that, assuredly in no less degree, is also the experience of poets.

John Livingston Lowes
--The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination

A glimpse into a great mind: Jonathan Z. Smith

[Editor's note: One of my purposes in writing Wide Awake Minds is to publicly recognize and draw attention to intellectual and academic achievement. In the coming months, I hope to highlight the achievements of many thinkers and self-educators by sharing excerpts from their books and interviews that highlight their love of learning, their commitment to education, and their individual learning styles and research methods.]

Jonathan Z. Smith is a historian of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

(Via his faculty website:) Smith's research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, nineteenth-century Maori cults, and the notorious events of Jonestown, Guyana. Some of his works include Map Is Not Territory; Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown; and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual.

---
From Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion:

All of these inchoate musings became clearer when I accidentally came across a copy of a journal with (Ernst) Cassirer's 1945 article, "Structuralism in Modern Linguistics," in a 10 cents barrel in a Fourth Avenue used bookstore. ...I don't think I had ever been as impressed with a mind at work as I was with Cassirer's.
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The more than thirty years I have spent teaching at the University of Chicago has defined my work. ...The University's commitment to letting a mind go where it will resulted in a diversity of appointments, until the ultimate freedom, granted in 1982, of being without departmental affiliation as the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities.
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Moving to Chicago in the late 60s was to enter into Mircea Eliade's orbit at the height of his influence. Eliade had been, for me, a model of what it might be to be a historian of religion. He seemed to have read everything to be able to place the most variegated data within coherent structures. While a graduate student, I set out to read nearly every work cited by Eliade in his extraordinary bibliographies in Patterns in Comparative Religion, hiring tutors to teach me the requisite languages. These readings constituted my education in the field.
...
It was during this period of "playing in the stacks," supported by a Yale Junior Sterling Fellowship, that, having read John Livingstone Lowes's description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reading habits (Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination [1927; reprint, New York, 1959], 30-36), I developed a set of reading rules I have followed ever since. These include: always read the entire chapter of a book in which a reference you are looking for occurs, then read at least the first and last chapters; always skim the entire volume of a journal in which you are seeking a particular article, then read the tables of contents for the entire run of the journal; after locating a particular volume on the shelves, always skim five volumes to the left and to the right of it; always trace citations in a footnote back to their original sources. ...Later, I added: do not teach or discuss a figure unless you have read the total corpus of their work as available to you.
...
The label 'historian' is the one I am most comfortable with.... Whether global in their reach or preoccupied with one limited segment of human activity, historians share an uncommon faith in the revelatory power of a telling detail, a small item that opens up a complex whole and that thereby entails a larger set of intellectual consequences.

From Smith, "The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines":

When we conceal from our students (the hard work of academic research), that which is actually the way we earn our bread and butter, we produce a number of consequences. I remember testifying once before the California state legislature and facing a legislator who wanted to know why professors should be paid to read novels, when the legislator himself read novels on the train every day. Well, that was the price of our disguising the work that goes into things.

There are, I think, more serious educational consequences. If we present the work as perfect or as work without a revisionary history, then we present a work that no student could hope to emulate. Indeed it serves, if it serves at all, as a standard for how far below that standard the student falls. If we present the material without displaying the effort that goes with it, students tend to conclude that things are true or false, or alternatively, that it's entirely a matter of their opinion whether the object is exemplary. In that case, what we have is a contrast between his or her feelings and my feelings. Thus, in the name of simplification, what we really end up doing is mystifying the objects we teach at the introductory level.


Excerpts from an interview with Smith conducted by Chicago Maroon reporter Supriya Sinhababu on 6/2/08:

SS: How about e-mail?

JS: I've never used a computer.

SS: Never?

JS: No.

SS: So do you typewrite all your papers?

JS: Yup. Or handwrite them. ...I take Marx very seriously, I think [the computer] alienates the worker from his production.... With a typewriter, I hit a key, and it goes bam. I understand that: I made that letter happen.

SS: What got you interested in the religions that you study?

JS: Because they're funny. They're interesting in and of themselves. They relate to the world in which I live, but it's like a fun house mirror: Something's off. It's not quite the world I live in, yet it's recognizable. So that gap interested me. And so I specialized in religions that are dead, which has the great advantage that nobody talks back. No one says, "That's not what I heard last Sunday!" Everybody's dead. And I like that. Now, I sometimes have to deal with religions that keep going. And they're more problematic because then you deal with people who believe things.
...
I also think that whether you like it or you don't like it, (religion has) been a part of the world, and remains a part of the world that has a lot to do with what people do. And so I think if you think it's a worthwhile task to try to understand other people, then you probably haven't given up on trying to understand yourself. ...Whether (or not) an individual sees themselves as religious, there is still enough embedded in the culture in which they live (that), to some degree, the eyeglasses through which they look at the world are shaped by those religions.

SS: You mentioned that your teaching style is peculiar. Can you describe what you mean by that?

JS: ...I try, I suppose, very hard — someone once said religion is a topic you have to un-teach before you teach, because in some sense, everybody comes in with an idea in their head, so they're obviously sure that they know something about it. Your job is to suggest, without being incredibly in their face, that they don't. So you have to take it apart, respectfully, but nonetheless take it apart.
...
For (students) the word belief means only religious. I'd never quite realized this before. They don't have beliefs about science, or beliefs about Obama or beliefs about War and Peace. They only have beliefs about religion. If you say "what do you think about..." that's not beliefs! So somehow beliefs isn't about "thinking about," first of all; that's the first thing I learned from my students.
...
SS: So do you consider yourself one of those people who's in-between [in terms of religious belief]?

JS: Oh, I would hope so. In between is where you always are. If you want one word from me I'm a translator. That's what I do. I translate in both directions.
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Martin Luther says, "What think you of Jesus Christ?" is the only question! Well that's the only question, but what hundreds of questions are wrapped up in that question?
...
SS: I don't know if you if you've heard of this website — probably not, but it's called Ratemyprofessors.com, and your reviews are glowing.

JS: I've never heard of such a thing. And I don't like the idea. ...

Well I think [Ratemyprofessors.com] is an awful idea. And what good does it do? I mean, I've been married for nearly 50 years, I'm not on the market. What other reason would one have for such a thing? ...

No, I've been spared much by never—I've never seen the Internet. And my son endlessly explains to me that I should say that rather than "I've never seen the Web." I haven't seen that one either! He says I sound very ignorant if I say I've never seen the Web....

One (college) major is bad enough. I would like to abolish majors altogether. So two is unbelievable. ...Majors I think are of no use to anybody.

Interview: Texas A & M Neuroscientist and Self-Educator Dr. Bill Klemm

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl

Featured self-educator (interviewee): Dr. Bill Klemm

Self-educator’s location: Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas

Date: 15 December 2009

Dr. Bill Klemm calls himself the "memory medic," and the label is emblazoned on the lab coat he wears as he goes about his business as a semi-retired - but quite busy - Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University. Dr. Bill's extraordinary CV, learning and memory blog, and faculty website reveal not only a scholar who is deeply concerned with adding to the sum of scientific knowledge about all things related to the brain, but also an educator who is committed to taking that knowledge and acting on it by sharing his discoveries with others.

WAM: Over the years, your activities have included writing (12 books and countless articles), teaching, mentoring, obtaining over $2 million in grants for your research, speaking at hundreds of engagements, and serving in and then doing research for the Air Force. What are you up to now that you are "semi-retired?" What activities and organizations do you dedicate the most time to these days?

BK: First, I keep up with the memory research literature and am always on the lookout for reports that have practical applications for everyday memory. When I find such publications, I summarize the "take home" lessons in my "Improve Your Learning and Memory" blog. My other main activities include working with school districts and teachers to improve science education and writing books (my current one, being shopped now by an agent, attempts to explain thinking in terms of biology: The Ghost Materializes: How The Brain's Three Minds Think. So much for "retirement!"

WAM: How did all this begin? How did you become so interested in the brain and in learning and memory?

BK: My late wife always said she noticed that many scientists work in areas where they have a personal medical problem. Well.... But I think I picked brain research because it is the ultimate intellectual challenge.

WAM: Your blog on learning and memory is filled with useful tips and strategies for learners. If you could pick out a few "top tips" for Wide Awake Minds readers - for self-educators to use in their own lives and for educators to share with their students - which would you choose? What are the most important things we can do to improve our ability to learn?

BK: 1) Avoid interferences of any kind immediately after the time you are exposed to new information you want to remember (this especially means don't multi-task). Rehearse that information several times (at least) before you move on to something else. 2) Wherever possible convert words or numbers into mental images. 3) Stay healthy, reduce stress, and get enough sleep.

WAM: Your writings about how to improve one's memory and learning ability are aimed, naturally, at those who are inclined to care about their own memory and learning; the people most likely to read your blog and your books are self-educators. But educators working in K-12 settings - and even in undergraduate settings - must constantly confront the question of motivating students. How do we turn students into self-educators? How can we get them to want to learn - both in their school years and throughout their lives? How can we help students overcome what you have termed "mental laziness"?

BK: Motivation is everything when it comes to learning. If you want to learn, you will. Nobody can force learning down your throat without your active support.

WAM: Are there any particular experiences or accomplishments in your life that stand out as particularly meaningful to you, or that had a particularly significant impact on your growth as a scholar, intellectual, educator, and human being?

BK: Most basically, my father was very demanding when I was a child. He expected nothing less than my best, and within certain limitations of being a normal child, I tried to accommodate him. Finally, I realized I needed my own goals and needed to live up to standards that I constructed, many but not all of which were similar to his. In later life, I learned to be more introspective and better at taking responsibility for my weaknesses. This led to my recent book: Blame Game. How To Win It."

WAM: You are currently writing an essay on the effects technological immersion is having on young people. What are your thoughts on that? What role should technology play in K-12 schools? Do you have any advice for parents who are trying to understand and monitor their kids' passion for cell phones, social networking, online gaming, and similar technology?

BK: I wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle pointing out that many modern technologies have the power to seduce youngsters into self-absorption. Once seduced, such children can acquire delusions about their self-importance, a sense of entitlement, a false sense of merit, illusory optimism, disrespect for others, short attention spans, mental laziness, sound-bite thinking, superficial interests, and a big waste of time. I received phone calls and e-mails from older people who thought I was a sage. Youngsters thought I was out of my mind.

WAM: Should adults be concerned about the role of technology in their own lives? It seems to me that the Internet has had both very positive and very negative effects on education, productivity, interpersonal interaction, and social norms. As a neuroscientist who is active both on the web (with a blog and several websites) and in "traditional," community-based organizations such as your local church and many scholarly organizations, I wonder whether you might have particularly interesting insights on these issues.

BK: Technology should always be thought of as a tool. Only use it to the extent it works for you. It is very easy for even adults to get caught up in wasting time with communications technology.

WAM: Thank you, Bill, for your time and for the good work you do.

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always, for reading!

Excerpts from Mortimer J. Adler's "The Paideia Proposal"

Equality of educational opportunity is not, in fact, provided if it means no more than taking all the children into the public schools for the same number of hours, days, and years. If once there they are divided into the sheep and the goats, into those destined solely for toil and those destined for economic and political leadership and for a quality of life to which all should have access, then the democratic purpose has been undermined by an inadequate system of public schooling.
...
We are politically a classless society. Our citizenry as a whole is our ruling class. We should, therefore, be an educationally classless society.
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Vocational training, training for particular jobs, is not the education of free men and women.
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There are no unteachable children. There are only schools and teachers and parents who fail to teach them.
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Education is a lifelong process of which schooling is only a small but necessary part. ...Learning never reaches a terminal point. As long as one remains alive and healthy, learning can go on - and should. The body does not continue to grow after the first eighteen or twenty years of life. In fact, it starts to decline after that. But mental, moral, and spiritual growth can go on and should go on for a lifetime.

The ultimate goal of the educational process is to help human beings become educated persons. Schooling is the preparatory stage; it forms the habit of learning and provides the means for continuing to learn after all schooling is completed. ...Schooling, basic or advanced, that does not prepare the individual for further learning has failed, no matter what else it succeeds in doing. ...Schooling should open the doors to the world of learning and provide the guidelines for exploring it. ...Every child should be able to look forward not only to growing up but also to continued growth in all human dimensions throughout life. All should aspire to make as much of their powers as they can.
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The reason why universal suffrage in a true democracy calls for universal public schooling is that the former without the latter produces an ignorant electorate and amounts to a travesty of democratic institutions and processes. To avoid this danger, public schooling must be universal in more than its quantitative aspect. It must be universal also in its qualitative aspect.
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Specialized or particularized job training at the level of basic schooling is in fact the reverse of something practical and effective in a society that is always changing and progressing. Anyone so trained will have to be retrained when he or she comes to his or her job. The techniques and technology will have moved on since the training in school took place.

Why, then, was such false vocationalism ever introduced into our schools? As the school population rapidly increased in the early decades of (the 20th) century, educators and teachers turned to something that seemed more appropriate to do with that portion of the school population which they incorrectly and unjustly appraised as being uneducable - only trainable. In doing this, they violated the fundamental democratic maxim of equal educational opportunity.

As compared with narrow, specialized training for particular jobs, general schooling is of the greatest practical value.
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Electives and specialization are entirely proper at the level of advanced schooling - in our colleges, universities, and technical schools. They are wholly inappropriate at the level of basic schooling.
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Participation in the creation of works of art is as important as viewing, listening to, and discussing them.
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The idea behind the Head Start experiment was, indeed, a sound one. Preparation for schooling is not a dispensable accessory to the reform we are proposing. It is an essential ingredient....
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Our future teachers should...follow a course of study that is general, liberal, and humanistic. That course of study will add to their knowledge, develop their intellectual powers, and enlarge their understanding beyond the level of attainment set for basic schooling. ...

The course of study here proposed for the preparation of teachers does not include most or much of what is now taught to college students who plan to teach and specialize for it by taking their majors in departments of education or in teachers colleges.
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"The goal at which any phase of education, true to itself, should aim," John Dewey declared, "is more education. Other objectives may surround that goal, but it is central."
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Our concern is double-edged. We have two fundamental goals in view. One is equipping all the children of this country to earn a good living for themselves. The other is enabling them to lead good human lives.
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A basic human right is the right to obtain a decent livelihood by working for it under decent conditions. Those whom the economy leaves unemployed through no fault of their own are unjustly deprived of an essential human right which is indispensable to their pursuit of happiness.
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You may be skeptical about the efficacy of your own involvement in political affairs. But you cannot love your country and at the same time be indifferent about the future of its free institutions.
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Human resources are the nation's greatest potential riches. To squander them is to impoverish our future.

Mortimer J. Adler
--The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto

Building the educational infrastructure

Learning experiences occur not just in schools, but everywhere - in discussions with others, on the Internet, on television, in museums, in bookstores or libraries, and in the home. And so those of us who believe in the importance of education must work not only to improve schools, but also to improve the overall educational infrastructure and intellectual climate of our communities.

This can mean deepening our connections with our neighbors by starting or participating in social organizations (learning often occurs through meaningful interaction with other people, and organizations like book clubs or religious discussion groups can create the context for high-quality conversations and activities); it can mean becoming more civically engaged by running for office, volunteering for a campaign, writing letters to the editor or op-eds, fundraising for a non-profit you support, or speaking up at school board meetings; and it can mean donating resources to schools and libraries.

Above all, everyone interested in promoting education should strive to publicly model their vision of the "educated person" or person concerned with education. They should make reading a part of their lives and get engaged with ideas, people, and community organizations; they should upgrade their choice of media from tabloid news and talk shows to high-quality local and national journalism; they should vote to fund new and existing educational resources such as libraries, schools, universities, scientific research, orchestras, theaters, museums, and parks; and they should participate as much as possible in the education of their children, attending open houses and school performances, and volunteering at school functions.

Practically everyone agrees at some level that education is important and worth investing in. But those of us who consciously believe in the importance of education must work to act on that belief in every sphere of our lives.

Compiling a list of reading suggestions for high school students

In many of the conversations I have had with educators over the past few months, a recurring theme has been the difficulty of providing challenging instruction to the most advanced students in a particular high school class. In the United States, test scores and other evidence show that the gap between the most and least academically able students in a given classroom widens as the students get older, so it is particularly difficult to design instruction for high school students. You risk teaching above the heads of the students who are behind, on one hand, or boring your advanced students with work that seems remedial or superficial, on the other. And you risk boring everyone by trying to steer a "middle course" by aiming your instruction at the average student.

I believe that one of the ways we can address this challenge is by equipping our best students to be self-educators through independent study. As a high school senior, five of my six classes were independent study. In the high school where I currently teach, one student I know studies Japanese independently in the library every morning, and another plows through massive books and watches as many classic films as he can get his hands on. We have to offer our support to these students, encourage their curiosity, and do what we can to point them toward the broader world of ideas and the academic disciplines.

To that end, I am currently in the process of compiling a list of reading suggestions - fiction and non-fiction - for high school students, and I would love to hear everyone's input. I have heard quite a few great suggestions so far.

I plan to label each book as a "circle," "square," or "diamond" - relatively easy, intermediate, or difficult - in the manner of ski slopes. If you find that helpful, please feel free to label the difficulty of the books you suggest.

Feel free to leave your suggestions as a comment to this post, share them on the Wide Awake Minds Facebook page, or send them to me via email. I'll post a draft list on this blog over the weekend.

Readings from E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s "The Knowledge Deficit"

"One of the major contributions of psychology is the recognition [that]...much of the information needed to understand a text is not provided by the information in the text itself but must be drawn from the language user's knowledge of the person, objects, states of affairs, or events the discourse is about."

T.A. Van Dijk and W. Kintsch
--Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (quoted in E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit.)

We can greatly accelerate the achievements of all students if we adopt knowledge-oriented modes of schooling that use school time effectively, and if we abandon process-oriented notions like "reading comprehension strategies" that waste precious school time.
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If we had a choice between offering each child a computer and imparting to each the broad knowledge that enables a person to use a computer intelligently, we should unhesitatingly choose knowledge.
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Reading ability correlates with almost everything that a democratic education aims to provide, including the ability to be an informed citizen who can actively participate in the self-government of a democracy. What gives the reading gap between demographic groups a special poignancy is the dramatic failure of our schools to live up to the basic ideal of a democratic education, which, as Thomas Jefferson conceived it, is the ideal of offering all children the opportunity to succeed, regardless of who their parents happen to be. Reading proficiency is at the very heart of the democratic educational enterprise, and is rightly called the "new civil rights frontier."
...
Being trained in the history of ideas, I had become familiar with the way in which unnoticed metaphors like "growth" and "development" unconsciously govern our thought - and continue to do so, even when scientific evidence clearly shows that reading and doing math are not natural developments at all.
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Disparagement of factual knowledge as found in books has been a strong current in American thought since the time of Emerson. Henry Ford's famous "History is bunk" is a succinct example. Since the nineteenth century, such anti-intellectualism has been as American as apple pie, as the great historian Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, and it came straight out of the Romantic movement into our schools.

In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as the key to education. In a 1785 letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antonius, Seneca, and Xenophon's Memorabilia, and in Poetry Virgil, Terence, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope, and Swift. Jefferson's plan of book learning was modest compared to the proper Puritan education of the seventeenth century as advocated by John Milton.
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Today our schools and colleges of education...are still the nerve centers of an anti-intellectual tradition. One of their most effective rhetorical tics is to identify the acquisition of broad knowledge with "rote learning" of "mere facts" - in subtle disparagement of "merely verbal" presentation in books and through the coherent explanations of teachers. Just like Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Dewey, our schools of education hold that unless school knowledge is connected to "real life" in a "hands-on" way, it is unnatural and dead; it is "rote" and "meaningless." It consists of "mere facts." But nobody advocates rote learning of disconnected facts. Neither Milton nor Thomas Jefferson nor any of their more thoughtful contemporaries who championed book learning advocated rote learning. What they did advocate was the systematic acquisition of broad knowledge. And such knowledge is precisely what it takes to become a good reader.
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American ed school ideas march under the banner of continual reform, but the reform, given different names in different eras, is always the same one, being carried out against the same enemy. The enemy is dull, soulless drill and the stuffing of children's minds with dead, inert information. These are to be replaced by natural, engaging activities (naturalism). A lot of dead information is to be replaced by all-purpose, how-to knowledge (formalism). These are the two perennial ideas of the American educational world. These two principles together constitute a kind of theology that is drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism.
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Many specialists indicate that a child or an adult needs to understand around 90 percent of the words in a passage in order to learn to understand the other 10 percent of the words. Moreover, it's not just the words that the student has to grasp the meaning of; it's also the kind of reality that the words are referring to. When a child doesn't understand those word meanings and those referred-to realities, being good at sounding out words is a dead end.
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If we do not spend large amounts of time reading aloud and discussing challenging material with children - material that is well beyond their ability to decode with understanding - we miss a critical opportunity to increase their knowledge of language and of the world - the kind of knowledge that will prove decisive for reading in later years.
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[In a section entitled "Reading Strategies: A Path to Boredom:] I have observed that American educational theory has been transfixed by the idea of all-purpose how-to strategies, such as "critical thinking" and "inferencing," using as an example Linda Perlstein's account of a school where young students were being subjected to formal reading strategies in an unsuccessful attempt to make them proficient readers when the time would be better spent teaching useful background knowledge. Kate Walsh, in an analysis of existing reading programs, has found that they continually emphasize teaching these conscious formal processes to children from kindergarten through eighth grade, year after year for nine years, classifying, drawing conclusions, making inferences, and predicting outcomes. So much time is being wasted on these misguided activities throughout the nation that if this book manages to persuade even a few teachers and administrators, it will have justified its existence.
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There is little scientific reason to expect that expertise in reading can be more quickly and effectively learned through the explicit methods employed in these reading programs, or that the "metacognitive strategies" used by experts are abstract, transferable abilities that can be detached from substantive knowledge of the subject matter of the text.
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It is not mainly comprehension strategies that young children lack in comprehending texts but knowledge - knowledge of formal language conventions and knowledge of the world.
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We learn words up to four times faster in a familiar than in an unfamiliar context. ...An optimal early reading program will exploit this characteristic of word learning by ensuring that the topics of reading and discussion are consistent over several class periods, so that the topic becomes familiar to the students and thus accelerates word learning.
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Other things being equal, the earlier children acquire a large vocabulary, the greater their reading comprehension will be in later grades. ...The biggest contribution to the size of any person's vocabulary must come from the printed page (whether it is heard or read), because print uses a greater number of different words than everyday oral speech.
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Even when teachers spend up to thirty minutes a day in explicit word study, the maximum number of new words they can teach this way during a school year is about four hundred. Compare that to the average of two thousand to five thousand words per year that an advantage child will have learned from age two to age seventeen. It is clear from these ballpark figures that most of our word learning occurs indirectly, through hearing, reading, and understanding a lot of text and talk. The consensus of all researchers is that indirect, implicit learning is by far the main mode of increasing one's vocabulary. ..It appears that we have a remarkable innate faculty for learning word meanings in context.
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Only a person with broad general knowledge is capable of reading the New York Times and other newspapers. This fact has momentous implications for education, and for democracy as well. A universal ability of citzens to read newspapers or their equivalent with understanding is the essence of democracy. Jefferson put the issue unforgettably: "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newespapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."
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The second- and third-rate fictions that are too often presented to children in the early grades are far less stimulating to their imaginations than classical stories and well-presented narratives about the real world.
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Those who develop language arts programs at the school level or in publishing houses must understand that the skills they wish to impart are in fact knowledge-drenched and knowledge-constituted.
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When James Coleman, the great sociologist of education, analyzed the school characteristics that had the greatest impact on educational achievement and equity, he found that effective use of time was a chief factor. Most important was "intensity," a persistent, goal-directed focus on academics that caused classroom time to be used productively. Schools with greater academic intensity produced not only greater learning but also greater equity.
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Tests of academic progress are the only practical way to hold schools accountable for educating all children and are therefore essential to the twin aims of equality and fairness.
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A student's actual ability to find the main idea of a passage is not a formal ability to follow procedures that will elicit the main idea but the ability to understand what the text says.
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It takes the mind much longer to process meanings of a text on an unfamiliar topic.
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Some have argued that these supposedly neutral (reading) texts are culturally biased, which is certainly true. While the test-makers attempt to be fair by making the tests knowledge-neutral, they do not succeed in this aim. Language can never be knowledge-neutral. A more accurate way of perceiving the inherent unfairness of those tests is to concede that although they cannot possibly be knowledge-netural and therefore fair to students who don't have the needed knowledge, they are perfectly appropriate as tests of reading ability. That is, their unfairness resides in the pretense that formal reading skills are being tested when in fact relevant background knowledge is being tested. Ultimately, the unfairness resides in the failure of schools to impart to all chldren the background knowledge they need to understand the passages on the test and similar passages in real life.
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The state standards for reading comprehension describe empty processes. These abstract, knowledge-evasive criteria do not reflect the knowledge-based character of reading comprehension.
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If schoools wish to meet the adequate-yearly-progress requirement, they should systematically teach and then test for the general knowledge that leads to proficient reading comprehension.
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Breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status.
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The percentage of economically disadvantaged students who migrate during the school year is appallingly high, and the effects are dishearteningly severe. ...Even with other adverse influences factored out, children who changed schools often were much more likely than those who did not to exhibit behavioral problems and to fail a grade.
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According to the most recent census, every year 45 percent of Americans change their residence. Among these domestic migrants are over 20 million schoolchildren between the ages of five and fourteen. Those in the lowest income brackets move most frequently. Few caregivers are able to time their moves to coincide with the beginning and end of the school year.
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The tacit, taken-for-granted knowledge needed for general reading and writing in a speech community is by definition traditional knowledge.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
--The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children

In defense of generalists and polymaths

Many of the most innovative thinkers and writers in history have been polymaths, individuals who were well-versed in several fields of study rather than focused on a single one. There is a long tradition of respect for the contributions of generalists to human knowledge: generalists have been called - forgive the gendered language - "Renaissance men," "men of letters," "humanists," "philosophes," "essayists," and "public intellectuals (or simply "intellectuals")."

Individuals in this tradition have included, to list only a few, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and other leading lights of the American Revolution, philosopher Bertrand Russell, essayists Michel de Montaigne, Susan Sontag, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Mann's fictional character Settembrini. I have listed a few others on the sidebar of this blog, in the section "Self-educators, polymaths, and lovers of learning." The list is potentially endless, and it includes many religious and conservative as well as secular and liberal individuals. The work of many generalists and public intellectuals in recent centuries has been rooted in Enlightenment values of reason, inquiry, the exchange of ideas, and a belief in the power of education, communication, and the written word.

Even in an era in which scholarly labor is divided and academic and economic specialization is the norm, generalism lives on in the form of the traditions of liberal education, of opinion columnists (David Brooks, Chris Hedges, Christopher Hitchens) who draw on resources from many disciplines, of scholars like Cass Sunstein, Peter Berkowitz, and Martha Nussbaum whose work moves fluidly across disciplinary boundaries, in broad-minded publications like the Economist, the New Yorker, and the American Scholar, and in institutions like the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

There is a close relationship between generalism and self-education. Those of us who are interested in several or many subjects cannot realistically get an academic degree in each area that we want to pursue, so we have to pursue most of our learning on our own initiative, for no grade or diploma.

Personally, I am interested in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including politics, literature, history, philosophy, religion, education, and law. I also hope to read as many "great books" (and good books, as I like to call deserving works that have not made their way into the canon) as I can manage, and I enjoy studying languages.

Is this realistic - or is having too many interests a surefire path to dilettantism and amateurism? Reasonable minds will decide differently. Certainly, you can't be an expert in everything, but is it possible to be a competent generalist? I think that the individuals and traditions I mention above suggest that it is possible for generalists to contribute effectively to the human conversation.

None of this is intended to denigrate specialists in any way. Academic specialists, regardless of their level of public engagement, are called to increase the sum of human knowledge through rigorous, methodologically-sound inquiry into their academic fields. They do the difficult, often lonely work of building the disciplines themselves through extensive research, writing, and discovery. And the disciplines they build are what we know. All I am suggesting is that specialization is not the only way to make a real and meaningful intellectual contribution to the world.

The way to pursue a variety of interests at once is as a self-educator committed to taking advantage of learning opportunities wherever they occur, reading a wide range of high-quality material in one's areas of interest, and engaging with the worlds of scholarship, journalism, and the arts.

But why bother? The self-educators I have been interviewing on this page have offered their own reasons, but speaking personally, I want to see the world through as many lenses as possible. I want to be able to draw on many diverse sources from across times, places, cultures, and disciplines in my writing and teaching. And I want to engage fully in the humanist project of "cultivating our garden" and creating a better, happier, freer world through political and social engagement and the spread of good ideas.