Saturday, November 21, 2009

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.
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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

Friday, November 13, 2009

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.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

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.