The Heart of Education

I’ve recently been approved as an Online Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion, so I’ll start teaching online courses at a local community college in the Spring.  I’m pretty excited about it, even though I recognize that it’s pretty much the lowest of the low on the totem pole of higher education.  Still, it’s a job in a field that I care a lot about, and I’m willing to hold on to my youthful hope and naivete as long as possible. :)

As a result of the new connections and relationships I’ve been building with this college, I’ve immersed myself in education-related blogs and twitter feeds for the past couple of weeks, learning the field and some of its major players.  The timing has been serendipitous, I think–NBC put together a week-long “Education Nation” conference, a series of panels and reports about reforming the American education system from Kindergarten through College.  With all of the press this week, and all of the responses to it, I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty good feel for how various groups of people believe education should work.

To vastly over-generalize: celebrities tend to favor the charter school approach advertised in the new documentary “Waiting for Superman;” journalists promote an increase of financial and technological resources, combined with higher teacher accountability; politicians want to refocus education on the “marketable” subjects like math and science and redesign American education to reflect methods used elsewhere in the world; and administrators (who, let’s face it, are often more politicians than educators) want to see higher standards and more accurate assessments of student and teacher success.  There’s always some mixing and matching, some blending of these various goals, but that seems to be a general breakdown of the most commonly-ascribed paths to a better education system in America.

You notice that I didn’t mention anything about how teachers want to improve education.  I also didn’t say anything about students’ opinions on reform.  That’s because their voices were given such a small role in the discussion this week — one town-hall style meeting, and that was pretty much it — that it’s obvious how little the decision-makers in our country care for anything they might have to say.  So even though they’re the ones who are actually affected by any changes that might be made to the educational system, they’re the ones who would implement and experience the reforms, their voices have been all but ignored by the people calling the shots.

At the beginning of the week, teachers were highly involved in the conversation.  There was some fantastic dialogue on Twitter about the Education Nation presenters, with lots of thoughtful insight and reflective critique.  As the week wore on, though, and the panelists drifted farther and farther away from the values and priorities expressed by faculty members, the Twitter feeds slowly dried up.  In essence, the teachers gave up.  They weren’t being heard, they weren’t being listened to, they weren’t being treated with any degree of respect–despite the oft-repeated refrain of teachers being at the heart of the classroom.

What was it that the teachers said that was so thoroughly ignored?  In essence, it was, “We don’t teach subjects, we don’t teach books, we don’t teach tests–we teach people.”  With everyone else focused on assessment methods and financial resources and technological innovation and schooling styles, the teachers were the ones who had the audacity to claim that education is about more than increasing the production efficiency and market value of the product of our education system, graduates.  The teachers were bold enough to say that the way to reform education is to focus it on the people it affects–students, teachers, parents, and so on.

If a student isn’t engaged in your art class, the answer might not be revising the curriculum.  It might be (as it was in the case of a teacher friend of mine) going to his football game and making a point to cheer for him.  Knowing that he has the support of his teacher, even in something seemingly unrelated, could be the difference between his withdrawal from or his participation in the class.

If a student is having difficulty reading, it should be alright for teachers to challenge parents about their home reading habits.  More importantly, though, it should be expected that parents will challenge themselves about their home reading habits, especially insofar as it influence the success of their children.

However many resources we throw at our current educational system, however many measurements we take and changes we implement, there will never be any successful reform if we fail to recognize that we teach people.  The trouble is, you can’t write a universal curriculum for that.  You can’t programmatize the human element–it takes people to teach people, not the robotic sources of prescribed (and proscribed) information that are often mistakenly called “teachers.”

That’s why it made me sad to see the voices of real teachers, the passionate and engaged educators who recognize the humanity of their students and not only their market value, slowly fade from this week’s conversation about education reform.  Theirs are the voices that need to be heard, declaring in both word and practice that the heart of education is not programs, plans, or resources, but the hearts of the educated themselves.