When I set out to write this posting my intention was to encourage some creative conversation about community-based projects, but I got distracted by the national attention being given to education reform. The public schools are in a mess, we are being told, but silver bullets are on the way: more top-down coercion -- more of the robotic systems that Erica Goldson describes.
My first reaction was a combination of anger and dismay -- anger that grown-ups would run over children's learning and dismay that we citizens are letting it happen. But I reminded myself that we're faced with a problem that has been around for a very long time and it will be fixed when we citizens commit ourselves to doing the fixing. I forced myself, you might say, to remember that this blog is an "Academy", a place for thoughtfulness.
Then, as luck would have it, I watched part of a televised discussion in which college students -- Columbia University majors in business -- asked questions of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. The questions mostly dealt with the economics of business, but one student asked Mr. Buffett how his classes at Columbia had helped him with his career. I can't quote Mr. Buffett's answer exactly (the transcript is here), but he referred to a number of professors who had encouraged him to pursue his own interests; those professors had inspired him and it was inspiration that he regards as the valuable part of his time at Columbia. Warren Buffett and Erica Goldson are saying fundamentally the same thing.
I regard the Buffett interview as significant, not because he is wealthy and famous, but because he is wise and he wants to share his wisdom. Warren Buffett, as I see it, represents the same kind of national resource as does the 89-year-old Kentucky man who is inspiring the 12-year-old boy regarding the American Chestnut restoration. (I told about that man here.)
One of the wisest of my elderly friends put it this way: "Life itself is the classroom". When the top-down people -- those who treat the children as robotic rather than as individual humans -- come to realize that we (We the People) understand what my friend understands, which is what Warren Buffett understands (and what many millions of us understand), the top-down silver bullet proposals will become irrelevant (and they'll go away).
I'll stop for now except to briefly call attention to a man I regard as the most insightful educator-journalist in the country. Marion Brady, who lives in Cocoa, Florida, is on the children's side. You can learn all about Marion's thinking from his website, but I'll briefly quote from his recent (September 22) letter to the editor of "Education Week": "We give assignments that send kids off to the library or the Internet to read what someone else has written and then say it in their own words. When we do that we're asking him to sharpen a skill but it's a far lesser skill than the one we should be promoting, and it invites plagiarism. What should concern us isn't the originality of student words, but the originality of student ideas". The Brady letter closes with these words: "There's an easy way around the problem. Don't send students to the Internet of the library to look and then write. Send them out into the real world".
My basic message to Erica Goldson (and everybody else) is that we're not alone, not by a longshot.
Bob Cornett
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