Arthur Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, writes frequently about education issues.
In this post, written a year ago, he warned that the real problem in education is that we fail to prepare our students for the challenges of citizenship. The post was prophetic.
The phrase college and career readiness has become ubiquitous in education debates, but as a slogan without significant transformational direction. Of course, students should leave K-12 education with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the next phase of their lives. Of course, students’ experiences should open rather than restrict their choices and opportunities when they graduate. Of course, they should all graduate. Of course, young people need to develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions to be successful in the world of work. Ignoring that would be an irresponsible abdication, especially for students whose parents already struggle to make a decent living. It’s not that that these are misplaced goals. They are just insufficient.
We need an education system intentionally designed to engage students to understand their values and to learn how to become effective citizens. Which questions teachers ask or do not ask influences how their students understand the world and their role in it.
There are ways to teach that promote passivity, he writes. And there are ways to teach that encourage active engagement:
In the past, how have people worked together to improve the human condition in different societies? What has supported and thwarted those efforts? What features of governments support or impede peaceful resolution of conflicts? How do scientists make discoveries? How do engineers design solutions that improve people’s lives? How do literature and the arts help us understand and value one another and our environment? How can mathematics be used to help make better decisions? What changes are you interested in investigating? These are change-oriented questions that affirm students’ capacities and encourage them to imagine themselves as agents of improvement. These are engaging motivational questions. When student engage in such action-directed learning they can develop the values, confidence and mindset to make things better.
We need a rebirth in the teaching of history and civics. We need more than ever to teach students the importance of living together with others in peace and mutual respect. We need to teach them to respect the humanity and individuality of others.
Perhaps this is the state we are in after 16 years of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, focused exclusively on test scores, standardized testing, basic skills, and getting the right answer.
Civics is about asking the right questions, and questioning why those questions are “right,” not picking a bubble and saying it is the “right answer.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The loss of civics and history in K-12 (in some but fortunately not all schools) seems to correlate with the long-term struggle-for-legitimacy in the arts and humanities (and history and political philosophy) in higher education. Arthur Camins’ essay easily can be read in both a K-12 and higher education context. It goes back to the reality-cum-slogan that says: What counts in education is not always countable; and the positivist assumptions that have tended to rule the day for a long time (most of the 20th century); and that also underlie our present testing-mania (taken up and written-in-stone by corporate money-making schemes).
See also Diane’s post to Lucia who commented on Sara Stevenson: Living in a Post-Truth World (copied below). in response to dianeravitch:
ALL COPIED BELOW
“Sara Stevenson is a librarian at O. Henry Junior High School in Austin, Texas. She is a genuine warrior for public education. The “reformers” have no one like her; they have to pay people six-figure salaries to write the way she does. For one, she frequently publishes articles in Texas newspapers in defense of public […]”
Diane’s Reply
“Honestly, I (was) surprised that Ms. Stevenson wasn’t aware of the problem of fake news until recently. My children are in their early 20s, and throughout their teen years, I had many conversations with them about the dubious “facts” they passed along to me, garnered from social media and fact-free websites.
“Fortunately, their public school curriculum placed a lot of emphasis on evaluating sources of news and information for research projects related to current events, (as well as an emphasis on using high-quality electronic resources in general).
“In my opinion, the degradation of public discourse and the rise of the low-information voter has a great deal to do with the fact that two generations of our population graduated from high school before the internet became a quick and easy source of ‘information,’ and many never learned how to evaluate electronic sources of news and information for credibility.”
LikeLike
Oh, dear. Another correction: It was Lucia’s reply to Diane’s posting. I’ll be more careful.
LikeLike
This really struck me at the core of my being. I think it addresses the reason why education and democracy are essentially intertwined. It also reminded me of the last paragraph of the last book Carl Sagan wrote, The Demon-Haunted World. He wrote it when he knew he was dying and he also knew they were likely to be his last words to the public:
“Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don’t have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen—or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
Linking the scientific method (we don’t “believe in,” for example, climate change–it is not a matter of faith–we accept the validity of the scientific assumptions being made) with the Bill of Rights and civic education is an essential part of being a citizen.
LikeLike
Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities is a great book that I think every educator should read.
LikeLike
AND WAIT UNTI THESE GUYS
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-koch-brothers-toxic-empire-20140924
GET TO RUN THE CURRICULA.
North Carolina Plans to Adopt Koch-Funded Social Studies Curriculum
AND TECH CIVICS THEIR WAY
Civics Lessons Financed by the Koch Brothers | Diane Ravitch’s blog
https://dianeravitch.net/2014/12/07/civics-lessons-financed-by-the-
LikeLike
As a history teacher of 20 years, Camins is spot on. Everything, and I mean everything, is simply about skills and college readiness. We don’t get to teach about anything else. My students complained that they aren’t learning much history in my AP class. They’re just analyzing documents and writing essays. But that is the dominant chunk of AP History classes with the format change.
Without that content and knowledge, the skills are useless. But no one who makes the decisions actually cares. We’re no longer an educational institution. We’re just job-training centers.
LikeLike
I was speechless after the orientation of my son’s 9th grade U.S. History class when the teacher let us know that the year would start with the “teaching” of five “essential documents” such as the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the state constitution, and (ugh) The Articles of Confederation. After that they would start at 1775. As a former government teacher (12th grade, after the students had U.S. history in 11th) I found this extremely disturbing. First, how could the students understand any of these “essential documents” without any historical background? How could 9th graders even begin to grasp the significance of the Federalist Papers? Who cares if they know about the details of the Articles? What is important to understand are the failures of the Articles and how and why it led to the formation of the constitutional convention. But the teacher was driven by a testing mania to check off boxes. And one that was done, it was to the races to the Pearson approved curriculum. I feel for you and the other teachers who are subjected to these dictums.
LikeLike
That is alarming, Steve. My AP History course (in 1985) laid the foundation for my understanding of America. It was a chronological history course with a lot of lecture and reading. And essay tests that tested our grasp of the content, not “complex text reading skill”.
I’m reading E.D. Hirsch’s latest great book, Why Knowledge Matters. It convinces me more than ever that there is a huge fundamental error at the root of most educators’ thinking about education. They think school should be about “skills”, not facts. Cognitive science shows that it’s the opposite: our brains already have the skills, but they need facts upon which to work. These facts need to be in the long-term memory, because our working memory is very limited. To think at a high-level about anything, one must be able to effortlessly deploy memorized information from long-term memory so as to free up working memory to do higher functions. If you’re having to look everything up, thinking degrades. Thus to make all-round good critical thinkers, we must stock the brain with reams of knowledge.
LikeLike
Thanks for the responses. I can honestly tell you that it’s a very frustrating time to be a history teacher. The informational content is only supposed to be used so that students can have evidence from which to execute skills.
My first two months of AP World were an absolute disaster. I’ve never had students so lost and confused. And I was following the course objectives with fidelity. Basing many of my lesson plans on AP recommended planning and pacing guides.
After a second consecutive test with an average score under 60% (which has never happened in my entire 20 year career), I apologized to my students for the nature of the class. I asked what they wanted: prep for the AP test, or a high level history class. They overwhelmingly voted for the latter (secret ballots). Now, I lecture some and provide more background with questions. They’re writing an essay now but I can literally see that their comfort level has increased significantly.
But I am going against the grain to do all of this.
LikeLike
cross-posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/U-S-Schools-Don-t-Fail-at-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Citizens_Citizenship_Civics_Failed_States_of_Mind-161122-532.html
LikeLike
Can I get a Halleujah!? I have been saying the same thing in the last few years. I teach social studies to 5th graders. I had to convince my principal that it is just important as all subjects. I focus on how our country was started. I dispel the heroification of history. I ask my students to think, consider, share, converse, debate, explore, and research to back up their opinions. Kids are interested in this! They have many questions as their minds are trying to make sense of their place in society. They hear the news whether from their parents’ conversations, what they see on t.v., what they hear from friends on the playground, and God forbid YouTube. But what they don’t get when hearing information from other sources, is that there is always another side – or two or three – to what they hear. They are naive to the idea of not believing everything you hear or read, without proper research. This year’s presidential election fit right in with what I want them to learn, and they were engaged!
This is a generation of students who have been raised by helicopter parents, and protected from all the bad stuff out there that will diappoint them. I’m not quite sure that I am comfortable with the idea that they are going to be in charge of our world when I’m retired, old and gray. I tell my students this all the time. I reinforce that you can’t say or do things on a whim or just “cuz”. I tell them everyday that what they learn now is important; somehow, somewhere, these students don’t believe that 5th grade (or any other elementary grade) “counts”, and that it only starts to count in junior high and high school. Where does this idea come from?
I am dedicated to all subjects I teach, including those that are not tested. My students deserve a well-rounded education that challenges them and makes them think; and these are kids from high poverty environments, who speak very little English, and are immigrants or refugees. Every moment in my classroom counts…it matters! I do my best to help them make that connection or realization, that what they are learning now is part of the whole picture of life. Even if you are in 5th grade. All of it matters!
LikeLike
Hallelujah! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q
LikeLiked by 1 person
Camins: cross-posted to National Literacy Association nla-986dz@wiggiomail.com
LikeLike
There can be no doubt that studies in the arts, sciences, and humanities have been shaved away from the pre-K-12 curriculum in favor of enthusiams for the Common Core and a new era of standards-based, outcomes-only education. This is tragic. That narrow view is still hardwired into ESSA’s insistence on test-driven results in a few subjects with no more than lipservice to a well-rounded curriculum. Almost all eduational research and policy is leveraged from or directed toward reading and math, as if content-free learning is the purpose of education.
I would not be surprised to see the Trump administration eliminate all federal funding for educational research, also the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and any research at the National Science Foundation that is not centrally focussed on getting more bang for the buck in specific industries. I imagine the Koch brothers will joine others in cut ting back on NASA as well, especially the imaging and data-gathering systems that document climate change. This is not to say that these investments and federal agencies have great track records, but that the absence of even a symbolic representation of these broad forms of inquiry and achievement at the federal level would affirm that the nation has lost all interest in scholarship, basic research, and collective work on the production of knowledge except for short-term and practical ends. Hope I am wrong.
LikeLike
Sadly progressive educators were doing the Koch Brothers’ work for them even before NCLB/ESSA : they’ve been denigrating the learning of facts since the turn of the 20th Century. The Left can begin to take back America with a revolution within the education establishment: return transmission of knowledge to the heart of schools’ mission. Cast out bankrupt progressive ed ideas.
LikeLike
What passed for history education even when I was in school fifty years ago was not presented in any way that would have provided the kind of information likely to make me aware of what are now considered progressive issues. As for civics, it was something to be gotten through, presented to more develop unquestioning patriotism than actual understanding.
One of the largest reasons behind the outrage among Sanders supporters after the primaries was their shock that there was corruption in politics. To them, it was something totally new, not the actual fact of that being how things have always been done. And had I not been self-educated in history, I wouldn’t have known either based on what I learned in school.
I concur the teaching of both history and civics needs to be restored and strengthened. However, I put out for discussion that relying on corporate-vetted textbooks will not achieve the goal of producing knowledgeable citizens. I also suggest this means those teaching those subjects can expect to have a target on their backs in the current climate, because the last thing those developing neo-feudalism want is a large body of educated young people who don’t buy their propaganda.
LikeLike
Agree somewhat about the history textbooks (Diane’s Language Police shows why textbooks are almost always lame). On the other hand, the textbook for the course I teach does contain lots of facts that the Right would like to deny (e.g. like the fact that Catholics and Orthodox Christians were the only game in town until 1517, a fact not known or liked by most Evangelicals). As of now, the textbook still has more credibility to them than the demonic and traitorous Mainstream Media. I’m grateful for that backup to my lectures.
LikeLike
I, too, was in public school 50 years ago. I must have had better history and civics teachers than you did, because we learned a lot about the positives and the negatives, wrote essays, learned how to disagree and analyze what had gone on.
Perhaps more importantly, though, in our history, language arts, and science classes, we learned critical thinking skills, and that, too, is sadly lacking in today’s public educational environment.
LikeLike
Science shows that we can only problem solve and think critically about things we know about. Thus, it seems to me, the way to teach critical thinking is to teach knowledge and to promote the habit of skepticism and questioning.
LikeLike
What I refer to isn’t about the process but the content. The women’s suffrage movement had maybe a paragraph, with not a word about what those women suffered to attain the vote. The labor movement might have gotten a bit more coverage, but no mention was made of the massacres. As for the Holocaust, nothing was said about how the US blocked Jews from entering the country even after the government knew what was going on. In other words, the way the material was presented supported US exceptionalism and made our imperialism seem like we were rescuing peasants from their own ignorance. Ditto for slavery and the facts about the Reconstruction. It was designed to ensure we embraced “my country, right or wrong.”
LikeLike
I taught in an unique community that was diverse. We had lots of artists, old hippies and socially conscious people. The community was all about being a good neighbor. I’d tell you about the social outreach to those less fortunate and the inclusiveness of the community, but I’d sound like I’m bragging. Let’s just say that the man with the red bandana of 911 was a graduate of our schools. We had an abundance of good citizens.
LikeLike
Responsibility for citizenship won’t be taught, through the example of the Walton’s. While they spend $1 bil. to privatize schools, they offload the costs of the crimes, that Walmart stores foster. Tax-paid policing at Walmarts, is excessive because Walmart is lax about in-store measures to prevent theft and other crimes, according to an Aug. 17, Bloomberg article. A sheriff was quoted “It’s ridiculous…the biggest retailer in the world. I have half my squad there for hours.”. In Tulsa, “there were 2000 police calls to Walmart, last year.”
LikeLike
I have said over and over for a VERY long time
People have forgotten what EDUCATION is all about.
You train animals
You educate or should educate people.
What humankind’s greatest minds have said about education is forgotten.
And now”
TRUTH IS NO LONGER RELEVANT!!!
Oxford dictionary word of the year: post-truth.
What kind of society can endure when propaganda supplants truth?
Germany tried it.
Now we must emulate it????
LikeLike
The ultra-conservatives’ idea to “help” this is to force kids to take the U.S. citizenship test in order to graduate. The class of 2016 was the first group required to do that in Utah. ALEC’s idea, of course.
Since the questions are just factoids, anyone can pass it and not know a real thing about the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, or how to be an informed voter. As social studies are cut and/or tested to death, there is less time to teach this. As a social studies teacher, it is incredibly disheartening to hear kids ask if the U.S. won the American Revolution or what U.S. even stands for (both questions have been asked to me in the last year). Social studies instruction in the elementary grades is pretty much gone, and it’s disappearing at the secondary level. My entire district has understaffed social studies departments district-wide, resulting in ridiculous class sizes.
That, my friends, is just a recipe for a disaster in our democracy, which is already happening and will get worse.
LikeLike
Sandra Day O’Connor developed icivics when, and don’t quote me, the 38th state dropped civics in schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICivics
https://www.icivics.org/
If one of your researchers were interested, you should see who pushed through the legislation to not require civics in the classroom. Yes, mostly Republican. Yes, because of budget cuts.
I filed the stories under ‘keeping us stupid’.
LikeLike
Pip writes about civics being omitted in the classroom: “Yes, mostly Republican. Yes, because of budget cuts.” And probably because it doesn’t relate to “getting a job,” which is, of course, what education means–ever since the light went out in it, that is.
LikeLike
In School and Society, John Dewey wrote that “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.” Aristotle wrote about this specific issue in Politics, circa 350 BCE. He noted the important link between democracy and schooling. In Book Four of Politics, Aristotle pointed out why a strong middle class is vital to democratic governance:
“the middle class is least likely to shrink from rule, or to be over-ambitious for it; both of which are injuries to the state…for when there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end.”
We know well what supply-side economic policies have done to the middle class in this country. Going back to the Reagan era, supply-side policies have piled up deficits and debt, increased poverty, enriched the already-rich, and squeezed the middle class. The oligarchs and “reformers” point the finger of blame at public schools, and put their children in private schools.
Aristotle explained why this is bad for democracy:
” education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
John Dewey understood this. He grasped why public education and democratic government were inextricably linked. And that’s what’s sorely missing from most of the current talk about education “reform:” democratic citizenship.
The explicit purpose of the Common Core is to prepare kids “to compete successfully in the global economy,” not to be citizens in a democratic society who are critically thoughtful and reflective, and who both understand and are committed to popular sovereignty, equality, justice, freedoms for all citizens, tolerance, and promoting the general welfare of the nation.
We would do well as a nation to heed the sage advice of Aristotle and John Dewey. It’s clear that (1) there’s an awful lot of work to do, and (2) most of the current crop of political and educational “leaders” are not up to the task.
There have been earlier debates and disagreements about, and pendular swings in public school pedagogy. For example, in Quincy, Massachusetts in the 1870s a system of public education emphasized “observing, describing and understanding, and only when those abilities had begun to manifest themselves, among the faculty as well as the students, were more conventional studies introduced.” There was grumbling in the community that the schools were not teaching the “basics.” As David Tyack writes in in “The Transformation of the School,”
“When an independent survey…revealed that Quincy’s youngsters excelled at reading, writing, as spelling…the survey was simply dismissed by critics as biased and unfair.”
In the 1930s, concern over how well American public schools were preparing students “to work up to the level of [their] intellectual powers,” and their alleged inability “to create conditions necessary for effective learning” or to give students “insight into the great political, social, and economic problems of our nation,” led to a study of how high school might improve to better serve youth. The Eight-Year Study compared the college performance of students from traditional, basic curriculum and instruction to students from schools that created their own programs, based, in essence, on the question, “How do we best prepare our students for life in a democratic republic.”
Meticulously measured, the results of the Eight-Year Study were striking. As reported by Tyack, students from the experimental schools:
“earned a slightly …grade average; received slightly more academic honors; seemed to possess a higher degree of intellectual curiosity and drive; seemed to be more precise, systematic and objective in their thinking; seemed to have developed clearer ideas concerning the meaning of education; demonstrated a high degree of resourcefulness in meeting new situations;participated more and more frequently in organized student groups; earned a higher percentage of nonacademic honors; and demonstrated a more active concern with national and world affairs.”
In other words, those from the experimental schools were better educated. They’d been taught to think better – to think critically. And they had a greater awareness of themselves and the world in which they lived. The students from the most experimental schools, those that developed a student-centered curriculum that integrated disciplines and that was inquiry-focused, had the best results.
People have disagreed about how to best to educate our future citizens, and how to develop the democratic citizen, but for the most part, people have agreed that the purpose of public education was to do so. The current brand of education reform has abandoned the precept of the public good just as it has largely discarded the central role of public education in advancing the “character of democracy.”
Top-down, business-model “reformers” place all of the blame and responsibility –– and accountability –– for improving public education on teachers and schools. They disregard the larger role of socioeconomic factors, and routinely use misinformation to argue their agenda. They buy into the private over the public, the “free market” over the common good, the oligarchic over the democratic.
John Goodlad observed that the pedagogical structures, practices and policies employed by schools are the means by which they “implicitly teach values.” Moreover, an explicit purpose of the school must be to “open up the desire to learn, not turn it off.”
The anecdotal and empirical evidence is mounting that we are teaching the wrong values, dumbing-down the quality of schooling, and undermining the citizenship education mission of public education. To put it bluntly, we have been perpetuating a shell game in public education for quite some time.
We’ve bought into the “elite” college nonsense, and we’ve subscribed to the the false belief that SAT and ACT scores measure “intelligence” and “aptitude” and accurately predict “success” in college. We’ve swallowed whole-hog the notion that Advanced Placement courses are better than sliced bread, and we’ve tracked and ability-grouped students relentlessly in order to “help” them learn.
And – it must be said – many of our education “leaders” –– from principals and school board members, to prominent education consultants and the heads of professional organizations and unions –– have promoted the goofiness. Too many teachers have said nary a word and gone along with all of it.
Here’s the bottom line: public education is a cornerstone of representative democracy. Public education is an essential part of the social contract.
The Republican Party has abandoned any semblance of a commitment to democratic governance. The oligarchs are their constituency. While the Republicans are owned entirely by the top income brackets, the Democrats periodically get rented by them, and Andrew Cuomo is a perfect example.
In a democratic republic, public education has a special and unique place. But we don’t honor that, and we’ve done an incredibly poor job of educating for democratic citizenship.
The late, great University of Chicago social scientist Earl Johnson once said the development of “democratic character” should be “the supreme end of education in a democracy.” John Dewey put it this way:
“the democracy which proclaims equality of opportunity as its ideal requires an education in which learning and social application, ideas and practice…are united from the beginning and for all.”
The big-money foundations –– Gates, Walton, Robertson, Bradley, Broad, and Koret, to name a few –– all push “reforms” that are tied to “markets” and “global competitiveness.” They get support from the big bankers (Goldman, JP Morgan, etc), hedge-funders, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They are aided and abetted by “educational” organizations like the ACT, the College Board, and Achieve, Inc. Sadly, they get support from administrators and educators too.
We cannot curtail global warming if we continue to burn fossil fuels. And we cannot stop corporate-style education “reform” if we continue to elect its puppets and if we keep playing its goofy shell game. Most importantly, we cannot and will not perpetuate democratic governance if we continue to short-shrift schooling for the explicit purpose of democratic citizenship.
Time is very quickly running out.
LikeLike
He nails it, and history bears this out: that most of a societies problems and solutions are moral in nature, not technological. What destroys societies and cultures is immorality, not the absence of the latest-greatest-newest app.
Yes, mandating a class on philosophy, comparative religions, ethics, civics or something to get students to ponder what is virtue, integrity and self-denial is a first step. Yet, too often when school districts attempt this liberal groups like the ACLU cry “that’s teaching religion”, as when several districts were taken to court about offering a class in Old Testament or Bible (from a literary perspective). As if having students read the book that is the foundation for much of Western culture and the book that has changed history more than any other, and has brought about more good than any other book…is a problem.
Exposing students to metaphysical or religious ideas, allowing them to explore them DOES NOT equal establishing a specific religious dogma and violate the 1st amendment; though some groups fallaciously believe so, ie. ACLU. If exposure and exploration was tantamount to establishing a religion, then much of what already happens in social studies classes would be illegal, ex. the explorations of secular humanism, atheism or the Reformation.
Our problem as fallible and fallen human beings is that we already know what is right and good, but fail to act on it, and neglect doing the good we know and have the capacity to do (call it a sin of omission). We already know what is evil and destructive, but chose it anyway. We believe science and technology, STEM education, will make the world a better place, but forget that Nazi Germany was probably the most technologically-advanced society in the world at that time and look how that “solved their problems”.
Yes, our problems are moral, not technical, and can only be confronted with acknowledging the importance of ethics and virtue (denying self for the greater good). No cell-phone app will ever dig us out of the holes we’re always stumbling into.
LikeLike