Monday, December 06, 2004
Challenge Everything
The time: mid-4th Century BCE
The place: Macedonia
Alexander the Great, newly ascended King of Macedonia, begins his unprecedented campaign of conquering. Within 15 years, he will subjugate the Greeks, annihilate the Persians and drive into India -- all without losing a single battle.
Why was Alexander so successful? Simply put, he refused to follow conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom said that you deployed your infantry, projectile troops and cavalry separately. Alexander coordinated them, using missiles to cover for phalanx charging up hills, and cavalry to charge across rivers and hold the opposing forces at bay while the rest of his army made the vulnerable crossing.
One and a half millennium later, Mahatma Gandhi would innovate a new form of resistance to colonial rule: non-violence. Throwing aside the mantra that the only two options were strife or supplication, Gandhi managed a program which helped win independence for both South Africa and India.
History is littered with great men and women who invoked change by challenging the assumptions of the world around them. What we need now is an equivalent examination of our surroundings. Though America in 2004 is not faced with issues so outwardly dire as massive oppression or conquering the world (don't say anything...), our task is perhaps more incisive: Just as racism was easier to fight when it came in the form of segregation and Jim Crow, so too is refining America now a campaign of tough, inglorious changes.
Education reform is the linchpin of this program, but I'll get to that in a moment. First, I want to make clear what I mean by challenging assumptions. Consider this simple sentence: "Each student in the class should turn in his or her paper." Now read this: "Each student in the class should turn in her or his paper." The second one doesn't read correctly, it doesn't seem grammatically accurate.
But ask yourself: Why does it matter? His or her, her or his, they mean the exact same thing. Except, of course, that one leads with the masculine pronoun and one with the feminine pronoun. I'm not one of those who thinks all language should be gender neutral -- clearly, either 'her' or 'his' has to go in front of the other -- but is it possible that a combination of all these little reinforcements add up to a large block of social inertia?
The next time you're watching a football game, really watch. All the coaches, referees, mascots, players and most of the announcers are men (manly men!), and the only women in the entire scene are cheerleaders, showing skin. Sports, they say, is the truest reflection of a society's values. "I love rockin' football towns, refs who shout 'first down!', playoff atmospheres...and TWINS!" Anyone think that women aren't still objectified in 2004?
None of this is to say that we should abolish football. I love football. Rather, I use it as an illustration of a point: No one challenges underlying assumptions. No one asks if maybe women should be playing a larger role, or if her could go before his, or if it's bad that we still are so hypocritical as to get up in arms about a Monday Night Football skit that's 'smutty' while beer and sex-appeal commercials pepper the entire broadcast.
No one challenges anything. [For another example, see my post two before this one, "Putting the course back in discourse"] Challenging assumptions doesn't necessarily mean changing anything; it might be that the current system is working fine. But at least then you'll know why the system is working, rather then taking it for granted.
Which brings us to education. Let me ask you a simple question: Have you ever used high school calculus in the real world? Have you ever been standing in line at a supermarket and thought to yourself, 'damn, it's a good thing I remember how to differentiate!' But no one questions that perhaps we shouldn't be teaching calculus in high school except to those people planning to be engineers or mathematicians. No one questions whether, perhaps, high school math should be devoted to applicability -- how to balance a checkbook, what a mortgage rate means, how the stock market works. Economics, not calculus. It's not that revolutionary of an idea, yet it comes across as one because no one ever stops to think that calculus is a relative waste of time.
I'm fairly convinced the reason suburban teenagers are angsty doesn't have much to do with hormones, but rather, as Paul Graham argues, because they're bored. They're bored by classes which they can't see the usefulness of, usually because there is no usefulness. Why do I need to know about the Calvin Cycle and that ADP becomes ATP during photosynthesis? It's certainly important that I know the basics -- that I emit carbon dioxide, that plants via photosynthesis makes energy, etc, -- but the Calvin Cycle and ADP/ATP should be available for me to explore on my own, not part of the standard and testable curriculum. Instead, in the time we're learning about the Calvin Cycle, let's learn about global warming, or deforestation. Apply the knowledge, and students will not only gain more, but they'll be more interested in learning.
This goes for everything: there is not a high school subject you can name that can't use this doctrine (heck, if math can, anything can). There are many, many other reforms the educational system needs; a de-emphasis on teacher-fed learning and a push for student-led learning, a paradigm in which we teach students HOW to think, not things to think, not to even mention the issues of getting good techers armed with good books into good buildings that have good technology. This is a project I've been working on with two close friends, and we're engaged in a broad attempt to seep up information on the subject; we're reading books by educators, researching the history of education to figure out how things have come to be as they are, and talking it out every chance we get to refine our ideas. This post is largely an introduction to that project, and a sampling of the direction we're pursuing.
Education is everything. Education is poverty, drugs, crime, tolerance, unemployment (which is the economy), civic participation -- which leads to better government and thereby affects literally every aspect of life. There are few silver bullets in public policy, but if there is one, it's education. There is nothing more important, no one arena which influences so many others.
I don't believe in standing idly by while problems persist. I don't believe in shutting my eyes so I don't see those problems to begin with.
Assume nothing. Challenge everything.
-Elliot
