[The Montana Professor 18.1, Fall 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
John Wiles and John Lundt
St. Augustine, FL: Matanzas Press, 2004
230 pp., $39.95 pb
Hugh Mercer Curtler
Philosophy (emeritus)
Southwest Minnesota State College
This is a perplexing book. At first blush it seems to be a carelessly written attempt to shock American parents out of their complacency by suggesting an outrageous solution to the educational crisis facing their children. Specifically, the authors claim that schools should be eliminated altogether as outdated and inefficient and the students turned loose on the World Wide Web. The book is, unfortunately, full of sweeping generalizations--which the authors admit are "often...oversimplifications" (66)--inaccuracies, high-flown rhetoric in the place of sound argumentation, and more than a few grammatical mistakes.
As an example of the type of inaccuracies one finds in this book, the authors claim that Mortimer Adler's Paideia experiment "focused solely on knowledge acquisition," which is simply wrong. Adler always focused attention on the acquisition of thinking skills: information is secondary. Great Books are read in order to put before the student works of exceptional minds; students are expected to think about what they have read and come to their own conclusions. Another inaccuracy arises when the authors refer to the "Socratic lecture format," in spite of the fact that the Socratic method, following Plato's Socrates, focuses on dialogue and the Socratic maieutic. Socrates never lectured, so far as we know. The authors also assert that "we are in the midst of arch-conservative control" (133) which is "wrapping up our schools" (37) when, in fact (by their own later admission), most of the groups currently dictating academic policy in our schools, in the name of political correctness, are not by any stretch of the imagination conservative--such groups as The Green Party, the Rainbow Coalition, N.O.W., New Democrats, Native Americans, and African Americans (167). And, finally, as one burdened by the fact that I have actually read Plato and Aristotle and taught their works for 41 years, I cannot for the life of me figure out where the authors find that "Aristotle believed that man was born bad, or fundamentally flawed, and was redeemed by society.... Plato, by contrast, believed that man was born good and was corrupted by society" (27). These inaccuracies are followed by several of those bothersome generalizations mentioned above where we are told that Americans (before Dewey) were, apparently, wed to the authors' view of the Aristotelian model since we thought "children were incomplete people (little adults) who possessed an evil spirit (beat the devil out of them) and who needed to be both filled up and corrected" (27). "Europeans," on the other hand, were "Platonians" who "thought of the child as good, not bad, and recognized the uniqueness of childhood" (27). I assume the authors mean by "Platonians" the followers of Plato. I always thought they were called Platonists. In any event, Plato never held such a doctrine.
Added to those vexations, overheated rhetoric flows on page after page, with references to "the unbearable status-quo," and concerns about the "frightening" and "dangerous" (39) situation in schools that were once "America's pride and joy" (40). More seriously, the authors frequently argue at cross purposes. For example, they insist, on the one hand, that schools "ruin lives" (9) while, on the other hand, they note that dropouts are more likely to end up in prison. They conclude that "we indebt our nation through a chain of foul-ups" (9). But, one simply wonders, if dropouts end up as incarcerated "foul-ups," wouldn't it be better to try to keep them in school?
In the second chapter, in a comment they regard as important enough to require a box around it at the outset, the authors insist that "if our nation had stopped developing around 1900, the United States would possess the finest education system in the world" (21). But in the same chapter, as noted above, we were told that before John Dewey, Americans followed what the authors regard as "the Aristotelian model" and educators "beat the devil out of [their students]" (27). Finally, while arguing that schools should be eliminated in favor of computerized education, they warn that schools must either "change or disappear" (18). But, if as they also argue, schools are not likely to change, and reform is not an option for these authors (41), then schools will disappear of themselves; we need not work toward that end or write books calling our fellows to arms.
The book sometimes sounds like a tract designed to be presented to business professionals (who should delight in the authors' repeated claims that closing the schools, eliminating faculty salaries, and selling off the school buses will save scads of money). As such, it lacks scholarly credibility (it has only scattered, general footnotes and no index, for example) and is designed to sway the emotions rather than reason. Nonetheless, this is--in spite of its flaws (and in some cases because of them)--a thought-provoking book. Thus, one must ask, is it possible that the authors have their collective tongues in their cheeks? Could this book's intentions, at times, be satirical? After all, the authors are self-described "successful products of the very system [they pillory]" (132). They are often keen observers of the education scene and point out many things that have gone terribly wrong. Perhaps, in committing the gaffs I mentioned above they hope to show how the school system has failed even its most successful graduates. If so, then the authors are devilishly clever and we can share with them a snicker or two.
In any event, Wiles and Lundt declare their purpose in no uncertain terms at the outset: "We believe the United States must seriously explore abandoning the school as the vessel for learning and move to redefine education in terms of other options. We believe that a failure to break away, soon, will result in a surprisingly rapid deterioration of the institution and the even further decline of the general culture of the United States" (14).
The tone of the book is most serious as the authors spew forth an amazing amount of data designed to show how costly and inefficient the schools have become, how business has leaped ahead of the schools in its use of technology, and how out of touch educators are with the reality of a technical world. I would certainly agree that educators are fearful of change. They have also long confused schooling with education and failed to ask what it is that they do. But our authors mistake analogy, anecdote, assertion, and hyperbole for evidence and argument, and while it certainly is the case that education, in America at least, is in serious trouble, it is not clear that we must euthanize the patient.
That is the authors' contention; however, this contention is suspect since the alternative to public schools they suggest is implausible.The authors dream of hundreds of thousands of young people sitting down at any time and in any place year-round in front of computers--not to play games, but to learn--led by a cadre of "teacher-mentors" backed by a "learning community." We are assured that these "teacher-mentors" will not cost anything, or very little (150), but it is not clear where they will come from, how they will interact with their "students," or how they will survive with little or no pay. Regrettably, the book lacks details at this critical stage of the argument, and analogies with "all of the other institutions in our society" that "have moved toward a reconsideration of how they communicate, learn, and process knowledge" (132) are not helpful, since we are talking about children here, not adults who have already been schooled and are now in the work force--most of them having learned how to use the computer in the schools our authors disparage.
However, we are to understand that in this dream world, worthy goals can be achieved, such things as early-start education (at age 3), individualized instruction, year-round learning, accountability based evaluation, lifelong learning, and reduced costs to the public by means of per-pupil funding through vouchers and/or tax credits. And while a number of these goals, as they are expounded upon in Chapter VI, the strongest chapter in the book, do seem desirable even in our real world, one does wonder how the means suggested, namely, universal usage of the World Wide Web, will (a) get the young people, especially very young people, involved in serious study in the first place, and (b) result in anything but bewilderment--given, as the authors say, that "each day there are three million new web pages on the Internet" (3). The authors focus almost exclusively on what is wrong with our schools, framed in the context of a whirlwind flight through the history of American public education. And while they provide an interesting set of goals that they are convinced can be achieved by eliminating schools, they do not provide the reader with specifics as to just how those goals are to be achieved. Again, this is regrettable. One might even say it is a fatal flaw in an argument that is not terribly strong to begin with.
Despite the fact that our authors correctly note the distinction between education and training and also correctly insist that education is not simply a matter of accumulating information, they do not explain how students cut loose from the schools are to acquire the critical thinking skills required to work their way through the mountain of information on the Internet--how they will learn to discriminate between viable and useless information, fact and opinion, sense and nonsense, truth and falsity. Indeed, how will they learn to read in the first place? Computers are an amazing tool, but they are just that. Teachers are still needed, even if we call them "teacher-mentors," and it is not clear how they will do their job if the young they hope to teach are not with them.
At times, Wiles and Lundt seem to be suggesting home-schooling, and they speak of that option with approval. But universal home-schooling is a pipe-dream. The authors themselves admit that the 1.7 million students home-schooled at present are merely a "drop in the bucket when compared with the other fifty-six million students not home-schooled" (135). Even in two-parent homes, which are increasingly rare, often both parents are employed and lack the time necessary to guide their children through the complicated maze which is the Internet. And in the real world where our authors claim to feel most at home, these same parents are perfectly willing to pay for the relatively cheap "baby-sitters" the public schools provide. Clearly, our schools are in sad need of drastic remedies. But there are successes, and the schools do accomplish more than our authors are willing to admit: at the very least, they promote social skills which are totally ignored in the "paradigm shift" recommended in this book.
Perhaps rather than euthanizing the patient, as these two men suggest, we should consider major surgery. Might it not be more salutary to remove what Charles J. Sykes has called "the Blob"? Sykes makes the excellent point in his book Dumbing Down Our Kids (1995) that the education establishment, the bureaucracy that we all have come to know and love including, but not restricted to, the National Education Association, is suffocating our schools and needs to be removed. Consider the rather interesting correlation between the growth of the "Blob" and the decline of the schools--a fact that our authors fail to mention while they do allow, in passing, that schools are "bureaucratic dinosaurs" (154). To be sure, the process of certification of teachers by outside (well-meaning) agencies, for example, has chased some of our best and brightest students from the field of education. And it is also the case that the N.E.A. continues to deny that there is a problem while the ship is sinking beneath them. As Sykes has pointed out, the N.E.A. has consistently lobbied against "threatening evaluative processes" and insisted that people outside the bureaucracy simply don't understand what is going on within--a myth that was soundly debunked by Maureen Stout in her excellent book, The Feel-Good Curriculum (2000). One does wonder how it is possible that "teacher-mentors" be held accountable in the "paradigm" proposed in the book under review, but in discussing accountability at all the authors do seem to have one eye on the N.E.A. It is a pity that in their penchant for reviewing the history of education they did not turn both eyes on the Blob.
Unrealistic though it may be, it is delightful to imagine our schools freed from the Blob. At the very least, colleges that have not already done so should attempt to eliminate the nonsense of certifying teachers by requiring them to take meaningless methods courses; it is sufficient that they spend some time practice-teaching with an experienced teacher--perhaps as interns for as much as a year. Teaching is not a science; it is an art, and, with rare exceptions, "teachers' colleges" have never really understood that. Further, colleges should also insist that future teachers major in an academic discipline where they can thoroughly learn the subject matter to be passed along to their charges and acquire the thinking skills necessary not only for effective teaching but also for active citizenship, which is the focal point of a liberal education. Even if it were possible, it is not clear that we need to eliminate public schools altogether, as the authors of this book insist, but it is certainly the case that drastic surgery is required. And the initial incision should be made in our schools of education where future teachers are trained. If this suggestion seems as far-fetched as the one put forward in this book, then I would only hope it will provide an equal amount of food for thought.
[The Montana Professor 18.1, Fall 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]