Hildegarde

I know this because what I have on the player behind me is Handel, not Bach, and there are no harpsichords. 

And it’s the Christmas season and not the holiday season because it seems silly to me to call the season of listening to Handel’s Messiah the–well, you get what I mean.

But then, that’s why I stopped sending out Christmas cards over a decade ago.  I had Christian friends, Jewish friends, atheist friends, Wiccan friends, and when I looked at cards the only thing that really attracted me was the art.

Mostly Renaissance art. 

And that didn’t even keep me out of trouble with my Christian friends, because those were split between Protestant and Catholics, and the Protestants had some trouble with some of the art, too.

Sometimes I think that people are less “free” of religion than they tell me they are.  The art’s the art.  I don’t have to believe in Zeus to like a lot of Greek statues of him, and I don’t have to believe in the Virgin Birth to like Renaissance Madonnas.

But apparently other people do.

I really am going to go back to the Liberal Arts thing.  It’s just been a little crazy.

But there’s a side note here, so–

I wish, if you’re going to post a link to something, you would also post a little explanation of what it is.  Due to the weirdness of my schedule, I tend to check most comments on my phone, and I do NOT have a “smart phone.” 

Matt has a smart phone, and I have seen it work, and I don’t want one.

But what ends up happening is that I try to access the thing and I crash the phone, or just can’t open it, or whatever, and then I forget to go check later when I’m near a computer.

So, some idea of what I’m looking for would help.

I did manage to open Elf’s link to the Atlantic article, and I’ll admit to rolling my eyes a little here.

First, though, I’d have to say that I largely agree with it.  But because I agree with it, I don’t think it would be possible to implement here, at least for public schools.

Education majors are the least qualified students on any university campus?  You bet, and they’ve got the lowest board scores, the lowest cultural literacy rate, and the worst overall literacy rate, too.

The best American private schools recognize this, and simply refuse to hire “certified” teachers.  They demand real degrees from prestige universities. 

Certainly, if we could demand the same for the teachers in our public schools, we’d be doing better–but how are you going to bring that about?  The teachers’ unions see certification as their lock on the profession.   Change certification requirements to the kind of thing the article is talking about, and you would end up rending nearly 90% of the present public school teaching corps unemployable. 

Do you really think they’re going to go for that?  And if they won’t, how do you think you’re going to get around them?

You’d also end up shutting down most of the present teacher’s colleges and education departments, and rendering most of their faculty unemployable.

Sound possible to you?

But the thing that makes me roll my eyes is this:  there really is a form of American exceptionalism at work here, but not in the way we usually use that term.

There is, first, the simple fact that we have a wildly diverse population, something someplace like Japan or Singapore doesn’t have to worry about. 

And yes, diversity is a problem in educational programs, because education is not a one size fits all proposition.  Teaching ESL to a student whose first language is Korean is different from teaching ESL to a student whose first language is Arabic.

And teaching students from dysfucntional homes (at least in the elementary grades) is different from teaching students whose home lives make some sense.

But I honestly think we could get out from under all that if it weren’t for the real issue of American exceptionalism here–the fact that we are scared to death to actually look at the facts of the situation.

Because we have a tendency to think–without having any way of knowing–that if we ever did have to acknowledge the facts, what we would find is that intellectual and academic ability varies inescapably by…race.

Please note what I did NOT say.

I did NOT say that intellectual and academic ability ACTUALLY varies by race.

I couldn’t know that even if I wanted to, because nobody has ever collected the data–no, not even Murray and Hernstein–and nobody ever will.   You couldn’t get funding to do that kind of study to save your life.

What we actually do is THIS–we secretly believe that if a single high standard were imposed across the board, African Americans and Hispanics would not be able to meet it.  They would then not attain the highest levels of education, and be pretty much locked out of the best jobs and the prestige professions from off.   This would be “racism” because–well, because it would be.  The outcome, after all, would be no different than if we were all the way back at segregation.

Having made such a determination based on no actual evidence whatsoever, we do what we have to do to get the numbers up as far as we dare–we dumb down education in our inner city, poor and minority-majority schools so that more of the students there graduate.

The graduation, of course, is bogus–what the students in these schools have received is not a high school education, but at best a sixth-grade one.  But it doesn’t look like that on the surface.  They have high school diplomas!

We then send these kids on to “college,” which isn’t really college, but sort of high school.  And we proclaim that we’ve given students who never before had a chance to go to college a chance to go.

Except, of course, that these students have not gone to college.  They’ve gone to high school and been allowed to call it “college.”   

And the “colleges” they’ve gone to have dumbed down standards so far, that students who would have been able to use them in times past for a real stab at a college education now no longer can.  Real college level work is no longer on offer there.

While we were doing all this, we were operating on an unstated assumption–that we could keep the dumbing down confined to those students over there.   It wouldn’t affect our own kids, who would go to real school with real standards, or be placed in “gifted” or advanced placement programs where the standards could be kept where they were supposed to be.

This did not, of course, work.  It took no time at all for the pressure to mount to insure “access” to things like gifted and advanced placement programs, even if that meant dumbing down the standards in these so that we could shoehorn in more students in “at risk” groups.”

And it took even less time than that for students from dumbed down school programs to enter the teacher’s colleges. 

And by now, you’ve got a very few places with decent programs, mostly in very rich, high educated upper middle class suburbs where the parents aren’t having any guff. 

And you’ve got other kinds of anomalies–Connecticut, a few years ago, changed its state standards in math away from the highly-abstract, go on to calculus stuff to more “practical” math.  Parents in places like Westport and Wilton had fits, and were told that “not everybody can go on to the analytical math.” So the parents in these places put their kids in tutoring to get the stuff they needed to end up i things like calculus and at places like Yale.

This might seem like a nifty solution, except for this–a kid whose parents are not educated, who comes from a poor background but has the talent, now has NO opportunity to learn advanced mathematics in high school.  His family will not have the money to pay for outside tutoring even if they know what they problem is, and they probably won’t know what the problem is.

For what it’s worth, I’ve had black students and white students.  My black students are, on average, far worse prepared–but I don’t see much in the way of a difference in native intelligence or academic ability. 

I think it’s entirely possible that if we instituted serious standards and stuck to them, we might have about ten years in which the “disparate impact” was glaring–but it would be glaring not because our minority students are stupid, but because so many of them do not actually have access to education at all. 

On the other side of that, though, I’d be willing to bet my house that we’d see significant shrinkage in the “achievement gap.”

But, you know, we’re not going to do that.  It’s to the advantage of too many people to keep that achievement gap wide, and, more importantly, to keep standards like “disparate impact” in place.

And they kids don’t vote.

I’m going off to read a little novel by a woman called Ellery Adams.  It’s title is A Killer Plot, and it’s the first in a series. 

Thanks to Dean James for the heads up.