Klarinet Archive - Posting 000349.txt from 2001/02

From: "Karl Krelove" <karlkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] chaos being sold for freedom...
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 15:41:58 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Hobby [mailto:jhobby@-----.net]

> I think this is generally true. And of course, Sarah's problem with the
> bully may be an example of the "one bad apple" syndrome. I'm generally
> satisfied with what our public schools are doing. I wish they would
> actually teach more, though. I still maintain that our knowledge
> base from
> the sixties high schools was greater than what is geneally taught
> in public
> school, now.
>
>
My apologies to those who don't like long posts of questionable topicality.
This snippet hit a hot button, an idea that's bothered me both as a teacher
(of music) and as a parent. It gives me a chance to think out loud. Please
feel free to ignore and delete it. It's therapeutic value for me may be
greater than its usefulness to anyone else here.

I had the same feeling as my kids went through school (my youngest, twins,
graduated last June). There is a growing problem, though, in all areas
including music. In the sixties the total knowledge base from which schools
(through their curricula) selected course content was significantly smaller
than it is today. What we were taught in science classes is not considered
to be complete or even necessarily accurate today. Math hasn't changed much,
but the level of math needed to deal with today's science content is higher.
English and world lit have widened in their scope and variety. Music and art
have gone rapidly through many phases and changes. Our ("baby boomers")
current events, with all the documentation that modern communications media
have provided, is part of our children's' history and social studies course
content.

What to include in today's school courses has become a major point of
discussion and often contention. There's just too much available. To teach
everything that we were taught in the sixties would leave no time for newer
developments and views. That the smallest particle of matter we ever
discussed in high school physics or chemistry was the electron is a
consequence of the uncertainty scientists at the time felt about asserting
anything as fact about smaller particles. That the science I learned could
be done with fairly basic algebra made calculus a high school luxury. Many
of us didn't have a calc course until college. If English teachers are going
to pay any attention to the last fifty years' developments in literature,
some of what we studied in high school has to be jettisoned to make room.
And on and on...

The end result has come to be seen among many serious educators as a need to
"teach children to learn on their own" or "teach children to think
independently" or some other form of the same idea. The rationale is that
the knowledge base is expanding and changing too rapidly for schools any
longer to keep up with the factual content that once formed the lifeblood of
all school courses. "Process orientation" has been a buzz term in arts ed
for decades, but the other content areas are finding it a possible solution
to their burgeoning information problem. Learning to process information
independently, rather than being taught a specific body of information, has
become a goal in itself among many educators, at least here in the U.S.. As
we teach more process, some (a lot, as it turns out) of the solid content
gets missed. The question then becomes whether or not the specific factoids
are in themselves of universal enough importance to require _every_ child to
learn them. Or is it more important to empower every child to find and use
the information he needs when the need arises?

The risk is that "need" becomes a very egocentric matter and children taught
in this way can become very narrow in their views of the world around them.
The answer from the education establishment seems to be that we as teachers
need to structure our courses so that students must, to fulfill our
expectations, explore more deeply. They can't be allowed simply to stop at
the point of self-validation, to stop exploring when they've found only what
they want to find. But the trouble for us as parents is that the entire
philosophy is an experiment, the outcome of which may not be known before
our children need to bury us. It isn't a refined, "debugged" approach. The
problem it tries to solve is a real one. But it requires teaching at a level
never before attempted, a level which may in fact not be reasonable to
expect from normal human beings, a level which demands perhaps superhuman
understanding of both the subjects' content and the way in which each child
will best learn _how to deal with it_.

All the above, I confess, is my best description of the problem that has
resulted in my children's having learned "less" in my view than I did when I
was in school. I'm not convinced completely that we in education are really
barking up the right tree. I wake up on opposite sides of the discussion on
different days, and I'm certain we're going to reap some unwanted
consequences as we continue in the direction we seem to be going. The
problem of information overload and the need to make choices among the
possibilities for inclusion in the school program can't be solved by going
back to the content or even, probably, the methods of my education. The
solution will be found, eventually, long after I've left teaching. This
will, after all, be history in another 50 years.

With apologies for the length...

Karl Krelove
Lead Teacher for Music
Neshaminy School District
Langhorne, Pennsylvania

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