History Taught Backwards and the Education Crisis

[Kamaji]

History Taught Backwards and the Education Crisis

It takes both a village and good parents to raise a child.

By Mark Judge
September 18, 2022

When thinking about the crisis in American education, a crisis of falling enrollment and teacher burnout, I often think back to when I studied to become a teacher. Something that happened on the very first day of class has never left me.

I was sitting in a classroom at a community college in Maryland with students who were half my age and mostly female when we got our first homework assignment. It was an essay, “Metaphors of Hope,” from our class textbook, Teachers, Schools, and Society. “Metaphors of Hope” is an account—supposedly—of what is right about American education. The essay’s author, Mimi Brodsky Chenfeld, began teaching in 1956 and is the author of several books on pedagogy. The metaphors of hope that Chenfeld writes about are the indications of hope amidst the collapse in every category of the American educational system.

My professor—I’ll call her Karen—was a nice, attractive woman around 40. She is a terrific teacher, kind, funny, and knowledgeable. She has years of experience. Yet on the first day, something felt off. A few of the students purchased the wrong book; instead of Teachers, Schools, and Society, they had with them a book that was sitting right next to it called Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. When somebody pointed out the mistake, Karen looked pained and a little disgusted. It was the face you’d make if you went to an expensive Italian restaurant and were presented with a plate of pasta with hair on top of it. “You can return that book,” she said. Not: you can read it if you want, see what you think. You can—the tone was more like you should—return that book.

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One of the most incredible and dramatic American lives belongs to Geoffrey Canada, the subject of Paul Tough’s Whatever it Takes. Equal parts history, profile, science, and sociology, Tough’s book tells the story of a remarkable man and his ambitious project to break poor black kids out of poverty. Canada is an African American educator and activist who in the 1980s and ’90s came across statistics that changed the way he looked at the problems of poor black people. One study revealed the massive discrepancy between the vocabularies of poor people and everyone else, and how this affected everything from taking tests to doing well in job interviews.

In the first few years of life, babies from poor households hear far fewer words, and what they hear is often negative. Hearing fewer words, and more negative words, has a physiological effect on the brains of poor children—it actually affects brain development and brain chemistry. Infants of all races who are read to and treated with love, support, and kindness do better on tests, in conversation, in job interviews, etc.

This lack of nurturing, Canada believed, kneecaps poor kids before they even reach the first grade. The liberals are wrong that racism and economics are why blacks do not get ahead—after all, massive social spending and economic booms have not changed the black unemployment rate much in the last 40 years. And certain conservatives are mistaken in claiming that IQ is destiny. How could it be, if IQ is so malleable in the earliest years of life? What matters is how a child is spoken to and treated in the first few years of life. Change that, and you may be able to change everything.

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What is striking about Canada’s breakthrough is that it has the potential to push past the Left-Right divide over education. The Left’s view is summarized in Jonathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities. Kozol is a sad-sacked geyser of left-wing condescension, and his books and lectures are long laundry lists of rat-infested schools with collapsing infrastructure. But Kozol has little to say about the crisis of bad parenting in both the black and white communities or about how teachers have moved away from teaching that life is an incredible, exciting adventure and instead seem only to understand it as something to survive, usually as an aggrieved victim. On the other side is libertarian Charles Murray, who has written a lot about education, but who thinks that IQ is destiny, despite the fact that IQ appears to be at least somewhat malleable and improve if a child is read to from a young age.

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Source:  https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/18/history-taught-backwards-and-the-education-crisis/