Some philosophical musings for the beginning of the year

I have successfully finished my second week back at school, or third week if you count in-service training. Last year I had to push most philosophical questions out of the way to maintain my sanity, but now I am slowly pulling them out again to ponder. Our keynote speaker for in-services was a friend of our superintendent, and his message was based on the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” As I’m sure you can guess, it was interesting and entertaining. However, there were some really fascinating questions that he brought to light for me: first, what are teachers really trying to do (not to mention what is possible for us to do), and second, what are the dominant philosophies of education in today’s political climate?

Our speaker told us that we should know ourselves as educators, as opposed to teachers. Sounds great, but why? He says being a teacher carries with it the denotation of instructing someone else in how to do something. On the other hand, being an educator etymologically has the idea of “bringing out something that was within.” The latter definition sounds warm, fuzzy, and humanistic, but I can’t quite buy it, for several reasons, some ideological and some practical. Ideologically, I know that there’s plenty of lousy stuff within my kids, and that without instruction the lousy will trump the good every time. I love my students very much, but they are not naturally well-behaved or brilliant. I also know that constantly teaching that way would be ludicrous. As a language arts teacher, I often do leave something to my students’ opinions, ask for their first reactions, or ask them to dig deeper than I have. However, I do not expect them to have my expectations for behavior implanted in their hearts or to create their own coherent ways to categorize parts of speech. Of course, any philosophy can be taken too far, and I would assume that Dr. Ed would not expect us to take his ideas of education to these lengths.

Another thing that really interested me was Dr. Ed’s commentary on “self-esteem training,” and I think I agree with him on this, but I would be fascinated to talk with him more on the subject. He talked about the popular cause of building kids’ self-esteem that took over education and other public sectors in the early 90’s, and how everyone was sure that it was the key to eliciting better performance and behavior from kids. He says it didn’t happen that way. This goes along with what Olweus, our school’s bullying prevention program, says about bullies: for so long, the conventional wisdom has said that the typical bully has low self-esteem and is very insecure. However, according to the body of research on bullying, this is not true. Many bullies have very high self-esteem and believe that they have many friends (though of course, they may only be their friends out of fear). We see the same thing at my school. Our counselor asks new students questions of their self-concepts and how they see others, and most of our bullies and our most resistant students have very high opinions of themselves, or at least they claim to. I know there is a difference, and that self-reporting is very tricky. Taking a test like that is quite a quandary for me, as a realistic person and a Christian. How in the world am I supposed to rate myself as a person on a scale from one to ten? Who made the scale anyway? The only scale that matters is God’s, and I guess without Jesus’ righteousness I’m weighing in at zero. So maybe the tests are ridiculous to begin with.

Anyway, the point is that filling kids’ heads with news of how terrific they are is only good if you have something solid backing it up. It seems like some of the gurus in education are getting that, but I know some of them are still missing the boat, because I still hear plenty of “rah-rah-rah go me” mumbo-jumbo out of my kids and my fellow teachers. So what is going on in education today? In my first education class I learned about different public education models and different philosophies that have been prominent through the last decades, but how will those in the future look back at these years? The National Education Association (NEA) is ridiculously liberal as a whole, from what I can see, but there seem to be some conservative voices in education that are very strong right now. I still haven’t quite gotten over the choice for keynote speaker when I attended the Education Minnesota Convention in the fall of 2008: Ron Clark, who wrote 55 Essential Rules, and whom my sister has decided to emulate in her future teaching career. My sister is pretty old school when it comes to her philosophy, and this guy really is, too, though he finds many very creative ways to get his point across. I need to read his book, and though I’ve been thinking about it for the last few years, now that my sister’s found him I know she won’t let me forget!
Of course, when I talk about “liberalism” and “conservatism” within education, I know I need to watch what I say, particularly because I found out during some of my college classes that certain methods of mine are labeled “liberal,” since they haven’t all been used for the last hundred years. During my class on writing and writing pedagogy, a classmate and I had some great conversations and were hugely entertained when we realized that she, who is a card-carrying liberal and pretty much a hippie, preferred many conservative methods of teaching, while I was the exact opposite. I’d never hated being put in a box so much before that moment. There are negative connotations that we carry along with every label, of course, but political terms probably make me go “hmmm” the most. Nowadays, the running conservative joke about me at work is that being conservative is the reason I don’t like spending money. I’d always thought that instinct came from my hippie side… my very closeted hippie side… There now, was that a bit more bloggish? Are you slightly more intrigued than by my typical post? : ) I love you either way! Blessings, Christina