Beware Of Calls For “Relevance”
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
It would be wise to be on guard when we hear modern educators talk about the need to make education “relevant” by including an analysis of “modern problems” in the curriculum. The odds are that their intention is not relevance but finding a way to use their classrooms to advance the agenda of the secular left. It is not extremist to express this concern, even if the educational establishment will argue that what some parents see as left-wing bias is likely to be merely an attempt by teachers to promote a free discussion of topics of current interest from a wide variety of points of view; that their children will hear not only the left’s point of view, but many points of view in the “marketplace of ideas.”
Perhaps. But a recent column by Michelle Malkin makes clear that there are more than a few teachers in our schools whose devotion to a free exchange of ideas is hard to find. She points to the Crescent Heights Social Justice Magnet School in Los Angeles, whose search for “relevance” features “action projects” for its students to transform them into “agents of change” who will “recognize injustice in their world or the world at large and be able to fully express their outrage, their plan of attack, their progress in this endeavor.”
You can bet the “injustice in the world” these students will be directed to correct will not be legal abortion on demand or the denial of tax credits to help parents pay the tuition at their children’s parish schools.
Those issues are also not likely to be addressed at the Social Justice High School in Chicago. Malkin quotes from the school’s mission statement: “Through collective community power, we commit to a conscious effort to overcome the intended historical obstacles that have been designed to disempower and divide our communities.” It sounds as if it could be from a brochure written by Saul Alinsky.
If you are taking some comfort from the idea that at least the radicals won’t be able to distort the study of mathematics, think again. Sol Stern reported in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, on a New York “city-funded program for training math teachers.” The goal of the program, in Stern’s words, is to “train students in seeing social problems from a radical anti-capitalist perspective.” Its teachers’ guide, Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, calls for students to be instructed to use mathematical analysis to study “racial profiling, unemployment rate calculation, the war in Iraq, environmental racism, globalization, wealth redistribution and poverty, wheelchair ramps, urban density, HIV/AIDS, deconstructing Barbie, junk food advertising to children, and lotteries.”
It is not impossible, of course, for topics such as these to be covered in a fair and objective manner in a high school classroom. There were colleagues of mine from my teaching days that I would trust in that regard. They would have included in their lessons reading selections from critics of a big government approach to solving these problems, perhaps from the writings of Charles Murray and George Gilder. But I would bet that is not going to happen at the schools Malkin has called to our attention.
Malkin closes with the following: “Passing the most rigorous student standards in the world won’t amount to squat as long as the overseers of public education exploit government schools as community organizing vehicles for captive tots, tweens, and teens.”
On another topic: In the September 25 edition of First Teachers we focused on a column by Amanda Ripley from the June 17 issue of the Arizona Daily Star, in which Ripley contends that the most effective way to improve American education is to raise standards in our schools of education, even if that means, at least temporarily, fewer new teachers entering the job market. (Ripley is the author of The Smartest Kids in the World — And How They Got That Way.)
Ripley called our attention to “something that hasn’t made many headlines but has the potential to finally revolutionize education. . . . In a handful of statehouses and universities across the country, a few farsighted Americans are finally pursuing what the world’s smartest countries have found to be the most efficient education reform ever tried. They are making it harder to become a teacher.”
Ripley pointed to reforms being made in Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Rhode Island to “raise the bar” for admission to their states’ schools of education. Education leaders in these states are convinced that whatever shortage of teachers these higher standards cause will be short-lived once the higher standards bring about new prestige for the teaching profession.
We can add North Carolina to the list of states taking this approach. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education has proposed a redesign of the program for aspiring preschool, elementary, and middle-school teachers, one that is aimed at raising the requirements in these areas of study, according to Laura Oleniacz, writing for the North Carolina newspaper The Herald-Sun.
Writes Oleniacz, “The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education has proposed a redesign of the program for aspiring preschool, elementary, and middle-school teachers. The proposal is aimed at raising the requirements in these areas of study.” One proposal is to permit science and math majors to add “the education course work needed to be licensed as a high school teacher in four years.” This is a significant change. It means that aspiring teachers need not major in education, but rather in the subjects they’ll all be teaching, math and science, for the present.
Beyond that, UNC is proposing to “eliminate its bachelor’s degree for preschool, elementary, and middle-school teachers and replace it with a master’s of arts in a teaching program that could be completed in approximately one additional year with undergraduate work and summer courses. The plan includes a full year of school internship, so they will also need some time to work with school partners. The change, if approved, will probably take place next year.”
UNC’s School of Education, Oleniacz continues, is also “ramping up recruitment through college fairs, open houses, information sessions, and partnering with admissions to get the word out.” The goal is to combat the view of teachers expressed by UNC sophomore Maria Kim: “I think the bigger issue with education is the lack of respect for teachers,” she said. “It’s a deeper problem than just pay — here, teaching is treated as a last-resort kind of profession.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
