It’s our public schooling, stupid
“Teaching in California has become a stupid job, one in which both common sense and pedagogy are replaced by state mandates and politicians’ programs,” reports Herbert Kohl in “Stupidity and Tears,” his collection of no-nonsense essays on public education and the need for reform. Reflecting the author’s 40 years in the classroom and his extensive writing about educational problems (“36 Children,” “Should We Burn Babar?” and three dozen other books), these six wide-ranging essays look into the source of the frustrated tears and institutionalized stupidity that Kohl says characterize our public education system. He examines in particular high-stakes and standards-based testing, the need to encourage and support teachers, the problems with English-only learning and how public schools fail the disadvantaged children in our society.
Kohl unabashedly condemns what he sees as the failure of public education, yet he approaches his subject not with bitterness but as one who has a huge stake in the outcome, who feels passionately that we need to do a better job serving our nation’s children. He regularly uses the term “stupidity,” taking his definition from the Sanskrit stupere (“to be knocked stupid or insensible, to be numbed or astonished”). Public education encourages students and teachers alike to be knocked stupid, he contends, creating students who are not encouraged to learn and teachers who are actively discouraged from being creative in the classroom. This brand of stupidity “is a form of institutional and social coercion that traps people into acting in ways they consider to be stupid and, in the context of teaching, counter to the work they feel they must do to help their students.”
As one example of institutionalized stupidity, he describes his work years ago with a summer literacy program serving minority children. The program was able to raise most of the students’ reading scores up to grade level over the summer, and the participants considered it wildly successful. The program, though, was abruptly discontinued once the summer ended, since it no longer qualified for funding: Under then-current guidelines, federal funding was restricted to programs serving children not performing up to grade level. In order to keep its financial support, a program would need to ensure that the children remained below grade level -- “a thoughtless system with built-in failure.” Kohl points out a further ironic twist: The program became eligible for funding again the following summer because “the students’ gains during the summer were lost during the school year, and once again they qualified for funding as failures.” Though this particular guideline no longer exists, the stupidity informing it continues: “[W]e now reward successful programs and punish failed programs.... [I]f you are already a success with poor children, you get money; and if you are struggling, you get money taken away.”
He also cites examples of teachers working with bilingual children in California after the passage of an initiative that effectively prohibits the use of Spanish in schools. Rosa, a teacher in San Francisco, reports that she had to enforce this English-only policy even during high-stakes testing. She was required to give test-taking instructions in English and couldn’t answer students’ questions in Spanish, even if they were about taking the test. Thus, she says, she became complicit in setting her students up for failure.
In addition to what goes on in the classroom, Kohl considers issues of social justice and class, the importance of dissent and the role of imagination in saving students from despair; he actively encourages children to think for themselves and develop their own value systems. Important questions are raised throughout, not to be answered by the author but to spur thought in the reader: “What are the moral consequences of the erosion of hope in childhood? How do we speak to children about moral issues?”
A few of the essays feel wide of the mark -- one about his yearlong stay in Spain speaks to the need for teacher sabbaticals but seems a bit off topic -- and the format wobbles from narrative to polemic to outline. Kohl’s crafting of these essays has taken a back seat to substance. At the heart of his writing is the welfare of the children and teachers our educational system is failing, and his mission is to light a fire under educators and administrators who can change things for the better.
