There was a time, many years ago, when I felt myself to be something like precious cargo.
My parents — a full-time English teacher and a full-time housewife — consistently treated their young son as a precious addition to their nuclear family… but they didn’t treat me like cargo. Rather, they treated me more like a flower slowly blossoming.
It was the public education system that treated me like precious cargo. Cargo, to be delivered up to the great big world of jobs and careers, at the end of 13 years of public schooling. In some kind of undamaged condition, hopefully.
We began Part Two of this article series, on Friday, with this short quote taken from the Colorado Charter Schools Act, passed by the Denver legislature in 1993.
Different pupils learn differently and public school programs should be designed to fit the needs of individual pupils and that there are educators, citizens, and parents in Colorado who are willing and able to offer innovative programs, educational techniques, and environments but who lack a channel through which they can direct their innovative efforts.
One of our readers has pointed out that this “run-on” sentence — including five occurrences of the word “and” — would likely have earned a well-justified critique from any competent Language Arts teacher. The part that stood out to me, however, was this phrase:
“…public school programs should be designed to fit the needs of individual pupils…”
Back before I started considering myself to be a load of cargo, my attentive and caring Kindergarten teacher, Ms. Wiggmann, noted that I was planning to become a paleontologist when I grew up. No doubt Ms. Wiggmann had surmised my intense interest in paleontology based upon the fact that, during Show and Tell each Friday, I reported on yet another member of my vast plastic dinosaur collection.
I’m guessing that not many of my Kindergarten classmates had ever heard the word, “paleontologist.” Certainly, I never heard any of them use the word in casual conversation.
I distinctly recall Ms. Wiggmann encouraging my interest in paleontology, as did my parents as well — especially my mom, who read to me, at bedtime, Lord knows how many books on dinosaurs, and biological evolution, and the science of fossils. She even bought me a small, hand-held paleontologist’s pick-ax, in case I should ever come across a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil and feel the need to extract it from the solid rock.
As far as I can recall, Kindergarten was the last grade where a teacher considered my interest in dinosaurs to be of any real significance. Over the next 12 years, I was essentially cargo to be delivered. The public school system made very clear to me that, not only did I lack knowledge and skills that were truly important, I had no idea which knowledge or skills were truly important.
Paleontology was one of the many things that lacked any true importance, regardless of my intense personal fascination with the subject. My teachers and the school district knew very well what I ought to be learning, and it had nothing to do with dinosaurs. It did, however, have something to do with the culture of the ancient Mayan civilization… and with dividing fractions by other fractions… and with the physiology of the human eyeball… and with the correct spelling of numerous words. The word “cargo”, for example.
How my school district had decided that the (relatively brief) reign of the ancient Mayans was more crucially important than the 135-million-year reign of Dinosauria, I am still not clear. Nor have I ever found, in my 63 years, the need to divide one fraction by another fraction. I suppose, if I’d become an ophthalmologist, knowledge of the eyeball’s inner workings might have proved eminently useful… but I never did become an ophthalmologist.
All of which is to raise the question: what, exactly, did the Colorado Legislature mean when they wrote:
“…public school programs should be designed to fit the needs of individual pupils…”
What are the “needs” of the “individual pupils”?
The collective wisdom of the education industry — at the current moment — is that, while students are individuals and have individual learning styles and individual strengths and weaknesses, their “needs” are essentially identical. Those “needs” are carefully summarized by the Colorado Academic Standards — which are in turn a modified version of the controversial Common Core State Standards forced upon the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) in 2010, when the federal government offered waivers to the No Child Left Behind Act, in exchange for an agreement to adopt Common Core.
From the CDE website:
The Colorado State Board of Education adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in August 2010. In December 2010, CDE released the Colorado Academic Standards (CAS) for Mathematics and Reading, Writing and Communicating incorporating the entire CCSS while maintaining the unique aspects of the Colorado Academic Standards, which include personal financial literacy, 21st century skills, prepared graduate competencies, and preschool expectations.
Yesterday, I opened Colorado’s uniform science standards for Preschool through 12th grade, and was disheartened to learn that the word “paleontology” does not appear anywhere in the 110-page document. Nor does the word, “dinosaur.”
So things have not changed much since 1958. Basically children are still treated, by the education industry, as cargo — numbered and labeled, to be delivered on the date of their high school graduation. Ideally, that cargo will be sufficiently packed with facts and job skills that all children “need” to learn, according to certain corporate interests — the folks who wrote the Common Core State Standards, and who also stand to make enormous profits from the implementation of those standards… regardless of who those individual children are, and regardless of where those individual children would, themselves, most like to arrive.
I hope I’ve been clear that my parents treated me as a precious individual slowly unfolding… not as a precious load of cargo to be delivered. And for that, I cannot thank them enough.
And, to be fair, most of my public school teachers also treated me as precious… but as a precious child who needed, most of all, to be shaped to fit into a preconceived pattern, endowed with preconceived skills, information, character traits, and goals.
I happened to be one of the “individual pupils” who adapted easily to those preconceived goals — which weren’t necessarily my personal goals to begin with, but became my goals as part of the adaptation process. And because of that adaptation, I earned good grades and praise and, ultimately, was offered scholarships to good colleges.
But I never used my paleontologist’s pick-ax… not even once.