All posts by plthomasedd
remnant 36: “I believe…”
Neil Gaiman Should Be U.S. Secretary of Education: “Things can be different”
Some people view the world differently than others.
Some people view education and schools differently than others.
Some people view children, books, and libraries differently than others.
And then there is Neil Gaiman.
I have been a staunch defender of public education, writing often against the negative consequences of Common Core (especially as related to literacy instruction) and doggedly resisting non-educators as leaders of the education reform movement.
Despite my resistance to what I consider misguided reform as well as my skepticism about innovation and market forces, I have conceded a compromise on Common Core, along with a clarification about that compromise. The response to that compromise has been underwhelming.
However, I am now willing to offer another compromise; this time about the qualifications for who should be our leaders in education reform. While I still call for the removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, I am offering Neil Gaiman as the next Secretary of Education in the U.S.—and suggesting that this office be his for life.
I am basing this new compromise on a speech presented by Gaiman for the Reading Agency in London.
First, I must admit that it isn’t entirely fair to judge Gaiman on a speech he wrote himself as that compares to the speeches written for him Duncan delivers. It also isn’t quite fair to judge the positions of a beloved author against the panderings of a life-long political appointee. Certainly, Duncan is beholden to different constituencies than Gaiman.
But judge I have, and here are my conclusions.
Gaiman’s qualifications for Secretary of Education must begin with what his speech does not include: no discussion of “grit,” no chants of “no excuses,” no praising of innovation or bowing to the brave new world of technology, no calls for new standards, no urgency about new high-stakes tests.
Instead, Gaiman offers a genuine and compelling argument for the essential value in books, the power of fiction, and the sacred nature of libraries.
Unlike typical political discourse, Gaiman confesses upfront his prejudices:
And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living though my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.
So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen*.
Immediately, Gaiman shows his political acuity by noting the importance of investing in literacy as one strategy for decreasing the rise in prisons in the U.S.:
I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. [1] And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.
It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.
Gaiman even understands the difference between causation and correlation—a dramatic advantage over Secretaries of Education in the past two administrations.
But Gaiman shines best when he speaks about and to the essential value in reading, recognizing what the field of literacy has know for a century, at least—children are drawn to reading by being offered an abundance of books and allowed to read by choice:
The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It’s tosh**. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different.
We may be able to imagine, also, how Gaiman would react to Common Core and their “architect,” David Coleman:
And not everyone has the same taste as you.
Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
After an impassioned and thoughtful argument about science fiction (SF)—even China is on board with SF!—Gaiman turns to the power of libraries:
Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky….
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.
But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
No, it seems, education reform should not be about new standards or new high-stakes tests—but about preserving and expanding children’s access to books. Education reform, it seems, isn’t buried inside the promise of new technology either:
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
Gaiman, we must note, is not being merely fanciful; he acknowledges the role of literacy in the world economy and the value in preparing younger generations for that world economy. But his commitments are distinct from the current calls for market forces and innovation.
In fact, Gaiman celebrates a different “I” word:
We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.
Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.
Along with “imagination,” Gaiman also speaks about our commitment to beauty and our shared democratic responsibilities. Fostering literacy in our children, he argues, is an obligation: “This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.”
Ultimately, Gaiman’s speech has inspired me to move outside my previous commitments to demanding that education reform be led by educators only. He has inspired me to imagine, and now I can join him in this belief:
You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this:
The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.
* Keep in mind, Gaiman lives in Minnesota and one of his best novels is American Gods. I think we could expect Gaiman to be as passionate about the good ol’ U.S. of A. if given the opportunity.
** As a side note, the U.S. would benefit greatly from having an appointed official who would occasionally say “tosh.”
[1] Please see this clarification of Gaiman’s claim and the point of this blog.
More Common Core in the Real World (or at Least Florida)
Recommended: Whose Knowledge Counts in Government Literacy Policies?
Especially in the context of President Barack Obama’s education agenda—one that builds on the failed No Child Left Behind template begun under President George W. Bush—and against claims that teachers must earn their place at the education reform agenda, Whose Knowledge Counts in Government Literacy Policies? (Routledge, 2014)—edited by Kenneth S. Goodman, Robert C. Calfee, and Yetta M. Goodman—is both a powerful and needed collection that confronts “the political determination of school knowledge in the field of literacy instruction” (p. xv).
Calfee’s introduction subtitle gets right to the issue: “How the Federal Government Used Science to Take Over Public Schools.” But the entire collection offers a solid case for rejecting thirty-plus years of inexpert accountability and seeking instead the voices and expertise of the field of literacy to drive education policy.
I highly recommend reading and sharing this volume widely.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Joel Spring
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Introduction: Knowledge, Evidence, and Faith: How the Federal Government Used Science to Take Over Public Schools, Robert Calfee
Part 1: The Political Realties
Chapter 2: Whose Knowledge Counts? The Pedagogy of the Absurd, Kenneth S. Goodman
Chapter 3: Re-reading Poverty; Reorienting Educational Policy, Patrick Shannon
Chapter 4: Neoliberal and Neoconservative Literacy Education Policies in Contemporary France, Jacques Fijalkow
Chapter 5: Flying Blind: Government Policy on the Teaching of Reading in England and Research on Effective Literacy Education, Henrietta Dombey
Chapter 6: Whose Knowledge Counts, For Whom, In What Circumstances?: The Ethical Constraints on Who Decides, Sue Ellis
Chapter 7: About the Dubious Role of Phonological Awareness in the Discussion of Literacy Policies, Renate Valtin
Part 2: Aspects of Literacy: The Knowledge Base
Chapter 8: The Role of Story and Literature in a World of Tests and Standards, Kathy G. Short
Chapter 9: The Staircase Curriculum: Whole-School Collaboration to Improve Literacy Achievement, Kathryn H. Au and Taffy E. Raphael
Chapter 10: Diversity in Children’s Literature: What Does It Matter in Today’s Educational Climate? Rudine Sims Bishop
Chapter 11: Examining Three Assumptions about Text Complexity: Standard 10 of the Common Core State Standards, Elfrieda H. Hiebert and Katie Van Sluys
Chapter 12: The Role of Literature and Literary Reasoning in English Language Arts and English Classrooms, Judith A. Langer
Chapter 13: Writing Teachers: The Roles Exploration, Evaluation, and Time Play in Their Lives, Jane Hansen
Chapter 14: What Do Children Need to Succeed in Early Literacy—And Beyond? William H. Teale, Jessica L. Hoffman, and Kathleen A. Paciga
Chapter 15: The Impact of Changing Conceptions of Language on Curriculum and Instruction of Literacy and the Language Arts, David Bloome and Melissa Wilson,
Comments: Nu!…. So!… Where do We Go from Here? Yetta M. Goodman
List of Contributors
Aren’t All Children Equally Deserving?
A common practice for introducing students to the ethical foundation of philosophy is to pose moral dilemmas, possibly the most typical example being the life-boat dilemma that forces a person to choose who lives, and thus who dies.
Science fiction (SF) and speculative fiction often build entire other worlds in which the given circumstances create a series of moral dilemmas that are the basis of the tensions and actions of the novels and films. Writers such as Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, for example) and Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, for example) often build these worlds in the tradition of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley as a way to say, as Neil Gaiman explains about the power of fiction: “The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.”
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the possible other world is one of scarcity, and by the end, the moral dilemma revolves around the fate of a child. The novel’s given, readers must accept, creates the narrow range of choices the characters face; that is part of the power of SF/speculative fiction.
Pulling back, however, from created other worlds, we are faced continually with moral dilemmas—often ones also involving children.
One such dilemma is how any society governs it schools. Confronting that dilemma in the UK, Polly Toynbee exposes dynamics that sound all too familiar in the U.S.:
Most people, right or left, would be alarmed at a trajectory of ever-worsening inequality. But few know the facts, wildly underestimating widening wealth gaps, still thinking Britain quite meritocratic. This ends the myth of modern classlessness, exposing shrinking mobility. The ladder up is so high and steep few can climb it – while those at the top exert all their power to stop their children falling down.
Citizens and institutions in both the UK and the U.S. are confronted by some troubling moral dilemmas: the rise of inequity in the wider society and the inability of public schools to overcome (as well as perpetuating) that inequity.
While debates often focus on the exact relationship between a meritocracy and its schools (a sort of “which comes first,” “chicken and egg” debate), an ethical decision about children seems to be ignored: To the question “Aren’t all children equally deserving?” the consensus in the U.S. appears to be “No.”
Education reform built on changing standards and high-stakes tests, weeding out “bad” teachers, funding the expansion of charter schools and Teach for America corp members, and retaining third graders based on their test scores is a concession to a fabricated moral dilemma. In other words, some children are more deserving (the standard among reformers is “grit,” by the way) because the reformers have conceded to a fatalistic scarcity that serves the advantages of the privileged, but leaves the middle class, the working class, the working poor, and the impoverished to fight among themselves for the scraps left behind.
Education reform in the U.S. is The Hunger Games.
Arthur H. Camins has identified the ugliest concession of them all in education reform as the Hunger Games, collateral damage:
“Whatever it takes,” is a dangerous philosophy because it tends to justify “collateral damage” in the guise of doing good things for children. It excuses increased segregation wrought by school choice policies. It excuses flawed metrics in teacher evaluation. It excuses the disruptions caused by open and closing of schools. It excuses decreased instructional time for science, social studies and the arts. It avoids exploration of meaningful debate about ideas and evidence. It dismisses all of these consequences with the glib phrase, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” as if there were no alternative strategies available for improvement. It is, I think, a calculated avoidance strategy that develops when leaders feel under siege and run out of ways to deflect valid criticism. In the end it is a profoundly undemocratic stance.
And what given have the privileged leaders in the U.S. embraced to justify allowing all their children to remain deserving while “other people’s children” have to fight it out to show who among them are more deserving? Competition and concessions to scarcity.
However, competition and concessions to scarcity are choices, not inevitable conditions in the U.S.
As Michael B. Katz explains in The Undeserving Poor:
Poverty is deeply rooted [in the US]. Before the twentieth century, the nation lacked both the economic surplus and policy tools to eradicate it; all that could be hoped for was to ameliorate the condition of the poor by keeping them from perishing from starvation, wretched housing, and disease. The situation began to change in the twentieth century with what one historian has called the “discovery of abundance” and with increasingly sophisticated methods for transferring income, delivering services, and providing essentials of a decent life. For about a decade, this combination of abundance and method backed by popular support and political will worked spectacularly well. Since then, poverty has been allowed to grow once again, not, it must be emphasized, as the inevitable consequence of government impotence or economic scarcity, but of political will. (p. xi)
When political leaders and self-appointed education reformers point to U.S. public schools reduced to life-boats and demand that we continue to choose which children are deserving and which children are not, instead of playing the moral dilemma game they are handing us, we must begin to point back at the ship wreck they have created and concedes only this: all children are equally deserving.
Hess, Please Begin the Moratorium
Ali: “You Must Listen to Me”
remnant 35: “Is that what writing amounts to?”
Is Learning to Read Natural?
I need to offer as few clarifications since my recent post on how the teaching of reading has been historically corrupted by the influence of reading programs. The motivation of the clarification comes from a comment posted by KenS.*
First, my literacy teaching for the past thirty years does rest on a controversial concept—that grammatical knowledge is essentially biological (see Pinker and Chomsky). This I believe is important as it helps keep literacy instruction from being reduced to seeing language as something acquired.
Next, and to KenS’s questions, speaking and listening are inherent to being human, but reading and writing are artificial, thus acquiring reading and writing are not natural.
However, my point in the earlier post, which certainly wasn’t clear or fully explored, is that Dewey’s claim about not needing to teach reading is grounded in that when children have privileged environments, notably ones that are language and text rich, the acquisition of reading can appear to be natural.
Our goals, then, should be to insure all children have privileged homes that are conducive to language acquisition and that schools provide parallel environments that foster and reinforce literacy acquisition.
One additional caveat is all of the above is addressing decoding and comprehension (“reading” is a complex term). But I never see decoding and comprehension as going far enough in formal education.
Direct instruction and careful fostering of critical literacy must be provided to all students, and the acquisition of critical literacy, I believe, is certainly not acquired naturally since it requires that we confront and challenge all of the conditions that constitute “natural” for each person.
I hope this is more clear and addresses the great comment from KenS.
* See the comment from Kens at my original post and below:
First, Dr. Thomas, thanks, as always, for making me aware of historical perspectives I was not previously aware of. Your writing always provides much food for thought.
I am not certain of your point with this post, however, and because understanding how young people learn to read (or don’t) has become so important to me, I hope you will clarify for me.
Mea culpa: Despite the fact that I am in my 17th year of teaching middle school English, I have come to see myself as a teacher of reading only gradually. Earlier in my career I saw it as my job to teach literature and academic writing. It took me far longer than it should have, but I finally began to wonder why students reached middle school with such widely varying aptitudes for understanding what they read.
My question pertains to your statement that your “perspective on reading isn’t all that different from Dewey’s” belief that “reading just happened.” How close, then is your perspective to Dewey’s position?
Dewey’s stance contradicts what I’ve come to believe – although there seems to be much disagreement about reading instruction, even among experts, so I am keeping an open mind.
OK, I’ll try to be brief: Pinker, in The Language Instinct, convinced my that young children are wired to learn oral language without formal instruction. Hart and Risley, in Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, convinced me that the extensive differences in the quantity and quality of verbal experiences among children had an enormous impact on children’s readiness to learn once they started school. Lakoff and Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, led me to believe that the advantages affluent children had in verbal practice led not only to a larger vocabulary, but a conceptual system far more prepared to make sense of the abstract content they encountered in school.
But here is where I disagree with Dewey; here is where I think he just didn’t understand that a reason he didn’t remember being taught to read is that his young mind didn’t have the conceptual framework yet to be metacognitive about what he was undergoing in his childhood.
Dr. Diane McGuinness, in several books, has argued that children don’t naturally learn to read any more than they naturally learn to work on car engines. Yes, some people have more aptitude for learning how car engines work, just as some people learn to read faster. But, still, having some guidance from someone more experienced seems a “natural” part of our development as humans.
McGuinness points out that writing systems are a human invention and the English alphabetic system is particularly complicated. To fully understand it, children must be taught to decode written words and encode into writing the sounds we produce as words. She also points out that the brain is an incredible pattern-spotting machine, and children will learn, even when teaching methods are not particularly efficient.
Now, to be clear, it seems to me there are essentially two stages (that must overlap) to learning to read – learning to decode and encode the code that is our alphabet, and learning to read for meaning. Perhaps I misunderstood your position, and you were referring to learning to read for meaning. To some extent, I think that can occur more “naturally,” as our brains are also meaning-seeking.
Finally, all this has led me to believe most definitely that discrepencies in wealth and power and priviledge are responsible for the much of the discrepencies we see in children’s academic achievment. In that regard, I agree with you 100%.
