Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State

Is Jerry Brown the model for Liberalism 5.0?

Every once in a while a major politician shocks by actually speaking in a way that politicians rarely speak, i.e., in a way that suggests that he really "gets it". What are the chances considering all the filters that prevent such people from seeing things other than the way the power establishment they inhabit presents things to them.

I've always found Brown to be an intriguing figure, but I don't live in California, and I can't say I've been paying much attention, but the education section in his State of the State Adress earlier today is something I could have written for him. Here's the relevant section, but the whole speech is worth reading:

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child.

We seem to think that education is a thing--like a vaccine--that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work - lighting fires in young minds.

My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level--with school boards. I am asking you to approve a brand new Local Control Funding Formula which would distribute supplemental funds -- over an extended period of time -- to school districts based on the real world problems they face. This formula recognizes the fact that a child in a family making $20,000 a year or speaking a language different from English or living in a foster home requires more help. Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.

With respect to higher education, cost pressures are relentless and many students cannot get the classes they need. A half million fewer students this year enrolled in the community colleges than in 2008. Graduation in four years is the exception and transition from one segment to the other is difficult. The University of California, the Cal State system and the community colleges are all working on this. The key here is thoughtful change, working with the faculty and the college presidents. But tuition increases are not the answer. I will not let the students become the default financiers of our colleges and universities.

BTW, my jaw almost hit the ground when he brought in 'subsidiarity'. It's something I've written frequently about here, but have never heard an elected politician talk about. Here's a post I wrote about subsidiarity  when I was running for School Board in 2011.

Comments

[Jonathan]

Why do we assume that, when it comes to education, local residents of a school district have better philosophies of education and pedagogy than distant bureaucrats? I'm all for localism in some things, but I fail to see the application to the design of curricula and examination methods. Local authority can be just as wrongheaded as the distant variety -- at least when it comes to education.

I don't see anything wrong with standardization per se. In fact, the whole idea of a unified culture, state, economy or what have you presumes broadly applied standards. We either believe knowledge is universal or we don't. Standardized testing may have gone too far, it may be the wrong kind or it may be used for the wrong ends. But standardization itself seems not inherently wrong all the time, and much of the time quite necessary. Otherwise we might as well all be autodidacts or hire private tutors. Americans have less and less in common as time goes by. It would be nice if we shared basic educational experiences. There is still plenty of room for inspired and idiosyncratic teaching within a pervasive and structured education. There is even still room to teach people how to think, and not just things to know. The educational systems of western European nations are much more homogeneous and standardized than ours, and right now they're making ours look chaotic and barbaric. Granted, we're a much larger and more diverse nation than any one European country. Maybe that's the whole problem.

One last objection from the devil's advocate. Why are teachers supposed to be saints who "light fires" of independent thinking and creativity in students? That's a wonderful thing, a blessing -- and therefore very rare and likely to stay that way no matter what edicts we hand down locally or nationally. Brown seems to be guilty of the same sin we accuse the technocrats: assuming teachers are miracle-workers. The fact is human beings, especially young ones, are intractable creatures. It takes a lot to make good people of them, and there is no known way to force genius on someone. We now seem to expect teachers to do the work that was once shared by parents, religious leaders, and the culture at large. I recall teachers being widely considered much better at their jobs when their jobs did not include saving the souls of their students and the economic and geopolitical well-being of the USA.

Why must every pupil grow up to be a brilliant leader and a great "innovator"? The fact is most people are cut out to live externally mundane lives, and that's not a bad thing. If education were responsible for as much of our personal fortune as we seem to want it to be, there would be no accounting for the radically different fates of graduates of the same institutions. Fixing schools won't do much until deeper cultural problems are addressed, because education presupposes culture. I truly don't believe it can go the other direction, though I know we so much wish it could. You have to fix the antecedent thing first.

I realize I've inhabited several positions here which may be inconsistent with each other. Apparently I'm feeling contrarian. This is a disagreeable aspect of my personal character for which I insist none of my educators are to blame.

[Jack Whelan]

Jonathan,
No arrangement is flawless, but subsidiarity is far superior to either libertarian laissez faire or top down technocratic control, if for no other reason than it seeks the balance or integration point between these two polarities. It assumes people on the local level know best, but allows for interventions from higher levels when the institutions on the local level fail because there aren't the resources--human or economic--to deal adequately with intransigent local problems.

And of course it's a teacher's job to light fires. The subject matter and the curriculum aren't as important as awakening in kids a love of learning and the ability to learn how to learn, because that's an essential life skill, and everyone without a serious handicap is capable of that, even if they aren't capable of or interested in doing college or graduate level work.

And most, too, are capable of awakening to beauty and mystery. But teachers and local learning communities cannot shape a course of study for that meets these kinds of student needs if they are straitjacketed by rigid state curriculum standards, especially those that are obsessed with math competency. Why is it assumed that math is more important than the arts? Why is it assumed that everybody has to be competent in algebra, trigonometry, and calculus? I suffered through them, never cared about them, and forgot everything I learned because I had no use for them immediately after graduation. Everything I remember about math and have occasion to use I could have learned in a weekend workshop. But I awoke to many other things during my time in school, and it wouldn't have happened without some good teachers who passed the torch to me.

The problem with standardization is that the standards don't serve human purposes; they serve bureaucratic purposes, and the whole process of setting standards is politically contaminated. Common Core Standards in theory could work, I suppose, but only in a country that isn't as politically riven as ours is, and the last thing you want is curriculum standards set by politicians and the technocrats who find their way into positions of power in education bureaucracies and policy centers. They come up with the kind of nonsense like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

[JP]

"I don't see anything wrong with standardization per se. In fact, the whole idea of a unified culture, state, economy or what have you presumes broadly applied standards. We either believe knowledge is universal or we don't."

Culture is organic.

The problem is these things are being forced mechanistically and are using a non-human Newtonian framework.

[Jonathan]

Jack, I can hardly believe what you write about mathematics. This is precisely the pragmatist argument I thought you stood against. Surely you are aware this is exactly the argument leveled against the humanities all the time. Why bother with math? Surely if math is useless, then so is poetry, foreign languages, philosophy, art, music, etc. Perhaps we should design a curriculum that pivots exclusively between athletics and microchip engineering.

I was always terrible at math. But even when I hated having to take it, I saw great virtue in studying the principles of it. It is practically the only training in logical thinking that most students will ever have, no matter how much higher education they go on to. I studied Greek and Latin intensively too for a while. I don't remember much of it now, and astonishingly I have yet to carry on a conversation with a 2,500 year old Athenian or an Augustan poet, but the study of those languages has been endlessly useful to me in less direct ways.

Once we start asking "what will I ever do with this or get out of it?" we're on a very wrong path. The answer is always, "You'll think with it." What is really needful in life, after all? I thought your whole point was that we should be teaching people how to think, not just rote information and behaviors that will get them jobs in the technocrats' world, and satisfy while prolonging the petty, enslaving desires consumerism cultivates in the citizenry.

The problem is not that students have to "waste" so much time studying mathematics. The problem is they're not told why -- because we apparently don't know or care -- such study is valuable. The same goes for any subject that doesn't teach you how to make a specific thing: in other words, everything that is taught in grade school and high school.

I actually think our curricula are very good. I wish I remembered more math and science, not that I had studied less of it. But I happen to have been drawn by personal inclination to the fine and the liberal arts, so that's what has stuck with me. But I would like to see all the same things taught, only more rigorously. The problem is a lack of reflexive awareness. The purse full of gold is no good to the hungry man if he does not know he can go to the market and buy food with it. We give our children gold (call it, 'mathematics'), but we fail to tell them it is anything other than a cumbersomely heavy metal that they must lug around for the rest of their lives without ever "using" -- unless they want to become goldsmiths.

As for the awakening in youth to beauty and mystery. . . If that is the job of teachers then we're doomed. I had plenty of good teachers, more than my fair share in fact (and not only in the subjects I preferred), but I know there's a limit to what a good teacher, or indeed any other human being can do when it comes to the inner or Godward life. Some things can't be explained or taught. Openness to beauty and mystery is available to every human from childhood onward, or I don't know what it is to be human. Creating an environment and an atmosphere to foster that openness is a responsibility much larger than even a perfect educational system could bear.

[Jack Whelan]

Jonathan--

My argument is against standardization, not standards. And also in support of teachers in a given community to figure out what is the best curriculum for their students. Do I think that kids should be innumerate? Of course, not. Do I think there's value in challenging kids to learn higher math? Of course, I do.

But I also know from talking to high school math teachers that I know that a lot of the kids are so far behind by the time they get to 10th and 11th grade they think of themselves as stupid and failures and hate school and they drop out. If giving them challenges that would provide an alternative to math would keep them educationally engaged, schools should have the flexibility to do that. In my own case, I think I should have been given the choice to learn math or to learn piano or violin, or to learn another language. The music choice would have been much more useful for me now, and more enriching.

I'm not against math; I'm against the mindset that makes it THE most important thing for kids to learn. It just isn't. Everybody should have a basic level of numeracy, but they don't need trig and calculus. And state standards are forcing down kids throats and having the unintended effect of incentivizing dropping out.

[JP]

"I was always terrible at math. But even when I hated having to take it, I saw great virtue in studying the principles of it. It is practically the only training in logical thinking that most students will ever have, no matter how much higher education they go on to."

I burned through most mathematics like a hot knife through butter, and I got little logic out of it.

Logic is quite different from math.

To me, math is intuitive, whereas logic takes more work.

And I say this as someone who slept through Calculus and would often get 100% on the examinations.

With the higher levels of math, there is a simple key to the understanding of it. If you do not possess that key, you will fail.

[Jonathan]

JP, it may be precisely because you slept through math and still aced it that you got no logic out of it. I know people from my own cohort who say the same thing. Because they never had to think about math, it never helped them think. There's nothing wrong with that. I've always envied you people. But I'm hardly the first person to point out that math, beyond simple arithmetic, is one kind of logic. It's really not up for debate. What is totally debatable, as you suggest, is whether math is the best way to learn logic. I think it probably is not. But because we don't teach it in any other way, I'm for requiring the untalented people like myself to study math.

[Jack Whelan]

Anthony Cody makes a similar point. When it comes to kids who honestly don't see, rightly or wrongly, how school is in any way relevant for their lives and are at risk to drop out, the primary objective should not be to make sure they meet certain standards, but that they stay engaged learning things that are truly useful to them. Here's Cody in Ed Week:

"Let's be clear about why so many students have disconnected from high school. As the pressure to perform well on tests is exerted ever more on everyone in our schools, we have shifted the very reason for our work. When students ask "why are we learning this?" our best answers revolve around the students themselves. We ought to be teaching things that are really useful in their lives, and which satisfy their curiosity about the world. It is our job as teachers to provoke that curiosity, and build on it. It is our job to make connections to the real world visible and compelling. When our answer to the question "why are we learning this?" is "because it is on the test," or "because it is Common Core standard 3.6a," we have lost our way, and our students know it.

It is time to abandon the phony imperatives of test-driven reform, and listen to what our students are telling us."

Source: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/01/two_crises.html