I’ve always liked David Brooks as a columnist. He often takes stands I disagree with, but, generally speaking, he also approaches his role as a public intellectual with inquiry and openness, not orthodoxy and attitude.
In his education columns, however, Brooks has become a dangerous and myopic mouthpiece for a particular set of reform ideas that, without much prodding, turn to dust. And after reading a weekend column of his, I think I understand why.
The column is called “The Other Education” , and it chronicles his discovery of Bruce Springsteen and the ways in which the “emotional curriculum” of The Boss’s music helped shape Brooks’s worldview. Addressing the disconnect between the more formal education he received and this other education that proved so formidable, Brooks writes: “For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.
“This second education,” Brooks continues, “doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it. The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.”
I love half of this description. In the second part – the part about our “emotional education” – Brooks captures the elusive, nonlinear and transformative nature of what all learning should look like (knowing that some days we will succeed, and some days we will not). Yet in the first part – the part about a “normal schoolroom” – Brooks reveals his assumption that scholastic learning must always be direct, described, and discrete.
This is a monumental, misguided assumption, and it is shaping most of our current public discourse about education reform. In Waiting for Superman, it takes the form of a graphic in which a schoolroom full of children have the tops of their heads removed, and a teacher attempts to pour the learning (if you can call it that) directly, and discretely, into each child.
As with Brooks’s education columns, the message in the movie is not that this is an outdated model of schooling, but that existing dysfunctions in the system (which are very real) are preventing the teachers from developing the right aim, resulting in all of this “learning” spilling helplessly onto the desks in front of each child’s empty, waiting vessel.
Pardon my French, but are you fucking kidding me?
Everyone knows learning does not lend itself neatly to 45-minute blocks, five-day weeks, or any of the other structures in place to try and guide each child through the formal schooling process. This does not mean, as some have suggested, that there is no role for standards, tests, or structures. But it does mean that in addition to a school’s most visible structures – its schedules, its assessments, and its policies – there are an equally essential (and elusive) number of invisible structures, otherwise known as the inner conditions from which we operate – our passions, our fears, our needs, our interests, and our dreams – or, to use Brooks’s language, the “emotional curriculum.” And any policy that tends to one, but not both, of these sets of issues is doomed to fail.
Over the past few years Brooks’s columns have advocated for a set of education policies that are notably attentive to the former, and breathtakingly silent on the latter. He would have us believe our single current measure of school success – 3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores – is a sufficient incentive for our entire system of schools. He has urged us to start using these scores to decide which teachers are best. He has contributed to the quixotic characterizations of charter schools. And, I now see, he has ignored the dissonance between his most powerful personal learning experience – a deeply relevant, engaging, experiential journey of self-discovery – and the types of school environments the policies he pushes would actually incentivize.
To be clear: the Op-Ed is a flawed communications vehicle. Nothing lends itself well to 700-word explanations – least of all how we learn, and what would help more of us learn well more of the time. Still, I would like to respectfully urge David Brooks to channel his “inner Bruce” and aim higher in the education columns that follow. As he knows from firsthand experience, the schools our kids need must tend to not just their formal academic needs, but also their social, emotional, ethical, vocational and aspirational needs. And the public intellectuals we need are people who, with inquiry and openness, help us better understand, and then imagine in new ways, how to get there from here.
Charlotte Hummel says:
Dera Sam,
I LIKE your French and use it all the time along side of “What flippin planet are they on?”
Just had the first of many budget planning meetings last night. The on-the-ground experience is both fiscally, emotionally and spiritually devastating. The ocean is wide and stormy and I am steering a little boat.
I may have to ask NSBA to sponsor me and another board member to attend the national conference in San Francisco in April. Our hard cut backs mean the least resourced will lose our voice at the national level. We have to stay home to tend to our 60% poverty rate and make the choice to either further gut education or kill our communities with increased taxes in one of the highest burdened districts in the state.
I’m coming to the place where I might have to strip and run naked (but for my ruby slippers) down main street (Pennsylvania Avenue?). Nuts is what I am feeling now and trying to hold onto a shred of hope.
Trying to keep the faith and wearing Ruby Slippers.
Charlotte
The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off – G.Steimen
Sam says:
Thanks Charlotte. We have a major misalignment problem in this country, where well-intentioned people believe they’re advocating for children when in fact they’re advocating for a further calcification of the elements of our current system that are most dangerous. So if running naked is what it takes, I’ll join you. Do you have an extra pair of slipper?
Charlotte Hummel says:
No extra slippers, (although you can get a pair through Etsy). It is harder to put on our (metaphorical) slippers than the real ones for sure. I found a book I was given 5 years ago by a former school board member in central PA who is now in his 90’s. I didn’t read it all through when I got it, but it found its way into my hands today and it is the basis for the speech we will give on the steps of the white house and capital (we’ll have robes on by then) Its called “The Rise and Fall of Public Education in America by R. Winfield Smith – selfpublished through AuthorHouse in Indiana.
I don’t think you and Mr. Brooks are at odds at all, just looking through different frames. What Mr. Brooks calls “The Other Education” is actually the best process through which we can impart knowledge (he calls this scholastic and is that which can be tested) and understanding (cannot be standardized). The medium is the message.
Lisa Guilfoile says:
Sam and Charlotte–
I am IN on the running naked down the street out of sheer frustration these days. It seems that so many get mired down in rhetoric, but when the rubber meets the road, it’s the same old *#@!, with no REAL progress….just dialogue about progress and what it should/will look like. Sam-I found your piece invigorating–and I so appreciate your spot-on perspective on issues like this. We need MORE like you!! Thanks for sharing….keep it coming….and I’ll see about drumming up some ruby slippers for ALL of us!!
Sam says:
Amen — and thanks Lisa! This is shaping into one helluva party!