I pounded the breasts into ¼” cutlets, smeared them with
mustard, and laid upon them a slice of ham and a slice of Swiss cheese. To that
stack I added four or five gently blanched asparagus stalks. I rolled that
stack of chicken, ham and cheese around the asparagus, and then secured the
rolls with tooth picks. These were then dredged in flour and gently sautéed, in
a 50/50 mix of butter and olive oil, until golden. I finished them in a 3500
oven for fifteen minutes.
This dish was fast, elegant and delicious. It was of course
purely improvised.
The Truth of Generational Knowledge
I cook. My wife cooks. So, not surprisingly my three
children cook. They are good at it and sometimes more adventurous than I. Herein
lays the truth of generational knowledge. It’s that body of knowledge that’s
cultivated by household and extended family. It’s the foundation of a child’s
education. But the experts tell us this isn’t so.
Keith Robinson and Angel Harris opined in the New York Times
that parental involvement in a child’s education ultimately doesn’t affect
school performance and achievement. [Full Text]
They wrote: “In
fact, most forms of parental involvement, like observing a child’s class,
contacting a school about a child’s behavior, helping to decide a child’s high
school courses, or helping a child with homework, do not improve student
achievement. In some cases, they actually hinder it …
“After comparing
the average achievement of children whose parents regularly engage in each form
of parental involvement to that of their counterparts whose parents do not, we found
that most forms of parental involvement yielded no benefit to children’s test
scores or grades, regardless of racial or ethnic background or socioeconomic
standing.”
The trend in
education is to remove parents from the equation of educating children. It
seeks a level “playing field” where all children can be tested and deemed
proficient. It’s Common Core, the federal national education standards, and an
implicitly necessary, nationally standardized curriculum to achieve them.
Yet a child’s
education is wrapped up in discovery and solving small mysteries. It’s the
stuff of fantasy and imagination and even for a very small child , a two year old say, it’s the pleasure of a
thing done well. In these things family and household lay a foundation for a
child’s education.
Common Core & Light Sabers of Generational Knowledge
The light saber was the weapon of the Jedi knights, who in
Stars Wars mythology maintained just social order prior to the tyranny of the
“Empire.” As I recall, in the first
movie “Old Ben Kenoby,” an old reclusive Jedi knight, taught the young Luke
Skywalker how to operate a light saber.
I bought my
grandson a slide rule. He’s not two yet and won’t have any use for it for a
while. But the day will come when he is in either the seventh or eighth grade,
and has mastered the fundamentals of arithmetic, when the slide rule might
become a light saber of math, and fascinating. It will be both a calculator and
pathway into a deeper understanding of mathematics.
My generation was the last when slide rules were
part of a grade school math curriculum. They are mechanical analog calculators,
good for multiplication, division, trigonometric functions, square and cube
roots, and based on natural logarithms. Until the early to mid-1970s these
analog computers were carried, saber like, in leather holsters fastened to the
belts of students studying math, science and engineering on our college
campuses. They of course gave way to less intellectually demanding, but faster
and more accurate, digital scientific calculators.
Meanwhile it
seems our kids no longer need to know the mechanics of addition or subtraction,
memorize multiplication tables or geometric proofs. It’s all key punching now.
My sister who
taught college math owns no fewer than three slide rules. She approved of my
purchase. At one time she had four slide rules, but gave one to her grandson. With
regard to digital calculators, she complains if you don’t know the math the
only thing they do is get you to the wrong answer faster.
So it goes with generational knowledge.
It is knowledge
passed down from a mother and a father, and knowledge passed down from a
grandfather and grandmother to a child. Slide rules might or might not be part
of it, but on the whole, a mostly intact family is the foundation of a child’s
education.
Common Core seems
to be placed in a position of severing that tie.
A Universal Cure
for the Shortcomings of Family
Apparently,
current thought in education has dismissed family as the structural cornerstone
of a child’s education. It’s too often broken and worse. Intact it is too often
pathologically destructive. This line of thinking that leads to the conclusion
that the trouble with our schools is the false assumption that parents play a vital role in their child’s education.
The solution of
course is to remove parents from the equation and instead set some sort of
national standard and benchmark for schools, one that overcomes the shortfalls
of family and the socially inequitable transmission of generational knowledge.
Somehow, a federal
thing once called the No Child Left-Behind Act morphed into another federal
creature named Common Core. One size fits all. In it there is room for tablet
computing and texting. There is room for hand held calculators and Google
searches. Yet, none of that is really the stuff of education.
Common Core ultimately envisions
an industrial like, optimized process for educating kids, complete with measured
inputs and tangible but limited measured results. In this model the teacher’s role
is nothing more a technician managing a process.
In all of that, lost
is the intrigue, beauty and mystery of the slide rule.
Wisconsin is
among the majority of states that have “bought” into Common Core. Though,
bribed into it is more correct. Federal grants to states that adopt the
standards are the deliciously dangled carrot hoisted above the horse. That is
precisely all that’s wrong with Common Core. It’s a standard by which neither
family nor community play a role. It sets standards for schools where the
family and community are mostly erased. It’s where large and powerful special
interest groups, possibly called “big education,” call the shots and federal
largess is the motivator. Horribly as it’s shaping up, it is where the lines of
“correct” social thought and education intersect.
The lobby is made
up of schools of education, educational publishing houses, teachers’ unions and
bureaucracies of state and federal departments of education. They drive the
carriage and collectively through the federal Department of Education they
dangle the carrot.
Do it this way,
they say, and federal dollars will fall like manna from heaven.
These are the
groups that write the laws and craft the regulatory code implementing them.
Meanwhile and some years later, moms and dads discover their children are being
taught lines of social thought absolutely counter their own. The arithmetic and
math they work with daily is incomprehensibly presented in their child’s lesson
book. Mouths agape they wonder, where did this come from?
It came from a
“public” interest lobby, whose seeds were sown ten, fifteen or more than twenty
years ago. Today, it is within this cohort precisely where the lines of
contemporary social thought intersect in a politically correct, national k12
curriculum. And to be sure, he who writes the test also authors the books and
outlines how teachers should go about their business.
At this
intersection generational knowledge is erased from k12 education. The
underlying assumption is for too many kids, the warehouse of intergenerational
knowledge is empty.
Mitigating the
Matthew Effect
Every child enters school with a foundation of knowledge gained
from their household environment. A child growing up in a leaning rich
environment, with educated parents who fill his or her early years with
reading, travel, museum visits and such, enters school with huge advantage over
children who don’t.
In education it’s called the “Matthew Effect,” coined by
sociologist Keith Stanovich after a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto
every one that hath shall be given, and shall have in abundance. But from him
that hath not shall be taken away everything that which he hath.”
In short, children entering the first grade who come from
language rich homes thrive in reading and comprehension, while those from
language impoverished homes fall further behind.
To address the problem we have Head Start, a federal
preschool program for economically disadvantaged children. Yet by objective
measures it hasn’t worked and nevertheless the president wants universal
preschool. And we now have Common Core.
A hopeful and optimistic read on Common Core is that it
fills the gaps in necessary prior knowledge needed for academic success. Let’s
set a baseline for student achievement. For some schools it might work, but the
trouble is the baseline. It is a low bar which is foisted onto all schools and
all school districts. It locks families and community out of the equation. And
for many their expectations are much higher. From a kid’s point of view it’s punishingly
grey and void of joy, much like the new school lunches being served up.
The Fundamental Nature of Light sabers
Now here’s the real deal. In the seventh
and eight grade I began learning how to operate slide rules. It was 1966 and
these were the scientific calculators at the time, but to use them you needed
to have a grounded fundamental understanding of basic arithmetic and an
introduction into somewhat higher orders of mathematics. Natural logarithms and
such. Neither scientific calculators nor Google searches are a decent
substitute for an education built on a foundation fundamental knowledge. [Full Text]
A child might learn such things as how to
cook, fix power equipment and build and grow things from their household
environment. And other things too, like how to put up a can of tomatoes or
beans. Maybe something about slide rules, literature, history, or polite and
civil manners. And maybe not. A good school fills the gaps.
The truth is Common Core assumes not only
that most households have abdicated their role in educating children, but the
majority of our schools are not up to the task either. Both assumptions are
horribly false. First off, most parents do a decent job of laying down a firm
foundation for their children’s education. And second, most schools to a
decent job of educating kids.
In every school district there are children
who are disadvantaged because the “library” of “prior knowledge” is deficient. Too
often in economically disadvantaged urban schools the “wellspring of prior
knowledge” is abysmally dry.
Nevertheless, even within the Milwaukee
Public School District which has been berated for years, if not decades, for
its overall poor performance there are outstanding schools. Four if its high
schools ranked in the top 20 of Wisconsin public high schools by US News and
World Report, and overall metropolitan area high schools took eight of the top
slots for Wisconsin’s best. [Full Text] Not included on the list were Milwaukee
schools like Messmer, a school choice high school. Additionally, the Milwaukee
metropolitan area has an open enrollment policy whereby Milwaukee parents can
enroll their children in suburban schools, like Shorewood High and Wauwatosa
East both on the US New top twenty list. Similarly, suburban parents can
enroll their kids in MPS specialty schools.
On the whole, schools in the greater metropolitan
Milwaukee area are doing a good job. Public school teachers who teach in them
are doing a good job. In the City of Milwaukee things are not so rosy. The
high school graduation rate hovers miserably around sixty-percent, and math and reading proficiency below that, and it’s somehow the fault of the school
district. That’s not so. The fault is in crumbled families and households. We
are to believe the fix somehow lies in the hands of the U.S. Department of
Education. Maybe, but probably not.
Meanwhile, well, you do what you can.
I bought my grandson a slide rule and one
day I, or his father, shall teach him how to use it. For now telling him
stories and reading to him is good enough. In the near term he shall help me in
baking chocolate chip cookies, and in the more distant future I shall teach him
how to take a safe and proper cut with a circle saw and speed square.
Between now and then, trout fishing, bird
hunting and motorcycle rallies might figure in. He will find his grandpa keeps a
modest library and an eclectic collection of vinyl phonograph albums. Such is
the “well spring of knowledge.”
These things reflect the fundamental nature
of light sabers after all.
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