A philosopher's take

My friend Harrison and I went to Cornell College together, but we weren't really friends there. We didn't run in the same circles..... possibly because he had long hair and wore skirts and I'm a small town girl from Tennessee who didn't really know what to think of that. But as my dear friend Amy fell in love with him as they both  were in grad school in Boston, I fell in like with his intelligence, wit, honesty and humor. He is probably the most intelligent person I know so I'm quite honored that this thing of public education that I am figuratively digging my teeth into both with my hands in my real life and my head on this blog elicits his thoughts and his response. He graduated from Cornelll College with a degree in Philosophy and Poly Sci, from Boston College with a M.A. in Philosophy and from Purdue with a Ph.D in Philosophy. He is a professor at Utah State University and I can only imagine how much I would learn and think as one of his students, but alas they probably don't appreciate him or what we are learning, much like all of us as students. But back to the subject, here is his take.

By Harrison Kleiner, Ph.D

This comment is motivated by Waiting for Superman and Sarah’s post on the documentary.

I think Sarah’s raises a good point at the end of her post. So many of these kids have issues outside of the classroom that they need to be “saved” from. But the public schools are not and cannot be the salvation of broken American families. The decline of our culture is a serious problem, to be sure, but not one for public schools to solve. The movie can give the impression that if we just fixed our school problems and provide our kids with a decent education that, somehow, all of these other social ills will magically disappear. Not so much.

That said, it is not too much to expect our public schools to teach the basic habits of learning. One lesson from Waiting for Superman is that you can design schools and curriculum in such a way that the same kinds from the same broken families can see dramatic academic turnarounds. 

So what is the purpose of a public education (or education generally), particularly in the primary but even secondary grades? I think it is wrong-headed to think of education in terms of questions like “what are we preparing them for”. This implies a reduction of education to mere instrumentality. Education is, of course, an instrumental good (it can help you get a job, have a career, etc), but that is not all education is for. Rather, the purpose of education is human flourishing, a bringing into excellence the intellectual capacities and moral sensibilities of the human person.

I teach World History to 8th graders, and the amount of facts that the state of Virginia wants these students to know is staggering....65 pages of Essential Knowlege on the subject. My humble theory is that they won't remember the names of the rivers on which the earliest civilizations developed yet I hope they will remember the significance learning how to farm along these rivers was to the development of civilization. Those are intellectual capabilities; knowing facts are not. Furthermore, these facts are not retained.  


I taught 7th grade Civics and know that its curriculum is quite similar to 12th grade US Goverment, but know from my relationships with those 12th grade teachers that most students remember nothing about their country's government. Flashcards and tidbits of rote memorization to regurgitate for a standardized tests are not an effective method for bringing into excellence the capactities and sensibilities of a human person. 

It is plain enough that we are failing to do this in most of our public schools. We have all encountered adults with a striking inability to articulate basic questions, ideas, or arguments. People don’t have a warehouse of cultural ideas and references by which they could understand rich analogies. I see this in my college classrooms every day. My students have never learned how to think, write, or read. If anything is plain from my college students, it is that their K-12 education has absolutely failed them. 

Heartbreaking, but possibly true. 

These basic skills of learning have been lost in the race to provide subject-based instrumental education, even though we all know that students don’t retain most of their subject content anyway. What we should be teaching are the basic tools of thinking and learning. For this reason, the classical approach to education is far better than the contemporary one. Classical education is broken into two main parts, the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium teaches learning and thinking skills (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) while the Quadrivium teaches subjects. These should be taught in that order. 

Grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric are not subjects. Instead, they are tools or methods with which one would deal with a subject. All are in the “language arts” because it is through language that thought is expressed. Students need to learn the logic and structure of language (grammar). Next students need to learn how to use a language, how to define terms and construct arguments (dialectic). Finally, they need to learn to express themselves in language in a way that is both graceful and compelling (rhetoric).

This should be the over-riding focus of education through something like middle school, and the entire curriculum should integrate these aims. It is only after mastering these basic skills of learning and thinking that students are in a position to really engage subjects (in the Quadrivium they are arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). Together, the Trivium and Quadrivium make up the classical liberal arts education.

Teaching these skills allows people to be life-long learners. But these skills are also requisite for the 21st century job force. In our times, subject matter information is changing at an incredible pace. For example, anything a computer science student learns in their freshman year will be obsolete by their junior year. Something like 8 of the 10 hottest jobs in America did not even exist a decade ago. Your average college graduate today will change careers 4 times. In light of these realities, vocational education is of decreasing benefit. What students need is the tools of learning. 

Again, I agree wholeheartedly, but I ask how do we move in this direction?  The problem of our limited amount of resources is compounded by the drive for accountability resulting in subject-based mastery of unrelated facts.  Mastery of the basic skills of learning takes time to teach and to learn; I would even say it demands more personal attention. Assesment of these skills take time as well.  My friends who teach English spend an inordinate amount of time grading writing and they have a third less students than we History teachers have.  

It seems to me that the answers to the public school crisis are strikingly simple:

a) Move away from the subject fetish and remember that schooling for primary and even secondary education is concerned first and foremost with teaching the tools of learning. With this in hand, we prepare our kids to be lifelong learners. This will help them get a job someday, to be sure. But more importantly it allows them to live rich human lives, to have a mature faith, and to be thoughtful citizens. So the first step is curricular re-orientation. 

I think curricular standards do not prevent us from teaching these skills. I am not opposed to the state of Virginia telling me what facts I should teach, but it should be understood that the skills outshine the facts.

b) Teachers unions have become an obstacle to progress, that much is plain. I am not generally against unions. Unions can and have played an important role in encouraging solidarity. However, union solidarity movements only make sense when they are connected to the broader common good. Teachers unions have long since severed that connection. They are inward looking, interested only in protecting their own (saving the worst teachers from termination). So the next step is abolishing tenure. I work in education (higher ed), and I think the academic freedom argument for tenure is strained at the university level. The argument from academic freedom appears to me to be simply foolish at the elementary or even secondary levels. This is particularly so if they curricular re-orientation discussed above was put into effect.

Sorry so long winded. Philosophers can’t help it.

I enjoyed every sentiment expressed here. I am proud that Harrison  and I received our undergraduate education from the same dear place, a little hilltop where human flourishing is valued .

Whatever is good to know is difficult to learn.

Greek Proverb