The big picture
There's an article in Saturday's New York Times about Harvard's president. The Washington Post is reporting on a Virginia county's efforts to raise SAT scores. Across the vast array of education blogs, you currently find posts on charter schools; appropriate school attire; different styles of high schools; the lawfulness of No Child Left Behind; the National Education Association's affiliations; teacher burnout; accountability; testing; and every other topic under the sun.
The discourse is vibrant and rich, and people bring unceasingly impressive passion and ideas to the table. Yet I am often left wondering: Where is the discussion of the bigger picture?
Talking about the nuts and bolts -- and some of the aforementioned issues are large nuts and thick bolts -- has its place, and it's rewarding in its own right. But to rehash a favorite analogy of mine, at some point, we're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Here are the questions I want to see engaged: What is the ultimate goal of education, and what is the ultimate goal of our education system? What is the bare minimum we want all of our students to be able to do when they exit the system?
Until we can answer, or at least begin to discuss, those basic questions, we're never going to achieve our potential, because we won't have defined it. Because once we start to move towards a consensus on those questions, another one begins to assert itself from every rooftop:
Is our system designed to meet those needs?
Every policy debate -- every single one -- should pivot around that singular, foundational point. Certainly, the current debates touch, brush and skim off the surface of the fundamental questions, but they never meet them head-on. We don't ask what we want our students to be able to do once they leave; we ask what questions we want them to be able to answer.
Every day, 40 million students go to school, and millions of teachers prepare to educate them. Tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of individuals interact with education via advocacy groups, research organizations and federal, state and local departments of education. More than $450 billion is spent on education annually at all three levels of government, and each and every taxpayer helps finance it.
How many times do we stop and ask: Why are we doing this, what are we trying to accomplish, and are we acting in furtherance of those goals?
I'm ironclad in my certainty of saying not enough. And I'm ironclad in my confidence of saying that, perhaps more than anything else, this silence is holding us back from greatness. The Greek philosopher Epictetus wrote, "First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do."
What would we be?
The discourse is vibrant and rich, and people bring unceasingly impressive passion and ideas to the table. Yet I am often left wondering: Where is the discussion of the bigger picture?
Talking about the nuts and bolts -- and some of the aforementioned issues are large nuts and thick bolts -- has its place, and it's rewarding in its own right. But to rehash a favorite analogy of mine, at some point, we're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Here are the questions I want to see engaged: What is the ultimate goal of education, and what is the ultimate goal of our education system? What is the bare minimum we want all of our students to be able to do when they exit the system?
Until we can answer, or at least begin to discuss, those basic questions, we're never going to achieve our potential, because we won't have defined it. Because once we start to move towards a consensus on those questions, another one begins to assert itself from every rooftop:
Is our system designed to meet those needs?
Every policy debate -- every single one -- should pivot around that singular, foundational point. Certainly, the current debates touch, brush and skim off the surface of the fundamental questions, but they never meet them head-on. We don't ask what we want our students to be able to do once they leave; we ask what questions we want them to be able to answer.
Every day, 40 million students go to school, and millions of teachers prepare to educate them. Tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of individuals interact with education via advocacy groups, research organizations and federal, state and local departments of education. More than $450 billion is spent on education annually at all three levels of government, and each and every taxpayer helps finance it.
How many times do we stop and ask: Why are we doing this, what are we trying to accomplish, and are we acting in furtherance of those goals?
I'm ironclad in my certainty of saying not enough. And I'm ironclad in my confidence of saying that, perhaps more than anything else, this silence is holding us back from greatness. The Greek philosopher Epictetus wrote, "First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do."
What would we be?
This entry was posted
on Sunday, February 19, 2006 at 10:09 PM.
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