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Teaching Violence?
by Bill Lauritzen
Probably the two major trends in American
education currently are: 1) increased use of standardized testing, and 2)
increased school violence. It was with a jolt that I realized that there might
be a causal connection between these two. I decided it was worth investigating
further.
Some investigation of statistics on the Internet
that assured me that both of these major trends were not illusory but real.
Nowadays, almost every state has some form of standardized testing. Teachers and
administrators are being held accountable for results, which in some cases may
affect their pay, and even their ability to hold the job. (See Teacher June/July 2000) School violence has also gone up: One government survey (1998)
of 10,000 reported that "overall crime rate" at schools is relatively
stable while "violent crime" is on the rise. A Metropolitan Life
Survey (1999) says that 1 in 6 teachers reported having been the victims of
violence, while five years ago it was 1 in 9.
I am aware that a more complete statistical
analysis could be done, however, after some consideration, I decided to take the
easier step first. So I here suggest a theoretical basis for a “proposed”
causal link between current educational trends and increased violence. It is my
hope that this proposed theory will then stimulate myself or others to do
further statistical analysis and research. I am also aware that some of what I
say here has been said before, however, by giving it a theoretical foundation I
greatly add, strengthen and unify.
The three reasons usually given for increased school violence are: 1) lack of parental involvement at school, 2) lack of parental supervision at home, and 3) exposure to violence in the media. Let’s add another reason. Too much abstraction. My thesis is this: The current emphasis on paper-and-pencil standardized testing causes undue emphasis in schools on abstract memorization and manipulation of words and symbols, which is unnatural to the species Homo sapiens, and which has by-products of frustration, anger, and sometimes violence.
Standardized testing includes the infamous SATs, the newly famous
Stanford 9, and other state and national tests that give a percentile ranking.
These tests are mostly interested in comparing students. Students are ranked from 99% down to the 1%.
In the past, many educators questioned the validity of these
paper-and-pencil-bubble-in-the-correct-answer-with-a-number-2-pencil tests.
After all, when someone gets to a job, he is expected to do more than this. As a
result, some educators began to use “reality testing.” This was also called
authentic assessment, portfolio assessment, reality-based assessment,
alternative assessment, oral assessment, and competency testing.
These educators were more concerned with questions like: When the
students graduate what can they do? Could they build a bridge? Could they stitch
up a wound? Could they fill out an income tax return? Could they write a
business letter? Could they fill out an employment application? Could they make
a floor plan of the building?
Just a few years ago, when I was at Adams Middle School in South
Central, I was required to take a class in portfolio assessment as part of a LA
Unified assignment. Now however, educators are enthusiastically embracing the
antithesis: multiple-choice tests. In Glendale, kids have been carefully coached
all year on how to take tests. Practice tests on content have been given weekly.
By the time you read this the results will have been released, and I am sure the
results will be high test scores, accolades in the local paper, people patting
each other on the back, etc.
In fact, high-pressure test-prep activity is
happening all over the country with even non-educators being brought in and paid
big bucks to help raise a local district’s test scores. In an article in the
current issue of Teacher, “It’s Come to This,” Chris Shea writes,
“We are, it would seem, entering a new era of standardized-test prep, one in
which educators become test coaches and vice versa.”
In order to demonstrate the inadequacy of paper-and-pencil tests, let me describe a test I have been giving to the students of the Glendale School District. (I do what I call “guerrilla testing and research.”) Of some 600 students I have queried thus far, less than 1% could correctly identify a “noun.” It seems incredible, as Glendale prides itself on having an excellent school district. (I have also given this test to students in LA Unified with similar results.)
I hold a pencil in my hand at the front of the
room and ask, “Is this a noun? Raise your hand if you think this is a noun.”
(It is not a trick question. The answer is either “yes” or “no.” Try
answering the question yourself before reading further.)
Over 99% of them raise their hands. However, they
are wrong. (Perhaps you missed this question, also.) At this point, I write the
word “pencil” on the board, point to it, and say, “This is a noun!” and
then I shake the narrow, wooden thing in my hand and say, “This is not a
noun!” This usually leads into much further discussion in which I talk about
the spoken word, “pencil,” which travels invisibly through the air at 750
mph and is also a noun. Or I walk across the front of the room and asking, “Is
what I am doing a verb?” It isn’t. The students usually end by say something
like, “You should be teaching our teacher.” What do we make of these
results?
What would you think of someone who thought a cow
was a tree? You would think that person was crazy. It is also crazy to think
that the world is full of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. So what we
have here, to a degree, is indoctrination (however unintentional) into insanity.
I still remember the great relief I felt when I cleared this confusion up for
myself sometime in my 20s. (Alfred Korzybski wrote about this theme in the 1930s
in Science and Sanity.)
With my simple test I have yanked the student out of the
paper-and-pencil world of education into the real world. I have taken the
students “out of the matrix.” I do the same with other subjects. I will
often ask a chemistry class if they know how much a “mole” of water is
(about a third of a glass). Again about 1% can answer correctly, despite the
fact that they are solving problems every day with moles and grams. I have
taught mathematics as a long-term substitute many times, and, when I can, I
teach my students to feel comfortable using a protractor. I have them go outside
and measure the height of the tree, flagpole, or building.
Last year, after interacting with some 60
different Los Angeles schools (public, private, and adult) and some 60,000
different students in their daily activities over a 17-year period, I wrote up
my observations and recommendations as a "Field Study Report," some of
which is summarized here. (For those of you who are interested, it is published
on my web site: www.EARTH360.com.)
A big part of one’s education is learning how to
read. I ask elementary students if they could learn more from reading or
looking, and they often answer “reading.” I tell them to imagine that a
flying saucer landed on the White House lawn. Would they rather read about it or
look at it?
However, the advantages of reading for Homo
sapiens outweigh the disadvantages. Books, libraries, etc., are a compact
storage system that record what the society has learned. Writing is one of the
tools that societies have used in order to displace other societies (see the
book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond).
Mathematics teaching in the 90s was characterized by the “big
debate.” Which is best for the student: exploring math or drilling math?
Unfortunately, sometimes “exploring math” got a bad reputation because
teachers who were not ready for these programs and didn’t know how to
implement them taught them. However, when I taught Berkeley’s Interactive Math
Program (IMP) and when certain other math teachers taught it, the results were
amazing to see. Students actually became interested in math. Someday I’d like
an administrator to say to me, “Forget about the curriculum and the
standardized tests. Just interest these students in math!” (I am not blaming
administrators. I have worked with some excellent and caring administrators.
They are often under pressure from the community or the school boards to do
things a certain way.)
One year, I taught mathematics at an exclusive private school in
San Marino, California. The kids there, in general, are encouraged to think.
These students would sometimes do a hands-on application problem, which could
not even be attempted by the average public school student, in 5-10 minutes.
Unfortunately, under the current pressure to raise
test scores, what many call “drill and kill math” is back in style. What I
see is a boost in test scores, just like steroids can boost strength, but what
about the side effects, like hating math, and never wanting to take another math
class?
As I mentioned, reading and interpreting
mathematical symbols are important in today’s society, but they must be
balanced by looking, touching, etc. There should be a link between the tiny
markings and the real things. An exceptionally good teacher attempts to link the
words to pictures, events, motions, and experiences. This teacher educates for
understanding rather than memorization.
A poor teacher merely requires memorization of the tiny markings
in terms of other tiny markings. Learning degrades into just “getting through
the class,” “getting through to graduation,” or “finishing the
requirements.” This type of learning takes schools that can discipline heavily
while promising “future rewards.” It takes lots of security and metal
detectors, an expert police force, and plenty of prisons waiting for those who
don’t behave.
This treats the student as if he or she were a
recording device of some kind. “What is the date of the Battle of
Gettysburg?” A machine could just as easily answer a question like this.
“What is 23 times 456?” A calculator could answer this.
Billions of years of chance mutations created the complex,
adaptive, biological systems which currently flourish on Earth. One branch of
these systems is called Homo sapiens. It is not a machine. When you treat it like one you
will get back a host of bad emotions such as boredom, hostility, anger, rage,
frustration, fear, grief, and apathy. If students are not allowed to express
these feelings they will lie beneath the surface, but, they will come out in the
future, or in other ways, such as juvenile delinquency, tagging, rave parties,
drugs, angry song lyrics, or various other forms of rebellion against the powers
that dehumanize.
If you stop to think about it, it is a remarkable
thing that the Homo sapiens civilization can force a young boy or girl to sit for five or more hours a day
crowded together with 20-40 others, in a box-shaped structure. To make all of
these youngsters focus their eyes for most of the day on tiny markings on paper
is almost unbelievable. For the species Homo
sapiens is not particularly adept at sitting for hours on end staring at
relatively tiny markings on paper, that are about one thousandth as tall and one
millionth as thick as they are. They are not even particularly adept at sitting
in a chair.
Homo sapiens was chosen
by the environment for its abilities in reproducing, thinking, walking, running,
jumping, looking, kneeling, touching, manipulating, grasping, squatting,
throwing, picking, and gathering. However, we have lost our connection to our
original environment, where we gathered nuts, roots, fruits, and seeds, and
scanned the horizon for predators and prey, and have been thrust, in the last
10,000 years only, a mere blink of the evolutionary eye, into a new world,
completely alien to our genetic blueprint, brought on by the rise of food
production and its resulting tools.
We were sculpted in a world of trees, grasses, stars, plains,
animals, mountains, rivers, lakes and oceans, and we have moved rather abruptly
to a world of TVs, computers, cement, office buildings, apartments, parking
structures, freeways, electricity, classrooms, desks, chairs, books, and
writing.
It is no wonder that we sometimes have alienated,
angry school kids (who might later become mail bombers.) Perhaps these kids that
rebel the most against school are simply those that follow their
two-million-year-old instincts. I find that often these “at-risk” kids are
extremely intelligent, but have decided they don’t want to play the game of
pleasing someone else by “memorization.” All this doesn’t justify their
actions, but it can help us to understand their actions and thus possibly to
prevent them in the future. Of course, it’s a two way street: they need to
learn to balance their instincts with the realities of living in modern
civilization, while we need to re-design education so it respects these ancient
instincts as much as is feasibly possible.
In Glendale, there have been a great number of
positive changes including rerouting traffic (a reform suggested by parents),
educating students on race relations, more responsive school security, school
uniforms, etc. In Long Beach, they are experimenting with single-sex classes for
middle schools with some initial positive results. They also are educating
students about the devastating effects of today’s modern bullets compared to
the 120-year-old bullets as seen on TV Westerns.
However, let us see what other remedies, perhaps more fundamental, are
suggested by our “education and evolution” theory. If the theory is correct,
then implementing these remedies should reduce violence in our schools.
Additional solutions are: 1) field trips, 2)
organic gardens for biology, 3) more experiments for science, chemistry, and
physics, 3) dramatic plays for English, 4) maps, plays, and field trips for
history, and, 5) manipulatives, experiments, and real world experiences for
mathematics. Having the student make clay models, draw diagrams, draw pictures,
and use puppets could also help. More music and art would help. In other words,
linking, grounding, seeing, hearing, and touching.
In actual fact, there is a kind of pyramid-shaped
educational hierarchy. Let me explain with an example. Suppose we wanted to
teach a student about the Battle of Gettysburg. The best way to do this, at the
top of the pyramid, would be to fly the student to Pennsylvania, hire the
world’s expert on the battle, cast several thousand actors, put them in full
uniforms, and have them recreate the battle with full sound effects, etc.
Meanwhile, make the student play the part of a foot soldier, a general, etc.
afterwards discussing with the expert the various implications of the battle,
etc. Obviously, this is costly. The next best method, further down the pyramid,
might be to have the student just talk individually with the world’s foremost
expert at the scene of the battle. Then, maybe just an old-fashioned field trip
to the site with the whole class. Then maybe a video/movie of the battle. Then
an audio lecture of the battle by an expert. Then a knowledgeable teacher with a
colorful, pictorial textbook. At the base of the pyramid, we would find a poor
teacher with a words-only text and a large class.
In other words, we move from a big production that
involves all of our naturally selected senses, one-on-one with an expert, down
through levels that use less and less energy, mass, space, and time, until we
reach the extremely tiny, thin, flat, dead, ink markings on paper with a poor
teacher and a large class. From a full experience of the event (in motion), down
to a memorized, highly zipped, or compressed event.
One interesting thing about this hierarchy is that
it generally costs more the higher you are on the pyramid. That is why we often
see so many classes at the bottom. However, I have found that if one knows the
hierarchy, one can more easily move up it.
New teachers should be taught this “education
and evolution hierarchy” and should be encouraged to boost students up
it. They should teach using all the senses, not because some people are
“visual learners” and some “auditory learners” or other such nonsense,
but because we are all members of the species Homo sapiens, with the
natural need to use our bodies and our brain.
I don’t think the answer is to make our schools more jail-like. I see
this as a temporary measure only. More metal detectors, more policemen, more
fences, more locked gates, and more video cameras are all measures that don’t
address the fundamental problem. These can merely suppress the problem, and the
problem will find another way or another time to show its face. Perhaps the
degree of abstraction present in the school is the degree to which police are
needed.
Teachers who address a student as if they were a
human being rather than a recording machine probably will have less violent
students. Schools, classes, teachers, textbooks, and tests that allow for human
touch, movement, and space, as our genes demand, probably will have less
frustrated, suicidal, or violent students.
“Educating Homo sapiens” has at its
foundation Darwin’s theory of species differentiation by natural selection. So
this theory and method might not gain much acceptance in Kansas where the State
School Board recently voted to allow schools to stop teaching evolution (thereby
making themselves the laughing stock of the scientific community.)
Remedy II: Ergonomics
Ergonomics was born in the hectic days of WWII aviation, when it was realized that engineers didn’t always consider the “human factor” in design. It spread from the aerospace industry, to the automotive industry, and now is spreading to the computer industry, where companies are desperately trying to make computers “user-friendly.” It has not yet reached the education industry. (Like education, it also has yet to recognize Darwin’s theory of evolution as its theoretical foundation.)
The written word, like all tools, can cause strain
on the human body if not used properly. That’s why we give so many breaks in
school, especially in elementary school, such as recess, lunch, physical
education, and sports.
I predict that in the future you will see many
ergonomic flow analyses of schools, classrooms, and school roadways with
subsequent redesigns to improve safety and student productivity. If we redesign
so that the needs of our species, Homo sapiens, are considered, we will
have much more “user-friendly” and happier schools.
If the results of the standardized test are going
to determine the way teachers are judged on their job, then most of them will
“teach to the test,” and to hell with anything else. So we need to
de-emphasize standardized tests.
Also, the tests could be made “friendlier” by the use of
computers. Videos and pictures can be used, as well what I call
“computer-branching tests.” In this type of test, if one misses a problem
the computer automatically gives him a problem at an easier level, or if one
gets a problem correct, it gives him a problem at a higher level. Instead of
taking several days a standardized test could be done in an hour or two.
The weight of
scientific evidence suggests that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved from
single-celled organisms, to more complex organisms, over billions of years.
Perhaps only in the last 50,000 years have we had to deal with speech, and in
the last 10,000 years with writing. I suggest that the way to educate is not to
force students to sit squirming in a seat, staring at tiny markings and
memorizing them for a test. The way to educate is to do what I call “link the
ink,” and “ground the sound.” Link those tiny markings to the real thing
(in motion whenever possible), or at least link them to pictures and models.
Also, link the speech sounds to real things.
There are those teachers who have learned through trial and error how to do this. I see their classrooms, in isolated pockets, throughout Southern California. They should be rewarded. However, if we continue to force accountability upon administrators, teachers, and students through standardized testing, this real-world teaching will lesson, abstract memorization will increase, and I believe violence will rise. Simply put, stick a human’s nose in book and he or she will get angry.
Through the use of spoken language, audio, video, computers, hands-on interaction, and other creative means, we must work together to somehow bring that book to life for the student. Perhaps coincidentally, the recent stabbing death in Glendale happened the day after our three days of standardized testing. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t coincidental.
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