Chapter 9
Educating Dick and Jane. And Roman and
Natasha.
If your forecast for American education is "overcast," join the consensus:
Quality education in the nation's public schools is in serious danger as language and discipline problems mount. Mass education, if not obsolete, needs a major overhaul — and quickly.
While formal educational methods are on a slow trip to oblivion, information technologies — well advanced in the scientific and business worlds — won't make it inside most classrooms in the 1990s.
Educators are split over the positive and negative aspects of using television and computers to educate Dick and Jane, Ramon and Natasha in the coming millennium.
Education will — and does — compete with television, radio and other forms of high-tech visual and electronic entertainment.
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium has become the message.
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Specifically, educators and communications experts like Neil Postman say that "television's principal contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable."1
What's so bad about that?
Plenty, says Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the closely reasoned pages of his chapter on "'Teaching as an Amusing Activity," Postman builds his case that the "Sesame Street" style of learning had undermined the traditional notion of schooling.2
" 'Sesame Street' appeared to be an imaginative aid in solving the growing problem of teaching Americans how to read, while, at the same time, encouraging children to love school," Postman writes. "We now know that 'Sesame Street' encourages children to love school only if school is like 'Sesame Street' . . . It encourages them to love television."
Not that television cannot be educational; it can. But, argues Postman, it has usurped the classroom and the printed page as the chief means of education "by its power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth."
"One is entirely justified," he concludes, "in saying that the major educational enterprise now being undertaken in the United States is not happening in its classrooms but in the home, in front of the television set, and under the jurisdiction not of school administrators and teachers but of network executives and entertainers."3
TV's "anti-family" sitcoms like "The Simpsons" and "Married . . . With Children" play up the cynical and the negative. Purporting "realism," these anti-family storylines mock the traditional family and it's stabilities while causing viewers to passively accept the dysfunctional family as the "norm." Ozersky shows how the TV screen
is an implicit invitation to participate in a vision of "society" largely designed to flatter us in sinister says, manipulate our attention, and commit us to the status quo. In discrediting "yesterday's family values in its various "breakthrough" shows (ostensibly defining "A Different World" for us, as the title of one series has it), TV seeks only to impose its own values — which is to say, the values of the marketplace. Bart Simpson, master sneerer, is the prototype of the modern series character who — by the social scripts of TV — reflects us.4
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Whether or not you agree with Postman and Ozersky, it seems incontrovertible that the audience shaped by "Sesame Street" has now reshaped all of television, as Jeffrey Moritz, president of National College Television, points out.5
Techno-Education
The answer, however, is not to spurn electronic education. Today's students are video-sophisticated and used to interactive screens — "screenies," Moritz calls them. They understand "video-logic" and are accustomed to making screens "do things." So, to be effective, tomorrow's educational systems will need to stay in sync with tomorrow's media systems. As we saw earlier, tomorrow's media will be complex, interactive, global, mobile, and virtually instant. And that is why savvy corporate sponsors are now nudging their noses into the education tent.
As we approach 2001, more and more corporations will be spending billions of dollars to provide employee-training programs that teach the basics — like reading and writing and arithmetic — missed the first time around by many students. They'll also teach technical, job-related skills indigenous to the information age. The firms hope the payoff will be brighter and more efficient workers who will improve the company's bottom line. The emphasis will be less on accumulating knowledge and more on knowing where to find information, which, say Toffler and others, is the key to power.
"We can cut schooling and teach people what they need to know when they need to know it, rather than laying up a store of knowledge," advocates Robert Theobald, chairman of Knowledge Systems, Inc.6
Although futurists generally agree that communications and computers will be at the core of future education, consensus is lacking regarding the degree and the rapidity that this will happen at the elementary-school level. So far, educational technology is underused. The typical school in 1990-91 spent just $35 per student — less than 1 percent of its budget — on all information-age technology.7
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James A. Mecklenburger, director of the Institute for the Transfer of Technology to Education, touts the opportunities that modern technology presents: eliminating barriers that prevent disabled students from participating in schools; facilitating students' collection of original, local information to create their own "real-world" databases, and "distance learning." As examples of the latter, Mecklenburger lists "German by satellite," in which a native-born German professor teaches German to students in remote sites; and students in Virginia experience "electronic field trips" via satellite to mainland China or hold discussions with students in Wales.
"Information technology . . . is the most powerful educational force since chalk," enthuses Mecklenburger.8
Not everyone agrees. A top-heavy emphasis on techno-education overlooks the larger question of the decade — and no doubt the coming century: What is education for, and what are the common values we want to share with the next generation? Nor does it address the flaws of a nation with a growing population of the morally illiterate, not to mention the literally illiterate and the culturally illiterate.9
"Values clarification" will rage into the third millennium for sure. And educational issues will continue to be compounded by social issues such as poverty, the breakdown of families, and the ravages of crime, drugs, and AIDS.
"Unless we're able to solve the economic and social issues simultaneously, we will have an underclass that will drag America down economically," warns Vartan Gregorian, president of Brown University. "As Europe and Asia become strong, we will no longer be able to draw skilled immigrants — only the unskilled, compounding the problem of educating the waves of them coming in."10
Also compounding the problem will be the expanding need for multicultural curricula: Race and ethnicity have become an increasing source of both inspiration and friction for the country's frayed public education system.11
How should minority ideals — and whose — be portrayed in our classrooms? We're not educating just Dick and Jane anymore; there's Ramon and Kae and Natasha and . . .
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Failure of Public Education
By most indications, public education is failing. Massive funds, new leadership, and a change of heart regarding educational philosophy are needed to "fix" it. Some say it's broke, all right, but "it ain't worth fixing."
Analysts head their "problem lists" with these items:
The huge high school dropout rate — at least one in four, with Hispanic students more than twice as likely as whites not to graduate.12
More college dropouts as education costs skyrocket and degrees don't necessarily produce well-paying jobs. In 1990, four years at a private college or university cost an average of $56,000 (tuition, room and board, books, and fees); expect twice that by 2001, when the average costs for four years at state schools will have risen to $57,000.13 (Figures in 1990 for four years at Christian colleges — tuition only — were in the $16,000 to $25,000 range.)14
The high degree of functional illiteracy — estimated to be somewhere between 23 million and 60 million U.S. adults. One study indicated that 61 percent of all seventeen-year-olds can't read their high school textbooks.15 Churches will need to be at the forefront of the literacy movement as well as teaching simple math and household finances.
A shrinking faculty and lack of strong leadership. Projections show a shortage of 1.1 million elementary and high school teachers and a half-million professors in this decade. About half of the nation's tenured professors will retire, and up to 75 percent of the current chief administrators in the big-city school districts will step down before the turn of the century.16 "So where is our seed corn? And who will educate the educators?" ponders Brown President Gregorian.
Huge and wasteful expenditures. Most informed people believe there is a poor return on the taxpayer's education dollar. Through polls, referenda, and frequent defeat of school-tax increases, the public is turning thumbs-down on a system that "appears costly, ineffective and inefficient."17
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Bright Patches on Campus
Despite the dark skies, there are signs that, at the college level at least, immigration and innovation may lift the clouds as we move into the next century.
Asian-Americans, whose numbers are increasing rapidly in the United States, tend to be well educated: 44 percent hold college degrees compared to about 25 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.18 Meanwhile, there will be no letup in the rush by tens of thousands of foreign students to enroll in U.S. universities, especially the research and graduate programs. In 1989 foreign students earned more than a quarter of the doctoral degrees awarded in the nation.19
Then there are the baby boomers and the elders mentioned earlier: they will be increasingly attracted back to schools and campuses during the decades of the 1990s and beyond.
The retirement destination of many elder boomers will be the outskirts of college towns, the atmosphere in which many of them matured, where they will take advantage of visiting lecturers, creative artists, music events, and physical recreation facilities. Universities will become centers for lifelong study and enjoyment of the arts and will offer training and noncredit classes in many art forms.20
"With a smaller generation of college students due in coming decades," suggest the Lifetrends book authors, "the schools will need boomer elders and will make class auditing and recreational facility privileges part of their housing packages. These arrangements will encourage developers to endow cultural activities at nearby schools, with the proviso that residents of the projects receive reduced rates on tickets."21
Elderhostel, a prominent adult education program, will become "a major institution in our country." It offers study opportunities on more than a thousand U.S. campuses and in thirty-seven other countries for senior over sixty. Participants spend a week in college dorms attending campus cultural events, auditing a wide variety of classes, and using school recreational facilities. Growing at a rate of
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about 20 percent a year, Elderhostel often enables seniors to combine travel and study at reasonable rates.22
Have churches thought about devising special programs to link up with these folks when they're in town?
Expect education programs in shopping malls and public libraries to be popular for older adults in the decades ahead.
Career changes, commonly four to six in a lifetime during the coming decades, will necessitate a back-to-the classroom move by many young and middle-aged adults. And, because lower-level jobs will be plentiful, many young people will work for awhile before they go to college. When they do matriculate, they'll mix school with part-time work. By 2001, half of all college students will be aged 25 and up.23
The nation's 1,200 community and junior colleges will help fill the gap between the cost crunch and the need for job-related training, serving as a more useful model for many students than the four-year college.
Alternatives to Public Education
The weather picture for Christian higher education is variable patterns with storms and intermittent sun. A layer of thin endowments and high costs will prevail across the entire horizon.
Colleges and universities affiliated with mainline denominations are in for a hard time, with both the budget blues and an erosion into secularization. The secular slide is already well under way and destined to be virtually complete by 2001.
"The modern university has forgotten its spiritual foundations," observes Mark R. Schwehn of Christ College at Valparaiso University.24 Dorothy Bass, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, agrees. Most church-affiliated colleges and universities have become so totally "missions for secularization [that] it's hard to know a church-affiliated college when you see one," she said, adding that the drift is the reason why many people drop out of mainline churches.25
If, then, distinctively Protestant education has been left by default to the evangelicals, what's the weather report in this quarter?
Trend-watcher Sine thinks that "in spite of many of the fine things
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they are doing and all the publicity about the 'integration of faith and learning,' they tend to be profoundly coopted by the values of the dominant culture . . . I believe they are doing more to prepare the Christian young to fit into upscale lifestyles and professional occupations of modern society instead of learning to be a counter-cultural agenda working for the kingdom."26
Others, like University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter, conclude that the coming generation of evangelicals may be moving away from the key beliefs that once defined evangelicals.27
Church growth analyst Elmer Towns foresees the collapse of the old-line Bible colleges, but thinks emerging "denominations" like the Vineyard Fellowship and Calvary Chapels, as well as some of the megachurch congregations, will form new Bible schools. These new institutions will usually center on methodology: They will have a statement of purpose and mission, he says, but will be "functional, not doctrinal," in orientation.28
Scholars like Carl Lundquist of the Christian College Consortium are anxious to have the academic environment remain open so students can grapple with contending ideas in order to strengthen their own beliefs. "We need to find room between rigid indoctrination and a wholly open campus atmosphere."29
Private, Parochial, and Home Schools
If money were not a factor, according to about half of the parents of public school students, they would send at least one of their children to a private or parochial school.30 Indeed, the demand for both has increased as quality public education has spiraled downward, and these trends are likely to continue.
While parochial schools have declined in number and enrollments during the past decade, the Catholic church is committed to holding the line wherever possible, producing quality education with religious and moral values. These schools provide a bright patch of light in contrast to the dismal public-school scene, especially in the inner cities. Meanwhile, between 1965 and 1988, enrollment in non-Catholic
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religiously affiliated schools grew by 150 percent to 2.5 million students.31 Evangelical schools now comprise about 6 percent of America's elementary and secondary school population.
"The evangelical Protestant community is increasingly disenchanted with the non-Christian schools of the country," says Paul Kienel, executive director of the Association of Christian Schools International, which represents about a half-million students in 2,750 schools. "They feel alienated; their views are not listened to in the public school system."
But despite a steady growth of about 5 percent a year, conservative Christian schools enrolled from only one in five evangelical families in 1991.32
The explosive growth is in the mushrooming home-school movement — parents teaching children privately at home. The phenomenon is gaining support from more educators as well as enthusiastic parents who like the individual attention, lower costs ($500 to $600 a year for the best materials), and hands-on control. Home schooling was the choice for parents of somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million children in early 1991, ten times the number just a decade earlier.33
I foresee the numbers multiplying at a dizzying pace well past 2001, forcing state authorities to further ease existing regulations; in turn, parents will feel more confident about overcoming the remaining legal ramifications of home schooling. (Laws in some states were being challenged in 1991, such as requiring teacher competence tests or college degrees for parents.)34
The home-school movement is neither exclusively religion-oriented nor a backwoods alternative to liberal education, but the conservatives and fundamentalists do make up its backbone.
"The school system and the National Education Association are so out of step with the average American family," declares Pat Sikora, a Redwood City, California, parent who home-schools Joshua, 6. "What American families want is a good education for their children in a values-oriented, violence-free atmosphere."
Joshua's schooling at home is augmented by activities with a group of about thirty Christian families who have formed a local home-school support group.
"Home schooling allows tailoring each subject to a child's
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developmental and intellectual level," adds Pat. "Nobody is going to love my child like I do or take care of him the way I will or pay the price to make sure he's learning and enjoying learning the way I will. I will go that extra mile for him. I want him to love learning and to retain it."35
Apparently Joshua and many others like him do: he was in "first grade" in 1991 but reading at a fourth- to fifth-grade level. Homeschooled children seem to do better than "school-schooled" kids on standardized tests, and concerns about "socialization" have faded "as more Americans have realized that the environments provided by strongly committed parents compare favorably with the value-free, peer-dominated culture of many public schools."36
A study in 1986 showed, in fact, that (1) children taught at home appeared not to be socially deprived; (2) the longer children were taught at home, the higher their self-concept; and (3) self-concept was unrelated to the parents' educational levels.37
Look for new models of education as 2001 nears, with churches providing increasing numbers of "home-school co-ops." Here's how the Sikora's group works:
We have seven families and thirteen kids who gather at our church each Tuesday morning for three hours. Having the larger group encourages us to do more time- and energy-consuming projects. So far this year we've studied kings, knights, and the medieval period (complete with a medieval feast and costumes); horses (with a Western day and costumes); Thanksgiving (with an almost authentic Pilgrim and Indian feast); and a nativity play for the dads and grandparents. Clearly, this is the high point of the week for all of the children.38
Next thing you know, they'll have more group meetings and a few more children and then more parents will volunteer as teachers and then they'll pay them a little and . . .
Another model involving parental choice is in place in Milwaukee. There, parents of 1,000 low-income public-school children receive a $2500 voucher from the city for tuition at the private school of their choosing. If successful, the Milwaukee plan is to spread throughout Wisconsin.
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Similar and modified plans will spring up all over America by 2001, Pat Robertson expects: "a free-market educational system well on the way to returning quality to our classrooms. If 40 percent of our school systems move into the free market, I predict that the remainder will follow quickly . . . . There would be no more education monopoly where parents had one choice: the gray mediocrity of present-day public schools."39
Sunday School on the Rocks
While home-schooling is growing, church school is not. Sunday school attendance is on the skids.
In the major old-guard Protestant churches, Sunday school enrollments are plummeting even faster than overall membership (we'll look at the causes for that in chapter 13). Between 1970 and 1990, church-school participation in the mainline denominations decreased an average of 55 percent.
Dorothy Bass, a Chicago Theological Seminary professor, blames the mainline decline on failure "to transmit the meaning and excitement of Christianity from one generation to another, one person to another."40
Comments Martin Marty wryly: "The populace complains that 'they took God out of the schools' and has shown how little the complaint means by doing nothing about locating the kids where God-talk is encouraged."41
Well, almost nothing. Some "boomer churches" are booming with the boomers' kids, but not enough to reverse the overall downturn.
"The Sunday school," says Robert Lynn of the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis, "while never as dismal and enfeebled as detractors say, is increasingly archaic in a time when family patterns have changed."42
And yet, as Harvard professor and psychiatrist Robert Coles discovered in his extensive exploration of children's minds and souls, youngsters grapple with profound questions about spiritual things.
"I've been stunned by what they told me about God," he says. "In trying to figure out how the planet came into being, how man
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as a species came into being, how long all this will last, they call upon God for an answer."43
But what's happening in children's lives in hidden, inner reflection doesn't easily translate to exterior action and participation.
Is there an answer?
Studies seem to show that there is hope in revitalizing the adult Sunday school, which, in turn, may carry on down the line, as Bass says, to transmit excitement about the faith from one generation to the next. The churches of the 1990s and beyond could begin by looking to the model of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount where the crowd is described as being "astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes."44
Also, a congregation doesn't have to be large to educate well, according to Peter L. Benson, director of the Search Institute in Minneapolis. "Smaller congregations often excel at providing one or two outstanding ways to learn."45
He also recommends:
That the elderly be connected in a meaningful, relational way to children, adolescents, and younger adults.
That more emphasis be placed on teaching parents faith-development skills.
That service be made a cornerstone of educational programming, since some of the best religious education occurs in moments of giving, of connection, of bonding to others.46
The Search Institute conducted an extensive study of six major Protestant denominations involving 11,000 people in 561 randomly chosen congregations. The conclusion was that, of all aspects of church life, "an effective Christian education program has the strongest tie to a person's growth in faith and to loyalty to one's congregation and denomination." Yet only three out of ten Protestant high schoolers and adults devote as much as one hour a week to study, reflection, and conversation at church (beyond worship).
Nothing matters more than quality Christian education, the study concluded.47
