“Children haven’t changed, but our expectations of their behavior have. In just one generation, children are going to school at younger and younger ages and are spending more time in school than ever before. They are increasingly required to learn academic content at an early age that may be well above their developmental capacity.” — Kerry McDonald, M.Ed. Harvard
COMMENTARY: In my fifty-year love affair with education, I have become increasingly disappointed that real education leaders are being replaced by politicians. We are witnessing the political devastation of New Mexico public education.
Over those 50 years of teaching in public school, community college and the university, I developed five general rules of education that in the politically controlled education system are constantly violated.
Courtesy photo
Michael Swickard
First, the currency of education is curiosity. Teachers must frame learning with a base of curiosity. Teaching things the students have no curiosity about requires rote memory, which is quickly lost over time.
Second, when students have curiosity, give them the literate and numerate tools to satisfy their curiosity. Curious students learn how to learn because they have a need, not because someone threatens a bad grade. If schools teach literate and numerate tools without students having a need, again it is rote memory at best, if at all.
Third, during this long process of learning, students must enjoy the passage of time. It doesn’t need to be a carnival, but if students hate every moment, there will be no lasting learning. Taking away recess, art, music and P.E. to concentrate on tests lessens student success.
Fourth, as Kerry McDonald said, the material must match the brain development of the students and not be above it. The development of the ability to hold some ideas in their head and use them while working on other ideas requires a sequence of brain development in the frontal lobe and related brain structures.
Educational leaders snapping their fingers angrily at teachers cannot change the physical brain development of students. Worse, when educational activities are foisted upon learners without adequate brain development the lesson for students is that they cannot learn — and they do not, even when their brains do develop.
Example: With normal brain development, third grade students can count coins knowing the denomination and how they fit together. In one elementary school the leaders decided to juke the third-grade counting tests by having first graders learn this activity.
Those first-grade teachers tried every day, and not one student could do it dependably all year. Sadly, when those students got to third grade, they still could not do it because they learned two grades earlier that they could not do it.
Finally, students must always retain their dignity. Loss of dignity endangers the buy-in by students and therefore wastes years of well-meaning educational effort.
Today, what used to be the first-grade curriculum is thrust upon kindergarten. When former N.M. Gov. Jerry Apodaca introduced voluntary kindergarten in the 1970s, the promise was it would always be half a day, a social transition from home to school. As with most political promises, that is no more.
In the last decade, New Mexico’s political leaders now command full-day academic kindergarten. Despite research against it, educational leaders were commanded by the politicians to comply or lose their jobs. They may have known it was wrong but they did it to keep their jobs.
Some educators, to protect their jobs, will juke the accountability findings. Officially, there has never been cheating in any way at any time in public schools. But the entire enterprise of public education in New Mexico constantly cheats because they spend the year trying to juke the tests.
The push for preschool in and of itself is not bad, if political considerations do not take over. Politicians who are not schooled in educational research think of students as widgets to be painted early and often. They do not understand that brain development must occur first.
In many countries that the world admires for academic success, those students don’t start academically until they are seven years old so that their brain development happens first. Our political leaders are devastating public education by not using replicated educational research. They injure students by using political solutions for non-political problems.
Michael Swickard is a former radio talk show host and has been a columnist for 30 years in a number of New Mexico newspapers. Swickard’s novel, Hideaway Hills, is now available at Amazon.com. Agree with his opinion? Disagree? NMPolitics.net welcomes your views. Learn about submitting your own commentary here.