Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 23, 1993 TAG: 9310280359
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHIP BARNETT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Take the recent Oct. 2 letter to the editor by Vincent P. McGinn of Virginia Military Institute (``Academic charlatans are stealing from the public''), who noted in passing, as a sign of the mess our schools are in, that students get out of high school unable to divide two numbers correctly. Do people in today's society really need to know how to divide two numbers? Aren't an awful lot of assumptions made about what students need to know, based only on what we had to know when we were in school?
What's the purpose of an education? The issue is far too complex to deal with here, and certainly there are many purposes. But if an education is to be any good, it must, above all else, prepare a student to function - survive - in today's society and tomorrow's, but not yesterday's.
I suspect that when Professor McGinn went to school, he learned how to use a slide rule. So did I. But would anyone seriously argue that students nowadays need to learn to use one?
It used to be that only the richest or brightest children finished high school and went on to college. Now the child who doesn't finish high school is the exception. It no longer makes sense for everyone to learn Greek, Latin and all the intricacies of English grammar.
A liberal-arts education is great; I'm all in favor of Latin, Shakespeare and calculus. But the fact is that there is literally more to know now than ever before, and simply not enough time to teach everything. We have to pick and choose.
Students 150 years ago didn't need to study the Civil War, automobiles, evolution, Freud or the novels of James Joyce. Even 50 years ago, students had no inkling of Vietnam, space flight, computers, molecular engineering, trickle- down economics or the poetry of Maya Angelou. Most of us today don't need to know how to plant a field, ride a horse, bake bread or sew a shirt - all skills that used to be critical.
Cultural heritage is important, but so are other areas of knowledge and thinking. A balance is necessary.
So do kids need to learn long division? Maybe, maybe not. (Spare me the find-the-best-deal-at-the-grocery-store argument.) We need to move away from a self- centered approach (``it was good enough for me ... '') to an approach that considers what's best for the students and that makes explicit the assumptions that are behind such consideration.
This move away from being self-centered and toward laying out all assumptions could well be applied to other aspects of education, not just curricula. The five-part series on higher education that appeared in this newspaper has sparked an angry debate about the role of professors at state-funded universities, focusing on salaries and the value of research.
The series itself was one-sided, trying to create a scandal by pointing out how much professors earn and how much teaching they do in return. Likewise, Professor McGinn, at least by implication, bitterly calls all university research ``stealing, swindling and deceit.'' Are writers' assumptions that teaching is more important than research? That may or may not be true, but it is hardly self-evident. And it baffles me that anyone can have hysterics about some professors who earn $100,000 a year. At the same time, we fork over millions of dollars annually to sports figures, entertainers and corporation executives.
On the other hand, the writers at Virginia Tech who responded to the series revealed their own biases. They pointed out that professors work hard for their money and that research is indeed important.
Were their assumptions that they are the ones best qualified to judge how much and what type of research gets done? To some degree that may be the case, but it smacks of a certain amount of arrogance to take gobs of public money and deny the public any right to criticize how it's spent.
Again, my point is that in all the emotional furor over public education, the implicit assumptions get buried, leading the contestants to see each other as totally irrational, when in fact they're looking at the debate from different perspectives. We must allow ourselves to shift perspectives and understand what assumptions each side is making.
Otherwise, we'll find ourselves arguing about different issues, and the debate will be hopeless before it's begun.
Chip Barnett of Fairfield is a mathematician and novelist, and works part-time as a professional librarian at the Rockbridge Regional Library.
by CNB