ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9609300110
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BARBARA P. JONES
THE IDEA of reforming American education on the basis of academic standard-setting isn't getting very far these days. A number of reasons account for this, including congressional resistance to national standards, the continuing arguments over multiculturalism, resistance to change by the educational establishment and, of course, the fact that a lot of the standards that have been proposed just haven't been very good. The simple matter of defining what students ought to learn in their chosen field seems to be endlessly complicated in practice.
It puts me in mr sister attend a one-room schoolhouse with a single, untenured teacher. In the autumn of 1882, a school exhibition is held (ancestor to our back-to-school nights?). The students recite geography. They parse sentences (``long, complex-compound sentence[s] full of adverbial phrases'') without the benefit of a blackboard. They perform mental arithmetic (e.g., ``Divide 347,264 by 16'').
In the piece de resistance, Laura recites the first half of a summary of American history, complete with detail and interpretation of the significance of events.
What struck me about this simple story is that these students, in their one-room schoolhouse, had mastered content that only a small fraction of high school students in this country could handle today. It's not that we should ask our students to master this same body of knowledge in 1996. They need more in some ways and less in others: For example, they need less in the way of calculation ability and more in the way of mathematical reasoning and computer skills.
Nor would one want to duplicate all of their teacher's methods, which included recitation and whipping. High school students, in fact, need something that was in short supply in Laura's schoolhouse and in my own otherwise excellent high school: an emphasis on critical and independent thinking and analytic reasoning.
But the point is this: If a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse on the Dakota prairie in the 1880s can teach students enough to be literate, verbally and mathematically adept, and knowledgeable about a body of geography and history, why can't we do the same, with all our resources?
Current standards for high school students are too low. There is no reason why every high school graduate in this country should not have four years of English, three years each of math, science and social studies, and a semester of computer science. Those headed for college should also have two years of a foreign language. Standards for each subject should be set to reflect the same levels of competence that other industrialized countries have demanded (e.g., France, Japan), and students' performances should be assessed with the use of national achievement tests.
In a 1993 article, education Professor David Berliner argued: ``Perhaps we do not teach as much in the K-12 schools as some would like. But we do not have to. A relatively large percentage of our students go on to postsecondary studies.'' With regard to the poor showing of U.S. high school students in international comparisons, he writes: ``My middle-class neighbors seem to agree that their children should be able to watch a good deal of TV; participate in organized sports ; spend weekends predominantly in leisure activities; work after school when they become teen-agers; have their own cars and begin to date while in high school. To accomplish all of this, of course, children cannot be burdened by excessive amounts of homework.''
I disagree with most of these views. It is a questionable achievement to send students to college to acquire the education that many nations' students acquire by the end of high school. The escalation of college tuition over the past decade accentuates the folly of this approach. High school students can and should spend more time on homework while still enjoying some leisure.
To say that the average American high school student is not capable of learning what Laura Ingalls Wilder's classmates learned demands an explanation. Are our high school students any less intelligent than they were 100 years ago? Research suggests the opposite is true. Intelligence-test performance worldwide has increased steadily ever since IQ testing began. This may reflect the increasing complexity of experience successive generations are exposed to, improved nutrition or gains in abstract problem-solving ability.
And recent work by cognitive psychologists suggests that one of our most venerable notions about great intellectual prowess (``either you have it or you don't'') is wrong. More and more evidence shows that great intellectual gifts - and indeed, expert performance in many different fields of endeavor (music, chess, mathematics and sports) - are dependent on intensive exposure and practice, sometimes at a critical age.
All the more reason to demand a clear standard of competence from our high school graduates.
Barbara Jones is a Washington neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst.
- The Washington Post
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Catherine Kanner/LATimesby CNB