Fighting evil, versus merely doing good, in education
It's impossible to talk about our future without ending up at public education. As the inaugural Liberty Fellowship class came to a close this past summer, we were given a challenge, "Are you doing good, or are you fighting evil?"
Doing good is important. People who dedicate their lives to doing good are the backbone of every successful community. Doing good wins accolades and doesn't make enemies. Life floats serenely by. But merely doing good often doesn't move the dial. Fighting evil changes society.
In 1963, moderate white ministers in Birmingham wrote a letter calling on African-Americans to do good.
We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel their hopes are slow to being realized... (but) we do not believe these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified."
Martin Luther King, Jr. responded with a Letter from Birmingham Jail. that there was an evil in the community that had to be faced.
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue... There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth... Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
Recently I reread Bill Gates comments on American high schools:
America’s high schools are obsolete.By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.
By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today...
Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year. [my emphasis]
Sir Ken Robinson, an expert in creativity, elaborates more precisely how public education is obsolete.
Children starting in school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in five years, and yet we’re meant to be educating for it. The unpredictability is extraordinary.
We all agree on the extraordinary capacities that children have..., and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
If you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. We run our companies this way; we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running educational systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make. The result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacity.
Our whole pubic education system was invented around the world to meet the needs of industrialism. The most useful subjects for work are at the top. You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid that you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Don’t do music, you are not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist. Benign advice. Now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
Academic ability has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. The whole system of pubic education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they are good at wasn’t valued, and was actually stigmatized.
We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. Intelligence is diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we thing in sound, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement.
Intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of the human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact creativity, which I define is the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about by the interaction of different disciplinarily ways of seeing things.
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principals on which we educate our children.
The Greenville News today opined, "The Greenville school district, the state's largest, has the reputation of having excellent schools." Excellent compared to what? Our public schools aren't excellent. They're not even relevant to many challenges our kids will face. In fact, our culture of education actually destroys capabilities our children will require over the course of their careers. This is as true of our best schools as it is of our worst. And the system stifles the creativity of our best and brightest teachers who see the problems everyday, but have no effective vehicle for bringing radically new ways of delivering education to our students. Our students and teachers are trapped in a system that pounds them with testing for static facts learned, without ensuring that students have learned to creatively think through the tremendous change they will face in their lives.
A teacher at one of our best International Baccalaureate high schools laments, "It is heart breaking to see the almost total decline of interest in rigorous math and science in our school." A university professor in the state concurs, "The students we're seeing don't lack facts; they lack problem-solving skills."
Swamp Fox is not about politics. We'd have many more readers if we were. Swamp Fox is about creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, which is not possible with a culture of education which is "limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year." Privileged groups control the status quo and resist change, and those that control the culture of education are no more willing than other privileged groups to give up their privileges voluntarily.
To be successful we need leaders who will not only do good, we need leaders who will "foster such a tension that a community... is forced to confront the issue" and face the evil that is holding us back. We need leaders who can create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in education that equips our children with the capabilities they will need to be successful over the course of their lives.