David Brooks had a sobering column in yesterday's Times, warning that America is going soft.? Or, as he puts it, ?the country is becoming less vital and industrious?. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work.? Though the essay isn't about education, the lessons apply. Brooks could have written that a fifth of our high schoolers in many places are not getting up and going to school.
Though Brooks's premise lacks nuance ? he attributes our loss of industriousness to the fact that only about 80 percent of American men between ages 25 and 54 are now working, compared to 96 percent in 1954 ? the point is similar to the one that has roiled education for a few decades: our schools have become ?less vital and industrious.? As we all know, our NAEP scores are flat, our SAT scores are flat, our graduation rates, flat ? and worse.
Why that is has, of course, been the source of endless argument among educators and policymakers. (There remains a healthy contingent of educators who deny that those indicators even have validity.)? Brooks attributes the nation's loss of vitality to, in part, the fact that ?more American men lack the emotional and professional skills they would need to contribute.? This would seem to apply to schools, where increasing numbers of children don't have the wherewithal ?to contribute.? ?Could that be because we are not asking them to contribute? ?(Remember the complaint of many educators: children are not coming to school ?ready to learn??) ?Are we so busy tailoring our instructional efforts to the ?needs? or ?learning styles? of the individual child that no objective standard applies?? It used to be that school was every child's first job ? you learned the skills of getting up in the morning and working hard (sit still, listen, do your homework), the attributes of self discipline needed to contribute to the larger world.? ?No shortcuts,? L.A. teacher Rafe Esquith so famously said.? ?Work hard, be nice,? is the KIPP mantra (borrowed from Esquith) that is helping pull thousands of kids out of the slumber of solipsism (another Brooks essay, see here) that our child-centered classrooms have encouraged.
Another part of the national malaise, says Brooks, ?has to do with structural changes in the economy.?? And this, of course, is also a hot topic in education: how do we teach ?21st century skills? and prepare our children for the new ?knowledge economy?? ?Brooks says that there are ?more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression? and that such idleness (vis dropout, attendance, and graduation rates) and that many of them ?will pick up habits that have a corrosive cultural influence on those around them?. This is a big problem.?
Indeed.? Most of Brooks's solutions are not that applicable to educators ? except this one:? ?shift money from programs that provide comfort and toward programs that spark reinvigoration.? ?That reinvigoration requires a return to a work ethic that asks more of our children, not less. And that requires a reassessment of education's current fetish for ?individualized instruction,? which threatens to re-blur the standards bar and give children little to reach for beyond their own needs.
--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
