Holland v. Hammond
Similar to the
workplace, there's a common assumption amongst the worker bee masses
that “school sucks”. Mark Twain said, “I have never let my
schooling interfere with my education.” Albert Einstein had a
similar quote, which he stated that “The only thing that interferes
with my learning is my education.” The autocratic dominated
classroom censors democratic virtues and practices, and even the
teachers are afraid to question, criticize, or oppose teaching
paradigms being crammed into their brains in Normal Schools. While
both Robert Holland and Linda Hammond make many interesting points
regarding Teacher Training Schools (aka “Normal Schools”), they
seem to have structured the debate about public schools into a debate
between regulation vs. deregulation of Normal Schools. For Robert
Holland, the problem for him is the government, which is ironic,
because universal public schools exist solely because of the
government. Equally appalling is how Linda Hammond pretends as though
no problems exist in our educational system, except for a little
tweak here and there.
Robert Holland
believes that public schools should be using experts in the field,
instead of general education teachers. Holland quotes William
Sanders, who determined that “of all the factors we study—class
size, ethnicity, location, poverty—they all pale to triviality in
the face of teacher effectiveness” (Holland). For Holland, an
effective teacher is one who is a master expect in their field, who
can pass their own enthusiasm for their field to the students, and
for those exceptionally intelligent folks who may have trouble with
public speaking, empathizing with their student's learning needs, or
controlling their classrooms, they can be briefed by faculty and
administration as they go.
Holland quotes
Hammond in a 1996 NCTAF (National Commission on Teaching and
America's Future) report titled “What Matters Most: Teaching for
America's Future”, which was bankrolled by the Carnegie Corporation
and the Rockefeller Foundation, where she states that great quality
teachers need to be both knowledgeable in their fields, and to be
able to teach it well (Holland). Linda Hammond believes that
Holland's “bright person myth of teaching” ... “presumes that
anyone can teach what he or she knows to anyone else.” The ability
to empathize with student's learning needs is not an inherent human
quality to Hammond; it's “developed through study, reflection,
guided experience, and inquiry.” “Changes in course taking,
curriculum content, testing, or textbooks,” boasts Hammond, “make
little difference if teachers do not know how to use these tools
well, and how to diagnose their students’ learning needs”
(Hammond).
While Holland
incorrectly scoffs at modern education's emphasis on “equity”,
“diversity”, and “critical thinking”, claiming that knowledge
is ignored for those concepts, his solution to the problems of public
education is on point. The biggest solution to the problems of public
education is to determine teacher effectiveness with a “results-based
accountability system”, the “objective differences instructors
make when actually placed before classrooms of children”, as
opposed to just having enough credit hours accrued in Normal Schools
(Holland). For Robert Holland, Normal Schools are just an elitist
government-controlled monopolizing gatekeeper barrier to prevent
regular folks from entering the educational field in a professional
domain. This is because the teacher's unions want to restrict the
supply of teachers, so that they'll be held in higher demand, and
will be able to retain higher teacher salaries, “without any
guarantee of increased quality” (Holland). Holland is correct in
assuming that academic results is the best way to determine high
quality teachers. Retention, as well as pay, should be based on
student academic achievement.
Last year,
Kentucky's Educational Commissioner accused Louisville of committing
educational genocide (Konz). The Scientific Socratic method dictates
that we always keep an open mind, which allows for the possibility
that we're wrong, and that an alternative perspective is possible.
Socrates said that the secret to wisdom is to admit one's ignorance.
Classrooms all across America are strictly hierarchical, with the
appointed dictator standing in front of the sit-down and shut-up
students, lecturing at them, and the students are expected to blindly
follow their orders like sheeple in the arbitrary and absolute
environments. The beauty of America is her liberty, which takes the
form of democracy in group settings, but where's the democracy in
American classrooms? Where's the democracy?
John Taylor Gatto
writes in The Underground History of American Education
the strict 3-tiered social stratification of the Prussian-Industrial
Education system. For the top ½% of the population, they attended
“Akadamiesschulen”, “where, as future policy makers,
they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they
learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history,
wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of
command.” (Gatto). The next 5-7.5% of the Prussian population
attended “Realsschulen”, which was “intended mostly as a
manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers,
architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other
assistants as policy thinkers at times would require”, and they
were taught “how to manage materials, men, and situations—to be
problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing
functions of the state, bringing order to the domain.” (Gatto). The
last group would educate the rest of the 92-94% of the population at
“Volksschulen,” “where they learned obedience, cooperation and
correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official
state myths of history.”
The purpose of
having a strict 3-tiered social stratification was so that the
Prussian Totalitarian system, which Horace Mann incorporated into
American common schools in the 1840s, when they were first developed,
would produce these 6 results: “1) Obedient soldiers to the army;
2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3)
Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4)
Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike
on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word and deed.”
(Gatto). Health, Happiness, Civics, Making Money, Democracy, Justice,
Peace, Solidarity, and Love all take a backseat to the wide-spread
national collective brain-washing in the name of order and control.
While I find Linda
Hammond's recommendation of having a 5th year of teacher
training added to undergraduate curriculum for teacher preparation to
be on the right track, and with how she says that Normal Schools
create more confident teachers, and teachers who can empathize with
“the perspective of learners who bring diverse experiences and
frames of reference to the classroom” (Hammond), the problem with
American education is inherently broken, and has been since it's
inception. Because of that, I disagree with Hammond, and in spite of
Holland being all over the place with his arguments, I agree with
him. As educators, teaching a “Race to Nowhere” (Race to
Nowhere), it's time we start teaching in democraticly structured
environments.
The solution for
Normal Schools, to break out of the archaic and irrelevant
Prussian-Industrial model of education, just seems so obvious to me.
At the Graduate level, we all already have undergraduate degrees,
which means we've gone through grade school, and University level of
learning, so we're a higher caliber of student. And since we're all
educators, or soon to be educators, and the best way to learn how to
teach, is by actually getting on that bike, and riding it, that's
what we should do. Teaching others has the highest retention rate
(The Learning Pyramid), and more learning would happen. To quote a
Breckinridge, whose political family is heavily entrenched in
Kentucky politics, “ancient dogms” should be attacked, and the
classroom should become “a field of battle where thoughts contests
with thought... Out of this comes only good” … “The professor
must teach his pupils to think, free from censorship, “even though
he teach heresy, rebellion, and schism” (Klotter).
We educators can
divide the chapters of any subject material amongst ourselves, and
teach each other, with the Professor acting more as a mediator, or an
administrator, for transitions, and to minimize conflicts, to make
sure the class runs smoothly. We'd learn to respect each other, and
to take each others' ideas seriously. We should be able to disagree
without being disagreeable (in spite of our Senator campaign). I
found another democratic method I believe would be effective for
Normal Schools when I googled “Robert Holland” for this paper. I
found a blog where the Professor whittled both Holland's and
Hammond's arguments down to two short paragraphs, and then a question
was posed to the Professor's teacher-students asking them which
argument they agreed with, and 35 comments from the teacher-students
followed past the initial question/post (Contemporary Issues in
Education). I was impressed with this process because all of their
posts were “published”, and so the student-teachers can read
their colleague's comments, and add their own thoughts to the debate,
and then, 5 years later, another student in a teacher training
program can sift through all of their ideas, and learn something from
all of them. It's cooperative learning, and shows a respect for each
other. It's fair and democratic, and was similar to this class, but
different than most classes I've had. We have the intelligence, and
the tools, for democratic learning. We're so close. And when the
teachers begin to work cooperatively in Normal Schools, that values
democracy as a common virtue, as well as health, happiness,
solidarity, success, justice, peace, love, and freedom, with a
dislike of the vices Diderot listed while praising Voltaire's
teaching style (lying, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition, and
tyranny) (Revolutionary Aftermath), then we'll lead by example in our
respective democratic classrooms for our young, impressionable, and
trusting American students.
Contemporary Issues in Education:
http://edfn500su09ely.blogspot.com/2009/06/issue-20.html
Gatto, John. The Underground History of
the United States: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into
the Problem of Modern Schooling.
http://www.leftyparent.com/blog/2012/06/03/the-american-three-tiered-education-system/
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
Hammond, Linda.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/a/aa/Darling_Hammond.pdf
Holland, Robert. Public Policy.
http://www.hoover.org/research/how-build-better-teacher
Konz. Courier-Journal.
http://archive.courier-journal.com/article/20130210/NEWS0105/104050001/JCPS-blasted-what-education-chief-calls-academic-genocide-
Race to Nowhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_Nowhere
Revolutionary Aftermath.
http://nhcp.gov.ph/revolutionary-aftermath/
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