Rod Allwood sent the following letter (response sent from mail@cartalk.com).
Tom, on last week's show when you asked the question, "What is an educated person?"
I thought that perhaps you wanted some kind of a flippant response, such as, "An educated person is one who has a heightened sense of being able to recognize BS before stepping in it."
Then I tapped into the Car Talk Web site and realized that you were actually serious about exploring this topic. So here goes.
I am just a shade over 50 years old, so my comments are couched in the fact that I now have more life experiences occurring since college graduation than those leading up to it. I'm not being cute--I believe this can have a large impact on the types of responses you will receive. Roughly interpreted, up until the age of 25 or 30, we humans tend to focus more on the self-centered "me" and more materialistic side of life, whereas, after 25-30 years of age, we grow up and mature. This results in an emphasis shift to "us" and the more altruistic side of life. More importantly, however, is the impact age, experience and the altruistic nature of teachers can have on students. These teachers have a dramatic impact on how a subject is taught. Hang on to this concept for a moment--I'll come back to it later.
The other part of my response to your question has to do with the APPLICATION of what is being taught. You alluded to this several times in the initial comments of your Education Forum. I refer to this as the PRAGMATIST APPROACH--connecting cognitive thoughts, skills and disciplines to real-world applications. Pragmatic educators refer to this as "bringing the materials to life." Ego-centered college (or HS college prep) educators, on the other hand, refer to this as material for vocational, lower-on-the-food-chain types of students. I refer to these people as having a more PURIST APPROACH to what they teach.
Purists are not bad people; rather, they just feel that the world would be a better place if their were more people like them. True, the abstract/cognitive/purist areas of math, art and science are very important--without them research and innovation would suffer--but these purist areas should be introduced as a follow-on AFTER pragmatic connections have been made and are understood by students.
Pragmatist-oriented teachers take their math classes on field trips to engineering companies or retail headquarters to see the importance of numbers in use. Pragmatist English teachers get their kids involved in shadowing experiences with newspaper editors, radio/TV scriptwriters or advertising agencies to learn how the "spoken word" is really used. What do purists do? They capture the attention of about 10 percent of their class and wish the rest were in shop class.
Many educators, parents and students have the concept of "vocation" all screwed up. In today's middle and high school organizational structures, there is still the 1950s approach of college prep vs. shop class...college prep being a euphemism for learning for learning's sake (the purist approach) vs. shop class, which is a euphemism for the application of learning to the workplace (the pragmatist approach). In the 1960s, "shop class" was expanded to include vocational areas such as occupational work experience, distributive education and other work-and-learn programs, but, in concept, it was still the college-prep-vs.-shop-class mentality. Going to college is still viewed as the magic pill to be successful.
The application side of teaching is what we need to change in our educational structure. There is a place for both the purist and the pragmatist on the educational delivery/approach continuum. One approach does not have to be successful at the exclusion of the other, but it seems clear enough to me that placing the purist approach early in the education of students is incorrect. The connections of thoughts, concepts and skills to real-life applications must come first.
Now, if we are to take the purist approach and the pragmatist approach and combine them with the self-centered and altruistic types of teachers, we have a simple but interesting chart (which e-mail, unfortunately cannot deliver to you). Therefore, envision a grid with two squares across and two squares down. Across the top (left to right), we have SELF-CENTERED TEACHER followed by ALTRUISTIC TEACHER. On the left side (top to bottom), we have PURIST APPROACH and PRAGMATIST APPROACH. With this simple chart, the best of all worlds for students would be the lower right box--an altruistic teacher using the pragmatist approach to education. The worst-case scenario would be the upper left box--a self-centered teacher using the purist approach. Unleash your sixth grader on that one.
Two final words: (1) There are any number of factors which influence the quality of education--factors which lie outside the classroom. We cannot go into all of these factors here, but one of the primary issues here is that schools cannot be expected to replace the importance of a family structure or the role designed to be played by parents. (2) There are, however, many factors which lie inside the school structure which have an impact on the quality of education. The primary one in my mind is the lack of teacher evaluations. Teachers should receive salary increases, promotions and multiyear contracts based on performance. The NEA has a problem with performance evaluations. That's odd, because I thought schools were in the performance business. I realize this is not a simple issue, but as a past educator, I would have been willing to face evaluation versus run from it as the NEA and teacher unions do.
My wife and I enjoy your show immensely. We rarely miss it. Keep up the good work--and congratulations for your willingness to venture out into the uncharted waters of education as it exists today.
Back to Tommy's Education Forum Part II
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