Joy Pullmann:
“When applied to education, [progressivism] dictates that students are no longer to be taught to know permanently true, good, and beautiful things because such things do not exist (at worst) or are simply unknowable (at best). Instead, the children are taught to adapt to their environment…
If the truth cannot be known and does not govern human societies, then there is nothing to restrain the rulers. If rights are not derived from truth, then they are granted by the ever-changing state. Liberty and knowable truth are interdependent.” — Gene Edward Veith and Andrew Kern, “Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America”
As you enter Ridgeview Classical Schools’ newest building, built to help relieve its perennially full wait list of some 900 students, a marble inscription thunders at you, and the whole world, through the full-glass entrance: “What will justify your life?” Just inside, a former Louisiana State University professor is overseeing study hall. Between sharp rebuffs when students titter, Robert McMahon explains he’s come cross-country to teach high-school literature because the former professor “got sick of the hatred for undergrad teaching.”
Teaching is what McMahon loves. The PhD is the author of four books, one on teaching high-school literature, and he’s won a bevy of teaching awards. That’s somewhat surprising at first glance, considering his sharp and exacting manner towards the 14-year-olds reading around a set of tables arranged in a square.
But talk to him a bit, and you’ll find that this bespectacled man who has never owned a television and disdains modern teaching methods—“Advanced Placement teachers don’t assign whole books. It’s a preparation with no intellectual integrity whatsoever”—can pierce your soul in just a few minutes of quiet conversation.
“The discipline I teach is reading carefully and understanding what you read,” he says. “You can either understand what the words mean and map it onto the bigger issues in the work, or you can’t.”
A central problem with much instruction now is the demand that students apply it to “the real world” before they have fully digested it, he says. Students never learn the art of full and sustained attention, which dilutes their character as much as it does their intellect.
“The capacity to pay attention to someone is directly proportional to your capacity to love,” he says, which lands right between my ribs as I consider what this means about fiddling with my smartphone when my husband is trying to talk.
Statements like this, which alone form a full meal for mind and soul, abound on Ridgeview’s K-12, 780-student campus in Fort Collins, Colorado. Try this one on for size, from Principal Derek Anderson: “We’re not training [students] for a job, but for life. Your life is divided into thirds: sleep, work, leisure. Sometimes your work does define you. But so does your leisure, and if you don’t use that well, a third of your life will be destitute…Americans fill leisure with escapism or more work because they don’t know what to fill it with.”
The Arts Befitting Free Men
Ridgeview is a classical school, where children learn phonics, traditional math and science, Latin, and the Western and American heritage. They study the great books and receive explicit instruction in art and music. In other words, they study the real liberal arts: what centuries of Western leaders, including America’s founders, have considered necessary instruction for free men who govern themselves.
Because it’s a public charter school started and managed by a board of local parents, students attend for free—if they can get in. U.S. News and World Report consistently ranks Ridgeview’s high school among the best in the state and nation, based on test scores faculty consider a joke because the tests measure disjointed collections of factoids.
“We went the charter route [instead of starting a private school] because we believed everybody should have access to a good public education, and is capable of it,” said Peggy Schunk, a mother who helped found the school and who now runs the school’s admissions and human resources.
This hits home even more when you read the account of a very progressive mom who worked hard to raise a liberal, eco-aware son.
Her son is 17 and probably bigger than his mom.
He bullies her unmercilessly for not being ”green” enough, not being ”sustainable” enough, not being leftist enough.
She hides her sins from him: her plastic food containers, her thrown-out spoiled veggies, her halibut, beef, etc.
She cannot wait until he goes to college so she’ll be free of his pushiness.
“What will justify your life?”
Nothing.
One need not justify a gift.
However, one may, if one wishes, explain what one has done with it.
I’m sorry to say but both Common Core and non-Common Core curricula are failing students. They are failing to learn the basic fundamentals. They do not read well. They do not write well. They do not know how to perform basic arithmetic operations – add, subtract, multiply and divide. They do not know the history of our country.
My sister, when she began teaching in the University of Colorado system, teaching college algebra, a few of her students complained they shouldn’t be in her class because they passed AP Calculus in high school. My sister’s reply to them was they didn’t score well on the math placement exam to enroll in Calculus I, and their performance on her exams indicate they still weren’t learning the material. Three of the five complaining students failed the course, the other two received D’s.
My daughters, when they entered the University of Colorado, they passed their placement exams on the first try. We didn’t spend money on special preparation courses or tutors. But, they did learn the fundamentals in middle and high school.
@David: #3
David, if you look at groups within the school system, you will find that some groups do well with academic measurements, and others poorly.
It’s not the schools alone that are failing, it is also certain cultures within society.
@Petercat #4 –
I understand that, but to say we cannot test students is ludicrous. You need to measure whether students are learning the material, and tests are best means available so far. To say culture/society influences how well a group performs on a test is the same crap that was used to explain poor test scores when I was going to school long ago, and when my parents were going to school.
@David: #5
By all means, test.
But don’t weigh the tests.
Let every student show where they are in relation to other students. Honestly.
Not everyone is equal in every way.
And yes, cultures do influence that. It is not “crap”.
Cultures within society. Not society itself. You misread me.