One Woman's View: A century of change in the classroom
Contributing writer
As I watched the neighborhood young people go back to school last month, I pondered all the changes (for good or ill) that have taken place in education over the past hundred years or so. Contrary to the impression of my subbing students, I do not actually remember back a hundred years, but by reading some history and recalling my parents' stories, I can fill in the gaps.
Schools today have more resources for teaching and learning than ever before. When I was in school, there were no computers, televisions, VCRs, or video cameras. Filmstrips were about as high-tech as our teachers could get. When my mother was in elementary school in Arkansas, her classroom did not even have a dictionary. The only books were the student's textbooks, which were purchased by the parents.
All the new technology opens a whole new world to students. Recently, I found a web site called Kansas Photo Tours. Sitting at the computer, I can travel the state and see pictures and information about more than a hundred places of interest. To me that is exciting! I'm sure that is a very small example of the fascinating knowledge available on the Internet.
Of course, methods of discipline have changed drastically. I'm not as certain as many of my generation that a good old-fashioned spanking was exactly what was needed to put a child on the right track. However, I have noticed that some young people feel they can do as they please, since teachers are not allowed to use force. I'm not sure that is a healthy development either.
With all advancements in teaching techniques and available resources, young people should be smarter today than they were a few generations ago. Are they? If you want my opinion, I'd say yes and no. The field of knowledge has expanded, and students today know about subjects (like computers) I had never heard of at their age. On the other hand, my parents had a lot of knowledge in their heads that would be alien to today's youngsters. My father once told me that one of the questions on his eighth-grade examination was to diagram the following sentence: "At midnight in his guarded tent, the Turk lay dreaming of the hour when Greece, her knee in suppliance bent, should tremble at his power." Although I have a college degree with an English major, I am not certain I can do that. In most of today's classrooms students don't know what diagramming is.
Perhaps it is inevitable that as knowledge expands, not all of the old knowledge can be covered in school courses. I am reminded of the joke about a teacher who told his class, "You're a bunch of slackers. When I was your age, I could recite all the U.S. Presidents in order easily." To which a child replied, "Yes, sir, but there were only five or six of them then." However, I feel some dismay when not one of the 20 odd seniors in a high school government class can tell me who was President during World War I. Many middle and high school students have trouble even reading their assignments independently.
With all the improvements in teaching and learning methods available, why are today's students not unequivocally brighter than those of the past? I think there are two reasons, neither necessarily indicating a failure of our teachers or our educational system, but one perhaps indicating a problem which needs to be addressed.
One reason is that we attempt to educate everyone. Students who could not learn in the traditional classroom are given special help and encouraged to reach whatever potential they have. Some of them may never learn what used to be considered the basics, but they learn enough to cope with their environment and survive. Special education has been a godsend to many children who would have dropped out of the system in my day.
Lack of ability was not the only reason for dropping out. Before compulsory education, many parents did not recognize a need to educate their children. I have found documents that my great-grandmother signed with her mark, although that goes back more than a century.
The second reason is that students are no longer held accountable for learning. When I was a first grader more than 50 years ago, the teacher made me stand in the corner, because I was the only one in the class who had not learned to write my name. Although I do not think that was the ideal way to help me learn, it shows that in those days learning was a job students were expected to do. I was not allowed to pass the buck by saying the teacher was incompetent or the lesson was boring. I was accountable.
Today when students do poorly on tests, most people blame the school system. It is considered the teacher's job to entertain students and to make lessons so interesting everyone will wake up and pay attention. Nobody asks how much time the student spent studying the material.
I do not recommend going back to the days when teachers rapped children with a ruler or made them stand in the corner if they had not mastered the lesson. However, it is unrealistic to expect a teacher to put knowledge into a passive student's brain through a funnel.
Yes, teachers do have a responsibility to make information understandable and as interesting as possible. But students also have a job to do, and learning is mostly up to them. Let's hold students accountable for doing their job.
