Monday, March 23, 2009

Longer school year not a panacea

Like most people in these United States, I believe that our public school system, and our higher education system as well, needs continuous overhauls to ensure that our youth will have fantastic futures.

Therefore, I followed with immense interest President Obama’s recent speech on education; I liked many aspects of it. However, I am not quite in agreement with the president’s observation that one way to get our children ready for a productive and engaged life is by lengthening the school year.

Obama compared our academic calendar with South Korea’s, noting, “Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea — every year. That’s no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy.”

A longer school year is not a necessary condition for success in the 21st century. It was not even a good model for the 20th century, which is when I was a student in a school system that has some of the longest school years.

As I look back at my childhood, it seems as though I was always in school. In the southern part of India, where I grew up, the academic year began in early June, and we had classes six days a week. It was a huge reward when we had the second Saturday of every month off — and, boy, did we look forward to that two-day weekend!

School ended in mid-April, in time for the peak summer heat, when we kids then spent our time climbing the mango and tamarind trees and playing cricket and football, darkening our already naturally tanned complexions.

Yes, the school system graduated quite a few successful students. But then, in a country with a population of more than a billion now, even a small percentage translates to hundreds of thousands of successes.

Later in life, as a parent here in America, I was excited by the educational system that my daughter went through — in a public school. I would have way preferred to be a student here than in India. And it was not at all because of the five-day school week or because of the long vacations.

I was blown away by a number of wonderful aspects of schooling here: from “learning by doing” to physical education to arts and music to student government. In contrast, I went through a system that emphasized learning by rote, not learning by doing. Music and the arts had only token representation in the curriculum, and we certainly did not learn civic responsibility through student government.

What ultimately mattered to me as a parent was not the length of the school year, but what went on when school was in session. Equally important, on weekends and during summers, kids are able to be kids — although like many parents, I sometimes preferred it when the kids were in school, because they can be stress agents at home!

Thus, having experienced two strikingly different systems, the question for me is a deceptively simple one: What is the purpose of education?

The more we begin to explore this question, the more it becomes intensely controversial, because of the profound differences in opinions. We might disagree because of the different weights we attribute to science, social science and language courses. Or how much we think the arts ought to be emphasized in schools.

These immensely controversial issues are precisely the ones we ought to focus on. What if the subjects that were taught in the 20th century will not have any “value” at all in the 21st century? Or what if the way in which we taught a subject in the 20th century will not work in the 21st century?

Furthermore, a child entering the first grade in September 2009 will graduate high school in 2021. I am willing to bet that none of us has any realistic idea of what might be the important issues in this country and the world 12 years down the road.

So, if we are trying to figure out how to prepare this kid to be constructively and productively engaged from 2021 until retirement in 2071, well, let us be honest here: We are all involved in a guessing game about the future.

I don’t have the answers. All I know is that Yogi Berra was, as always, on the mark: “The future ain’t what it used to be!”

I am convinced, however, that longer school years are no panacea for the complexity and uncertainty about the future economy and polity. Merely retaining students in classrooms for a lot more days of the year will not necessarily guarantee that they will graduate as young adults with the ability to successfully negotiate the economic and civic challenges they will face for the rest of their lives.

For The Register-Guard
Posted to Web: Sunday, Mar 22, 2009 11:47PM
Appeared in print: Monday, Mar 23, 2009, page A7

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