Beyond Textbooks
     Ravitch tries to figure out why they're so bad

In The Language Police, Dianne Ravitch documents the way sensitivity guidelines have led to textbooks that interfere with students’ chances to learn critical thinking. Whereas in the past students were kept from liberal education by theories of vocational education, today’s students are kept in the dark by those with theories of a moral order that pretends much of the past was different than it was.

One of her observations gets near to my main complaint about some textbooks: that “voice of God” presenting information as though it simply exists, rather than as a point of view constructed by a human being:

Ravitch notes that one of the major problems in history textbooks is the absence of an author. A name at the end of a chapter would make clear that the account is the product of an individual with distinct interests, tastes, and, even, God forbid, prejudices. And why should students be protected from knowing that “he” once was, and sometimes still is, used as a generic pronoun, or that “negro” was once the commonly endorsed term for African American? To make these issues the subject of discussion in the classroom is to acknowledge the inequities of the past without necessarily condemning the past for not being as enlightened as the present. The contemporary world also needs to be represented as it actually exists. Textbooks that whitewash this world provoke only contempt from students, who know when they are getting a snow job.

One solution to bad texts is primary documents, Ravitch says. But her reviewer deems this impractical.

Of course, if nothing about schooling changes except the text, using primary documents is impractical. But when a stronger emphasis is placed upon local studies, and when schools and libraries make a concerted effort to organize good collections, including materials appropriate for younger students, and when teachers become more familiar with what is already on the internet and of what else might be put there. . .

The View from I-90
     Helping students construct a point of view

I drove back to St. Ignatius from Helena yesterday though a gorgeous Montana autumn. The brilliant light flaming in the cottonwoods along the river made it hard to keep driving. I wanted to stop and explore.

Not that I disliked the reality of gliding through an almost timeless landscape at more than a mile a minute, feeling the grip of steel-belted radials on the exquisitely engineered curves and rises of I-90, listening to an audio recording about Alexander the Great written by first century C.E. biographer Arrian on my Subaru’s stereo.

It was great fun, hurtling through space encased in an elaborately contrived point of view sustained by layers and layers of engineering and design. I was seeing the river from a point of view unavailable to earlier travelers. A fur trader wet to the hips trudging the river bank with forty-odd pounds of traps or a Salish hunter returning cautiously from Three Forks leading game-laden ponies could imagine my swift and comfortable journey only as something supernatural.

Though watching the world through a window seems quite natural, it is actually the product of layer upon layer of artifice and construction. And it was only one of the points of view available to me. I also had easy access to information that would help me see the river as part of a vast hydrological cycle, or as a constantly changing habitat for fish, or as a potential real estate development, or as a likely site for a heap-leach gold mine.

Depending on what information I chose to pay attention to, my view of the river might be radically different.

It is the very richness of the information available today that creates the most daunting challenge for educators. A young person has before him or her endless points of view constructed of arguments and facts, and endless choices about what points of view to inhabit, all supported by web sites, music, brochures, pamphlets, videos, and reports.

In this noisy and contentious world, young people need help constructing points of view that are honest and reasonable. Much of the help they need they can get from teachers who guide them into science and history, providing a good grounding in reason and evidence, learning to see things as they really are. This is the basis of a liberal education, and it remains as important now as it ever was.

But by itself, it is not enough. This is because the most profound disagreements among those who would enlist the young in their causes are not about things as they are. They are about things as they will be, and things as they ought to be.

Our best guides in these dimensions are often those people in the community, especially the elderly, who have worked for years to accomplish good work. Every town has them: people who build museums, organize food pantries, develop management plans for rivers or forests, run 4-H programs, establish gardens, or operate successful businesses. They often understand things worth hearing.

In the simple act of gathering and telling their stories, students learn much of what they need to know. They learn how to sort through information, how to select facts that are useful, and how to combine data into coherent narratives that move the work forward. In representing others’ points of view, they find their own. Along the way they discover astonishing uses for the digital cameras and recorders and multimedia programs that we now have, creating cultural artifacts that will be of great worth to other people.

And they also learn a fundamental secret of life: learning is a joy. It goes beyond whatever information highway we find ourselves upon. We can pull out of the traffic and park, climbing down the bank to make our own photographs along the river bottom with mountains beyond mountains all around.

We can see the world anew, getting to the water’s edge with the smell of leaf fall in our nostrils and the cool of unsettled breezes tickling our skin.