Educating Our Children
I recently saw an old Confucian proverb that goes:
If your plan is for one year plant rice.
If your plan is for ten years plant trees.
If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.
I was raised in a household that valued education. My mother had grown up in rural upstate New York in a family where neither the mother nor father had much formal education. They were a normal immigrant family where the parents were all about hard work and some degree of shrewdness. My grandfather had emigrated from Slovakia as a child with his younger brother. They specifically came to upstate New York to work in the salt mines, which was a work skill not unknown to Eastern Europeans of the late nineteenth century. His breed were short and very stocky men who worked well in low-ceilinged salt mines where intelligence was way down the list of needed qualities and a broad back was the best trait.
My mother’s older siblings (two brothers and a sister) shared their parent’s penchant for hard work and shrewdness, but never transcended that to get to a more cerebral level. For some inexplicable reason (perhaps because her mother died of TB when she was fifteen), my mother evolved during high school to a higher plane. She was born in 1916, so she was in high school during the Great Depression. She was always quick to point out to me that the Depression did not impact country folk the way it affected people in the city. She claimed little impact, but that may be because New Deal programs like the WPA and CCC suddenly provided employment to many young people theretofore unemployed. In those years from 1931-1933 my mother blossomed as a student. This changed the course of her life and the lives of all of us who have come after.
She decided all on her own to apply to nearby Cornell University for a scholarship to the one school there that suited her farm background, the College of Home Economics. It was her entry ticket to higher education and exposed her to a world of the mind and the prospects of where life could take her. After working for almost twenty years in the U.S. and for the Rockefeller Foundation in Latin America (not to mention getting married and having three children), she chose again to change her stars as a single mother by going back to graduate school at forty-five years old and with three children in tow. She got her Doctorate in Education and went on to set up important programs to educate underprivileged women in the U.S. (the Job Corps) and countless programs for women around the world via the FAO/UN programs she administered. She used education to raise herself to an entirely different socioeconomic level and in so doing influenced us all about the value of education.
I grew up always assuming I would get a Doctorate, not just a Bachelor’s Degree. It was a valuable goal as I worked through high school and then college. I did graduate work as an MBA, but chose not to go for the Doctorate as a thinking adult who preferred a non-academic path, but certainly not due to any disregard for the value of education.
I took a job in graduate school teaching underclassmen and enjoyed it. Then after a successful career in banking I chose to take up academics again and teach as a Clinical Professor at Cornell for ten years. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching and have gone on to use several of my students in various jobs I’ve undertaken. I am now faced with another change of life as I plan my move west. Naturally, as I contemplate my alternative uses of my time, teaching once again comes to the fore for consideration. I don’t yet know what I will do, but there seem to be some west coast schools that would like what I have to offer the teaching profession.
This all makes me stop and contemplate the importance of education. My children all matriculated at Cornell (yet again following in my mother’s and my footsteps). Two of them graduated and one followed his own path, (he did not see higher education as the beacon the rest of us did). It has caused me to stop and wonder about the ebb and flow of the human attitude towards education. In today’s world it can reasonably be argued that formal education is less valuable than it used to be. In the oldest of days, without a Socratic teacher there were not even any books to learn from. Then, with the advent of the printing press there was a medium for passing on learning, first through the church (since that is where most manuscripts and libraries lived) and then through the universities where education was concentrated. And now, with the ubiquitous internet, can people not just as easily educate themselves if they are so motivated? There is a line in Good Will Hunting where he says to a Harvard student that someday he will wake up to the fact that he could have gotten as good an education for three dollars in late charges at the public library. It’s a good line and a very telling one about the state of education.
I read this morning that there is a new study based on the Program for International Student Assessment that yet again places U.S. students in a bad light against their global peers. This implies that the U.S. education system is simply not doing a good enough job educating our children to a standard that is competitive in the world. Given the focus that this has gotten (billions spent specifically to address this) with programs like the Common Core program over the past twenty years, this is very disappointing. I know that educationalists worry about the masses and the education of the broader population, but I must admit that my experience makes me wonder whether there isn’t some logic to focus education on the rudiments (perhaps the Common Core) to teach basic reading and math skills and then let self-education take it the next step whereupon students can qualify for advanced learning based on what they have individually chosen to learn. I am reminded of the movie Captain Fantastic where Viggo Mortensen teaches his children himself in the woods of Oregon and equally stresses both mental and physical education. They are all better educated than their peers from more formal educational settings.
It seems to me that beyond the core curriculum, what is needed is the motivation to learn and expand one’s mind. I feel I was blessed with this from a young age thanks to my mother and the preconceived notion that education was not just necessary, but a given. I know that my children have it to some and varying degrees. It might be that some get it sooner and some get it later. My brother-in-law would be a good example of the latter. He thirsts for knowledge as much as anyone I know and yet in his younger days, Rock n’Roll took precedence. I would love to see a world where people can pause to educate themselves whenever they chose along their path. Then maybe our children would score better on these global tests because it would test only those that want to learn at that moment.