BackStory

29 Responses

• I love your show — I never miss an episode! I have a question that I hope you’ll address on this show: When did we as a society start to believe that all kids deserved a good education regardless of their class background? I’m less interested in issues of race or gender in education, but specifically class. When did schooling extend to kids of all socioeconomic backgrounds and how did the idea that the poor also should be educated come about?
  Thanks!

  Quote
  Sophie

  6/3/2009 at 7:40 am

• As a high school teacher I have observed the increase of distraction of students (texting), increase in student anxiety regarding performance (I have to have an A) and an increased pressure to “entertain” students. Is this a new phenomeon or is it rooted at all in history?

  I LOVE the show and make my students listen to various segements throughout the course of the year. I wish you guys were able to produce it weekly!!!!!!!!!

  Quote
  Kathy

  6/4/2009 at 9:02 am

• [...] Has school just gotten  in the way of education? Share your comments and questions! [...]

  I went to a little brick school house with six grades in four rooms in the 1960s. In classic New England style, the place was run by a curmudgeon queen serving as principal/5th & 6th Grade teacher. My most notable memory of school was the extravagant rhinestone matching jewelry sets she wore, especially the brooches affixed to her broad bosom. However, I did learn a lot in school. Because the teachers did not have time to harass anyone who was quiet, I spent my childhood reading during schools — usually at least a novel a day, often more. Imagine my horror when the new Jr. High School teachers actually forced us to listen in class. By age 15, I was skipping over 90 days a year, due to savage and chronic boredom. Didn’t hurt my grades a bit, either.

  Quote
  Kathleen Hulser

  6/4/2009 at 2:14 pm

• [...] Has school just gotten  in the way of education? Share your comments and questions! [...]

  My most notable memory of school was the extravagant rhinestone matching jewelry sets she wore, especially the brooches affixed to her broad bosom. However, I did learn a lot in school. Because the teachers did not have time to harass anyone who was quiet, I spent my childhood reading during schools — usually at least a novel a day, often more. Imagine my horror when the new Jr. High School teachers actually forced us to listen in class. By age 15, I was skipping over 90 days a year, due to savage and chronic boredom. Didn’t hurt my grades a bit, either.

  Well-remembered, Kathleen! I think a surprising number of us can still recall the odd sartorial choices made by our elementary school teachers… You raise some interesting questions we hope to address on the show: How much of school is day care and how much truly education? Who and what decided when a standard school year would begin and end (how did it vary regionally)? But what I’m really curious about is how you managed to get away with skipping half the school year? (Note: Don’t try it today, kids. It was different times back then…)

  Quote
  Rachel Quimby

  6/5/2009 at 11:10 am

• I love your show — I never miss an episode! I have a question that I hope you’ll address on this show: When did we as a society start to believe that all kids deserved a good education regardless of their class background? I’m less interested in issues of race or gender in education, but specifically class. When did schooling extend to kids of all socioeconomic backgrounds and how did the idea that the poor also should be educated come about?
  Thanks![

  I had always remembered learning that our founding fathers believed education was necessary for our democratic society…that to have the privilege of voting, one must be literate and educated, and therefore a free and public education was required for ALL children. But I cannot find any reference to that anywhere. Did I imagine this. Has anybody else heard that?
  My personal opinion to answer the above question is, in order for America to be the land of equal opportunity, everybody should have equal access to education. I would say that that only happened during the civil rights movement of the 1960′s.

  Quote
  Paula Anderson

  6/7/2009 at 12:21 pm

• As a high school teacher I have observed the increase of distraction of students (texting), increase in student anxiety regarding performance (I have to have an A) and an increased pressure to “entertain” students. Is this a new phenomeon or is it rooted at all in history?

  I LOVE the show and make my students listen to various segements throughout the course of the year. I wish you guys were able to produce it weekly!!!!!!!!!

  It is a recent phenomenon. When I was in grade school, the worst kids shot spitballs at each other. Children were expected to sit still and listen. If not, they’d be sent to the principal’s office, which was a feared fate. Parents were expected to discipline their children, and if the teacher said, “Do I need to call your parents?” the student straightened up. Of course back then, we had 2 recesses, one long, one short…and the kids got rid of pent up energy. We could play dodge ball. We climbed on monkey bars. We chose sides for games, without interference from teachers.
  Also, teachers taught. They weren’t babysitters. So there wasn’t as much homework. Kids today, my kids, are overwhelmed with too much homework. And studies show, success in school is not correlated to amount of homework. Give the kids a break! After being in school all day, they can’t spend 5-6 hours at night doing the massive amounts of homework. I think this is because teaching has become specialized. There are different teachers for each subject in ELEMENTARY school. That’s crazy! I had one teacher per grade through sixth grade, 2 teachers in seventh…then specialization 8-12. But even then, the teachers coordinated as to homework. I remember them saying, well I know you have a big exam in history, so I won’t give you math homework. I think teachers are overwhelmed today. They are teachers, administrators, bus monitors, lunch monitors, disciplinarians, social workers…etc. and that is crazy too! Wow I’ve really rambled here but this is close to my heart. I feel schools need to get BACK TO THE BASICS and stop trying to be in loco parentis, and just TEACH.

  Quote
  Paula Anderson

  6/7/2009 at 12:33 pm

• Just before i started a job teaching freshman English at a local community college in upstate New York, the head of the department warned me about the level of general cultural knowledge of the newly-minted high-school grads i was about to meet. “Not only do they not know where Chigago is,” he said, “but they don’t know WHAT Chicago is.”
  That characterization proved not far off the mark. But many of them had a desire to “know what they didn’t know,” and to learn what they’d need to get into a 4-year school. Most of them, somehow, also had the initiative and intelligence to catch up pretty fast.

  Quote
  HerStory

  7/11/2009 at 4:50 pm

• Wow–great minds think…..heard BS (sorry pun not intended) for the 1st time driving home today and planned to suggest a program devoted to education. — and poof! right on your home page: EDUCATION. I have spent my life delving into the Education Problem. I am a scientist, engineer, inventor, pioneer, and visionary–which implies some Back Story Knowledge. My hope is that you’ll keep this subject in the forefront of history discussion because it goes to the root of American beliefs about freedom, self-determination, and citizen engagement. Until our system of education is free of its various shackles–political, commercial, and cultural–we may as well be consigning the young to an ongoing sleep–a form of domestic tyranny cloaked in academic garb. When you talk about Education, you need to address tools and media–old and new–to get a fix on the diet and nutrition, old and new, we feed students. You need to address how little education has changed over the course of decades; how so many books and studies are published and yet the basic character of education culture stays the same. How, even as the political yoke on schools has tightened, protest is rare and fear among teachers not to rock the boat is widespread. How in spite of upbeat and imaginative movies like Night at The Museum, the teaching of history and the importance of history in the minds of the young are at an all time low. “Just Teach” is the refrain. Don’t Entertain yells another: School was meant to be hard. Blame the parents. Keep education tough–raise those standards–onward the Factory Farm schooling that aims for the numbers as if test scores were eggs. I liken Education to a ship during the Age of Discovery navigating for centuries by dead reckoning without the benefit of longitude–without an organizing principle that allows it to move forward with confidence in the knowledge of science. Education is still drifting as we move into a sea of global forces–technical, political, climatic–that students will face head on. Without the thinking and synthesizing skills–without the ability to think–students will not be able to navigate no matter if all gadgets have GPSs. If schools don’t discover a science that helps them to determine and define the really important things that kids need–and to make the factory into a thriving habitat kids love to live and work in then we will fail our society, cutting the roots off the shoots of the coming generations. We have to outsmart the system we have created. I have been studying this problem now for over 35 years, and believe that I envision a solution–and have done the necessary building and engineering that must attend such ambition. As preposterous as it sounds, I have created a vehicle that can outsmart the system and am launching a movement that can perform the heavy lifting required. For now I would like to link interested parties to the ‘Teaching of History’ question since it bears directly on the question of not just teaching but of transforming young minds as they confront the future and, yes, face the challenge of re-inventing life as we know it.

  http://www.puppetools.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=297

  Quote
  Jeff Peyton

  7/13/2009 at 1:35 pm

• [ But what I'm really curious about is how you managed to get away with skipping half the school year? (Note: Don't try it today, kids. It was different times back then...)

  Well, here was my brother’s answer to that question: At the end of the first marking period, he would inform the school office that he had lost his report card. For the rest of the year, he would fill in the original report card to show my mother. Of course, he didn’t report how many days he had missed. He, in turn, would sign the official report card and return it to the school, with my mother never having seen it! If he had put that much energy into attending school, who knows what he might have accomplished? (This was before the days when schools called the parents for much of anything.)

  Quote
  Elayne

  7/15/2009 at 8:55 am

• I’ve been back and forth on how we do public education. I’m not sure if I should curse John Dewey and lay the blame at his feet or if the problem is really a number of things all contributing to the large mess we have now. Would we really be better of with a return to classical education as some private institutions claim?

  One of the other issues about public education that I wrestle with is who is actually guiding the curriculum and writing the textbooks. As a historian (public historian!), I’ve been fascinated with the story about how the United Daughters of the Confederacy controlled history curriculum in the South for so many years (and the cultural results of that legacy). I have so many personal stories or stories from others of them finding out something at a historic site or in a college classroom that was either not what they learned in K-12 or was something that was left out entirely from their education. Earth shattering stories like how Alice Paul and her compatriots engaged in peaceful protests and underwent amazing degradations in order to secure the right to vote. The first time I even heard the name Emmett Till was in an upper division history class in college. It was in that same class that I learned about American Indian Movement and the Second Wounded Knee.

  So, my intellectual struggles with this issue include both how public education evolved and who has been guiding it.

  Quote
  Heather

  7/20/2009 at 1:31 pm

• There is a saying: ‘Fish learn water last’.

  The culture is everything and yet it is largely invisible unless you are looking for it. The moment we started making education compulsory and enacted the Box model, we embraced control, authority, and academics as the path forward. We removed generations from nature, denied them their birthright, and soon enough a state and federal mandate to ratchet up the lock-down with testing and standardization. If the premise for all of this superstructure is to empower young people for the life well expressed and self-determined, then there is a huge disconnect. Education is surrounded by media. If even 1% of the engagement of reality TV were applied in classrooms, you would see students and teachers begin to self-propel. AS I write in the link above–about Night at the Musuem–we have all the tools and magic to enage kids everywhere but in the classroom, but educators are the last to give up control. They are victims of the system they have chosen to work in to supposedly free young minds. Fish learn water last.

  How do you outsmart the culture and land in a zone that’s free of control and indoctrination? The Taliban banned Play from the get go because they know free-spirited behavior when they see it. Play is a huge elephant sitting in the classroom. He or she is invisible, but if the teacher called on this mammal’s huge resources, it would change everything. That would be a history-making event in Education.

  Quote
  Jeff Peyton

  7/20/2009 at 2:06 pm

• http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=97923652021

  The 40th Anniversary of the Moon Landing should actually commemorate John Kennedy’s bold visionary goal—because he cleared the way forward with his words and his charismatic spirit. True, it was the Soviet cloud that compelled us to focus, but we have greater clouds hanging before us now. We can change Education in the same way we willed ourselves to the moon in a huge, history-changing leap of optimism, imagination, and engineering. If we put a fraction of the intelligence applied in gaming and software development into a new model of education that is free and enlightened, we would regain not merely a competitive edge but the respect and admiration of the world.

  Quote
  Jeff Peyton

  7/21/2009 at 8:57 am

• How has the role of schools changed in relation to changes in the role of parents and the family in a child’s life?

  I was thinking about this in two ways — First, when did school start becoming the site of social service delivery? The whole child theory states that we have to help children deal with a host of issues before they are even in a physical and mental state of readiness to learn anything. This has certainly expanded the scope of what it means to educate a child.

  And then on the other end of the socio-economic spectrum (which I witness often as a parent in Brookline, Mass.), is the phenomenon of the helicopter parent. Have schools had to deal with hyper-involved parents in the past?

  Quote
  Julie

  7/30/2009 at 12:24 pm

• How has the role of schools changed in relation to changes in the role of parents and the family in a child’s life?
  George Washington: Just Another Average Kid?

  This interview with George Washington is Adapted From: A Map, a Mirror and a Wristwatch By John Taylor Gatto, Education Reform Revolutionary

  INT: President Washington, how nice to have you with us today. Would you like to begin by telling us a little about your early days? I hear that you were just an average kid. How did you do in school?

  GW: Well, uh, I was no genius. All my friends would agree; John Adams said I was “too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation.”

  Mr. Jefferson, my fellow Virginian, declared that I liked to spend my time “chiefly in action, reading little.” As a teenager I loved two things, dancing and horseback riding. I studied both formally with a passion not supplied by schoolteachers.

  INT: You mean they were like hobbies? How did those activities benefit you?

  GW: I did not realize it until much later, but these activities made me an impressive person to look at, if I may say so myself, and they allowed me to physically dominate any gathering.

  Think of Michael Jordan the basketball player. I read somewhere that he played so well, it was exactly as if the other players weren’t even playing the same game. Well, that is how people saw me thanks to my dancing and horsemanship.

  INT: Your friend George Mercer used these words to describe you as a young man:

  He is straight as an Indian, measuring six feet, two inches in his stockings and weighing 175 pounds…. His frame is padded with well-developed muscles, indicating great strength.

  GW: You know this sounds awfully self-centered, but you know I grew up in a time when there were to photographs or yearbooks, and so words like this were like today’s snap shots.

  INT: I guess everyone would wish this to be said of his or her own son! You seem to have got there by spending a great deal of time doing things that today’s schools do not teach. What subjects did you study as a boy?

  GW: I didn’t attend school until I was 11 (the same age, incidentally, that Woodrow Wilson, another President, learned to read)

  I had no trouble learning reading, writing, and arithmetic on my own. None at all, nor did any of my colleagues. They all cared to learn such things and did not have much difficulty whether they were rich or poor. Indeed in most places in the colonies or the early republic you couldn’t go to school at all until you had first become literate. Few young people wanted to waste their time teaching what was so easy to learn.

  INT: There is much evidence that colonial America was overall very literate (meaning lots of people could read) wherever literacy was valued; children became literate because they wanted to be and because they were expected to be because it isn’t hard to do.

  GW: So I am eleven on my way to school for the first time. What did I study? How about geometry, trigonometry, and surveying?

  INT: Not what your own average-minded eleven-year-old studies in sixth grade! But wait a minute. Those were dumbed-down versions of those things that you got, some kid’s game!

  GW: Well, maybe, but how do you account for this? Two thousand days after I picked up a surveyor’s transit in school at the age of eleven, I assumed the office of official surveyor of Culpepper County, Virginia. This was a wonderful way to make a living in early America. Not only was the job highly paid, but as a frontier surveyor I could pick out and keep the best land for myself.

  In the next three years that followed, I earned today’s equivalent of about $100,000 a year.

  INT: Well, I mean no disrespect sir, but perhaps your social connections helped you, a fatherless boy, to get the position?

  GW: That might be the case, except in a frontier society anyone would be crazy to give a boy serious work unless he could actually do it. I mean, what would the neighbors say?

  Well, I was smart. Almost at once I began speculating in land, and by the time I was twenty-one, I had used my knowledge and had acquired 2,500 acres of prime land in Frederick County, Virginia. Not a bad place then or now to own a few acres.

  INT: Very impressive sir. So, you had no father and as we know and were no genius, but you learned geometry, trigonometry and surveying in school starting when you were eleven. And you were rich by your own effort at twenty-one.

  GW: In school I studied hard. I used legal forms including bills of exchange, tobacco receipts, bail bonds, servant indentures, wills, land conveyances, leases and patents. And using these forms, I became able to recreate the theory, philosophy and custom which had produced them. My mind was average, but by steeping in grown-up reality, I was never bored.

  At some point, I decided to scientifically study what then was called “gentlemanly deportment”, how to be well regarded by the best people. I would like to take rule 56 to illustrate how I gathered my own character in hand, and became my own father:

  Rule 56
  Associate yourself with men of good Quality if you Esteem your own reputation.

  INT: Mr. President, you were a sharp young man; is it any wonder you became our first President?

  GW: I also recall studying geography and astronomy, gaining knowledge thereby of the continents, the globe, and the heavens.

  INT: But sir, it is reported that you did not read very much.

  GW: You will be interested to know that I read regularly the famous and elegant “Spectator” from London, which was sort of like the “New Yorker” magazine.

  By the time I was 18 I had read all the writings of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Daniel Defoe. But I read much more than the great English novelists, I read, too, Seneca’s Morals, Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, and the major writings of other Roman generals.

  INT: Wow. What amazing standards Adams and Jefferson must have had to consider you, Mr. President, illiterate.

  GW: At 16 I began writing memos to myself about the design of his own clothing; years later I became my own architect for the magnificent estate of my home, Mt. Vernon.

  INT: Mr. President, even at a young age, you already had an impressive store of knowledge.

  GW: Yes, thank you. I began studying the spots off technical manuals about agriculture and economics without a guide. I found the mysterious nature of money particularly fascinating, as any young many would, but I perceived that money was a much less valuable thing than wealth.

  Using my own research about such things, I was able to figure out that the talk of British bankers, politicians, and creditors about the importance of internationalism and global markets was a cunning way to drain my own re-sources into their pockets.

  I saw that the economics of tobacco farming (which had been forced on Virginia) made the tobacco farmer dependent on international factors, put his well-being out of his own control.

  INT: What did you do with this knowledge?

  GW: I was in my early 20s. I began experimenting with domestic industry – where I could keep a close eye on things myself. First I tried to grow hemp. (that’s called marijuana today, but I was growing it for rope, not to smoke).
  I was 25. It didn’t work.

  Next I tried to grow flax. I was 28. It didn’t work.

  INT: So not everything automatically succeeded for you.

  GW: No, but because I had been educated to think for himself and not to wait for a teacher to tell me what to do, I kept trying. At 31 I hit on wheat. That first year I sold 257 bushels. The third year 2,600 bushels. The seventh year 7,500 bushels. I built flour mills in various parts of Virginia and marketed my own brand of flour. Just think of it, “George Washington’s Finest Home Grown Flour”, accept no imported substitutes!

  While the wheat business was maturing, I turned my attention to building fishing boats. By 1772 my boats were pulling in 900,000 herring a year.

  INT: It makes you wonder, sir, what our education system is actually teaching our young people.

  GW: Yes, it does. I was no genius, but partly because I got an education and wasn’t compelled to waste all my youth in a government school scheme, I did okay for myself.

  INT: There is no public school in the United States set up to allow a George Washington to happen; an Andrew Carnegie, from a poor family, who was well on his way to becoming rich at age 13 through a combination of hard work and intelligence, would be referred for psychological counseling; a Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed. No doubt about it.

  Thank you Mr. President.

  Quote
  Jeff Peyton

  7/30/2009 at 2:00 pm

• This interview with George Washington (based on an essay by John Taylor Gatto) answers the question: Has school gotten in the way of learning? We have a Calvinistic, joy-suppressing learning culture, and a model copied from the Prussians. Einstein criticized the system, and wrote a letter to the German Ministry of Education asking it to cease testing students. Does a student like George benefit from the social service of institutional schooling?

  Maybe. If it afforded George the room to be himself, to develop his personal talents and resources. If it was a truly freeing and empowering system. If school was not a factory farm hellbent on an academic mission to mars.

  Now imagine George’s Mother and Father driving him over to McDonald’s for his part time job (preparing him for his future). But parents today accept the schools and Mcd’s pretty much as they are, but if they don’t, they remain largely mute anyway because they don’t want to rock the boat.

  The clearest example of this institutional dysfunction is the ugly, horrendous fact of suicide by young people (victims and predators) who get no help from the system and feel so desperate that the only escape is self-destruction. Hovering parents are so consumed by the competitive state of mind of their children in the system; yet in places where bullying thrives (and it is rampant in this country) adults are See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil. We fail children when we believe that a learning culture should provide only one path to success. Academic skills are not the road to empowerment and success in life.

  Since when did schools get into the Social Service Delivery business? When they made the assumption that kids needed to be controlled, compliant, and corralled together. To learn the same thing. (The same now goes for teachers—what happened to intellectual freedom?) Kids in school are forced to relinquish a birthright that animals never give up: the right to learn through Play and explore with adults who support and guide them in the course of learning Human kids are put in Play-deprived environments. (Some grow violent because of this incarceration.) All this in the name of Education. Play is authentic social service. When you bring Play into classrooms, the space in which young interact with one another (and adults share) becomes a habitat. A habitat makes more sense for a free nation. It means we might be able to cultivate more free thinkers and empowered young people like young George

  Quote
  Jeff Peyton

  7/30/2009 at 2:18 pm

• I’m a career public school teacher. In my neck of the woods, Utah valley, public schools educate 95% of the population- and successfully by any standard (I can explain that in more detail if you’d like).

  I would be interested to know how expectations for teachers have changed. Currently, pre-service teachers are expected to learn cognitive science, sociology, psychology, educational technology and a little law in addition to their subject area requirements. And that’s before they begin a near seven-year learning curve for how to actually teach. In American history, were teachers always expected to be as knowledgeable as possible? What kind of training has been required of teachers in the past? Were there different expectations for teachers in different areas?

  Quote
  Brooke Anderson

  7/31/2009 at 2:13 pm

• How has the role of schools changed in relation to changes in the role of parents and the family in a child’s life?

  I was thinking about this in two ways — First, when did school start becoming the site of social service delivery? The whole child theory states that we have to help children deal with a host of issues before they are even in a physical and mental state of readiness to learn anything. This has certainly expanded the scope of what it means to educate a child.

  And then on the other end of the socio-economic spectrum (which I witness often as a parent in Brookline, Mass.), is the phenomenon of the helicopter parent. Have schools had to deal with hyper-involved parents in the past?

  As I teacher, I can tell you that I see two schools of thought in my profession about the role of parents. One, that teachers can never overcome (for good or bad) the family culture that students bring to school with them. That belief places almost total responsibility for the child’s behavior and success on the parent. The other paradigm reasons that teachers must separate their classroom from any negative home culture- that teachers can and should overcome any deficit in parental support. Both schools have thought have a large amount of research backing them up. Personally, I would choose whichever attitude is most useful to your particular population.

  Quote
  Brooke Anderson

  7/31/2009 at 2:21 pm

• I would also be interested to learn more of what constituted a basic education through American history. As a teacher I hear the mantra “back to basics” from different quarters, but what does that mean? It’s usually founded in a belief that the education of yesteryear was superior to the education of today. Is that provable?

  In my classroom, I can’t imagine that a teacher from 20 years ago, much less 50 or 100 years ago would find much that was familiar. Students are expected to use primary documents to learn about history, and compare and contrast viewpoints. I must thank Ed Ayers for his site The Valley of the Shadow- that has been a great resource. My students also compare and contrast Lincoln’s statements about emancipation and colonization over time.

  Students are expected to learn media literacy- especially in regards to the internet. I teach students how to search, evaluate, and cite web sources. They’re also taught how analyze media for bias. Inevitably, we wind up spending some time on logic and logical fallacies (which I guess would resemble classical education in a small way).

  I also focus on teaching students how to spell and read, even though I’m secondary teacher. Rather than giving students list of words, hoping they learn to spell by memorization, I focus on teaching students the patterns in our language. It is not enough in my classroom to know how to spell a word. You must explain why it is spelled that way.

  I’ll stop there. Those are the first three things that came to mind, but that doesn’t cover everything I do in my classroom. Or at least try to do. I wonder if any of those teaching strategies mentioned above would be included in a “back to basics” movement. Are my expectations for my students similar to the expectations of yesteryear? Are they harder or easier?

  Quote
  Brooke Anderson

  7/31/2009 at 2:50 pm

• [...] Has school just gotten  in the way of education? Share your comments and questions! [...]

  My most notable memory of school was the extravagant rhinestone matching jewelry sets she wore, especially the brooches affixed to her broad bosom. However, I did learn a lot in school. Because the teachers did not have time to harass anyone who was quiet, I spent my childhood reading during schools — usually at least a novel a day, often more. Imagine my horror when the new Jr. High School teachers actually forced us to listen in class. By age 15, I was skipping over 90 days a year, due to savage and chronic boredom. Didn’t hurt my grades a bit, either.

  Well-remembered, Kathleen! I think a surprising number of us can still recall the odd sartorial choices made by our elementary school teachers… You raise some interesting questions we hope to address on the show: How much of school is day care and how much truly education? Who and what decided when a standard school year would begin and end (how did it vary regionally)? But what I’m really curious about is how you managed to get away with skipping half the school year? (Note: Don’t try it today, kids. It was different times back then…)

  – Sure, skipping school is not recommended, it is often a prelude to dropping out, which I did. I never finished high school, not that McGill University ever noticed when they admitted me a couple years later.

  Quote
  Kathleen Hulser

  8/11/2009 at 10:12 am

• Hey!
  I just listened to part of this show on WABE Atlanta and wanted to listen to all of it but when I looked it up…I found out it is “still in the works”?!?!
  When will this podcast be posted on itunes or where can I find it otherwise?
  Thanks!
  Great Job, guys!

  Quote
  Elisa

  9/6/2009 at 8:45 pm

• I’m a big fan of Backstory, and as a professional in educational theatre (see Jeff Peyton’s comments above about making learning fun), I was fascinated by your take on the history of public education.

  That said, I’d like to see you re-visit your discussion on the cost-effectiveness of public vs. private schools.

  Private schools like to boast that they get slightly higher test scores at a slightly lower cost per student. Taken by itself, that seems like an impressive accomplishment.

  One of your callers voiced a common question: What are private schools doing so well? How can we replicate their effects for the rest of our kids? In response, you suggested that bureaucracy eats up a lot of public funding. That may be, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. After all, advertising and profit margins have to eat up private funding, too.

  Is there, perhaps, a simpler explanation for those cost-effectiveness statistics?

  Consider this. Some students need remedial classes, some need accelerated classes, some need special one-on-one help, some need extra support, or extra hand-holding, or special nutrition, or extra security guards, and so forth. As a result, it costs more to educate some students than others.

  Private schools operate on a business model. They’re free to pick and choose which students to accept, so it stands to reason they’ll only take the kids who they think will give them the best test scores for the least expense.

  Public schools, on the other hand, are required by law to accept almost everyone, gifted and troubled alike.

  Is it really so impressive to have a cost-effective school when you’re free to cherry-pick the most cost-effective students?

  Is it any wonder public school teachers have to play police officer and surrogate parent when our system keeps sending them the kids who need them to play those roles?

  Is it any wonder that public schools “keep getting worse” when we keep siphoning away the kids who could have been positive role models for their troubled peers?

  Would a universal voucher system mean better outcomes for everyone? Or, combined with choosy private schools, would “universal” vouchers just mean giving up on the kids who need the most help to excel–arguably, the same poor kids that public schools were created to help more than a century ago?

  Quote
  Steve Anderson

  9/21/2009 at 11:51 am

• An excellent program!

  Do you know if any educational historians have researched the effectiveness of “old-fashioned” public schools of the 1920s to 1950s in comparison with school of the 1960s and thereafter? I wonder whether the old schools, with their harsh discipline and rote methods, outperformed current schools, or if nostalgia has cast a rosy glow over a system that didn’t work very well. Many of our kids reach middle school and even high school as functional illiterates–so everything is lost on them because they simply can’t read. I wonder if literacy rates were better under the old regime.

  Quote
  Henry Wiencek

  10/30/2009 at 8:16 am

• An excellent program!

  Do you know if any educational historians have researched the effectiveness of “old-fashioned” public schools of the 1920s to 1950s in comparison with school of the 1960s and thereafter? I wonder whether the old schools, with their harsh discipline and rote methods, outperformed current schools, or if nostalgia has cast a rosy glow over a system that didn’t work very well. Many of our kids reach middle school and even high school as functional illiterates–so everything is lost on them because they simply can’t read. I wonder if literacy rates were better under the old regime.

  Dear Henry:

  It’s Jonathan Zimmerman, author of \Small Wonder\ and one of the interviewees for this segment. Thanks for the thoughtful query. The short answer is that we really don’t know how kids in earlier eras \performed\ compared to today, because both the measures and the stakes of \performance\ have changed radically. Remember, it wasn’t until the 1930s that a majority of American teenagers attended high school . . . and it wasn’t until the 1950s that a majority graduated. Formal education was *not* a prerequisite for social and economic mobility, the way it is today. So millions of kids didn’t go to high school; millions of others went for a little bit, and then dropped out. Those who remained represented an elite, of sorts. Would they have outperformed high school kids today? On some measures, including math, we have scattered evidence that they would have; again, though, the comparison isn’t really fair, because we’re comparing a growing but still limited institution to a truly mass one.

  And on the subject of history, which is the one I know best, there is *no* evidence that kids in in the past knew any more than they do today. Quite the contrary. In 1917 and again in 1942–both wartime years, and therefore times of national anxiety–the New York Times ran exposes about how few kids could identify the proper decade of the Civil War, or the right year of the Constitutional Convention. Sound familiar? It should.

  Thanks again for the smart note!

  Fondly, JZ

  Jonathan Zimmerman
  Professor of Education and History
  New York University

  Quote
  Jonathan Zimmerman

  11/3/2009 at 4:05 pm

• Thanks very much for your reply. There is a very interesting article in the NY Review of Books (November 19, 2009), “Dreams of Better Schools,” by Andrew Delbanco, reviewing “The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools” by E.D. Hirsch Jr., and “Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us” by Mike Rose.

  The article mentions that in a 1998 survey, “barely 40 percent of American teenagers could identify the three branches of government, while nearly 60 percent knew the names of the Three Stooges.”

  Quote
  Henry Wiencek

  11/5/2009 at 10:01 am

• …The article mentions that in a 1998 survey, “barely 40 percent of American teenagers could identify the three branches of government, while nearly 60 percent knew the names of the Three Stooges.”

  As a follow-up to Jonathan’s point about the familiar tone that hand-wringing through the ages has taken, see Stanford ed school scholar Sam Wineburg: http://tinyurl.com/y9v4f7h
  Or this, courtesy of the NYT in 1943: http://tinyurl.com/yedtsgf

  Thanks for writing, Henry…

  Quote
  Tony (BackStory Producer)

  11/5/2009 at 1:31 pm

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

• Back Story on Public Education « Teaching American History in SW Washington :

  [...] Has school just gotten  in the way of education? Share your comments and questions! [...]

  Quote -- June 2, 2009 @ 10:26 am
• A Trip to the One Room Schoolhouse « Mr Daniel's 4th Grade Class :

  [...] great podcast from Back Story on the history of American schools and a great segment on one room [...]

  Quote -- September 4, 2010 @ 10:15 am
• School Days: Further Reading | BackStory with the American History Guys :

  [...] The following links and documents relate to the BackStory episode “School Days: A History of Public Education”, originally broadcast in September of 2009. You can listen to the entire episode here. [...]

  Quote -- September 13, 2011 @ 4:43 pm
• Podcasts: Theological, Technological, Economical, and Comical « 81 Inches :

  [...] America (respectively) look at current events in light of American history. You might check out School Days: A History of Public Education to get [...]

  Quote -- October 6, 2011 @ 8:36 am

Leave a Reply