“By removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.”
~ Sal Khan, of Khan Academy
This 39-minute film about a school in south Tel Aviv gets my vote for best Oscar-nominated documentary short subject. The principal and teachers of Bialik-Rogozin School enthusiastically embrace the challenges of educating children from all over the world, many of whom have experienced extraordinary violence, loss, and displacement. It is a remarkable and inspiring study of resilience nurtured by providing a safe environment, finding common ground in the midst of dizzying diversity, and igniting passion for learning.
Strangers No More Movie Trailer - Bialik Rogozin School from Simon & Goodman Picture Co. on Vimeo.
My brother, David, works for Communities in Schools in Wichita, Kansas. He and my nephews, 
Food 4 Kids foodbags contain healthy, kid-friendly snacks that require no preparation such as:
“Because the most essential school supply is food.”
Lyrics from Shine
by John Legend, for the documentary Waiting for “Superman”
So dark, but I see sparks, if we don't snuff them out.
We gotta let them flame, let them speak their name.
Let them reach up to the clouds.
Can't eat if we don't feed them.
Can't read if we don't teach them.
There's no line if we just hide them.
Don't just let them die.
Let them shine.
Let them shine on.
Let them shine.
Let them shine on.
Stars flicker in the distance, lonely out in space.
They sing out when we're not listening, because we don't see their face.
We can let them die, we can make them high.
Hold the little miracles that live inside.
Let them shine.
“Kids will take a chance and if they don’t know they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said that ‘All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.’ I believe this passionately. We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”
“This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.”
Excerpt from “What Oman Can Teach Us,” by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, October 13, 2010:
Many researchers have found links between rising education and reduced conflict. One study published in 2006, for example, suggested that a doubling of primary school enrollment in a poor country was associated with halving the risk of civil war. Another found that raising the average educational attainment in a country by a single grade could significantly reduce the risk of conflict.
Sorry if this emphasis on education sounds like a cliché. It’s widely acknowledged in theory, and President Obama pledged as a candidate that he would start a $2 billion global education fund. But nothing has come of it. Instead, he’s spending 50 times as much this year alone on American troops in Afghanistan — even though military solutions don’t have as good a record in trouble spots as education does.
The pattern seems widespread: Everybody gives lip service to education, but nobody funds it.
Two of six excellent letters of advice to new college students from “Ditch Your Laptop, Dump Your Boyfriend,” New York Times, September 25, 2010:
Take classes in many different subjects before picking your major. Try lots of different clubs and activities. Make friends with people who grew up much poorer than you, and others much richer. Date someone of a different race or religion. (And no, hooking up at a party doesn’t count.) Spend a semester abroad or save up and go backpacking in Europe or Asia.
Somewhere in your childhood is a gaping hole. Fill this hole. Don’t know what classical music is all about? That’s bad. Don’t know who Lady Gaga is? That’s worse. If you were raised in a protected cocoon, this is the time to experience the world beyond.
College is also a chance to learn new things about yourself. Never been much of a leader? Try forming a club or a band.
The best things I did in college all involved explorations like this. I was originally a theater major but by branching out and taking a math class I discovered I actually liked math, and I enjoyed hanging out with technical people.
By dabbling in leadership — I ran the math club and directed a musical — I learned how to formulate a vision and persuade people to join me in bringing it to life. Now I’m planning to become an entrepreneur after graduate school. It may seem crazy, but it was running a dinky club that set me on the path to seeing myself as someone who could run a business.
Try lots of things in college. You never know what’s going to stick.
— TIM NOVIKOFF, Ph.D. student in applied mathematics at Cornell
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UCLA professor Mike Rose from “The Meaning of Intelligence,” a conversation with Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith, August 26, 2010:
Or another angle on it is, I want to find out more about what didn't happen in their educations that made them do poorly on that test or in their life experience.
So let's take the IQ test…If someone does well on an IQ test, that certainly tells us something, right? They've got some smarts; there's no doubt about it.
But think of the folks who might not do so well on those kinds of tests because they didn't have a lot of formal schooling — and everybody admits that there's a direct correlation between amount of formal schooling and how well you do on tests like that. There's an intimate connection between those two things. So they didn't have a lot of formal schooling. They haven't had a lot of experience taking those kinds of tests.
They also don't invest as much in them. Those of us who have been through a ton of schooling, we've been socialized to know that when one of those things appears in front of us, we better try our damnedest to do well on it.
So there's all kinds of reasons through which we can explain somebody not doing so well on a test like that, reasons other than some intellectual deficiency. So then I say I'm interested in, well, gee, what happens when we go out into the world with this person and we watch them work, let's say, or we watch them raise kids, or we watch them figure out how to make their way through the day or some complicated social relationships. What emerges that bespeaks of intelligence? What goes on right under our noses that bespeaks of some kind of smarts?
Or the hairstylist who is presented with someone who comes in and they have a botched dye 
And what an interesting problem-solving road that takes her down. Now those kinds of things are not going to be picked up on an IQ instrument. They're not structured to get to that stuff. But those are certainly manifestations of intelligence.
Excerpt from “The Creativity Crisis,” by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, Newsweek (July 10, 2010):
In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.
From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.
They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function. Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity—not having loads of it—is the real risk factor. In his research, Runco asks college students, “Think of all the things that could interfere with graduating from college.” Then he instructs them to pick one of those items and to come up with as many solutions for that problem as possible. This is a classic divergent-convergent creativity challenge. A subset of respondents, like the proverbial Murphy, quickly list every imaginable way things can go wrong. But they demonstrate a complete lack of flexibility in finding creative solutions. It’s this inability to conceive of alternative approaches that leads to despair. Runco’s two questions predict suicide ideation—even when controlling for preexisting levels of depression and anxiety.
In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.
There’s an orthodoxy of style at MFA programs, and it’s a style that turns me off. It’s the stone soup parable. Lots of people who don’t really know what they’re doing tear your work to shreds. No matter how robust you are, it has to be a painful experience and change your work, and probably not in a good way. I’m all in favor of grad school for surgeons and car mechanics, but less so as we get towards art, where I don’t think it does much good.”
~ Zachary Mason, computer scientist and author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, from “Trojan Horse in Silicon Valley,” by Hara Estroff Marano, Psychology Today, May/June 2010
“Children—and humans, everybody—all need both windows and mirrors in their lives: mirrors through which you can see yourself and windows through which you can see the world. And minority children have not had mirrors.
That has placed them at a disadvantage. If you want to call white children majority children—[they] have had only mirrors. That has placed them at a disadvantage also…Because they live on a planet that is more window than mirror. And they have tended to believe that the planet is a planet like them or people who wish to be like them. And it’s not necessarily so.
It’s a mistake to believe oneself one’s only valid participator in life, that that is the standard, the standard for human is white. I tell children the standard for flowers is many-colored; the standard for all kinds of things is many-colored. That is also the standard for humans, though they have not been taught that.”
~ Lucille Clifton, from “She Could Tell You Stories,” interview by Hilary Holladay, Poetry Foundation (April 11, 1998)
Excerpt from ''How Christian Were the Founders?” by Russell Shorto, New York Times (February 11, 2009):
…The [Texas school] board has the power to accept, reject or rewrite the [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills], and over the past few years, in language arts, science and now social studies, the members have done all of the above. Yet few of these elected overseers are trained in the fields they are reviewing. “In general, the board members don’t know anything at all about content,” Tom Barber, the textbook executive, says. Kathy Miller, the watchdog, who has been monitoring the board for 15 years, says, referring to Don McLeroy and another board member: “It is the most crazy-making thing to sit there and watch a dentist and an insurance salesman rewrite curriculum standards in science and history. Last year, Don McLeroy believed he was smarter than the National Academy of Sciences, and he now believes he’s smarter than professors of American history.”
In this case, one board member sent an e-mail message with a reference to “Ethical Marxism,” by Bill Martin, to another board member, who suggested that anyone who wrote a book with such a title did not belong in the TEKS. As it turned out, Bill Martin and Bill Martin Jr. are two different people. But by that time, the author of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” was out. “That’s a perfect example of these people’s lack of knowledge,” Miller says. “They’re coming forward with hundreds of amendments at the last minute. Don McLeroy had a four-inch stack of amendments, and they all just voted on them, whether or not they actually knew the content. What we witnessed in January was a textbook example of how not to develop textbook standards.”
Excerpts from “The University’s Crisis of Purpose,” by Drew Gilpin Faust, New York Times (September 1, 2009):
…
Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.
…
Since the 1970s there has been a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees. Business is now by far the most popular undergraduate major, with twice as many bachelor’s degrees awarded in this area than in any other field of study. In the era of economic constraint before us, the pressure toward vocational pursuits is likely only to intensify.
As a nation, we need to ask more than this from our universities. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.
Excerpts from “College Advice, From People Who Have Been There Awhile,” Week in Review, New York Times (September 6, 2009):
I give this advice with some trepidation because too many writing courses today teach everything but the craft of writing and are instead the vehicles of the instructor’s social and political obsessions. In the face of what I consider a dereliction of pedagogical duty, I can say only, “Buyer beware.” If your writing instructor isn’t teaching writing, get out of that class and find someone who is.
From "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?" by Louis Menand, The New Yorker (June 8, 2009)
Excerpts from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address which has been recently published by Little, Brown under the title This is Water:
...a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
...Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education—least in my own case—is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
...And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
...But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving...The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
...It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over.
"This is water."
"This is water."
“If you wanted to create an education environment that was 
~ Dr. John Medina, from Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war."
From The Writer's Almanac (8.31.08):
"...today there are more than 5,000 Montessori schools in the United States, 300 of which are public schools. A study in 2006 published in the journal Science tested public school children in inner-city Milwaukee, some who had won a district lottery to attend the public Montessori school, and a separate control group who had entered the Montessori lottery but did not get picked. (This was to account for differences in home environment between the sorts of parents who want their children to attend Montessori; in this study, every participant's parents had wanted their child to enroll in Montessori.)"
"The study showed that five-year-olds who attended Montessori had better vocabulary and math skills, as well as better social problem-solving skills — that when presented with stories of behavior dilemmas, Montessori children used 'a higher level of reasoning by referring to justice or fairness to convince the other child' to share. Twelve-year-old Montessori children were deemed to have written essays that were 'significantly more creative' and that employed 'significantly more sophisticated sentence structures' than their non-Montessori peers, though their spelling and grammar skills were at an equal level."
Daron Larson
Freelance Contemplative
