Peggy's Musings

Educating All our Children

I just saw a very uplifting movie – based on a true story. While it’s primarily the personal story of one young man named Michael Oher, it includes a powerful message on the importance of educating all our children - despite what may appear to be overwhelming odds against some of them succeeding.

The movie is “The Blind Side,” based on Michael Lewis’s book of the same name. It recounts the story of a 15-year-old homeless black youth who was taken in and adopted by a white family in the deep South who made it possible for him to get the kind of education that had previously been unavailable to him. He completed high school, went to college, graduating from Ole Miss, then was drafted by the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens this season. (I have a link at the bottom of this piece to more information about his life.)

The film does not trace his entire journey; it focuses on his early years. Also, the film did not detail his school experience 'prior' to the time he finally got to go to a good school. But it does show the difference it makes when you have teachers who ‘go the extra mile’ as well as (in this case) the opportunity to have access to a tutor. The movie also doesn’t tell about the ‘changes’ in his IQ - which is included in the book.

Below is an excerpt from a story reported by Star Parker for Scripps Howard News Service:

“He’d been in 11 different schools. The public schools were pushing him through to get rid of him, not to educate him. His records showed that in ninth grade he missed 50 days of school, yet he was passed. By his senior year, making a final push to get his grade-point average to meet NCAA standards for college admission, they took him to psychologists for intelligence testing. They found, incredibly, that in his few years at Briarcrest, his IQ increased almost 30 points. When he was admitted, his IQ measured 80. Now tests showed him as between 100 and 110. This, according to Lewis [author Michael Lewis] ‘wasn’t supposed to happen. IQ was meant to be a given, like the size of one’s feet.’ The psychologists were dumbfounded.”
(See the bottom of this piece for a link to the entire article.)

The fact that IQ is not ‘fixed’ has been known by brain researches for many years, but the old thinking about IQ is finally being challenged by the education system itself. One of the many books making this point is “Einstein Never Used Flashcards" by three Ph.D.’s, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, and Eyer, in which they say: “IQ and other test scores provide a narrow view of intelligence.”

Many people are now speaking out about the faults and failures of our education system and the need for serious reform. On November 28, 2009, Bob Herbert, New York Times, wrote:
“We still have a hideously dysfunctional public education system, one that has mastered the art of manufacturing dropouts and functional illiterates. We have not even begun to turn that around.”

There is now a new effort to overhaul our education system to make it better serve all our children. The depth of the challenge was the focus of the TV program, ‘Meet the Press,’ November 15, 2009, featuring Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democrat Al Sharpton. Duncan stated the problem as: “We have a time of educational, academic crisis. We have 1.2 million dropouts a year in this country.” This group is on a multicity tour of public schools with the mission to find out what works, what needs to change and what students themselves expect.

There are other efforts that are producing excellent results as well. Here’s a quote from Carl Honore’s book, “In Praise of Slowness, Challenging the Cult of Speed:”
“Rudolf Steiner pioneered a brand of education that… eschewed rigid timetables that forced pupils to hop from subject to subject at the whim of the clock, preferring to let them study a topic until they felt ready to move on. Today, the number of Steiner-inspired schools around the world is over eight hundred, and rising.

And one of the most impressive turnarounds in educational success is the story of Prep Public Charter School, Detroit, MI, called Uprep University, led by Amber Arellano. The school has 512 students - chosen through a blind lottery process, and the results prove that any child can succeed; it’s not about poverty or ethnicity, but opportunity and support. Here’s the proof:
100% of seniors graduated in 2008. (94% went to college )
In all Detroit schools, only 32% graduate.

It’s not enough for us to be satisfied that our own children or grandchildren may have excellent educational opportunities. In a country like the U.S., we can do much better at seeing that ALL our children are educated in ways that allow them to succeed personally as well as make significant contributions to our overall way of life.

Nothing I can write here is likely to be as motivating to care about this situation and want to do something about it as reading the book and/or seeing the movie, “The Blind Side.” So I encourage everyone to put that on your priority list. By the way, the ‘blind side’ refers to the fact that the task of an offensive lineman (like Michael Oher's position as left tackle) is to protect the quarterback’s blind side from the pass rusher.

You can read the entire article from which I excerpted above at:
'The Blind Side' should trouble as well as inspire.

For more of the details about Michael Oher’s unlikely life, see his listing on Wikipedia.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOTE: If you enjoy these blog posts, please check out the list of 107 similar 'musings' (and read 8 of them) included in my book Musings on Life.

---