Peggy's Musings

Education is Powerful

I’ve had a life-long interest in issues related to education, along with the inevitable concerns that come with paying attention to what’s happening in this area and how it affects our future. Most of my focus has been on education here in the U.S., but for the past few years I’ve had a growing interest in what’s happening in other countries – especially when it comes to educating girls.

A lot of my interest in education around the world is due to having read Greg Mortenson’s two books about his efforts (and successes) in building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I read “Three Cups of Tea” a few years ago and have just finished reading his newest, “Stones into Schools.”

For those who don’t know the story of Greg Mortenson’s path to this work, it began in 1993 when had a serious accident while mountain climbing in the Himalayans and was rescued and nursed back to health by a group of people in a small Pakistani village in the area. During his recovery, he came to learn about their extreme poverty, the Islamic extremism, and lack of education.

He also learned of the strong wish of parents to be able to educate their children and the desperate desire of children, especially girls, to be able to learn. This led to his commitment to work to provide educational opportunities for Central Asian children, particularly young girls. The impact of this work goes far beyond just the education of who would be girls attending school for the first time. As he explains, “when you educate a girl, you educate a community.”

So he spent a great deal of time (and, according to custom, drank enormous amounts of tea) in the process of gaining the respect and support of the leaders in many villages in the area. Then he began attacking the challenge of raising money, gradually developing an organization and enlisting on-the-ground local people to oversee the work. The result is that he has won over hearts as well as minds during the past 11 years, during which time 131 schools have been built in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The American military wound up taking note of his effectiveness in changing attitudes and pulling people away from their old allegiances that were often aligned against the U.S. In fact, last year Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended the opening of one of new schools to see firsthand what a difference this effort was making in the lives – and the attitudes - of the people.

Admiral Mullen brought some media with him on the trip, one of whom was Thomas Friedman, op-ed columnist for the New York Times. Friedman had a strong interest in these issues as well – not only in those countries, but in Yemen as well. In fact, he wrote a column February 9, 2010, titled ‘It’s All About Schools.’ In this report from Yemen, he said:

“So here is my new rule of thumb: For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.”

So the issue of educating children in these far-flung areas of the world is important not only for improving their lives, but also for the safety and well-being of ALL children. The interconnected world in which our children will live in the future cries out for our attention to this effort. We’re only beginning to see just how powerful education (or the lack of it) can be.

For more information about Greg Mortenson’s work, see the website of his non-profit organization,
Central Asia Institute (CAI). From there you will find links to more information about the Institute as well as his two books – which I highly recommend.

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

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.

Information-Knowledge-Wisdom

For over 25 years I have saved an article that provides some of the most relevant perspective about learning (and education) that I’ve ever seen. I don’t recall the source, but I do know it’s even more relevant today than it was back then.

We’ve heard for a long time that we now live in an ‘information society.’ In fact, we’re inundated with information – and more is at our fingertips through Google or some other search function on the Internet. Unfortunately, learning facts (‘information’) has been the foundation of our education system. But as the world continues to change at an accelerated rate, we need to educate our students for a lifetime of learning.

To pick up on the main point in the article, information is just a ‘resource.’ Alone, it doesn’t provide the kind of knowledge that we need to address the problems and challenges we all face every day – as individuals and members of a global society.

In addition, even ‘knowledge’ is not the ultimate goal of our learning and our education. In order to make the best use of our information and knowledge, we need to integrate it into a more meaningful, relevant whole – to achieve ‘wisdom.’

Here’s an overview of the differences between information, knowledge and wisdom.

Information is the raw material. It’s the sum total of all the facts and ideas that are available to be known by somebody at a given moment in time.

Knowledge is the result of somebody taking the mass of facts and ideas and selecting and organizing what is useful to somebody.

Wisdom is integrated knowledge – information made far more useful by crossing disciplinary barriers to weave into an integrated whole something more than the sum of the parts.

Here’s a description of a cartoon strip that illustrates how this process might have worked back in caveman days:

Information: The caveman looks around and gathers facts as to what things he finds in his environment: grass, dirt, rabbits, wolves, clouds providing rainfall, etc.

Knowledge: The caveman puts together the separate pieces of information: rabbits eat grass… grass grows in soil… rain falls from clouds… wolves eat rabbits… etc.

Wisdom: The caveman recognizes that if he kills off all the wolves, the rabbits will eat up the grass, and the soil will all wash away in the rain.

This simple example demonstrates the need to integrate all the information we teach in schools – in order to be prepared to organize data that can be used in any situation that may arise in the future.

So while we need to begin with information, it’s important to learn how to get information and USE it than to just memorize facts. While some schools go well beyond imparting information to learn how it’s applicable to real-life situations, there needs to be much more emphasis on integrating the facts and less on the facts themselves. In other words, we need to become better skilled at how to USE the information we learn in school.

We can’t possibly teach all the facts that a child will need throughout their lives. But if we can teach them how to learn, they’ll be set for life.

This kind of idea is well-expressed in the old saying attributed to Confucius:
“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

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

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.

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.

Educating ALL our Children

I just watched a 3-hour presentation by Jonathan Kozol – who, for many years has been the strongest advocate for equal education for ALL our children. This renewed my longstanding interest and grave concern about the discrepancy in the quality of educational opportunities in this country.

The fact is that children who live in upscale communities with high real estate tax rates get to go to excellent schools that offer all kinds of ‘extras’ – while those children who live in poverty-ridden communities with low real estate tax rates must settle for schools that do not even offer the ‘basics!’

Those of us who only see the better schools can’t fully appreciate the damaging impact on children who go to the many poor schools in this country. Most of the schools that are without basic needs are in inner city areas, primarily affecting people of color. So this inequality in education winds up also being inequality based on race.

Although the Pledge of Allegince of the U.S. promotes “Liberty and Freedom for all,” this simply isn’t possible without also pledging to support “equal education for all.” The degree to which a person is able to realize their full potential in life depends in large part on receiving a good education. Of course, we can all point to some ‘success stories’ where people have overcome dire educational opportunities. But they are the exceptions, and we hear about them specifically because they are the exception.

The general concern for the well-being of children has led the U.S. to provide many programs to help children learn and grow – such as Head Start programs, School Lunch programs, Children’s Health initiatives, etc. However, all these efforts just nibble around the edges of the huge ‘elephant in the room:’ the disparity in basic educational opportunities - based primarily on economic differences.

I want to repeat what I have written in the past:
"Focusing only on the alternatives available to each of us personally (like the ability to live in a nicer area of town, pay for a private school or get a school voucher) leaves those who are not able to do these things even worse off than before. [If we] allocated education monies based on an equal amount per student, it could be the first step to addressing not only the problem with public education, but the human problem for those who fail to receive an education—and the impact of their failure on all of us.”

The bottom line is that providing equality in education is not just the ‘right’ thing to do; it’s also the ‘smart’ thing to do. So I hope we can move beyond thinking only of whatever immediate impact this issue has on each of us personally to focusing on the much larger societal problems that result from our joint failure to provide a quality education for ALL our children.

To become better informed about the whole issue of lack of equity in public education, please check out the many books written by Jonathan Kozol.

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

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.

Using your Whole Brain

I read two articles this week in USA Today that focused on the importance of using ‘both sides of your brain’ in order to succeed in the world today. (I’ll provide links to the articles at the bottom of this piece.) The articles presented a brief overview of some of the ideas in a book I read a few months ago called "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. (I’ll also provide a link to this book.)

This is not a NEW concept. It’s just that it has taken a long time for it to be taken more seriously within the education system. I've been interested in combining right/left brain learning in education for a long time. About 30 years ago I made a presentation to the teachers at the high school my children were attending at that time that focused on the importance of ‘whole-brain learning.’ I even wrote a song about 'using both sides of the brain' which I included in that presentation. I also included an article (with the lyrics to that song) in my book, "Musing on Life."

Here’s an excerpt from my earlier writing about this issue, including the lyrics to my song:

“I’m concerned that today’s formal education is more about studying for tests than about learning. In fact, in today’s world where so much information is available at your fingertips through the Internet, a strong case can be made for placing much less emphasis on memorizing facts and much more attention on the processes of thinking, organizing, problem-solving, recognizing patterns, and finding meaning and significance. In other words, in such a fast-moving world, we need to focus less on learning facts and more on ‘learning how to learn.’

“For many years I’ve saved an anonymous quote titled “On School.”
--Very little of what is taught in school is learned.
--Very little of what is learned is remembered.
--Very little of what is remembered is used.

“But I don’t think it has to be that way. In fact, here are the words to a little song I wrote about 30 years ago and sang for the teachers of my kids’ school at that time. I called it “How’s Your Education.”

“How’s your education?
Have you learned your ABC’s?
Learned your reading, writing and arithmetic
and all those things that please?

Well that’s a good beginning
for the left side of your brain,
but there’s another side to learning
And that’s the one I want to explain.

You see the left side works by reason
and rationality,
and it does all the talking
for everyone, both you and me.

But the right side is important
though it never says a word.
You see it’s silent and observant
with a still, small voice that’s never heard.

So we tend to forget it
no matter how it tries.
We use the 3 R’s of our left side
and forget the right’s 3 I’s.

The first is Intuition,
then Ingenuity,
and then Imagination
to be the best that we can be.

So if we want a lot of learning
we’ll use both sides of our brain,
and we’ll plan our education
so that both of them we train.”

While there are still practical barriers to implementing some of these ideas into the school system, the nature of the world today makes it evident that this combination of left-brain linear thinking and right-brain creative thinking is absolutely essential to success.

Finally, here are the two articles about this issue in USA Today:
Economic success? It's all in your head
The line for brains forms on the right

And here’s the book: A Whole New Mind

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

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.