Success Requires Character by Robert Freeman

A Teacher’s Suggestion for How to Improve Our Schools
By Robert Freeman

Mark Twain once famously wrote, “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” He may just as well have been talking about education.

We’ve tried smaller class sizes, standardized curriculum, more testing, better teacher training, longer school years, charters, technology, and, of course, that perennial elixir, more money. Nothing seems to work.

The reason is that all of these “fixes” assume that the student is a “product,” something to be built, tested, and packaged for use. They overlook the two most critical things that matter in education: that character is more important than content; and that it is the student—much more than the teacher or school—who ultimately determines success.

Until our reform efforts reflect those two realities, all of our efforts will only deliver more frustration and failure.

The idea that character is more important than knowledge is readily understood by most parents. It is character that parents are inculcating when they remind their child, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

A child with strong character will find the way to whatever knowledge he or she desires or needs. He will be much more easy to teach and able and willing to learn, no matter what the grade or subject.

The reverse is equally true: knowledge without character is impotent or, worse, malevolent. Weak or conflicted character becomes its own worst enemy, both in school and in life. We’ve all seen the wreckage of “brilliant failures.”

What does this say about how we should reform our schools?

First, we need to cultivate high standards of character at least as much as we do high standards of content. Honesty, discipline, compassion, patience, perseverance, self-respect and regard for others will not only help the student excel in school, they will serve the student for her entire life.

Academic content should be used as a vehicle for cultivating character. How many of us remember our trigonometry, our chemistry, or our French verb conjugations? Virtually none of us.

What we remember is how to stay with a problem, how to meet deadlines, how to present our work with pride, how to ask for help if we need it, and how to help others when they need it. With these skills, any discipline can be mastered. Without them, none can.

Second, teachers need to model the primacy of character over content and cultivate this knowledge in their students. It is not what I say that speaks to the child, it is what I do. This is the same as in parenting, isn't it?

If I am an engaged teacher, interested in each student's welfare, curious about the world, passionate about my subject, and embodying integrity and dignity in all of my acts, the children will see it. They will know it and they will esteem it. It is not so much what I teach that they learn, it is what I am.

Finally, we need to enlist the students as active participants in the development of their own characters. They’re not products on an assembly line, receiving bolted-on, prepackaged knowledge components, though too often our schools work as if that were the case.

Students need to understand that character is both the means and the end of a good education and that it is they who are most responsible for it. With that in hand, and with a supportive teacher, content comes easily, no matter what field the student chooses to pursue. It is who they choose to become that will define their success in life, much more so than what they choose to be.

Focusing on character enables students to transcend the limitations of race which is too often an excuse for student underacheivement. Race is a trap, for students can never change theirs. But they can build stronger characters every day and with them, be effective in any circumstance and in any society.

Information? Knowledge? Intellect? These, of course, are critical in today's hyper-competitive world. But they are actually the easiest things to teach and measure. It is the deeper elements of character that are more elusive, harder to cultivate and so much more valuable: How do you discern good Information from bad? What Knowledge is it you aspire to? How do you use Intellect wisely?

It is these gifts that will stand the test of time, that will bear fruits of self-respect, confidence, and ease with oneself in the world. These are the true ends and the true measures of education and it to these that we need to direct our impulses for reform.

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Robert Freeman teaches economics and history at Los Altos High School. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a non-profit that asks American high school students to give one dollar and uses those funds to build schools in the developing world.

Competing Models for Public EducationWhich Model is Best?
by Robert Freeman

Cultures live by their models. They die by them as well. Ulysses spawned ancient Greece. Horatio Alger defined rags-to-riches America. Rambo epitomized the 1980's. When it comes to education, our models are not people but, rather, ideas.

Our seeming schizophrenia about education can be understood as the struggle between two different models, two competing sets of ideas. One model views schools as a process of cultural birth, of bringing forth a new generation of children who will carry on - replicate - the culture. The other model views schools as a machine, an industrial process not unlike an assembly line. Its purpose is to mass produce "factors of production," well trained, obedient inputs that can be used in the manufacture of wealth.

Not surprisingly, these competing models produce radically different prescriptions for how to improve our schools. The differences show up in everything from how to pay and retain good teachers to curriculum design, teaching methods, and discipline. In order to improve our schools, getting the model right will prove not nearly so important as getting the right model.

Mass public education in America was conceived and designed as a production process. In the late 1800's, millions of farmers and immigrants were arriving in American cities in search of their mythic riches. The challenge for the country's leaders was how to at once assimilate these teeming masses to both American culture and industrial society.

The answer was simple: students would be moved from station to station, hour by hour, year by year, and fitted with various types of "knowledge." It was not unlike moving a car through a factory while bolting on engines, axles, and wheels, only, the "parts" were literacy, vocational skills, and citizenship.

In addition to its physical process, the factory model has an economic side as well: capitalism. Adam Smith, capitalism's patron saint, was in awe of Isaac Newton's model of the universe as a big machine. He determined to apply Newton's idea to social life and so, in 1776, wrote The Wealth of Nations, the book that ultimately became the Bible of capitalism. Where Newton's world was made up of planets in motion, Smith's was composed of consumers in motion.

In each world, fundamental forces-gravity in one, greed in the other-held things together in a balanced, harmonious whole. But where Newton had centrifugal force to balance gravity, Smith had to invent a theological agency to moderate the destructive excesses of greed: The Invisible Hand.

It is not an accident that calls to "reform" schools, to make them more "efficient," almost always come from business interests. They not only have long experience with the factory model but an abiding need for cost effective "inputs" as well. They also see education as a business opportunity in itself, a chance to cash in on the half trillion dollars a year spent on public education in America. They wouldn't be good capitalists if they didn't at least make a try for it.

The other model of education - call it the cultural womb - we can trace back to Plato's Academy and up through the universities of medieval Europe. It views the student not as a factor of production to be assembled and put to work, but as a human being to be nurtured and set to thinking. Its primary goal is not mass production of vocational competence but rather individual cultivation of human maturity.

In the cultural womb model, society replicates itself by creating thoughtful human beings who will carry its "cultural DNA" into succeeding generations. It is those thoughtful human beings who embody and therefore model society's values for those who come after them. This concept of education as cultural womb could not be more different from that of the school as a factory.

Clearly, American education today is more factory than womb. But it is a towering irony that it was saved from becoming a completely de-humanizing process by the "factory workers" themselves: the teachers. In the beginning, they were overwhelmingly women. They were natural nurturers, instinctively able to shelter their students from the cold, harsh depersonalization of the machine process. It was the teachers, both women and men, who, through their simple humanity, bridged the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between factory and womb. It was the teachers who birthed generation after generation of productive workers AND thoughtful human beings. It was they who may have saved society itself from destruction at the hands of its own ideational schizophrenia.

All of us know the difference between organisms and machines. We would think it insane to put dirt into our engines or motor oil onto our plants. Yet we've become so captivated with the machine model we no longer know when it is appropriate or not. We can no longer understand that in some settings it is simply destructive. Most of the calls for "educational reform" today would have us do what we intuitively recoil from: make our schools even more machine-like, even more relentlessly mechanical.

The "reformers" want to make schools into businesses, profit-making educational factories stripped of the very humanizing sheltering that saved such factories from themselves in the first place. In the emerging industrial model of education, standardization is everything. No matter that all children are different, that all learn in different ways and at different rates. Learning is not about thinking but memorization. Imagination is replaced by regurgitation. Tests become totems to be taught to. Efficiency becomes the iconic measure of performance where out-of-spec. "products" are discarded. Questioning is replaced by obedience. Freedom succumbs to fealty.

Worst of all, the teachers are expected to become industrial robots, dutifully bolting on prefab knowledge components while remaining subservient and docile. No more guiding the strongest, succoring the weakest, while inspiring the rest. The compassion, empathy, and love of human growth that led teachers to education in the first place, that humanized an otherwise dispiriting process, is winnowed out and replaced with regimentation, routine, and reverence for return on investment. And it is not enough to hope that its greed-driven mechanism might be moderated by an "Invisible Hand," no matter how Providentially inspired. If it is not mitigated, balanced by an intentional, palpable Visible Hand of nurturing, encouragement, and compassion, the school-as-factory will simply chew up its inputs, making cogs, parts, and Frankenstein-like assemblies of human beings.

What kind of society, what kind of humanity, could such people-as-products reproduce? For, let's not forget: society still needs to replicate itself. But factories cannot do that. Only wombs can. As a society, we've become besotted with the language of costs and benefits, as if everybody was a commodity whose highest purpose in life was to be put to work. In our thrall to mechanism, we have already destroyed a formerly vibrant public health system so that businesses could earn more profits by letting accountants make "cost-effective" medical decisions.

And we stand now in danger of destroying the most powerful democratizing institution in the world-public education-and for the same reason as well: so that private interests can make a profit off of it. It will be a fateful, perhaps irreversible decision. Remember: cultures live by their models but they die by them as well. In the debate over how to improve public education we would be wise to listen not to the "educational entrepreneurs", the accountants, the politicians, or the ideologues.

We would be wise to listen to the teachers. It is the teachers who already saved public education once from the worst depredations of its inner machine. Not only is it the teachers who know education best, it is they who care about it most. For it is one thing to commit your investors' money to an enterprise. It is another thing altogether to commit your own life. Which commitment-which model-would you rather trust your children to?

Robert Freeman writes about economics and education. He can be reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.