Today Nicholas Kristof has a column titled What Oman Can Teach Us. Next door to Yemen, Oman is a nation that has very much converted its society in the 40 years since a young man overthrew his backwards looking father and became Sultan. How? Through education - of all of his people, male and female. Oman went from a nation with 3 schools serving 990 boys to one with public and private universities serving both sexes.
It a column worth reading. Kristof's point is that we would be far better off aiding education around the world rather than dropping bombs.
He offers some cogent quotes. I want to take some of them in a different direction.
I don't want to talk about building schools in Pakistan or Afghanistan instead of bombing and occupying, although I agree that we would be better off doing that.
What I want to discuss should not surprise anyone, given my commitment to teaching and education.
I want to talk about our non-commitment to education at home, here in America.
Children start studying English and computers in the first grade. Boys and girls alike are expected to finish high school at least.
There are few places in the United States where we begin foreign language study in any meaningful way before high school or perhaps for some children in middle school. We do have children who will be fluent in more than one language, because they speak one at home - most often Spanish. We insist on English only instruction, driven by testing: after one year in English Language Learning classes we must, under No Child Left Behind, test them in English. It is almost as if we are hostile to other languages. How silly.
Why can we not in elementary school begin the process of learning a language other than English? Perhaps here I am influenced by my own experience at Murray Avenue Elementary in Larchmont, New York, where in 3d grade we began conversational French, largely as the result of one parent born there who volunteered to set up a program of Conversational French. No, we did not become fluent. Yet we learned to do songs, to act out in plays (I remember playing the Big Bad Wolf) - in short, learning something about a foreign language was fun, and as a result what we did learn stuck.
Monday I was at a college fair in another high school and I had to tell several seniors not to apply to my Alma Mater, Haverford College. Oh, they had the grades, they had at least two AP courses, their SATs were in range. But they were going to graduate with only 2 years of a foreign language, and we require 3. It seems odd to me that in an increasingly global economy and culture it is possible to graduate from a good high school with so little exposure to language and culture of anything except our own nation. That hurts us economically. For all the international comparisons on scores on science and math, why is it we never mention the countries that outscore us start foreign language instruction earlier, and their better students graduate fluent in at least one language other than the official language of their nation?
Kristof has an extended section on the education of women in Oman, very much a Muslim society, at the end of which he offers these two short paragraphs:
In short, one of the lessons of Oman is that one of the best and most cost-effective ways to tame extremism is to promote education for all.
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.
When we look overseas we are concerned about extremism directed against us, leading to violence against America, Americans, and what we perceive as American interests. Perhaps we could look at home at our own forms of extremism and violence, and ask ourselves how much these could be eliminated were we truly committed to education.
Let me be clear. Meaningful education is not rote preparation for testing. It invokes the natural desire of most children when they enter to school to learn, to want to experience the wider world. It prepares them for new things.
We rightly express concern about the spread of rigid madrassas for boys funded by those dedicated to a narrow, Wahhabi version of Islam. It is an education focused on learning a literal interpretation of the Qu'ran. Insisting on a similar literal interpretation of Biblical material is just as destructive to real learning in the U. S. Such an approach actually escalates conflict in this country - it leads to demonizing those who do not accept dominance by those of that particular religious orientation, it justifies violence against those who take actions contrary to the mandates imposed in such a society. As with those coming from such madrassas, the violence is fueled in part by hatred and in part by rationalization that one is doing "God's will."
Education should open doors of opportunity. Kristof writes about girls who are winning entrepreneurial competitions. I read Mandates from superintendents whose track record is an educational approach which puts those upon whom these are imposed further behind those who go to suburban schools or elite city schools where the emphasis is not so much on test scores that art and music and history and poetry and creative writing get squeezed out of the curriculum. Some of our children receive educations that are rich, full of things that inspire and provoke. Others are effectively told by the nature of education that we give them that they are of less value, and they know it. Their school buildings are decrepit. Their neighborhoods are decaying. The opportunities for employment for the adults in their communities are limited, both in number and in quality.
Some quickly learn about entrepreneurship. They become street-smart, learning that they can make more money in drugs and other crimes even as teens than their parents can in supposedly "legitimate" jobs.
. . . 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.
a $2 billion global education fund would not begin to scratch the surface of the educational needs around the world, even as a fraction of that spent on education would do more to positively change Afghanistan than the more than $100 billion spent on our troops.
What does that cost this nation? Far more. It is the opportunity cost of money that could be spent on real education - and health care, and nutrition - for all Americans.
I am not saying anything we do not already know. The most cogent statement on the issue was offered in April of 1953, by a man who knew something about war. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Dwight D. Eisenhower offered these words:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?
Let me return to Kristof one more time. This is his brief, penultimate paragraph: The pattern seems widespread: Everybody gives lip service to education, but nobody funds it.
I sadly find that true in our national educational policy. We insist on continuing our military efforts in Afghanistan, even as we starve our schools. States and localities cannot go into debt for current expenses, only the Federal government can. We have an economic crisis fueled both by the ridiculous levels of spending for unnecessary wars of choice and by lack of meaningful oversight of our financial sector. We allow that financial sector and other corporate interests to distort our political processes, so that our citizenry does not learn the truth of how they are being cheated, both now and of their birthright to a healthy and productive future for themselves and their children.
... for themselves and their children . . . words inspired by the document that established our government, that the final of the purposes listed in the Preamble to the Constitution was to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .
The blessings of liberty is not to be in a situation of constant war, draining the resources of the nation for purposes that are not productive.
The blessings of liberty should not mean that some are from birth condemned to narrower possibilities for their lives because of their parents while others are given advantages they may neither have earned nor are they warranted in having.
The blessings of liberty should not condemn some to a narrow education that limits their possibilities, makes it far more likely they will be the cannon fodder for the wars of choice or the drones and worker bees whose efforts are not properly rewarded so that others can can richer from those efforts.
The blessings of liberty should give all of our people voice in the selection of our political leadership, and not have their voices drowned out by the wealthy and powerful who use that wealth and power to manipulate our political, economic, social and legal framework to their advantage.
War is a key. It is not merely the issue of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also the military complex that has American troops in almost every nation, more than 170 currently. It is the economic dependency upon the military industrial complex.
It is also the war of one set of values against another, whether that be of a narrow religious viewpoint, or of economic power of the rich and the few and those who are controlled by them.
War. What a horrible metaphor upon which to rely. War on Drugs. War on Poverty.
I think we need to move away from war. We need to remember that our overreliance upon competition as the model for our endeavors is often shaped in war-like terms. Even on education, we are threatened with the dire consequences of losing the educational competition.
Go back to 1983, to a document that began with the words Our Nation is at risk. In that we read these additional words, and note what I put into bold:
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
Perhaps we should again turn to Eisenhower for a single sentence, offered in a speech in 1946: I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.
The model of war is a failed model, destroying lives and communities. Unbridled competition is also a failed model, which is why even the sports that dominate so much of American life have rules. It is why, despite the insistence of some that government get out of the way of business, that we have put limitations on what economic entities can do.
We need to rethink education. We certainly should explore how we can use education to improve the world rather than bombs.
We should also remember the cost of war and preparation for war. It is a cost that drags down our economy. It robs our children of their future, not merely because we have borrowed the money to pay for it without even attempting to tax the wealth being created by those - individuals and corporations - profiting therefrom.
We narrow the education, and thus the future, of far too many of our young people.
Let me repeat the penultimate sentence of Krisor's piece:
The pattern seems widespread: Everybody gives lip service to education, but nobody funds it.
Sadly, as I look at our national educational policy, at how education is used as a political football, I find those words applicable here at home.
That makes me sad.
What about you?