For three years -- ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade -- he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC.
Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming.
Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.
Oh, today's desktops and laptops offer plenty of other fancy things -- a dizzying array of sophisticated services that grow more dazzling by the week. Heck, I am part of that creative spasm.
Only there's a rub. Most of these later innovations were brought to us by programmers who first honed their abilities with line-programming languages like BASIC. Yes, they mostly use higher level languages now, stacking and organizing object-oriented services, or using other hifalutin processes that come prepackaged and ready to use, the way an artist uses pre-packaged paints. (Very few painters still grind their own pigments. Should they?)
And yet the thought processes that today's best programmers learned at the line-coding level still serve these designers well. Renowned tech artist and digital-rendering wizard Sheldon Brown, leader of the Center for Computing in the Arts, says: "In my Electronics for the Arts course, each student built their own single board computer, whose CPU contained a BASIC ROM [a chip permanently encoded with BASIC software]. We first did this with 8052's and then with a chip called the BASIC Stamp. The PC was just the terminal interface to these computers, whose programs would be burned into flash memory. These lucky art students were grinding their own computer architectures along with their code pigments -- along their way to controlling robotic sculptures and installation environments."
But today, very few young people are learning those deeper patterns. Indeed, they seem to be forbidden any access to that world at all.
And yet, they are tantalized! Ben has long complained that his math textbooks all featured little type-it-in-yourself programs at the end of each chapter -- alongside the problem sets -- offering the student a chance to try out some simple algorithm on a computer. Usually, it's an equation or iterative process illustrating the principle that the chapter discussed. These "TRY IT IN BASIC" exercises often take just a dozen or so lines of text. The aim is both to illustrate the chapter's topic (e.g. statistics) and to offer a little taste of programming.
Only no student tries these exercises. Not my son or any of his classmates. Nor anybody they know. Indeed, I would be shocked if more than a few dozen students in the whole nation actually type in those lines that are still published in countless textbooks across the land. Those who want to (like Ben) simply cannot.
Now, I have been complaining about this for three years. But whenever I mention the problem to some computer industry maven at a conference or social gathering, the answer is always the same: "There are still BASIC programs in textbooks?"
At least a dozen senior Microsoft officials have given me the exact same response. After taking this to be a symptom of cluelessness in the textbook industry, they then talk about how obsolete BASIC is, and how many more things you can do with higher-level languages. "Don't worry," they invariably add, "the newer textbooks won't have any of those little BASIC passages in them."
All of which is absolutely true. BASIC is actually quite tedious and absurd for getting done the vast array of vivid and ambitious goals that are typical of a modern programmer. Clearly, any kid who wants to accomplish much in the modern world would not use it for very long. And, of course, it is obvious that newer texts will abandon "TRY IT IN BASIC" as a teaching technique, if they haven't already.
But all of this misses the point. Those textbook exercises were easy, effective, universal, pedagogically interesting -- and nothing even remotely like them can be done with any language other than BASIC. Typing in a simple algorithm yourself, seeing exactly how the computer calculates and iterates in a manner you could duplicate with pencil and paper -- say, running an experiment in coin flipping, or making a dot change its position on a screen, propelled by math and logic, and only by math and logic: All of this is priceless. As it was priceless 20 years ago. Only 20 years ago, it was physically possible for millions of kids to do it. Today it is not.
In effect, we have allowed a situation to develop that is like a civilization devouring its seed corn. If an enemy had set out to do this to us -- quietly arranging so that almost no school child in America can tinker with line coding on his or her own -- any reasonably patriotic person would have called it an act of war.
Am I being overly dramatic? Then consider a shift in perspective.
First ponder the notion of programming as a series of layers. At the bottom-most level is machine code. I showed my son the essentials on scratch paper, explaining the roots of Alan Turing's "general computer" and how it was ingeniously implemented in the first four-bit integrated processor, Intel's miraculous 1971 4004 chip, unleashing a generation of nerdy guys to move bits around in little clusters, adding and subtracting clumps of ones and zeroes, creating the first calculators and early desktop computers like the legendary Altair.
This level of coding is still vital, but only at the realm of specialists at the big CPU houses. It is important for guys like Ben to know about machine code -- that it's down there, like DNA in your cell -- but a bright kid doesn't need to actually do it, in order to be computer-literate. (Ben wants to, though. Anyone know a good kit?)
The layer above that is often called assembler, though there are many various ways that user intent can be interpreted down to the bit level without actually flicking a series of on-off switches. Sets of machine instructions are grouped, assembled and correlated with (for example) ASCII-coded commands. Some call this the "boringest" level. Think of the hormones swirling through your body. Even a glimpse puts me to sleep. But at least I know that it is there.
The third layer of this cake is the operating system of your computer. Call it BIOS and DOS, along with a lot of other names. This was where guys like Gates and Wozniak truly propelled a whole industry and way of life, by letting the new desktops communicate with their users, exchange information with storage disks and actually show stuff on a screen. Cool.
Meanwhile, the same guys were offering -- at the fourth layer -- a programming language that folks could use to create new software of their very own. BASIC was derived from academic research tools like beloved old FORTRAN (in which my doctoral research was coded onto punched paper cards, yeesh). It was crude. It was dry. It was unsuitable for the world of the graphic user interface. BASIC had a lot of nasty habits. But it liberated several million bright minds to poke and explore and aspire as never before.
The "scripting" languages that serve as entry-level tools for today's aspiring programmers -- like Perl and Python -- don't make this experience accessible to students in the same way. BASIC was close enough to the algorithm that you could actually follow the reasoning of the machine as it made choices and followed logical pathways. Repeating this point for emphasis: You could even do it all yourself, following along on paper, for a few iterations, verifying that the dot on the screen was moving by the sheer power of mathematics, alone. Wow! (Indeed, I would love to sit with my son and write "Pong" from scratch. The rule set -- the math -- is so simple. And he would never see the world the same, no matter how many higher-level languages he then moves on to.)
The closest parallel I can think of is the WWII generation of my father -- guys for whom the ultra in high tech was automobiles. What fraction of them tore apart jalopies at home? Or at least became adept at diagnosing and repairing the always fragile machines of that era? One result of that free and happy spasm of techie fascination was utterly strategic. When the "Arsenal of Democracy" began churning out swarms of tanks and trucks and jeeps, these were sent to the front and almost overnight an infantry division might be mechanized, in the sure and confident expectation that there would be thousands of young men ready (or trainable) to maintain these tools of war. (Can your kid even change the oil nowadays? Or a tire?)
The parallel technology of the '70s generation was IT. Not every boomer soldered an Altair from a kit, or mastered the arcana of DBASE. But enough of them did so that we got the Internet and Web. We got Moore's Law and other marvels. We got a chance to ride another great technological wave.
So, what's the parallel hobby skill today? What tech-marvel has boys and girls enthralled, tinkering away, becoming expert in something dazzling and practical and new? Shooting ersatz aliens in "Halo"? Dressing up avatars in "The Sims"? Oh sure, there's creativity in creating cool movies and Web pages. But except for the very few who will make new media films, do you see a great wave of technological empowerment coming out of all this?
OK, I can hear the sneers. Are these the rants of a grouchy old boomer? Feh, kids today! (And get the #$#*! off my lawn!)
Fact is, I just wanted to give my son a chance to sample some of the wizardry standing behind the curtain, before he became lost in the avatar-filled and glossy-rendered streets of Oz. Like the hero in "TRON," or "The Matrix," I want him to be a user who can see the lines that weave through the fabric of cyberspace -- or at least know some history about where it all came from. At the very minimum, he ought to be able to type those examples in his math books and use the computer the way it was originally designed to be used: to compute.
Hence, imagine my frustration when I discovered that it simply could not be done.
Yes, yes: For three years I have heard all the rationalized answers. No kid should even want BASIC, they say. There are higher-level languages like C++ (Ben is already -- at age 14 -- on page 200 of his self-teaching C++ book!) and yes, there are better education programs like Logo. Hey, what about Visual Basic! Others suggested downloadable versions like q-basic, y-basic, alphabetabasic...
Indeed, I found one that was actually easy to download, easy to turn on, and that simply let us type in some of those little example programs, without demanding that we already be manual-chomping fanatics in order to even get started using the damn thing. Chipmunk Basic for the Macintosh actually started right up and let us have a little clean, algorithmic fun. Extremely limited, but helpful. All of the others, every last one of them, was either too high-level (missing the whole point!) or else far, far too onerous to figure out or use. Certainly not meant to be turn-key usable by any junior high school student. Appeals for help online proved utterly futile.
Until, at last, Ben himself came up with a solution. An elegant solution of startling simplicity. Essentially: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
While trawling through eBay, one day, he came across listings for archaic 1980s-era computers like the Apple II. "Say, Dad, didn't you write your first novel on one of those?" he asked.
"Actually, my second. 'Startide Rising.' On an Apple II with Integer Basic and a serial number in five digits. It got stolen, pity. But my first novel, 'Sundiver,' was written on this clever device called a typewrit --"
"Well, look, Dad. Have you seen what it costs to buy one of those old Apples online, in its original box? Hey, what could we do with it?"
"Huh?" I stared in amazement.
Then, gradually, I realized the practical possibilities.
Let's cut to the chase. We did not wind up buying an Apple II. Instead (for various reasons) we bought a Commodore 64 (in original box) for $25. It arrived in good shape. It took us maybe three minutes to attach an old TV. We flicked the power switch ... and up came a command line. In BASIC.
Uh. Problem solved?
I guess. At least far better than any other thing we've tried!
We are now typing in programs from books, having fun making dots move (and thus knowing why the dots move, at the command of math, and not magic). There are still problems, like getting an operating system to make the 5141c disk drive work right. Most of the old floppies are unreadable. But who cares? (Ben thinks that loading programs to and from tape is so cool. I gurgle and choke remembering my old Sinclair ... but whatever.)
What matters is that we got over a wretched educational barrier. And now Ben can study C++ with a better idea where it all came from. In the nick of time.
Problem solved? Again, at one level.
And yet, can you see the irony? Are any of the masters of the information age even able to see the irony?
This is not just a matter of cheating a generation, telling them to simply be consumers of software, instead of the innovators that their uncles were. No, this goes way beyond that. In medical school, professors insist that students have some knowledge of chemistry and DNA before they are allowed to cut open folks. In architecture, you are at least exposed to some physics.
But in the high-tech, razzle-dazzle world of software? According to the masters of IT, line coding is not a deep-fabric topic worth studying. Not a layer that lies beneath, holding up the world of object-oriented programming. Rather, it is obsolete! Or, at best, something to be done in Bangalore. Or by old guys in their 50s, guaranteeing them job security, the same way that COBOL programmers were all dragged out of retirement and given new cars full of Jolt Cola during the Y2K crisis.
All right, here's a challenge. Get past all the rationalizations. (Because that is what they are.) It would be trivial for Microsoft to provide a version of BASIC that kids could use, whenever they wanted, to type in all those textbook examples. Maybe with some cool tutorial suites to guide them along, plus samples of higher-order tools. It would take up a scintilla of disk space and maybe even encourage many of them to move on up. To (for example) Visual Basic!
Or else, hold a big meeting and choose another lingua franca, so long as it can be universal enough to use in texts, the way that BASIC was.
Instead, we are told that "those textbooks are archaic" and that students should be doing "something else." Only then watch the endless bickering over what that "something else" should be -- with the net result that there is no lingua franca at all, no "basic" language so common that textbook publishers can reliably use it as a pedagogical aide.
The textbook writers and publishers aren't the ones who are obsolete, out-of-touch and wrong. It is people who have yanked the rug out from under teachers and students all across the land.
Let me reiterate. Kids are not doing "something else" other than BASIC. Not millions of them. Not hundreds or tens of thousands of them. Hardly any of them, in fact. It is not their fault. Because some of them, like my son, really want to. But they can't. Not without turning into time travelers, the way we did, by giving up (briefly) on the present and diving into the past. (I also plan to teach him how to change the oil and fix a tire!) By using the tools of a bygone era to learn more about tomorrow.
If this is a test, then Ben and I passed it, ingeniously. In contrast, Microsoft and Apple and all the big-time education-computerizing reformers of the MIT Media Lab are failing, miserably. For all of their high-flown education initiatives (like the "$100 laptop"), they seem bent on providing information consumption devices, not tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery.
Web access for the poor would be great. But machines that kids out there can understand and program themselves? To those who shape our technical world, the notion remains not just inaccessible, but strangely inconceivable.
Leaders in Total Compensation at Private Colleges, 2007-8. Source: IRS tax reports analyzed by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
1. Shirley Ann Jackson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: $1,598,247
2. David Sargent, Suffolk University: $1,496,593
3. Steadman Upham, University of Tulsa: $1,485,275
4. Cornelius M. Kerwin, American University: $1,419,339
5. Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia: $1,380,035
6. Donald V. DeRosa, University of the Pacific: $1,350,743
7. John E. Sexton, New York University: $1,297,475
8. Jerry C. Lee, National University: $1,189,777
9. Nicholas S. Zeppos, Vanderbilt: $1,275,309
10. Amy Gutmann, University of Pennsylvania: $1,225,103
Note: Total compensation may include deferred compensation and other benefits and is not necessarily take-home salary. Kerwin, who was named president in 2007, was provost for much of the period covered.
One morning last week, before my kids Desmond and Nini had begun their home-school kindergarten day, they were playing on the floor with a random assemblage of building blocks, figurines and toy vehicles, like a zillion other 5-year-olds around the world. Since I was theoretically in charge while their mother got ready for the day, I surfaced from my cup of coffee and the New York Times sports section to listen in for a few seconds. It turned out they were building a temple for Ganesh, the elephant-headed god who removes obstacles from the lives of observant Hindus. Their construction materials were the columns and blocks from a Greco-Roman architecture play set.
I made some wry dad comment: Hindu gods at a Greek temple, ha ha ha. Literally jumping up and down with excitement, Desmond set me straight: "We're playing ancient times, Daddy, when there was trade between Greece and India! They traded stuff, and they traded ideas!"
Now, I'm not vouching for the soundness of Desmond's scholarship. Ancient contact between Greek and Indian civilization is plausible, according to historians, but entirely hypothetical. Furthermore, if it did happen it almost certainly did not involve motor vehicles. See, the way elephant-headed Ganesh and blue-skinned Vishnu are incarnated in Nini and Desmond's game, they look an awful lot like little die-cast metal cars. Specifically, they look like Snot Rod and Doc Hudson, two supporting characters from the Disney-Pixar "Cars" universe.
In a perverse way, that's highly appropriate. Our kids know about Ganesh and Vishnu -- along with Isis and Osiris, Orpheus and Eurydice, and a few dozen other mythological figures -- thanks to a pre-K and kindergarten home-school curriculum designed on the fly by my wife, Leslie Kauffman. (She calls it "Meet the Ancient World.")
Leslie is definitely drawing on some of the alternative educational theories that inform the home-school movement. These include the ideas of "unschooling" guru John Holt, the literature-based approach identified with 19th-century English educator Charlotte Mason, and the "classical education" model popularized in bestselling books by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. But it didn't start with them, or from some highfalutin desire to read our kids "The Odyssey." It all started with the hero of "Cars," Lightning McQueen.
As I wrote in the first installment of this series last month, home schooling sneaked up on us, or at least on me. It's true that Leslie knew about the rapidly expanding world of urban, mostly secular home schooling through online parents' groups, and was already drawn to alternative educational approaches. But right up until the moment she quit her lefty-nonprofit job early in 2007, when our twins were 2½, we were a pretty typical big-city, middle-class family, with two kids, two incomes and a full-time nanny.
One of the numerous screwy things about raising children these days, especially in a hotbed of social-Darwinist parenting like New York, is that by taking time off to hang out with a couple of toddlers, Leslie became a home-schooler by default. Neither of us completely understood this until it happened. But in an economy that essentially requires all able-bodied adults to work outside the home, and an environment where preschools for 3-year-olds have an intensely competitive application process (and can cost $15,000 a year), you can't opt out without making a statement, whether you intend one or not.
When Leslie started hosting a playgroup for preschool-age kids in our Brooklyn, N.Y., backyard, there was no major-league ideology attached. She was thinking she'd attract a group of like-minded moms and dads who were skipping official preschool for a wide range of personal reasons. As it turned out, those personal reasons dovetailed to a remarkable degree. Everybody who showed up to let their kids smash melons and chase bunnies in our yard was already opting out of the mainstream system, at least temporarily, which involved some sacrifice: time or money or both.
Almost all of them had either decided to home-school already (at least for a while) or were right on the cusp of that decision. Although the methods they chose as they moved forward with home schooling are all over the map, their reasons for doing it are roughly similar. They didn't feel comfortable about sending their kids to "school" at the age of 2 or 3, and wanted them to have much more open-ended, free-form play than most preschools and pre-K programs allow.
So at least for a while, the bunny chasing and melon smashing, and the trips to the Bronx Zoo and the New York Hall of Science, were free of any explicit educational intentions, beyond the universal goals of all exhausted parents of small children: to get through the day without unacceptable acts of violence, while demonstrating that the world is full of cool and exciting stuff. But as the months rolled on and the 3-year-olds in Leslie's group turned 4 -- the age when most public-school kids head off to pre-K -- their parents began to face the inevitable question: What do we do now?
We had always read tons of books to Desmond and Nini, and they were picking up letters and numbers more or less on schedule. But we weren't unschoolers, who resist all attempts at formal education and allow children to decide for themselves, within certain broad parameters, what to do and when to do it. We also weren't the kind of home-schoolers who were going to take someone's prepackaged curriculum -- there are a great many available, in every cultural and ideological flavor you can imagine -- and implement it on a regular and rigorous schedule.
Leslie experimented with some pre-K workbooks from a teachers' supply store, and they weren't exactly a smash hit. Desmond liked them pretty well -- he's a task-oriented kid who loves structured activities -- and Nini largely ignored them or responded to them by hopping up and down and telling stories about the silly animals in the pictures. (This is her standard modus operandi at all times.) As Leslie read and thought more about home schooling, she began to ask herself a basic question: What are our kids most excited and most passionate about? As she wrote in her blog recently, an answer quickly emerged:
One day last winter, when my twins were 4½, they were fighting back exasperation as they explained to their obviously dense mother the differences between Radiator Springs McQueen and Cruising McQueen, two [nearly identical] die-cast metal toy figures from the movie "Cars" ... Like many kids their age, Desmond and Nini had developed a fascination with the world of the Piston Cup and Radiator Springs. They had an encyclopedic knowledge of the movie's characters and personal histories and had developed the discernment to pick out small differences between the many versions of each. The characters loomed large in their imagination and play life.
Well, I thought, if they can have this complex connection to Lightning McQueen, Doc Hudson, and Tow Mater, why not to Isis, Osiris, and Anubis? Or Zeus, Athena, and Aphrodite? At a time when they were so clearly eager to learn about the world around them, might it be possible to introduce them to its history in an age-appropriate and systematic way?
For weeks after that, Leslie did research online late at night, or at the public library, in search of books, resources and materials for teaching an introductory approach to ancient history (including paleontology and archaeology) to young children. What followed, as she led Nini and Desmond through a pre-K year that encompassed dinosaurs, the rudiments of evolution, early humans and the Ice Age, ancient Egypt, the Old Testament and ancient Greece, came as an extraordinary revelation to me. Don't get me wrong: I've read the kids dozens of books and dished out hundreds of PB&J sandwiches, serving as a combination of substitute teacher, teacher's aide, librarian and cafeteria lady. But the conceptual heavy lifting has been Leslie's.
As a basis for an early-education curriculum, the ancient world is especially ingenious. There are any number of stories to read, which tend to converge in a fascinating way, and to form patterns and archetypes we can see all around us in modern life. At age 5, our kids have already grasped, without much prompting, that stories about floods and quest-adventure narratives show up all over the world. After we read Beverly Cleary's "Ribsy," a book about a dog who gets lost at a suburban shopping center and has to find his way home past many dangers, I asked them if Ribsy's long adventure reminded them of anyone else. They thought about it for a minute and seized on the answer with big, beaming smiles: "Odysseus!"
But it isn't simply that Nini and Desmond are enjoying themselves, have learned a bunch of names and stories I didn't know until I was much older, and may, just possibly, have received a basic foundation in cultural literacy that I'm not quite sure I possess now. They love it. They've devoured it all voraciously and begged for more. They demand stories from "D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths" over and over again -- Hades and Persephone, Jason and Medea -- and howl when it's time to close the book and go to bed. They recount their own versions: I remember one gruesome bathtub tale about Osiris' Hall of Judgment, where the hearts of recently deceased Egyptians are weighed against the Feather of Truth. (Nini takes particular glee in the crocodile monster, who stands ready to eat your heart if you've led a wicked life.)
They've built Mesopotamian ziggurats out of mud in our neighborhood park and repurposed Fisher-Price Little People to serve as the Olympian gods and goddesses. (You can easily acquire plastic figurines of the Egyptian gods, maybe because they're such striking human-animal hybrids, but Greek gods are in short supply.) As we've moved on to India and Hinduism in their kindergarten year, they used one of those plastic Barrels of Monkeys to build the monkey-bridge by which the hero of "The Ramayana" reaches the demon-island of Lanka. They know a lot more about Hindu theology and mythology than I do: "Daddy, Hanuman the Monkey King is really an incarnation of Shiva," Nini informed me the other night, as if it were only common sense.
She also told us recently that the Metropolitan Museum is one of her favorite places in the world -- along with the playground across the street from our house and Storybook Land, a 1950s-era amusement park on the New Jersey shore. Nini and Desmond and their friend Benny were regular visitors in the Met's Greek and Roman wing last spring, and even elicited some smiles from the notoriously grumpy guards. There just can't be that many people who show up there in costume. (Nini goes as Demeter, goddess of the harvest, in a crimson holiday dress and golden sash. Desmond is Hermes, messenger of the gods, in a pair of winged hightop sneakers. Benny gets to be Zeus, complete with painted cardboard thunderbolts.)
Now, look: Our kids aren't geniuses or prodigies, and their understanding of the ancient world based on a year-plus of reading storybooks and going to museums is a miscellaneous highlight reel, extremely vague as to chronology and context: Sue the famous T. rex, woolly mammoths frozen alive, Moses among the bulrushes, a few dozen mythological deities and their stories. As Leslie puts it, "Small children have no preconceptions about ancient history, no notion that it might be dry or remote or inaccessible. They also, however, have no real conception of time -- certainly not of millennia or centuries or even decades ... Teaching ancient history to small children, in my experience, involves not trying to explain historical causation or even spending much time discussing historical change: It's a matter, instead, of making introductions to the marvelous, beautiful and fascinating civilizations of long ago."
I should add that Leslie's also been doing an hour or two every day of more conventional kindergarten stuff. Our kids are fast-improving readers, and they practice handwriting, do art projects, sing the occasional cacophonous round of "Puff the Magic Dragon," and so on. If we do absolutely nothing more than we've done already -- if Leslie packs up the whole project next week, next month or next year and ships Nini and Des off to whatever school will take them (and believe me, we have those days) -- she'll have done something amazing. She'll have implanted in them a ferocious appetite for learning, and the idea that it's full of wondrous discoveries. They have absolutely no idea that some children experience schoolwork as thankless drudgery, or human history as a tedious assortment of facts, dates and dusty objects in vitrines.
After my earlier article, a bunch of people wrote me with variations on the question: Well, OK, tough guy, but how in the hell are you going to teach them calculus? I can promise you that neither Leslie nor I will be teaching them any such thing, and about the only thing to say is that we're well aware that eventually they'll need or want things we cannot provide. There certainly are home-schoolers with an ideological opposition to formal schooling, but that doesn't describe us or most of our peers. On balance it seems unlikely that we'll home-school Nini and Desmond all the way through high school. (Anyway, that decision will end up being as much theirs as ours.)
My perception, at the moment, is that whatever they do and wherever they go down the line, Nini and Desmond will be better off with the tremendous start Leslie has given them. We may be stuck with them for a while -- I suspect they'd be monumentally bored by first grade if we closed down our home-school program next year -- but there are worse problems to have. Right now, I have to go watch the story of how Ganesh got his elephant head (after losing his human one in an unfortunate misunderstanding), acted out by a couple of little kids with toy cars.
Education is one of those values that just about everyone agrees is a good thing. But how do you keep kids interested in school? Do you make classes more interesting and hire good teachers? Draw up stricter standards to objectively measure "accomplishment" and hold students and teachers accountable for meeting them? How about just paying off the kids that meet your standards, regardless of what those standards might be?
France is the latest country to experiment with providing cash incentives to underachieving students. And according to an article in Time magazine, this "capitalistic and non-egalitarian" idea has not sat well in a country where the public school system "embodies republican values that go back to the French Revolution."
The program is simple: Students at three vocational high schools in the suburbs of Paris will receive "reward payments" up to $15,000 per year for attendance and reaching "performance targets agreed upon by their teachers." These aren't straight cash payments: They can only be redeemed for "school-related projects" such as "a class trip abroad to improve foreign language skills, computer equipment for the classroom or driving lessons to obtain a license."
Sounds like pretty good stuff. But it does raise the question: Wouldn't kids be motivated to do better in school if attending school already included the opportunity to study abroad, work on decent computer equipment, or obtain a driver's license? And should one's opportunity to do so be limited by fellow students' attendance records and achievement? Couldn't one spend the same amount of money to put these programs in place and offer the spots to students who wish to participate and meet the entrance criteria? Doesn't the existence of "special" programs imply that the rest of school is kind of a drag?
Part of the reason vocational students are less motivated, according to Philippe Vrand, president of the Parents of Public Students Group, is because being sent to a vocational school in the first place implies to some students that they have already failed to achieve a place in a more traditional academic program; once there, many end up taking courses they aren't interested in because they can't find a slot in programs they do want. "We should spend this money making sure vocational students who wanted to learn cooking can get into these programs rather than being shunted into car repair because there was no room left," he told Time. "Instead, students are being paid to compensate for [their] boredom."
Considering that the courses many vocational students take will determine their future profession, it seems pretty crucial that they have the option to choose what that profession will be. But the French program is just another example of a worldwide trend of rewarding -- some might say "bribing" -- students to do well in school. And it makes one wonder: If you have to bribe the students, doesn't it already imply that the school system and parents -- people otherwise known as "adults" -- aren't doing enough to keep them interested and focused on their own talents and class work?
The programs are especially catching on here in the United States, and in many cases, the rewards are even more tenuously connected to academic achievement. An article published in USA Today last September rounded up some of the more popular programs, almost all of which involved direct cash incentives and/or fancy consumer items: Fourth- and seventh-graders in New York City can earn up to $500 for improving their scores on state exams; Baltimore offered $110 to students improving their scores; Atlanta paid students $8 an hour to attend an after-school program (the minimum wage was $5.84 an hour); students in seven states -- Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Virginia and Washington -- could earn up to $100 for each passing grade on an Advanced Placement exam through a program funded by Exxon-Mobil; and Sam Scavella, a principal in Macon, Ga., offered iPods, movie tickets, dinner for two, and a chance to win a 26-inch television to students who attend Saturday study sessions.
These programs are popular, in part, because some of them seem to work. The Exxon-Mobil program was modeled on a program adopted in Dallas during the 1995-96 school year, now statewide in Texas, that was linked to a 30 percent improvement in high SAT and ACT scores and an 8 percent rise in college-bound students. Last June, the New York Post reported that two-thirds of the 59 schools participating in the New York City program saw their scores go up from previous years -- some as high as 40 percentage points.
The idea, of course, is to link school achievement to future earnings to kids who educators seem to think might not otherwise make the connection. Scavella, the Georgia principal offering iPods and big-screen TVs, is explicit about this. "If you do well in school, then you can afford a lifestyle that will pay you well," he told USA Today. And Rose Marie Mills, a principal at a New York City school where 90 percent of the students are below the poverty level, told the Post, "When they get the checks, there's that competiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them."
Sure, going to college is one of the surest ways to boost one's lifetime earnings. And kids who aren't necessarily having that message reinforced by their parents might react well to a little external motivation. But the biggest gap between students at high-performing schools and underperforming schools is much larger than $100, $500 or a big-screen TV. In affluent school districts, academic performance is the competitive battlefield: Taking AP classes means college credit; students compete with their peers for higher SAT scores; and the reward is a place in a competitive school. Replicating that kind of environment costs an awful lot more than an iPod.
In bribing kids to do well in school, educators are following a road well trod by generations of frustrated parents. While I don't begrudge kids a few hundred-dollar checks, I have to say that next to having teachers that will nurture and encourage, say, one kid's obsession with writing, or teach another to build a rocket for a science fair, or help another to get a scholarship to study abroad, it seems pretty paltry.
After 10 years of refusing to speak publicly about the Columbine High School massacre, in which her son Dylan and his partner, Eric Harris, killed 13 people and themselves, Susan Klebold has written an essay about it for the forthcoming issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. "I'd had no inkling of the battle Dylan was waging in his mind," Klebold writes, explaining that she could only begin to understand her son's final actions when she recognized the extent of his own death wish. "Once I saw his journals, it was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there. And so in order to understand what he might have been thinking, I started to learn all I could about suicide."
The opinions of FBI psychologists and psychiatrists who reviewed the evidence suggest that she was right to focus her search for answers on Dylan's self-destructiveness. As "Columbine" author (and former Salon writer) Dave Cullen wrote in Slate on the massacre's fifth anniversary, experts have concluded that Harris was a psychopath -- his "pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points" on a diagnostic test -- but Dylan Klebold was "a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems." Which means that although the psychiatrists believe Harris was bound to become a violent criminal, "Klebold, they agree, would never have pulled off Columbine without Harris." If Dylan hadn't befriended a psychopath who focused his rage outward rather than inward, he "might have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to live a normal life."
In the 10 years since the massacre, schools and parents have put a great deal of effort into trying to understand what happened and how such violence can be prevented. Recognizing mental illness like Dylan Klebold's and understanding the risk it can pose to others as well as the child himself is certainly one part of the strategy. Stopping the Eric Harrises of the world, however, the ones who simply have no conscience, involves other measures. That's where zero-tolerance policies about weapons in schools and threats of violence come in, and at first glance, they appear quite sensible. We hear the stories about teenagers being expelled and prosecuted for bringing guns to homeroom or writing essays describing their own massacre plots, and in light of what we know about school shooters' behavior prior to their crimes, those reactions don't sound so extreme.
But what about a 6-year-old boy who brings a Cub Scout-approved camping utensil, including a fork, spoon and small knife, to school to eat his lunch? Delaware first-grader Zachary Christie is currently being home-schooled by his mother and facing 45 days in reform school for that transgression of his school district's code of conduct. Says the New York Times, "[S]chool officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, 'regardless of possessor's intent,' knives are banned." In 2007, the same school district "expelled a seventh-grade girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project." State law was changed last year to allow schools more discretion in expulsions, after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because she brought a knife to class to cut her birthday cake. ("The teacher called the principal -- but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.") But because the law didn't address suspensions, it left no wiggle room with regard to Zachary's punishment. Or Kyle Herbert's -- the 13-year-old was ordered to reform school after a classmate "dropped a pocket knife in his lap," and is now, like Zachary, being home-schooled by his mother. One wonders what parents are supposed to do if they can't stay home with kids kicked out under the zero-tolerance policy.
Such policies exist for understandable and even admirable reasons: "Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses." Removing the authorities' discretion undoubtedly seemed an easier way to level the playing field than rooting out racism. Unfortunately, that means little kids get thrown out of school for carrying camping gear or being prepared to share birthday cake. And according to at least one expert, it's not worth it. Ronnie Casella, an associate professor of education at Central Connecticut State University, told The Times, "there is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer."
What does, then? "[O]ther programs like peer mediation, student support groups and adult mentorships," according to education experts who spoke with the Times. In the decade since Columbine, "the rate of school-related homicides and nonfatal violence has fallen," alongside an overall decrease in crime. Despite several subsequent school shootings that made national news (and several others that didn't), the evidence suggests that some progress has been made. Susan Klebold's essay in O might be one more step toward understanding what went wrong and how to help kids like her son before they become dangerous. But I can't see how suspending innocent children, forcing their parents to choose between sending them to reform school and staying home with them, is making anyone safer. Giving authorities both greater discretion to enforce school policies and some anti-racism training, on the other hand, might just be an improvement.
"I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me in Christ Jesus." It may lack the wallop of “De-fense De-fense! Push 'em back! Take 'em down!” but it’s a classic nevertheless. And for nearly a decade, in the small Georgia town of Fort Ogletorpe, the cheerleaders of the Warriors football team have opened their games with that and similar sentiments -- holding banners of Bible verse for players to burst through at the start of their games. 2,4, 6, 8! “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed!”
This season, however, is different. Just a few weeks into the new school year, a parent alerted the Catoosa County Schools Superintendent that the Warriors were setting themselves up for a lawsuit, and the county reluctantly pulled the plug. In a press statement, Superintendent Denia Reese said, “The practice of the cheerleaders’ use of banners was in violation of the current state of the law as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals.”
The Warriors, however, aren’t so named for nothing.
On Tuesday, five hundred locals attended a rally in support of the cheerleaders and their signs. Speaking to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, cheerleader Taylor Guinn said, “I’m sad and I’m angry about it, because we’re being silenced for what we believe in. It was heartbreaking to know that our school system is just conforming to the nonbelievers … our freedom of speech and freedom of religion is being taken away.”
There was also the inevitable “We Support the LFO Cheerleaders! LET THEM HAVE THEIR SIGNS BACK!" Facebook campaign, which is already over 12,000 members strong. And Fox news glommed on to the “Cheerleaders censored” story, calling it a “20 year tradition” despite the fact that it began earlier this decade. “It’s not fair” cheerleader Courtney told Fox, “that we can’t spread God’s word.”
The ban has found precious few supporters, even among those who enforced it. Superintendent Reese has said, "It broke my heart to have to tell those girls that they could not display that message on the football field. Personally, I appreciate their expression of their Christian values. However, as superintendent, I have the responsibility of protecting the school district from legal action by groups who do not support their beliefs.” Jerry Ransom, the school's principal, summed up his response by saying, "I hate it." And Fort Oglethorpe Mayor Ronnie Cobb said, “I’m totally against them doing away with it. If it’s offensive to anyone, let them go watch another football game. Nobody’s forced to come there and nobody’s forced to read the signs.”
True that, but the presence of the signs open up a whole bunch of issues beyond the mere legalities. Would the Warriors be cool with an opposing team charging through a few lines of Koran or, what the hell, the Iliad? Would they welcome an atheistic herkie jumper on the cheer squad? Or instead could this be considered a case of what conservatives so fondly refer to as indoctrination?
The good Lord, of course, is already an oft-invoked fixture of the sporting world. And the school maintains that no other teams have ever complained about the signs. But no one could seriously argue that the Warriors’ “freedom of religion” is being taken away. What they can’t express with the school’s taxpayer funded art supplies and on the school’s field, they can do on their own. In fact the school has gone out of its way to designate a special area outside the stadium for displaying religious signs, and principal Cobb told the press, “We’re encouraging people to bring signs to hold up in the stands.”
On Friday, students took the cue. They showed up for class sporting shirts emblazoned with Biblical wisdom. And that evening, a sea of red-clad fans took to the stands, holding signs that said, “Warriors for Christ” and “You took HIM off our SIGN but you will never take HIM out of our HEARTS.” They painted Bible verses on their bodies. Front-running Georgia gubernatorial contender John Oxendine was there as well, Tweeting his heart out in support of “the brave cheerleaders” The team, meanwhile, had to settle for charging through a sign that uninspirationally read, “This is Big Red country.”
Though the Warriors may have to settle for drawing spiritual strength from the stands, the fight isn’t over though. There’s a school board meeting on October 13, and a rally is planned outside the Board of Education building. But God may already have forsaken the Warriors. Friday they lost to Ridgeland High School, 34-0.
We've all heard about the major disappointment of yesterday's Senate Finance Committee meeting. But the defeat of the public option wasn't the senators' only poor decision of the day. As the Associated Press reports, the committee spent the evening approving a measure to restore $50 million of federal funding to abstinence-only sex education. That's right, folks: These 23 senators think it's more important to devote several million dollars to teaching your children lies than to provide a realistic public alternative to a healthcare hell created by private insurance companies. Are you pissed off yet?
The committee voted 12-11 to support the measure by (who else?) Sen. Orrin Hatch. And guess what? As with the public option, it was Democratic disunity that pushed Hatch's plan through. Two Democrats, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, voted with all 10 Republicans in favor of the measure. (At least Baucus was on the right side of this one. According to the AP, "Hatch said abstinence education had been shown to work, though Baucus disagreed." Of course, unless by "work" Hatch means "increase the teen birth rate," we know who's got the facts on his side.)
Luckily, the Senate Finance Committee vote doesn't automatically free up the funds. But it does allow the full Senate, as well as the House, to vote on the measure. And there's a bit of good news here, too: Baucus also introduced an alternate measure that "would make money available for education on contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, among other things, in addition to abstinence," which was approved 14-9. That means the two measures will need to be "reconciled" (although considering that the latter also includes abstinence, it might be difficult for the comprehensive sex ed crowd to compromise further without abandoning their entire agenda) before moving ahead.
What makes Hatch's measure even more ridiculous and dismaying than usual is the news out of Texas this week. According to the Austin American-Statesman, some districts in the conservative state (a longtime leader in the abstinence-only disinformation movement) "are moving from so-called abstinence-only instruction to a more comprehensive sex education curriculum, also called 'abstinence-plus.'" And guess why? Once federal funding for abstinence-only disappeared, districts took a look at teen pregnancy statistics and decided they didn't like what they saw. The American-Statesman includes a particularly shocking figure: "The rate of student pregnancies in Austin high schools has increased 57 percent since the 2005-06 school year." Instances of STDs are on the rise, too.
So what does Texas teach us? Federal funding -- and the lack thereof -- for abstinence-only sex ed programs really can change states' agendas. While half of states were already refusing Title V abstinence-only funds by the end of the '08-'09 school year, when the program ended, it may take a blow to the pocketbook for others to re-evaluate their curricula. If Hatch's measure does pass, then some states may never get that opportunity.
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