Parents are extremely important to the success and direction of education (quote)

Since parents have given children their life, they are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators. –Paul VI, Gravissimum Educationis 

 

The state shouldn’t “substitute itself” for the family (quote)

Now this end and object, the common welfare in the temporal order, consists in that peace and security in which families and individual citizens have the free exercise of their rights, and at the same time enjoy the greatest spiritual and temporal prosperity possible in this life, by the mutual union and co-ordination of the work of all. The function therefore of the civil authority residing in the State is twofold, to protect and to foster, but by no means to absorb the family and the individual, or to substitute itself for them. –Pius XI, Divini illius magistri, 43

 

Diagnosing educational ailments (article)

The issues we have with standards and assessments today were something the government has historically tried to address as the country noticed falling literacy rates in both math and reading; in addition, it was discovered that students were unable to match or exceed the levels of learning achieved by other countries. Today, reports continue to find that literacy rates are still falling, especially when you consider the norm or the 50th percentile has been lowered over the past few decades.

Educators, politicians, and parents continue to give their varying theories as to why literacy continues to fall. Educators might blame the background of the child–the family, the language barrier, or the cultural barrier, they say. Politicians and some parents might blame the teachers–they just don’t know how to teach, they suggest. Other parents might see a conflict in what is being taught with what they would like to see taught–this conflict invariably leaves the child in the middle of a battleground of ideas. Even more, some feel that there is this grand conspiracy to overtake the masses by leaving them barely literate and therefore easily controlled. The agreement amongst all these theories is that literacy levels in the US are lower than they historically were, and they continue to fall.

It remains to be seen if and whether this new emphasis on teacher and student assessments will help, but it seems to me that some of the ideas that are floating around are not really addressing the main issue. For instance, some groups are promoting new tests. I cannot see how new tests that test something other than the main components of literacy would help the main problem if the old tests already show that there is a problem. Some of the new tests do not test literacy, per se, but rather they test whether or not a student adheres to a certain political perspective. Note, it is this author’s opinion that political perspectives convey some of the weakest or most shallow forms and purposes of literacy.

What I propose are the following: a proper diagnosis of the problem, a likely prognosis, and a possible remedy.

Diagnosis

The results of this ailment have been found through a series of tests on literacy (vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension).

The ailment–decline in literacy rates and levels

Symptoms–poor reading comprehension (inability to understand what is read or heard); inability to make connections within the text, with the text, and with other texts, i.e., does not have background knowledge or cultural knowledge; inability to make analogies and order out of the reading or speech; inability to express inner thoughts; cannot get a job that requires reading or listening

Determine whether this is due to an illness, a weakness, or a disability. Illness can be cured; weakness can be strengthened; disability can be aided.

Intellectual illness–this deals with the realms of ideas; some ideas are more harmful than others; sometimes this illness is due to concupiscence (a person desires that which is evil, a spiritual problem); other times, this illness is due to misinformation, assumptions in place of knowledge to fill in gaps, or exaggerations. It is caused by the matter (material) that is read and how it is portrayed.

• poor language knowledge (a misunderstanding in the nature of the language)
• poor development in meaning (a misunderstanding or misplacement of word and structure definition)
• poor concept understanding (difficulty with concepts, such as free-will)
• poor historical knowledge (inaccurate or lacking)
• poor cultural knowledge (biased or lacking)

Unlike other countries in the western world, the US has the particular challenge of cultural heritage since she comes from several nations. The cultural heritage is not in the land, language, or customs of the place necessarily; many times in education, the cultural heritage emphasized depends on those politicians who are choosing the information. Historical knowledge is confused by the varying biases that exist in narratives. Families can help with or reinforce this illness; teachers can help with or reinforce this illness. This illness can become the most controversial in admitting there is problem and in the proposal of remedies since it deals with ideas.

Intellectual weakness–this deals with the lack of strategic methodology; students who are not explicitly shown how to read and write or are not given enough practice in reading, writing, and listening will invariably be weak in reading and speech comprehension. Weakness in reading/speech comprehension will lead to weak interpretations of material.

• poor language instruction (a misunderstanding in the function of the language)
• poor gathering, ordering, or connection of information (this might be attributed to learning styles but can also be attributed to poor instruction)
• poor trust in the messenger or misplaced trust in a messenger, especially if unable to discern the difference between true and false information (this can be due to personality conflict, a bad experience with the messenger, a bias against a type of person, has never seen the concept spoken of manifested–no good examples)

This aspect inevitably rises or falls on the philosophy or ideas on education that an educator has. The primary question here is, ‘What is an education for?’ If an educator has hard time understanding this question, then he or she is likely to not know which method to employ because he or she may or may not know why literacy is so important.

Intellectual disability–this deals with a physiological impairment, sometimes genetic, for instance, Down’s syndrome, and falls under the category of “students with exceptionalities.” Many dedicated professional teachers have discovered ways in which to help students who have these specific impairments. This impairment is a small portion of the student population and cannot be understood as a the primary source of our literacy problems.

Prognosis

What will happen if we continue forward with these ailments of the intellect?

If nothing is done, literacy will continue to fall.

If the wrong remedy is applied, literacy will continue to fall.

If literacy continues to fall, education systems become irrelevant and incomprehensible because they are not doing what they are supposed to do. If literacy continues to fall, voters will not be making educated decisions when they vote and participate in their community. If literacy continues to fall, humans will not be able to communicate with each other; thus, understanding will lose its effect and unifying power.

Remedy

Before applying the needful remedy, it is important to discover what literacy means, when and where it began, and when and where it began to fail. In that way, one can determine if the primary source of literacy problems can be traced in the history of humanity. While sin is an easy target for our intellectual ailments, that is not the primary focus of this article since there seem to be other problems contributing to our decline in literacy that are clearly not the fault of the students. In some cases, it may not even be the fault of today’s teachers because they usually only pass on what they were taught or what they were hired to teach. If the primary problem is an idea that was adopted several decades ago, then it would be unfair to lay blame on today’s teachers. It also does not matter which method is employed if the primary problem is an attachment to a harmful idea–this would be a tradition of teaching that extends back several decades that many teachers do not have the time to reflect upon.

• Is it possible that an idea we have adopted in the past is causing a literacy illness?
• What are destructive ideas or ideas that obstruct literacy?
• When did these ideas appear, and when were they adopted?
• Where did these ideas come from? Were they integrated into certain cultures? Which ones and why?
• How did educational institutions teach these ideas? Were these ideas described as good, different, or harmful? Were any contrasting ideas given? Was the idea made apparent or was it an underlying concept?
• Were these ideas reinforced through the media? Through the culture?

The remedy, of course, is a sound educational purpose, a sound educational philosophy, and a sound educational application. In order to discover those, one must have a firm grasp of salvation history (lights in the world) and language (the communication of light). In order to apply the proper remedy, however, the messenger needs to be trusted. Acceptance of knowledge rises and falls on trust and trustworthiness.

And, remember that intellectual illnesses can be cured, intellectual weaknesses can be strengthened, and intellectual disabilities can be aided–all can be helped with an appropriate education!

Subjects to be taught:

trivium–the reality of thought, language, and its application: the logic (through questions, analogies, order, structure, connection, meaning, agreement), grammar (through letters, sounds, combinations), and rhetoric of language (through reading, writing, speech, and visuals)

quadrivium–the material to discuss (the theory of math and its application; the theory of science and its application); this includes, history, geography, mathematics, literature, music, medicine, biology, art, physics, geology, archaeology, etc.

The trivium and quadrivium cover all that can be known as regards human knowledge. Whether a person calls the above subjects by those names, these two primary aspects of knowledge still exist.

In addition, Catholic students should be taught prayer, theology, philosophy, and Catholic history because all knowledge loses meaning and becomes unintelligible without Jesus, the Light. If a person does not acknowledge that essential truth, no matter; the Light gives off light anyway, and helps even those who have not yet found Him.

How to teach:

Dialogue–the teacher (hopefully more experienced and having studied longer) informs the student of all he or she knows about the material through lecture and/or readings; the students are given time to reflect on the knowledge and to create questions about the knowledge; the teacher and the students look at the varying gaps (what is not known), the inconsistencies (what does not connect), and the connections (what is known and what connects); the teacher and the students will write down their new discoveries, admitting where there was an error or gap in knowledge and retaining what is true.

This is the method that respects the free-will and creativity of the other person the most while simultaneously contributing to the knowledge of all people in the group.

When and who to teach:

Of course, dialogue takes time. Smaller classroom sizes would also be more conducive to this type of education. While dialogue might not work with younger students, since they would not yet have acquired enough language material to join the conversation, this definitely would work with high-school students who are in much need of philosophical discussion.

How to test:

Dialogue–a superior form of gathering knowledge, adapting conveyance, and finding exactly where a gap or error in knowledge is.

Written essays–a secondary form, which is useful for feedback, reflection, and refinement.

What to test:

It depends on what you think an education is for and how you think testing helps you discover what a students knows and does not know and what kinds of tests show this information the best.

Why to teach:

This author believes that literacy’s primary origin comes from the Word made flesh; literacy–understanding speech and written works–was given in order to show us Himself and the beauty of creation. All knowledge reflects God in one way or another. Education is to help us to come to know Him and His varying gifts (people and creation) better. Some people advance in knowledge faster than others, depending on their grasp of and attentiveness to the Prime Mover. I would rather see a person advance in spiritual knowledge more than any other way; the rest of knowledge, after that, just sort of falls into place as needed.

_____________________________________________________________

References:

Marchand-Martella, N. E., Martella, R. C., Modderman, S. L., Petersen, H. M., & Pan, S. (2013). Key Areas of Effective Adolescent Literacy Programs. Education & Treatment Of Children (West Virginia University Press), 36(1), 161-184. (article)

Sister Miriam Joseph (2002 revision). The trivium: The liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, understanding the nature and function of language. Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia. (book)

Sweet, Jr., RW (2004). The big picture: Where we are nationally on the reading front and how we got here. The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research. P. McCardle and V. Chhabra, eds. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.: Baltimore. (book)

Turner, W. (1912). Scholasticism. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved January 6, 2014 from New Advent:http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13548a.htm

*see also other articles on literacy on this website for more references

 

Building A Canon of Literature (brainstorming)

I have for quite some time questioned the canon of literature that has been used for American education. This questioning not only came with the Common Core controversy but also my experience with English Literature courses in the United States. How is it that Americans are more likely to know more English history than US history? If several Americans have Irish ancestry, why do we not hear of the extensive Irish literature that begins in the 5th century? Why did poetry become somewhat dead or deadly in the 20th century? Do we necessarily have to accept the canon that has been passed down from a system of education that is having problems with helping students become literate? What kinds of literature do I think my students should know in order to be able to think thoughtfully through the various pieces of information they encounter every day?

To even attempt this sort of project, however, I have had to ask why and where certain biases existed. Why was some highly significant literature left out? Why was other literature emphasized?  How does that affect people’s perception of the world and history? As an American and a Catholic, this becomes a very provocative line of questioning, especially when you consider that one culture’s written literature in the US was held as superior at the expense of all others and when you consider that Catholic thought seemed to find its way through other literary instruments despite the odds.

My preference, however, is not to tear one culture down in order to make all other cultures feel better. I want to build a canon of literature that resembles a quilt; I do not intend to condemn any culture’s literature. As I see it, literature is not an evolution of the art of writing [once I began to study early Irish literature, that theory falls apart] nor can literature be confined to that which is written [movies or visual stories have proven to be the most widely accepted literature today]. I do not want to ignore or toss out pieces of this quilt in order to prove some point, but I also know that as a teacher, I will have a limited time to convey the story of…literature. The information age is a blessing, but it is also more abundant than one person can learn in a lifetime. Which pieces will I choose to go on this quilt?

• Catholic literature
• American literature

Those are pretty broad terms…

It also becomes a question of knowing not only literature from several cultures, but it also is a question of knowing history and historical context.

An honest literature scholar must admit that no one can claim that available written literature is the only type of literature. Most scholars must admit that oral tradition was the most efficient way to pass on literature in most cultures for a very long time. Even today, to talk to another person is far quicker and probably more understandable than taking the time to write something down. Written work takes time to write as well as time to interpret. How many interpretations do we make of a work because we cannot read the body language, the tone of voice, the historical context? Knowledge of oral tradition also means knowing that just because we have older written texts from certain areas of the world that those cultures may or may not have been necessarily better at telling a story, nor can it be claimed that they were the first to tell a particular story. Just because a piece is missing does not mean that the gap can be ignored–we can’t say a puzzle is done when pieces are gone. Thus, original stories were not necessarily written down first.

For instance, if I write a poem down by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poem that he spoke but did not write down, I cannot claim to be the author of that poem [he died before I was born]. This fallacious line of thinking has been made by some teachers of world literature. They believe that since an older version of The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI exists today than does the written Hebrew Bible, that means that the epic’s portrayal of the flood is the original story. The first assumption is that all writers had to read a text before knowing the story themselves [the Brothers Grimm would have had a hard time printing any folklore with that line of thinking]; the second assumption is that the flood story was only known by the Mesopotamian people in circa 1900 BC [I think that we are up to 250 different cultures from all around the world having a similar story, a story that is hard to date but extremely coincidental]; and the third assumption is that oral tradition is inferior to written text [Wouldn’t you rather get the story straight over a cup of coffee? I would like to talk poetry with Gerard Manley Hopkins.]. Written text might be more concrete and stable, sort of, but it is not superior to oral tradition.

Stories travel through people far better than through paper. I like to think of oral tradition as a collection of books who were people. In some places, they were called poets, in other places bards, in other areas priests, and in other places prophets.

Oral tradition might not be as clean and stable as written work but neither is history. How many interpretations of history are we getting now even with written information? Here, I have to mention another phenomenon I have noticed. Many Catholic authors wrote the histories of the cultures they encountered as if finding another culture were a blessing. Rather than throwing things out, Catholics seem to have enjoyed gathering what they could, good, bad, or ugly. They just love story!

So, in that beautiful tradition, this is just the beginning of my journey in trying to build a suitable canon of literature that tells the story of humanity, the Church, and Americans. It will be a story filled with heroes and villains, with hope and fear, victory and loss, God, Saints, and sinners. The setting will be that past, the present, and the future on any continent or planet. The plots with be thick; the conflict will be intense; the sense of humanity will be real. My aim for this project is to be honest and grateful for the abundant blessings of literature.

As a reminder, this would be for Secondary education.

Let’s begin:

1. Creation Story, Oral Tradition and World Literatures (a study of myth and meaning; note, myth means that which points to something which is hard to say with words)

2. The Bible, Old Testament (a study of genres); Egyptian love poetry (something that will be noted in contrast with Hebrew poetry and literature is that Hebrew work contains more hope)

3. Maccabees with Greek Literature supplemental (Plato, Aristotle, Homer, etc.); Confucius and Buddha supplemental

4. The New Testament (as well as the Christian innovation of moving from scrolls to books in the early centuries); Roman Literature (Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, etc.)

5. The Church Fathers and Mothers, 2nd century forward (Augustine of Hippo, Isidore of Seville, Catherine of Alexandria, and other Saints); Boethius, the Consolation of Philosophy, and Valmiki supplemental

6. Irish Literature, 5th century forward (vernacular, genre study, and historical impact)

7. French Literature, 9th century forward (philosophy, science, etc.); also literature from Japan and the Middle East (7th Century +); also St. Alfred the Great

8. Spanish Literature, 13th century forward (poetry, international law, navigation, philosophy); also Germanic/Nordic 11th & 12th century forward

9. Italian Literature, 14th century forward (poetry, science, etc.)

10. English Literature, 14th century forward (Chaucer, More, Shakespeare, etc.); German Literature, 15th century forward

11. American Literature, 16th century forward (short stories, slave narratives, letters, novels, movies)

12. The 20th Century

To choose literature from the 20th century will be the most complicated of all previous centuries because so many editors had odd nationalistic or political tendencies and created canons according to those tendencies. No longer was it about enjoying good literature from wherever it came but cherry picking literature that proved a point. Early in that century, the British perspective in written literature became dominant in the US and therefore was read in school, but community-enjoyed literature in the US had moved to the movies and songs by the 1930’s. The second half of the century’s canons in the US were built by those trying to prove a political point at the expense of losing literary and historical perspective. The most frustrating thing for literature scholars when it comes to the 20th century must be those darn cultural revolutions that ended up destroying a great deal of literature and culture. If you love culture and literature, you probably do not like the active suppression done by several regimes in the 20th century.

The above list is not set in stone and literary history is certainly not linear endeavor. Great literature, flourishing with Christian initiative, was being produced at multiple places at the same time. I still have more research to do and could use your help, but with Catholic and Hebrew literature as the base, students will learn how innovative and original people have been with literature. For instance, framework stories, essays, autobiographies, ethical religious works, utopia literature, and science fiction are just some of the inventions fully employed by Catholic and Hebrew writers. Students will also learn that God’s light does not hold brightness in just one culture, but He moves around to share the wealth and abundance of the Word. In my mind, He’s creating a beautiful quilt that can be wrapped in and read, on a cold day with a warm cup of coffee.