I am tired, damn tired, of people not thinking.
As a teacher I don't have a problem with ignorance; ignorance can be fixed. As my first mentor teacher said, however, "You can't fix stupid."
I am going to try and be as positive as I can and assume that President Obama acted out of ignorance tonight rather than purposeful stupidity. Obama's reference to Sputnik might sound good to someone who has no idea what the history really is, but to an educator? Let me put it this way: the SOTU tonight was the first speech I've heard since Bush was in office that made me too angry to sit through. And even though I should be retiring for the night, I feel I need to make some things plain to those who haven't taken courses in education history.
I'll even be brief (compared to an ed-history class at least).
In the beginning (all the way back to the 19th century) public education existed primarily to instill morals and/or promote characteristics the captains industry wanted to find in their workers. Gradually the purpose of education widened to include promoting responsible citizenry and encouraging academic endeavors. This meant that students studied math, science, history, foreign languages (even dead ones), literature, writing, rhetoric, oratory, visual arts, drama, music. The sciences taught them to be critical. History taught them context. The arts taught them to be creative. [Quick aside: creativity is not a talent that you either do or do not possess. Creativity is a way of solving problems intuitively that can be taught and must be practiced to be developed.]
Then there was Sputnik and the ensuing nationwide freakout about how we were falling behind communism. The educational focus changed to discipline-based education; under that newer model creativity of any kind was seen as only a small and easily-neglected component of teaching. This is where we get the much-maligned new math. This is also where we get the comprehensive school model. And in the short term this renewed emphasis on math and science worked wonders. But why?
It worked because the children who were then going through secondary education had been raised to think critically, contextually and creatively. Adding to or augmenting the math and science in their powerfully broad-based education produced a generation of technological innovators. The gifted revolution in the late 70s and 80s did the same thing for the children that were brought up in that environment as well, producing many of the current crop of great thinkers. But what is overlooked is that in both of those situations, the foundation of their education was broad. It was not rigidly defined as only the hard sciences.
Now? Today there are no gifted classes. There are some that keep the name perhaps, but court rulings have prevented tracking students for the past 15 years. In my school system, there are no differences in curricula no matter the level of the students, meaning both high- and low-performing students are essentially left out. NCLB even removed the definition of giftedness from Federal law. And the arts? Rhetoric? Latin? Music? We are now educating children by focusing on only the 'core' areas: Math, Science and English.
That's why the President's vision is so short-sighted. Yes, Race to the Top is nothing but a national lottery for educational funding whose grants have nothing to do with either need or equity. Yes, you cannot claim to respect teachers on one hand while pretending that teachers are either good (and ought to be rewarded) or bad (and we should stop making excuses for them). Remember that the next time you see your doctor's diploma hanging on the wall. Does it tell you their value-added score?
But more than any of that, this fetish politicians seem to have with math and science has to go. To concentrate on math and science to the exclusion of all else is not just ludicrous, it's suicidal. We cannot have innovators unless they know first how to innovate. We cannot create unless we first have learned to be creative. You can know all the math and science in the world and it will not amount for anything unless you have even a glimmer of an idea of what to do with it.
As America's greatest inventor Thomas Edison once said, "During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple."