Election 2008 Education How should we teach our children?

Author: Gregg Humphrey, Director of Elementary Education

The Teach For America recruitment has begun again on campus soon to be followed by Teach Kentucky, representatives from independent schools, and placement agencies such and Carney, Sandoe & Associates. Clearly there is a groundswell of interest in teaching among Middlebury students well beyond those who are filling our Teacher Education courses or who decide to student teach in our program. The desire to find meaningful work, "to make a difference," drives this desire to teach. This current interest in education reminds me of another war era when I was at Middlebury, from 1966-1970.

I fondly remember the sociology course "Radical Perspectives on Education." It was during this course that I first learned of The Vermont Design for Education. Published in May 1968, this position paper from the Vermont Department of Education defined "an ideal, a student-centered philosophy for the process of education in Vermont." When I completed the Middlebury College Teacher Education Program, it was the ideas within this paper that the program embraced and taught me. A few sample "premises" include: Education should strive to maintain the individuality and originality of the learner; Emphasis should be upon a child's own way of learning - through discovery and exploration, through real experiences; The teacher does not abdicate a leadership role in the student-centered approach, but indeed assumes a far more important role of leadership, one responding to the individualized needs of each student; The continual assessment of each student's progress is vital.

I wish I could give a copy of The Vermont Design to every teacher, administrator, and school board member across Vermont and to every Middlebury College student who decides to teach after graduating. Why? Because I feel that we have lost our way amid the federal and state accountability mandates. Many elementary schools here and around the country have virtually eliminated or have seriously diminished the teaching of science and social studies and the arts as we "bubble test" in a world of all math, all literacy skills, all the time for the sake of No Child Left Behind. In these forty years we have gone from a belief in student-centered learning to nary a peep about any core educational convictions except politically driven sloganeering.

I feel firmly that it is time to once again ask, "what do we stand for in our local public schools?" regardless of what the politicians in Washington, D.C. and Montpelier mandate (and typically never fully fund anyway). Bill Mathis, superintendent at neighboring Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union, has calculated that we spend more money than we receive in federal funding just to manage and abide by the demands attached to the funds.

We can learn much from the past by conserving good ideas and changing and adapting ideas to fit today's world which is not the world of 1966-1970. As we reflect on the Bush administration, and as a shift in power begins to swell, the time seems especially ripe to reexamine educational policy. I feel that we need to halt the mandated testing, broaden assessment requirements to include a variety of teacher-generated evaluations, and teach our young students to question once again, to become inquirers. How Vermont ever got in the business of kowtowing to unreasonable and uninformed national mandates is too long a political story to go into now. We used to pride ourselves on our uniqueness and in fact we still do in so many other important areas. We need to begin the process once again of deciding what constitutes excellent education at our local levels and designing programs to help students once again discover, explore, and experience great teaching and learning - and not just in math and reading to do well on the (expensive, time consuming, and ineffective) standardized tests.

As you consider becoming a teacher, consider what your fondest hopes would be for your future students and add these thoughts to your reasons for entering the field. You also might want to take a Teacher Education course and learn about the leadership skills needed to inspire and maintain a rigorous, student-centered classroom.