The Core Knowledge Blog

Re-establish the traditional teacher-centered classroom, and soon we won’t need state tests to demonstrate progress. Thus spake Fred Strine, a 36 year veteran public school teacher who pens a guest op-ed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It will be easy to dismiss Strine as a greybeard, but what he has to say will strike a chord with anyone who has dared wonder why what used to be called teaching is now dismissed as “chalk and talk.” We are all “facilitators” now, and Strine has isssues with that.

Education requires discipline, both intellectual and behavioral, and discipline must be imposed before it becomes engrained….To inculcate discipline in others, a leader must model excellence and self-discipline. Traditional teacher-centered classrooms had such leaders. By contrast, student-centered learning allows the inexperienced and the undisciplined to become the standard. Who then is the model for students when today’s teachers merely facilitate as “guides on the side,” leaving students to discover on their own?

Our schools are not producing enough real self-esteem based on genuine achievement measured by a respected, educated adult. Instead, the facilitator system generates phony, Hollywood self-esteem — a cocky, anti-intellectual sense of entitlement that shouts, “Facts and information be damned. My opinion is as valuable as any facilitator’s.”

Strine is just getting warmed up.

Ignorance is intellectual inertia. Most real learning requires real work. No one ever became an expert by being lazy. Since ignorance is the natural condition of uneducated humans, it needs to be overcome by some outside force. Sometimes curiosity and enthusiasm will suffice. Often necessity is the catalyst. Most of the time, however, intellectual inertia needs a genuine push toward knowledge. Facilitators are too wimpy, too passive to push anything or anyone.

“Every person who has ever played sports knows at least one coach who pushed his athletes to accomplish more than they ever thought possible,” Strine concludes. “The process is necessarily confrontational. So is life, and therein lies the lesson. Every literate person ought to be able to point to a teacher, a brain coach, who had the same effect. It shouldn’t be a major leap to understand what works for the body also works for the brain.”