Lift Up Your Hearts!

I don't believe I was aware of the launch of the first Sputnik 50 years ago.  I do remember going outside with my father two and a half years later to watch Echo 1 traverse the sky.  That marked the first of many excursions with him to look at phenomena in the sky:  satellites, lunar and solar eclipses, comets.

When Sputnik aroused consternation in the United States and set off furious attempts at educational reform, I was a month into my kindergarten year, so I can't speak accurately about consequent changes in our public schools.  There are some comparisions I can do, however, looking at the three generations I know.

The results are mixed.  I remember my father remarking that I was learning much more than he did, by which he chiefly meant that I studied calculus in high school.  His first calculus course was in college, and the only reason he had been exempt from taking trigonometry first was that he had gone to a particularly good high school.  That our children's first calculus experiences were in early high school was due to their previous home education, not the public school system, but their high school does deserve full credit for making it possible for them to complete half a dozen or more college-level classes before they graduated.  There was no Advanced Placement program when my parents were in high school, and in my day it was limited to just a few courses and open to seniors only.  It's undeniable that the 50 years post-Sputnik have expanded our educational opportunities, and many people are graduating from high school with knowledge far advanced from that of previous generations.

And yet....  In general knowledge I could never compete with my father, and neither could my siblings, our children, nor any of our contemporaries.  In history, geography, and literature the gap was especially noticeable, all the more so since by profession he was an engineer.  He was continually astonished at what people didn't know about things he assumed were common knowledge, such as the location of Hudson Bay.  He could recite great quantities of poetry, understand literary references, and converse about history from ancient times to the present.  Some of his knowledge, to be sure, must be credited to his life-long habit of reading books, but I know he learned much of it in school, and even in his love of books he differs from most contemporary students—how many graduate with the habit of reading to sustain their education all their lives?

Technically, of course, today's students are far beyond his knowledge, even though he had a master's degree in physics to supplement his engineering degree.  And yet, even though he would have been lost in most of his daughter's and granddaughter's mechanical engineering courses, his college courses left him with a gut-level, practical knowledge of the behavior of materials lacking in those "who just plug numbers into computer models."

So—is our educational system better than it was pre-Sputnik?  Certainly yes, and definitely no.  We know more in some areas, but are we better educated? For poor, minority and special-needs students (both low- and high-end), opportunites are certainly greater.  But are our children, in general, better off?  Are they graduating with both the skills and the will to continue learning throughout their lives?  Do they have a sound foundation in all basic areas on which to build?  Are they building on that foundation?

Have the changes been worth the cost?

I don't know the answers.

What I do know is that in our home education program we did not give our children a tenth of the education I had hoped for—and yet it rocketed them to the top of their college classes and best of all left them with the desire and ability to continue learning.  If we, doing so little, did so much, why hasn't our educational system done better, with its vast resources, its near-monopoly status, and its strong community, business, and governmental support?

John Taylor Gatto would no doubt say public education is still doing an excellent job of accomplishing its true goals, but that's another issue.