This year, I decided to undertake a project that I had no idea how I would actually complete: teaching a World History course. As someone who loves history and ancient civilizations, I thought it would be a cinch. And, after all, I knew more about recent history in the far-flung corners of the world than the average Joe, or so I thought.
As I have fought my way through the course, I realized that something was fundamentally off about how we teach history in our public school's system. To give an example, looking through the textbook, I realized that, in a single chapter, we were supposed to cover the highlights of African history, a history that, in recent times, affects almost every aspect of foreign policy in which our nation is engaged. We, through the democratic process, are making decisions about countries like the Congo, Rwanda, Egypt, Israel, etc., without really having a thorough understanding of the motivations of the people who live there. And the reason is that we fundamentally misunderstand their history, mostly because we haven't studied it.
Then we got to the Asia chapter, again, confined to about one twenty-page chapter in the book with four lessons. I have to admit, on Chinese ancient history, I am an absolute ignoramus. I was totally lost on how to explain the differences between Manchurian China and the Qing, or what the effects of the Mongolian invasion were, and correspondingly, how to fundamentally improve my students' knowledge of these subjects. And yet, if we consider current events as the standard by which we evaluate our history curriculum, it is Asia, particularly China, whose history and culture are completely changing the conditions under which we live.
We are in a global society now, and yet our history curriculum seems to assume that an American will never encounter or need to encounter businessmen, politicians, or even ordinary folk from countries that are only a mouse-click away. Currently, as I understand it, the basic framework for the secondary history curriculum is this:
7th grade - Geography and World Cultures
8th grade - Civics
9th grade - World History
10th grade - American History
11th grade - American Government
12th grade - Elective (Usually an AP course)
The problem with this system is that each of the courses, at best, offer a scattershot of particular cultures in which we are supposed to interact. The "World History" course, in particular, offers particular challenges because, at best, students will gain a shallow concept of the overall development of their OWN civilization and its global sources, but more realistically, will be reduced to learning a modicum of trivia about this or that far-eastern country. Also, each of these courses is going to be primarily focused on the ANCIENT history, or the "origins" of each of the topics under which they seem to fall, which means that, in my experience of the public school and in teaching World History myself, an inordinate amount of time is spent at the beginning of the year on the distant past, while the transition from antiquity to modernity gets short shrift.
Also, the breadth of these courses tends to result in ideological attempts to focus on one particular "theme" throughout the text. This is a good pedagogical method for the curriculum, but oftentimes those themes are unduly ethnocentric. For example, in my World History textbook, ONE chapter is spent on Indian history, a nation that currently has around a billion citizens and is the driver of economic development throughout the world, while TWO chapters are spent on Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in Europe, respectively.
Some attempts have been made at reforming this process in experimental or "classical" private schools, which have introduced a chronological method for teaching history. The basic premise here is that, in order for students to gain perspective on history, they need to learn things relative to the events that were happening contemporaneously. Also, students learn best from a good story and, as experience teaches us, a good, memorable story starts from the beginning and proceeds in a logical order.
There are some certainly some merits to this approach. In teaching the Renaissance, for example, I had the rather bothersome task of trying to bring a chapter that kept jumping from date to date in a topical, rather than chronological order. My students were completely confused. The only way around this was to have them create a timeline of all the events in a clear, straightforward presentation. When we finished this, we starting seeing relationships between the events that we hadn't seen before in the chapter, such as the observation that the Northern Renaissance didn't really get in full swing until after the Protestant Reformation, and that this definitely influenced the different direction that Northern humanists took the rediscovery of classical learning. You can't have Milton without Calvin, Knox, and Luther.
On the other hand, part of this depends on the continuity of the story that you are telling. Different civilizations develop at different times along different lines, and to tell a chronological history of the world in a single course necessarily involves underemphasizing some cultures and emphasizing others. In my experience, the usual way that World History texts resolve this is by centering on outside sources for the American experience, an "inside looking out" approach. The problem with this is that the American experience of today is fundamentally different from that of yesteryear precisely because multiple cultures are participating IN it: just consider the role of Latin American politics in the modern United States. What a history curriculum needs to do is change the focus from an "inside looking out" perspective to an "outside looking in" perspective, if it is going to be truly educational.
So, while wishing to keep the best of the chronological approach, I tend to think that we need a radical reorganization of our history curriculum along ethnological lines. If we are to teach students the story of humanity, we need to refocus our efforts on helping them gain perspective in detail of the various cultures that are participating in the global culture of the twenty-first century. We also need to change our philosophy from teaching students starting with the most familiar and quotidian experiences to the least, to starting with the most distant culture to the most familiar, taking the history of the human species as our fundamental guide. We all share a common origin, so we can all start at the same spot.
In my ideal world, the history curriculum would focus on specific areas of the areas of the world, and then proceed along a chronological basis. Here is a sample curriculum (very roughly drawn):
7th Grade - Ancient Civilizations (Beginnings to the Fall of Rome)
8th Grade - Middle Eastern and African History
9th Grade - Asian History
10th Grade - European History
11th Grade - American History
12th Grade - Pacific History
Students would cover, in a more integrated manner, all of the topics that are the focus of current social studies curriculum. For example, the development of Christianity and the rise of Islam would cover religious studies and be developed in 8th grade. Students would learn about the development of democracy and the philosophies behind it in 10th grade, while they would then learn about our governmental system in particular in American History, which would also include the history of Latin America considered as an integral part of our own story. They would learn geography more effectively, because they would spend more time on individual regions than they have time for in 7th grade Geography.
The arrangement above is not perfect, I am perfectly willing to admit, and the complexity of these individual topics would require a great deal of care in designing texts. The other challenge would be finding teachers who are qualified to actually teach the particular courses, but in our interconnected world, the possibility of finding experts on particular topics of history, such as Asian or African history and bringing their instruction to the United States is greatly aided through the use of e-learning technology and the ease of transferring money over long distances. A global educational network would, in fact, serve to improve the lives of academics and instructors (and thereby, the people with whom they do business on a daily basis) in developing nations. Imagine a cohort of enthusiastic graduate students from South Africa who are being paid American wages to spread knowledge about their culture in a foreign country. The possibilities are rather mind-boggling.
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Friday, April 24, 2015
Monday, February 9, 2015
Education Reform (My Personal Platform)
So, as all of you know, I am a teacher. I have taught for the past six years in various private institutions. I also had the great opportunity of teaching in a public school for a little while at the beginning of my career, and I have met and worked with students from both a public and a private background in the context of an online environment. That, admittedly, may not amount to a whole lot of experience professionally next to some of you, but I would submit that the following suggestions are not so much centered on a criticism of the teaching profession or education per se, but on the way that we organize the education system as a whole. In other words, what I am talking about here is the way that we integrate all of the state's learning environments into a coherent whole. And that has way more to do with politics than it does with educational praxis. So this is a sort of outline, in brief, of the various ideas I have collected over the past few years for reforming Arkansas' public educational system.
First, I think it essential that, in order to have a uniform assessment of skills regardless of educational background, we have a fairly objective system for assessing a student's qualifications at the end of his education. It does very little good to have yearly exams (most of which do not prevent a student from passing to the next grade) which are merely intended to assess the ongoing quality of instruction, if the students, at the end of the program, are not prepared to go on to higher studies. There is also the challenge that annual benchmark exams, as we used to call them in Arkansas, are very specific to each grade level and so encourage teachers to merely "teach the exam" to up their qualifications. I think this is an abuse of the whole idea of instruction. What we should be using exams to do is to help parents decide whether their children are getting the best out of their education, and that would imply a high-stakes exam leading out of high school.
So, what I would propose is that we break apart the whole separation between schools, homeschools, and private schools. Students in Arkansas would simply receive an "Arkansas High School Diploma", of which there would be two different categories. The first, taken at the end of tenth grade, would be a "Standard Level Diploma", which would essentially cover most of the material in the GED and ACT. Students who passed it would receive a diploma and could legally discontinue their education, if they chose. The Standard Level Exam would also include a number of sections for elective courses, which a student could decide to take based on his own level of confidence in the subject. It would not matter where they were educated; they would all qualify for the Standard Level Diploma in the same way.
Students who passed the Standard Level Diploma and qualified with above average or excellent scores in particular subject areas could then take courses in those areas to prepare themselves for the Advanced Level Exam, which they would take at the end of the twelfth grade. Provided that they received average or higher scores in a minimum number of subjects and at least one or two electives, they would qualify for the Advanced Level Diploma which, again, they would receive directly from the state with no involvement from the local school or school board.
I believe that this method of qualifying students would ultimately be the most equitable for students. Parents themselves could decide: Is paying money for a private education really worth it in terms of results? Can I educate my child to the qualifications necessary for them to achieve a useful diploma? I believe in freedom and choice in the realm of education, and I think that forcing the parents (and students) to look seriously at the alternatives before them would benefit everyone involved.
The next part of this is where I will probably get myself into trouble. On the one hand, I support school choice, in the sense that I do not believe that parents should have to pay taxes or fees to public schools when they choose to enroll their children in a private institution, unless, of course, those fees are redirected to the schools which parents themselves chose. This, however, I only support in the instance that the schools that parents are enrolling their children in are free of charge, meaning that they do not ask nor require those parents to pay for their children to take classes at the private school. This is because the taxes themselves are collected on an ENTIRE community to guarantee that everyone in that community receives an education, whether they can afford it or not. It is a rudimentary form of wealth redistribution, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. Just because a person can afford a better school, does not mean that funds should be withdrawn from those schools that serve everybody. It would be like letting people bring their own popcorn to the movie theater. On the other hand, if those private schools are doing a good job educating the community as a charitable organization, then of course, we should support the charitable instinct of individuals over the crushing presence of a welfare state. Another option, of course, would be to exempt individuals from paying the school property taxes and instead taxing tuition payments to private schools, but I doubt that would be any more or less popular.
Where I absolutely do not support school choice is in allowing parents whose children live in one school district to send their children to another school district unless, in exceptional circumstances, the student is simply unable to go to their local school. The reason for this is much the same. Many students, particularly those in poor neighborhoods, will be unable to afford to send their children to schools outside of their district due to additional transportation costs; and if they do decide to send their children away, the longer distance will mean less time at home with family, less time for homework, and less connection between the local community and its school. A local school is a center of knowledge and empowerment for a small community, as well as a neighborhood. If we allow students to flock to this or that public school, it will inevitably rip students out of their communities during the most foundational time of their lives and ultimately result in their integration into a general culture-less consumerist society with no morals and no background.
I also believe in small local schools. Oftentimes, small local schools become a target for accusations of waste, poor management, and poor instruction. However, consolidation has not achieved any more financial viability in the long term as unconsolidated schools, and the negative effects (peer pressure, violence, high teacher-student ratios) seem worse than the problems they were trying to fix. Yet, even from a financial and professional point of view, technology has finally caught up to the problem. It is now possible that a small school in, say, Ash Flat, Arkansas could have a course in Mandarin Chinese, taught by an instructor from Hong Kong and supervised in a large multi-level classroom with a paraprofessional supervisor. I know this because I do this job on a regular basis. It has its own challenges, of course, but in general, I have been satisfied with the results. Today, every school in every small town could have any course offered in the state of Arkansas, and qualified professionals could teach from their own hometowns in multiple districts at competitive pay without having to take jobs outside of their field. Who needs a coach to be a history teacher any more?
I also believe that the school day should be significantly shortened or opened up throughout the state. Ideally, students should be free for at least an hour in the day to study, participate in intramural sports, receive religious instruction from clergy of their choosing, or some other profitable recreation. Students do not have enough time to really process what they are learning in the modern school environment, and I think that results in very shallow presentation by the teachers to keep up with the curriculum timetable. What those periods of time set aside for leisure should NOT be used for is work. Work can happen in the classroom or after school: schools should not be in the business of turning their students into so many cogs in the industrial machine.
Finally, I think it is essential that we consider establishing specialty institutions to target boys and girls for fields in which they are underrepresented. This would require some gender segregation, but with the overall goal of making the professional field more diverse in particular areas. For example, Arkansas needs a public school of math and science that is for female students only. Imagine, also, a boys-only arts and humanities school, or an advanced academic institution for students with learning disabilities. Once again, it is essential that these institutions be either free or public (or both) and focus on enlisting students who show particular aptitude for these skills. Merely making them available would lead to a consistent downgrading of expectations to meet parents' demands.
There are, of course, many different areas where we could improve our educational system and methods. I, however, am a teacher, and if I wrote down every possible improvement (additional courses in agriculture and fine arts, people?), I would never have enough time to grade papers. As it is, I think that adopting even a few of these ideas would so radically change people's perspective on education, that a lot of other improvements might simply follow as a natural consequence.
First, I think it essential that, in order to have a uniform assessment of skills regardless of educational background, we have a fairly objective system for assessing a student's qualifications at the end of his education. It does very little good to have yearly exams (most of which do not prevent a student from passing to the next grade) which are merely intended to assess the ongoing quality of instruction, if the students, at the end of the program, are not prepared to go on to higher studies. There is also the challenge that annual benchmark exams, as we used to call them in Arkansas, are very specific to each grade level and so encourage teachers to merely "teach the exam" to up their qualifications. I think this is an abuse of the whole idea of instruction. What we should be using exams to do is to help parents decide whether their children are getting the best out of their education, and that would imply a high-stakes exam leading out of high school.
So, what I would propose is that we break apart the whole separation between schools, homeschools, and private schools. Students in Arkansas would simply receive an "Arkansas High School Diploma", of which there would be two different categories. The first, taken at the end of tenth grade, would be a "Standard Level Diploma", which would essentially cover most of the material in the GED and ACT. Students who passed it would receive a diploma and could legally discontinue their education, if they chose. The Standard Level Exam would also include a number of sections for elective courses, which a student could decide to take based on his own level of confidence in the subject. It would not matter where they were educated; they would all qualify for the Standard Level Diploma in the same way.
Students who passed the Standard Level Diploma and qualified with above average or excellent scores in particular subject areas could then take courses in those areas to prepare themselves for the Advanced Level Exam, which they would take at the end of the twelfth grade. Provided that they received average or higher scores in a minimum number of subjects and at least one or two electives, they would qualify for the Advanced Level Diploma which, again, they would receive directly from the state with no involvement from the local school or school board.
I believe that this method of qualifying students would ultimately be the most equitable for students. Parents themselves could decide: Is paying money for a private education really worth it in terms of results? Can I educate my child to the qualifications necessary for them to achieve a useful diploma? I believe in freedom and choice in the realm of education, and I think that forcing the parents (and students) to look seriously at the alternatives before them would benefit everyone involved.
The next part of this is where I will probably get myself into trouble. On the one hand, I support school choice, in the sense that I do not believe that parents should have to pay taxes or fees to public schools when they choose to enroll their children in a private institution, unless, of course, those fees are redirected to the schools which parents themselves chose. This, however, I only support in the instance that the schools that parents are enrolling their children in are free of charge, meaning that they do not ask nor require those parents to pay for their children to take classes at the private school. This is because the taxes themselves are collected on an ENTIRE community to guarantee that everyone in that community receives an education, whether they can afford it or not. It is a rudimentary form of wealth redistribution, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. Just because a person can afford a better school, does not mean that funds should be withdrawn from those schools that serve everybody. It would be like letting people bring their own popcorn to the movie theater. On the other hand, if those private schools are doing a good job educating the community as a charitable organization, then of course, we should support the charitable instinct of individuals over the crushing presence of a welfare state. Another option, of course, would be to exempt individuals from paying the school property taxes and instead taxing tuition payments to private schools, but I doubt that would be any more or less popular.
Where I absolutely do not support school choice is in allowing parents whose children live in one school district to send their children to another school district unless, in exceptional circumstances, the student is simply unable to go to their local school. The reason for this is much the same. Many students, particularly those in poor neighborhoods, will be unable to afford to send their children to schools outside of their district due to additional transportation costs; and if they do decide to send their children away, the longer distance will mean less time at home with family, less time for homework, and less connection between the local community and its school. A local school is a center of knowledge and empowerment for a small community, as well as a neighborhood. If we allow students to flock to this or that public school, it will inevitably rip students out of their communities during the most foundational time of their lives and ultimately result in their integration into a general culture-less consumerist society with no morals and no background.
I also believe in small local schools. Oftentimes, small local schools become a target for accusations of waste, poor management, and poor instruction. However, consolidation has not achieved any more financial viability in the long term as unconsolidated schools, and the negative effects (peer pressure, violence, high teacher-student ratios) seem worse than the problems they were trying to fix. Yet, even from a financial and professional point of view, technology has finally caught up to the problem. It is now possible that a small school in, say, Ash Flat, Arkansas could have a course in Mandarin Chinese, taught by an instructor from Hong Kong and supervised in a large multi-level classroom with a paraprofessional supervisor. I know this because I do this job on a regular basis. It has its own challenges, of course, but in general, I have been satisfied with the results. Today, every school in every small town could have any course offered in the state of Arkansas, and qualified professionals could teach from their own hometowns in multiple districts at competitive pay without having to take jobs outside of their field. Who needs a coach to be a history teacher any more?
I also believe that the school day should be significantly shortened or opened up throughout the state. Ideally, students should be free for at least an hour in the day to study, participate in intramural sports, receive religious instruction from clergy of their choosing, or some other profitable recreation. Students do not have enough time to really process what they are learning in the modern school environment, and I think that results in very shallow presentation by the teachers to keep up with the curriculum timetable. What those periods of time set aside for leisure should NOT be used for is work. Work can happen in the classroom or after school: schools should not be in the business of turning their students into so many cogs in the industrial machine.
Finally, I think it is essential that we consider establishing specialty institutions to target boys and girls for fields in which they are underrepresented. This would require some gender segregation, but with the overall goal of making the professional field more diverse in particular areas. For example, Arkansas needs a public school of math and science that is for female students only. Imagine, also, a boys-only arts and humanities school, or an advanced academic institution for students with learning disabilities. Once again, it is essential that these institutions be either free or public (or both) and focus on enlisting students who show particular aptitude for these skills. Merely making them available would lead to a consistent downgrading of expectations to meet parents' demands.
There are, of course, many different areas where we could improve our educational system and methods. I, however, am a teacher, and if I wrote down every possible improvement (additional courses in agriculture and fine arts, people?), I would never have enough time to grade papers. As it is, I think that adopting even a few of these ideas would so radically change people's perspective on education, that a lot of other improvements might simply follow as a natural consequence.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
What is a teacher? What is the point in learning Latin?
I was asked these questions a couple years back by a colleague in grad school. I recently dug up my response, which I thought might serve as an interesting discussion-starter.
So, you posted this a while ago. Back then, I felt like writing a reponse, but didn't. Now, I don't feel like writing a response but will anyway.
A teacher is, simply put, an extension of the parent. Basically, it takes a LOT to raise up a human and halfway-decent child, and most parents don't have what it takes. Among the skills that most parents don't have, usually, education tops the list. Some parents are excellent teachers, but most aren't, so they ask other people to give 'em a hand.
Now, there are higher, deeper meanings for the word 'teacher.' A teacher in the truest sense is someone who has ideas of their own and wants to share them with others. But most of us aren't that, and if we were when we started at UMASS, it is likely that the reality of the job quickly crushed any such idealistic notions. And, basically, it's an impossible ideal, because there's only one fellow who ever came up with something truly new, and we aren't Him.
Now, let's get back to the other half of your question. "What is the point of learning Latin?" The fact is, in my humble opinion, there ISN'T a point for most people to learn Latin. The point of learning Latin, in its most limited academic sense, to gain an in-depth understanding of the Romans and subsequent Latin-speaking cultures. That limits the academic need for Latin to a few archaeology geeks and a few anthropology majors.
But there is a wider, non-academic need to learn Latin. Latin is the language of a culture (actually, multiple cultures) which continues to have significance for SOME of the world's population today. Connection with that tradition allows those people to root themselves and develop a deeper sense of self-identity ("autochthony" in Heideggerian terms). For some people, e.g. Roman Catholics, that cultural heritage is so significant that the language remains in active use even to the present day.
To me, however, that makes teaching Latin in most public schools (I would except those in Europe) the equivalent of forcing students in Antarctica to take lessons in water skiing. Learning an ancient language is simply too difficult to be justified, when such brain power could be used on something more applicable or local, such as regional languages.
As for the notion that learning Latin helps with a plethora of other skills, the evidence is too questionable. I am comforted everyday by knowing that the students to whom I teach the "Lingua Latina" also use it everyday, or at least have the opportunity to do so, in the context of the traditional Roman Liturgy.
So, you posted this a while ago. Back then, I felt like writing a reponse, but didn't. Now, I don't feel like writing a response but will anyway.
A teacher is, simply put, an extension of the parent. Basically, it takes a LOT to raise up a human and halfway-decent child, and most parents don't have what it takes. Among the skills that most parents don't have, usually, education tops the list. Some parents are excellent teachers, but most aren't, so they ask other people to give 'em a hand.
Now, there are higher, deeper meanings for the word 'teacher.' A teacher in the truest sense is someone who has ideas of their own and wants to share them with others. But most of us aren't that, and if we were when we started at UMASS, it is likely that the reality of the job quickly crushed any such idealistic notions. And, basically, it's an impossible ideal, because there's only one fellow who ever came up with something truly new, and we aren't Him.
Now, let's get back to the other half of your question. "What is the point of learning Latin?" The fact is, in my humble opinion, there ISN'T a point for most people to learn Latin. The point of learning Latin, in its most limited academic sense, to gain an in-depth understanding of the Romans and subsequent Latin-speaking cultures. That limits the academic need for Latin to a few archaeology geeks and a few anthropology majors.
But there is a wider, non-academic need to learn Latin. Latin is the language of a culture (actually, multiple cultures) which continues to have significance for SOME of the world's population today. Connection with that tradition allows those people to root themselves and develop a deeper sense of self-identity ("autochthony" in Heideggerian terms). For some people, e.g. Roman Catholics, that cultural heritage is so significant that the language remains in active use even to the present day.
To me, however, that makes teaching Latin in most public schools (I would except those in Europe) the equivalent of forcing students in Antarctica to take lessons in water skiing. Learning an ancient language is simply too difficult to be justified, when such brain power could be used on something more applicable or local, such as regional languages.
As for the notion that learning Latin helps with a plethora of other skills, the evidence is too questionable. I am comforted everyday by knowing that the students to whom I teach the "Lingua Latina" also use it everyday, or at least have the opportunity to do so, in the context of the traditional Roman Liturgy.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Reflections of a New Catholic Teacher
It happens fairly often, I think, that converts to the Catholic faith, such as myself, who tend to be fairly well-educated people who have thought deeply about religion, get recruited as teachers in Catholic schools or PRE programs. It makes sense, to a certain extent, because they have undergone formal instruction in the fundamental truths of the faith and they are usually excited about it and ready to share it with others. However, as I tell my friends, if someone is a young and eager convert, they should NOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES undertake the catechesis of youth who are primarily from Catholic families.
The reason for this is because cradle Catholic children are, in my opinion, the most scandalous creatures in existence. Even if they have received impeccable religious education, the convert finds himself confronted with a group of creatures who, having been cleansed, as we believe, from original sin and nourished with the spiritual food of the Blessed Sacrament, nonetheless tend either to behave in exactly the same manner as children from the non-catholic communities he has left behind or, as has been my experience, to behave even worse than their non-catholic counterparts. At best the well-catechized children can recite their prayers, know a few theological definitions, can explain the trinity, have the Ten Commandments memorized, etc., but have absolutely NO clue the reasons for this or that particular belief, nor feel particularly effected, from long habit, by receiving or not receiving the sacraments, except perhaps Confession.
Now, while I do not have any illusions about the fact that my Sunday School experience as a Baptist was excellent in comparison to most, I also know that we, in general, had a sufficient knowledge of the Biblical texts that supported this or that doctrine to be able to make a pretty devastating reply to any would-be papists we might meet--and that by the eighth grade! It helps, of course, that fundamentalism reduces the Christian message to such an easily consumable product, but nonetheless, we were far ahead of our Catholic friends in being able to account for much of what we believed.
So, that is why I tell new Catholics to stay away from Catholic children. It often tries the faith of the new convert, who finds all of his new beliefs, for which he has suffered and with which he has struggled, trivialized or ignored by little urchins pockmarked with original sin. Luckily, before I started, I had spent plenty of time with Catholic families and, in general, had some hold onto reality before jumping into the classroom. Still, I will be the first to admit that I was disheartened by Catholic high school boys who, while they could rattle off a rosary like nobody's business, never seemed to let it sink in to their personal morality or relationship with their teachers, and who, despite their ability to serve at Mass like angels, had never gone to the trouble of actually studying their missal to see what it said.
That being said, I don't think that we can lay the guilt entirely on the shoulders of the children, nor on those of their parents who have tried so hard to bring their children up in the Catholic religion. I think that one of the biggest problems comes in the general methodology used to instruct children in the Catholic faith, which comes in one of two varieties: (1) the 'traditional' approach of giving students a certain set of catechism questions to study and then expecting them to parrot back the answers to you with rapid-fire accuracy and (2) the 'modern' approach of trying to teach little bits and pieces of the Catholic faith while removing all the traditional doctrinal content and replacing it with so many variations of "Jesus loves you!" Both of these methods, in my opinion, have the same failing: they underestimate the capacity of children for profound religious sentiments. This is because, I think, in the former case, the instructor is afraid that he cannot assess, content-wise, the religious sentiments of children, and in the latter case, because the instructor himself has no truly profound religious sentiments.
I don't pretend to have all the answers. When I was working with a group of college-aged Catholics, all of whom were brought up in the faith, I often discussed the question with them, trying to get them to analyze their experiences and bring out their deep misgivings about the Catholic faith in a group-discussion format. I noticed that there were a few things that seemed to come up over and over again.
First, most of them seemed to have never had an experience of "discovering" the Catholic faith. For them it was always a given. The process, then of maturing, which is really a process of testing and stretching things that are "given" then becomes a process of rebelling against their "given" faith. Although many of them never actually reject the beliefs themselves, they become callous to them and marginalize them to Church and family life, although oftentimes Church life is so marginalized that it eventually gets snuffed out too.
My suggestion? Generally I would say that we need to spend more time at the beginning of catechesis making students familiar with the stories and poetry of our faith. Focus on the lives of Christ and Mary, the history of salvation, the meaning and texts of the liturgy, the musical tradition of Gregorian Chant, rather than on dogma. In other words, give them all the stuff of the faith and let them play with it, never making it simplistic or watered down, long before you didactically hand down to them the official formulas of the Catholic faith. I have had great experiences in my Religion class having the students look up the important texts from the Bible and discussing them with an eye to the Catholic interpretation; generally they can remember the stories long after they forget the answers to their catechism questions.
I think that another aspect of this is setting. It simply does not take a whole academic school year to cover Baltimore no. 1 or the Penny Catechism. The whole thing, cover to cover, can be taught content-wise in a few weeks over the summer, if students spend the time on it. And perhaps this would be the better way to ensure that children see the faith as something that is holy and exceptional, if rather than being incorporated into the ordinary course of school work or Sunday school programs, they instead went to summer camps where, mixed with games, solemn liturgies, and outdoor activities away from home, they intensively studied the key texts of our Catholic faith. I envision something like what Vacation Bible School used to be when I was a small child in a Baptist congregation, but whose function has gradually been turned over to residential Church Camps.
Of course, many cradle Catholics love to carry on and on about the way their devout parents browbeat them into believing or doing this and that, and many of them tie all their notions of prayer or religious study to some fond, or perhaps traumatic, memory of their parents or home life. This is a complicated issue. On the one hand, it is good to associate one's family with one's religious life, and clearly it is the intention of the Church for one to make the family home a center of prayer and religious virtues. On the other, no person, even a mother or father, can have faith for someone else. Each person must have that desert experience of conversion and temptation; every person must work out their salvation with fear and trembling. My fear is always that parents try, in their good intentions, to preserve their children from that fear and that trembling and, thereby, deny their children the experience of testing and doubt that is needed to refine a person's faith.
Lately, I have been thinking that a certain secularism is healthy in the Catholic family home. Sure, prayer has its place, but rather than compelling children to participate in so many Catholic devotions and so forth in the home, simply taking time to pray to God before meals, before trips, or on important occasions, such as birthdays and funerals and so forth, seems to me to be more in keeping with the individual character of faith. It is true that Catholicism holds that faith is essentially shared with others, but it is with others as brothers and sisters in Christ, not as natural or biological parents.
On the other hand, religious experience, in order to be shared by the children equally with the parents, needs to have a certain "otherness" to it. That is why I think it would be best for religious education programs, particularly those that have to do with sacramental preparation, to be more intensive and to take place at times other than those which are usually taken up with school and family duties. Rather, on ordinary Sundays, I think it would be better for the parish religious ed. programs to be focused on making Catholic children literate in basic apologetics,Sacred Scripture, church history, and liturgy.
I do think that it is important to give children the opportunity to develop their own relationship with God. Some of the most devout people I know were cradle Catholics whose families were always very keen to take the family to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, which requires everyone to just spend time in silence together with God. I like this idea lot: simply giving children an opportunity to be quiet with God and to say such prayers as interest them. It could even take place at home in the evening as a sort of "daily sabbath".
Prayer, it seems to me, is the most common element missing from the religious formation of young Catholic children. Not that many programs do not strive to have the children say prayers, but as Lesson 28 of Baltimore no. 3 tells us, merely reciting formulas "such as a machine might do" does not really amount to praying. True, we must always stick to the concrete, and formulas are often helpful for beginners, but too often, for lack of creativity, we often find ourselves merely reciting 'vain repetitions' as if saying more prayers meant that God heard us more, which is fundamentally untrue. It is likewise untrue for children.
One of the things I think I would like to see is a religious education program that taught the segments of the Catechism backwards, starting with the Lord's Prayer and prayer, both mental and vocal, public and private, as the foundation, then proceeding to the study of the Ten Commandments, the Sacraments, and the Creed. It seems to me that this might be more effective in inculcating the need to constantly tend to one's relationship with God, even outside of school and the family.
I apologize if any of this seems overly judgmental or harsh about the nature of Catholic families. I have to confess my general ignorance about such things. I am only writing as someone who sees the effects of various family situations, and the general indifference of many children to spiritual matters. I am writing mostly to those who undertake the religious education of young children; parents have to work out their own solutions.
The reason for this is because cradle Catholic children are, in my opinion, the most scandalous creatures in existence. Even if they have received impeccable religious education, the convert finds himself confronted with a group of creatures who, having been cleansed, as we believe, from original sin and nourished with the spiritual food of the Blessed Sacrament, nonetheless tend either to behave in exactly the same manner as children from the non-catholic communities he has left behind or, as has been my experience, to behave even worse than their non-catholic counterparts. At best the well-catechized children can recite their prayers, know a few theological definitions, can explain the trinity, have the Ten Commandments memorized, etc., but have absolutely NO clue the reasons for this or that particular belief, nor feel particularly effected, from long habit, by receiving or not receiving the sacraments, except perhaps Confession.
Now, while I do not have any illusions about the fact that my Sunday School experience as a Baptist was excellent in comparison to most, I also know that we, in general, had a sufficient knowledge of the Biblical texts that supported this or that doctrine to be able to make a pretty devastating reply to any would-be papists we might meet--and that by the eighth grade! It helps, of course, that fundamentalism reduces the Christian message to such an easily consumable product, but nonetheless, we were far ahead of our Catholic friends in being able to account for much of what we believed.
So, that is why I tell new Catholics to stay away from Catholic children. It often tries the faith of the new convert, who finds all of his new beliefs, for which he has suffered and with which he has struggled, trivialized or ignored by little urchins pockmarked with original sin. Luckily, before I started, I had spent plenty of time with Catholic families and, in general, had some hold onto reality before jumping into the classroom. Still, I will be the first to admit that I was disheartened by Catholic high school boys who, while they could rattle off a rosary like nobody's business, never seemed to let it sink in to their personal morality or relationship with their teachers, and who, despite their ability to serve at Mass like angels, had never gone to the trouble of actually studying their missal to see what it said.
That being said, I don't think that we can lay the guilt entirely on the shoulders of the children, nor on those of their parents who have tried so hard to bring their children up in the Catholic religion. I think that one of the biggest problems comes in the general methodology used to instruct children in the Catholic faith, which comes in one of two varieties: (1) the 'traditional' approach of giving students a certain set of catechism questions to study and then expecting them to parrot back the answers to you with rapid-fire accuracy and (2) the 'modern' approach of trying to teach little bits and pieces of the Catholic faith while removing all the traditional doctrinal content and replacing it with so many variations of "Jesus loves you!" Both of these methods, in my opinion, have the same failing: they underestimate the capacity of children for profound religious sentiments. This is because, I think, in the former case, the instructor is afraid that he cannot assess, content-wise, the religious sentiments of children, and in the latter case, because the instructor himself has no truly profound religious sentiments.
I don't pretend to have all the answers. When I was working with a group of college-aged Catholics, all of whom were brought up in the faith, I often discussed the question with them, trying to get them to analyze their experiences and bring out their deep misgivings about the Catholic faith in a group-discussion format. I noticed that there were a few things that seemed to come up over and over again.
First, most of them seemed to have never had an experience of "discovering" the Catholic faith. For them it was always a given. The process, then of maturing, which is really a process of testing and stretching things that are "given" then becomes a process of rebelling against their "given" faith. Although many of them never actually reject the beliefs themselves, they become callous to them and marginalize them to Church and family life, although oftentimes Church life is so marginalized that it eventually gets snuffed out too.
My suggestion? Generally I would say that we need to spend more time at the beginning of catechesis making students familiar with the stories and poetry of our faith. Focus on the lives of Christ and Mary, the history of salvation, the meaning and texts of the liturgy, the musical tradition of Gregorian Chant, rather than on dogma. In other words, give them all the stuff of the faith and let them play with it, never making it simplistic or watered down, long before you didactically hand down to them the official formulas of the Catholic faith. I have had great experiences in my Religion class having the students look up the important texts from the Bible and discussing them with an eye to the Catholic interpretation; generally they can remember the stories long after they forget the answers to their catechism questions.
I think that another aspect of this is setting. It simply does not take a whole academic school year to cover Baltimore no. 1 or the Penny Catechism. The whole thing, cover to cover, can be taught content-wise in a few weeks over the summer, if students spend the time on it. And perhaps this would be the better way to ensure that children see the faith as something that is holy and exceptional, if rather than being incorporated into the ordinary course of school work or Sunday school programs, they instead went to summer camps where, mixed with games, solemn liturgies, and outdoor activities away from home, they intensively studied the key texts of our Catholic faith. I envision something like what Vacation Bible School used to be when I was a small child in a Baptist congregation, but whose function has gradually been turned over to residential Church Camps.
Of course, many cradle Catholics love to carry on and on about the way their devout parents browbeat them into believing or doing this and that, and many of them tie all their notions of prayer or religious study to some fond, or perhaps traumatic, memory of their parents or home life. This is a complicated issue. On the one hand, it is good to associate one's family with one's religious life, and clearly it is the intention of the Church for one to make the family home a center of prayer and religious virtues. On the other, no person, even a mother or father, can have faith for someone else. Each person must have that desert experience of conversion and temptation; every person must work out their salvation with fear and trembling. My fear is always that parents try, in their good intentions, to preserve their children from that fear and that trembling and, thereby, deny their children the experience of testing and doubt that is needed to refine a person's faith.
Lately, I have been thinking that a certain secularism is healthy in the Catholic family home. Sure, prayer has its place, but rather than compelling children to participate in so many Catholic devotions and so forth in the home, simply taking time to pray to God before meals, before trips, or on important occasions, such as birthdays and funerals and so forth, seems to me to be more in keeping with the individual character of faith. It is true that Catholicism holds that faith is essentially shared with others, but it is with others as brothers and sisters in Christ, not as natural or biological parents.
On the other hand, religious experience, in order to be shared by the children equally with the parents, needs to have a certain "otherness" to it. That is why I think it would be best for religious education programs, particularly those that have to do with sacramental preparation, to be more intensive and to take place at times other than those which are usually taken up with school and family duties. Rather, on ordinary Sundays, I think it would be better for the parish religious ed. programs to be focused on making Catholic children literate in basic apologetics,Sacred Scripture, church history, and liturgy.
I do think that it is important to give children the opportunity to develop their own relationship with God. Some of the most devout people I know were cradle Catholics whose families were always very keen to take the family to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, which requires everyone to just spend time in silence together with God. I like this idea lot: simply giving children an opportunity to be quiet with God and to say such prayers as interest them. It could even take place at home in the evening as a sort of "daily sabbath".
Prayer, it seems to me, is the most common element missing from the religious formation of young Catholic children. Not that many programs do not strive to have the children say prayers, but as Lesson 28 of Baltimore no. 3 tells us, merely reciting formulas "such as a machine might do" does not really amount to praying. True, we must always stick to the concrete, and formulas are often helpful for beginners, but too often, for lack of creativity, we often find ourselves merely reciting 'vain repetitions' as if saying more prayers meant that God heard us more, which is fundamentally untrue. It is likewise untrue for children.
One of the things I think I would like to see is a religious education program that taught the segments of the Catechism backwards, starting with the Lord's Prayer and prayer, both mental and vocal, public and private, as the foundation, then proceeding to the study of the Ten Commandments, the Sacraments, and the Creed. It seems to me that this might be more effective in inculcating the need to constantly tend to one's relationship with God, even outside of school and the family.
I apologize if any of this seems overly judgmental or harsh about the nature of Catholic families. I have to confess my general ignorance about such things. I am only writing as someone who sees the effects of various family situations, and the general indifference of many children to spiritual matters. I am writing mostly to those who undertake the religious education of young children; parents have to work out their own solutions.
Friday, April 12, 2013
"Problems" based on the Baltimore Catechism, no. 3- Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?
So, these are some "Problems" that I gave my fifth-graders to work out, based on Lesson 28 of Baltimore Catechism no. 3. No, I don't use Baltimore no. 3 for fifth grade. We are just doing this one lesson from it to reinforce their Baltimore no. 1 lesson on prayer. What do y'all think? Could you pass fifth grade Religion?
7. Sister Perpetua says that we pray to God for rain,
because otherwise He will forget that the convent’s garden needs water. What
mistake has she made?
8. Tom prayed a novena to get a new water gun for his
birthday. When his birthday came, he did not receive a water gun. What is one
possible explanation for why God chose not to grant his prayer?
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