In yesterday's comment section, Wendy pointed to an op-ed in the New York Times by Susan Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College. Engel writes that as policy talk shifts from health care to education, we should consider designing "a curriculum that teaches what truly matters."

Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to
cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and
behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on.

So
what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave
elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a
story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and
multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to
support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their
family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all
elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be
prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.

She says that teachers need to be freed up a laundry list of goals for every period. They should immerse the children in a reading environment. Children should have the time to thoroughly read and discuss books, rather than marching from one subject to the next.

Children should write essays or creative stories for ONE HOUR EVERY DAY. Does your child write for one hour every day? Mine doesn't. I just forwarded this article to my son's principal and said that I agreed that this was an important goal.

Engel also writes that kids shouldn't be memorizing useless math formulas and scientific terms that aren't grounded in experiments and experience. They should have time to explore through play.

I liked Engel's opinion piece a lot. Kids should be reading all the time. Kids should be writing and exploring all time. And they're not.

Jonah does way too many worksheets. His science curriculum is about studying for tests that involve filling in the blanks with a word bank. At ten, he had to figure out the molecular weight of Zinc, but without the adequate discussion of what molecules are and why they are cool.

He does little essay writing or creative writing. Which is a crying shame, because this is what my boy does really well. He never writes on his own, because if he does have a half hour of free time, he would much rather veg out in front of a computer. When he is forced to write at school, one of those rare times, he writes long, detailed stories that twist here and there. His handwriting is sloppy. He makes a ton of spelling errors. But he is marvelously creative.

A River Runs Through It is one of my favorite movies. In the opening scene, the narrator talks about his father, a Presbyterian minister, and his method for educating his boys. In the morning, they wrote and rewrote and rewrote essays making them as lean as possible. In the afternoon, the boys were let loose to fly fish until dinner. Sometimes when I'm working with Jonah, I channel Norman's father and emphasize the importance of perfection, hard work, and playing outside in the sun.

Yes, I have an inner Presbyterian minister.

This is the way a perfect school would be run. However, few schools can operate that way except for in very affluent communities. This system relies on certain assumptions. It assumes that all children come prepared to learn. It assumes that all teachers have a love of learning and are themselves readers and writers. It assumes that state legislatures haven't imposed rules about time spent in health class or on mandatory lessons on bullying that the children promptly ignore. It assumes that all children have done their homework and show up for school on a regular basis. It assumes that parents are encouraging these same goals at home. It assumes the teachers aren't burnt out from the last round of curriculum reforms.

Too many assumptions.

Let's just talk about Engel's point about the importance of collaborative learning. Engel is imagining a scene of four kids working on a project about the digestive system of the body. The kids jointly discuss how to lay out their poster and what information should be on the poster. One kid draws the picture of the body. Another finds information on the web. Another neatly copies down the words. Another kid leads the discussion to the larger group about their work.

How does that work in practice? One kid does all the work, and the other three hang back. The expectations for the project are so low that not much learning happens. The teacher has no idea how to assign grades to the students and how to evaluate this project. The project stretches on for one month.

Implementation is a bitch.

While I don't really expect the schools to implement the teaching style that Engel describes, I do think that parents should do this at home. We have mandatory reading time at home. We limit computer time. We talk during dinner time. We make time to play outside. 

Parents should also nudge schools to do the right thing. Send your school principals a link to the article with a request for more writing instruction. The writing reform is the most do-able of Engel's suggestions.