Educating for Wisdom

The dissonance between the vision that now animates public education in this country and the view offered by Jeffrey Wilhelm and Bruce Novak in their new book on teaching English is sharp indeed. The most recent cheating scandals that have rocked the public schools in Atlanta and Philadelphia only underline the disconcerting direction in which our schools are headed. Public education continues to be gripped by debilitating mantras of utility and accountability.

Leaders focused on “utility” insist that the overriding goal of education in America is to provide the skills and aptitudes needed in the job market. Education is to be seen, first and foremost, as a vehicle for transforming students into the human capital demanded by the economy. Of course the plausibility of this educational “need” is belied by high levels of unemployment and underemployment and the inability of so many with educational credentials and qualifications to find suitable (or any) employment. Job projections in the United States offer a bleak picture of the lack of fit between the “output” of our educational institutions and the prospects of meaningful, decently paid, and appropriate work. Contrary to the myths of an economy requiring masses of highly skilled, cognitively sophisticated employees, for many the future looks to be one of low-skilled and insecure labor. On this basis we may as well dispense with the importance of public education for a large swath of our young people. Indeed this is already part of the Tea Party educational agenda, which sees well-supported public education as a pointless and futile expense—one more area where we can save our tax dollars and limit the function of government.

By now the deleterious consequences of our fixation on educational accountability have been well documented. Even some of those who, like Diane Ravitch, were advocates and architects of the accountability “regime” have concluded that it has become a blight that is destroying much that was good in our classrooms. Accountability has, among other things, limited what counts in education to only those things that can be counted. It has reduced learning to those things that can be made into testable items in the form of standardized tests. It has made classrooms into places where the primary focus is on preparing for the next test. It has meant a curriculum that has increasingly limited what children encounter or are exposed to—especially in terms of learning that encourages artistic expression, creativity, imagination, individuation of understanding, critical interrogation of ideas, and the joyful unfolding of curiosity and interest. Learning has followed the one-size-fits-all model of seeking out standardized and homogenized answers—preset responses to preset questions. Whether intentional or otherwise, the regime of accountability is one that induces boredom, passivity, and conformity among students. And, not least, it is a regime that makes school a place of enormous stress with its focus on endless competition and meeting the bar of increasing test result expectations. For many of us who have followed this development, the epidemic of cheating (involving not just students but also teachers and school administrators) comes as little surprise.

It is in this damaging and dispiriting context that we encounter Wilhelm and Novak’s book. To say that much of what they write echoes the words of a great many other educational visionaries in no sense detracts from the importance of their words. What they have to say represents a light in dark times. Their book offers not just an uplifting vision of what education for literacy might be, but also the wealth of the authors’ accumulated teaching experiences. They have written a book that is at once a sophisticated philosophical treatise on education and a radical guide for those who teach kids in the classroom. I cannot do justice in this short space to the scope of this book, but it is worth, I believe, highlighting a few important dimensions of their writing.

In the first place the book provides a powerful countervision to the desiccated, depersonalized...