Spock v McCoy. Coming To A School Near You

Full disclosure: I’ve never been a fan of the Common Core. Standards established by corporations and politicians have always raised suspicions in my mind. Even if done with the best of intentions, the educational outcomes valued by business tend to be centered on producing employees that are literate, compliant and able to follow orders. This conflicts with another purpose of education—a higher priority for education in a democratic society in my view—and that is to produce citizens who are literate, independent and who question everything.

As you can see, there’s a built in tension between the outcomes desired by business and those demanded for a just and vibrant democracy, much like the uneasy marriage between Capitalism and Democracy itself. We are, of course, both employees and citizens so the competing claims to educational outcomes both have merit, but lately is seems business outcomes  have been taking over more and more of the territory that used to belong to democratic outcomes.

Perhaps this goes back to the struggle between what John Rury in his book Education and Social Change called administrative progressives and pedagogical progressives. Administrative progressives were “more concerned with issues of efficiency and carefully aligning the purposes of schooling with the needs of the economy.” (143). Pedagogical progressives on the other hand, people like John Dewey, were concerned with “making education more responsive to the needs of children and integrating the school more closely with its immediate community.” (ibid). 

Unfortunately the administrative progressives won, and that brings me back to the Common Core, which, say whatever else you want about it, is certainly concerned with “efficiency and carefully aligning the purposes of schooling with the needs of the economy.” There are a couple of problems with educational standards based on business premises though, the first of which has to do with the raw material. Businesses produce quality products cheaply because they can rely on consistency of the ingredients, yet there is nothing more inconsistent than a class full of students, all with different levels of talent, motivation, interest, experience, language and backgrounds. To apply an external standard to as heterogeneous a collection of raw material as this and expect to produce a common outcome is ridiculous on its face.

The other problem is with procedure. No one cares how the car feels as it moves along the line and has nuts and bolts attached to it, but children are another matter. When emphasis is moved from the individuals in the class to the process applied to them it becomes dehumanized, sometimes to a critical level, where students become educational input vessels who are quality checked at certain stages along the line and, if deemed acceptable are passed on, and if not are shunted off to the scrap heap—sometimes with their teachers and their schools.

It’s possible at this point that some readers have come to the conclusion that I’m against standards. It seems to me the real argument made by those people is that if you aren’t for my standards you aren’t for any standards, which is simply dumb and I’m not going to address it. What I am for are standards based on a flexible model instead of a rigid one. Standards that don’t come from a manufacturing philosophy, but from one that takes in to account the reality of this human endeavor we call education. Standards that reflect the wisdom in the Confucius saying there are many paths to the same destination.

And who better to guide students than a well-trained, engaged teacher who has the vision to see the destination and the wisdom to help students choose the best path. Currently, teachers are viewed as no more than adult versions of the aforementioned educational input vessels who, if they respond appropriately to the methodology are deemed acceptable, and if not, are shunted off to irrelevancy. In actuality though, teachers—just like students—are a heterogeneous collection of raw material containing myriad mixtures of talent, motivation, interest, experience, language and backgrounds and I suspect the efforts to produce a homogenous teacher profile reflective of the Common Core priorities will meet with the same success as the effort to produce a common student outcome—which is to say not much.

So I see the current push back to the standards by parents, teachers and students as the inevitable outcome of what happens when  industrial control inputs are applied to human beings engaged in that very human activity we call educating children. People are funny that way.

Dogs Have Been Telling Us This For Years, And We're Finally Able To Listen

There is an interesting bit of research coming out of Emory University about dogs and what is really going on inside their heads.  Neuroscientist Gregory Berns has been successful in training dogs to tolerate having an M.R.I. and the results are very intriguing, but totally unsurprising to those of us who share our lives with a canine companion.

In dogs, we found that activity in the caudate increased in response to hand signals indicating food. The caudate also activated to the smells of familiar humans. And in preliminary tests, it activated to the return of an owner who had momentarily stepped out of view. Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.

Now there is a scientific underpinning to arguments made by people like Peter Singer and more recently Tom Regan to name just two, plus, as Berns points out these results may have value that goes beyond the scientific in determining the lawful rights of dogs: 

I suspect that society is many years away from considering dogs as persons. However, recent rulings by the Supreme Court have included neuroscientific findings that open the door to such a possibility. In two cases, the court ruled that juvenile offenders could not be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. As part of the rulings, the court cited brain-imaging evidence that the human brain was not mature in adolescence. Although this case has nothing to do with dog sentience, the justices opened the door for neuroscience in the courtroom.

I agree that we are many years away from facing the implication of what science is beginning to show us because to do so would call into question some of the fundamental tenants of western Christian culture, particularly the idea that we have been given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1: 24-26). To paraphrase Darth Vader, the hierarchy is strong in this one.

More to the point though, I don’t think the “because they’re like us” premise of Berns', Singer’s, and to a lesser extent Regan’s arguments go far enough. It seems to me the determination of what kinds of rights are given to an animal should not be based on how much they are like us, but the fact that they are. In his book Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy Julian Franklin pushes beyond the arguments of Singer and Regan in particular to a reframing and expansion of Kant’s categorical imperative that provides an ethical argument for the treatment of all sentient creatures.  I’m drawn to that argument, but I know the issue is still unsettled philosophically (see J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals). 

I would like to make the case for sympathy, which I know is a term in some philosophical disrepute. Luckily I’m not a philosopher so I direct the reader to John Fisher’s Taking Sympathy Seriously: A Defense Of Our Moral Psychology Towards Animals (pdf) for a more extensive discussion. As humans we have the capability for sympathy, but that capability is not limited to other members of our species. Who hasn’t been affected by Sarah Mclachlan’s ASPCA commercials, or stories about the suffering of pets after a natural disaster, or felt that momentary heaviness in the heart when we see an injured animal?

I think there are important implications to the fact that we are able to extend our ability to connect with living creatures beyond our fellow humans, and when, through tradition, or expediency, or denial we ignore that connection we are ignoring a vital part of our nature—the part that tells us we are of this planet, not simply on it.