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Points In Between: Episode FiveThe Great Equalizer[Intro sounds: kids yelling, door opening, footsteps in hallway, classroom voices, bell ringing to start class.]You’re listening to Points In Between.This is Episode 5: The Great EqualizerSelena: The thing that I think is most different than in American schools is we didn't really have a lot of standardized testing. Whenever they tested us you would have to stand up, you would go in front of the class, you would be asked questions, and you would have to answer them. Serafin: But then over there you have homework like every day... even on the weekend you get off school Friday, you have Saturday, Sunday. You've got like hella homework to do and it's like, “Oh.” By the time you're done it's 8:00 PM Sunday. “I to go to bed. I've got to go to school tomorrow.” Those were the voices of Selena, who first went to school in Bosnia, and Serafin, whose schooling began in Senegal. Their comments echo a sentiment I heard from a lot of the people I interviewed. And that is: American schools just don’t feel that hard. But it’s too simplistic to take that perception at face value. At its core, this is about two basic questions: What is the point of educating everyone and What is the best way to do it?A school system, as an institution, is an embodiment of our – often messy and contradictory – answers to those two questions. Our debates about length of the school day, or funding sports facilities, or testing are all really debates about why schools exist and how they can best fulfill that purpose.If you’re a student who only experiences one system of schooling, these larger questions are hard to see behind the day-to-day minutiae of assignments. But if you move from one system to another, the differences can be unsettling. It feels like the rules have changed, and you’re right. They have.Mia grew up in China, where access to college is dependent on a single test that comes at the end of high school: the gaokao. China has a 2000-year history of using testing as a pathway to political power or economic success. The gaokao is the modern iteration of that tradition. In that system, being a “good student” means developing the skills to excel on that test.Mia: I think a good student here is absolutely not the type that I was in China, especially in high school. I think like before like learning process means to me that you just need to practice, practice a lot about the class you take and exercises you do. But now is like – since I have a different purpose - so I'm paying attention to every information that I get, no matter from textbook, class, or even people that I talk with. So now I don't need that identity to be a good student.Before we started our interview, Mia showed me a Powerpoint presentation on her laptop. It was about how her understanding of education has changed since she came to America. I didn’t ask for it. She just wanted me to know. It was sweet and I asked her more about it during our interview.Mia: My religion background is my mom is a Christian and when I was in high school, especially the period of passing the exam, she talked with me a lot. Obviously I was stressed out and had like, a bad time. And she just talked with me and prayed a lot for me and like told me that God loves you no matter what you do. And because of that, like, I think my family is quite different from other like traditional Chinese family because my mom don't have much expectation to me. But like when I got into college I actually I didn't take Christian[ity] or religion seriously. I wanted to like solve problems and, maybe, focus my future. When Mia came to UC Berkeley, immersion in a new system, with its new expectations, changed her.Mia: I think I couldn't be that person anymore. I was like, I was the kind of person also chasing for perfection. When I went through the mid-terms, I never had the experience of like writing papers. No matter how hard I try, I can't be that perfect me anymore. So like, you know, this is my identity of a Good Student. The midterm broke that identity and when I was like so weak and - I cried to my parents. I also had homesick[ness]. All emotions just came together. At that time like my friends, they are Christians. I came - a lot of Christian friends, they came to me and like tell me, “Your identity is not about school but also like much more about God, how God sees you.” So I remember like how when I was in high school my mom told me Christianity. So I think, I want to get to know more about Christianity, whether I can find my meaning and my identity in Christianity and I think now luckily I found it.Mia’s inability to be a “good student” in this new system prompted her to entirely re-evaluate the point of education. In any system, the markers for student success are constructed, based on that larger underlying purpose for educating people. Change the purpose and it should follow that teaching methods and evaluations also change. To really consider this, we need to do some historical digging. It’s going to get a little long, but truest me. There’s a point to it.There have been a lot of changes in American schools, of course. But if you were going to pick one single year to help you make sense of our shared understanding of the purpose of American schools, it would be 1848.The early 1800s were kind of strange by modern standards. If you went to school in the US you’ve probably heard of abolitionism. But you may not know that the fight to abolish slavery was one of a whole range of movements focused on the moral character of individuals and society. This was the time period tht saw the rise of Evangelical Christianity and transcendental philosophy. But it’s also the time when Sylvester Graham, inventor of the Graham cracker, argued that a diet of bland foods could prevent both cholera and masturbation. The temperance movement suggested that alcohol caused both immorality and poverty. Those are only a few examples of a huge number of social movements at the time. So that’s the background.Our year, 1848, was itself momentous. In the West, after defeating Mexico in war, the US added a half-million square miles to its territory, along with the non-English-speaking people who lived there. In upstate New York, on the other side of the country, women at the Seneca Falls convention asserted that women should have the right to vote. Along the Eastern seabord, Irish Immigrants, escaping the potato famine, poured into Boston, New York, Philadelphia Baltimore. Within two years these mostly Catholic newcomers would be 25% of the population in those cities.Across the Atlanitc, in Europe, 1848 was also the year that Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto. In it, they argued that violent class conflict is one of the unavoidable constants of human history. And they predicted that growing industrialization would eventually lead to revolution and a complete re-ordering of industrial societies. That same year, 1848, within months of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, on the other side of the Atlantic, Horace Mann delivered his 12th Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education. Not a very sexy title. Mann was the first Secretary of the first state Board of Education. His state, Massachusetts, was the most industrialized one in the US at the time – though the process was still in its infancy. Massachusetts was also the home of the Common School movement – the movement in favor of creating free, compulsory, state-funded public schools – and Mann was its best-known advocate.That 12th Annual Report wasn’t a philosophical reflection of schooling, although it certainly contained some philosophizing. It went to the Massachusetts legislature. It was about money. It’s basically an argument explaining why tax money should be collected to pay for schools and why students should be required to attend school.In that 1848 document, Mann laid out the arguments that are still, in a lot of ways, at the core of how we think about education in America. And to understand the current student experience in American schools, it helps to know why we have schools.Mann predicted that public school could become, in his words, “the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization.” This is first because of the scale of its impact, how many people are affected. He said, “all the rising generation may be brought within the circle of its reformatory and elevating influences.” And also because young peopleare, in his words, “pliant.” When you get them young you can mold them into “a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator.” An “effective force of civilization” isn’t just teaching you arithmetic. It’s more subtle than that.Consider this example from a 14-year old. He’s been in the US for 4 years.William: My name is William and I'm currently living in Houston and I used to live in London, England.William attended what Americans would call a private school in London. The scope of public schools is obviously far greater, but the practice of inculcating behaviors is the same.William: There were many entrances. It was sort of a large … but every single day the headmaster was standing by the gate where you should enter and you had to look him directly in the eye and shake his hand before you were allowed to enter, just so you learn how to socially interact with adults better. And I think to this day that helps me. Learning to shake hands with confidence could never be considered an academic skill, but you certainly might call it an “elevating influence” to use Mann’s words.I asked Angel about writing essays here in California, versus the style she was taught in high school, back in Taiwan. Angel: What’s very different is that the English essay require you to state your opinion in the first sentence and the topic sentence should be really specific and the whole essay should be really logical and understandable. And actually, in Chinese like writing, maybe the topic is about struggling and you have to write an article about that in Chinese. And, like, the English essay, the hook [is] just in the beginning maybe a few sentences, but like in the Chinese article is like maybe the whole article is the hook and in the end of the article, you express your opinion.If you’re a student just trying to get a paper written, you might be frustrated by a teacher who says you can’t use “I” in a formal essay. You might struggle to articulate your main idea in a single sentence in your first paragraph. But you probably aren’t challenging those conventions on the basis that you reject the larger cultural norms you’re being forced to model.Angel: I think in Chinese society it's …there's more oppression for you to speak out your opinion in public if you're opinion is different from others. There’s not...well, the American will embrace more diversity of your perspective. But in Chinese society if you have a different opinion or you want to say something to criticize, you may be a little bit careful of your wording. You encounter more like pressure to [if you] speak out a differing opinion. I think it's in general is like this, or was in high school. Shiraj commented on a different standard sort of American writing assignment: the research paper. Shiraj: The teacher is giving you two weeks and then there should be something really good about it and I don't know what… what should it…what detailed thing should it be because I can write an essay in an hour. But I always feel like something's missing because why would the teacher give me two weeks? Like how you find quotes and then you analyze it? That's something I never did. But then the good thing here is also they give you many examples of how you do it. But it's just weird because you get two weeks and I don't know what to do for two weeks about it. [laughs]Shane: Well, I mean, as a teacher I can tell you that at least a solid week of that I expected my students to procrastinate and not do anything. But I mean it was for doing research and finding new information. Shiraj: There the information is already given to you, in India. It’s like, just write a letter to the editor about the problem in your society. The garbage problem. Or maybe write a letter or maybe write an essay about a day in your life. It was very simple or very, very realistic. Here it’s way detailed. That topic, the research paper raises another question. Exactly what information and skills should you use this, in Mann’s words, “effective and benignant force of civilization” to teach? And how?Roya: Arts was big. We did a lot of like making – they say in Farsi “kardesti” - making like a clock or making a house, like building things with cardboard. I was really good at that...my artistics I always got the highest score in school. You’re listening to Roya, describing part of her schooling in Afghanistan. Roya: So we had physics, we had algebra, we had science. The system in Afghanistan with education, it was really exposing a lot of subjects, early stage, that you have six [or] seven subjects that you have to know. And each class is like 30 minutes, 35 minutes, but then you get exposed to so many different subjects. When Vishnu arrived from India, he encountered a reorganization of subjects he was already familiar with.Vishnu: Most schools here only have one science that time or like one math at the time. In India it's like, you do all the maths at the same time, all science at the same time. You begin low each thing and go up. It's not like you do begin low, go up, begin low, go up again and again. So it's kind of like that and like. For Juan, who came from El Salvador at age 16, the reorganization of subjects wasn’t just curious. It was frustrating.Juan: The last math class I took there I was taking a little bit of trig and pre-calculus with algebra mixed. So when I came here, my school transcript from there, you know school was looking at it and they were like, “Let's do pre-algebra.” So I took pre-algebra and that was super easy. So like I moved algebra. And that was kind of easy so I talked to them and then like, “OK let's move you to pre-calc.” I was understanding some part of it, but after the first week I was kind of lost. So that's when they told me, “OK let's move you back to algebra 3/4”. So I was kind of frustrated because most of the things in algebra 3/4 I already had taken it there and I was pretty good, but I couldn't take pre-calc because I was kind of lost. When I asked about the differences in skills and expectations between the US and elsewhere, the most common response had to do with math. Yesica, Vishnu both commented on it.Yesica: What I was learning in 6th grade I had learned that in 3rd grade and I was just like, "Man...why are these people like…" Not that they're slow. They just like pace them too slow. They don't have them, like, “Do this, quick." So as far as education, I think like Mexico was pretty good because it moves faster.Vishnu: So we had a question on the board saying you need to solve this equation or something. I like took the pen and paper, like piece of paper and a pen, and solved it in a few minutes. The guy next to me had a calculator, he kind of started solving in like five minutes. I still got it first. So people looked at me like I'm totally different cause I get super fast in my head. I kind of feel like it's not that the math in India is far ahead than this place. It's like, I don’t know, I just felt like the way we got taught math in India is like more intuitive than just saying, “This adds to this.” If you look at something saying, “This happens and that happens” you'll see, “OK, this happens.” In India, it's like why did this happen, so I think that helped me a lot. Vishnu also reflected on a…
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