Roy Turrentine on the Long-term Effects of a Good Education and One of the Many Things That Ed Deformers Don’t Understand

I don’t usually post work by others on my blog, but I loved this piece by ex-farmer and history teacher extraordinaire Roy Turrentine. It’s a comment he left on Diane Ravitch’s wonderful blog.

I was very busy yesterday . . . . One of the things I was doing was having coffee with a friend who is retired. Then we worked up our music for Easter Sunday when we will play together for congregational hymns and other liturgical music. He is reading Hamlet.

It got me to thinking about our different paths to life. He was educated in a public school near Memphis. I went to a public school for elementary and a private school for high school. Our paths crossed mostly over traditional music, a thing neither of us got from school.

Here is what the deform advocates do not understand: we get the good things out of a good education long after we leave school. Often these thing do not even relate to our specific course of study. The only true indication of whether we get a good education or not lies wholly in the degree to which we value its broad goals years after we pass on to our lives. School is the soil from which a good society grows, and counting the corn kernels from a crop may say something broadly, but the real question is whether there is continued fertility.

If I expect my students to instantly enjoy history, I will be disappointed. There are many people who never come to understand history. If, on the other hand, I can plant a seed that will grow into reading about some subject and reflecting on it later in life, I have succeeded. Not even the agricultural statistics guy, Bill Sanders, can figure out how to “measure” that one. Educational success cannot be quantified.

Because of this, the business model, which crept into education about the time I hired on, is the intellectually bankrupt idea leading us into the mess we are mired in. You can count money. You can count stock prices. You can count corn, cars, and dead armadillos. But you know education has succeeded when your friend tells you he is really enjoying reading Hamlet.

For pieces by Bob Shepherd on the teaching of literature and writing, go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/teaching-literature-and-writing/.

For more pieces by Bob Shepherd on Education “Reform,” go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/