Magic in Education - Not!

NOTE to READERS: This is an editorial for Silhouettes, the official e-journal of the National At-Risk Education Network, so it stands a bit away from most of my posts that are more to the personal side of things. I strongly believe - I KNOW - we are heading in the wrong direction in our schools, despite my liking the new President. He is too traditional regarding education and will continue the policy of doing a great job to prepare children to live in the 1950's.
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The Magic of Education

Some of you know, that a large part of Doctor Zest is based in the business of education. It is a business, make no mistake about it. Literally it is the largest business in the United States---more money, time and other resources are expended towards education than any other single enterprise. It is so much a part of our lives that we forget it is optional. Yes. People have survived quite well never having gone through a school door. Fewer and fewer, however, as we have begun to get frantic about this business called education. Now they are pushing towards "national standards" so all states are equal in identifying what a "good education" is and, further, it will be the same in NYC as it is in Montgomery, Alabama. Logically, makes sense.

Do you know how a magician works? Not only do they have to have gadgetry, cards, hats, rabbits, or whatever, the real trick of a magician is to make you look one place while something is going on somewhere else. While you watch the hand hold up the hundred dollar bill above his head, you do not notice that he palmed a piece of paper he is later going to burn with his other hand. Magic.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I learned often that it was not what WAS done that has the largest impact. Let me give you an example. Surviving dysfunctional (abusive and neglectful) families was my specialty. Research shows that rarely do you find patients in mental institutions or convicts in jails who came from loving, nurturing, affirming homes. It is just a fact that most clinical mental illness and criminal behavior has at its seeds of origin in an abusive and/or neglectful family.*

I had clients sit and tell me horror stories about how they were raised. Some clients let the details just spill out on the first visit; some it took a building of trust and searching through personal history before it would come out. It was amazing to me how glib some people were about the terrible things done to them as children, and, often, without a lot of emotion. It was like they were telling a story they had told many times. I listened, and listened, and listened. I was paid to listen and I became a hell of a good listener. And I listened some more. Eventually all the details were expressed on what was done to them as children.

However.

Nothing expressed emotionally during the telling of these tales was as dramatic as when I asked this question: "You have told me about all the things that were done to you. Now, tell me what wasn't? What did you need but did NOT get from your parents?" THAT was when the tears started. THEN I heard halting, stumbling, not well thought out, unrehearsed, details on what was missing in their home as a child. Wow. "They never told me I was dear to them." "They never came to any event I was in at school." "They never took time to just ask me how I was doing or what I was feeling." "They never listened to me." and on and on. And I listened.

I sometimes wonder if Neglect is not the big damaging piece in many children's lives. Survivors of physical abuse usually heal. Even if it is headline material relating how someone got this burn on their skin or that broken bone. Rarely does anyone write about the severe damage done to kids when they are neglected. I have reason to believe that, in the long run, we are more impacted in our lives by what we did NOT get more so than what did happen to us.

This brings me to national standards, and why I am concerned. Just like in NCLB we were so concerned with kids being left behind that we spent all this time testing and measuring schools against one another, and the result is that we now have almost a 30% failure to complete record in our public high schools. We were so busy paying attention to measuring and evaluating that we failed to notice that the neglected kids dropped out in larger numbers!** Seven years of NCLB and larger failure to complete numbers. Wow.

So, as we now decide that NCLB was not "the answer" the governors and the President and his chief of education are going to get us very busy designing a new complexity: national standards of education. Answer me this: If kids were not responding to local efforts as well as was hoped, how is something as depersonalized as national standards going to help? It will not.

But a lot of kids will continue to get neglected while we are very very busy with the new $100 bill.

Magic.

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* Read SHADOW CHILDREN ~ Understanding Education's #1 Issue. You can buy an autographed copy only from http://www.doctorzest.com/

**I know this is oversimplified, which doesn't mean it is inaccurate. It is VERY complex measuring things such as human beings in large groups, and in a way that is my point. The complexity and discussions created by the complexity can easily fulfill the prophecy.