Sacrifice: The Unfortunate Persistence of Monastic Tradition in Public Education

During my first year as principal, 1986-87, an unmarried teacher I’ll call Morgan came to my office and told me, “I’m pregnant. On purpose. I’m due in April. I’m not getting married.”

When this happened in the 1980s, public schools were still sorting out the collision between individual employee rights and traditional social values. Morgan gave birth to her child less than two decades after Tucson began allowing married teachers to stay in their classrooms once the pregnancy was obvious.

Before public schools existed, teachers often came from monasteries and convents, where they were bound by vows of poverty and chastity. As schools have developed into secular institutions and the profession has overflowed the bounds of the religious orders, I wonder if an expectation of personal sacrifice continues to undermine not only teachers' salaries but also their status as professionals.

 Once I became a principal, I found that it was part of my job to help maintain the illusion of the chaste and bland teacher. Even as teacher celibacy stereotypes have faded, we as a nation may not have stopped regarding the call to teaching as an implicit commitment to living in worthy poverty, some willingness to occupy a subordinate and humble role.

Ironically, today’s teachers must do far more parenting in their classrooms than previous generations of educators—yet another aspect of the work inside the sacrifice paradigm but outside the job description. Imagine an accountant or a book editor or an architect, both high-intensity professionals, having to work with all their clients together in one room, six hours at a stretch, five days a week. 

Does the tradition of teacher as sacrificial instrument infect public policy and educational decision-making in America? In all the discussion of teacher compensation, does the abstemious monk or the virtuous nun hover in the background, the images against which today’s teachers are judged? I’m not sure we are beyond that yet.

Another Take on Reading: the Case of Japanese

My recent trip to Japan challenged me in an entirely new way.  As a proficient reader and writer of English, I take alphabetic writing for granted and am comfortable with Roman letters in the languages that use them. Russian and Greek also seem close enough that I believe I could fairly easily learn what the letters represent in the spoken language.

Then there's Japanese. In two weeks, I never knew which of their three linked writing systems I was seeing. I did not learn to recognize a single character in Kanji, Hiragana, or Katakana. So today I turned to Google to find out a little more.

It turns out that the orthography used for beginning reading, Hiragana, has "only" 46 characters. Each Hiragana character is formed with at least three strokes, with seven strokes being the maximum. While there are no reverse letters like b and d, p and q, there are many characters of six and seven strokes that closely resemble one another to an inexperienced reader. And these strokes can curve all over the place and cross each other. Unlike most Western alphabetic orthographies, Hiragana characters represent syllables rather than phonemes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#Table_of_hiragana

Holy cow! Japanese children can read most or all of the Hiragana (syllabic) characters by the end of kindergarten. Dyslexia is rare.

We have often attributed superior academic achievement of Japanese children to cultural or structural elements of their schooling. I started thinking about the more micro level of the connections among developmental factors (visual vs. auditory cortex of the brain), informal and formal preparation for reading, and the instructional strategies that are used.

Japanese children are introduced to and expected to learn written language content that is very much more visually challenging than the English alphabet. At the same time, the characters represent syllables, a pattern of sound that is more cognitively and acoustically authentic than the more abstract phonemic segments that correspond to English letters.

It makes me wonder if our emphasis on a fairly primitive version of "phonics," based on the artificial segmentation of speech sounds, makes life more difficult for our young readers. The Hiragana system, with its greater load on visual processing and lighter load on auditory perception than English "phonics," raises a question about brain development. Are humans at ages 4 and 5 more "ready" to deal with concrete graphic distinctions than with the much more ephemeral and artificial auditory segments emphasized in English literacy?

We have tended to work preschool children's auditory processing much harder than their visual in our pre-literacy teaching efforts. Is it possible that we are wasting some of their visual learning potential by not looking for more ways to stimulate and challenge a readiness for graphic analysis that may be superior to their auditory discrimination? Or is it possible that we are wasting auditory learning potential by teaching a phonemic level of analysis rather than one based on the more natural acoustic unit of the syllable?

I've always been skeptical of systems that fail to develop areas of strength while over-working areas of weakness. I've opposed so-called phonemic segmentation practice for kindergartners as backwards to the natural sequence of learning, a time-waster for kids under a certain age who may be quite ready to deal with graphic material. Why couldn't they be doing fun and interesting activities (art? science?) that build on a readiness in visual discrimination and analysis rather than forcing them through cognitive tasks more appropriate to where their brains will be at age 7?

I could be all wet. I imagine there's a body of research on all of this, and right now I have way more questions than answers.