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The Student/Parent/Administrator/Teacher Rectangle
By Donald Gerz
The Student/Parent/Administrator/Teacher Rectangle
By Donald A. Gerz
This paper was prepared for a panel discussion on English secondary education at
the English Professionals Conference held at Kennesaw State University
in Kennesaw, Georgia on April 3, 2007.
“Rectangle: a parallelogram having four right angles.”("Rectangle." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 23 May 2007. <Dictionary.comhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Rectangle>.)
Over the course of twenty-two years of teaching adolescents English composition and literature in seven private high schools, each with radically different missions, I have been fascinated with a phenomenon I call “The Student/Parent/Administrator/Teacher Rectangle” and how its dynamics fundamentally affect education in general and teachers in particular. Part of my fascination with this unexamined structure is that few frontline teachers and administration officials ponder its implications, and almost no parents and students seem to be aware it even exists! Nonetheless, it has been my experience that the rectangle is the most decisive factor in determining the health and/or sickness of education in American private high schools today.
The Four Angles of the Student/Parent/Administrator/Teacher Rectangle
Students
Many students today are remarkably passive, alarmingly ambivalent, and flagrantly apathetic where their own formal education is concerned. Many do not take responsibility for and ownership of their learning. Instead, many modern students regard formal education merely as something imposed upon them from without by artificial requirements of “not-with-it” parents, teachers, and societal leaders, most of whom they dismiss as outdated, obsolete, irrelevant, or even worse. It is not that these students have little respect for any other cultures and subcultures than their own. Rather, curricula generated by teachers who can relate ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern cultures and their breathing derivatives to students’ actual lives are dismissed because those curricular entities are presented and explained by those who define relevance as that which persists longer than Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame.
The de facto “teachers” of many students in our age are rock stars, celebrities, outlaws, sports stars, wrestlers, NASCAR drivers, and the like. The primary sources in determining how many students select, perceive, organize, and analyze information are (in no special order) computers, The Internet, cell phones, video games, television, rock concerts, laptops, I-Pods, videos, and other electronic toys that have become the ends rather than the means of knowledge.
In the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, students tended to be more inquisitive about vast swaths of human experiences over multiple and diverse eras and cultures as well as their own time and selves than they are today. Today, many students tend to be eerily disinterested and overwhelmingly disconnected from the general and shared experiences of their own human condition, choosing instead to settle for small solipsistic universes of exclusively selected peers connected to each other by cell phones but not necessarily to humanity’s past, present, and future universes.
Thus, many students arrive in their English classrooms spurning the curriculum well before teachers even open their mouths as they dutifully and laboriously employ creative and innovative “student-friendly” teaching aids to drive their syllabi. Unfortunately, many of today’s pupils seem more comfortable in placidly and passively gazing at a few scraggly bushes at the edge of mall parking lots than they do in climbing massive trees in the middle of trans-cultural and multi-epochal forests of human knowledge and wisdom.
Parents
In the not-too-distant past (particularly in the Sixties and the first part of the Seventies), most parents applauded, revered, and enthusiastically cooperated with teachers who imparted knowledge, skills, and even wisdom that would transform their children into literate, humane, and self-actualized individuals. These individuals were in turn capable of contributing to cohesive and yet dynamic societies and cultures (i.e., “the New Frontier,” “the Great Society,” etc.). The emphasis was on the full development of emerging responsible and responsive young citizens who were inspired by the best minds of world history to achieve excellence in order to attain personal happiness and to serve all humanity. President Kennedy put it best for a whole generation of Americans (and the free world at that time) when he defined happiness according to Aristotle: “Happiness is the full use of one’s powers along the lines of excellence.” The stress was on intellectual and creative development and excellence as the path to individual happiness and social progress, not on self-centered and egotistic gathering of material wealth for its own sake (i.e., “profit taking”) at the expense of politically, socially, and economically disenfranchised sectors of the U.S. society and other world populations. (Of course, economic improvement of individuals usually followed a good liberal arts education . . . if applied by those same persons; but individual material wealth was seen then as one of many by-products of that education instead of the relentlessly pursued and sole end it usually is today.)
Today, many parents view good grades, high-standardized test scores, and diplomas as little more than tickets to good jobs and economic security. More distressingly, many of today’s parents misperceive the college preparatory diploma virtually as a divine right, a class entitlement. Unfortunately, many parents do not understand (or choose not to understand) that good grades must be accurate indicators for the presence of skills that have intrinsic value—skills that require proficiency. Today, many parents are interested in their children earning good grades, but not necessarily in what the grades stand for (skills, knowledge, excellence, and even wisdom). Consequently, many parents today tend to subtly lobby for their children. Sometimes, the lobbying is not too subtle, and some will even resort to objecting to low grades despite the obviously poor performances of their children and in spite of their own lack of professional expertise and credentials. Pressure of this type obviously compromises the ability of teachers to grade accurately and reduces the motivation of students to put in the necessary effort to acquire necessary curricular skills. As well, such parental high-handedness impinges on faculty morale and professional satisfaction.
Patients who tell their doctors how to practice medicine are dismissed out of hand. Unfortunately, teachers cannot dismiss parents (and students) with skewed educational values. The present educational system in America demands otherwise. In the past, students and parents were treated as patients. Today, the political, social, and economic demands of our critically ill educational system require that they are treated as customers and clients…and “the customers are always right, even when they are wrong.” Indeed, in secondary education today, the patients are running the hospital…especially in private high schools.
Administrators
The duties of current school administrators are far more numerous, diverse, and often contradictory than they were in the past. In today’s consumer-centered model of education, the administrator inevitably becomes an unwilling arbiter (a Judge Judy, if you will) in contrived and ridiculously perceived binaries between school/student, parent/student, student/student, student/school, student/teacher, teacher/school, public opinion/school, parent/parent, administrator/teacher, board member/teacher, etc. dyads. (The combinations are endless!)
Furthermore, any given headmaster is forced by social, political, and business realities to conduct his or her office as that of a corporate executive who must answer to virtual “stockholders,” such as influential parents, board members, athletically endowed football and basketball players, wealthy benefactors, and the like. Education has become a business, a feeder of an American economy that must continue to grow at all costs—even at the cost of not producing three-dimensional human (and humane) individuals, something that has always been the goal of formal education, especially in the humanities…especially in English secondary education.
Teachers
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard my colleagues cry out in desperation, “All I want to do is teach!” Such a lament most often springs from the lips of those who teach students composition and literature. Respect for these disciplines and admiration for those who teach them seem at an all-time low. Even though parents and students are preoccupied with grades, more often than not, English is seen by many of them as implicitly superfluous. One expects such a badly informed attitude from students. However, parents who dismiss the intangible (and practical) benefits of mastering the skill of reading, understanding fine literature, and developing the skill of writing fine prose lurk in the wings like so many stage mothers and fathers.
For students and parents, the horrible effects of consumer-based education are experienced in the future. For teachers, the consequences of this social malignancy become an inevitable subtext in every class now, a subtext that all (save teachers) seem unable (or unwilling) to decode, comprehend, and set right.
Definitive Solutions Must Come from Those
Who Have the Ultimate Power: Parents and Their Children!
Solving the incessant problems that issue from the Student/Parent/Administrator/Teacher dynamic is beyond the scope of a whole army of teachers and administrators because these professionals are not actually in charge of education in our country. The client/customers (students and parents) are the main determinants of policy (both written and especially unwritten) because, in a client-centered and egalatarian educational system, the customer is always right…even when he or she is wrong...which is more often than not.
Sadly, most students in our U.S. culture today are more interested in settling for the immediate gratification of shallow and short-term materialistic pursuits than they are in achieving the delayed gratification of realized human potential along the lines of excellence so revered by Aristotle and President Kennedy. Furthermore, today’s parents certainly have a massive amount of power to bring about positive change, but they seem unaware of and/or unconcerned about what their obligations and moral responsibilities are toward their own children in a healthy, effective, and excellent educational system.
My intention in this brief paper has been to articulate the inherent social construct of the process that is private college preparatory education in the United States today and then to comment briefly on the parasitical and largely reactionary societal values that have slowly and insidiously grafted themselves into its trunk during the last half century or so. This parasite, virus, bacteria (call it what you will) has become the unseen antigen in the healthy blood that teachers are trying to transfuse into their students’ humanity. In identifying this societal parasite, I hope to stir debate and facilitate dialogue among students, administrators, parents, and teachers so that all affected parties will be more inclined to fulfill their respective responsibilities instead of expecting teachers to educate while all others sit idly by and wait for something magic to happen. Teachers are fulfilling their responsibilities, but they cannot fulfill the responsibilities of other key elements of the Student/Parent/Administrator/Teacher Rectangle!
It will be interesting to see how formal education in the United States fares in the future. Parents want (and demand) many types of education for many kinds of individuals from one generalized system instead of from many specialized structures. For some unexamined reason, most parents intensely believe beyond all reason that their children must have a university education to be successful in life, yet they have no idea of what a university education is and what it will entail from their children (and themselves) in terms of preparation during high school! At any rate, a university education is certainly not required for all students to be successful and happy in this life. (My plumber, electrician, mechanic, and carpenter are all very successful and, most importantly, happy because they are excellent in their fields.)
Modern secondary education attempts to be all things to all people, yet it pleases few. Inevitably, teachers unfairly catch most of the blame, which is painfully demoralizing to those who are doing their parts while parents and students tell administrators how to run schools and lecture teachers on how and what to teach. Administrators know how to administer, and teachers know how to teach. All college preparatory teachers want is to teach students who are college material how to attain the skills necessary to achieve their human potential along the lines of excellence so that they can be successful, self-sufficient, productive, helpful to humanity, and happy for the rest of their lives…not just for now.
Parents have these same dreams for their children, but dreams do not become realized without the hard work of students who must dream large and then inform their actions by those larger-than-life dreams. Excellence, self-sufficiency, productivity, success, responsibility for others, and the life-long happiness that follow are dreams that must be realized through student action and parental responsibility and resolve. Without the right kind of student action and parental responsibility, everything is a mere dream. With them, everything is possible.