I was reading student papers on a flight to Montego Bay when the man seated next to me asked if I was a teacher. I explained that I teach school administration in western North Carolina, and I was on my way to do the same in Jamaica.
He said he did professional training too. I sensed that he wanted to talk about shared interests, so I said something like this:
I have a theory about teaching that goes back to my days as a basketball coach. The best coaches keep the fundamental principles in the forefront of their teaching. For example, they realize the laws of geometry and physiology apply to basketball, just as they do to soccer.
Soccer coaches teach their players to pass the ball in a pattern, from the side to the middle, and back to the side so geometry and physiology work in their favor. Players can accept a pass while their bodies are facing the goal, which gives them the best opportunity to create a good angle for attack.
Successful basketball coaches teach this same idea and keep it at the center of their offensive strategies. Mediocre coaches ignore this idea and teach the peripheral strategies they learn in coaching journals, books, and clinics.
The man smiled. He said it was also his experience that the best teachers stick to the essence.
This book is based on the same idea. Successful educators stick to the essence. In other words, their work is grounded in a deep, meaningful definition of what it means to be educated.
The book chapters explain two ways of thinking about improving American public education—the way we think about it now, and how we ought to think about it. The first is captured in our current model of schooling. It is a model driven by the politics of education and the findings of educational research—both of which ignore the essential question of what it means to be educated.
The second way is captured in an alternative model. This model sticks to the essence by defining the educated person as one who develops understanding and imagination (intellectual virtues), strong character and courage (character virtues), and humility and generosity (spiritual virtues). Comparing the alternative model with our current one explains the educational significance of these virtues.
Chapter 1 explains our current model of public education. Understanding is deepened by seeing the model’s focus, the relationships among the five elements of schooling, and the assumptions underlying those relationships.
Chapter 2 provides a history of how three of the elements have driven public education and how we have found ourselves where we are today. We need a deep understanding of history before deciding to either improve or replace our current model.
Chapter 3 describes an alternative model. It starts with the six-virtue definition of the educated person. This is the essence that focuses schooling on educational beliefs and purposes instead of political ones.
Chapters 4 through 8 describe the alternative elements in greater detail. This model departs from our current model in several ways, but the two most significant departures are in the core belief that drives everything and in the relationship between governance and purpose.
Chapter 9 and the epilogue explain how we can move from our current model to the alternative. It will not be easy. Implementing a new model of education requires the modeling and teaching of all six virtues.
Some ideas in this book are familiar to those who study American education. Others are not. The familiar ideas are that public education (1) is driven by politics, (2) serves a public interest, (3) strives to improve standardized test scores, (4) and is bureaucratically structured.
This book’s unique contributions to the school improvement literature are the following:
1. Our educated human nature demonstrates the virtues of understanding, imagination, strong character, courage, humility, and generosity.
2. Our uneducated human nature demonstrates the opposite vices of ignorance, intellectual incompetence, weakness, fear, pride, and selfishness.
3. These vices and virtues can be separated in discussion but not in human behavior or situations.
4. Today’s public schools teach three of the virtues (understanding, strong character, and generosity) and three of the vices (intellectual incompetence, fear, and pride).
5. Educated (virtuous) people make life beautiful, and uneducated ones make it ugly.
6. The democratic governance of education is antieducational because it models and promotes the six vices.
7. Virtue purposes are more fundamental, more comprehensive, and more useful than knowledge and skill purposes.
8. The operation of American public education can be captured in a model that includes a core belief, a governance approach, a set of purposes, an organizational structure, and an improvement paradigm. Relationships among these elements are explained in chapter 1.
The alternative model and the six-virtue definition of the educated person can be unifying themes for a classroom or school. They can be founding principles for a parochial, charter, or independent school. Or they can guide what parents teach their children. As this happens, the credit goes to those who embrace this vision of a better world. The benefits accrue to our children.
