Free-Range Childhood

A number of forces have converged to make us, as a national community, fearful and distrustful. The consequences have negatively affected on our children, both socially and educationally. We now make them fearful in our own image, and that degrades their learning.

In the aftermath of 9/11 the Bush administration ramped up national fears, which gave the federal government relatively free reign to suppress citizens’ rights to privacy and to engage in two costly, as yet unpaid for, and unnecessary wars, which in turn fomented an uptick in the opposition’s virulent radicalism. Conservative state governments have followed suit. Our national culture of fear serves radical conservative interests and helps keep them in power. We have not heeded FDR’s timeless warning that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear suppresses our humanity.

But fear has been abetted by loss of trustful community through other means, such as the absence of parental adults at home. As the income/wealth gap has widened, more families require income generated by all adults to sustain themselves, leaving neighborhoods empty and unsafe for children on their own. Neighbors often no longer know one another, and the notion of a “parental village,” in which all parents look out for all children, has fallen away with the decline of a meaningful, universal sense of community.

Finally, another key factor has been the push to “improve” education by ever-earlier emphasis on “academics,” a failure to recognize that play, for the young, is real learning. In a Scholastic Instructor article titled “What Happened to Kindergarten?” the author quotes a kindergarten teacher who says, “While young students’ reading and math scores are soaring, there is little assessment of the effect of the intensified academic focus on kids’ motivation to learn, creativity, motor skills, social skills, or self-esteem. The risk is children who are already burned out on school by the time they reach third grade,” says Stoudt, the kindergarten teacher. “Play is how children learn. There should be more of it in the upper grades, not less in the lower.”

I was fortunate to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s at a time when childhood could best be characterized as free-range. As a sixth-grader living in a U.S. military community in Germany, I was fortunate to live near a forest that offered unlimited possibilities. It was crisscrossed with paths and traversed by a raised Roman road that passed near the ruins of a small Roman bath and a wooden Roman watchtower recreated by the local residents. One memorable day some of my fellow sixth-graders and I set out to explore these woods. Our method of navigation was to pause whenever paths crossed. One of us would then take out a pocket knife (something no sixth-grade boy would be without), open it, and toss it into the air. Whichever way it pointed on landing was the direction we took.

Hours later we emerged from the woods near another village, from whence we made our way back home using the German road signs to guide us. Incidentally, none of us spoke German, but it didn’t matter. We were adventurous kids, confident in ourselves and our burgeoning ability to navigate the world and have fun doing so. Our parents supported this freedom. On such adventures we discovered things about the world around us but also about ourselves. We were learning free-range, gaining independence that would make us socially and intellectually strong.

Today, we rob our children of these kinds of learning adventures. Sixth-graders with knives? What if they cut themselves or stabbed another person? And bringing a pocket knife to school? Out of the question! Fear. Four or five twelve-year-old boys roaming unfamiliar woods in a foreign country? What if they get lost? What if someone takes them or hurts them? Fear. Sixth-graders walking from one foreign village to another, not even knowing the language? And out of touch? No cell phones? No way to check in for hours at a time? What if…? Fear.

I am reminded of a character in Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune, who says, “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” So long as we allow ourselves to operate as a society based in a culture of fear, that fear will obliterate childhood learning that is natural, open, and leads to fulfillment in adulthood. We desperately need to recreate the free-range childhood—for the sake of our children, for the sake of our national future.

Opt-Out Movement Growing

The opt-out movement is gaining strength as more and more parents recognize that over-use of standardized testing is damaging their children’s education and psychologically harming their children in the process. In New York State, for example, more than 183,000 of some 1.1 million students refused to take a recent English exam, more than triple the number last year.

Opting out is going to continue to gain momentum. It’s not, as some have asserted, about labor unions disputing with legislators because over-testing looks a lot like union-busting, though that would certainly be another reason to opt out. Boycotting tests is a grassroots action by increasingly better informed parents and students to stop a harmful, time-wasting, money-wasting, and educationally useless practice, namely, testing for the sake of testing—and for the sake of enriching testing corporations with public tax dollars. That’s the bottom line.

Of course, there is push-back from those in power whose corporate overlords don’t take kindly to even a modest damming of the money flowing into testing corporations—or their long-term objective to bust unions, lower wages, and control education workers, those folks we used to call teachers who now mainly function as test preppers and proctors. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the federal government will be “obligated to intervene” if too many students opt out and states don’t reach their testing quotas.

By “intervene” Duncan means cut federal funding, which as most people know, flows mainly to programs that assist low-income students. In the way of the world—or at least the way of the United States in recent years—punishment will be meted out to those who are most vulnerable. Underfunding education, a consistent pattern of abuse of education that increasingly happens at all levels of government, is a way to destroy public education and thus complete the transformation of the United States into a third world oligarchy.

Some states are already ahead of others in the race to the bottom. In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback’s failed financial policies and radical tax cuts are causing school districts to shut down early this year because the state’s education coffers have been depleted. This and similar problems are not the result of grassroots movements by parents and students to push for better education. They are the consequence of bad government, of government that has ceased to be by the people or for the people but is, instead, by the few for the few—those few being the corporate elites for whom destruction of public education is a fundamental objective in their war for wealth and power.

God, Inc.

It’s hard to call oneself a Christian when so many who flaunt that label behave in such unChrist-like ways. Too often Christian is synonymous today with racist and homophobe, which leaves many who actually attempt to live out the principles attributed to Christ feeling as though they are victims of identity theft. I wonder if God feels the same way.

The public context of God has been almost wholly subsumed in the identity of radical right “Christian” hegemony. Political Christianism is a rightwing gimmick. The God of “In God We Trust” is a “Christian” god for a “Christian” nation—both fictions designed to fool unthinking masses with feel-righteous rhetoric.

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“How Business Made Us Christian,” March 15, 2015), Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse traced the formulation of God as an advertising ploy. Kruse attributes the mid-20th-century adoption of a decidedly Christianist God as America’s national trademark to the influence of business interests, particularly as stimulated and articulated by a young charismatic evangelist, Billy Graham.

Kruse quotes Graham as saying in 1952, “If I would run for president of the United States today on a platform of calling people back to God, back to Christ, back to the Bible, I’d be elected.” Republican conservatives have been banking on this ploy ever since.

Imagine a decade-earlier version of AMC’s Sixties advertising agency in Mad Men and one may better understand how corporate America began its drive toward oligarchy with the collusion of rightwing politicians. God got big in the 1950s. Government agencies initiated prayer services. In 1954 Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance, and that was the year “In God We Trust” got added to postage stamps. The next year the phrase was added to U.S. currency. And in 1956 it became the official national motto.

In the current national debate about the character of the United States—a debate that affects education, the arts, the sciences, politics, global affairs, and all the rest—it is useful to remember that the public “God,” like the notion of being a “Christian nation,” is a recent invention—at root merely a crass advertising ploy and propaganda with no actual foundation in faith.

This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Posttraumatic Test Disorder: A New Disability?

One might posit a Maslow-style hierarchy of responses to the standardized test mania that has swept the United States as the misbegotten child of “reform,” another word for corporatization of public education. Pearson and other test-producing corporations are raking in profits at the expense of parents, children, and educators. At the top of this response hierarchy are the academic arguments against testing: that standardized tests are being cobbled together contrary to acceptable practice standards for test development, that tests are being overused and misused to draw unwarranted conclusions about students, teachers, schools, and communities. All of these are true, but they aren’t the concerns that trouble parents.

At the most basic level of this hierarchy parents are worried about the health, welfare, and safety of their children who are being exposed to toxic levels of testing. If test mania continues we may need to consider a new category of disability: PTTD, or Posttraumatic Test Disorder. You may think this is a joke; it’s not. Consider how “shell shock,” a World War I era term, has evolved into our current understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, the physical/mental response to trauma. Similarly, we may soon need to reconsider old-fashioned “test anxiety” in a new, more serious light.

Parents’ concerns are justified. As increasing amounts of testing have been mandated by federal and state legislatures, more and more parents are noticing in their children the symptoms of stress associated with test anxiety, such as headaches, nausea, anger, and fear. When these anxiety responses occur occasionally, they may be fairly easily managed. But the ramping up of teaching to the test, practicing for the test, and taking the test renders such anxiety a nearly constant companion, an endless trauma state.

“Stressed elementary students in grades two through four tend to show emotional stress behaviors such as crying, throwing tantrums, wetting themselves, and vomiting,” says Tim Urdan, assistant professor of psychology at Santa Clara University. “The older kids, such as those in high school, are more likely to show ‘rebellious’ responses: refusal to participate, cutting class, and deliberately undermining the test by answering incorrectly on purpose.”* Parents cannot fail to notice these anxiety symptoms, and they are worried and angry that mandated over-testing is the problem, regardless whether the tests themselves are good or bad. They are bad for kids.

The dirty, not-so-little secret of test-oriented education systems is that they produce more problems than positives. They are conformity-based and do not encourage creativity, but even more problematic is that the stress caused by intensive standardized testing tends over time to inhibit learning. Tiredness, worry, lack of appetite, and increased infections—all stress-related—disrupt the ability to concentrate.

Sometimes test anxiety leads to more dire consequences. Across Asian test-oriented education systems, for example, student suicide frequently is attributed to test anxiety. The researchers who wrote China’s annual “Blue Book of Education” (2014) concluded that “most of the teenagers who killed themselves are in middle school, and they did so mainly because they could not bear the heavy pressure of the test-oriented education system.”**

Increasingly, worried and angry parents are demanding an end to the overuse and misuse of standardized tests because toxic test anxiety is traumatizing their children. Such abuse needs to stop before PTTD becomes an actual disability designation.

*Quoted in Edelstein, D. (2000, July 12). “Tests + Stress = Problems for Students.” Brain Connection. http://brainconnection.brainhq.com/2000/07/12/tests-stress-problems-for-students/

**Zhao, X. (2014, May 14). “China’s School Tests Blamed for Suicides.” China Daily. http://www.chinadailyasia.com/news/2014-05/14/content_15135133.html

The Erosion of Common Ground

A hive of intellectual curiosity and pursuit. That was my impression as I looked up from the new Alexander McCall Smith novel I was sampling in the New Books section of our public library. Before me, spread throughout the spacious, well-appointed library, were patrons of all ages, even college students in spite of the fact that the university nearby has several extensive libraries as well. The public library is a citizens’ space: common ground for the common good. Ours is heavily patronized by readers young and old across the economic strata. Yes, a number of homeless individuals take shelter there, reading the day away or using the pubic computers, avoiding the bitter chill of the Indiana winter. Why should they not? They are as entitled to the pursuit of knowledge or the pleasure of a good read as anyone.

Although the Digital Revolution has brought about changes in how we can engage in literate pursuits, those changes—the Internet, ebooks—have provided new options, rather than substitutes for volumes on shelves. I will gladly confess that in the course of writing five or six books since 2000, I have not darkened the door of traditional library to do the research necessary for them. The Internet has provided me with access to libraries, collections, and various media worldwide. But that does not mean that I consider traditional libraries obsolete. Far from it. Public libraries offer both traditional resources and access to digital resources, especially for those who don’t have computer media ready to hand. The emerging Digital Age is enlarging the role of public libraries, not reducing it.

That is not what those heavily invested in the Industrial/Corporate Age would have us believe. Corporate oligarchs are grasping at every possible means to extend the Corporate Age past its sell-by date, which was about the turn of the century. Much of this grasping is taking the form of attacking common ground: public places, spaces, and endeavors whose democratic mission is to foster and support the common good. The graspers are largely conservative, though not exclusively, and focused on elitist privilege, often corporate. The Digital Age is increasingly about individuation and diverse community, not about corporate personhood.

Public libraries, public schools, public—read “democratic”—anything is suspect in the eyes of corporate oligarchy, in which monied elites are focused on controlled parochialism. Gerrymandering electoral districts to ensure that candidates backed by corporate money win offices and become puppet legislators; undermining public confidence in public schools by unfounded criticism, underfunding, and the shunting of public money into corporate pockets through contracts for ever more testing, vouchers, and charter schools; widening the wealth gap between rich and poor through regressive taxes and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy—all of these are the self-serving actions of those heavily invested in a dying age, the Industrial/Corporate Age.

The Digital Age, sparked by two key Digital Revolution developments, the computer and the Internet, is not an extension of the Industrial/Corporate Age. It is a revolution-worthy new era. Too many people already understand this. Maybe they read newspapers or see the information on Facebook. Maybe they come to the public library. However, they gain their understanding of the radical changes that are marking out a new cultural era, it’s scaring the bejezus out of conservatives hoping to preserve the dying Industrial/Corporate age. But beware. Those who are afraid are always dangerous. Those of us ready to embrace the Digital Age would do well to remember Gandhi’s words: “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).