On education

This has been an impressive year for me with regard to education. I have been impressed with the accomplishment of my students and this is especially obvious when their awards and scholarships are taken into account. (I am of course not the reason for their accomplishments - that belongs to the whole school, their parents, their community, and their connections to the media they use, and the weather, the food they eat - you get the idea.) But the end result for me is very positive. From what I see, young people are amazing and learning and maturing faster than ever. Granted, the students (for the most part) that I am associated with come from intact families that are connected to the community, are honest, and industrious. (In short, they meet the criteria Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart as the kinds of families that are not falling apart.) They also are in education for the right kind of education (Again following Murray in Real Education.) The school here (Alaska Middle College School) has avoided the pitfalls that are apparently impacting education in many other communities according to Diane Ravitch. So in my case, the students I work with are among the elite and receiving an elite education and we are protected from many of the statistics that give many schools, even in the same local area, a lower success rate. Our students are already literate, healthy, engaged, motivated to learn, and in touch with modern media. What certainly does still impact what they do is their immersion in modern media and what seems to go hand in hand with that, a decreased attachment to difficult texts (of the paper sort). The Flynn effect is certainly part of the picture here. So their IQ's are rising - as far as I can tell. But their familiarity with details in history, science, religion, and literature - the sorts of things that come from books mostly, has been apparently decreasing. They have fast processors in their brains but little data to process! If a problem they are dealing with can be solved using computer apps and Google they are on it. I suspect as I have heard that most of the news they get comes from the Daily Show. The moral narrative they follow seems to be best explained by Peter Watson. Though there are exceptions of course. (I have to say that the churches they attend are what Charles Taylor calls "thin". All of this makes me feel like I am nicely placed. I am encouraged.