Obama, Teaching Art History and Monuments Men

Monuments Man George Stout (second from right) and others remove Michelangelo's Madonna and Child from the salt mine in Altaussee, Austria on July 10, 1945 [here]

If you have seen the film, then you may have had the same experience I did. The film was framed by Frank Stokes, played by George Clooney, trying to explain the importance of saving art to Harry Truman and a couple other Senior White House folks. Truman struggles with the idea that art is worth risking someone's life to save. For him, it has no "real" tangible value. Now, this is the man who dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. He's definitely not squeamish when it comes to sacrificing life for some purpose. The problem is that he can't wrap his mind around any value art might have.

Recently Obama followed in Truman's missteps when -

"At an event at a GE plant in Wisconsin Thursday, President Obama reiterated his support for the manufacturing industry, saying that Americans could probably make more in that line of work “than they might than [with] an art history degree."   [here]  [see Obama's apology here]

I am of the opinion that art should be appreciated for art's sake. But art also has social currency. Art is a means to opposing oppression [see the Smithsonian's exhibit on art and the Civil Right's Movement here - or South African resistance to Apartheid here and here - or Iraqi artists' responses to war here]. Artists are at the front lines of taking on dictators and drawing attention to inequalities. The Taliban's attack on the ancient Buddhas of Bumiyan [here] speaks to the continuing importance of art in the geo-political realm. Street artist around the world [Peru] [Egypt] [Palestine] show us that art is part of our common human need to challenge the world we find ourselves in. As educators, this is exactly what we should encourage our students to do.

Alas, given our nation's turn away from the arts and humanities and towards STEM, one can only wonder if the next generation will find even less value in art than the current one. Would anyone step up to save a work of art from destruction or to defend an artists' performative right as a human right? Will anyone take to the streets, paint in hand, to confront the oppressor? And will they have the tools to understand, or even care, what artists around the world are expressing?

Public School Failure and the Poverty Connection

"If you're a child born into a poor household, you're more likely to exhibit psychological symptoms than if you were born to a non-poor household - symptoms that are a direct result of being born poor.

Thought it would be interesting to juxtapose two articles:

This is Your Brain on Poverty: What Science Tells Us About Poverty and The Myth Behind Public School Failure

The latter article provides a a nice summary of the strategy to place the blame for "failing" schools on public education and offer privatization as the heavenly manna. Nice quote from Chris Hedges:

The federal government spends some $600 billion a year on education—“and the corporations want it. That’s what’s happening."

This is Your Brain on Poverty speaks to the research behind understanding the effects of poverty on brain development. In the article two researchers posit the bandwidth metaphor as a way of understanding the effects of poverty.

The human brain has a finite amount of bandwidth. If one is forced to spend that worrying about poverty, it will necessarily have less capacity to spend on other tasks. 

Now - let's take a look at a third article by William Galston,* entitled "Is there a Crises?" Galston puts forward that there are actually two public school systems in America, one is suburban and relatively well-funded and the other is urban/rural, and relatively underfunded. Galston reaches an interesting conclusion:

When anyone speaks of the distinction between the suburbs and the cities in America, and the distinction between suburban school districts and urban school districts, one is speaking to a significant extent about race and ethnicity and class. If we do not close the gap between the two systems of public education in America, the system that could and should be better, but which is not failing its students, on the one hand, and the system that is failing its students on the other, then we will be condemning our society to the perpetuation of the distinctions and the inequalities across lines of race, ethnicity, and class that we've been struggling to overcome in recent generations.

My conclusion: If we are serious about providing equitable opportunities for all youth in the public sphere (this is not to say that people of wealth can't go to private schools, only that the public sphere should be equitable) then we need to:
* Provide all schools with the same resources
* Tackle poverty in America as a starting point through (a) raising the minimum wage to a living wage; (b) ensuring that all people have affordable health care; (c) providing free childcare to all working parents; (d) providing job training opportunities and expanding subsidized apprenticeships and adult education.


* Professor and director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs

See Also

 "Historic Use of the Term Failing School"

"Is American Culture to Blame for Failing Schools"

The School to Prison Pipeline

Zero tolerance? School to prison pipeline? The threat, and fear, of youth violence? 

The White House finally stepped in. In Rethinking School Discipline, Dept. of Education puts forward:

"Racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem today, and not just an issue from 40 to 50 years ago....Our Guiding Principles document highlights the need for locally-developed approaches to promote positive school climates and equitable discipline practices. Yet at the same time, we think those locally-tailored approaches should be grounded in research and promising practices--instead of being based on indiscriminate zero tolerance policies, or, at the other extreme, ad-hoc approaches to discipline...

Schools should remove students from the classroom as a last resort, and only for appropriately serious infractions, like endangering the safety of other students, teachers, or themselves.

Unfortunately today, suspensions and expulsions are not primarily used as a last resort for serious infractions.

In recent years, secondary schools have suspended or expelled an estimated two million students a year. That is a staggering amount of lost learning time--and lost opportunity to provide support.

Making matters worse, exclusionary discipline is applied disproportionately to children of color and students with disabilities."

Let's explore the situation a little further. Chris McGreal of the UK Guardian recently described the situation as follows:

  "Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school." The US Schools with their own Police

Is punishment, or law enforcement, the answer? Let's play a thought game. Let us say that if stricter punishment is the answer, than more punishment should have better results. Here's a list of what schools could consider:

• Shackling all misbehaving students
• Hard labor (breaking rocks) in the school yard
• Flogging
• Waterboarding

If incarceration and corporal punishment isn't the answer, than perhaps society could turn to psychiatry and try designer behavior modification therapies, such as:

• "Prescription" drugs such as Ritlin
• Electroshock therapy
• Brain surgery of the  hypothalamus.

If these approaches don't seem promising, than perhaps we need to think rethink school discipline.  Henry Giroux points out:

The United States is one of the few countries in the world that puts children in supermax prisons, tries them as adults, incarcerates them for exceptionally long periods of time, defines them as super predators, pepper sprays them for engaging in peaceful protests and in an echo of the discourse of the war on terror describes them as "teenage time bombs."(21) Young people have become the enemy of choice, elevated to the status as an all-pervasive threat to dominant authority. Instead of nurturing such children, we now taser them, sequester them to dangerous prisons and demonize them in order to divert our attention from real social problems, while at the same time engaging a public purification through the ritual of imposing harsh disciplinary practices on them.The Suicidal State and the War on Youth

And in his paper entitled War on Youth, Henry Giroux argues:

As is evident in the recent killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, poor minority youth are not just excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that no longer considers them of any value. Such youth, already facing forms of racial and class-based exclusion, now experience a kind of social death as they are pushed out of schools, denied job-training opportunities, subjected to rigorous modes of surveillance and criminal sanctions and viewed less as chronically disadvantaged than as flawed consumers and civic felons. Some such as Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd experience something more ominous - death by homicide.No longer tracked into either high- or low-achievement classes, many of these youth are now pushed right out of school into the juvenile criminal justice system.(18)Under such circumstances, matters of survival and disposability become central to how we think about and imagine not just politics, but the everyday existence of poor white, immigrant and minority youth. Too many young people are not completing high school, but are, instead, bearing the brunt of a system that leaves them uneducated and jobless and, ultimately, offers them one of the few options available for people who no longer have available roles to play as producers or consumers - either poverty or prison. When the material foundations of agency and security disappear, hope becomes hopeless and young people are reduced to the status of waste products to be tossed out or hidden away in the global human waste industry.  The Suicidal State and the War on Youth

So, where do we stand? How do we address the school to prison pipeline? I would argue that the White House's position is rather naive. The school to prison pipeline can't just be turned off by recommending that kids go to the principal's office. Instead, we need to deconstruct the entire structure. We need to think about both the aesthetics of the school to prison pipeline (the prison like conditions in schools, e.g., windowless classrooms, no time for play, regimentation, and the actual treatment of some students as prison track and others as college bound) as well as the new private prison industry that has grown into a lobbying machine, pushing society into ever harsher punishments in order to profit from incarceration. 

For more on this topic:

Robin Young of Here and Now
Obama Administration Discourages "Zero-Tolerance" School Policy

Teaching STEM with a view towards Social Justice

The growing obsession with STEM has pushed the arts and humanities out of the room. But are we only teaching STEM to prepare kids for the workplace? And if so, and STEM is now the dominant focus, then what does this say about education? What about the bigger picture, the need to prepare kids to take responsibility for self, and work with others to form a better, more just, society?

Perhaps it's time we picked up another lens by which to view STEM. Perhaps we should teach STEM subjects from the point of view of social justice? For example, a recent research shows that Latinos and Blacks living in poverty are more exposed to household carcinogens than individuals not living in poverty (read more).  We know that children in the inner cities are exposed to higher amounts of lead (here), and that this likely has an effect on brain development (here), and perhaps even increases in violent behavior (here).

So,  what does this mean for the classroom? I'd suggest having civics teachers and scientists co-teach. Let's have kids investigate their home and neighborhood environments. Let's have them discover what they're exposed to. Let's use STEM to energize youth to stand up against the greed and idiocy that has been destroying lives for decades.

See also:

Neuroscience for Kids - here
Public Health and Social Justice - here

The School - PTSD - Violence Connection

A growing body of research shows that Americans with traumatic injuries develop PTSD at rates comparable to veterans of war. Just like veterans, civilians can suffer flashbacks, nightmares, paranoia, and social withdrawal.**

When we think of schools that are "failing" or "succeeding" society often places the blame on teachers and administrators. However, our national discourse around the topic needs to factor in the neighborhoods in which schools are located. Many children are immigrants and arrive from war torn regions.* Other children are exposed to the daily violence that takes place in America.**

* Report from Child Soldiers International - here

** The PTSD Crises that's Being Ignored - "Researchers in Atlanta interviewed more than 8,000 inner-city residents and found that about two-thirds said they had been violently attacked and that half knew someone who had been murdered. At least 1 in 3 of those interviewed experienced symptoms consistent with PTSD at some point in their lives..." Read more

The Push to Make College more Equitable

“Unfortunately, today only 30 percent of low-income students enroll in college right after high school and, far worse, by their mid-20s only 9 percent earn a bachelor’s degree … There is this huge cohort of talent that we’re not tapping.” 
Recently the White House is attempting to increase access to upper-level education for lower-income students - (read the White House's report here). Universities and foundations responded with commitments to open academia's ivory gates (here). 
The problem is that a nice soft cozy chat by the president and a cheerful response from the sector does little to address the issue. Universities and colleges are places of class segregation in America, just as public schools begin segregating children at an early age. The solution isn't more ice cream floats and milk shakes. Instead, how about - 

• near free university and college for all students (as in Germany)
• guaranteed grants to students to pay for college (rather than loans and debt)

We could ask (non-GI) students to pay for their tertiary education by committing up to two years of public service. This would mean a beefed up Americorp or Peace corp. And no one could buy their way out of the public service. Public service could include working in inner cities, building infrastructure, serving in K-12 "poor performing" schools, etc.