Fighting Words

We have the moral disease of domination, with which we must struggle for our souls. Power has become our national obsession, as it has for many nations before us and around us. We have bartered moral suasion for brute force.  

-from For Everything A Season (Orbis Books), by Joan Chittister

I’m an old debater. I was the first girl to ever win Best District Speaker in our debate league. I supported the Common Core standards move toward argument writing and away from personal narrative as the primary form of writing students practiced in school. “People don’t really give a shit about what you feel or what you think,” David Coleman, architect of the new standards, said. Yet here he was building his career, and the daily lives and choices that our children would experience, through which they would absorb the priorities of the world, on what he felt and what he thought.

Maybe his problem, which became our problem, was that he didn’t recognize the extent to which his work, something he seemed to regard as objectively outside what he internally felt and though, was permeated by his own subjectivity? Although the personal writing of our children, my sons at least, consisted of accounts of their play dates with friends, “and then” over and over, it strikes me that they’ve grown up to have a good sense of where they begin, their own inclinations and biases, and the boundaries of the outside world. Yet I have my own doubts about their early education.

Schools are now being roiled by another reform: the science of reading. And there is no doubt we need to establish a much stronger foundation for teaching reading in the early grades. I spent years working with teachers in middle and high school addressing a silent tragedy: how many students arrived in, say, ninth grade reading below third grade level. I had hired a tutor to teach my first son to read. She said he was one of those students who needed explicit practice with the sounds and letter correspondence, and I wondered how many children didn’t need that. There is no question in my mind, after thirty-five years of teaching and coaching, that we need much better teaching of reading–not just exposure to books–in our schools. I’m cheering for the Reading League and all the serious literacy researchers who’ve been trying to get this message out.

And yet. The medium is the message, a long-ago literacy researcher told us. And our current medium, a word which also means predictor of the future, is a form of discourse that has become so binary, so othering, so violent, that it ensures that many people will strongly resist the brutality of the delivery and completely miss the value of the original message content.

The shrill bleating on social media, “so and so must be held accountable,” is followed by “yes, and also the other so-and-so.” Arguments are made that the damage done to people’s lives is so harmful (do you know how clearly illiteracy in 4th grade predict future prison sentence?) that this is a war–and we need to use the language of war. And yet the language of war, the language of violence and revenge and wiping out the enemy, will never build a new society. In the past 35 years, my career, at least part of the problem in schools has been an increasing fragmentation, an endless process of bureaucratic directives, often contradictory, for how the shrinking amount of teacher planning time must be used. Adult learning, the ongoing reflection and learning that teachers much do, always but especially now, requires a capacity for holding multiple ideas in mind (the reading rope is complicated), for weighing and sorting and prioritizing, for assessing how well our previous decisions worked out, discussing and, yes, arguing. To create and sustain the culture of adult learning to support student learning, leaders must have time to think beyond binaries. They must model real learning, reflection, admitting where we may have been misguided in the past, and how we can synthesize what we now know into the hourly and daily life of a school. 

Public discussion these days resembles the Salem Witch Trials. “I saw Goody Proctor using 3-cueing.” “I saw Abigail Goodman with a phonics workbook, boring children to death.” Treating reading pedagogy like fundamentalist religion and identity politics is what got us into this mess.

In order to lead people with hearts of flesh rather than stone, open to new ideas and practices, we cannot use the language of war and division, of us and them, of violence and brutality. There will be resistance enough anyway, from exhaustion and cynicism and genuine though misguided generalizations about how children teach themselves to read. Powerful moral suasion, without which we will never get systemic change, does in fact rest on what we think and feel.