If you teach more of X then you teach less Y and Z. This is the omnipresent time/money budget tradeoff in education. Yes, Joel Spring's USA-centric book is correct that education can be deculturalizing in a rapidly changing multicultural society such as the USA and probably similar countries as well. Teachers teach what they know. What they know is limited by increasingly scarce funding and how well they use what funding is available. Teacher education and today's culture is the product of a long history. Spring talks about white English Protestant settlers in relation to Amerinds without going into how the English were forged by force in the religious wars and breakaway from 1000 years of Roman Catholicism. Our mathematics uses Arabic numerals which were developed in India, a big improvement over Roman numerals. The English language is 65% Latin following the invasion by Claudius in 43AD and William the Conquerer after the battle of Hastings in 1066. Our religions are more Abrahamic (Judaism, Christian, Muslim) than the older pagan religions. After all the wars, killings, and persecution most teachers do not know and do not teach very much about all the people that were converted or annihilated in the process. Even Roman numerals get little use. Pagan gods name our days of the week: sun, moon, tyr, wodan, thor, frigg, saturn but get little attention beyond that unless students study Beowulf or Wagner. Most of our language and culture is Latin based from Christianity which arose on the outskirts of the Roman empire and later was adopted by the empire as it fell to barbarian invaders. Teachers know this violent history and teach it but do not teach much of the Roman beliefs or tribes, practices, and customs that were annihilated by the Romans and the Christians Nor does Spring.
So I would agree that education is deculturalization especially when the teacher and students have very different backgrounds. Today in California students often come from a different country, state, race, religion, linguistic group, or gender than their teacher. For example undergraduate students at UC Berkeley are 42% Asian, 31% Caucasian, 12% Hispanic and 53% Female -- a mixture quite different from their teachers and many school districts in California. Most of the Asian students are Chinese. Many are English language earners who quickly adopt the English language, Christian religion, distinction in European classical music, and all the arts and sciences in the European and other traditions. Rather than having their culture destroyed they view California as just another bunch of curious people to learn so as to do more business with or to succeed in relation to. Chinese are the business people of Asia, the central and oldest country that branched out and colonized most of Asia. Even countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia that are somewhat hostile to Chinese are often mostly run by Chinese. As we sit here China is scouring the world for resources and out-competing USA in Africa and South America for business deals. Chinese are good at learning local cultures well enough to function successfully anywere. The US Department of Census reported in 2008 that the USA imported the most from China (followed by Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany). Further China is the leading lender to USA and together China and Japan hold 44% of all US public debt amounting to over a trillion dollars or 10% of the USA entire economy by GDP! I have been taking classes at our local university the past two semesters with many Chinese students from Xian, a less prosperous, less well known city about twice the population of Los Angeles. These students just discovered our small California university and have arrived in force like a small army helped by our exchange program. To these students our university is more like a vacation than destruction of their culture. They take twice as many courses as American students and in a foreign language (English) and radically different culture, weather and environment. Their grades will be the top or near the top, and they are eager to practice their English on anybody who will listen and help them speak better -- they walk across campus and shout hello to everybody within range. I have seen this phenomenon in other schools and believe it to be universal. Unfortunately our university exchange program is suffering because many American Students will not go to China or Germany, the second most popular country in the program. It is too bad that Americans are so provincial and do not learn about other cultures as much as others learn about us. I have traveled to China twice and it is quite a bit different than San Francisco Chinatown, the largest concentration of Chinese in North America where I lived 5 years. You really have to go to China to understand it. Teachers will not be able to teach what they do not know. Students need to know more about China and to read some of the language to supplement their Latin-based language English Spanish training. In view of California budget it might be easier to import Chinese teachers than to train existing teachers to teach Chinese in our K-12 schools.
Joel Spring has separate chapters for Amerinds, Africans, Hispanics, Asians in the USA as part of the Americas discovered by accident by Europeans who were seeking a sea route to China safer than the Mongolian highways traveled by Marco Polo. Spain was the great empire with the largest claims in the Americas but Spring covers more of the English which are now a small minority in the USA and were majority for only a few decades before 1776. Europeans themselves are a minority that inhabit a foggy damp corner of the Eurasian land mass. They were easily invaded but few bothered to do so (Mongols, Attila the Hun) because there was little of value in Europe and the people were primitives who after the fall of Rome lived in the dark ages walking in ruins wondering how their ancestors did it. After the Renaissance, the sudden growth in the economy, technology, and military power especially what accompanied the protestant reformation seemed miraculous so could be interpreted as evidence of divine providence. Books such as the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, even used the term "invisible hand." Spring repeatedly points out that religion and education were linked in the minds of the colonists and USA and how it provided motivation and justification for their actions. The struggle out of poverty, plagues, famines, wars, revolutions, conspiracies, beheadings, was so arduous and painful that victors became stubborn in the beliefs that allowed them to survive. They "forged" an empire while Amarinds remained living not unlike Europeans did in the Dark Ages and prior.
Most of Spring's book topics are covered in depth in a modern History of USA textbook so his book is redundant. Spring's book is at 155 pages concise, small, targeted, well written and rather elegant. He does add history beyond what is required for the topic that is the title of the book thus overlapping with history texts. This helps understanding the historical context of the facts and also points to the need to study all these facts in a full sized book of USA history. This book is probably more relevant to older readers who did not learn this material before and do not have time for a full treatment. Most USA students need to study more history of the USA and even more history of the world and all of the people in it. (As opposed to the shortening of the school year that is proposed.)
I will also say that as a drawback it is history and not up to date with the first edition published in 1994 -- drastic changes have occurred since thin. To be relevant for policy making it needs to be current as to where we are today. That was not his goal, but it is important for those with knowledge to help out with how to deal with our collapsing state and USA budget that will likely overshadow many of the historical events that he does cover. If one understands history, that might help prevent repeating the mistakes of history.
Spring discusses Asians as a "model minority" without noting that they are a majority in the world's population and even a majority in some top USA universities, at least in many majors. Also Spring may not be sufficiently respectful of his fellow Amerinds (he does claim some unstated percent Cherokee ancestry). They established a mostly ecologically balanced economy with a moderately high standard of living for their period of history, in some cases advanced civilizations. They held out for a long time against a formidably armed enemy. They still survive in large numbers on reservations and in the larger society with most "whites" claiming or having some Amarind ancestry unless they are more recent immigrants. Like the Chinese students many Amerinds know both their own culture, language and customs and that of the larger world. Chinese students do not come to the USA to study Chinese from a teacher who knows less about it than they do. Nor would a Sioux want to come to a California University to learn about her culture. Rather than destroying a culture I would look at it as learning something new rather than repeating something old. Most people naturally seek out new kinds of food, music, ideas, travel... They may decide to keep the old, but then may adopt the new that they would never know unless they studied their options. People should not expect foreign teachers to teach them about their own culture. People should pick up what they must to figure out what they are saying so that they can then decide if that is correct or useful to them. In "the Sioux" by Guy Gibbon the Dakota looked with wonder at the French technology. Supernatural gifts were projected onto the French people who were regarded as powerful spirits to be carefully treated. The Sioux forced the French to become adopted by a family or intermarried before trade was allowed so that the Sioux could acquire this power. Eventually the French were demoted to "ordinary people" once the trade was well underway and the technology understood and imported. Rather than having this knowledge imposed on them, they actively and aggressively went out to gain that knowledge. So the Sioux behaved much like the Chinese students that I know. I would guess that white dominance, hegemony may already be a historical curiosity that did not last very long and is not true in much of California or the USA today.
So Spring is correct than when they taught more X they taught less Y and Z. He covers some of the history and the various labels and arguments. Like the glass that is half empty and half full one can be optimistic or pessimistic about the current situation, but the history of how we got here cannot be changed. Spring implies changes to the curriculum but does not actually recommend changes or the many issues that would raise. He is USA centric and focuses on past issues, not the present. He did not discuss the cost of or any details of possible changes, a major issue in the California and USA during our hopefully reversible time of debt, deficits and economic meltdown. He does not address the poor performance of our schools during the past decades long boom or what our competitors are doing better and how that competition helped cause our downward spiral. In his 162 pages he discusses a few issues but not how these issues relate to the big picture (which would take more than 162 pages). |
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