Humane Education

Helpless at birth, humans, in common with most higher animals, are locked into a cycle of growth, development and learning to meet the basic requirements of biological survival. Unlike the plants and other lower growth forms, human beings do not come equipped with all the information for survival hard-wired into the organism at birth. Much of the information is acquired through life experience and transferred from older to younger members of the species. It is not possible to think of the survival of humans out of the context of the biological family, the most basic form of which is the mother and her children with a transient father. Father present is an obvious improvement and an enormous advantage, but the simplest, most basic, survival form is the unit of mother and children. Kinship relations can bring about the extended family where three generations are living under one roof and may encompass a whole clan or tribe.

Biological/ecological learning occurs in this environment and, when acquired by children, it affects them for the remainder of their lives. Competent parents tend to have competent children. Competent children grow up to be competent parents.

Women Invented Language

Some 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 million years ago humans acquired language. The women who invented language could not have known what they did since, in its most primitive form, language was a scarcely distinguishable offshoot of animal communication. Language differs from communication most significantly in the sense that it refers to the future, or the thing "not there." The discovery of the future is the greatest single discovery in the history of the universe. It transformed humans from animals living in "real time," like the beasts of the field and forest, to sentient beings possessed of self-realization. Through countless little changes and innovations over countless millenia, language took the form we know today. (For practical purposes, "today" encompasses the ancient as well as the modern world.) Language is a technological development of humankind and it serves to differentiate the two beings of humans—humans as animals and humans as technologists. Other animals have technology, but none of it can compare to the sheer magnitude and complexity of human technology. It is necessary not only for humans to learn to be good animals, but also to learn to be good technologists.

Language is the Master Tool

Language is the mother of invention. It is the master tool that makes all other tools understandable and therefore improvable. Language gives us the future; language and the future give us planning. With planning, humans have developed the world. Language is the skill that makes humans human; an inability to acquire language marks a human being as not just handicapped but actually as something less than human.

The senses are hard-wired. We can learn to refine the senses—sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell—but the basic mechanisms for acquiring and analyzing the information obtained in this fashion are genetically determined. The senses allow the higher animal to acquire information from sources outside the body and send it to the brain, where it is analyzed and acted upon if necessary. Hunger, thirst, pain, fatigue, and temperature are sensations generated by the internal organs of the animal body and are then transmitted to the brain for analysis and action.

Language is not Hard Wired

Language is not hard-wired in the manner of the senses or the sensations; language is not intuitive to the animal. Language is acquired only through learning it from another animal. Many other things are learned one animal from another, usually mother to offspring, such as hunting and killing. Mountain lions taught by their mothers to kill deer but not elk will not kill elk if transported and released in elk territory. But language skills are different. They are acquired early by human infants, first by listening and understanding, then by speaking.

Most household pets, particularly dogs, acquire the language skills of prespeaking children. My dog Princess had at least a 30-or 40 word vocabulary. She could even communicate a complex thought, typical of which was to bark at the back door as if she wanted to come in, but then stand aside to let the cat in.

But no other animal has the language skills possessed by humans and nothing but language so clearly distinguishes humans from other animals. The acquisition of language by children is of paramount importance if they are going to be useful members of the society into which they are born. The story of Helen Keller demonstrates what dedicated teaching can accomplish with a handicapped person, but the basic brain mechanism has to be in place first. And it is not enough simply to have the basic brain mechanism; that mechanism literally has to be programmed before it can be functional in language. The programming must come from other humans already skilled in the language arts.

Isolated Children

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa wanted to see what language infants would speak if they were completely isolated. They spoke no language. Children who do not acquire language skills are handicapped and will not do well in the society under normal circumstances. Children with learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia, if not diagnosed early may never become competent to handle the written language. This again relates to the basic brain mechanism. Senses that are distorting information can be compensated for if the distortions are known. If they are not known or detected, the problem may be erroneously diagnosed as reduced ability, lack of attentiveness, or trouble making, thereby losing the dyslexic person to the educational system.

The hallmark of the educated person is to speak, read, write, and listen well. All of these skills must be taught by those who have them to those who do not. Only after some base level of competence is reached is the individual capable of self-education, the desired goal of all education programs.

Education cannot start too early in life and cannot go on too long. Education in a republic, where the supreme authority is vested in the people and their elected representatives, must be an open system from top to bottom. People have to be able to enter and leave the system, to return to it again and again. A free education system must be based upon the notion of sustainable natural and cultural diversity. Education is not a cost to the nation, but an investment in the enterprise of the nation.

The Northwest Ordinance

In 1787, before the Constitution was adopted, the Continental Congress enacted the land act that was to provide the philosophical basis for the system of free public education that has become the hallmark of our republic. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided the legal framework for the settlement of the Northwest Territories, land ceded by England after the Treaty of Paris. Among other things it provided for the public support of education by designating each section 16 of each township in the Northwest Territories as school lands. A township comprises 36 square miles, and may be visualized as a square six miles on a side.

Each square mile designated a section was numbered starting with the square mile in the upper (northeast) right hand corner of the township and proceeding leftwise to the western boundary, then dropping one down and proceeding to the eastern boundary, back and forth until the last section, section 36, was numbered in the lower right hand (southeast) corner. Section 16 was three rows down from the top and 4 in from the east.

In the survey of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), two sections from each township were designated for the public schools. And in 1862, the Morrill Act designated certain institutions of higher learning as land grant institutions and they were given grants of the public land, which could be sold or husbanded for the benefit of the university or college so designated. The University of the District of Columbia is a land grant college but it received a payment in lieu of land.

It's a Great System

The educational system of the United States has an illustrious history and was the chief instrument in transforming a raw continent into a modern nation. The transformation of the United States from a creditor nation to the world's greatest debtor nation, from the world's leading manufacturer to an also ran, is not the product of a decrepit, run down educational system. It is the direct result of the fiscal, tax, and debt policy of recent Federal administrations. The United States has the finest system of higher education in the world. The United States has many of the finest minds in the world. The United States has the most self-defeating industrial policy in our history and, coupled with our completely irresponsible public debt (induced by reducing taxes and increasing spending), it has made us vulnerable to economic attack on all sides. The position we are in is not happenstance. It is not a whim of nature, or the luck of the draw. It is not even mis-management, for the aim of the authors of our policy is to shift the United States from an industrial and manufacturing economy to a service economy. We do have an industrial policy and the White House endorses it. It is a policy tilt toward the service industries, from MacDonald's to computers and banking. Our present industrial policy is not production oriented; it is service oriented.

Our school system has responded to this shift in our national priorities, and our employment statistics bear it out. Where are the production jobs going (and where have they gone)? They have gone overseas to our trading partners.

Don't Blame the Schools

The fact that our industry is noncompetitive cannot be blamed on the schools, but must be blamed on a Federal Government policy that places great emphasis on trading beef, citrus, and rice with Japan instead of manufactured goods, and places emphasis on competing with the Japanese in their market when the real battle is going on in ours. So when we examine education as an unalienable right, and when we look at the role of education in our national being, we have to took past the deliberate policy of crowbarring our national identity away from industrial and manufacturing productivity and toward the service industries, and we have to look at the basic structure and function of the educational system—how it can and should be made available to all citizens sovereign as part of their birthright. The Federal Government has a role to fulfill as the protector, patron, and trustee of the Declaration of Independence and the unalienable rights it grants us all in exchange for our consent to be governed.

The years since 1980 are an anomaly in the history of the United States. It is the only time in our history that we have repeatedly shot ourselves in the foot, given away the store, (or the farm if you prefer a rural simile), and attempted to change the form of our Federal Government without debate or a Constitutional amendment. Improving our present educational system will help us solve many of our problems since education is the universal solvent. Attempts to improve the educational system in an environment of no agreement on national goals, artificially induced debt stresses, and exacerbation of racial strife are daunting tasks. Nevertheless, we should not be distracted from looking at education as an unalienable right.

The Purpose of Education

We have to begin by rethinking the purpose of the educational system. The original purpose of using the educational system to staff society, (local, regional, or national industry) has merit. Schools have a history in western society of supplying the staffs of religious institutions and the cathedral schools, and the early universities had this purpose. Local schools that train students to work in local industry serve the same purpose. But schools have to do more than that for, while schools have a function to serve the society in which they are located, they have a higher function, which is to serve the student citizen sovereign. Schools that merely serve the business and industrial community of the nation operate under a human morality and are human schools. Schools that promote the interests of the individual (and through them, the rest of society) operate under a humane morality and provide humane education.

Role Models

Most schools in the United States, by themselves, cannot provide role models that would enable students to make judgments about the range of intellectual activity (requiring either hands or minds) available to them. In fact, most high school students—even those from affluent neighborhoods—do not discover the range of educational pursuit until they go to college and, depending upon the college, their choices may still be limited. Schools have to make a conscious effort to make available to the student information that covers a reasonable scope of pursuits. That, in turn, will enable the student to make better choices in preparation for careers, further study, or self improvement. Schools have to serve the needs of the community, but they also have to serve the needs of individual students. Schools should not be barriers to the development of genetic potential. This doesn't mean singling out the bright students and giving them an enriched program; it means giving all students an enriched program.

Creating Failure

Public schools should not be in the business of creating failures. Life is full enough of its own personal failure without the schools deliberately producing more. The educational system has to be structured so that there is a place in it for everyone. The present cohort system with its emphasis of coordinate learning by chronological age does not take into account varying rates of development, both intellectual and physical, and places too much emphasis on specific accomplishment in a specific time. I saw an ad on television that showed an athlete who said if it had not been for football, he would not have gone to college, where he learned to read and write and acquire the basic learning skills that now are enabling him to pursue successfully an MBA program in a leading university. That ad spoke volumes on our system of education. But what it said most of all was that if one has the proper assistance, in this case because of football talent, one can overcome deficiencies and succeed in the educational system. The ad says nothing about success in a career, but one can assume that it follows.

Japan is Winning

Since Japan is winning the economic wars, there is the notion that we should carefully examine the Japanese educational system and see what they are doing right and maybe copy them. Nothing would be worse for this country. The Japanese system of education is based upon grades. High grades get entrance to the good colleges, high grades get the good job with the good company. The fact is that grades are only one facet of the many faceted individual's ability to perform. Grades are an artificial indication of excellence of a type seldom encountered later on in life. In the long run, grades simply perpetuate a class system where children with well-off parents who can provide enriched environments succeed in the system, and lesser well-off children do not. This type of system has prevailed in England where examinations at key ages determine the life path of school children. These are devices to support society at the expense of individuals rather than with the help of individuals.

The Achieving Society

David McClellan, the Harvard psychologist, in a landmark book, the Achieving Society clearly differentiates between grades and achievement. In a longitudinal study that involved 10,000 Students, he examined the very question of grades versus achievement. He found for high school students that their class standing had no correlation with later success. However, whether or not the students graduated was highly correlated with later achievement.

Similarly, with college students, their class standing was not correlated with success but their successful graduation was. At the graduate level, grades in graduate school were closely correlated with grades in undergraduate college, but again grades in graduate school were not correlated with success or achievement in the professional world of Masters and Doctors. Grades reflect the ability to learn and repeat. Grades do not measure creativity or innovativeness. If grades had been the determining factor, neither Thomas Edison nor Albert Einstein would have had any impact on our lives.

Studies of life earnings always show that persons with professional degrees earn more than persons with collegiate degrees and those with collegiate degrees earn more than those with high school diplomas and, of course, those with only a grade school education earn the least. The differences in the life incomes exceed, by far, the cost of additional education at every level and the increases in income earned will always be reflected in higher income taxes paid, demonstrating conclusively that spending on education is a social investment, not an expense.

Our Universities are Great

In our present crisis of self-confidence, we bemoan the deficiencies of our public schools system, yet we acknowledge that our university system, particularly the land grant system, is the best in the world. How can we have the best university system yet have such a pitiful public school system? The answer is that universities are flexible to change, they are staffed with people who excel in what they do, and they are not in the business of warehousing students. Universities produce their own failures, much as the public schools do, but because the universities are on an informal cohort system the damage can be rectified, (by the student I might add), at a later time. Students drop out of the university for a variety of reasons. Some simply leave school; many fail in the early years. Since it is possible to return to the university at a later date, many students do so and complete their studies. Because so much emphasis is placed on age in the lower levels and high school, a return to "normal" classes is not possible as it is in the university. This is a deficiency in the lower schools that has to be corrected. There are many ways to do it and reasons to use all of them.

Because public education is compulsory until age sixteen, many school districts feel obliged to serve the student until age sixteen or graduation, whichever comes first, and they feel little obligation beyond that. This kind of action can occur because it operates within a philosophy that education is not a right but a privilege granted by the local taxpayers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Education is an unalienable right granted under the terms of the Declaration of independence, and as an unalienable right has many more characteristics than a privilege bestowed by local taxpayers. The most important characteristic is that it should be open to all ages for all subjects, for all times.

Defining the Academic Community

To achieve this desired flexibility, the school systems of U.S. states should be organized so that for a fixed group of elementary schools there is a high school, and for a fixed group of high schools there is a university. The public community colleges, junior colleges, and four-year institutions of the area would complete the system. One could think of a pyramidal educational structure. The relationships within the cone would not be administrative or financial. All the elements of the system would operate fiscally and managerially the way they do now. The difference would be academic.

The cone would define an academic community. The university at the top would provide hard core research and scholarship and a growth environment. The university would become the aegis of public education for a fixed number of lower level institutions. If there were only one major public university in the state, as is the case in Minnesota, the university could divide itself into two or more subunits, each subunit being independently responsible for a cluster of four-year colleges, junior or community colleges, high schools, middle and grammar schools. If the existing number of universities could not perform the function, that inability would be sufficient reason to start new ones. Scholars would be free to move within the system, both up and down, and the pedagogic requirements for the public schools might begin to resemble those of the university.

As importantly, students should have mobility within the system. The basis for mobility would be ability, not age. Resources within the system, particularly the library assets, could be shared up and down the line by means of inexpensive CD ROM terminals that could hold the card catalogue. Existing transportation (United Parcel, Federal Express, Overnight Mail, etc.) could move the library items.

The system could come into its own in the summer time when greater mobility would be possible. Such a system could be elaborated to include local schools and additional units of the university to accommodate any student need.

Universities Can Do It All

When I worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I had occasion to speak to officials of Arizona State University about Indian education. Although nothing came of it, the official I talked to was willing to provide whatever accommodation would be needed to provide Indian education. He said they would be willing to provide trade school courses in welding and auto mechanics. There is every reason to believe that flexibility could be introduced into the educational system at all levels, with the universities leading the way as research and development innovators. The benefit of the vertical integration of the academic community would be that all elements of the school system would be visible and available to all other elements. Increased knowledge would increase participation and the overall system would gain ecologically. Role models would abound for students at all levels. If the pyramid university included teachers active in the business and industrial world, the system would be complete. The energy in the system would increase and would be used much more efficiently.

Local schools should be run by local school boards. Colleges and universities should be run by their own boards. Local taxes should support local schools including community and junior colleges, and state taxes should support the universities and four-year colleges.

Equalization

Not all school districts have equal taxing bases and at present in most states there are great disparities among the school districts of any given state. As I recall the numbers for the State of Virginia for a number of years ago, the per student expenditure for schools in Fairfax County, (northern VA) was about $5000 while in Smith County (southwest VA) the rate was $750. That is patently unfair. However, it is not the fault of either Smith or Fairfax Counties but of the State of Virginia. There is litigation in Texas to correct a similar situation with the possibility of a court-imposed equalization tax to rectify the situation. This has been done in Minnesota where the State levies a state income tax for the purpose of making equalization payments to school districts in order to provide similar levels of support across the state. In deep rural areas of Minnesota additional payments compensate for the remoteness and lack of facilities and assets (transportation costs for instance). The pressure on the Minnesota system involves a number of districts that would like to exceed the state level of support and have the local tax base support the additional taxes. It seems a pity that school districts should be inhibited from spending additional amounts on their local system if they want to, but doing so would unbalance the system unless the state accepted the new highs as the desirable average and raised the income tax levels to reach the new education levels. Minnesota should consider that line of procedure if the local jurisdictions insist in raising their own taxes and increasing their own level of spending per student.

The Federal Role

If all the states adopted the Minnesota school tax equalization program, and they should, this would still leave wide differences from state-to-state. This is a perfect place for the Federal Government to play a role. Federal income taxes should be used to provide equalization payments across the states. If the per student level of funding in the highest state is $4000 and the level in the lowest is $1000, the Federal Government should make up the difference to provide equalization. The Federal Government is making an experiment with local pay for Federal employees. These adjustments for local costs of living could be used to adjust the school payments accordingly. Schooling in New York City is going to cost more than in Winona, MN no matter what else is considered except locality, and the Federal support should be more in the high cost areas, but according to a fairness formula that ensures the payments will be equal. The state's receipt of the Federal equalization payment should be contingent upon the adoption of a Minnesota-like equalization tax system.

A New Land Grant Act

At the university level, the Federal Government should undertake a new "land grant" program. This time the payment should not be land but money. In the spirit of the Morrell Act the money should come, not from taxes, but from income from the public domain. The public domain, consisting of the public lands and other tangible assets, is a trust held for present, as well as future, generations of citizens sovereign, and should not be alienated (privatized), since that would deprive future generations of their birthright of an equal share of the common wealth.

A National Savings Plan

Since most of the income from the public domain comes from non-renewable resources, it should be converted to renewable resources by the creation of trust funds. The Land Grant University Trust could be created out of income from the public domain. This income, in rough estimate running from 2 to 8 billion dollars a year, could be used to create an industrial development bank capitalized at $50 billion. In the bank would be an account for each state. The income from the bank would be split 535 ways, and apportioned to the states in proportion to their representation in the Congress to support the land grant university system of the states.

Since industrial development is heavily dependent upon savings to produce capital, this type of trust fund would be part of a national savings plan providing capital for the continuing improvement of the manufacturing and industrial capacity of the United States. It would complete an ecological loop among the citizens sovereign whose money is being saved, the universities, which are the font of knowledge and wisdom upon which our technological capability rests, and the business community, which needs the capital for developmental purposes.

Every element in the loop will benefit from such a plan, particularly the citizen sovereign, who would have a much strengthened educational system in which to exercise the unalienable right to education.

With such an income the universities would be free to pursue open admission policies, and either reduce or eliminate altogether the cost of attendance.

Setting Up a Self-designing System

None of the above discussion envisions changing the administration of finances, managing buildings, or land, the hiring and firing of teachers or professors. All the present administrative and managerial functions would remain the same. What would change is the relationship among the various elements of the school systems of the states. The proposal is for the academics to discover each other, to realize that they are part of a larger system. Merely adding this knowledge to the system will change the system for the better. Simple telephone and fax communications can provide the glue to meld the system.

How the system is specifically changed is irrelevant to this discussion. Beneficial changes will be made by the system participants, who will recognize that they are fashioning a new ecosystem. The system will self-design in mysterious and wonderful ways. If this were to happen for the nation, it would not have to go on periodic soul searches trying to find out why Johnny can't read or compute or whatnot. Since none of the parts of the system would be isolated, they would become an environment of self-renewal and improvement.

No one in the history of the country has raised the question of why our colleges and universities are not performing up to snuff. This attests to the fact that the higher education system has continued to operate satisfactorily. The simple fact is that colleges and universities are large enough, and autonomous enough, to make self-improvement a simple fact of research and development and scholarship. The university system aegis is big enough to shelter and mother the entire education system, and we can make it even more so. The educational system, under an academic organization such as here proposed, would become a life cycle ecological phenomenon and would form the foundation for all other functions we would wish to carry out in our society. It would be the basis of business, manufacturing, and industrial capacity. It would be the basis of providing social services and health care. It would become the preferred mechanism for solving pressing social problems. Such an educational system would become the catalyst for continuing our unique national culture no matter what manner of population elements are added to it.

Education is an unalienable right. Simply recognizing and acting on that fact will transform our nation from soul searching to problem solving and will go a long way toward re-establishing our place in the international manufacturing and industrial community. It will attack the pernicious problems of poverty and crime, converting liabilities into assets and eliminating the bias and discrimination that produces poverty, crime, poor health, and non-productiveness. Everybody wants to be a productive member of society. Education for all is the only way to achieve that goal.

We Live In A Republic

The greatest stimulus to our educational system would be for our national leaders to recognize that we live in a republic, that the supreme authority in a republic is vested in the citizens sovereign and their elected representatives, that this republic is guided by two documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, that under these documents education is an unalienable right of the citizens sovereign, and that we should get on with the business of being a nation.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1991
Institute for domestic Tranquility