For more than 50 years as a teacher, a parent and an adviser of parents, I've been fascinated with the educational process. In my opinion, the purpose of education is not to pass tests or to get degrees but to prepare for life by doing and feeling.
In parts of the world where there are no schools, parents encourage children to learn and mature naturally, by giving them opportunities to imitate and assist their parents at their traditional occupations, which children are proud to do.Where there are schools, education has been formalized into a different kind of process, concentrated on learning for its own sake.
Teachers in our traditional schools have accumulated wisdom - as proved by their academic degrees - and they believe their job is to dole it out again, bit by bit, in lectures to students.
The students' duty is to memorize it and hand it back at recitation or examination time, and they are graded on how well they do it. Learning is done mainly by words rather than by doing.
Many teachers, parents and students still operate on the assumption that whatever the course, the higher the grade received, the more the student learned and the more surely she or he is on the road to success in life.
Despite the fact that grade-point averages and SAT testing are seriously questioned as measures of ability, they are still widely used for college and university acceptance.
The relationship between medical-school grades and competence as physicians in practice a number of years later threw light on this question. A number of general practitioners were objectively reviewed some years after graduation.
The study covered the care they took compiling patients' medical histories, the physical examinations they performed, the appropriateness of laboratory tests they ordered, how well they kept up with the medical literature, whether they treated their patients sensitively and kindly and their overall ability to diagnose and treat patients.
After they were ranked as practicing superior, average or inferior medicine, they were sorted in terms of their grade ranking in medical school years before.
There was no correlation whatsoever. Those practicing superior medicine had come equally from the top, middle and bottom thirds of their medical-school classes, as did those practicing inferior medicine.
What produces capable practitioners is something we vaguely call motivation. Whatever goes into producing it has nothing to do with grades.
I think it's fair to say that grades mislead students and teachers alike. Good grades depend on good memory and a willingness to accept and feed back the teacher's opinions, at least temporarily.
Neither of these seems to me important in making a good worker or a good worker or a good citizen.
Part-time teachers
This country faces a critical shortage of qualified math, science and computer teachers in public schools.
The reason is quite simple: We do not pay teachers comparable salaries to their counterparts in the private sector, and there is little likelihood that we will soon do so.
Ironically, where we need teachers most are in engineering, computer sciences and other high-tech, well-paid fields. Many such professionals would love to teach one or two courses a week, but our public schools won't allow it.
Many of these professionals would volunteer to teach without pay or for a modest fee, and many of their employers would be willing to release them for a few hours a week as a public service and for good will.
Colleges, especially graduate schools, have for years used part-time or adjunct professors to teach one course at a time. Law schools often hire attorneys to teach a single course. Medical schools use specialists to teach courses in their field of expertise.
These gifted professionals often cost less per course than full-time faculty members, providing state-of-the-art expertise and saving money in the process.
Why shouldn't our elementary, middle and high schools do the same thing?
Unfortunately, teachers' unions and professional organizations bind state-funded schools in a web of vested interests, prohibiting qualified practitioners from the classroom, while the tenure system protects many less qualified and poorly motivated teachers.
I believe that exposing interested students to serious-minded people who work in trades and professions would help to overcome students' boredom and lethargy.
Any such program would have to be organized and supervised by professional educators, and I don't believe that qualified teachers would lose jobs if this proposal were implemented.
A few years ago President Ronald Reagan appointed a "National Commission on Excellence in Education" made up of teachers and administrators at the high-school and university levels.
Its report showed how poorly many educators themselves understand the possibilities of education and why so many of our high schools are failing to interest or retain many of their students.
The commission, which deplored the poor state of secondary education, offered three broad recommendations: one more hour of school a day, one more month of school a year and more homework.
In other words, more of the same. But "the same" isn't working - and not because there isn't enough of it.
Experiments long ago showed that homework that repeats work already done in class does not improve students' comprehension or skill - only their grades.
That sort of tedious, unimaginative work is light years behind independent study and independent experiments performed and evaluated by students in projects they themselves select and carry out with minimal supervision - but with imaginative guidance - by teachers working in supportive rather than dominant roles.
Piling on more of the same will only disillusion these young people earlier and in larger numbers.
What they need is a curriculum that starts where their interests are and that rewards them in every class, every day, with some sense of achievement.
Getting values back in the schools
I believe that our society is suffering severely from a loss of spiritual values and that educators from kindergarten to graduate school should let their ideals and beliefs show - not to impose their personal convictions but to encourage students to discuss them and, most important in today's climate of cynicism, to show that people they respect have spiritual beliefs.
As adolescents and youths gradually abandon identification with their parents and find identities of their own, they want to hear the beliefs of people who appeal to them, including the beliefs of their teachers.
It's not that they will adopt other people's beliefs uncritically but they will consider them and weigh them against the opinions of others, then reject or adopt them in whole or in part.
It's the same need that a new person on the job feels - to sound out peers or seniors in the hallway, to consult informally about problems.
It's the same need that we see in beginning parents when they consult experienced ones over the back fence, in the supermarket or the hardware store.
Of course I'm not advocating that teachers speak of their beliefs as if they are the only tenable ones but simply as ideas to be discussed, along with the students' own, when that seems appropriate.
Otherwise, if the teacher omits this discussion of his own views it makes students think that values have no importance or that they have no valid connection with other aspects of the subject under discussion.
I'd say that values are the most central aspect of any field.
I'd say that all our society's ills - excessive competitiveness and materialism, marital failure, discrimination, drug abuse, violence, the joylessness of work and the despiritualization of sex are partly due to our weakened sense of values or our failure to discuss them.
A few basic qualities are truly valuable in developing individuals who can make useful contributions to the world.
They include, in my opinion, a readiness to think for oneself, to try to solve problems, to take initiative and responsibility, to be creative and to be cooperative. It is also essential to be conscientious and to like people.
The first five qualities can be developed in school - if the teachers believe in them and give their students opportunities to practice them every day. The last two come mainly from growing up in a secure, loving family.