I’ll just quote some of them here. They are verbatim: 60% of Finnish adults are English-literate. Read these. Take some time to ponder them. Chew on them.

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The need and desire of students for life-long learning must be reinforced.

Cooperation, interaction and communication skills must be developed by means of different forms of collaborative learning.

Upper secondary schools must develop students’ abilities to recognize and deal with ethical issues involving communities and individuals.

Education must help students recognize their personal uniqueness.

Education must stimulate students to engage in artistic activities, to participate in artistic and cultural life, and to adopt lifestyles that promote health and well-being.

Students will be capable of facing the challenges presented by the changing world in a flexible manner, be familiar with means of influence, and possess the will and courage to take action.

An upper secondary school community must create prerequisites for experiencing inclusion, reciprocal support and justice. These are important sources of joy in life.

Human beings must learn how to adapt to the conditions of nature and the limits set by global sustainability.

Upper secondary schools must reinforce students’ positive cultural identity and knowledge of cultures.

Technology is based on knowledge of the laws of nature.

Students will observe and critically analyze the relationship between the world as described by media, and reality.

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I feel as if I have been handed something which, in this climate of national standards development, needs to be on Arne Duncan’s desk tomorrow, and I’m going to be messing around with my blog and personal contacts to see how far I can get with this ridiculous and lofty goal. Suggestions, comments, forwards, and general publicity from readers would be most welcome.

The whole Finnish document can be found here.

The roshi (Zen master) who is taking us through our day-long Zen workshop today is warm, smart, sharp, has no problem using some choice profanity, trained in pyschology, and incredibly kind. And then he says this, with the unequivocal conviction of someone with over 35 years’ practice under his belt:

“When you sit in meditation, you still the body, which in turn stills the mind, because the mind and the body are really indivisible. You learn how to really concentrate. Which means, of course, that you then learn how to concentrate in your daily living. You become better at anything you do.”

Put this up against a very different workshop I attended not too long ago, the title of which might have been “101 Ways to Help Students Fart Around While Still Being Productive.”

We talked about using pipe cleaners as “fiddle sticks” for our tactile kids, allowing our kinesthetic kids to pace, teaching our musical kids to tap the pad of cartilage in front of their ear canal to make a soundless drum for themselves. I bought in. I still do.

And now I’m stuck.

You could argue with me about the suggestion that we should teach kids to meditate (although people have, with success). But no one’s going to argue that kids in school need to concentrate. So if, as Roshi suggests, the best means to concentration–  true, genuine, concentration, with the focus of a lazer– is to focus and quiet the body, then are we doing these kids any favors by teaching them what may amount to a bucketful of ways to better suck their thumbs?

Thoughts, anyone?

Here’s the kicker. Despite all my previous (and continued) skepticism about the use of technology in the classroom, I have no doubt– none– about its focused benefits for cross-literate adults, particularly for the traditionally isolated teacher. I have never laid eyes on Patrick. We discovered one another’s blogs through a chance link on a third blog. He’s in New Jersey, for cripe’s sake. And yet I got more pleasure and food for thought out of this day than any professional development I’ve done at home in a long while.

Here comes everybody.

My colleague Joe Henderson suggested a post on it, in light of some stuff I talk up regularly on the blog in regards to the massive and irreplaceable value of intrinsic motivation in school. I thought I would respectfully request the originator of Self-Determination Theory himself, Dr. Ed Deci, to comment instead.

Dr. Deci, in case you don’t know, is the author or co-author of much of the motivation research used by major education experts in the field, including Alfie Kohn and Robert Marzano. Very kindly, he agreed to help out.

I pitched to him three possible arguments for the idea that Cheektowaga Middle School is taking the appropriate approach to their problems. Here’s his responses.

Statement: A highly disruptive and dysfunctional situation such as the one at Cheektowaga requires initial Draconian measures. Once order is restored, then perhaps a more autonomous approach can be adopted, but not before.

Dr. Deci: A highly disruptive and dysfunctional situation is a tough one to deal with, that is true. But my inclination is to avoid Draconian controls. They are most likely to exacerbate rather than help. In troubled situations, it is necessary to reach students, and it may take “big measures” but control and force are not the methods most likely to work. How about some restructuring that allows teachers and students to interact
in more meaningful ways, for example. I agree it is not easy, but it is important to try to understand the students’ perspectives in order to work with them toward meaningful change. The Cheektowaga situation is one where students’ perspectives seem to be being run over rather than understood and acknowledged.

Statement: Middle schoolers, and children in general, do not have the developmental maturity to handle an autonomous management approach. Because of their youth, they require “carrots and sticks” to facilitate the internalization of societal values.

Dr. Deci: This is utter nonsense. It is possible to have elementary students who are relatively autonomous in their self-regulation and who do not require carrots and sticks to any significant degree, so to say middle school students are not old enough (or mature enough) to be autonomous is inaccurate ideology.

Statement: The minority population of the school (35% Latino and African-American) would respond positively to authoritarian, teacher-centered management, as this is a cultural norm for them (as Lisa Delpit argues).

Dr. Deci: First, I doubt that that minority students respond positively to authoritarian approaches. If that is what they are getting at home and elsewhere, and if they were responding positively to it, there would not be the problems that are apparently being faced in Cheektowaga.

Second, whenever we have looked at our data in terms of differences in majority vs. minority participants, we have not seen meaningful differences in how they respond to autonomy support. It has positive effects for minority participants and for low-income participants just as it does for “majority” participants. Autonomy support works for females as well as males (some people say it is a male thing); autonomy support works for eastern cultures as well as western (some say it is a western thing); and it works for low-income individuals as well as high-income individuals (some say it is only a high-income thing). So, there is no solid empirical basis for the Delpit view that I have ever seen.

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Thoughts, readers?

Yeah, right.

Dan has some knifing things to say about teacher portrayal in film along these lines: that the heart-attack-inducing martyrdom of the protagonists is merely a sob story excuse for the absence of what real teaching should be: intelligence, ruthless truth-telling, and rigor.

Chris Lehmann agrees last week on his blog, but with a twist. To him, the application of this same rhetoric is what excuses our schools from improving themselves. He asks in turn: why haven’t our best and brightest figured out how to solve the horror of our working conditions already? His answer is to cite this dreadful survey (reading it feels a bit like rubbernecking at a car wreck) as a snapshot of a energy-sucking system that doesn’t leave practitioners enough time to eat and sleep, much less think critically about change.

Myself, I keep going back in my mind to this article by Linda Darling-Hammond in February’s Time magazine on the way teachers are supported in Singapore, and wondering why the edublogosphere didn’t go crazy over it.

Is it indeed because teachers prefer a mythology which camouflages their incompetence? It is because we have no mental or physical resources left to combat the mythology?

Or is there something else in the mix?

I wonder if we are looking at the birth of a new psychological evil. We might call it the Plymouth Syndrome.

A hybrid of the famous Stockholm Syndrome and the against-all-odds, paradigm-resistant Protestant work ethic which carved out our country in the first place, the Plymouth Syndrome causes teachers to make the day-to-day decisions that align ourselves with our “captors,” swallow the global rhetoric of “whatever it takes,” and enable our broken system: in otherwords, to welcome, not challenge, the teacher-martyr mythology.

Why?

For the simple reason that fighting not to change the dysfunctional system, but fighting within the dysfunction, is what actually gives us a sense of purpose. In this scheme of things, if there is no dysfunction—even if the dysfunction is being actively replaced with health– there is no sense of purpose.

Thus the expending of one’s energy running the gauntlet of public education is, in the end, more immediately satisfying, and therefore more desirable, than expending energy to get rid of the overarching dysfunction itself.

I’m not proposing that this is a conscious decision—after all, who says to themselves, “I’d rather teach 165 kids at a pop, thanks”? I mean rather that an educator who cannot find meaning within the system might instead, at a subconscious, bedrock level, embrace her microcosmic struggle itself as the meaning of what she does. Once she does this, she needs only the struggle—not the resolution of the struggle.

The means becomes the end. So why bother with real change?

I have no data for this (and actually find solid sociological research on teacher culture pretty scarce anyway. Ideas, anyone?) So my theory is a conjecture, based on informal observations and the vaguaries of my own heart. But I wonder very much about its prevalence.

For example, the first reaction of my own heart is not to congratulate, but condemn, every time I forgo a completely unmanageable assignment such as weekly dialogue journals. (These would require me to spend five minutes minimum responding to each of my 88 kids every week, for a whopping total of over seven hours of grading. If I spend a thoughtful ten minutes on each journal? Fifteen hours.) Yet why do I react this way? Because I find that partially lose my bearings, my sense of meaning, if I am not mightily struggling with something related to school.

This same heart can feel deeply uneasy without the exhaustion of an 11+ hour work day. It elevates me—indeed, in my silliest moments, elevates me above my own co-workers. (”Where are they at 6:00 in the morning? I must be doing something right.” Insane, isn’t it?) Such toil gives me purpose. It is a symbol of my worth.

I’m not saying this attitude is healthy, or (on the flip side) my entire motivation. But it does exist.

So I find myself shaking my head a bit when it comes to both Dan and Chris’ assessments. Can they be right, and not entirely right? I wonder if they might be missing the Plymouth Syndrome, a much more subtle sociological dynamic than either fatigue or fatuousness– and one to which intelligent and motivated individuals might be particularly susceptible.

I remember a conversation I had with a colleague last year. We were discussing the working conditions of a private school in a neighboring town, where teachers have weekly half-days dedicated to reflection and collaboration, adequate pay, and no teacher load over twelve students.

“Cushy,” she said, disparagingly.

And I agreed.