Thoughts on the Thesis

Understanding the unique character of my academic thesis has been, throughout the months of my project, perhaps more difficult even than researching and writing it. Thrown into the world of social science research and scholarly reporting, I have labored merely to appreciate what a thesis can be, and how it ought to be built, to say nothing of all the time I have spent digging under every rock from Diane Ravitch to the Harvard Graduate School of Education to NCBI reports. Finally having grasped what I believe to be the final vision for my paper, I feel relieved that several big discrepancies have been worked out. For months, I have worked through reams of statistics and conclusions from across the educational world, but have struggled to identify where these facts will be used in my paper, and to what end. I have known from the beginning that our school system is seriously and dangerously flawed, and I have always had opinions on how to fix it. As I searched and assembled the data, I grew more confident of my theories for solving the problem, but still was not sure how to present the problem, and how to argue for its solution. In realizing the final form of my paper, I have reconciled many competing themes in the education debate into one cohesive idea, one that reflects my earliest hopes and expectations for my project, while remaining true to my thesis committee’s agreement that concision and focus be brought to bear on my often unwieldy aspirations. What stands now is a twofold argument that seeks to delineate, first, the reality that great failure has beset contemporary education policy reform to a remarkable and worrying degree, and, second, that the only way to solve this much debated “education problem” is to fundamentally reconstruct the goals and methods of American public schooling. How education and its various modern reforms have failed us, and how I imagine the reconstruction of the American educational paradigm would work best, is what my paper aims to explicate.

The first great challenge that I had to encounter was the problem of scope. Where to begin to describe the problems with American education? Where to begin solving them? What, indeed, are the problems in the first place? I came to the drawing board filled with assumptions, beliefs, and experiences that inspired many great insights, but also that weighed me with expansive and unmanageable intentions. I was lucky, however, to have settled quite distinctly on one particular conceit, which guided me through the early months of this project, and continues to resound through my paper: During my years in secondary education, I had consistently noted—often painfully—that my peers and I seemed to sometimes lack a basic and crucial connection to the material of our classes. Lectures, notes, assignments, and whole disciplines seemed disturbingly removed from the real world of careers, families, successes, and challenges that we knew to exist beyond the schoolhouse walls. Depending of course on the disposition of the student, certain courses might seem uninteresting or even useless, but the degree to which so many of my peers recognized a peculiar meaninglessness in our curricula struck me as important. This fact was always married, in my own mind, to the myth of the restive teenager, which I call a myth because I disagree with its premise. Essentially, the image of a restless, discontented young person is widely enjoyed as an accurate picture of adolescence, and while this may be partly true, common wisdom often assigns the responsibility for that discontent solely to the child. This dynamic is realized routinely in the interplay between teacher and student, especially when it comes to a child’s focus in class, his work habits, the intensity and quality of his schoolwork, and his perceived interest in a particular lesson or program. When a student is unfocused, misbehaved, fails to deliver good work, or fails to fully comprehend, it is ultimately his cross to bear. This pattern is easily maintained by commonly held theories of childhood and pedagogy, but it never sat easily with me. As a student who usually did deliver quality work, who did comprehend most lessons, and who had little trouble focusing and behaving in class, questioning this paradigm may not have made so much sense. However, to assume that supposed “good” students are not touched by the foundational fallacies of education would be incorrect. Indeed, I experienced these problems as much as any student, even if their effects on me were not so pronounced as in others. Frequently during my education, failure was met with strict punishment, though these punishments never seemed to correct any intellectual or practical deficit. And I witnessed many of my peers being punished so consistently, so habitually, that they seemed to be giving up entirely on the game of comprehension. Why would a student try to progress if his path had been constantly marked by failure and punishment, without any positive, corrective intercession? So many environmental factors affect the capacity of a child, within school and without. It has been shown that racism and segregation contribute most heavily to the yawning gaps in achievement between students of color and white students in American schools. It has been shown as well that the pressures to achieve at extraordinary levels contribute not only to classroom trouble among more affluent white students, but that they can lead to drug abuse, anxiety and depressive disorders, and have been linked to suicide. Given the enormous social and economic burdens that our nation allows onto the shoulders of our youth, it should come as no surprise that success in school can often be an unachievable goal for many. And yet, there seemed to be something else contributing to the malaise that I had identified. Beyond external stresses, was not something inherently wrong with the fabric of our learning? If one could set aside the world whence we issued to the classroom, would it be possible to determine some problem in the learning itself that contributed to students’ general distaste with their education?

Contemplating the nature of these problems is what brought me to the conclusion that whatever it was that was wrong with the way we were learning, it was certainly beyond our own doing. The research tends to support this conclusion, and goes further to demonstrate that the “problem” in our education, which I long endeavored to name, is as deep-rooted as American education itself. I grew to believe that no one fix, no miracle cure, no magic panacea, could fix our sickly system. A problem as wide as ours would have to be addressed from the bottom up. But what, exactly, was the problem?

The next obstacle that I had to cross was just this. What was the problem that I had been talking about for so long? It would not be enough to write a paper about institutional respect for students, about “malaise” in the classroom, about the effects of racial, economic, and achievement pressures on students. For one, much of this had already been written about. I could contribute little new to these well-traveled patches of the field. As I continued to consider my own thoughts on education, it became clear that none of these was exactly the problem that I felt so strongly about. While I had spent much time agonizing over the exact character of this “malaise,” or researching the precise conditions of the degradation of city schools or the achievement pressures in suburban schools, something more elementary seemed at work in the classroom. Concluding the identity of this problem progressed for me concomitant with the determination of what I could uniquely contribute to this crowded field. In the end, it was quite simple. The reforms promised by legislative, business, and other reformers for generations had never truly broken with a failed tradition of American educational philosophy, a philosophy born of a different time. To change education, to really better it, we would have to sever our footing in an old world of schooling and look to a new one, one founded in research on childhood and learning theory, one which respected, as its highest ideal, the intellectual individuality, creative energy, and curious mind of the child. Indeed, this paper would necessarily limit its focus to the goals and methods of the immediate classroom, which would mean excepting the potent and destructive influences of racism, segregation, class and achievement pressures, as well as such political schemes as school choice and the charter movement. The former influences are essential to the temper of our classrooms and our students, but my paper would not seek to confirm their influence, but rather to explore a different factor in the atrophy of the schools, a factor which I had a peculiar insight to as a student currently enrolled in an American public school. Clarifying the fatal connections of our current reform movements to our old traditional pedagogies, and demonstrating how these movements have thus failed us, would set the stage for an exposition on the proper ideals and practices that our school system ought to sustain. Chief among these would be the affirmation of children’s unique intellectual impulses. This, of course, would work not only to validate the narrative that the research in this field illustrates, but would also support my original hypothesis that student detachment from the educational program is a response to the character of the educational program, rather than the character of the student.

Once my journey into the mere bounds of my thesis was complete, it came time, of course, for laying out how the paper would operate. Thanks to my advisors, I was confident about the basic structure of the thesis, although filling in this outline became a great trial all on its own. My paper would comprise (ignoring, at least for now, the abstract and conclusion) an introduction, which would provide the thesis and context for the work; a literature review, which would provide a survey of exigent scholarship in the field of education; and the larger body of my argument, where I would compose my proposition for the future of American public education. Of course, articulating this seems so simple, but the evolution of my understanding of the paper’s organization was not so easy. For example, I long struggled with the very purpose of the literature review. How could I possibly survey all important scholarship related to my paper? Especially before I settled on my precise thesis, imagining a review of educational research at large seemed impossible, and surely purposeless.

Eventually, appreciating the place of the literature review allowed me to divide the two-part thesis. Much of my argument centers around the proper replacement for the current system, but before I can articulate and defend my specific ideas about how to fix education, I need to establish the current educational policy context. Thinking over how precisely to do this, it seemed sensible that the literature review would cover a review of some of the wider policies that have been enacted in the last several decades, with the aim of explaining their workings, and detailing their failures. This would sufficiently contextualize the thesis while providing the desired review of contemporary literature.

Clearly, I have been struggling mightily with the form and content of my thesis, but I believe that I am close now to its final state, and am building toward that realized product. Constantly considering the angles of a project as big as this one has given me the perspective, thought, that I certainly need if I am to complete such a tall order as this.