Newspapers, Background Knowledge and Schools
Last week Chris Lehmann wrote about a school he’d like to see:
Every morning, the first thing everyone did was read the New York Times for an hour. Now, imagine that they are using some kind of Kindle-style software so that they can annotate with ideas, questions, etc… such that at the end of the hour, the school community could see who had similar questions from the day’s paper.
And now, imagine what it would look like if the kids spent the better part of the day researching those questions and seeing where that took them, with the end of every day being a “share out” where kids shared what they learned across a variety of media.
I’ve had his post bouncing in my head ever since.
As a teenager, I would have killed to attend a school like this. (Well, maybe maimed.) And if you could figure out all of the logistics and get all of the technology together to make it work, I think this could be a tremendous magnet or select-admission school. I wouldn’t make the admission criteria grades or test scores or even an essay. I’d want to interview the prospective students to see who has the curiosity and self-direction to thrive in a school like this. I’d maybe even want to see each prospective student pick up a copy of the day’s paper and map out a list of questions for further review.
Why am I thinking so much about who I’d let into a school like this, and therefore who I would leave out? Because I can’t help but think about the students for whom this wouldn’t be a helpful structure, and I can’t help but think about the reasons why. Partially, this is because I have looked for ways to incorporate news coverage of current events into my teaching, including newspaper articles and NPR broadcasts. I haven’t always had as much success as I would like.
One conclusion I’ve reached is that our news media assumes a great deal of background knowledge. Look at the first two paragraphs of the New York Times’ news story about Standard and Poor’s decision to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating:
Standard & Poor’s removed the United States government from its list of risk-free borrowers for the first time on Friday night, a downgrade that is freighted with symbolic significance but carries few clear financial implications.
The company, one of three major agencies that offer advice to investors in debt securities, said it was cutting its rating of long-term federal debt to AA+, one notch below the top grade of AAA. It described the decision as a judgment about the nation’s leaders, writing that “the gulf between the political parties†had reduced its confidence in the government’s ability to manage its finances.
OK. For starters, you have the writing style. “Freighted with symbolic significance†is not the kind of phrase I see high school students tossing around. It’s good to challenge kids, but the language is presenting a barrier to the concepts rather than carrying them to the reader. Get beyond that, and we get to the question of why this is a big deal that this company is changing this rating. It must be because the company “offers advice to investors in debt securities.†Well, what are debt securities? Who invests in them? Why do they care about this company’s advice? And what does this have to do with the United States government? Maybe it’s the phrase long-term federal debt. So what is the difference between long term and short term federal debt? And what’s that gulf in the political parties that the article is talking about?
Now, these are the questions you’d want to see a student ask. And then you’d want the student to think about where he or she could go to find answers to those questions. But if the student doesn’t enter the project with curiosity, or with a belief that this information in the newspaper is relevant, the student is more likely to give up. If the student doesn’t have a sense of how to go about answering those questions, the curiosity is not likely to lead to the kind of substantial inquiry that leads to deeper learning.
Now, as I’ve been writing this, it occurred to me that Chris’ proposal doesn’t say the students have to focus on the new section. Maybe a student starts reading about the debt downgrade, gets bored, and finds something in the sports section or the arts section that they do have some background knowledge about. Getting a student to dig deeper into a story about baseball statistics might help provide some of the media-reading skills I’m talking about. Maybe an analysis of the NFL lockout leads a student to think about antitrust law, or a performer’s contract dispute inspires a discussion about contract rights and the respective roles of labor and capital. This could be a good start, but sooner or later each student would have to be willing to dive into the front pages if this type of school is really going to help students become strong citizens.
When I think about a school like this, I think about the school system that it would be a part of. What would an elementary school that prepared its students to thrive in a school like this look like? What kind of college would its graduates seek out? Right this very minute, there are eighth graders across Philadelphia and the nation who would benefit by being able to look forward to a school like this. But I also wonder what we can do to build a system where that would be true of many more.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.