French Class As The Paradigm For The Perfect Way To Teach Everything

There is one constant throughout the 20th-century: professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes for how education should be organized, even as these schemes confused students and destroyed achievement.

Each scheme had a catchy name (Open Classroom, Life Adjustment, Multiculturalism, Constructivism) and a phalanx of resistance-is-futile jargon. Somehow the proposals didn´t translate into gains. One might cynically conclude that the jargon was a goal in itself (to get a grant, to build a career). You may even suspect that the larger purpose of all these schemes is to create an illusion of seriousness, and to fool parents into thinking that their kids are being educated. I suspect as much.

But what if we banished the nonsense, outlawed the jargon, and were genuinely serious, as opposed to faking it? What would that look like? Why, it would look exactly like what we see in every French class. And therein lies the starting point for this meditation.

Let's reflect on what is the most salient thing about a French class. Teachers and students start off from a position of reverence for the material. French is a glorious thing. You want to learn to speak French. Everybody's on board, with the same goal, the same love, the same seriousness. We want French and more French. We expect to make progress; and if we don't, we feel cheated.

The next most salient thing is that it's absurdly easy for an observer to judge the progress of the students. You say, "Ca va?" and they answer appropriately. You hand them a Parisian newspaper and they read it in a way that sounds like French. You say, "Here is an English sentence. Write it in French...Here is a list of French words, tell me what they mean." See, the whole thing is totally transparent.

I submit to you that ALL courses should be taught exactly the way every good teacher naturally teaches French. That's the way things used to be done! I invite teachers to imagine how you would teach French if you were suddenly dropped into that position (assuming you speak French). Point is, you would be really serious about it. You would not settle for mumbo-jumbo and empty promises about what was supposedly happening. No, you would want your students to learn French! To read it, write it, and speak it, easily and fluently. What a utopian idea. But such actual mastery was the common practice in EVERY classroom until Progressive Education got in the way.

Respect for content and clear expectations, these are what our professors of education removed from arithmetic, history, and most other subjects. Content is regarded as a nuisance to be circumvented. Testing is dismissed or mocked. Nobody is actually expected to know even the most basic facts. There is merely the goal of spinning wheels, putting up a front, going through the motions. All of education becomes a strange sort of mime. Progress is not expected, and nobody knows whether they achieved any or not. Typically, classes are an incoherent blur.

Our elite educators managed to eliminate sequential progress and an honest evaluation thereof. All the while they injected cloudiness and incoherence into every subject. American History is reduced to dressing up as Pilgrims and eating pumpkins. Being multicultural means that kids build models of pyramids and dress like pharaohs. Learning arithmetic is hopelessly befuddled, for one example, by spiraling from topic to topic. What kids need to know they don't master. A blizzard of trivial stuff smothers any chance of learning.

I suspect that, in the typical public school, the only courses left uninfected by dangerous fads are language courses. There, you would still see the focus on substance and goals that is the essence of real education. You would still see the honesty--in school, teacher, textbook, and student--that is the precondition of learning. Finally, you would see the transparency that lets everyone quickly judge the progress of the class and of each student.

Good schools are so easily achieved! Let everyone shut their eyes and imagine, in great detail, a good French class in a good school. Every student is making progress each day. New vocabulary, improved accent, greater reading skills, everything building upward in a logical, systematic way....Now, simply imagine that the same teacher is teaching European History, biology, or anything else. Bingo! That's the way you do it.

(For more about respect for content, see "47: Teach One Fact Each Day" on Improve-Education.org.)