Contributed Commentary on
Volume 4 Number 1: Stedman The Achievement Crisis is Real:
A Review of The Manufactured Crisis
10 April 1996
Andrew Coulson
andrewco@IX.NETCOM.COM
Dan Cline takes me to task for including a personal anecdote in my
recent post criticizing The Manufactured Crisis. In response,
I'd just like to say: Good for you!
I threw in that personal comment because, in my experience, it's true,
and because I was interested in getting a debate going, but it does not
play even a minor role in my overall verdict on The Manufactured
Crisis.
In my post I mentioned Larry Stedman's critique, and my own very brief
assessment of their treatment of the IQ data and the comparative
spending and efficiency data (neither of which Dan mentioned). I have
also, independently from Larry, examined their achievement data and
arguments. When I complete my review of their case I plan to
incorporate it into a book I'm writing on school reform. I do not
intend to include my personal opinions on the educational breadth of
European vs. U.S. students unless I can provide some concrete, broad-based data to support them.
Berliner and Biddle, however, saw no such need for empirical evidence
in making their own claim about American students being more "broadly
educated." They write, without even a token piece of supporting
evidence, that:
By comparison then, American teenagers probably have more
nonacademic interests and a wider knowledge base than do
students from countries that stress narrow academic concerns (p52).
They do not bother to prove that the emphasis on academic achievement
enjoyed by other countries is indeed "narrow," nor do they bother to
show that foreign students fail to enjoy all the same activities they
list for American youth. The possibility that "narrow" concerns such as
literature, history, geography, civics, might widen people's "knowledge
base" also appears not to have occured to them.
I trust that readers of The Manufactured
Crisis, whether or not they
like
what B. & B. are saying, will be just as quick to discount their use of
unsupported anecdote as Dan was to discount mine.
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An aside on the "educational breadth" issue:
This is such a vague term, and such a, well, "broad" concept, that I
never would have initiated it myself if I were trying to make an
international comparison. Still, since we're on the topic, I'll just
address a few of Dan's comments on the subject.
While I don't disagree with Dan's suggestion that learning second,
third, or fourth languages is to some degree related to the child's
environment, schooling is clearly a significant factor in Europe and in
other regions, such as the Canadian province of Quebec. In Quebec it is
eminently practical to become bi/multi-lingual, and schools generally
teach whichever languages (French or English or both) are not native to
the student. Success seems to depend on how intensively the languages
are taught, and how much use the student makes of them (in and out of
school). According to the OECD (Education at a Glance, 1995), foreign
language teaching in 15 European countries takes up an average of 13%
of teaching time. This is second only to mathematics, at 16%. It ranges
from a low of 9% to a high of 26%. According to the Digest of Education
Statistics. (1993), U.S. students spend roughly 6.5% of their class
time on foreign languages--half of the European average, and less than
the lowest rate of the 15 European countries studied by the OECD.
Of course it remains to be argued that foreign languages add to one's
"breadth" of knowledge, but I think that case can fairly easily be
made.