"No Child Left Behind began the recent craze in accountability," says NYU'S Jay Gottlieb, PhD., a long-time, published, and respected educational research professor. I hate to reduce him to this brief vocational description because he's the stereotypical fast-talking New Yorker whose extemporaneous anecdotes and razor-sharp recall of a wealth of case studies and legal decisions are matched only by his humanity and sense of humor. He teaches me this summer at Columbia University Teachers College Klingenstein Center for Independent School Leadership.
His criticism of the singular focus on quantitative academic assessments seems intuitive, and his call for character education reflects a lot of what Independent Schools offer for both our children's' character development and good citizenship.
Kids' motivation plays into this larger discussion, and methods of how best to approach the national challenge vary as wide as one can imagine. Realizing that kids are different with various learning styles, we in Independent Schools know that schools are also different, in both culture and practice, and the variety of options accommodates the freedoms of citizens living in a diverse culture. At MUS, we obviously have confidence in our traditional educational methods and curriculum which incorporate contemporary culture as both a comparative backdrop as well as a necessary destination. What we do in our school through serious implementation of our Honor Code, institutional support of student rules and expectations, and deliberately encouraging a sense of personal liberty and corporate responsibility is becoming a rare culture. That Dr. Gottlieb advocates the necessity of what we do for our boys is not surprising, but knowing that the majority of his secondary school exposure has been with the public system in New York is interesting as framing his opinions.
Maintaining form and content for "freedom and responsibility" with our diverse body of accelerated boys seeking a future of leadership is a tough charge in any era. The Times They Are A-Changin', but "times" always have. What's fundamentally, foundational true in reality and human nature never changes. That is one reason why we teach our boys to learn what it means to be a good person, for themselves and society, as they read good books depicting people, places, and things with our unique culture of teachers shedding light on the human drama.
