Childhood Swallowed Up by Education Culture- Sermon inspired by Race to Nowhere

From the moment that our children are conceived, we imagine the person they will become. We dream: “My son will be loyal and strong. His compassion and sensitivity will surprise people; his charm will dazzle them. He will be committed to justice. People will love him, and he will love many people. He will say thank you. He will be fiercely gentle and forgiving.” We can spend hours imagining his laugh lines and growing body, but these dreams are more than just beautiful and entertaining projections. They guide us in our parenting. We steer our children toward the values that we believe are deeply important, values we discover are important to us through these imaginings. And then, when they are 5 years old, we put them in school, and for the majority of their waking hours, we hand the sacred project of their development over to a terribly broken educational system. We should not think for a moment that we are entrusting this task to teachers, because the art of teaching has, for the most part, been hijacked by school boards, politics, a detached legislature, and finances. Our educational system is in terrible distress, and change will only come when we as a society demand it.

In order to begin understanding the problems, we have to know what we think education is meant to do. This is by no means a modern question. A dramatic and exquisite response to this question is the driving force that animates the final chapters of Genesis that we just read. Jacob is dying, and he is dying in Egypt, the paradigmatic symbol of exile. How will he transmit his values to his children if they settle down in exile?

This fear terrorizes Jacob, so he spends his final hours sitting with each son, bestowing on them a mixture of blessings, predictions for their future and assessments of their character. Jacob’s testament is a deeply felt expression of his dreams for their future. He has one last chance to dramatically reinforce his values to his sons. To Ephraim and Mensasheh he says,

הַמַּלְאָךְ הַגֹּאֵל אֹתִי מִכָּל רָע
יְבָרֵךְ אֶת הַנְּעָרִים
וְיִקָּרֵא בָהֶם שְׁמִי
אֲבֹתַי אַבְרָהָם וְיִצְחָק וְשֵׁם

“The angel who has redeemed me from all harm, bless the young boys. In them may my name be recalled and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac.”

In them may my name be recalled. This phrase points us directly to his anxiety. The names Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are synonymous with the values they brought into the world, their innovations: faith, hesed (or loving-kindness), justice, and truth. He is afraid that everything that he and his father and grandfather dreamed for them will become extinct. Nachmanides suggests that Jacob is expressing the hope that these values will be mentioned in connection with his children forever. To wit, Jacob is speaking about you and me. We are his descendents, and he is terrified that a few thousand years after his death, we will no longer embody the concepts and ideals that he worked hard to bring into the world.


As Aviva Zornberg writes, “If, to Hamlet, Denmark is prison, then to Jacob, Egypt is a grave that threatens to swallow all his family’s aspiration for a distinct identity…In a reality of exile and diffusion, how is the identity of this family to be preserved?” This is the purpose of education. To preserve identity. To transmit values. To create a space for children to develop life skills. To engender in them a love of learning and the pursuit of knowledge. To cultivate a sense of humility and connectedness to humanity. If these are the over-arching goals of education, then we are failing our children. The state of our education system should create in us the same panic and anxiety that exile generated in Jacob. We too are in exile, exile from real and meaningful education without which our dreams for our children will be rendered mere fantasy.


On Tuesday, I watched the documentary Race to Nowhere. The movie illustrates the misery and despair that our schools are leaving behind as they plow ahead, creating automatons who can ace tests without learning a thing. Everyone is suffering: parents, teachers, administrators, and most especially our children. As a form of art, the movie isn’t especially brilliant. As a social critique – it is painfully illuminating and I think, terribly important for everyone to see. The impact of an education culture built on testing and performance instead of learning and moral development has been devastating. To quote a clinical psychologist from the film, “These kids are so over-scheduled and tired. I’m afraid our children are going to sue us for stealing their childhoods.”


When I went to a son’s parent teacher conference, his teacher sat us down with the results of all of the testing they did in order to assess his development. He was exactly five years old that day. I learned that he was able to write an A, B, C, D, etc, but that he mixed up his Qs and Ps. He was able to sort shapes and recognize the sounds that letters make. Most of the meeting was about the curriculum. You know what, I don’t care if he knows how to write the letters of the alphabet. Is he kind to other children? Does he work well in groups? Does he transition from one task to the next appropriately? Is he having fun? Is he exploring things and beginning to discover his passions and interests?


None of this is his teacher’s fault: she is forced by the school system to approach his learning in this way. She has been teaching kindergarten for many years and my sense is that this shift to focusing on these standards and skills instead of the whole child upsets her. But what can she do?


In the film, a teacher broke down crying and said, “If you are teaching things you love, you cannot do this job.” She has since resigned from teaching. A teacher who teaches in Southern Westchester told me recently that her salary will soon be adjusted according to the test scores of her students, and that last year, on the major standardized tests, two of her colleagues cheated by giving their students the questions ahead of time in order to boost their scores. Her salary will now be evaluated against the scores of students whose teachers are cheating. If she wants to engage and teach her students, she can only do so by risking her economic stability.


By high school, we are mostly teaching children one skill: how to pass a test, period. We are not teaching kids how to think or solve problems. We are not helping kids learn how to collaborate with other children. We are not assisting kids in the formation of the important elements of their moral character. When children learn simply to pass a test, they retain very little. 40% of all college freshman have to take remedial classes because by the time they get to college, they have not learned basic Math and English skills. They figured out how to pass their tests in high school but they didn’t learn or master the material.


We are preoccupied with performance, and this message is internalized by our children at a very, very young age. In order to pass these tests and perform at what we call high levels, there has been an explosion of cheating amongst our kids. According to a recent study, 95% of the 24,000 high school kids surveyed cheated during the course of their education? Kids do not develop an internal motivation to learn when the utility of learning something is to get a grade.


More important than any of this is the fact that our children are miserable. We are enslaving them with homework. For elementary school students there is no correlation between the amount of time spent on homework and achievement, and by middle school, there is only a moderate correlation. Yet between 1981 and 1997, the amount of homework assigned to kids between 6-9 years old has tripled. 9-13 year olds revealed that the stress that they experience stems from academic pressure more so than anything else, including families in crisis and bullying by their peers. A nationwide survey of kids in grades high school found that 15% of students reported seriously considering suicide, 11% reported creating a plan, and 7% reporting trying to take their own life in the 12 months preceding the survey. Kids who appear happy and well adjusted are often falling apart on the inside. I didn’t need the movie to teach me this. I see it all the time in our kids here at the PJC.


How did we get here? Why are we fighting with our kids, damaging our precious bonds with them to get them to do homework for hours everyday even though it has little proven academic value? At what point did we sanction spending $45,000 a year for a college education so that our kids can graduate without finding work? Some of you may be thinking, “Hey, I don’t have kids or my children are grown now. This is not my problem.” Well guess who will be your new doctor or your child’s dentist or your grandchild’s engineer? Someone who can only work from a memorized script and has no ability to think out of the box or solve complex problems or navigate intricate moral quandaries. This problem belongs to everyone. It has societal, financial, and cultural implications for our country. We need a rebellion. The necessary changes to this problem are complex and require a grass roots societal effort. This will not happen from the top down. As a PJC member recently wrote me in an email about the movie, “It's very upsetting that my generation cancelled childhood without first taking a vote. I am prepared to join any revolt or underground movement against the Admissions-Industrial Complex!” Though this was written humorously, the sentiment is absolutely correct.


Remember the dreams that enchanted us from the moment our children were conceived? Remember the values that we promised Jacob on his deathbed we would do our best to pass on to our children? We are rapidly drowning them in a mess of tests, anxiety, performance pressure, and misery. If we want to give our children a fighting chance to love learning, nurture an inner moral life, and develop a system of values in which we believe, we must begin by raising awareness. We will continue this conversation on January 25th with a screening of the movie Race to Nowhere which will be followed by a panel discussion. Tell everyone you know about this. The film begs us to ask ourselves what it will take to create a happy, motivated, creative human being, and then do everything possible to ensure that we do this. It is time to resuscitate childhood with boredom, unstructured play time, and deep experiences of learning.

We owe this to Jacob.

We owe this to the dreams we had for our kids, dreams we dreamed before they were even born.

And of course, we owe this to our beautiful children and their future children.

Just as Jacob’s sons survived a brutal exile and grew into a people who cherish study, we too can survive this present exile from real learning. We just have to take this on, and start today.