July 20, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 1995 Vol. 4 No. 3
Interview with Ernest L. Boyer
By Carole Novak, Editor,TECHNOS Quarterly
Our TECHNOS interview may have been the last with Ernest Boyer, who died late in 1995. For more information about him and The Boyer Center, visit the Center's Web site at: http://www.boyercenter.org.
Ernest Boyer has been President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching since 1979, having served previously as U.S. Commissioner of Education
under President Jimmy Carter. Prior to that appointment, he was Chancellor
of the 64-campus system of the State University of New York. A fellow of the
American Academy of the Arts, Boyer was awarded the Charles Frankel Prize
in the Humanities, a Presidential Citation, in 1994. During his tenure at
the Carnegie Foundation, Boyer authored landmark research reports, most notably:
High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America (1983); College:
The Undergraduate Experience (1987); and Ready to Learn: A Mandate
for the Nation (1991). His most recent book, The Basic School: A Community
for Learning (1995), which has a wide range of recommendations for strengthening
elementary schools, has met with an 'overwhelmingly positive national reaction.'
So much of The Basic School is common sense and not terribly expensive to implement.
Well, that's true. I really do think that, while certainly we should have research and development in education as in all other fields, the reform movement has been inclined to act as if we don't know what works, and if we're only successful and clever enough, we'll find by the year 2000 some panacea that will answer the problems—when, in fact, educators, school teachers, and others know what can be effective in the classroom. We've tended to ignore what are common sense approaches that we really do understand can lead to effective education. The exciting part of the report, at least for me, is that when we spent several years in schools, we kept discovering these practices at work—not always in a comprehensive way—but every proposal we make in this report is drawn from something that we observed and some practices that we saw were effective in local schools.
Is there going to be something coming out of the Carnegie Foundation called the Basic School effort?
We're not typically in the business of following up reports in an implementing fashion—we're a policy center; we're not an action center. But we've been asked to stay with it now that we've proposed the idea. So we followed our report with the establishment of a Basic School Network. At the moment, we have 15 schools that are working together; we selected them very carefully to make sure they represented the broadest cross section of elementary schools in the country. We have a New York City school, an Indian reservation school, a school that's primarily Hispanic in south Texas, and several non-public schools. And they're working together intensively to try to implement in a comprehensive way the elements of the Basic School. We've had such an overwhelming response to the report, even in the advance copy stage, that we've established an office at Princeton University to accommodate what appears to be a national commitment to this report that we want to serve as well. So, in addition to this core group of schools, we're going to be developing a program to provide services—including perhaps newsletters and videotapes—to respond to other schools that literally by the hundreds have been calling to ask how they can participate—including several states that have already indicated they want to go statewide. One of the requests they make more frequently is how they could stay in touch with other schools that are working together on the priorities of the report.
Have you considered setting up an electronic network for the Basic Schools?
That's one of the first steps we're taking. We've established through the National Association of Elementary School Principals office in Arlington, Virginia, a Basic Schools access point through America Online. Anyone in the Network, in fact, anyone nationwide who wants to know more about the Basic School and participate in a conversation, will have access to that. We'll be putting in information on a regular basis to tell about new developments, but more importantly, schools can communicate directly with each other. The electronic network will probably be one of the most effective ways in which this conversation about the Basic School can move forward on a rapid, daily basis. One of the first steps we took was to make sure the schools have modems and access. Last summer, we met with administrators and teachers from our core network, and one part of that workshop was to instruct them on how to use the Basic School electronic network. We've helped them purchase the technology that will make it possible for each school to be electronically connected.
What about the high cost of implementing technology? Is that something the Foundation is prepared to subsidize?
Each school in the Network is given a small grant each year from us. Actually, the idea of establishing the Basic School Network is supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, which gave us a generous grant because it believes in the comprehensiveness as well as the priorities of the report. As a result, we were able to give each school a small grant to be used in any way. Some have used it for teacher development, and some have used it to purchase the technology hardware that they needed in order to be a part of the Network.
But the Basic School is not a high-cost institution. It's an idea. And many of the best practices we talk about in the report are common sense approaches and can be done without a major financial investment. The one area that, over the long term, would call for some investment is that of technology. We strongly stress building schools that for the 21st century are prepared to take advantage of the absolutely marvelous capacity that technology teaching provides. We know that many of the schools are not there now, although several schools in our Network are using state-of-the-art technology. Moving to make technology very much a part of teaching will take resources, but the first step is to develop a plan to get there and not try to do it all at once.
What are your thoughts on the recent federal budget cuts in the area of funding for the arts and humanities?
In The Basic School we define the arts as one of the essential languages. It seems absolutely clear to me that the arts represent one of our most effective ways of communicating with each other. Every culture throughout human history has been defined as civilized to the extent that it has sustained language and the arts and the beauty of ceramics, of painting and drawing, of music and dance. So we know it's fundamental to a civilized society; we know it's fundamental to the quality of our own lives. And yet, we continue to view it as a frill. Why we deny it to our children is incomprehensible to me because if it's denied, children are impoverished. In The Basic School we say that language includes the words we use, the numbers we use, and the arts we use, and these are simply variations of symbol systems that allow us to communicate with each other. So, the school we're proposing is a school where the arts are basic. Incidentally, this means that it should be woven through the entire school and not something you tack on an hour at the end of the week. Every lesson can be artistic.
Won't we have to teach our teachers to teach differently? Isn't it like writing across the curriculum—arts across the curriculum?
Exactly. This is true. I think one of the reasons the arts have been diminished is that teachers themselves have not felt comfortable. Their inclination is to feel that they're not artists, and frankly very few teacher-training programs indicate the arts as a language, so teachers are taught in a more formal content way and don't see the arts as having this power and potential. But I believe every elementary teacher can be an effective teacher in the arts, just as we expect every elementary teacher to be an effective teacher with language or with mathematics.
As a former U.S. Commissioner of Education, what do you think of the talk about abolishing the Department of Education?
There's an interesting irony to this, because I was the last Commissioner before it became a department, so I went through the debate in the 1970s as to whether it should become a department. At the time, I was Commissioner within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Secretary Joseph Califano. When President Carter proposed that education become a separate department, I thought it was a good move because it gave education—in the best sense—a symbolic status as having as much importance as health or agriculture or commerce or labor or all the other major national interests that had status at the Cabinet level. And as I thought about education in our society, it seemed to me that it clearly was as consequential to our future as were those other Cabinet-level posts. Now, that doesn't mean that I think the federal government can or should take over education, any more than it should take over labor or commerce or the environment or housing. In fact, I don't think federal government should become engaged directly in running education. Rather, it should make sure that education is continuously brought to the national attention as a part of the national public debate. It would be a step back to abolish the Department, to remove that voice from the Cabinet level, and to dismantle these programs and scatter them around in pockets of departments here and there, which would make the administration of them less effective.
Four Priorities of the Basic School
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You wrote about what you called 'good corporate citizenship' in The Basic School. What responsibility do you think business and industry have to help American education?
First, the business community has been an important part of the school renewal effort of the past decade. I'm amazed and deeply satisfied that in the past 10 years the CEOs of some of our largest corporations have become some of the strongest voices for public education and for some of the programs to enrich the schools. They've testified before Congress; they've supported Head Start; they've understood the need that if we don't have good schools, we can't have strong industry and strong business. Their voices have mattered more than school superintendents and others in the education field. So I'd like to celebrate the leadership that The Business Roundtable, the National Alliance of Business, and others have given—their voices have been powerful, and they've been heard by politicians at the highest level.
At the same time, I think businesses have to recognize that they have another role to play. They must realize that they're part of the partnership with local schools because their employees are also parents. We talk a lot in our report about parents as partners—there's just no way to build a good school without family and parental engagement, since parents are the first and most effective teachers. And if we don't build that partnership, schools can't do it alone; you can't have an island of excellence in a sea of community indifference. That means, however, that parents have to have time periodically to meet with teachers and to be with schools. So we're suggesting in this report that employers have to consider that they need a family-friendly work policy that allows parents periodically to be engaged with children.
One suggestion is that the first day of school should be a time of national celebration. Parents should be with the child all day to show that the partnership is going to be strengthened and not weakened. I think it's appropriate to suggest that employers give parents time off with pay that first day of school to spend time with their children. Not all employers could do this. But what is encouraging is that some businesses are doing it. And some states, such as California and Massachusetts, allow workers several days off each year to work more closely with the schools.
Dr. Boyer, what do you think the purpose of education is? Is it just to train people for the workplace?
Historically, education in this country has had a civic function, before it had an economic function. We saw that if we hoped to build a democracy, we needed to have an education that was broad-based, and we determined it had to be universal. Every one of our Founding Fathers knew that if we wanted to move toward a government that was run by the people, they had to be enlightened. Surely, they have to work; surely, they have to be responsible as producers as well as consumers. But the larger purpose of education in this country is always driven by the fact that we need people to be civically engaged, intellectually and educationally well informed, or else we were opening the doors to tyranny. That's what Jefferson was talking about and why, in 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony said every town or village of 50 or more citizens had to hire a school teacher to teach children to read and write.
Certainly we want a well-trained workforce, but it would be a total miscalculation to say that schools simply drive the economic engine. Our economy can't survive if we don't have the structures of good government to keep it sustained. Education has both civic and economic—and ethical and moral—dimensions. Those would be the three legs on the education stool that I feel are absolutely crucial, and one should not overshadow the other.
There's a great deal of emphasis on values in your book. Do you feel you're walking a tightrope between the Right and the Left about whether the schools should be teaching such things?
No. I felt strongly that we could not write a report about the elementary school without talking about the virtues that are critical to a good life. I've felt for years that schools have been intimidated and therefore too timid about recognizing the obvious: that you cannot give information without knowledge and knowledge without wisdom. There is throughout history abundant evidence that people who are well informed but not driven by a sense of ethics can do mischievous and heinous things, so that maybe the most dangerous condition is to be well-educated but ethically misdirected. That's giving power toward tyranny. We have tragic examples in recent history of how knowledge has led to human devastation. So education has to be concerned about its ethical and moral dimensions. I couldn't write a report about schooling without dealing with that, but as you say, this most essential issue has been somehow so politicized that people are uncomfortable even talking about it. But the more we worked on the issue, the more I thought this timidity was unfounded. There is in our society almost universal consensus around what we identify as the seven core virtues, which we think are appropriate for every school and every child; these are consensus values that no one finds unacceptable, such as honesty, respect, responsibility, and perseverance. There might be variations on these themes—I don't mean that the ones that we've chosen are the exact words or the only ones. We do recognize that there are contested values in our society—we don't agree on everything. So we caution against a school moving into the contested areas, if it doesn't have some support in the community that surrounds it. Schools can't resolve these issues that the larger community hasn't resolved.
How would you suggest the Basic Schools maintain contacts with the outer world as they look toward themselves and their own communities to determine their values?
We've organized a curriculum around the eight characteristics that make us truly human. And we say that the content typically taught through the subjects and the academic fields in schools today can be fitted within these eight integrative themes. The value of this would be that children could not only study the content of the disciplines but also understand that what they're learning relates to their own lives. And third, they'd be able to think about what the human community is beyond themselves. The human commonalities allow students to study their own specific location and to make comparative studies with other cultures that have similarities in the large sense but have differences in the way they apply them. So while we might all share the life cycle, for instance, the way that it's lived out in different societies will vary. While we're all connected to nature, the way children in Manhattan are connected to it is not the same way that my grandchildren in Belize are connected to it. In this way, students are able to study locally and globally and to gain a perspective about the human experience that's not built around governments but around the way people actually live.
Incidentally, as our own nation becomes more diversified, that sense of differences within commonalities is crucial. I can't stress enough my belief that while we need to understand diversity in this culture, and diversity around the world, we need also to understand that we're sharing an experience together and to reinforce our connections to each other—or I don't think we'll be able to hold ourselves together, or as part of a global community. That is a centerpiece of what the Basic School is all about.
And to help the child in New York City learn what it's like in Belize, technological connections can help.
Well, that is almost a benediction. One of the marvelous potentials of this new electronic capacity is the way we can create a global network, where children who are studying in Manhattan can also be communicating instantly with children in Australia. For the first time in human history, we can create a global classroom. Nothing could be more exhilarating in building a sense of international relationships than to take advantage of this new capacity to communicate with each other. And that is one of our greatest prospects for not only better education but also better human understanding.
I do believe one of the most important, unfinished agendas—and the urgency is increasing—is to find a better way to utilize the new technologies effectively. They should become so embedded in the work of teachers and students that they enrich and extend the curriculum naturally. And that, to me, is one of the great unmet challenges. If we could make that connection, we'd have the best educated generation within a decade. The failure to do that, I think, will cause schools to be increasingly obsolete. There's nothing more urgent than to find a way for the enrichment that can come through the new electronic tools to be embedded authentically within teaching and learning. If that happens, I think we'll see excitement and motivation and knowledge exponentially expanded, always guided by insights under the direction of a wise and sensitive teacher.
You mentioned your grandchildren—what would you like them to think of as your legacy?
Well, I'd have to start at the family level. Will Durant said that the family is the nucleus of civilization, and I agree with that. So, I would hope that I would be seen by my grandchildren as a loving family member. As to my professional work, I would hope they would see this work as caring profoundly for children above all else. I'm concerned not about schools, but about children, and I think that our most important challenge in America is to try to create a public love for children. I would hope they'd also see my deep belief that schooling, public education, is one of our most important social institutions and that it's never perfect but that we should give our time and effort to sustain it for the sake of the children and our future. And finally, I would hope that growing out of our report, they would see that I believed education meant more than knowledge—that it meant moving from information to knowledge and from knowledge to wisdom and from competence to conscience—and that in the end, it's not simply becoming more informed but becoming capable of living a better life and directing your energy toward humane ends. I want them to know that our purposes here are to be of service to others and not just to be selfishly directed.
| To order a copy of The Basic School ($12.00), contact California Princeton Fulfillment Services, 1-800-777-4726. |
Ernest Boyer photograph courtesy of Linz Photography.