why thinking out of the box is the only solution for education

at age 8 when one would assume little girls would receive dolls, clothing and toys for Christmas my parents gave me the following: a record-player, a transistor radio, and a box camera. (this would begin my love affair of music, broadcast media, and photography, not to mention technology in general) I don’t recall asking for any of these items, although I would become an avid Beatle-fan - and later a record-collector - in the new year when they arrived and performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. it seems that my dad, an electrical engineer by training, and in management at an electronics corporation - for what would turn out to be 32 years - decided that I should have these things, since he as a child was fascinated with anything that plugged in and turned on. a former government Naval inspector, my father was asked to work for an electronics company and became part of management, a contracts administrator, numbers cruncher and plant engineer. which all proves that one never knows where one’s training will lead one, but the fact that an individual can use ingenuity - the word “engineer” comes from “ingenious” - to think out of the box - hence becoming the all-too-overused “creative problem solver” - may have nothing to do with our parochial and narrowly-viewed association with creativity as being relegated strictly to the “arts” - in fact, on the north facade of the Foundation Building of The Cooper Union - where I graduated with a BFA in 1976 - are the words “TO SCIENCE AND ART”; therefore my premise is that there is no distinction between creativity of the mind in whatever form it may take or whatever path it may lead. Unfortunately that is not the case in programming or assessment of a child’s ability to think, problem-solve, or make decisions. NCLB is just the nail in the coffin of a long-standing discrepancy in thinking about what makes a person “smart”, well educated, and a functioning member of society, not to mention, happy.

so to get back to the Christmas of ‘63, age 8, the Bronx, New York, the first-born female child of second-generation Italian-American parents, both college-educated, father a W.W.II veteran of the Army-Air Corps, student of engineering, mom a graduate of CCNY, B.B.A., “City Downtown” later renamed Baruch College. the role of family is undoubtedly critical in the development of a child, but so are the attitudes and influences of the society at large. lucky for me my father had a feminist-leaning mind combined with that of a fiscal conservative. I only saw the fiscal conservative (e.g., cheap about allowance) but I learned by example not to throw my hard-earned wages out the window and have been able to live as I wish as long as I have been an independent adult, since age 20. mom was the progressive, liberal democrat, who took on the school-system as Parent Association President in two schools and school community district-activist. it was not unusual for my mom to be around in school, and I got used to that as my norm. as a teacher for 25 years in nyc schools it seems most normal to be in a school and to feel a sense of ownership, which is what is sorely lacking these days in many of our students and their parents, not to mention the lack of morale of school personnel. the schools are called PUBLIC for a reason, yet between NCLB, the Gates Foundation, mayoral-control, and a chancellor who really believes that he is the “CEO” of a public-school system that he - ahem - does NOT own - one might actually think that the people in the schools - the students, the parents and families, the teachers (gasp!), the support staff, and yes even the administrators - have little to nothing to do with the decision-making surrounding who, what, how and why we educate children these days.

attempting to address these inequities by creating yet another “vision” of the “small learning community” in the hope of making right the wrongs of too many years of educational and fiscal neglect, to create within the fishbowl of the small school the perfect environment for learning, without examining some of the most entrenched notions that separates “intellect” from “creativity” from “practical thinking” from “test taking” - all of which are crucial in educating a person - makes me wonder why we are taking apart the mechanism to see how it works and then failing to put it back together again in a functioning manner. the small learning environment is not "the" answer to our problems, as we see many “large” schools in public school districts across the country and indeed worldwide functioning well without all the pitfalls that we use to blame for our student’s lack of success. if the community does not believe education deserves first-dibs on everyone’s time, money and attention then we can bang our heads for eons and still find the struggle getting harder and harder.

I am fighting a system that basically STANDS IN MY WAY rather than empowers me to be a good teacher. I see it all as a political power-play that few people are capable of standing up to, or against, to simply say “No!” and to stop operating in fear. I include all “constituents” - parents, students, teachers, staff members, and yes even - and maybe most crucially - administrators - and our union - who are all laying themselves down at the mercy of politicians and government. fear is our enemy now. no wonder NO one is capable of “thinking out of the box” much less managing to run a school smoothly on a daily basis. this would take the “ingenuity” of an “engineer” like my dad, whose fiscal projections - using his own secret system - had about a 1-2% margin of error - who wowed them all. perhaps we might take a new look at how and why we educate children, where we would like them to go, and how we can help them to get there. never mind the Regents, which are exams that we’ve been taking and passing for decades, and which should not be our enemy. the enemy is fear, loathing, and the inability to take the initiative - or the refusal to ALLOW ingenuity - by people who would rather hide in an office with a sign on the door that says “Do Not Disturb” than to engage in an honest, open, and genuine manner, with those who really want to see a new world of new ideas, not the same old rehashed and regurgitated pabulum that the kids already know is old-school. we just can’t fool them anymore.