Today’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Dr. Karen Palasek, director of educational and academic programs for the John Locke Foundation.
RALEIGH — What would it be worth, and how would you go about orienting young students toward an appreciation of the traditional principles of American liberty? I’m talking about property rights, the value of free enterprise, capitalism, a fair an impartial judiciary, and other basic founding ideas. I would argue that preserving freedom is worth quite a lot, and it cannot be assumed or understated.
Promoting knowledge and appreciation of foundational principles of the American free society is a story of the benefits of early intervention in the educational process. It’s also about keeping the goals and foundations of a free society uppermost in mind. These are lessons drawn from my sources for today, the Quincunx, and from a bit of Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.
Quincunx. The name sounds like something out of an Indian tribal tale. The Quincunx is a probability-teaching/learning tool developed in the 1800s by a polymath and statistician, Sir Francis Galton. Galton’s statistical analysis is far better than were his social theories, but he has left us with an interesting way to analyze all types of processes. The Quincunx board is used to demonstrate how all processes, including both mechanical and human behavior, naturally produce some level of variation.
In other words, every situation in which you have inputs — whether factories or schools, for example — will give you some differences in outcomes, even under apparently identical circumstances. This applies to the differences in academic performance in children raised in the same family or taught in the same classroom (even identical twins), as well as to highly mechanized industrial production techniques. More importantly for this discussion, Quincunx experiments make a strong case for focusing and refining your efforts at the onset of a process such as education, for maximum success in achieving your goals, rather than trying to make adjustments and corrections later and along the way.
Example: We want our kids to be competent in basic writing skills, like punctuation. We have a goal, a standard of good English usage. So — when and how do we introduce punctuation into the curriculum? Answer: statistically, the sooner the better, if the goal is to produce English-language students with a command of proper English-language writing skills.
The advantage of early instruction is to preclude mistakes and bad habits — and some might call this “creative variation” — so much as possible right from the outset. An alternative view might argue that we teach the abstract rules of writing and grammar first, and only when students are old enough to understand them, insist that they apply them to their writing. Early learner/practitioners have a clearly superior record on this one.
These Quincunx experiments indicate that early and focused instruction will yield less variation — more success in acquiring and mastering basic English skills — than will a more wide-open, experimental, or individualistic/“creative” approach. Direct Instruction methods in grade-school education are one example, and probably the most formal application, of this focused attention/limited options principle and of its success.
Basic skills mastery has many implications for long-range goals, personally and in society. Through The 7 Habits…, Steven Covey inspired millions of people to rethink the process of personal change and excellence. By now Covey’s ideas have become part of a widely accepted wisdom across many areas of personal and professional development. A severely condensed summary of 7 Habits goes something like this: To be successful, our internal habits of thought, learning, initiative, and self-discipline have to be brought to bear effectively upon our external environment. Covey’s book has become an icon and a general blueprint for that process.
Covey’s second habit, “Begin with the end in mind,” is a reminder that having a picture of the end result we want is an indispensable first step toward getting there.
Keeping Covey’s second habit in mind in education suggests focusing primarily on standardized, well-defined subjects with mastery in mind. The earlier we do that, statistical analysts suggest, the better will be our results.
How do these different ideas work together? In a free society, one could reasonably assume that individual freedom is a goal we should keep preeminently in mind. It should take on the status of a habit for all of our public educational institutions, perhaps the most all-encompassing institutions in society. And how do we foster an understanding and appreciation of complex concepts like property rights, free enterprise, capitalism, a fair an impartial judiciary, and other founding ideas?
Early attention, in our educational institutions, to the value and underlying principles of a free society, and devotion to the mastery of literacy, numeracy, and basic thinking skills. A vast majority of home schools, most private schools, and a number of charter schools take this approach. We should insist on it throughout the entire educational landscape.
Competing world views have an interest in seeing property rights and other founding principles take on the status of a la carte menu items, alternatives among presumably equally attractive political, social, and economic choices. The availability of individual liberty in the future, however, depends upon rejecting the a la carte approach, which finally allows few or no substitutions in terms of personal or economic freedoms.