Spayde, Jon. “Learning in the Key of Life.” The Presence of Others. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz. 4th ed. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2004. 64-69. --- What does it mean—and more important, what should it mean—to be educated? This is a surprisingly tricky and two-sided question. Masquerading as simple problem-solving, it raises a whole laundry list of philosophical conundrums: What sort of society do we want? What is the nature of humankind? How do we learn best? And—most challenging of all—what is the Good? Talking about the meaning of education inevitably leads to the question of what a culture considers most important. Yikes! No wonder answers don't come easily in 1998, in a multiethnic, corporation-heavy democracy that dominates the globe without having much of a sense of its own soul. For our policyheads, education equals something called "training for competitiveness" (which often boils down to the mantra of "more computers, more computers"). For multiculturalists of various stripes, education has become a battle line where they must duke it out regularly with incensed neotraditionalists. Organized religion and the various "alternative spiritualities"—from 12-step groups to Buddhism, American style—contribute their own kinds of education. Given all these pushes and pulls, is it any wonder that many of us are beginning to feel that we didn't get the whole story in school, that our educations didn't prepare us for the world we're living in today? We didn't; we couldn't have. So what do we do about it? The first thing, I firmly believe, is to take a deep, calm breath. After all, we're not the first American generation to have doubts about these matters. One of the great ages of American intellectual achievement, the period just before the Civil War, was ruled by educational misfits. Henry David Thoreau was fond of saying, "I am self-educated; that is, I attended Harvard College," and indeed Harvard in the early 19th century excelled mainly in the extent and violence of its food fights. Don't get me wrong: Formal education is serious stuff. There is no divide in American life that hurts more than the one between those we consider well educated and those who are poorly or inadequately schooled. Talking about education is usually the closest we get to talking about class; and no wonder—education, like class, is about power. Not just the power that Harvard- and Stanford-trained elites have to dictate our workweeks, plan our communities, and fiddle with world financial markets, but the extra power that a grad school dropout who, let's say, embraces voluntary simplicity and makes $14,000 a year, has over a high school dropout single mom pulling down $18,000. That kind of power has everything to do with attitude and access: an attitude of empowerment, even entitlement, and access to tools, people, and ideas that make living—at any income level—easier, and its crises easier t.

1. Spayde, Jon. “Learning in the Key of Life.” The Presence of
Others. Ed. Andrea A.
Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz. 4th ed. New York: Bedford
St. Martin’s, 2004.
64-69.
---
What does it mean—and more important, what should it mean—
to be educated?
This is a surprisingly tricky and two-sided question.
Masquerading as simple problem-solving, it
raises a whole laundry list of philosophical conundrums: What
sort of society do we want? What
is the nature of humankind? How do we learn best? And—most
challenging of all—what is the
Good? Talking about the meaning of education inevitably leads
to the question of what a culture
considers most important.
Yikes! No wonder answers don't come easily in 1998, in a
multiethnic, corporation-heavy
democracy that dominates the globe without having much of a
sense of its own soul. For our
policyheads, education equals something called "training for
competitiveness" (which often boils
down to the mantra of "more computers, more computers"). For
multiculturalists of various
stripes, education has become a battle line where they must
duke it out regularly with incensed
neotraditionalists. Organized religion and the various

2. "alternative spiritualities"—from 12-step
groups to Buddhism, American style—contribute their own
kinds of education.
Given all these pushes and pulls, is it any wonder that many of
us are beginning to feel that we
didn't get the whole story in school, that our educations didn't
prepare us for the world we're
living in today?
We didn't; we couldn't have. So what do we do about it?
The first thing, I firmly believe, is to take a deep, calm breath.
After all, we're not the first
American generation to have doubts about these matters. One of
the great ages of American
intellectual achievement, the period just before the Civil War,
was ruled by educational misfits.
Henry David Thoreau was fond of saying, "I am self-educated;
that is, I attended Harvard
College," and indeed Harvard in the early 19th century excelled
mainly in the extent and
violence of its food fights.
Don't get me wrong: Formal education is serious stuff. There is
no divide in American life that
hurts more than the one between those we consider well
educated and those who are poorly or
inadequately schooled. Talking about education is usually the
closest we get to talking about
class; and no wonder—education, like class, is about power. Not
just the power that Harvard-
and Stanford-trained elites have to dictate our workweeks, plan
our communities, and fiddle with
world financial markets, but the extra power that a grad school
dropout who, let's say, embraces

3. voluntary simplicity and makes $14,000 a year, has over a high
school dropout single mom
pulling down $18,000. That kind of power has everything to do
with attitude and access: an
attitude of empowerment, even entitlement, and access to tools,
people, and ideas that make
living—at any income level—easier, and its crises easier to
bear.
That's something Earl Shorris understands. A novelist and
journalist, Shorris started an Ivy
League-level adult education course in humanities for low-
income New Yorkers at the Roberto
Clemente Family Guidance Center on the Lower East Side,
which he described in his book New
American Blues (Norton, 1997). On the first day of class,
Shorris said this to the students, who
were Asians, whites, blacks, and Hispanics at or near the
poverty line: "You've been cheated.
Rich people learn the humanities; you didn't. The humanities
are a foundation for getting along
in the world, for thinking, for learning to reflect on the world
instead of just reacting to whatever
force is turned against you. “Do all rich people, or people who
are in the middle, know the
humanities? Not a chance. But some do. And it helps. It helps to
live better and enjoy life more.
Will the humanities make you rich? Absolutely. But not in
terms of money. In terms of life.”
And the Clemente course graduates did get rich in this way.
Most of them went on to further
higher education, and even the hard-luck Abel Lomas (not his
real name), who got mixed up in a

4. drug bust after he graduated, dumbfounded the classics-innocent
prosecutor with arguments
drawn from Plato and Sophocles.
By deliberately refusing to define poor Americans as nothing
more than economic units whose
best hope is "training" at fly-by-night computer schools, Shorris
reminds us all that genuine
education is a discourse—a dialogue—carried on within the
context of the society around us, as
well as with the mighty dead. School helps, but it's just the
beginning of the engagement between
ideas and reality—as Abel Lomas can attest.
Shorris' radical idea—more controversial even than expecting
working-class students to tackle a
serious college curriculum—was to emphasize the humanities,
those subtle subjects that infuse
our minds with great, gushing ideas but also equip us to think
and to argue. As more and more
colleges, goaded by demands for "global competitiveness" from
government officials and
business leaders, turn themselves into glorified trade schools
churning out graduates with highly
specialized skills but little intellectual breadth, you might think
humanities would go the way of
the horse and buggy.
"It's an enormous error to believe that technology can somehow
be the content of education,"
says John Ralston Saul, a Canadian historian and critic with
years of experience in the business
world. "We insist that everyone has to learn computer
technology, but when printing came in
with Gutenberg and changed the production and distribution of
knowledge profoundly, nobody
said that everyone should learn to be a printer. Technical

5. training is training in what is sure to be
obsolete soon anyway; it's self-defeating, and it won't get you
through the next 60 years of your
life." Training, says Saul, is simply "learning to fit in as a
passive member of a structure. And
that's the worst thing for an uncertain, changing time."
Oberlin College environmental studies professor David Orr
poses an even fiercer challenge to
the argument that education in the 21st century should focus
primarily on high-tech training. In a
recent article in the British magazine Resurgence (No. 179), he
defines something he calls "slow
knowledge": It is knowledge "shaped and calibrated to fit a
particular ecological and cultural
context," he writes, distinguishing it from the "fast knowledge"
that zips through the terminals of
the information society. "It does not imply lethargy, but rather
thoroughness and patience. The
aim of slow knowledge is resilience, harmony, and the
preservation of long-standing patterns
that give our lives aesthetic, spiritual, and social meaning." Orr
says that we are focusing far too
much of our energy and resources on fast knowledge, ignoring
all the richness and meaning slow
knowledge adds to our lives. Indeed, slow knowledge is what's
needed to save the planet from
ecological disaster and other threats posed by technological,
millennial society.
"Culturally, we just are slow learners, no matter how fast
individuals can process raw data," he
says. "There's a long time gap between original insights and the

6. cultural practices that come from
them. You can figure out what you can do pretty quickly, but
the ethical understanding of what
you ought to do comes very slowly."
Miles Harvey, a Chicago journalist who assembled a list of
environmental classics for Outside
magazine (May 1996), reminds us that much of the divisiveness
in contemporary debates on
education boils down to a time issue. "The canon makers say
you've only got so much time, so
you have to choose between, say, Shakespeare and Toni
Morrison, on the assumption that you
can't get to both," he says. "Well, it is hard. The level of
creativity and intellectual activity in this
country would jump up if we had a four-day workweek."
But suppose we redefined this issue from the very beginning.
Suppose we abandoned the notion
that learning is a time-consuming and obligatory filling of our
heads, and replaced it with the
idea, courtesy of Goethe, that "people cannot learn what they do
not love"—the idea of learning
as an encounter infused with eros. We always find time for what
we truly love, one way or
another. Suppose further that love, being an inclusive spirit,
refused to choose between
Shakespeare and Toni Morrison (or Tony Bennett, for that
matter), and we located our bliss in
the unstable relationship between the two, rattling from book to
book, looking for connections
and grandly unconcerned about whether we've read "enough," as
long as we read what we read
with love.
And we wouldn't just read. We would reflect deeply on the

7. relationship between our everyday
lives and big philosophical questions—for, as Nietzsche
memorably said, "Metaphysics are in
the street." The Argentine novelist Ernesto Sabato glosses him
this way: "[By metaphysics
Nietzsche means] those final problems of the human condition:
death, loneliness, the meaning of
existence, the desire for power, hope, and despair." The whole
world's a classroom, and to really
make it one, the first thing is to believe it is. We need to take
seriously the proposition that
reflection and knowledge born out of contact with the real
world, an education carpentered out of
the best combination we can make of school, salon, reading,
online exploration, walking the
streets, hiking in the woods, museums, poetry classes at the Y,
and friendship, may be the best
education of all—not a makeshift substitute that must apologize
for itself in the shadow of
academe.
One of the things I like about this in-the-streets definition of
education is how classical it is. In
what's still one of the best concise summaries of classical
education, Elizabeth Sutton Lawrence
notes in The Growth of Modern Education (1971), that ancient
Greek education "came largely
from firsthand experience, in the marketplace, in the Assembly,
in the theater, and in the
religious celebration; through what the Greek youth saw and
heard." Socrates met and
challenged his adult "pupils" in the street, at dinner parties,
after festivals, not at some Athenian
Princeton.
Educational reactionaries want to convince us that the Western

8. classical tradition is a carefully
honed reading list. But as the dynamic classicist and
philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who teaches
at the University of Chicago Law School, insists, "The very idea
that we should have a list of
Great Books would have horrified the ancients. If you take to
heart what the classical
philosophers had to say, you'll never turn them into monuments.
Their goal was to enliven the
mind, and they knew that to enliven the mind you need to be
very alert to what is in the world
around you."
To really believe this casts a new light, to say the least, on the
question of what the content of our
learning ought to be. In her latest book, Cultivating Humanity:
A Classical Defense of Reform in
Liberal Education (Harvard University Press, 1997), Nussbaum
argues compellingly that study
of the non-Western world, of women's issues, of alternative
sexuality, and of minority cultures is
completely in line with classical principles, in particular the
Stoic ideal of the "world citizen"
with a cultivated ability to put her- or himself into the minds
and lives of the members of
divergent groups and cultures.
And New York jazz and rock writer Gene Santoro—trained in
the classics and Dante studies—
points out there's nothing frivolous about paying attention to
popular culture: "Popular culture,
and particularly popular music, is the place where the dominant
culture is most heavily affected

9. by marginal cultures. Jazz, for example, became wide enough to
take in much of the range of
American reality, from the African American experience to the
European classical tradition to
the Latin and Caribbean spirit. It's the artistic version of the
American social experience, and if
you care about this culture, you'll look at it." And, he adds in a
Socratic vein, "Jazz can help you
think. It's both disciplined and unpredictable. It gives you
tradition but doesn't let you settle into
preconceived notions."
Colin Greer—co-editor of The Call to Character and The Plain
Truth of Things, progressive
responses to William Bennett's Book of Virtues—suggests
further ways to make the most of the
relationship between books and what's going on in the streets.
"You could study the moments of
major change in the world," he proposes. "The end of slavery.
The early struggle against child
labor. Woman suffrage. The organization of labor. People have
forgotten what it really took to
accomplish these things: What pragmatic things were done and
how people learned to be
generous and decent to their opponents. It's important to know
the real story of how change
works, and recognize that to fall short of your highest goals is
OK as long as you stick to the
struggle."
You get the idea. The American tradition, in learning as well as
jazz and activism, is
improvisatory. There are as many ways to become an educated
American as there are Americans.
To fall short of your highest goals—mastering that imaginary
"complete" reading list, say—is

10. OK as long as you stuck to the struggle. And the joy.
Urine labData Sheet for Renal Lab -Urine analysis pre- and
post-treatment (39 subjects)T=0 (Pre-Treatment)T=30-120
(Post-Treatment)Rate of Urine formationAverage Rate of Urine
formationGroup/Subject123456789MeanGroup/Subject1234567
89MeanA (1000 ml water)1.620.440.810.521.330.90.870.92A
(1000 ml water)0.835.291.063.807.504.44.003.84B (300 ml
0.9% NaCl)1.202.990.770.270.331.91.611.29B (300 ml 0.9%
NaCl)1.152.600.890.790.752.863.071.73C (100 ml 2.7%
NaCl)0.490.812.501.092.230.70.924.701.68C (100 ml 2.7%
NaCl)0.671.831.501.560.220.540.360.95D (300 ml 0.5%
NaHCO3)1.181.221.370.730.530.40.431.361.730.99D (300 ml
0.5% NaHCO3)1.391.422.671.662.110.930.501.591.961.58E
(Control)2.150.532.210.581.931.10.920.381.22E
(Control)1.220.360.810.284.542.111.001.331.46pHAverage
pHGroup/Subject123456789MeanGroup/Subject123456789Mean
A (1000 ml water)5.07.06.07.07.05.07.06.3A (1000 ml
water)5.07.08.07.07.07.0007.06.9B (300 ml 0.9%
NaCl)8.08.06.06.05.07.08.06.9B (300 ml 0.9%
NaCl)7.05.06.06.06.07.07.06.3C (100 ml 2.7%
NaCl)7.07.06.07.08.06.06.07.06.8C (100 ml 2.7%
NaCl)6.08.06.07.08.06.05.06.6D (300 ml 0.5%
NaHCO3)7.07.08.05.08.06.05.08.08.06.9D (300 ml 0.5%
NaHCO3)7.08.06.07.08.07.09.06.06.07.1E
(Control)7.07.007.08.07.07.08.06.07.1E
(Control)7.07.07.07.07.06.07.07.06.9Sp. GravityAverage Sp.
GravityGroup/Subject123456789MeanGroup/Subject123456789
MeanA (1000 ml
water)1.0321.0211.0221.0201.0151.0101.0281.021A (1000 ml
water)1.0221.0031.0141.0051.0201.0131.0231.014B (300 ml
0.9% NaCl)1.0271.0201.0201.0201.0201.0071.0051.017B (300
ml 0.9% NaCl)1.0271.0141.0261.0131.0081.0051.0001.013C

11. (100 ml 2.7%
NaCl)1.0251.0201.0201.0261.0001.0201.0201.0251.020C (100
ml 2.7% NaCl)1.0321.0231.0171.0211.0101.0221.0201.021D
(300 ml 0.5%
NaHCO3)1.0201.0061.0101.0131.0241.0201.0311.0101.0251.01
8D (300 ml 0.5%
NaHCO3)1.0181.0151.0061.0191.0211.0131.0281.0051.0121.01
5E (Control)1.0151.021.0151.0221.0011.0251.0361.0151.019E
(Control)1.0201.0281.0221.0001.0041.0221.0171.016NaCl
(g)Average NaCl
(g)Group/Subject123456789MeanGroup/Subject123456789Mean
A (1000 ml water)1.000.781.801.080.301.080.910.99A (1000 ml
water)0.800.530.270.010.450.6550.530.46B (300 ml 0.9%
NaCl)1.860.520.840.300.271.201.260.89B (300 ml 0.9%
NaCl)0.700.310.220.540.151.500.780.60C (100 ml 2.7%
NaCl)1.191.431.001.562.961.201.325.322.00C (100 ml 2.7%
NaCl)0.270.440.460.720.530.310.250.830.47D (300 ml 0.5%
NaHCO3)1.170.720.131.210.941.190.961.713.121.24D (300 ml
0.5% NaHCO3)0.310.350.080.020.990.250.600.270.460.37E
(Control)0.980.241.200.841.801.710.030.840.96E
(Control)0.800.110.541.300.020.640.020.560.50Normal Values
for Urine:Rate of Urine Formation: about 1 ml/minSpecific
Gravity: 1.015 - 1.025pH: 5.0 - 6.5Sodium chloride excreted
over a 24-h period: 15 g
Approach to, and interpretation of, the results from the Renal
Physiology Lab
The renal lab is informative, but we always run into the
problem that some individuals simply don’t serve as textbook
cases of renal function. There are a number of potential reasons
for this, including what they have drunk and eaten for breakfast
and lunch on the day of the laboratory, caffeine consumption,
etc.,but the basic fact is that you may find the measurements
and calculations for some members of your group don’t appear
to represent what would reasonably be predicted. Additionally,

12. some people were not capable of urinating every 30 min, or
even more than once during the lab. Not to worry, you’ve been
provided with the results of all 5 groups (a total of students),
so you have data from subjects to examine and to help you find
reasonable responses. The only way we could tighten up the
data considerably would be to supervise diets and activities for
a day or two before the lab.
By now or by the time you will start writing the report you
are/will be familiar with the function kidney plays in the
homeostatic adjustment of: (1) the osmotic pressures of the
body fluids; (2) the volumes of the body fluids; (3) the pH of
the body fluids (normal body fluid pH is about 7.4), and; (4) the
electrolyte concentrations of the body fluids. Thus, if any of
these parameters is disrupted, the kidneys will function to
adjust them back to normal values.
Kidney Function - Summary
1. Nephrons are the functional units of your kidneys. There are
millions of them. When blood flows into the kidneys, some of
the fluid portion of the blood (i.e., the blood plasma) is filtered
into small tubular structures called nephrons. Larger molecules,
such as proteins, are left in the blood, but smaller molecules
pass into the nephron with the plasma.
2. The filtered plasma moves through the nephron, and as it
does so the nephron uses membrane transport mechanisms to
reabsorb molecules that the body needs. That is, molecules that
need to be retained in the body are moved back to the blood and
the other body fluids.
3. Molecules that are present in excess in the body fluids will
not be reabsorbed, or will be reabsorbed only in limited
amounts. Molecules that don’t get reabsorbed have no
alternative but to end up in the urine, and so will be eliminated

13. from the body.
4. So, needed molecules get reabsorbed at the kidneys, and
molecules in excess get dumped in the urine - the end product
being homeostasis.
Given these basic facts, consider the following. If you drank
800 ml of water, and you weren’t thirsty, would you expect that
in response to this unneeded water for: urine volume and rate of
formation to go down, or for the specific gravity of the urine to
increase? Your kidneys would be expected to get rid of the
excess water, and so bring the volume and electrolyte
concentrations of your body fluids back to normal. Thus you
would expect there to be a greater volume of water in the urine,
a higher rate of urine formation, and a drop in the specific
gravity due to the extra water diluting any electrolytes in the
urine. [Since your body fluids were diluted by the excess water,
the kidneys would also tend to reabsorb more electrolytes from
the filtered plasma in the nephrons, instead of voiding them in
the urine, and that would also help to adjust electrolyte
concentration back to normal. However, you really don’t have a
way to pick this up readily from the lab data].
The adjustments the kidneys make happen pretty quickly. For
most subjects, the response that is seen through urine analysis
will peak in about an hour or so, and then decline as the
correction is completed. This varies from person to person, as
you will see by comparing different individuals who drank the
same solutions, but is the typical situation.
How is the data presented:
There are several ways to assemble data. I have assembled the
semi-analyzed data in the tabular form under two broad
sections- Pre-treatment (T=0) and Post-treatment (average
values for T=30-120). The post treatment values are averages of
values obtained from the entire 2 hour session after drinking the

14. test solutions. Under each section the values for the four
parameters tested (Rate of urine formation, pH, Specific Gravity
and amount of NaCl in urine) are provided for each subject in
columns (every group has atleast 7 subjects who participated
and provided the data) and for each group (A/B/C/D/E) in rows.
The last column in each of the two sections provides a mean
value from all the subjects in that group for each of the four
parameter tested. Feel free to re-assemble the data in any other
way, if that helps you look at and interpret it better.
Note: You will be expected to draw graphs for each of the four
parameters (rate of urine formation, pH, specific gravity and
NaCl) and compare the pre-treatment and post treatment values.
Based on those graphs write a two-page report about your
findings and conclusions.
How to Use the Data
Again, there are various ways to interpret a large volume of
data such as this. You could compare within a group (e.g.
changes in mean pH values in group D before and after
treatment), or between groups (e.g. changes in pH values
between group A and group D before and after treatment), in a
subject (e.g. change in values pre-and post-treatment in subject
1 of group A, between individual subjects in the group, so on
and so forth. In general, it’s a good idea to compare the mean
values for a group since it would reflect a general trend instead
of individual variations that might skew interpretation. When
you compare data, comment on whether any change you observe
is along predictable lines and if not; provide any insights into
why the data surprised you. To help you with the data
interpretation here are a few basic things to consider:
1. The person who is the control should not be expected to
deviate in any significant way from normal values for any of the
normal urine parameters, since s/he didn’t drink any of the test

15. solutions. This assumption, of course, is completely out-the-
window if the control persons drank two liters of their favorite
drink at lunch! Thus, a good question to ask is whether the
control group members appear to be functioning as a
representative control.
2. As with the controls, others in your or other groups may have
produced data that don’t seem to represent homeostatic renal
function. That’s ok- we are dealing with real physiology here.
3. In approaching the data ask the following questions:
(a) How would ingestion of solution X have perturbed
any of the parameters that are regulated by the kidney, and;
(b) How could the kidney make adjustments that
would be reflected in the composition of the urine, and would
correct these perturbations? That is to say, what would be
reabsorbed, and what would be dumped in the urine.
For example, what if a person who drank the 1000 ml
of water at time zero showed consistently low urine volumes
and rates of urine formation, and maintained normal to high
specific gravities? Why this sort of response might be observed
instead of what is expected? How about, maybe that person
came into the laboratory dehydrated, and so the 1000 ml of
water simply took care of that problem, diluting the body fluids
to normal values instead of diluting them beyond normal
values?
4. What about NaHCO3 (sodium bicarbonate)? It is a
basic/alkaline molecule. It is also part of the buffer system that
regulates the pH of the body fluids. If it’s present in excess in
the body fluids, what do you think will happen in the kidneys,
and how will that response affect the pH of the urine? The
bicarbonate, to make its taste less obnoxious, is drunk in 300 ml
of water. Could that water volume affect any of the parameters
you measured? Do the data show such a response?
5. NaCl intake should produce an obvious imbalance, and so

16. produce a response in terms of NaCl in the urine, and in terms
of specific gravity of the urine. Check out rate of urine
formation also, since intake of Na+ can reduce urine volume.
6. You may want to compare responses to a given solution
across different subjects in a group. Is there an obvious trend
for each solution, accepting the fact that some people probably
won’t fit the norm?
7. Keep in mind that the time = 0 min values can be influenced
by all sorts of things that happened before students came to lab.
Ask yourself whether they are reasonable, and consider any
trends in the post treatment values (time = 30-120 min) if the
initial values are a bit unusual.
1
SCHOOL IS BAD FOR CHILDREN
By John Holt
Almost every child on the first day he sets foot in a school
building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't
know, better at finding and figuring things out, more confident,
resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be
again in his schooling – or, unless he is very unusual and very
lucky, for the rest of his life. Already, by paying close attention
to and interacting with the world and people around him, and
without any school-type formal instruction, he has done a task
far more difficult, complicated and abstract than anything he
will be asked to do in school, or than any of his teachers has

17. done for years. He has solved the mystery of language. He has
discovered it – babies don't even know that language exists –
and he has found out how it works and learned to use it. He has
done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his own
model of the grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing
whether it works, by gradually changing it and refining it until
it does work. And while he has been doing this, he has been
learning other things as well, including many of the "concepts"
that the schools think only they can teach him, and many that
are more complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.
In he comes, this curious, patient, determined, energetic,
skillful learner. We sit him down at a desk, and what do we
teach him? Many things. First, that learning is separate from
living. "You come to school to learn," we tell him, as if the
child hadn't been learning before, as if living were out there and
learning were in here, and there were no connection between the
two. Secondly, that he cannot be trusted to learn and is no good
at it. Everything we teach about reading, a task far simpler than
many that the child has already mastered, says to him, "If we
don't make you read, you won't, and if you don’t do it exactly
the way we tell you, you can’t. In short, he comes to feel that
learning is a passive process, something that someone else does
to you, instead of something you do for yourself.
In a great many other ways he learns that he is worthless,
untrustworthy, fit only to take other people's orders, a blank
sheet for other people to write on. Oh, we make a lot of nice
noises in school about respect for the child and individual
differences, and the like. But our acts, as opposed to our talk,
says to the child, "Your experience, your concerns, your
curiosities, your needs, what you know, what you want, what
you wonder about, what you hope for, what you fear, what you
like and dislike, what you are good at or not so good at – all
this is of not the slightest importance, it counts for nothing.
What counts here, and the only thing that counts, is what we

18. know, what we think is important, what we want you to do,
think and be.” The child soon learns not to ask questions - the
teacher isn’t there to satisfyhis curiosity. Having learned to hide
his curiosity, he later learns tobe ashamed of it. Given no
chance to find out who he is – and to develop that
person, whoever it is – he soon comes to accept the adults
evaluation of him.
He learns many other things. He learns that to be wrong,
uncertain, confused, is a crime. Right Answers are what the
school wants, and he learns countless strategies for prying these
answers out of the teacher, for conning her into thinking he
knows what he doesn't know. He learns to dodge, bluff, fake,
cheat. He learns to be lazy! Before he came to school, he would
work for hours on end, on his own, with no thought of reward,
at business of making sense of the world and gaining
competence in it. In school he learns, like every buck private,
how to goldbrick, how not to work when the sergeant isn't
looking, how to know when he is looking, how to make him
think you are working even when he is looking. He learns that
in real life you don't do anything unless you are bribed, bullied
or conned into doing it, that nothing is worth doing for its own
sake, or that if it is, you can't do it in school. He learns to be
bored, to work with a small part of his mind, to escape from the
reality around him into daydreams and fantasies – but not like
the fantasies of his preschool years, in which he played a very
active part.
The child comes to school curious about other people,
particularly other children, and the school teaches him to be
indifferent. The most interesting thing in the classroom – often
the only interesting thing in it – is the other children, but he has
to act as if these other children, all about him, only a few feet
away, are not really there. He cannot interact with them, talk
with them, smile at them. In many schools he can't talk to other

19. children in the halls between classes; in more than a few, and
some of these in stylish suburbs, he can't even talk to them at
lunch. Splendid training for a world in which, when you're not
studying the other person to figure out how to do him in, you
pay no attention to him.
In fact, he learns how to live without paying attention to
anything going on around him. You might say that school is a
long lesson in how to turn yourself off, which may be one
reason why so many young people, seeking the awareness of the
world and responsiveness to it they had when they were little,
think they can only find it in drugs. Aside from being boring,
the school is almost always ugly, cold, inhuman – even the most
stylish, glass-windowed,$2O-a square-foot schools.
And so, in this dull and ugly place, where nobody ever says
anything very truthful, where everybody is playing a kind of
role, as in a charade where the teachers are no more free to
respond honestly to the students than the students are free to
respond to the teachers or each other, where the air practically
vibrates with suspicion and anxiety, the child learns to live in a
daze, saving his energies for those small parts of his life that
are too trivial for the adults to bother with, and thus remain his.
It is a rare child who can come through his schooling with much
left of his curiosity, his independence or his sense of his own
dignity, competence and worth.
So much for criticism. What do we need to do? Many things.
Some are easy – we can do them right away. Some are hard, and
may take some time. Take a hard one first. We should abolish
compulsory school attendance. At the very least we should
modify it perhaps by giving children every year a large number
of authorized absences. Our compulsory school-attendance laws
once served a humane and useful purpose. They protected
childrens’ right to some schooling, against those adults who
would otherwise have denied it to them in order to exploit their

20. labor, in farm, store, mine or factory. Today the laws help
nobody, not the schools, not the teachers, not the children. To
keep kids in school who would rather not be there costs the
schools an enormous amount of time and trouble – to say
nothing of what it costs to repair the damage that these angry
and resentful prisoners do every time they get a chance. Every
teacher knows that any kid in class who, for whatever reason,
would rather not be there, not only doesn't learn anything
himself but makes it a great deal tougher for anyone else. As for
protecting the children from exploitation, the chief and indeed
only exploiters of children these days are the schools. Kids
caught in the college rush more often than not work 70 hours or
more a week, most of it on paper busy work. For kids who aren't
going to college, school is just a useless time waster, preventing
them from earning some money or doing some useful work, or
even doing some true learnings.
Objections. "If kids didn't have to go, they’d all be out in the
streets.” No, they wouldn’t. In the first place, even if schools
stayed the way they are, children would spend at least some
time there because that's where they’d be likely to find friends;
it's a natural meeting place for children. In the second place,
schools wouldn’t stay the way they are, they'd get better,
because we would have to start making them what they ought to
be right now – places where children would want to be. In the
third place, those children who did not want to go to school
could find, particularly if we stirred up our brains and gave
them a little help, other things to do – the things many children
now do during their summers and holidays.
There's something easier we could do. We need to get kids out
of the school buildings, give them a chance to learn about the
world at first hand. It is a very recent idea, and a crazy one, that
the way to teach our young people about the world they live in
is to take them out of it and shut them up in brick boxes.
Fortunately, educators are beginning to realize this. In

21. Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon , to pick only two places I
happen to have heard about, plans are being drawn up for public
schools that won't have any school buildings at all, that will
take the students out into the city and help them to use it and its
people as a learning resource. In other words, students, perhaps
in groups, perhaps independently, will go to libraries museums,
exhibits, courtrooms, legislatures, radio and TV stations,
meetings, businesses and laboratories to learn about their world
and society at first hand. A small private school in Washington
is already doing this. It makes sense. We need more of it.
As we help children get out into the world, to do their learning
there, we can get more of the world into the schools. Aside from
their parents, most children never have any close contact with
any adults except people whose sole business is children. No
wonder they have no idea what adult life or work is like. We
need to bring a lot more people who are not full-time teachers
into the schools, and into contact with the children. In New
York City, under the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, real
writers working writers – novelists, poets, playwrights – come
into the schools, read their work, and talk to the children about
the problems of their craft. The children eat it up. In another
school I know of a practicing attorney from a nearby city comes
in every month or so and talks to several classes about the law.
Not the law as it is in books but as he sees it and encounters it
in his cases, his problems, his work. And the children love it. It
is real, grown-up, true, not My Weekly Reader, not “social
studies,” not lies and baloney.
Something easier yet. Let children work together, help each
other, learn from each other and each others’ mistakes. We now
know, from the experience of many schools, both rich-suburban
and poor-city, that children are often the best teachers of other
children. What is more important, we know that when a fifth-or
sixth-grader who has been having trouble with reading starts

22. helping a first grader, his own reading sharply improves. A
number of schools are beginning to use what some call Paired
Learning. This means that you let children form partnerships
with other children, do their work, even including their tests,
together, and share whatever marks or results this work gets –
just like grownups in the real world. It seems to work.
Let the children learn to judge their own work. A child learning
to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time – if
corrected too much, he will stop talking. He compares, a
thousand times a day, the difference between language as he
uses it and as those around him use it. Bit by bit, he makes the
necessary changes to make his language like other peoples. In
the same way, kids learning to do all the other things they learn
without adult teachers – to walk, run, climb, whistle, ride a
bike, skate, play games, jump rope – compare their own
performance with what more skilled people do, and slowly make
the needed changes. But in school we never give a child a
chance to detect his mistakes, let alone correct them. We do it
all for him. We act as if we thought he would never notice a
mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless he
was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on the expert. We
should let him do it himself. Let him figure out, with the help of
other children if he wants it, what this word says, what is the
answer to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or
doing this or that. If right answers are involved, as in some
math or science, give him the answer book, let him correct his
own papers. Why should we teachers waste time on such donkey
work? Our job should be to help the kid when he tells us that he
can't find a way to get the right answer. Let's get rid of all this
nonsense of grades, exams, marks. We don't know now, and we
never will know, how to measure what another person knows or
understands. We certainly can’t find out by asking him
questions. All we find out is what he doesn't know which is
what most tests are for, anyway. Throw it all out, and let the
child learn what every educated person must someday learn,

23. how to measure his own understanding, how to know what he
knows or does not know.
We could also abolish the fixed, required curriculum. People
remember only what is interesting and useful to them, what
helps them make sense of the world, or helps them get along in
it. All else they quickly forget, if they ever learn it at all The
idea of a "body of knowledge," to be picked up in school and
used for the rest of one' s life, is nonsense in a world as
complicated and rapidly changing as ours. Anyway, the most
important questions and problems of our time are not it the
curriculum, not even in the hotshot universities, let alone the
schools.
Children want, more than they want anything else, and even
after years of miseducation, to make sense of the world,
themselves, other human beings. Let them get at this job, with
our help if they ask for it, in the way that makes most sense to
them.
Copied from
Saturday Evening Post
February 8 1969
Reprinted with permission
Example Outline
INTRODUCTION:
Hook: I believe the hook here should be something you find to
be true or at least something that you used to believe to be true
until you read the essays.
Here are my recommendations for the hook:

24. · Over the years, western society has seemed to be proud of the
quality of its educational system and achievements, but is it
really working?
· What comes to mind when we talk about education? Probably
classrooms, exams, schools, long hours sitting on a desk, etc.
But this maybe just due to the wrong approach that we have
taken on it.
· Are we having the right approach in our educational system?
Introduce their text: here you introduce the text you are
analyzing. It could be directly as in “I will analyze the..” or
kind of indirectly “In his paper, Jon Spayde talks about…”
· I will analyze Jon Spayde’s 2004 essay “Learning in the Key
of Life.”, which takes a look at what is wrong with the
educational system and how to understand education in a
broader sense.
· In his 2004 essay, “Learning in the Key of Life.”, Jon Spayde
…
Thesis: you will have to choose your own thesis and work on
that. I have some suggestions, opposing views:
· (1)I will argue, along the lines of Jon Spayde, that to be
educated means more than just to receive information and to be
able to be useful in the world. It means interacting with the real
world and being able to solve problems in real life. The state of
education now has a clear class division, which is something
that we should change. In his essay, Spayde makes it clear what
the problems are and how we should begin to assess them.
· (2) I will argue, against what Jon Spayde maintains, that to be
educated is not so much about having real world experience, as
much as it is about having the correct information to solve
specific problems in an specific scenario or culture. Spayde is
mistaken in believing that “the whole world’s a classroom”,

25. because this would lead to having no control over what one
learns and may even lead to having contradictory views or
ideas.
BODY PARAGRAPHS
First paragraph: Approach the main idea of the current view of
education and how it is wrong or at least imperfect.
· Argument: look for data about school/college dropouts. Life
satisfaction. Etc.
Quote: from Spayde, Jon. “There is no divide in American life
that hurts more than the one between those we consider well
educated and those who are poorly or inadequately schooled.”
· Analyze quote: look for data about the intersection of higher
education and class/socioeconomic status. This should serve as
an analysis.
· Second quote: from John Holt, “School Is Bad for Children”
· Analyze second quote: this shows how the main focus in
education is not about education or self realization or any of the
other values it should be about.
· Synthesis: current view of education is wrong due to the
aforementioned reasons. .
Second paragraph: Approach the idea of other views about
education. There used to be other approaches.
· Argument: There are other views and positions that may be
more effective.
· Quote: from Jon Spayde, “Learning in the Key of Life”
· Analyze quote: In the past, the idea of an enclosed building
with a very specific teaching goal was nonexistent. The idea of
a kind of holistic way of learning was fruitful in the past.
Second quote: from John Henry Newman, “The Idea of a
University”

26. · Analyze second quote: there are two kindS of knowledge, and
we should focus on the ……..
· Synthesis: there is more than just one possible approach and
we should try to find the best.
· Holt: “Let children work together, help each other, learn from
each other and each others’ mistakes”
Third paragraph: Here the idea of what is education for. Or
what should be its goal.
· Argument: We should focus on the development of the human
as a useful member of society, yes, but also as a being with the
potential to fulfill its own expectations and create new ones.
· Quote: From Jon Spayde, “Learning in the Key of Life”
· Second quote: from John Holt, “School Is Bad for Children
· A real education gives a person the tools not just to fit as a
productive member of society but to get along in the world, and
reflecting on it, thus achieving a level of self understanding.
· Synthesis: education has gone the wrong way, looking for the
wrong goals, but here are the real goals we should be pursuing.
CONCLUSION: here goes your own conclusion. Remember you
can go with something you are certain of (it is a fact) or just
leave the question open but giving your own inclination for one
scenario (it is not certain that this model of education would
actually be better but…)
ADDITIONAL QUOTES FROM TEXTS:
SCHOOL IS BAD FOR CHILDREN
By John Holt
· He learns many other things. He learns that to be wrong,
uncertain, confused, is a crime. Right Answers are what the
school wants, and he learns countless strategies for prying these

27. answers out of the teacher, for conning her into thinking he
knows what he doesn't know. He learns to dodge, bluff, fake,
cheat. He learns to be lazy! Before he came to school, he would
work for hours on end, on his own, with no thought of reward,
at business of making sense of the world and gaining
competence in it. In school he learns, like every buck private,
how to goldbrick, how not to work when the sergeant isn't
looking, how to know when he is looking, how to make him
think you are working even when he is looking.
· The child comes to school curious about other people,
particularly other children, and the school teaches him to be
indifferent. The most interesting thing in the classroom – often
the only interesting thing in it – is the other children, but he has
to act as if these other children, all about him, only a few feet
away, are not really there. He cannot interact with them, talk
with them, smile at them
· You might say that school is a long lesson in how to turn
yourself off
· We should abolish compulsory school attendance. At the very
least we should modify it perhaps by giving children every year
a large number of authorized absences.
Holt: “Children want, more than they want anything else, and
even after years of miseducation, to make sense of the world,
themselves, other human beings. Let them get at this job, with
our help if they ask for it, in the way that makes most sense to
them.”
·
The Idea of University, John Henry Newman
· All branches of knowledge are connected together, because the

28. subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself.
· It is a great point to enlarge the range of studies which a
University professes.
· A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which
the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness,
moderation, and wisdom.
· University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors,
of founders of schools, leaders of colonies or conquerors of
nations.
Here you can back up each claim taking the other two essays
into account:
· (1) In “School is bad for children”, Jon Holt points out that
“We don't know now, and we never will know, how to measure
what another person knows or understands. We certainly can’t
find out by asking him questions.”, which goes along the idea of
education being more than just storing information.
· (1) In “The Idea of University”, John Henry Newman argues
that a university is not just a place to learn about an specific set
of information in one area, but to learn how to interact with the
world, here he states that a person after passing through
university becomes “is at home in any society, he has common
ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to
be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask
a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably.”
· (2) In “The Idea of University”, John Henry Newman argues
that the institution of universities is necessary for education,
this goes against the idea of the world being the source of
education. Newman says that “University is the great ordinary
means to a great but ordinary end”