Editorials

...It goes on to argue that so long as the church's own unjust structures and practices are in place, it is crippled in addressing these ills...

...Perhaps it is the presentation of these reforms not on their individual merits but together as a platform for renewal...

...Service agencies, such as soup kitchens, the humane society, and groups working with the blind, have benefited from the involvement and energy of his students...

...Maybe that is what a "return to standards" and "back to basics" is really all about.k to basics" is really all about...

...It is true that around the world the church corporately and Catholics individually have been peacemakers and advocates of the poor, notwithstanding a wide variety of internal church attitudes and structures...

...Theodore Sizer (Horace's Compromise, Houghton Mifflin), former headmaster at Phillips Academy, argues that only simple structures will be flexible enough to reach the students now being lost...

...To which others have replied that an imperfect church nowise prevents Catholics from striving to remedy the world's injustices and that thinking it does distracts energies, especially lay energies, from pressing and plausible tasks...

...In fact the American bishops' original "Call to Action" began in 1976 as a bicentennial project primarily focused on change in society, only to end (and founder) with a major focus on change in the church...

...Mandatory community service is another element in Gatto's ideal curriculum...

...There is very little about faith or worship, mystery, sacrament, or salvation...

...No doubt that is a problem...

...Yes, there are old concerns still to be pursued, and no less valid because they are old...

...Interdisciplinary approaches to the basic intellectual skills of analyzing and computing, observing and hypothesizing, are being developed...

...But increasingly those who grew up after Vatican II form the body of the church...

...One of the reasons for Japanese economic and cultural prowess, Fallows wrote in More Like Us (Houghton Mifflin), is not that Japan's best and brightest are better and brighter than ours, but that Japan's bottom 50 percent are...

...His commitment to ideas and concern for children are irrepressible, and his exhortation to make the world that unfolds around our children a greater part of our daily lives needs a wider hearing...

...A second missing ingredient is a sense of the sacred...

...But the thrust of the petition is essentially ethical-toward renovating the church so that it can effectively perform good works...

...In our view the reforms of Vatican II are far from having been fully implemented, and no one knows that better than the generations of Catholics who grew up in the pre-Vatican II church and invested so much in the spirit and work fostered by John XXIII...

...On this point, we are with the sponsors...

...This petition reflects the experience of those generations, reflects it in what is missing as well as in what is stated...

...Community service, parental involvement, and individual pacing are all part of the school's curriculum...

...Presumably there were many, like us, who did not sign up...

...One is a sense of boundaries...

...Its interdisciplinary offerings-one class on math and science in the morning, another on the humanities in the afternoon-reflect Sizer's emphasis on a mastery of a limited number of basic skills and areas of knowledge...

...The petition opens with a catalogue of the world's ills-poverty, environmental dangers, international conflict, drug abuse, technological dilemmas...

...Gatto's response is to put children back in contact with the working life of the community...

...The petition's concern for inclu-siveness, justified in many ways, is not completed by any corresponding concern for a distinct Catholic identity...

...Compulsory public schooling, initially modeled after the nineteenth-century factory system, is oppressive and inordinately wasteful, he believes...

...Practice what you preach and preach by your practice are the inevitable demands of a world suspicious, for good reasons and bad, of preachers...

...Gatto thinks it is time to return to the tradition of performance-based testing, or specific task evaluations, and Sizer also is in favor of such "exhibitions of mastery...

...Does that represent a fundamental disagreement with the proposed reforms...

...Nothing in this petition addresses that, nor does it speak to the possibility that young people will not be drawn to a church that doesn't offer them something they won't find by supporting Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, or Amnesty International, becoming Peace Corps volunteers, or joining community organizations...

...Finally-and here we tread uncertainly-the Call for Reform forces us to ask ourselves whether the liberal-conservative axis that has set the post-Vatican II agenda (of which this petition is mostly a reflection of the liberal end-though conservatives might voice agreement with some of its points) is not wobbling out of orbit...

...In Japan, a sense of inclusion and a relatively secure status are accorded all hard-working students...

...Our superstitious and socially divisive regard for test scores has created a meritocracy with little room or respect for the necessary contributions of those Americans who are not now succeeding in school...

...We are beset by such de-valuing...

...What led us to hesitate in this case...

...The petition was widely circulated-this office received a dozen copies in the months preceding...

...Having rejected the first objection and reached a split decision on the second, why not rally to the Call for Reform...

...Is more fundamental change needed...

...School children have been artificially segregated from the larger community, and from the kind of real-life experiences in which one learns to accept responsibility and from which one earns self-respect...

...This philosophy is roughly congruent with that of other reformers who are calling for a move away from the standard "supermarket" curriculum...

...Furthermore, as the influence of television grows and the stability of the family erodes, that isolation has become more debilitating...

...worldwide have sparked a national reform movement...

...But more and more it strikes us that woeful ignorance of theology, liturgy, spirituality, and the church's moral heritage is the greater problem...

...When the full story of the liberation of Central Europe is told, the role of both believers and religious institutions-though largely untouched by the reforms of Vatican II-will be recognized as having been critical to change and to nonviolence...

...But the universe has cranked around a full quarter century since the council and posed new problems that cannot be examined honestly within the limits of the liberal-conservative polarity...

...And Gatto is a strong advocate of parent-teacher cooperatives, in which children, parents, and teachers jointly tackle such things as gardening and parks projects, as well as museums and more academic chores...

...Such a vision reminds us of the late Bruno Bettelheim's defense of fairy tales and his attack on utilitarian reading materials in The Uses of Enchantment (Random House...

...A recipe can be a disaster if it lacks crucial ingredients, no matter how tasty and nutritious the other elements...

...The alienation fostered by these "endless doses of low-level abstraction," as Gatto calls them, is compounded by the system's reliance on standardized testing...

...Having collected 4,505 signatures on its petition, it nailed its "ninety-five theses" to the cathedral door of American culture-the New York Times [February 28...

...Gatto's own solutions to the impasse emphasize student initiative, structural flexibility, and real-life tests and tasks...

...Such preferences for narrower measures of competence dovetail nicely with James Fallows's criticism of the American reliance on standardized tests...

...Public funding for education has increased, and in many states teacher salaries have risen dramatically...

...THE PASSION OF TEACHERS Like death and taxes, school reform is always with us...

...Gatto teaches at a junior high school on the edge of Harlem...

...Teachers should be resources and coaches, not prison guards...

...In the last five years, talk about the relative ignorance of American schoolchildren and the declining status and competitiveness of the U.S...

...Is it time we recognize that what could be taken for granted in a platform for church renewal two decades ago cannot be taken for granted today...

...Virtually every one of its proposals has been advocated at some time or another in these pages...

...Another objection is that the petition is too "churchy...

...Essentially the petition calls for a more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive church: the inclusion of women at all ministerial and administrative levels, the end of mandatory celibacy, consultation with lay people on the church's teachings on human sexuality, greater say by the local church in the selection of bishops, widespread consultation on parish and church closings...

...No body, from the early church on, has been able to say clearly what it is without a willingness to say what it is not...

...Its well-intentioned but almost promiscuous suggestion that there are no substantial issues dividing the various branches of Christianity is revealing...

...Both these lacunae could be seen in the way the petition treated the church's crucial task of passing the faith on to future generations...

...Although the principles appropriate to a just organization of secular life cannot be applied unmodified to the church- indeed, cannot be applied uniformly throughout all of secular life either-the church simply cannot preach one message for the rest of society and a sharply contrasting one for itself...

...He's been at it for twenty-five years, and his criticism of the system is unsparing...

...Without reasons to love and treasure the church, younger generations will take little interest in reforming it...

...We're presiding over a catastrophe here," John Taylor Gatto, New York City Teacher of the Year, told us recently, and we're inclined to agree...

...Once students are provided with models and know they will be held accountable, the freedom to pursue projects in their own way can be intoxicating...

...To this the sponsors reply, with an eye toward Eastern Europe, that the world is full of surprises and that the Call for Reform encourages already disappointed Catholics to share their hopes rather than drift into apathy and disaffection if not outright dis-affiliation...

...Some have objected that since these changes are highly unlikely to be achieved under the current papacy, campaigning for them will only breed disappointment...

...Yes, good teachers must draw students out, but as Chesterton remarked about education, some things-English and algebra, for example-need to be put in as well...

...It is not difficult to see how this element was lost in a document focused on organizational structures...

...Such unorthodox tests develop self-reliance and confidence...

...The Call for Reform may exaggerate the interconnectedness between internal change and external effectiveness but it is not wrong to highlight the link...

...Yet it is hard to imagine how his proposals might be implemented on a large scale...

...Self-knowledge and individual initiative are indispensable in education, but a curriculum that revolves around the mercurial interests of students is likely to lack substance, and would place unusual demands on teachers...

...The passion of teachers like Gatto is invigorating...

...How will the success or failure of such alternative methods be measured...

...Boundaries, identity, sense of the sacred-these were so deeply inculcated into those pre-Vatican II Catholics that they are likely to take them for granted, while chafing at the rigidity of the way these realities were formerly presented...

...Ultimately, Gatto believes, the task of education is to create "arrangements that work to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve...

...Young people, it declared, are "reluctant to affiliate with a church they view as authoritarian and hypocritical...

...The group hopes to acquire 100,000 signatures endorsing "fundamental renewal of the church...

...Sizer's "Coalition of Essential Schools" is involved with Central Park East Secondary School in East Harlem...

...The Call for Reform also asks for more expeditious attention to enculturation, mechanisms for financial accountability, and unity among the Christian churches...

...Still, any student would be lucky to have a teacher like Gatto...

...When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks," Gatto notes, "they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them...

...The Call for Reform appears to lack several crucial ingredients...

...Self-knowledge and self-education are the most efficient and effective tools in learning, Gatto insists...

...He advocates one-day apprenticeships, in which students "shadow" the daily routine of an adult...

...Nonetheless, even when these efforts were not preceded by reforms in the church, they have usually been accompanied or followed by demands for them...

...In the past, his students have visited with police officers, newspaper reporters, and trucking company executives...

...One of Gatto's former students, a young teenager, took a bicycle trip across the country...

...Independent study also works...

...The acquisition of skills, including the ability to read," Bettelheim wrote, "becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life...

...The poignancy of the Call for Reform-but also, we are sorry to say, its serious weakness-arises not because it is radical but because it is so terribly familiar...

...Or is something else at issue...

...Where possible, adventure and excitement should be encouraged...

...Double standards swiftly self-destruct...

...Fallows attributed this to the Japanese cultural regard for effort and participation...

...Furthermore, his suggestions place too little emphasis on communicating a civic and cultural tradition...

...The papacy cannot bless historical change, human rights, the benefits of participation and loyal opposition outside the church doors, then dismiss them as inconsequential or inapplicable within...

...Few immediate improvements in the quality of instruction or the performance of students are evident, however...

...Most of them have been endorsed by us editorially, and since they are unlikely to be implemented soon, we expect to support them again...

...Many educators contend that abstract measurements of ability, such as the IQ and Scholastic Aptitude Tests, are unreliable and destructive...

...The school day's ever-changing rotation of classes and the curriculum's proliferation of disciplines fragment children's experience and frustrate the learning process...

...This is an old debate...