Joy Hakim

A review in the NYTimes of a new edition of “Wind in the Willows” reminded me that my older son (now in his 40ties) loved that book. His younger brother (now in his 30ties) refused to read it. When I asked him why, he said, “It’s a schoolbook.”

            In the decade between them, schools around the country had introduced new reading series. They contained lots of great authors–all presented in bits and pieces. The younger boy had read a single chapter, out of context, from Wind In the Willows. It had become a schoolbook, not a story to cherish, or remember, or read.

            That trend to excerpt has, today, gone much further. Young students read few classics and almost no whole nonfiction books. Mostly they do what I call “snippet reading.” Teachers gather those snippets into units or classroom presentations. It can make for very lively sessions, but the teacher has done most of the work, and it’s the teacher who learns and remembers. The students have been entertained.

            I believe that kind of teaching helps explain the stubborn refusal of test scores to rise.

            Anyway, I’m out here with books that kids seem to love to read. And, if anecdotal evidence can be trusted, they do make a difference in reading comprehension scores. But more and more it is homeschoolers who read the whole volumes. Public schoolteachers, with some wonderful exceptions, often chapterize, I’m finding that charter school teachers are apt to go even farther down that snippet road (with the best of intentions and also to save money).

            Will today’s Twitter-generation students read whole books? I haven’t found that a problem. (The Harry Potter phenomenon makes that clear.) I still get love letters from young readers. From what I hear, lots of kids are starved for solid content.

Around the country I find teachers who are appalled by current materials and trends. In one Illinois city seven elementary teachers went before the school board protesting the choice of social studies books and asking for A History of US. Their story is kind of interesting. The city ended up adopting a standard textbook and also the A History of US reading/thinking approach to social studies (okay, I’m biased). Giving teachers a choice may be the best way to go. A Virginia district did the same thing.

Visiting a Maryland public school I was met by a tenth grade girl, with hot pink hair, who had read all three of The Story of Science books on her own. (Yes, that made me feel mighty good.) Visiting an 8^th grade classroom where students were reading “Einstein Adds A New Dimension,” I was peppered with questions about black holes. “Is the book difficult?” I asked the kids. (After all, it’s a book that tells the story of quantum physics, not the easiest of subjects.) They looked at me as if I were missing something. “No, it’s not hard,” they told me. And I realized that they were learning at their level and exulting in their knowledge of black holes, supernovae, and dark matter. These are the great idea-based subjects of our time and, mostly, we are keeping information about them from our students.

The big scandal in education today, at least from my perspective, is in the textbook publishing (now expanded into technology) world. A few firms have made huge profits from our schools. In return they have produced books with phony professor authors—who sell their names but don’t write the books. That concept has spread to some of our great institutions, who also sell their names. Then underpaid freelancers write/produce the actual works. Good books or materials rarely come out of a committee format, especially a committee dedicated to making money. And that begins to explain the textbook/school materials travesty that is impacting our schools with serious implications for the future of our democracy. As my friend Tom Jefferson said in an 1816 letter to Charles Yancey, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

I’m trying to upset the educational apple cart with, of all things, information-packed books. In an age of easy twitter-talk, solid absorbing reading may be the real balancing innovation. Traditionally, the best way to pass on information, and make it stick, has been through stories. (Read educational psychologist Kieran Egan to learn of the power of stories.)
     Since the days of the ancients, civilizations have always conveyed their important ideas through stories. (Check out the Bible; check Homer.) Somehow in our time we traded in stories for litanies of facts. We put those litanies in textbooks and school learning tanked. Now we’re setting those lists of facts on discs and on the web. But dull is dull. Stories have been and are the way to go.
     So I’ve been writing story-based books that, yes, are meant to teach history and science–but also to change some current educational thinking. Reading is essential if we are to produce thinking citizens; those who don’t read don’t have the in-depth knowledge to do a whole lot of thinking. Books are not the problem; it’s dreary books that are a turn-off.
     Read a tale from “Making Thirteen Colonies” (in the Oxford University Press’s American history series, A History of US) and see if you’ve learned some U.S. history. Or try a chapter from “Einstein Adds A New Dimension” and see if you’ve acquired insights into modern physics, along with some world history (from Smithsonian Books/NSTA’s The Story of Science.  In our world science should be for everyone, not just for scientists. (As it happens, we have some eloquent scientists writing stories of their craft.)
Back to that apple cart: Today, narrative learning books really are innovative: if you call going back to an old model innovation. This goes beyond subject matter. The idea is to create environments where teachers, pupils, and parents all learn together. The teacher as the purveyor of knowledge is an out-of-date model in a world where information is growing at exponential rates. No one, not even a great teacher, can be a know it all. So good absorbing books feed an environment where everyone can explore and learn together. It takes new thinking. It’s innovative. It’s fun.

Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Now it’s easy to agree with that, but I lived with Albert for almost ten years so I know he expected his thoughts to be questioned. I fell for the guy—as did quite a few women of his time—but I think that he was being a bit disingenuous with that statement.
    Einstein’s fantastic imagination—the key to his creativity—rested on a solid knowledge base. This was a man who lived in his head, and there was a whole lot to keep him occupied. It was his imagination that gave him the power to visualize, which he did amazingly well. That ability helped him hatch his theories.
    He wasn’t a conventional scientist:  he was clumsy and often mucked up when he tried to experiment. His were gendanken experiments, which means thought experiments. Many great scientists do them. Einstein went farther than most; when asked where his lab was he pointed to his pen.
    There aren’t many Einsteins: people with amazing intellectual skills, a fair bit of knowledge, and a sense of fun. So I believe it’s useful for us, as educators, to consider his schooling, and then to think about that balance between knowledge and imagination.
    Einstein was a product of strict German schools.  That structured school environment was balanced at home by parents who read broadly, talked about books, played music, and doted on their children—taking their questions seriously. An uncle taught Albert algebra, explaining that x was a merry fellow who needed chasing until he was found. Einstein had a popular series of science books—written by a woman—that he read avidly and discussed with his parents. Once a week, the Einsteins invited a college student for dinner, and that young man talked math and philosophy with the boy. Because German law said all children were to have religious training—and the school didn’t provide it for Jewish children—a relative was brought in to teach him Hebrew and Jewish tradition. For a while, he became intensely religious.
    His father was a sweet man; his son called him “wise,” but he wasn’t much of a businessman. He and Albert’s uncle ran a company that built dynamos. Cities were just turning on lights; dynamos were cutting edge. So Albert learned the latest technology at home. It may have been like having parents today who are involved with space science. It was an exciting environment, especially for a young boy with a good mind and a lot of imagination.
    Here we are back to imagination. Einstein was right. It is the key to creativity and the creative leaps that we all admire and aspire to. Interestingly, both Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton described themselves as little boys who never really grew up, who kept a child-like curiosity all their lives.
    So what are we as educators to make of this? You only get one Einstein a century, but maybe we’d have a few more if we could successfully nourish imagination and at the same time provide young minds with a knowledge base to feed their imaginations. Right now we’re involved in test-crazy times. Of course we need evaluations to tell us where we are and how each student is responding. But spending time on rote memorization of expected test questions doesn’t teach much of anything lasting—we all know that.
    We’ll get beyond this to a better testing process. In the meantime, the transition to today’s information age is a bumpy process. In good part our schools are still industrial-age relics. Many are embracing technology, as if it were more than just a method of delivery.
   As we make changes, I believe we should look at classical models of learning. Those German schools didn’t cherish imagination, but they did give their students great literature, languages, solid mathematics, and sound science: all tools for reasoning. Why can’t our kids have all that, along with an environment that nurtures imagination?

     I was a writer by trade, so writing on U.S. history didn’t seem daunting. Newspaper reporters tackle all kinds of subjects. I’d done a bit of medical writing, I was a business writer for three years, I wrote often about schools, I’d reviewed some plays and concerts, become an editorial writer, and done a lot of whatever-will-sell freelancing.  As for history?  A story I wrote about Jefferson’s “Statute for Religious Freedom” (a little known but enormously important document) ran in the Wall St. Journal. Virginius Dabney, one of my heroes and a grand old man In Virginia history circles, had actually complimented me on the article.  So had Dumas Malone, a Jefferson biographer and University of Virginia historian. The idea was to do as good a job as possible and go to experts to have my work checked. I didn’t realize it, but compared to those who actually write the books used in most schools, I was enormously well qualified.

        I already had a desk squeezed into a sunny bedroom corner; I was ready to begin. My intent was to write a one-volume U.S. history and take a year (at most) to do it. (Later I would chuckle over my ignorance of what I was undertaking.)

How to start? I headed for the Virginia Beach library where cardholders can check out 15 books. (During the time it took me to write A History of US, I would almost always have 15 library books stacked them on the floor next to the desk.)

And so I began reading: some overview American histories, some old college texts, and all the books I could find about the first people who walked and paddled over the Bering Strait area and on into the Americas. I discovered the wonders of used bookstores where out-of-print books often hold treasures of little known Americana. I tabbed library books and underlined in the books that I bought. When I could I visited the places I was describing.

Today I’m often asked about my writing method: Do I keep notes on index cards? Do I finish most of my research before I begin writing?

        Lots of writers do just that. I don’t. Maybe I’d be better off if I did. But I’m a rewriter. I start with an overview and some details—look for an unfolding story—and begin writing. Each time I read a new book or article I tweak, sometimes that leads to a major revision.

In my first newspaper jobs I had used a glue pot and scissors, as most reporters did then, moving paragraphs around by literally cutting and pasting. But thanks to a math-minded son, I was an early user of computers. I had a basic Apple and a dot matrix printer and found that the computer made rewriting enormously easy.

The Internet? When it arrived (years later, while I was writing “The Story of Science”), it would change my way of work. But that was in the future. When I began, the source of much of my information was a big bookcase filled with encyclopedias, dictionaries, and research resources. A thesaurus may have been the most used of those books.

It was about twenty years ago. I was a newspaper reporter sent to Richmond to attend a special meeting called by the Virginia State School Board. Someone on the board had looked at the literature book most used in Virginia high schools. It contained “Romeo and Juliet.” That seemed a reasonable choice. But a board member who knew the play well discovered that whenever Shakespeare used a difficult or arcane word the publisher changed it, without noting in the text that a change had been made.

        Children in Virginia, and around the country (this was a popular textbook), thought they were reading Shakespeare, teachers thought they were teaching Shakespeare, when they were actually dealing with a bowdlerized version.

        That got the school board members attention. They looked at other textbooks, especially in history and science. What they saw upset their collective stomachs. So they called a meeting and invited leading publishers to attend. The idea: to do something to improve American textbooks. Members of the national press covered the event. I was there too.

        Like most parents, I’d never actually read any of my children’s textbooks, but I had looked at a son’s world history and, as a writer, been appalled. My son reassured me, “Mom, don’t worry, the teacher hates the book too and hardly uses it.” I was less than thrilled with that response.

         As to the Richmond meeting? I thought I’d fallen down a rabbit hole. Nothing made sense. The publishers sent sales people. Their job: to promote their books. They spoke an arcane language—education jargon—the school board members tried to talk common sense. Afterwards I spoke to a board member who shook her head in dismay. Nothing had been accomplished.

        I went home and started reading about textbooks. Frances Fitzgerald’s America Revised compared current American history textbooks with those used early in the 20^th century. The “old” books had engaging narrative and were written to high standards. The “new” texts were dreary, with mistakes, and obtuse content. As to history’s stories? They were gone.

        Fitzgerald wasn’t the only one writing about the situation. Diane Ravitch’s now-classic article, “Tot Sociology,” described history curricula that focused on litanies of facts and trivia and an “expanding horizons” concept of learning that didn’t work. Ravitch called for “real books” in classrooms. Harriet Tyson in A Conspiracy of Good Intentions described the way contemporary textbooks are produced—an endeavor led by business and marketing decisions. Tyson told an appalling tale of glitzy books and shabby content.

        And so I decided to write a U.S. history for young readers. I would go back to a classic narrative model. Given the almost universal contempt for what was out there; my belief that reading skills are honed on readable books; and some background in U.S. history and government; I thought I could do a fair job. I was sure that if I did, textbook publishers and school adoption committees would all fall at my feet.

        Umm, I was in for a surprise. (To be continued.)