For example, you’ll never find the southern European countries promoting “Happiness Lessons” as is becoming the fashion in England. Parents paying up to £24,000 a year for private secondary education now find their children playing games like “Guess What I Am Feeling,” activities designed to help the students get in touch with his or her emotions.” It seems that Brits have imported the mid-90s U.S. enthusiasm for “emotional literacy” which has spawned a multi-million pound industry of consultants, publishers and “educational trainers.” British critics say such self-esteem training does nothing to promote a student’s confidence; it rather encourages them to obsess about their feelings, and cheats them out of a good education. (There are only so many hours in the day.) Traditionalist further argue that Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Aristotle do far more to provide a good moral education than encouraging kids to “get in touch with themselves.”
But this kind of progressivism is hard to find in southern Europe. Friends of ours in Florence told us that their high-schooler sits through six hours of instruction a day, with only a short break or two. Many Italian students go to school six days a week, with only a respite on Sunday. There is little to no interaction between pupil and teacher in either Italy or Spain, a problem that continues through the university.
To be sure, what students are studying in both countries is often more substantive than the strained soup of a curriculum on which many American adolescents survive. Languages are of course studied much more seriously and (in a nod to practicality), English has supplanted French as the first foreign language. In Italy, students take up to six years of Latin and three of Dante; in Spain a high school graduate knows Cervantes backwards and forwards. Graduation is by no means guaranteed.
Students are even allowed religious instruction in both countries, although it is under threat from Spain’s current liberal government, and spiritual teaching may be short-lived in Italy where only 10% of the population now goes to church and 70% of live-in couples are unmarried.
But, although the Mediterranean curriculum may be more serious, students rebel against it, even if their recalcitrance is passive-aggressive. In Spanish high schools—collegios—cheating is so rampant that it is winked at by instructors, if not at times encouraged. In many schools, it has become institutionalized, the norm at test time, sort of like the institutionalized parliamentary corruption that stabilized relations between the Crown and parliament in 18th century England. In Italy, students regularly claim an urgent call of nature, during which they take time for a leisurely outside smoke. Those in the back row of the class furtively play their “Game Boys”.
All of this perhaps should be a lesson for educators in the States. One of the things that made Progressive educational ideas attractive at the turn of the 20th century is that Progressivism—in its most benign form—encouraged student-teacher interaction and greater student involvement. It was only when these practices were hijacked by idealogues intent on changing the world through the classroom that these techniques provoked outrage—as is still the case today.
So we should continue to teach Shakespeare, Austen, Latin—maybe even a little classical Greek. But it should be done in a manner that commands the student’s full participation. The problem with Progressivism is when politically charged ideologies are furtively slipped into the classroom under cover of night. The benefit of progressive techniques is that it allows teachers to adapt and evolve in ways that bring the best out in our students. At our university, we’ve gained some international fame for all the ways that we’ve taken advantage of Apple’s technology, including podcasts and video iPods. I have found a useful guide in a paraphrase of that Gospel parable: the good educator pulls out of his curriculum something old and something new.