Davey's Oxytocin Solution

More academic musings, mental masturbation, and totally impractical solutions to very real problems from Davey-boy....

"It's time to focus a little less on individual capacities and more on nurturing attachment," says he.

Brooks writes:

"The Gates Foundation recently sponsored focus groups with dropouts. The former students knew how detrimental dropping out would be. Most were convinced they could have graduated if they wanted to. But their descriptions of school amounted to a portrait of emotional disengagement: teachers were burned out and boring; discipline was lacking; classes weren't challenging; there weren't enough tutors and wasn't anyone to talk to; parents were uninvolved."

Me? I go for the practical solutions: get rid of tenured, burned out teachers and hire those who excite & motivate and engage students, work on ways to improve dicipline in the classroom (better teachers and teaching methods will solve most discipline problems), reevaluate curriculum and teaching methods and re-invent the entire process, pay teachers according to their societal value (huge) in order to attract (and keep) more and better qualified teachers, institute tutoring programs that insure help to those who need it, and, finally, look for new and creative ways to engage parents--paying attention to the shared problems of parents and schools and how they can benefit each other through mutual support.

Brooks goes for the bigger picture; he thinks you have to solve every human being's relationship and lack-of-love problems in order to improve our educational system. Talk about being unable to see the forest through the trees. Brooks has missed the forest entirely--and has decided to focus on the entire universe.

Great way to solve problems, huh? Make them so impossibly huge and unsolvable that they become self-fulfilling prophesies. I guess that's as good a way to failure as any.

Like some schizophrenic Mama-and-Papa-Bear-in-one, Brooks is either overly simplistic or overly complicated, rarely seeming to get it 'jusssst right.'


Of Human Bonding
By David Brooks
The New York Times

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Photo credit: David Brooks. (The New York Times)

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