ICE is Like New Math

I am a lifer in education.  I started teaching in 1968 and kept at it until my retirement. During that time, I saw some poor ideas come along, die from lack of pedagogical vigor and then be resurrected a generation later by another group of misguided zealots. 

One of these was New Math. 

To understand New Math you must understand how devastating the U.S.S.R.’s launch of Sputnik was to the free world.  I remember standing out in the cold, clear Colorado air with my family and our neighbors watching for the pinpoint of light moving across the night sky.  There it was.  Sputnik.  A Russian space satellite, the first in the world, and it wasn’t ours.  It was the enemy’s satellite, doing God knows what, circling the entire world impervious to American intervention.  The race for space was suddenly real, and we were running a distant second. 

My parents were the generation that fought in both WWII and the Korean War.  They had come home counting on American superiority to keep us safe from any further wars.  Now, moving across the sky, was proof that we could no longer count on that superiority.  What had gone wrong?

Education became the culprit of choice.  Why weren’t our kids smart enough to build space machines?  One response to this was adoption of a new mathematical teaching method developed in France.  New Math.  The idea was that we were spending too much time teaching children how to “do” math and not enough time turning them into math geniuses, people who can intuit math.  New Math would mandate conceptual thoughts about math.  What about being able to compute?  To solve for “x.” To find the area of the living room so you can buy the right amount of carpet?  What about being able to total up a bill, find a percentage, double the fractions in a recipe?

The answer to the practical questions were poo-pooed by the New Math proponents as too mundane.  The assumption was that once you were a creative thinker about math that the multiplication tables would take care of themselves.  Wrong.  You can not teach people to be gifted in mathematics (or music, athletics, literature…et.al.).  But you can teach useful skills in each of these areas.  Just as you can be a good singer without being an opera star; a good swimmer without being an Olympic swimmer; an intelligent observer of history, an avid reader, an employable accountant, carpenter, chef or teacher without being a leader in any of those areas, you can learn excellent math skills without being a theoretician. 

In fact, making intuitive leaps in mathematics is much more likely to take place if you are comfortable in the basics.  New Math may have been well-intentioned, but it was instituted by people who knew nothing about child development, brain theory or good education.  It was promoted by zealots who wanted their way, no matter what the facts or the realities.  These people were dismissive, even disdainful, of educators who told them they were on the wrong path. 

The most righteous goal in the world is useless if your means to that goal carries you in the wrong direction, destroying bridges and leaving only burn scars on the landscape. 

The current ICE organization is like New Math.  The good that they hoped to achieve has been destroyed by the deliberate actions of its rank and file.  Their goal has been subverted by zealots.  Their motivation has been adulterated by those who hold the worst of intentions.

Like New Math, there is no salvaging this situation.  ICE, in its current mutation, cannot be redeemed.  It must be removed and then replaced, rebuilt, reformed from the bottom up with its original purpose in mind.  Those responsible for its corruption must be removed. Under the Trump administration, ICE is a failed system. 

Resist those who subvert the Constitution.  Keep the faith.