Negotiating the past and the future.

Once or twice a year AASA, along with University of Texas professor Nolan Estes, organizes an international seminar on schooling. We have superintendents, school board leaders and higher education folks who spend a week or so visiting one or more countries, visiting schools and universities and absorbing the culture of the country. I have shared many of these trips with you. One of the most recent was to Italy.

Some of my colleagues love to tease me about these trips--you know, "Too bad you had to go to Italy. Hope it wasn't too stressful, etc." I point out that mine is a tough job but someone has to do it. Actually the trip allows AASA to be seen, not just as a national leader, but as an international leader. It also creates lots of discussion among the participants about what is going on in our own country and it allows me to think about the United States with new eyes that see the reflection from a distant mirror.

Now going to Italy cannot be considered hard duty. It is a beautiful country with warm people and great food. The hardest thing about going to Italy is making sure that your pants aren't too tight at the end of the trip. The second hardest thing is trying to find out what values underpin the country's education system.

Articulating Values

The history and culture of Italy is so embedded in our own culture that going there makes one realize how much we owe them. English is heavily influenced by Latin, and much of our art and religion started there. Their schools also were a study in where we have been. It has been my experience that you can't really understand the schools of a country unless you understand the values of that country because the schools tend to reflect what the country most strongly values.

Wherever I travel I like to try to understand the values that are embedded in the schools. But this time I had trouble. Every time I asked an Italian educator what the values were, I got nowhere. Perhaps I wasn't making myself clear. Or perhaps it is just really hard for educators to know what the underlying values are. It led me to wonder if I asked the same question here, what kind of answers I might hear. Can you state what values underpin American education?

However, while observing the schools I did come to understand that in many ways what we were seeing in the museums and historical sites was, in fact, the values that they wanted to preserve. It is clear that Italian children are expected to know and understand their history and culture and to appreciate languages other than their own. In essence, they are grounded in the past.

Where the schools in Italy seem weakest was is in looking toward the future. Little technology is in place, and the schools' pedagogy is pretty much stuck in the 19th century. Teachers teach and students listen.

The week we were there the Parliament was debating and voting on its school reform legislation. I found two things amusing. The first was whenever we asked educators about the school reform bill they laughed. Not much different from Americans on that front. The second thing was that as they described their reforms, it was clear they were trying to make their schools more like American schools--at least like American schools used to be. A big emphasis was placed on moving away from a nationally dictated curriculum to more local control. They were trying to de-emphasize testing and while they were concerned with accountability, they were looking more broadly at what that means. And above all they wanted to inject more creativity into their students.

The cultural aspect of the trip took us to the ancient sites of Rome. Rome continues to be an object lesson for modern empires as it overreached and crumbled from within and finally succumbed to less advanced, more primitive societies. We visited Pompeii and saw a major city that disappeared in three days due to a volcanic eruption. Poignant castings were made from the actual preserved bodies of an expectant mother trying to protect her unborn child from the eruption of Vesuvius and a young child covering his face to avoid the ashes. Both obviously perished showing that despite our human instincts for survival sometimes we are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, we saw the magnificence of Michelangelo's work and wondered at how one person could bring such excellence and beauty to his fellow human beings.

Moving Forward

Throughout the trip we stayed or ate in structures that were centuries older than this country. Even many of the schools we visited were located in old villas or palaces where vestiges of the art and culture of that earlier time mixed with today's Generation Y teen-agers. This led me to another observation that the culture of "teen-agerdom" is much stronger than the culture of mere countries. Teen-agers are more alike around the world than they are different. That was brought home most poignantly while we visited a high school in Rome. It was the eve of the Iraqi war and we were serenaded by a young lady who sang "Imagine" with tears streaming down her face. The hope for peace knows no boundaries.

Late one evening we were returning to our hotel on our very large bus, which was trying to negotiate its way through the narrow streets of Florence. As it rounded a corner, it got stuck between cars that had parked too close to the corner leaving inadequate room for our bus to turn. We couldn't go forward and with traffic behind us we couldn't back up. As a school leader it made me feel right at home.

The driver, undaunted, got out and enlisted the aid of a couple of onlookers. Because cars are much smaller there they simply lifted the offending car and set it on the sidewalk. This led me to several insights. Sometimes you don't have to widen an ancient street and tear down the glorious past to make way for modernity. You just have to move the obstacles that are blocking you from moving ahead. And you can't do it alone.

So I am not so sure the Italian schools need to worry as much about creativity as they think. At least there is one bus driver there who has it figured out.

Paul Houston is AASA executive director. E-mail: [e-mail]