"Passport"-- to Ignorance. No more geography

Passport to Ignorance
by Mère Fâchée

In the mid 1990’s, my three daughters were in elementary school in a large district in south King County. This school had a building-wide program called “Passports”. Some of the parents I talked to were excited about it, but my personal experience was more than disappointing.

The idea behind passports was that each room would ‘become’ a country for several weeks. The concept was that the students would get deep learning about this particular country. Then, the entire school would spend a week visiting the other ‘countries’ and learning about them from the other students. The whole thing would culminate in an evening when the parents would visit their children’s classrooms. It was the execution, not the idea, that was the main problem, although the amount of time devoted to it was not justified, based on what learning took place.

Also, one of the years, the parent night was scheduled for Maundy Thursday (Holy Week, right before Easter). I told my children to tell their teachers that we would not be attending, as we had responsibilities at church that night. I told the principal that it was poor planning, and not very culturally sensitive of him to plan a school-wide program for Holy Week.

The first year that my family was exposed to Passports was when my oldest daughter was in fifth grade, the middle one in second, and the youngest not yet there. Daughter number 1 did learn quite a bit about her middle eastern country. The teachers tended to pick countries of which they had some personal knowledge, and this one was married to someone who was from that country. However, daughter number 2 learned next to nothing when she visited her sister’s ‘country’. The best she could come up with was, “They barter there.”

Daughter number 2 could not even tell me what continent her country was in, much less what language the people spoke, what religion they were, what the country produced, what its geography was like, any of its history… Her teacher had visited this country and used the opportunity as a travelogue. She brought her souvenirs to school and taught the kids to spell out the words one through ten in the Cyrillic alphabet. (There’s a life skill for you!) Knowing nothing themselves, they certainly could not teach what they learned to their ‘visitors’.

I aired my grievances at a meeting of the Learning Improvement Team (LIT), of which I was a member. Daughter 1’s teacher was also a member. He said he was completely satisfied that the only knowledge Daughter 2 gained from his class was that they barter there. The result was a rather heated discussion between the two of us over what the point of the Passports program was. His goal was entirely multicultural ‘understanding’. Mine was academic knowledge. The principal stepped in and said that both were important and moved the meeting to other topics.

The next year, the execution was pretty much the same. A few classes got some deep learning about their country, but most really didn’t. There was little to no knowledge gained through the visiting of other ‘countries’. But this year presented new problems.

Daughter 2, now a third grader, had Africa as her ‘country’. I don’t know off the top of my head how many actual countries there are in the continent of Africa, but I am sure the teacher could have managed to pick just one. It is also pretty hard to get deep learning about a single country when one studies an entire continent. It is pretty diverse in geography, race, history, climate, political systems. I think the teacher just wanted to focus on zoo animals.

By the family’s third year in this school, Daughter 3 was a second grader. Her teacher had selected Japan, a place she had visited. There was the usual travelogue aspect to her treatment, but this teacher also managed to scare the daylights out of my little girl, having convinced her that the school was going to be bombed. I found out about much of this many years later, as Daughter 3 belatedly realized what a skewed and inappropriate experience she had had, and finally told me about it.

This teacher was completely fixated on the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II. I was only vaguely aware of this. I knew she had read the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, about the little girl who died from radiation from the Hiroshima bomb. I knew the class was making paper cranes. The teacher even asked me, when she found out I was a chemical engineer, if I could do an experiment in class to demonstrate the power of a nuclear explosion. (“Uh, no. And if I could, you wouldn’t want me to.”) What I didn’t know about was that this seemed to be the entire focus of the unit. They didn’t really learn about anything else related to Japan. I also didn’t know about the “duck and cover” drills she had the kids doing. The poor kid was terrified that the school would be bombed.

The classes spent about six weeks every year, at least part of every day, focussing on Passport activities. The week spent visiting each other’s ‘countries’ was entirely devoted (all day long) to Passports. The evening event required the presence of teachers, so they likely were paid overtime for that. If you evaluate what was learned and compare it to the lost opportunity for other learning, the whole thing was a colossal waste of time and resources – a passport to ignorance.