Deirdra Stockmann: You can't quantify the educational experience

I doubt there is a better way to get to know West Philadelphia than through the eyes of the children who turn its streets into the playgrounds their schools and city rarely provide. When you escape the schoolyard fence with a couple of kids, they are eager to share a different world.

Unfamiliar with the territory, I was at the mercy of a pair of brothers as we hiked through the urban terrain to their home. After following their lead through Powelton Village, we emerged from an alley onto a quiet street.

It was dusk when they pointed out their house at the end of the block. I waited after they rang the bell. Usually I would exchange polite nods with whoever opened the door and turn to leave.

This door opened to reveal an old, fragile woman. Rather than signal me to leave, she softly invited me in. She inquired with a grandmother's sternness about the boys' behavior that afternoon.

Then she looked at me with a gentle seriousness and spoke in a near a whisper.

"Thank you... Thank you for teaching them."

Her tone carried a level of sincerity and gravity that threw me off balance. Looking into her tired eyes through thick glasses only magnified the unjust dessert of the thanks she was giving me. She had given her life to raise three generations of children, I had given a few hours to help them read.

As I stepped off the stoop, into the then dark December evening, I did not experience any dramatic catharsis. I did not immediately identify that experience as a turning point in my life, but I was deeply affected.

I could not then, nor could I today, assign a value, a grade, a number of credit hours to that highly personal encounter. But that brief insight into the lives of a family I might never have met, and the unspoken agreement of the value of education resides permanently in my consciousness. Among other anonymous experiences, it silently yet incessantly reminds me of my duty to society.

Deep inside last Saturday's New York Times was a brief story on President Bush's "reading czar" and the future of education funding. G. Reid Lyon, head of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a primary contributor to Bush's so-called "groundbreaking" education bill, emphasized the importance of scientific data, test results and research-generated statistics in the development of reform policy.

Representative of the quantity-focused public, politicians wait to be sold solutions to our nation's social problems. In choosing policy initiatives, they depend exclusively on statistics claimed to guarantee success.

When policies fail, decision makers do not consider the possibility that this oversimplified approach might be inadequate. Instead, politicians demand more and better numbers.

They ought to reexamine both the process of creating public policy, as well as the quality of the programs it supports. Perhaps there is more to it than just numbers. Perhaps some numbers have no meaning. Perhaps others are not honest.

Part of the solution will always depend on scores and statistics, and rightfully so within our social context. Yet we must be wary of empty and misleading data. More importantly we need to realize that some very essential things may be virtually impossible to reduce to numbers.

How do you assign a point value to meeting grandma? How do you score the experience of catching a glimpse into the private and complex life of another human being? Experiences that cannot be captured in time, with effects that seethe into every aspect of one's existence, can certainly not be captured in a grade. Yet, most often, these are the experiences that drive people to change society.

Colleges and universities have the most direct influence on each new wave of citizens to enter the work force and society. They simultaneously set the standard for all lower schools by establishing expectations for all students who strive to attend them.

Thus, institutions of higher learning cannot simply be clearinghouses for grade point averages and test scores. They must also facilitate and explicitly value learning experiences beyond the lecture hall. Just as a chemist must spend countless hours in a lab to learn what can never be sufficiently communicated through textbooks, citizens cannot know how to contribute to their society without being active participants in it.

By integrating more service-based learning courses into the university curriculum, the inherently immeasurable value of personal experience will necessarily find its way into every classroom, every teacher, every student. Subsequently, the raw data generated by research will be given a more complete meaning, making it more effectively applicable to policy.

Only when policy begins to reflect this more inclusive system of values, respecting qualitative experience along with quantitative data, will it be equipped to respond to the complex issues it only dances around today.

Deirdra Stockmann is a senior Politics, Philosophy, and Economics major from Oak Park, Il.

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