All posts in category Tradition in the Classroom

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION Ic: WHY COME TO SCHOOL? (cont…)

Let’s continue the argument in favor of a more progressive understanding of schooling.  In the last post, we discussed an analogy to schooling: giving and receiving directions.  The traditionalist understanding of education is like a mere list of directions to students, directions in an area students are unfamiliar with and to somewhere they have no desire to go.  A more progressive schooling would be sure students were familiar with the area first, then allow them to practice getting there.  When we understand schooling in this “progressive” way, the need for repeated testing falls apart like toilet paper in a rain storm.  You can still use it if you want, but it won’t have the effect you’re after, and you’re likely to make a mess in the process.

Let’s stick with the directions analogy for a minute: if our goal is to help students get from point A to point B, a standardized test is the equivalent of making students write out a list of the directions they have heard.  It only provides a way to check if they had memorized the list of directions.  It does not test whether or not they understood why they were going to point B in the first place, or whether or not they could actually get there in real life.

This is a meaningless game.  Students recognize that.  Instead of providing an evaluation of how much students are learning, repeated standardized tests merely test to see how many students in any given school are willing to compete in the game.  This is why test scores are so unshakeably tied to race and class.  When schooling conditions are pleasant and the meaningless school game seems to be a game that must be played, a higher proportion of students will work to master the lists of information provided.  They will try to perform well on the regurgitative tests.  When schooling in unpleasant and there is less family and peer pressure to do well at the school game, a higher proportion of students will not bother.

Standardized tests promise to provide a dipstick measurement of student learning.  What they provide instead is a measure of cultural compliance.

What would truly provide a check of student learning would be a system in which students are allowed to drive from point A to point B.  Can they navigate the difficulties of real life conditions to perform at an important adult skill?  Do they have the imagination, knowledge, and experience to get there?  There are two main reasons why this kind of authentic testing is not attractive to those who shout for increased testing and “accountability.”  First, these kinds of tests would cost a great deal of money.  Second, these tests would force schools to loosen their coercive grip on young people.  In short, these kinds of authentic tests would disrupt two of the important functions of institutional schooling.  They would release students from the economically designed control offered by our current school model.

Let’s see how it would work in practice:  To see if students really had mastered an authentic skill, such as driving cross town from point A to point B, a teacher would need to spend time with each individual student.  The teacher would need to help the student with some maps and written directions.  The teacher would have to gauge when each student was ready to move to the next step in the learning process.  Finally, the student would have to be allowed to authentically test her skills.  She would have to get from point A to point B, first with some teacher guidance, then finally on her own.  Such a test would provide real information about the intelligence, knowledge, imagination, and skills of students.  It would keep teachers accountable for the authentic learning of their students.

But imagine the financial price.  In essence, each student would need her own adult teacher.  Instead of the current model that provides one salaried adult teacher for twenty to thirty kids, this model would multiply that salary cost by at least twenty times.

Second, this kind of testing would shatter the implicit coercive wall of schools.  It would force schools to abdicate their implicit role as containment for the majority of young people during the traditional work day.  If schools were to attempt to give students an authentic education, one that consisted of helping them master the skills and knowledge that they will need as adults in our society, they would have to allow students to try out those ideas outside of the institution.  Young people would no longer be (more or less) reliably contained and separated from adult society.  They could engage in the delinquency that has been such a feared part of youth for centuries.

If the goal is to force schools, teachers, and administrators to be accountable for student learning, standardized tests are only a convenient figleaf.  They do not check to see if students are actually mastering any intellectual or practical skills and knowledge.  They only check to see how willing they are to play the game of memorizing lists of seemingly haphazard information.  Teachers and schools can pack such lists of information into more appealing forms.  They can increase material incentives for students to play the testing game.  They can limit the functions of their school to drill students in the peculiar skills necessary to master this meaningless game.  But they do not have to provide any authentic education.

Such tests and testing regimes remove any accountability from teachers and schools.  They allow teachers and schools to spend their time on the testing game itself instead of on helping students master real adult challenges.

Consider the difference in the questions teachers and schools face when they are faced with a standardized testing regime, as opposed to when they are trying to help students authentically master ideas:

Teacher’s questions   for himself in testing regime: Teacher’s questions   for himself in authentic education:
Will the student remember what I told her about the plot   of Hamlet? How can I help students understand Hamlet’s existential   dilemma?
What tricks can I show students to help them get a good   score on a reading-comprehension question? Can students read a voter-information bulletin?
What do they need to know for the test about the   Pythagorean theorem? Do my students understand the relationship between the   sides of right triangles?
How can I entice them to try their hardest on the test so   that I do not get my salary docked? Can they function as competent, caring, informed adults?

 

Which column puts more pressure on teachers?  Which column has more difficult questions?  Which column reflects a teacher who puts more effort into true education for students?

The answer is obvious: testing merely elevates the meaningless game of random information repetition into the only measure of education.  It gives students and teachers a free pass to sidestep the difficult work of real education.  It gives students no reason to play along.  And it forces schools and school districts to enforce the vision of education that is least productive.  It pushes those districts to increase the coercive and regurgitative nature of institutional schooling, when those are the factors that had pushed students to evade the meaningless game of standardized testing in the first place.

In other words, an educational regime that emphasizes standardized testing will discourage all the elements of education itself.  It decreases teacher responsibility, removes local control of schooling decisions, and restricts students from developing their skills as the intelligent citizens necessary to a democracy.

 

FURTHER READING: Theodore Sizer, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (Mariner, 2004); John Holt, How Children Learn (1969).

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by Adam Laats on November 26, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 26, 2011

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TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION Ib: DISCOVERY…OF WHAT? (continued…)

To return to our imagined argument about the proper nature of schooling (to see the prequels to this argument, see here and here): Traditionalists can argue that not only does the traditionalist educational scheme make philosophical sense, but it makes a great deal of practical sense as well.  In the imaginary progressivist classroom described in the last post, a student left to “inquire” about the history of American chattel slavery “discovered” that slavery was not such a bad deal for the slaves involved.  A horrible and all-too-common result.  But in real classrooms, there is often a much more depressing result from progressivist pedagogy.  A student can only discover such alarming falsehoods if she actually does some inquiring.  Most students, when left to explore intellectual fields, will simply sit down in one comfortable corner and wait until they’re allowed to leave.  That is, without a classroom structure that pushes students toward learning, the vast majority of young people will not learn.  The good news is that they will not uncover any of the intellectual landmines that threaten those students engaged in progressivist “discovery”-oriented pedagogy.  But that is only because they will not uncover any ideas at all.

Consider one of the classroom staples of progressive-style education.  This teaching technique has become such a stereotypical signal of progressive teaching that principals, parents, and other teacher evaluators often give teachers credit for being creative and dynamic if only they use this technique.  At the same time, this method is the bane of every serious student everywhere.  It is the method every lazy student loves and every earnest nerd hates.  It is “group work.”

The philosophy of group work is compelling.  In the traditional classroom scheme, the teacher stood at the front of the class and delivered information.  The students sat in orderly rows and tried their hardest to absorb that information.  Periodically, the teacher would ask the students a series of questions about the information.  Students were graded on the amount of that information they could successfully regurgitate.

Progressivist educators asked themselves, what is the point of such rigid teaching?  Students don’t actually learn much; they only memorize and spit back dry facts.  Even worse, for progressives, is the social lesson that this kind of teaching ingrains.  Students don’t learn the material, but they do learn that their role in society is to passively accept the dictates of authority, without appeal.  This scheme trains subjects, not citizens.

Instead, progressives advocated group work, among other things.  One benefit would be that students would have more chance to really learn material by discussing it and working with it first hand.  Just as important, they would internalize the notion that they are important members of society.  Their voices deserve to be heard.

Sounds good.  But in practice, the method of group work means that the cruelties of the playground are brought into the classroom and passed off as modern teaching techniques.  Instead of having an educated caring adult leading a classroom discussion, that discussion is left in the hands of children.  It doesn’t take a belief in original sin to understand that children can be cruel.  They can show a finely developed sense of social combat.  And putting them into less supervised groups in order to work on classroom ideas simply abdicates the basic responsibility of teaching.

In those groups, no learning takes place.  At best, the students merely look sheepishly at one another, talking about things of more interest to them: sports, TV, music, social events.  If there is one student who is earnestly trying to complete the assignment the group has been given, she must usually work in vain to interest her fellow students.  That role should not be foisted off onto students.  It is the job of a teacher to compel students to get some learning done, not of one hapless and well-meaning student.

At worst, time in a group is time to fine tune the playground staples of ostracism and groupthink.  As progressivist educators argue, working in a group does allow students to practice their social skills.  But instead of the naïve progressivist assumption that students would work diligently together and learn the value of democratic citizenship, students hone their existing social skills into cutting weapons that are used against the least proficient members of the assigned group.

In other words, progressivists assume that young people need to learn social skills.  They don’t.  Young people have keen social skills.  They group together in packs and cliques with predictable precision.  What young people lack is the intellectual, moral, and spiritual maturity to stand up to those bullies who would pick on the weakest members of the group in order to get a quick boost to their own social status.  As a result, placing students in a group forces them instantly to renegotiate their social rank, their playground pecking order.  It forces the socially strongest to pick on the weakest in order to shore up their status.  And those in the middle usually watch the abuse unfold, unwilling to stand up to it in case it turns on them.  We do not see democracy in microcosm.  What we see is a tiny totalitarianism.

Of course, this kind of cruel ganging-up doesn’t happen in every classroom group.  But just as it is the intellectual role of a teacher to guide students along a very narrow path of truth, so it is the teacher’s role to ensure that every member of the classroom feels safe and encouraged to learn.  By assigning students to groups and assuming they are capable of the very adult task of learning together, teachers act irresponsibly.  At best, they waste students’ time by forcing them to chat together without any real learning going on.  At worst, teachers give up their role as shepherd and protector and abandon their less socially gifted students to the merciless rule of the adolescent social scene.

 

 

DISCOVERY. . . OF WHAT? FURTHER READING

John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Free Press, 1997); Dewey, The School and Society & The Child and the Curriculum (Readaclassic.com, 2011); Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1953); Max Rafferty, Classroom Countdown (Hawthorn Books, 1970); Jay E. Adams, Back to the Blackboard (Evangelical Press, 1982).

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by Adam Laats on November 23, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 23, 2011

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WHAT ARE SCHOOLS FOR?

Teachers that I talk to often complain that everyone thinks they can do a better job, even though such folks never spent five minutes in a real school.  Politicians, neighbors, pushy relatives, all tell teachers loudly and repeatedly that it would be easy to fix schools.  Teachers often point out, sometimes publicly, sometimes only in teachers’ lounges, that those folks would never talk that way about other professions, like medicine or law.  But since everyone went to school, everyone thinks and talks as if they’re experts in school reform.

I think the teachers’ complaint makes a lot of sense.  I work with a lot of smart people who are planning to become teachers.  A lot of them are very well educated, very smart, very hard working, and very eager to help people by becoming teachers.  There is a huge difference in the way these folks view schooling and education reform before they start teaching, and once they’ve got a taste of life in real classrooms.  Many of them come into the teachers’ education program confident that they will be a new kind of teacher, one who doesn’t water down hard ideas for students, one who doesn’t take any guff, one who doesn’t softpedal the hard facts of intellectual life for students.  After they’ve tried it, even for just a few weeks, they often relate stories of shock and sometimes depression at the sheer impossibility of accomplishing their lofty goals.

Maybe it would help the conversation if everyone had to teach for a few years before they could suggest ways to fix schools.  But that’s not likely to happen.  Especially in the case of ambitious politicians, there will always be those who think they have a simple panacea to fix America’s schools.

In addition to the fact that some of these schemes demonstrate a profound ignorance of the realities of schooling, there is another enormous problem with all these reform ideas.  Depending on who’s talking, the fix for schools might be more discipline for those lazy kids.  Or it might be less discipline for those creative yet hounded students.  It might be less public money to encourage competition and entrepreneurialism.  Or it might be more public money for better teacher pay and student conditions.  Like a blanket pulled in every direction at once, with all these varied prescriptions, reform can go nowhere.

This is not incidental to the nature of American schooling.  America’s notions of the proper role of schooling have always pulled not only in different directions, but in precisely opposite directions.  Like a tug-of-war in many directions, this has resulted in short bursts of movement, followed by correction, and often accompanied by messy pileups.

As David Tyack and Larry Cuban argued in their 1995 essay “Tinkering Toward Utopia,” Americans have long held contradictory ideas about the purposes of institutional schooling.  In Tyack’s and Cuban’s words, Americans have always wanted schools to do lots of different things for their children:

“to socialize them to be obedient, yet to teach them to be critical thinkers;

“to pass on the best academic knowledge that the past has to offer, yet also to teach marketable and practical skills;

“to cultivate cooperation, yet to teach students to compete with one another in school and later in life;

“to stress basic skills but also to encourage creativity and higher-order thinking;

“to focus on the academic ‘basics’ yet to permit a wide range of choice of courses.”

To muddy the waters even further, I think it will be more accurate and more helpful if we change Tyack’s and Cuban’s ‘yets’ and ‘buts’ to ANDs.  That is, Americans have wanted both ends of these apparent dichotomies in their schools.  When one side appears to have worked itself into absurdity, public pressure grows to emphasize the other end.

In terms of the endless bickering over whether our schools need to be more “progressive” or more “traditional,” this multiplicity of ideas about the nature of schooling means that everyone can find something to be angry about at any time.  For example, a progressive, democratic parent or teacher can find lots to complain about if he or she wants schools to do a good job of teaching students to be cooperative.  Especially in these days of high-stakes standardized testing, students can spend most of a school day learning that the function of school is to move quickly through academic material.  Like the end of a zombie movie, students learn that the most vital notion of schooling is to keep moving.

On the other hand, parents, teachers, administrators, and students who hope for more “traditional” schools can gripe that schools do nothing but “fluff.”  They don’t prepare students with the real-world skills they’ll need to get and keep good jobs in a competitive economy.

Both sides can keep on talking, since they can both be right at the same time.  Both can claim the justice of having the vast majority of people on their sides (“Every intelligent teacher I know agrees with me”) while also claiming to be a victimized minority (“Why don’t the powers that be every recognize these obvious truths about school?!?”)

Perhaps this pull toward the middle is a good thing.  It might be far more terrifying if one group of zealous educators could simply seize control of America’s schools and declare a dramatically new direction.  As it is, the notion of “school” is tied up with so many conflicting and contradictory notions that it is more likely to maintain its basic structure than it is to change rapidly or dramatically.

 

Further reading: David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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by Adam Laats on November 21, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 21, 2011

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PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION Ib: WHY COME TO SCHOOL? (cont…)

It is easy to notice that students don’t come to school to learn.  In fact, it is difficult to spend any amount of time in a secondary school without butting up against that central truth.  But it is much harder to figure out how to engage students more authentically in the learning that could go on inside a school.

There are at least two big problems.  First, students often don’t have the background knowledge to make the transmitted information interesting.  For example, students can be told about the Boston Massacre of 1770.  They can hear or read about the colonists’ anger at the Stamp Act.  They can be told that five men died from the
shooting by the British soldiers.

But without an adequate background, students can too easily miss the importance of the event.  They can see it as simply a very small battle, one in which just a few people were killed.  Without a fuller historical understanding, they can view the Boston Massacre as simply one of the steps that led to the Revolution a few years later.  They can miss the terrifying uncertainty and excitement of that March day in 1770, the anger among the colonists, the sweaty nervousness among the armed teenagers in the British army.  Without a proper background, the events lose their individuality, the participants become stick figures acting out their parts, running along a pre-ordained track toward the Revolution and the start of the united States.  Boring.

The second major problem is that many students don’t have a decent reason to work to remember this transmitted information.  This can be different for a lot of students.  For a surprising number of young people, the internal rewards are enough.  They want to earn good grades, so they work hard at the abstract task of memorizing the series of facts that are told to them.  Sometimes they are successful, sometimes not.

The bigger problem comes from the much larger numbers of students who see very little reason to chase after those internal rewards.  They don’t care what kind of grade they get.  They don’t see any reason to work hard to memorize this series of facts.  They don’t care about Crispus Attucks, or Paul Revere, or the anxiety of late colonial life.

Consider this analogy: without these two things, 1.) background knowledge with which to contextualize information and 2.) a reason to care about that information, information transmitted in schools is like listening to driving directions in an area you’ve never been, to a place you have no desire to go.

With a solid background, you can follow along with those directions in your head, making sense of each part.  When you are told to “take a left on Broadway, where there’s that big Halal store on the corner,” you can picture that store and picture yourself driving along the new street.  It all fits.  You can follow along and mentally get to the place you want to go.  You’ll remember it.  You’ll get there.

But if you are hearing directions for a city you don’t know, you will have to do the much more difficult task of simply memorizing a list of directions.  You’ll have to remember that after taking a left at the Halal store, you need to go through three lights, then take a right on 83rd, etc.  Without a preexisting knowledge of the destination in general terms, it is a much more difficult task to remember a list of directions.  You are not able to picture the route in your
head as it is described.  Second, if you don’t really want to go where the directions are leading, you will be less likely to make the effort to memorize the list of directions.  You will be more likely to simply stop listening after you hear the mind-numbing list of directions.  But if you really need to get there, you will be more likely to listen carefully, take notes, and ask questions to be sure you’ve got the directions correct.

In any case, reading a list of directions then expecting people to be able to get where they are supposed to go is a tall order.  Yet that is what the transmission model of schooling assumes.  It presumes that young people will be able to memorize long lists of facts, usually separated from any reasons to make the facts seem important.  Also, the transmission model assumes that students will be able to develop the background information to contextualize those facts at the same time that they are receiving the lists of facts.

In order to make schooling more effective, we need to shatter both of these mistaken preconceptions.  We need to break away from thinking of proper schooling as a transmission of facts from adult to youth.  We need to break away from conceiving of the proper measure of that education as the regurgitation of lists of transmitted facts.

So how do we do it instead?
Let’s return to our directions analogy.  If a young person was not familiar with a part of town, we would not
simply read them a list of directions.  If we could, we’d take them on a tour of that part of town first.  We’d let them know that in a little while we’ll be expecting them to be able to get to the destination on their own.  That we need them to get there without help from us in order to function as an adult in our society.  Then we might show them some maps of the area as we point out the route.  They could try to redraw the route themselves on a map before they try it their first time.  As they go, they could progress from driving with an experienced instructor at first to driving on their own.

And in order to decide if the education had been successful, we would not simply ask students to recite back the list of directions they had been told to a place they did not want to go in a part of town they had never been.  Rather, we would evaluate their education by watching them get themselves to that destination.  If they took a different route, fine.  The important part would not be a question of repeating back abstract transmitted information but achieving a real task set out for them, one in which they had been given the support and guidance to complete successfully.

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by Adam Laats on November 12, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 12, 2011

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TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION Ia: DISCOVERY…OF WHAT? (continued…)

Traditionalist educators have sometimes tried to combat the philosophical underpinnings of progressivist education.  In America, conservatives have often argued from a Christian viewpoint.  The materialist understanding of humans, they sometimes say, misunderstands the nature of humanity.  People are not merely clever apes, but something essentially different.  Therefore, young humans need to be taught that there are transcendent truths; there are absolute values of right and wrong that need to be transmitted from one generation to the next.

This has concrete implications in classroom practice.  If there are eternal values and truths, it is not merely mistaken to adopt a “discovery” approach to classroom teaching.  If there are such things, it becomes both cruel and dangerous to do so.  It would
be like allowing students to wander at will around a field, when the teacher knows full well that there are intellectual landmines buried throughout the field.  It would be to keep silent as students wandered away from the truth.  Instead, the proper role for a teacher is to lead the children carefully along an intellectual path. The teacher’s job is not to encourage the children to wander, but to correct the children—sternly if necessary—to keep them from straying from the correct path.

What does this mean for day-to-day teaching?  If we have this kind of traditionalist mindset about the nature of morality—that there are eternal values of right and wrong—then the goal of education must be to impart those truths.  Fundamentally, it requires us to acknowledge that the teacher must remain the authority in the classroom.  Consider two different ways of teaching about the history of antebellum slavery.  A progressivist pedagogy might encourage students to collect information about the nature of
that slavery, make a website in which that history is explained, then present this website to the class and school/learning community.  The role of the teacher in this scheme is to help the student find research material, guide the process by which the student learns how to put the information into a website, facilitate the presentation, and evaluate the presentation by suggesting improvements.  The student might then improve the presentation based on the teacher’s feedback.  The goal would be for the student to be motivated by her interest in the subject, to conduct authentic research in which she learns about the history of
American slavery, and then gets practice in speaking to a group.  All of those skills are improved while the student learns about the historical content.  It sounds good.  But what happens when the student concludes that antebellum plantation life didn’t
look too bad for slaves?  It may sound outlandish, but such was my experience with student research time and time again.  Students did not yet have the ability to fully understand the horrors of being owned.  They did not yet have the intellectual
maturity to put themselves fully into the shoes of a slave and understand what such a thing would mean.  Students would
look at the maps online of the typical plantation house and conclude that slaves had a “nice little row of houses all to themselves.”  Even worse, what happens when the student finds online sites from white supremacists claiming that slaves enjoyed slavery?  How does she know what information to include or exclude?  And if she presents her history of the happy slave to the rest of the class, how are they to know that such history is fundamentally flawed?  The role of the teacher is precisely to prevent those things
from happening.  Before a student can be encouraged to “discover” the historical lessons of antebellum slavery, she must
be given a lot of information about the topic.  She needs to understand the horrors of dehumanization that accompanied
chattel slavery.  She needs to understand that slaves were people, just like her, with the same rights and expectations.  There are values, in other words, that a student must be directly taught.  It is not responsible to allow students to explore among the ideas that are out there about slavery without giving them a roadmap.  Students should be led intellectually to understand that owning other humans is a fundamental injustice.  They should not be expected to consider that truth as one idea among others.

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by Adam Laats on November 9, 2011  •  Permalink
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IS There an Education Culture War?

People disagree about the nature and proper direction for American schools.  But do those disagreements rise to the level of culture war?  Unlike the evolution/creation divide, there is a lot of room in the middle.

For instance, are charter schools ‘progressive’ or ‘traditional?’  Some scholars suggest that charter schools are an attempt to privatize education and undermine the power of teachers’ unions.  They suggest
that charter schools tend to function regressively.

Other charter-school advocates say that charter schools give students and families a fairer chance at a quality
education.  This “Waiting for Superman” crowd promotes charter schools as the ‘progressive’ solution for poor people.

The same could be said for other educational ideas.  For instance, where does the notion of testing fit in?  For most of the twentieth century, the idea that tests could determine the individual strengths and weaknesses of students led the pack of progressive ideology.  With the proper array of tests, progressives believed, schooling could be tailored to each particular student.  The procrustean bed of institutional schooling could be shattered with a more individualized sense of personal experiences and beliefs.

Today, some educational thinkers promote the progressive possibilities of high-stakes standardized testing.  They argue that kids from lower-incomefamilies have been allowed to slip through the educational cracks.  For too long, they argue, such kids have been subjected to the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”   High-stakes testing promised to turn that around.  Embedded in the language of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act was the notion that schools must improve test scores for all kids, including those from groups that historically underperformed on academic
measures.

Other education thinkers disagree.  They dismiss such talk as mere window-dressing for conservative attempts to seize school power.  Famously, New York University professor Diane Ravitch recently switched sides in the debate over the meanings and implication of high-stakes testing.  Ravitch helped design the original testing
megalith.  Now she argues that the focus on tests undermines the proper goals of schooling for all students, especially those from the most vulnerable categories.

This broad expanse of room in the middle for disagreement and debate about foundational ideas in the field of education suggests that there is no real culture war at work.  If people can agree on basic terms and notions, even if they disagree about policy and practice, then they must share fundamental ideas about the proper form and
purpose of schooling.  The fact that issues such as testing and charter schools attract different arguments from
conservatives and progressives implies that each side shares most of the notions of its opposition.  The
disagreements are more prosaic than in the starkly defined ideologies and theologies of creation or evolution.

More telling, I have had only a handful of firsthand encounters with culture-war clashes in my career in education.  We all have heard stories of teachers getting fired for offending people’s religious or political beliefs, but in my
experience parents are far more concerned with grades and achievement than in creeping secularism or dictatorial preachiness in schools.

On the other hand, one could argue that education is the ultimate culture-war battleground, since it forces Americans to define their values and rank the importance of foundational notions such as social inequality, race, religion, and the relationship between family and state.

For example, it is difficult to think of a culture-war issue that has not become a clash over schooling.  For instance, the forum for most disagreements over beliefs in creation and evolution has always been schooling.  Should schools teach evolution?  Creation?

Similarly, clashes over the role of race in American culture have been framed as questions about schooling.
Brown v. Board focused on the legitimacy of educational segregation.  George Wallace stood in the doorway of a school, the Foster Auditorium of the University of Alabama in 1963 to proclaim “Segregation now, segregation
tomorrow and segregation forever.”

Schools also are the field in which activists contend over fundamental notions of social and economic justice.  Schools in poor neighborhoods look, feel, and are funded in very different ways than schools in affluent ones.  Nicholas Kristof’s recent plea for more equalized funding for early-education programs only rehashes generations of
arguments about the power of schooling to combat the great inequalities of American life.

So IS there a culture war in education?  Do Americans fundamentally disagree with one another about the basic premises of schooling?  As with evolution and creation, do the two sides have such different worldviews that they claim not to be able even to understand the other side’s view?  Or is education an embodiment of Louis Hartz’ famous claim in 1955 that America really only has one fundamental political tradition, that of a general liberalism?

If you are a teacher, parent, or school administrator, have you had experiences with culture wars in your schools?  Or is this more evidence to back up Morris Fiorina’s claim that culture-war rhetoric is merely the creation of a myopic chattering class?

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by Adam Laats on November 5, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 5, 2011

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Agnotology and Education

Late-night comics must miss the days of Cheney and Rumsfeld.  Dick Cheney shot people and literally had no heartbeat due to a special kind of pacemaker. Donald Rumsfeld offered rhetorical gems during press
conferences, none better than the following from 2002:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some
things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Along these lines, although with pithier prose, historian of science Robert Proctor  has suggested a promising line of study, about the things we don’t know and the ways we don’t know them.  He calls the field agnotology, or the study
of ignorance.  Others have suggested different terms, such as agnoiology.  (See Tim Lacy’s discussion of the history on the US Intellectual History blog for more.)

In a recent collection of essays co-edited with Londa Schiebinger, Proctor laid out a three-part structure of agnotology.  In Proctor’s view, it will be helpful to differentiate between types of ignorance:

ignorance as native state (or resource), ignorance as lost realm (or selective choice), and

ignorance as a deliberately engineered and strategic ploy (or active construct).

Proctor and some of the other essay contributors are especially interested in the ways that ignorance can be a strategic ploy.  Proctor, for instance, describes the ways tobacco companies constructed plausible ignorance about the negative health impacts of smoking.  Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, in their contribution “Challenging Knowledge: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War,” explore the conspiratorial history of the George Marshall Institute and its quest to create ignorance about the causes of global climate change.

It seems to me the study of ignorance has another productive application in our thinking about the cultural and intellectual role of institutional education.  Notions of education usually include the implicit claim to be combating ignorance.  But in fact, some kinds of ignorance have long been part and parcel of educational goals.  In general, this has taken the form of certain types of information from which young people must be shielded.  This has a long and storied legacy.  Anthony Comstock, for example, made his career on protecting youth, women, and other “vulnerable” classes of people from exposure to lewd information.

In American schools, a Calvinist hangover has implicitly shaped ideologies of mandatory ignorance, especially for the young.  Pre-1857 editions of McGuffey’s Third Reader included a short anonymous selection that typified this tradition.  In the short dialogue, “Knowledge is Power,” the first speaker asserts confidently, “Knowledge is an excellent thing.”

An old man replies, “It may be a blessing or a curse.  Knowledge is only an increase of power, and power may be a bad as well as a good thing.”  The old man goes on to give examples that overwhelm the initial reluctance of his optimistic interlocutor: A horse without a bridle can wreck a barn. A pond without dams can flood a field.  A ship well steered goes faster, but if steered wrong, “the more sail she carries, the further will she go out of her course.”

The younger man is convinced.  Without tight control, such things can cause damage.  “‘Well, then,’ continued the old man, ‘if you see these things so clearly, I hope you can see, too, that knowledge to be a good thing, must be rightly applied.  God’s grace in the heart will render the knowledge of the head a blessing; but without this, it may prove to us no better than a curse.”

This short bit captures the powerful drive toward ignorance that long ruled the Reformed tradition in the United States.  Knowledge, in this view, was not a simple good.  It must be carefully examined and weighed before being pursued.  By itself, knowledge could be the sinful knowledge first banned for Adam and Eve.  It could be the knowledge of pernicious doubt and skepticism.  To become wise, in this tradition, meant remaining ignorant of such fields.

This tradition of mandatory ignorance has been enormously influential on American thinking about education and youth.  Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, the notion that ignorance must be actively promoted and defended among young people has proven culturally and politically powerful far beyond the circles of religious conservatives.  Knowledge about sex, violence, and—among certain circles—scientific topics such as evolution has been seen as an intellectual poison.  Building and defending walls of ignorance around such notions has been asserted as the primary aim of education.

For instance, in the 1920s, when the culture wars over the teaching of evolution first heated up, anti-evolutionists insisted that any chink in the armor of ignorance protecting young people would be worse than death.  In 1923, anti-evolution evangelist T.T. Martin demanded relentless defense of the ignorance of young people.  “Ramming poison down the throats of our children is nothing,” Martin accused, “compared with damning their souls with the teaching of Evolution.”

Other anti-evolutionists in the 1920s argued that this ignorance should only extend through children’s formative years.  By the time they reached college age, many thought, they could be safely allowed to know.  For instance, Alfred Fairhurst, a fundamentalist educator active in the 1920s controversies, had always argued that “in the colleges and universities [evolution] ought to be taught honestly and fully to the select few who have the ability to comprehend it in all its bearings.”

Similar arguments were made throughout the twentieth century about the importance of ignorance about sex for young people.  One of the most prolific fundamentalist writers about education and ignorance has been Tim LaHaye.  In his 1983 Battle for the Public School, LaHaye decried the fact that explicit knowledge about sex had been “jammed down the throats of our children.”  LaHaye described one passage of a sex-ed book:

thescene of intercourse portrays a naked father astride his equally naked wife,
intent on three areas of contact: lips, breasts/chest, penis/vagina.  The genital area offers an ‘inner’ diagram,
so that the child can perceive the mother’s vagina and uterus; the father has
inserted his penis into the vagina and is emitting sperm cells.

Such knowledge, LaHaye insisted, exemplified “this reckless policy of inflaming young minds with adult information.”  For LaHaye as for Protestant fundamentalists of the 1920s, this was not an undifferentiated insistence on ignorance, but rather a belief that certain types of ignorance must be maintained for young
people specifically.  As many conservative Protestants did not—and do not—object to the teaching of evolution
to older students, so LaHaye famously celebrated sex knowledge for some audiences.  In his 1976 book, The Act of Marriage, LaHaye promoted frank, explicit knowledge of sex for adult married couples.

This distinction between young unmarried people and married couples runs throughout current conservative Protestant thinking about sex education.  Ministries such as Joe Beam’s Family Dynamics promote knowledge about sex, but only within a traditional marriage.

For such Christian conservatives, knowledge as such is not dangerous, but the boundaries around knowledge must be vigorously defended.

The notion that young people must be protected from certain types of knowledge has powerful influence beyond the ranks of Protestant fundamentalists.  Recently, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v.
Entertainment Merchants Association (2010) that the state of California could not ban violent video games for those under eighteen years of age.  The Court agreed that such a ban violated the game-makers’ First Amendment right to free speech.

Justice Clarence Thomas made a curious rejoinder.  In his dissenting opinion, he argued that California could ban violent video games because the founding generation believed in and rigidly enforced parents’ ability to severely curtail the outer bounds of knowledge accessible to their children.

Thomas argued that the founding generation demanded strong control over what young people could know.
He stated, “Adults [in the founding era] carefully controlled what they published for children.  Stories written for children were dedicated to moral instruction and were relatively austere, lacking details that might titillate children’s minds.”

Like LaHaye and the 1920s anti-evolutionists, Thomas insisted on the educational tradition of promoting, defending, and enforcing ignorance.  Certain topics, especially concerning sex, violence, and religiously charged notions such as evolution, must not be broached with young people.  There is an inherent danger, according to this line of thinking, in the merest exposure of young people to such forms of knowledge.  In this view, schools join parents as gatekeepers of such forbidden forms of knowledge.  The role of the school, parent, and society, is to become active purveyors of constructed ignorance for young people.

 

 

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by Adam Laats on November 1, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 1, 2011

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PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION Ia: WHY COME TO SCHOOL? (cont…)

In the last “progressive education” post, we discussed the notion that most students don’t come to school primarily to learn.  They are often willing to learn, but their main reason for going to school is because they have to.

Schools for less affluent kids wear the compulsion more nakedly.  Some schools resemble nothing so much as  prisons.  Students are processed like prisoners, by armed guards.  They have very little freedom in the school, and the fact that they are in school because they have to be is starkly evident.  Evident largely from the fact that many
students evade the requirement.  Do they want to learn?  By and large, yes.  But they do not connect their desire to learn with school.  They do not see school as the place to do their learning.  They see school as a requirement that they can evade.

Sometimes the evasion is internal.  That is, kids will be physically present in their schools, but they will not agree to master the mind-numbing tasks set before them.  They will not work to memorize the information that teachers attempt to transmit to them.  Thus, when the time comes for students to regurgitate that information on a high-stakes test, they cannot do it very well.  When large numbers of students in a given school don’t repeat back transmitted information successfully, it shows up in these NCLB days as a school that is not making “Adequate Yearly Progress.”  It shows up with a dunce cap on the school in the form of a label of “School in Need of Improvement.”

What does that mean for education?  Too often, it is assumed that new educational methods must be tried only in those schools that show the compulsion of attendance more nakedly.  In those schools where large numbers of students do not agree to the social contract.  Where students do not agree to work to memorize and repeat back chunks of information.

Educators say that they need to try new methods for “these kids” who aren’t succeeding in the traditional school environment.  The assumption is that students who come to school regularly and willingly, students who sit docilely through transmission-style classes and submit to tests of their reception of that information, the assumption is that such students are doing well in the traditional system.  But that’s not good enough.  All students, whether they are
willing to submit to school or not, must first really come to school tolearn.  If we start by assuming that those students who can repeat back transmitted information can do so because they’ve come to school to learn, we’ve put the cart before the horse.

A traditionalist might object at this point that we can’t sap the students’ responsibility for their own education.  If we don’t assume that students come to school to learn, a traditionalist might say, in the end we’re weakening them
even further.  We can’t do everything for a student.  They are not hothouse flowers.  It is a good point.  But it represents a misunderstanding.  Schools and teachers must not coddle students.  That is counterproductive in
both the short term and the long term.  But dismissing the simple assumption that students come to school to learn does not mean that we will turn school into what students desire; we will not turn school into a purely social event, where they can meet and mingle and enjoy themselves and one another.  A traditionalist might object that if we assume that students don’t come to school to learn, we have to radically decrease our expectations of student motivation.  But there is another solution.  Instead of making the tasks easier in order to encourage student buy-in, we must increase the responsibility we assign to students.  We need to begin our thinking about education by assuming that we must engage students in learning.  We must get students—even students that weren’t protesting too loudly against schooling as it was—to connect schooling with learning.  In short, we must convince students to come to school to learn.  What will that mean?

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by Adam Laats on October 29, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on October 29, 2011

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Traditionalist Education I: Discovery…of What?

TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION PART I: DISCOVERY…OF WHAT?

Underlying the standard teaching that goes on in most American schools are some fundamental philosophical assumptions about what it means to be a person and the nature of right and wrong.    Beginning in the early twentieth century, progressive educators, led by John Dewey, voiced a vision of humanity that resonated across
American culture.  They recognized that the modern era demanded a new understanding of humanity.  This was a question with ramifications beyond the rarified air of academic philosophy.  Progressive educators took these modern notions of the nature of humans and spelled out their meanings for classroom education.  In brief, modern philosophy recognized that ancient understandings of humanity no longer made sense.  In the traditional view, humans were essentially different from the rest of the animal and vegetable world.  They had a soul, a connection to a transcendent plane of being.  The modern view saw people as one example of life on earth.  One that had evolved into some highly specialized forms, to be sure, but not essentially different from other animals.  There were no transcendent truths out there somewhere; there were no ideal forms casting shadows down upon humanity.
Rather, truths were generated by people, for people.  This did not mean that there were no values, no meaning to notions of right and wrong.  But it did introduce the modern intellectual dilemma: those values could no longer be left unquestioned; they could no longer simply be accepted as givens in a universe dedicated to unrelenting change.

Traditionalists invariably point to a document from 1933 to illustrate this pernicious philosophy.  Signed by John Dewey and an A list of other progressive personalities, the Humanist Manifesto  declared in stirring tones “The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world.  The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes.”

What difference did these notions make to everyday classroom teaching?  At the most fundamental level, they suggested that learning should no longer be seen as the simple transmission of eternal truths from an older generation to a younger.  Young humans must not be seen as empty vessels to be filled with the wisdom of the ages.  Instead, the leading intellects of the progressive education idea argued that young humans, like humans of every age, construct their knowledge based on bits and pieces from their own lives.  In this understanding of humanity, education must not consist of mere lists of knowledge to be acquired, more or less successfully.  Rather, education must be built by each student, based on the experiences that student has already acquired.  In order to facilitate that construction of knowledge, schools and teachers must guide students in their educational process.  The role of the educator is no longer to simply dump knowledge into the young.  Rather, it must be to help those young people build their own knowledge.

For those who advocate traditionalist education, these changes meant a distressing shift in America’s assumptions about the proper role for its public schools.

FURTHER READING: Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education (1995); Mel and Norma Gabler, What Are They Teaching Our Children? (1987); Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public School (1983); Sam Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary? (1981)

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by Adam Laats on October 25, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on October 25, 2011

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Progressive Education I: Why Come to School?

Why should students go to school?  At the most basic level, the traditional answer is that students go to school to learn. That learning—in the traditional understanding—consists of the transmission of information from adults (teachers) into children (students).  The more intelligent and hard-working a
student is, the more he or she will retain of that transmitted information.  To complete the process, the adult will measure how much the student has learned by asking him or her to repeat back certain parts.

This testing, in the traditional way of thinking abouteducation and schooling, is like the old game of telephone, except not fun.  There is an assumed degradation of the information transmitted.  The student
is more or less successful—achieves a higher or lower grade—based on how much he or she can repeat back accurately.  On how well she can battle that inevitable degradation.

It may sound a little silly when it’s spelled out like that, but that understanding of the basic principle of schooling still has overwhelming cultural support.  It is one of the most basic foundations of our institutional education system.  For instance, when I pick up my fourth-grade daughter from school, I still ask the same dumb questions:

–“How was school today?”

–“Good.”  Or –“Okay.”

A pause.  Then,
–“What’d you learn about?”

–Shrug and non-committal noise.

It’s not just me.  I overhear every other parent and child having similar conversations at the end of the school day.  Maybe it is just a way for us to look like caring parents in front of the other parents.  Or to look like we are invested in our kids’ education.  Or to demonstrate to the teachers who are also standing around that we support their attempts to transmit information into our kids.  But at the back of that question are some big assumptions about what is supposed to go on in schools: “What did you learn about today?”  Assuming that each school day should include some measure of information transmitted from adult—or video, or book made and selected by adults—to kid.  And that the school should be prompting each student to build up a storehouse of information on a variety of subjects.

It is not only awkward after-school conversations that show this.  As we have all seen for the last ten years, the political power of the cultural idea of testing is hard to match.  The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 did not create the idea of testing.  It introduced a regime of high-stakes tests that would evaluate all
students’ abilities to read and perform mathematical processes.  Those tests were not just of interest to the individual students and their families.  They did not merely collate into a report card of progress for each
student.  In the new universe of NCLB, the test scores of individual students had practical implications for the funding of entire school districts.  If enough students failed to improve their test scores for three years in a row, school districts risked being forced to close schools and fire staff unless they came up with big ways to improve student scores fast.

The hinge of this regime remained the notion of testing as a way to evaluate the success of education.  The makers of NCLB did not invent this.  They merely tapped into dominant notions about the nature of
education.  Proponents of the NCLB regime did not need to explain that these tests would give good information about the process of learning at each school.  Everyone already agreed that testing could do that.  All NCLB did was build on this notion of testing to enforce a new scheme of funding and bureaucracy.

Americans already agreed that testing is the primary measure of school performance.  And behind the
notion of testing is the assumption that students go to school to receive transmitted information.  A formal testis a way to test how successful that transmission was.  This would only seem so important if that
transmission were assumed to be the main reason for going to school.  Not that NCLB or the regime of high-stakes testing hasn’t been controversial.  It has.  But the controversies have largely focused on the nature of the testing regime, or on the consequences of poor performance on tests.  The notion that students go to school primarily to receive transmitted information is not generally questioned.  That is the general understanding of what a student should be doing within those walls.

It does not take a very sophisticated understanding of sociological theory to see some holes in those assumptions.  Every teacher, every parent, every adult who works in a school sees it right away.  It is inescapable: This shared consensus about the reasons for going to school is only shared among adults.

For their part, students come to school for all sorts of reasons.  Some of them may come to school primarily to receive transmitted information.  But the leading reason why students come to school—from the  students’ perspective—is because they have to.  In different schools, that requirement is more or less coerced.  Many students don’t mind the coercion.  Yes, they have to go.  But the school also represents to them their entire social universe.  And many of them even share the general adult expectations about the reasons for school.  They agree without thinking about it too much that school is the proper place for them.

Perhaps a comparison to other kinds of learning institutions might help.  Think about piano lessons
from when you were ten.  At that age, at that stage, parents make their children go to lessons.  And children go because they have to.  Some of them might enjoy it.  Some of them might complain about it.  But very few kids at that age go to piano lessons because they are seeking to receive transmitted information and skills about music and piano-playing.  Plus, the upcoming “test” is generally not of very much interest to piano students.  In these kinds of private lessons, the “test” will traditionally be a painful recital, in which parents and siblings and grandparents gather to hear the terrible piano playing that their ten-year-olds
can produce.

These assumptions are similar to those of most school experiences.  Students go because they are told to.  They are judged on the level at which they are able to reproduce the musical lessons their teacher has
transmitted to them.  For our purposes,the important point is that the student did not go to the lesson to learn piano.  He went because his mom dropped him off there at four.

Compare that learning experience to a different kind.  Consider a sixteen-year-old kid who is taking guitar lessons.  In my town growing up, there was a guy who taught guitar in a little basement down under where the supermarket used to be, just next to the railroad tracks.  Students went to him because they wanted to
learn to play awesome guitar.  His selling point was that he was awesome.  He played guitar really well, hung out with his friends in the smelly basement “studio,” and smoked a lot of pot.

If a sixteen-year-old boy—and it was almost always boys that seemed drawn to this guy—went to take guitar lessons, it was because the student really wanted to learn what the teacher could teach.  The student saved some money or asked his parents for money to pay this teacher to share his accumulated knowledge of how to play that guitar.  In this case, the student went to school to learn.  The student hoped that the teacher would successfully transmit a certain type of information to the student.

Just having a desire to receive transmitted skills or information is not a magic bullet.  Not every teenage guitar student ends up learning guitar.  But I think this example illuminates what is NOT the norm in regular schools.  Students went to take those guitar lessons because they wanted to learn guitar.  They wanted the teacher to transmit information to them.  That is a different attitude than most students take to their regular school.   In contrast to the most basic assumption of traditional schooling, most students do not go to school to learn.  They go because they have to.    These conditions have been in place for at least the last fifty years.  Sociologist James Coleman noted in 1961 that students do not go to high schools in order to learn.  In fact, he found that the most intelligent students were not the ones that received the best grades.  Rather, Coleman found in 1961 that the best students, gradewise, were those who accepted the game of transmission-and-testing the most unquestioningly, the ones who were “willing to work hard at a relatively unrewarded activity.”  The most intelligent young people, in contrast, took the transmission of information as something to be tolerated.  They went to school for social reasons.  They hoped school would provide them with an exciting and stimulating social environment.  But they did not go to school in order to receive information.  They put up with that as the cost of admission.

 

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION I: FURTHER READING:

James Coleman with John WC Johnstone and Kurt Jonassohn, The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).

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by Adam Laats on October 22, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on October 22, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/10/22/progressive-education-i-why-come-to-school/

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