All posts tagged Progressive Education

TRADITIONAL EDUCATION IIC2: TEACHING VALUES

Everyone wants America’s schools to teach values.  Progressive types tend to imagine schools that teach children the value of egalitarianism, of celebrating the rich mosaic of cultures that make up America. Traditionalists tend to imagine schools that train students in traditional cultural values.  As we have argued in earlier posts about the “Cult of Multiculturalism” (see here and here), traditionalists could argue that the values of progressive education aren’t real values at all.  Traditionalists might argue that the only real moral instilled by the progressive educational regime is a lamentable and decadent relativism.  According to this traditionalist argument, children are indoctrinated by progressive educators in the pernicious notion that there are no transcendent values, that all values must be welcomed equally.

Such traditionalists have insisted that America’s schools must instead lay out an explicit menu of true moral values for their students.  In its more sophisticated forms, this traditionalist argument has pointed out that we can distill a reasonable list of these values that does not simply impose traditional Christian values in public schools.  Rather, it is simple enough to create a short list of moral values that will incorporate the traditions of all cultures.

For example, writing in the 1960s, California School Superintendent Max Rafferty built his career, in large part, on his insistence that public schools must return to their original mission of instilling traditional moral values in children.  The problem with progressive education, Rafferty believed, was that it denied the obvious and inescapable truth that there are “positive and eternal values.”  In such an educational environment, which Rafferty believed had dominated America’s schools since the 1930s, this moral irresponsibility had drastic effects.  Not only did students fail to grasp obvious moral truths, but under the progressive educational regime,

the mastery of basic skills began insensibly to erode, knowledge of the great cultures and contributions of past civilizations started to slip and slide, reverence for the heroes of our nation’s past faded and withered under the burning glare of pragmatism.

In the place of time-tested values, Rafferty argued, progressives offered “such airy and ephemeral soap bubbles as ‘group dynamics,’ ‘social living,’ and ‘orientation.’”

Rafferty noted that such innovations meant both educational and moral failure.  It also ignored the wishes of the vast majority of Americans.  As Rafferty argued in 1964,

Parents, by and large, want what they have always wanted for their children.  They want them turned into civilized, patriotic citizens speaking and writing good English; able to succeed both in business and college; possessing at least a passable knowledge of our great cultural heritage; trained in such minimum essentials as reading, basic mathematics, spelling, grammar, history, and geography; and, above all, well enough grounded in habits of diligence, perseverance, and orderly thinking to enable them to prepare for adult life. 

Such values did not imply, in Rafferty’s opinion, that minority groups and non-Christians would be made to feel unwelcome in public schools.  Rather, Rafferty believed that everyone agreed on a few basic values that schools must impart.  For Rafferty, these included love of country, non-sectarian religiosity, and character traits such as bravery, honesty, thrift, and hard work.

Writing in the late 1960s, Rafferty noted with alarm that public schools had been divested of their traditional role as moral guardians.  As he wrote in 1968,

Parents pay us to introduce their children to the accumulated culture, wisdom and refinement of the ages, not to give them a mud bath in vice and suggestiveness.  They expect us to inspire in those children a love for the good, the true and the beautiful.

Anybody can pick up obscenity and irreverence on any street corner.  You don’t have to go to school to learn four-letter words and ugly racial slurs.  The schools are built and supported to fight against this sort of dry rot, not to go over to it and embrace it.

We teachers need to set standards, understand them and then uphold them.  And this we cannot do until we abandon an educational philosophy which holds that all standards are fictitious and all truths mere fantasy.

The problem with progressive education, in Rafferty’s opinion, was its “bizarre and even creepy” insistence that public schools must “uproot the ethical standards of 2000 years and to substitute for them the moral criteria of a pack of sex-starved alley cats.”

Max Rafferty’s unabashed insistence on traditionalist education for California did not take his career quite as far as he had hoped.  He ran for U.S. Senate in 1968, on an unapologetically conservative platform that included, in the words of one Newsweek article, “shooting looters, summary street courts-martial for other rioters, more capital punishment, abolishing most foreign aid, and escalating the Vietnam war (perhaps with nuclear weapons).”  Unlike other conservative California politicians, most notably Ronald Reagan’s successful bid for governor in 1966 and Richard Nixon’s win as President in 1968, Rafferty lost his election by a huge margin.  Nevertheless, his fulminations on the importance of including traditional values in America’s public schools won him a large and dedicated following among traditionalists.

William J. Bennett shared many of Rafferty’s beliefs about the importance of traditional values for America’s public schools.  As U.S. Secretary of Education in the mid-1980s under President Reagan, Bennett encouraged American schools to encourage “Moral Literacy.”  Bennett built his educational program around what he called the “Three C’s:” Content, Choice, and Character.  He insisted that teaching students traditional moral values was a necessary function of public schools.  Only by doing so, Bennett believed, could schools help young people develop their character, their unique individual moral quality.  Such moral values, Bennett argued, did not imply the imposition of one set of moral values on a culturally diverse American population.  They did not, as his critics allege, yearn for a return for an imagined past in which only the values of White European Americans were valued.  No, Bennett insisted in 1986, “there is a good deal of consensus among the American people about these character traits.”  Americans of all cultural backgrounds, Bennett believed, could agree that schools ought to teach such traits as “thoughtfulness, fidelity, kindness, diligence, honesty, fairness, self-discipline, respect for law, and taking one’s guidance by accepted and tested standards of right and wrong rather than by, for example, one’s personal preferences.”

Bennett worked during his tenure as Secretary of Education to encourage public schools to teach these values formally and explicitly.  He also published the phenomenally successful Book of Virtues to help parents, educators, and young people learn these time-tested standards of right and wrong.

More recently, two academics have attracted attention beyond the usual ranks of committed traditionalists with their concoction of a list of universal character traits that schools ought to be teaching.  Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson claimed by 2004 to have distilled twenty-four universal values from their survey of moral thinkers from all cultures, from all periods.  As one New York Times article described their work, Seligman and Peterson “consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters.”  As we might expect, their list of character traits included some of Bennett’s and Rafferty’s favorites, including bravery and integrity.  They also include personal traits such as gratitude.  As many commentators have noticed, Seligman and Peterson also added a few that might surprise traditionalists, such as the need for “zest” among young people.

Most important for our discussion here, the notion that schools ought to do more than expose children to a variety of moral values has continued to attract vehement supporters among large numbers of parents, scholars, and educators.  According to these supporters, the fundamental presumption of progressivism—that schools ought to help students discover their own morality rather than imposing an external list of disembodied moral values—has proven to be both ineffective and morally indefensible.  Instead, schools must teach students actively and explicitly that they must practice a short list of traditional values.  They must be honest.  They must be charitable.  They must be kind.  They must be brave.  At times, of course, students may stumble and fail as they learn these traits, just as they might not master long division on the first try.  But one of the primary functions of schooling, in this traditionalist argument, must be to guide students toward learning these fundamental values.

 

FURTHER READING: Max Rafferty, What Are They Doing to Your Children (1964); Rafferty, On Education (1968); William J. Bennett, Moral Literacy and the Foundation of Character (1986); Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004).

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by Adam Laats on February 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 23, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/02/23/traditional-education-iic2-teaching-values/

TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION IIc2: GETTING AHEAD

As argued in earlier posts, the vision of proper schooling among traditionalist educators is so culturally powerful it rarely needs to be articulated.  One goal of schooling, traditionalists assert, is to learn things.  This seems obvious, yet throughout the twentieth century, traditionalists believe, a small but influential cadre of “progressive” educators has maneuvered the public debate about education into a discussion of ways schools can be used instead to achieve other goals.  Schools, these self-proclaimed progressives have argued, can be the institutions that acclimate students to society.  Schools can be the institutions that help students shed their prejudices.  Schools can be, first and foremost, a way to form the character of young people into more egalitarian models.

Such progressives have denigrated the notion that schools should mainly be a place to acquire more information.  Similarly, progressives have denied the powerful idea that schools must be the way to lift poor people out of poverty; they have denied that schools can be the path to greater economic earning power.  Of course, most progressives and traditionalists agree that school must not become only this.  Both sides want part of school to remain learning for its own sake.  But progressives often attack this notion that schooling can be used to get ahead by countering that this is only a myth of the dominant class.  Scholars such as Michael Apple, Paolo Friere, Michael Katz, and Joel Spring have made powerful arguments that real schools only reproduce social inequality.  They insist that the myth of economic advancement through formal education is the fig leaf that justifies an entrenched economic and social hierarchy.  In order to keep the poor from recognizing the injustice of American society, this argument goes, elites offer second- or third-rate educational institutions to the poor and to ethnic minorities.  Those elites can then claim, perhaps even sincerely believing it, that those poor folks who don’t do well in school are failing due to their own laziness and intellectual dimness.  All the while, those schools for poor people offer no real chance of economic advancement.

This argument, traditionalists counter, ignores historical reality.  In every generation, smart, ambitious, hard working young people have used education as their path to a better life.  Consider just a few brief case studies.  Frederick Douglass, for example, the famous escaped slave, used education as his literal path to freedom.  In his case, the institutional systems of education certainly worked against him.  As a young slave, Douglass was forbidden to learn to read.  One of his owners taught him some basic literacy.  But her husband insisted that such education would ruin a slave.  Douglass persisted, and taught himself to read and write nevertheless.  The reading that he was exposed to, gleaned from snatched secret moments with abandoned newspapers and primers from white children in the neighborhood, convinced Douglass of the fundamental injustice of the slave system.  One of his first activities as an antislavery activist was to found a secret literacy school for his fellow slaves.  The goal of that school was not, as so many progressive education advocates have hoped the goal of schooling would be, to adjust slaves to their lived conditions.  Instead, the goal was to give slaves academic skills and information they did not already have.  Frederick Douglass was convinced that this was the ultimate goal of schooling.  His owners believed it as well.  As soon as they discovered his secret school, they broke it up immediately.  The slave owners agreed that the purpose of a school was to impart knowledge.  In this case, that was something they could not allow, since it threatened to move slaves out of their ignorance and give them literacy skills that could help them escape from slavery.
There was no doubt in the minds of either the slaves or their owners that the purpose of schooling was to improve one’s position.  The knowledge acquired in secret slave schools was used to move slaves out of slavery into freedom.

It does not take such dramatically unjust social systems to see the ways schooling has been used as a way to improve economic position.  There are plenty of examples from more recent history of the ways schooling has served as the path out of poverty.  Consider the case of former US Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell.  Whatever one thinks of his politics, Powell’s career demonstrates the elevating power of formal schooling.  Powell was born in Harlem.  He worked his way through high school, then through the City College of New York. Thanks to his education, he was able to rise in the ranks of the Army, eventually becoming one of the most powerful and influential leaders of the country.

Or how about the story of Sonia Sotomayor?  She was also born in New York City, the Bronx.  Her family didn’t have a lot of money, but she worked hard in school and earned a full scholarship to Princeton.  Her work there propelled her into the legal career that has resulted in her current place on the US Supreme Court.

And what about Leonard Covello?  With his family, Covello came to New York in 1895.  They didn’t have money; they didn’t speak English.  But Covello worked hard in school and earned a college education.  By the end of his career, Covello had become a national leader in education.

It doesn’t take this kind of rags-to-riches story to prove the point.  The number of people who use schooling to move themselves and their families out of poverty is too many to count.  There are examples anyone involved in education could name.  My first teaching job was at an inner-city middle school in Milwaukee.  The school existed, as do so many schools across the nation, to help students use formal education as their path to a better life.  Did it work for every student?  No.  But the life chances of some of these young people would have been far worse if it had not been for the opportunities presented by formal education.  The notion that schools aren’t working if they don’t lift EVERY young person out of poverty represents a mistaken idea about the nature of schooling.  Schooling is an opportunity, not a guarantee.

Historically, one progressive critique of American education is that it has failed in its mission to lift every poor child out of poverty.  American education, in this view, is a failure since it did not end racial segregation.  American education, such progressive critics might say, is a failure since it has not eliminated widespread poverty.  Such thinking is a misrepresentation of the nature of both society and schooling.  It certainly seems true that schools for more affluent children offer advantages not available to kids from families in traditionally disadvantaged groups.  But this kind of structural injustice is more than schools can fix.

The promise of schooling in America is not that it will lift every poor child out of poverty.  The promise has always been that schooling will be available as a lifeboat.  In the meantime, it is difficult not to resent the fact that schools for more affluent children seem more like cruise ships.  Those young people can relax and enjoy the ride.  But those left rocking in unsteady waters in flimsy lifeboats must work tirelessly simply to stay in place, much less move ahead.  Not all of them will succeed economically, whereas a much larger proportion of cruise-ship students will.

The crucial point, however, is not that this situation is unfair.  It manifestly is.  The important point here is one that ‘progressive’ critics of American education often ignore or don’t recognize.  The main point is that schooling itself is not to blame for this situation, any more than the makers of lifeboats are to blame if a ship hits an iceberg.  Lifeboats and cruise ships are not equal.  They are not fair.  But no one has promised every student from every background the same cruise experience.  Rather, schooling in America has functioned and will continue to function as a chance to change one’s economic position, to dislodge oneself and one’s family from received positions in the economic hierarchy.

Let me describe just one example of the kinds of possibilities that formal, traditional education can offer.  One of our students, I’ll call him Student X, came to the United States in fifth grade.  He didn’t speak any English.  His family didn’t have any money.  But he worked hard in middle school, learned English, and set his sights on serving the Latino community.  He worked hard through high school, and earned a full scholarship to a prestigious college and medical school.  He is now on his way to becoming a doctor.  He plans to return to his old neighborhood to serve low-income and recent immigrant families who struggle to find affordable medical care close to home.

This has always been Americans’ expectation of school.  One Gallup poll in 1972 asked respondents to describe their primary reasons for going to high school.  The number one reason was to get better jobs.  The number three reason was to earn more money.

Schooling, of course, must be about more than just economic improvement.  It should make each young person a better person.  But the “progressive” notion that schools have not been able to help people improve their lives just doesn’t match either experience or the hopes and dreams of most Americans.  Most of all, the progressive criticism of schools misunderstands the nature of schooling.  It can not and never has been able to solve poverty.  Instead, formal schooling has been available as a chance, an opportunity, to improve one’s economic position.

 

FURTHER READING: Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970); Michael Apple, Educating the ‘Right’ Way (2006); Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (1968); Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine Revisited (1989); David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia (1995); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of a Slave (1845); Colin Powell, My American Journey (2003); Michael C. Johanek, Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School (2006); Jonah Winter, Sonia Sotomayor: The True American Dream (2010).

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by Adam Laats on February 15, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 15, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/02/15/traditionalist-education-iic2-getting-ahead/

TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION IIc1: LEARNING STUFF

People go to school to learn.  And what we mean by that is that people should gain information and skills they did not previously possess.  For traditionalists, this basic argument about schooling is so breathtakingly obvious it shouldn’t need to be said out loud at all.  However, in traditionalists’ opinions, due to (possibly) well-meaning misunderstandings on the part of progressive educators, this simple fact about schooling is not adequately appreciated.

The core mistake of progressive education, in the eyes of traditionalists, is to think that education must be built on children’s experience.  This idea was articulated powerfully in 1902 by John Dewey and has found influential advocates ever since.  As Dewey argued, in most traditional schools,

Facts are torn away from their original place in experience and rearranged with reference to some general principle.  Classification is not a matter of child experience; things do not come to the individual pigeonholed.  The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of activity, hold together the variety of his personal experiences.    

In order to make education more effective, Dewey argued, classroom teaching must be connected more organically to the way children learn.  Not by sitting in rows and reciting, but by building up experiences, by building on their existing experience.

Dewey insisted that the “old education” had gone wrong by making “invidious comparisons between the immaturity of the child and the maturity of the adult, regarding the former as something to be got away from as soon as possible and as much as possible.”

By the time such progressive reforms had found a home in a few American schools, Dewey’s notion of building upon children’s experience often took some turns Dewey found unfortunate.  He had warned in 1902 that there was a “danger” in assuming that the experience of young people alone could be “finally significant in themselves.”  Unfortunately, most self-appointed progressive school reformers didn’t listen to this second warning.  By the late 1930s, though Dewey still insisted that “the cardinal principle of the newer school of education [is] that the beginning of instruction shall be made with the experience learners already have,” he pointed out that in too many progressive schools, “overemphasis upon activity as an end, instead of upon intelligent activity, leads to an identification of freedom with immediate execution of impulses and desires.”

Regardless of Dewey’s own opinion of progressive education in practice, generations of teachers have been enthralled with their own interpretations of what Dewey’s “schools of tomorrow” could look like.   However, as soon as new teachers get any actual experience in education, experience in real schools with real children, they realize that the breathless “progressive” notions they attributed to Dewey don’t have much to do with the work of teaching.

Traditionalist educators insist that progressive notions fall apart in real schools, the way dreams dissipate upon waking.  In the opinion of those traditionalists, this is not merely because—as generations of progressive educators have argued—the progressive ideas haven’t been implemented fully enough.  It is because one of the central intellectual presuppositions of progressive education represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both human nature and schooling.  As Dewey himself insisted, children are not small adults.  They are fundamentally different.  These differences are biological and developmental.  Most important in this traditionalist argument, the differences are also a matter of experience.  By definition, young people lack experience.  Attempting to build schooling on a foundation of children’s lived experience is a mistake.

This does not mean that children do not have experience, or that they do not learn by building on those experiences.  They do.  But those learning encounters will take place outside of institutional schooling, by playing sports, playing with dirt, talking with peers and family members, volunteering at their churches, and so on.  In each of those contexts, young people will build on their experiences to improve at various skills and abilities.  They will build on each of those experiences, hopefully, to become better people.

But schooling is different.  Schooling, by definition, should be the transmission of academic information and skills to young people.  Every day, students should walk out of school with more knowledge and better academic skills than they had when they started in the morning.

There is nothing mysterious about this.  This is not a foreign notion of schooling that has been imposed on people from some grasping social elites.  Rather, this notion of the function of schooling is so basic that it has been embraced by all groups in American society, except for a tiny slice of education “experts” who insist on a different vision of schooling.

For instance, in the years following the Civil War, African Americans in the former Confederacy struggled to build schools that would impart academic information to their children.  As historian James Anderson has demonstrated, many influential voices weighed in on the purpose and function of these schools.  The majority of white northern philanthropists, Anderson argued, insisted that their money go toward schools that built on African Americans’ lived experiences.  Schools for young people and freed slaves, these philanthropists insisted, must teach basic vocational skills that African Americans could really use in their lives, such as farming and house cleaning.  That would be, in the phrase that came to prominence during World War II, a truly progressive “life-adjustment” education.

African Americans themselves, however, rejected that notion.  Except for a few tokens, such as Booker T. Washington, whom Anderson dismisses as nothing more than a racist white philanthropist “in blackface,” most African Americans insisted that their schools and colleges must focus on transmitting academic information and skills to new generations.  Their children should be studying mathematics, Latin, and philosophy, not gardening, milking, and plowing.

Anderson’s depiction of Washington may have been too harsh.  Other scholars such as Louis Harlan have argued that Washington managed to support African American causes in a variety of ways.  The point here, however, is much simpler: traditional education is real education.  The purpose of schools, the way traditionalists see it, is to give information and skills to young people; information and skills they did not already have.  This is the transformation that schools can and should accomplish.  Schools can provide a safe and protected place for young people to gain experience they lack.  In schools, students can experience vicariously the sweep of history and literature.  They can learn mathematics and science.

Any other approach to the basic function of schooling will serve to cement children’s place in the existing social order.  Building schooling primarily around the lived experience of young people will only support a very non-progressive social hierarchy.  The lived experience of kids from affluent families, for example, will prepare them for roles as dominant members of society.  Similarly, building schooling around the lived experience of the poor will anaesthetize poor kids to the structural injustices of current society.

Instead, schooling must deliver new things to students.  This does not mean that the lived experience of students will be dismissed or looked down upon.  Teaching Shakespeare to both rich and poor does not somehow imply that the popular culture of rich and poor is not valuable.  It merely demonstrates that there is a culture beyond popular culture that schooling will transmit to each new generation, regardless of family finances or students’ ethnicities.

This is not a new theory of education.  It merely acknowledges and makes explicit one of the most basic truths of schooling.  It offers students a reason to go to school.

To do otherwise, to assume that schools will build upon the existing experience of students is a cruel and circular notion.  In fact, young people go to school precisely because they lack experience.  They go to school so that they can engage with a broad range of ideas that they would never experience on their own.  The reason Dewey’s notions—or, more exactly, the “progressive” fantasies people have attributed to Dewey—have never made many inroads in real schools is because they fundamentally mistake the function of schooling.  Schooling is about imparting information to young people.  Of course, it is not the only way young people learn.  But in school itself, they do not learn primarily by building on their own small share of lived experience.  Instead, they learn by sampling from the vast array of knowledge and culture left behind by the thousands of years of human experience that has gone before them.

 

Further Reading: John Dewey, Experience and Education (1938); Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum (1902); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1930 (1987); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (1983).

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by Adam Laats on February 12, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 12, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/02/12/traditionalist-education-iic1-learning-stuff/

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION III: SCHOOLS AS SAVIOR

Whenever an argument for the progressivist transformation of schools comes up, we can be sure the traditionalist rejoinder won’t be far behind: “Why should we transform our schools?  Traditional schools have worked fine for generations, they will work now.”  Behind these traditionalist arguments is a sentiment that America in the past had a certain moral backbone that it lacks today.  The sense—sometimes vague, sometimes explicit—is that today’s schools with their mollycoddling progressivism have created a generation of self-centered, lazy, even criminal youth.  Only traditional schools, in this oft-repeated line of thinking, can help put America back on course.

In fact, just the opposite is true.  It may be true that American society has some troubling fractures.  But those fractures will not be healed with sterner authoritarian classrooms.  Instead, the only way to bring America together—whether or not this returns anyone to any kind of golden age—will be to encourage schools and classrooms in which every student feels himself or herself to be an important member of American society, not merely an inmate in a social and educational processing regime.

Consider the depressing reality.  In America today, whenever there is the slightest crack in the regime of control, people go nuts.  The second there is a power outage in a major city, or a natural disaster, or even a major sporting event, Americans riot.  My hometown of Binghamton, New York, for example, recently experienced a major flood.  Whole neighborhoods were engulfed by the rising Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers.  Police and emergency crews couldn’t keep up with the situation.  To be fair, lots of people—I like to think most people—put aside their selfish interests and tried to help those folks who had been flooded out of their homes.  But there were the predictable number of people who took to looting.  They knew police could not patrol the downtown streets, so they helped themselves to anything left dry in downtown stores.

And sunny Binghamton is much friendlier in its rioting than bigger cities.  I remember back when the Chicago Bulls won their first of three national championships, back in the 1990s, we hurried downtown to see the predictable riots.  Drunk people spilled out of sports bars in the Rush/Division neighborhood to celebrate the victory.  Before you knew it, taxis had been flipped over and lit on fire, and horse-mounted police were doing their damnedest to clear the streets.  The crowd by then had expanded.  Not just the white-collar/loosened tie/after-work sports fans were yelling and pushing back against the cops. The crowd had been bolstered by no-collar/no tie/no-work enthusiasts from the vast public-housing complex just down the street, Cabrini Green.

It was obvious that the police couldn’t handle the situation.  That slight loosening of the regime was all it took.  Soon the riot script played out to its predictable end.  People smashed store windows, threw bottles and rocks at the line of police, and waited for the inevitable tear gas to chase them away from the area.

And why?  Because Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippin, and the rest had defeated another basketball team.  It doesn’t matter the reason.  As soon as people feel the slightest crack in the regime, as soon as it becomes clear that the government cannot enforce its will, people will riot.

What does all this have to do with progressive education?  Everything.  Traditionalist educators may point to riots and social upheaval as evidence that young people today are no longer being taught respect and obedience.  They may insist that schools need to return to traditional disciplinary schemes.  Maybe even get back to some good old-fashioned corporal punishment.  But just the opposite is true.

Riots like this are not the result of new-fangled progressive notions of including every young person as the most important decision-maker in schools and education.  Riots like this have appeared in every society, whenever authorities try and fail to maintain total domination of a population.

Consider an example from the roots of United States history.  In Boston, in 1770, tensions had been building up between the British regime and the young colonists.  (In this case, the youth of both sides played a crucial role.  The soldiers were mostly teenagers, and they were taunted and provoked by a crowd led by teenagers.)  In March, a group of soldiers found themselves surrounded by a crowd of angry colonists, taunted to fire their muskets, pelted with rocks and snowballs.  Finally they fired, killing five of the crowd and pushing the rest of the colonies further on the path to open revolution.

Here’s the question for traditionalists: were those angry colonists the product of touchy-feely, ‘progressive’ schools?  Or had they received whatever education they received in thoroughly traditional ways?

The point is that coercive regimes—as the British were perceived to be in Boston, in March, 1770—are only able to hold on to power by brute force.  And traditional schools in the United States are nothing if not coercive regimes.  When students and their families agree with the regime, the coercion is hidden.  But when they do not, the coercion emerges in its ugliest forms.  This is why schools in poor neighborhoods look and feel so much like prisons, with armed guards, metal detectors, and very limited student freedom.

There are two possible solutions.  First, and most common, we can bolster the effectiveness of traditional regimes by strengthening the coercive arm.  Schools can hire more truant officers to round up absentees.  They can implement stricter rules for student dress and behavior.  They can mandate “zero-tolerance” rules to crack down on student resistance.  These are traditional responses, and they can be effective in the short term.

However, the costs of this kind of stepped-up coercion are obvious.  In order to compel compliance with the school regime, school administrators must alienate each student.  When people—even young people—are forced to act in certain ways, it eliminates the likelihood that those people will embrace those actions.  When they are forced to go to school, forced to be in classrooms, and forced to submit to the authority of teachers and school administrators, they are unlikely to see those schools as places in which they can improve themselves.  They will not embrace the process of education in the ways they must if they are to actually learn something.  Some might.  But those few are the exception, rather than the rule.

And, predictably, whenever there is the smallest crack in the efficiency of the coercion, students will take advantage of it.  They may not flip over taxi cabs and battle with mounted police each time, but they will disrupt the function of the school in any way they can.

The second solution is the only sensible solution.  In order to have schools in which students learn, the primary goal must be to encourage students to embrace the process of schooling as something they want to do.  As argued in other posts, students must see schooling as more like working with a personal trainer, and less like breaking rocks.

The earliest roots of tax-funded public schooling included this notion of schooling as the best defense against anarchy.  Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century leader of the public school movement, warned that mobs were nothing more than “wild beasts, that prove their right to devour by showing their teeth.”  In order to tame those mobs, Mann argued, the public must fund schools to teach young people that they played an important role in American society as empowered citizens, not merely as subjects and ‘wild beasts.’  In 1877 the US Commissioner of Education warned of ‘the enormities possible in our communities if the systematic vagrancy of the ignorant, vicious, and criminal classes should continue to increase.” In his opinion, “Capital, therefore, should weigh the cost of the tomb and the tramp against the cost of universal and sufficient education.”

These days, the only schools that can effectively defeat the tendency of people to riot against their coercive regimes are schools that do not resort to the tactics of such regimes.  Students must see themselves as part of the schooling process.  They must be given authentic power within the school regime.  Otherwise, it will be seen as a coercive imposition and resisted accordingly.  Traditionalists may gripe that this kind of empowerment will lead to a breakdown in social order, as every person acts in his or her immediate self interest.

Not so.  The mentality of the looter does not come from a breakdown in traditional values in schools.  Instead, it comes from a consistent application of traditional schooling.  When schooling is a coercive experience, young people are trained to see school and society as a heavy hand, an imposition of external power.  When the pressure of that hand is relaxed in the slightest, as must happen occasionally, young people who have not embraced their role as a valuable part of that school and society will act aggressively.  They will take what they want.  They will loot, ignite, riot.

In contrast, a progressive educational system, not just in every individual classroom but in the schooling system as a whole, trains young people to be invested in both school and society.  They embrace their role as empowered members of that society.  When the power goes out, or if the Bulls win the playoffs, people—even young people—who are invested in their society will help hand out candles.  Young people who spent their youth incarcerated in traditional authoritarian schools seize upon the temporary weakness of the regime in order to lash out.

 

FURTHER READING: Horace Mann, Life and Works, IV; Report of the Honorable John Eaton, US Commissioner of Education, for the year 1877, on Crime and Education.

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by Adam Laats on January 19, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 19, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/01/19/progressive-education-iii-schools-as-savior/

From the Archives: Of Penises and Progressive Schools

Like most other culture-war issues, the enduring battles over the proper form and function of schooling have tended to fight with caricatures rather than realities.  Each side has produced compelling fictions about the dangers of ‘tyrannical’ traditional schools or ‘anarchic’ progressive ones.  Among fans of progressive education, the generations have not produced a more damning portrait of traditional schooling than Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind.

Gradgrind hammered home his bullheaded vision of the proper goal of schooling:

‘“Now, what I want is Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!”

‘The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.’

A little bit later in the story, Gradgrind receives a visit from an official in the government bureau of education.  The two reach perfect agreement on the essence of proper schooling:

‘“Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman.  And “Fact, fact, fact!” repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

‘“You are to be in all things regulated and governed,” said the gentleman, “by fact.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.  You must discard the word Fancy altogether.  You have nothing to do with it.  You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact.  You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.”’

This sketch of the cruelties of traditional education from 1854 could just as easily be a conversation from 1954 or 2004.  The caricature of traditionalist education is that it harps senselessly and incessantly on the need for young children to memorize and regurgitate ‘Facts, Facts, Facts!’  Every traditionalist since 1854 has lambasted “progressive” schools for including fads and frills, of ignoring the overwhelming importance of ‘Facts, Facts, Facts!’

For their part, traditionalists can’t hope for a more ridiculous picture of the perils and puerility of progressive education than we find in the 1955 novel Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis.  This is a title that resonated powerfully with Americans when it first came out.  It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years, and sold over two million copies.  Inevitably, it was made into a Broadway play and musical, then into a Hollywood movie.  Apparently, the musical still makes an appearance every now and again.

The novel tells the story of young Patrick Dennis, a ten-year-old orphan sent in 1929 to live with his free-spirit Aunt Mame.  Mame lives the life of the New York intellectual avant-garde to the hilt.  At first, young Patrick is terrified by the outlandish characters his aunt surrounds herself with, but he soon embraces her slapdash bohemian elegance.

When it comes time to send the boy to school, Aunt Mame subverts his dying father’s last request that the boy be sent to a “conservative school.”  Instead, she finds Patrick a place in a “completely revolutionary” school run by her friend Ralph, a man who scolds Mame for allowing the boy to read.

When young Patrick arrives at the “progressive” school, he falls in with a school regime that typified contemporary stereotypes of the foibles of progressive education.  The portrait so perfectly captures the enduring caricature of excessive progressive schooling that I’ll include a good long chunk of it here:

When we got there, the big room was filled with naked children of all ages racing around and screaming.  Ralph came forward, as naked as the day he was born, and shook hands cordially.

‘Isn’t he lovely,’ Auntie Mame gushed.  ‘Just like a Praxiteles.  Oh, darling, I know you’re going to love it here!’

A square little yellow-haired woman, also naked, rushed up and kissed Auntie Mame.  Her name was Natalie.  She and Ralph were running the school together.

‘Now you just tag along with Ralph and enjoy yourself, my little love, and I’ll see you back at the flat in time for tea.’

Auntie Mame departed with a gay wave and I was left alone, the only person in the place who was wearing any clothes.

            ‘Come in here and disrobe, yes?’ Natalie said, ‘then join the others?’

            I always felt a little like a picked chicken at Ralph’s school, but it was pleasant and I never had to do anything.  It was a big, stark, whitewashed room with a heated linoleum floor, quartz glass skylights, and violet ray tubes running around the available ceiling.  There were no desks or chairs, just some mats where we could lie down and sleep whenever we wanted, and, in the center of the room, a big white structure that looked like a cow’s pelvis.  We were supposed to crawl in, around, and over this if we felt like it, and whenever one of the younger children did, Ralph would give Natalie’s broad bottom a resounding smack and chuckle, ‘Back to the womb, eh Nat!’

There was a communal toilet—‘Nip the inhibitions in the bud’—and all sorts of other progressive pastimes.  We could draw or finger-paint or make things in Plasticine.  There were Guided Conversation Circles, in which we discussed our dreams and took turns telling what we were thinking at the moment.  If you felt like being antisocial, you could just be antisocial.  For lunch we ate raw carrots, raw cauliflower—which always gave me gas—raw apples, and raw goat’s milk.  If two children ever quarreled, Ralph would make them sit down with as many others as were interested and discuss the whole thing.  I thought it was awfully silly, but I got quite a thorough suntan.

But I didn’t stay long enough at Ralph’s school to discover whether it did me good or harm.  My career there—and Ralph’s too, for that matter—ended just six weeks after it began.

Ralph and Natalie, under the misapprehension that their young followers did any work at school, organized an afternoon period of Constructive Play so as to send us all home in a jolly frame of mind.  The general idea was that the children, all except the really antisocial ones, were to participate in a large group game that would teach us something of Life and what awaited us beyond the portals of the school.  Sometimes we’d play Farmer and attend to the scrubby avocado plants Natalie grew.  At other times we’d play Laundry and wash all of Ralph’s underwear, but one of the favorite games of the smaller fry was one called Fish Families, which purported to give us a certain casual knowledge of reproduction in the lower orders.

It was a simple game and rather good exercise.  Natalie and all the girls would crouch on the floor and pretend to lay fish eggs and then Ralph, followed by the boys, would skip among them, arms thrust sideways and fingers wiggling—‘in a swimming motion, a swimming motion’—and fertilize the eggs.  It always brought down the house.

On my last day at Ralph’s we’d been playing Fish Families for about half an hour.  Natalie and the girls were on the linoleum and Ralph started to lead the boys through the school of lady fish.  ‘A swimming motion, a swimming motion!  Now! Spread the sperm, spread the sperm!  Don’t forget that little mother fish there, Patrick, spread the sperm, spread the . . .’

                        There was a sudden choking sound.

                        ‘My God!’ a familiar voice gasped.

            We all turned around and there, fully dressed and looking like the angriest shark in the sea, stood [Patrick’s “conservative” trustee] Mr. Babcock. . . . With one deft motion, he yanked me out of the melee.  ‘God damn it!  You get your clothes on and hurry.  I want to talk to that crazy aunt of yours and I want you to be there with me!’  He threw me in the dressing room.  ‘As for you, you filthy pervert,’ he shouted to Ralph, ‘you haven’t heard the last of this!’ . . .

The next day Ralph’s school was raided by the police, and the tabloids, caught in a lull between ax murders, became profoundly pious about all of progressive education.  Over delicately retouched photographs of Ralph and Natalie and the student body were headlines such as SEX SCHOOL SEIZED, with articles by civic leaders and an outraged clergy that all seemed to begin: ‘Mother, What Is Your Child Being Taught?’

Some of the emphasis on Freud as a panacea for curing children of traditional hang-ups seems a bit dated, but the notion of over-eager progressive school leaders establishing bedlams under the cover of freeing young minds does not.  Every generation of progressive school leader has suffered from comparisons—voiced or silent—to this kind of caricature of the dangers of progressive schooling.

Of course, progressive educators will counter that this kind of cartoonish depiction says nothing about the realities of progressive education.  More important, though, to understanding the seemingly permanent culture war over the proper nature of education, this stereotype of the eventual result of progressive schooling has always had enormous cultural power.  Many traditionalists have argued that any opening in the traditional school regime will lead eventually to some sort of chaotic free-for-all.  For most traditionalists, however, Patrick Dennis’ rose-colored nostalgia for the bumbling Freudian ineptitude of Ralph and Natalie mistakes the more common result.  Not only will students “never have to do anything” constructive in such muddle-headed progressive schools, but the students will soon be robbed of any sense of traditional morality.  They will descend, as in Ralph’s game of Fish Families, to little more than scrabbling beasts, learning that they should consume raw vegetables from the field, that they ought to defecate in public, and that they should see the end and goal of their animal existence as nothing more than laying eggs and spewing sperm.

READINGS: Charles Dickens, Hard Times, For These Times (New York: Signet Classics, 1961); Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame (New York: Vanguard Press, 1955).

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by Adam Laats on January 7, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in From the Archives, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 7, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/01/07/from-the-archives-of-penises-and-progressive-schools/

In the News: Schooling, Poverty, and the Educational Culture Wars

In a recent piece in the New York Times, (Class Matters: Why Won’t We Admit It?)  policy professor Helen Ladd and journalist/college-guide writer Edward Fiske offered a strong argument for the close link between social class and school performance.

Poorer children tend to do worse in school.  As Ladd and Fiske point out, this is not news.  Nor is this only an American dilemma.  Other countries face similar situations.
The point of Ladd’s and Fiske’s piece is that federal policy has obstinately and deliberately ignored this important aspect of education policy.

For those interested in the continuing culture wars over education, the more interesting question is this: how have the progressives/liberals/Left come to embrace the position that fixing only schools can not fix education, while the traditionalists/conservatives/Right has taken to heart the idea that schools can be fixed by more rigorous testing and standards?

After all, the notion that schools are only one educational institution among many has long conservative roots.  For generations, educational conservatives have argued that the educational rights of family, church, and other non-school institutions must be respected.

Similarly, for a long time the notion that schools must find ways to test every student to determine individual capability and performance has a long and respectable progressive history.

Yet these days, the notion that schools alone can’t be held responsible for students’ total education has become a favorite on the educational left.

My hunch is that there are two main reasons for this development.

First of all, ten years of No Child Left Behind has shifted the ideological weight of “testing” squarely from left to right.  But this did not come out of Right field.  The progressive appeal of testing faded when the cultural biases of IQ tests were clearly established in the middle of the twentieth century.  When progressives called for more testing, they did so in the hope that such tests would allow schools to tailor education more closely to individual strengths and interests.  When traditionalists call for more testing, they do it as an appeal to the long American tradition of educational exhibitionism.  In the American tradition, schools, teachers, and students are all expected to make public displays of their learning. Today’s high-stakes tests are only an updated version of the old tradition of calling the schoolmaster out on the rug, forcing students to “toe the line,” to show off their learning in ways the community finds acceptable.

In addition, the argument that schools alone can’t fix education comes from a progressive notion that any social improvement must be more than just a policy band-aid.  That is, in order to fix schools, we must fix the more basic injustices of our society.  In order to improve students’ performance, we need to address the fundamental economic imbalance of society.  This would shift the discussion in markedly progressive directions.  Instead of labeling poor children and schools in less affluent areas as ‘failing,’ we would need to start talking about reducing the Gini coefficient, about reducing the growing chasm between the few rich and the many poor.  Instead of blaming schools and teachers for cheating on high-stakes tests, we would need to find ways to improve the economic well-being of huge numbers of poor people.

The ideological baggage that comes along with each of these educational positions points out the difficulty of speaking calmly and clearly about education reform.  Each side hopes to seize the moral high ground, even while claiming to argue in practical, non-ideological terms.  But the very terms we use frame the discussion in ways that are difficult to overcome.  Are we talking about a redistribution of income?  Or are we talking about improving individual performance in reading and math?

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by Adam Laats on December 22, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 22, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/22/in-the-news-schooling-poverty-and-the-educational-culture-wars/

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION IIb: Bumps in the Road

Recent posts (see here and here) have noted the repressive and depressing realities of much of American education.  Much of the school talk these days reflects a surprising ignorance about those realities.  Politicians and business leaders offer shockingly naïve reform proposals for schools, to which every good teacher responds, “This guy hasn’t set foot in a real school since he graduated.”  In this post, I’ll try to offer a detailed look at what happens in real schools.  I’ll argue that a truly progressive education is possible, but it must do more than simply try to change one classroom.  It can and must work in two ways.  First, educators must work to divest themselves of dictatorial authority in the classroom.  This is not due to any touchy-feely desire to be nice; it is a hard requirement of effective schooling.  As I’ve argued in recent posts, when students see learning as an imposition from above, they will resist it accordingly.  Teachers and students must work together to build a classroom culture in which students buy in to the work; students must shift from seeing classwork as breaking rocks to seeing classwork as working with a personal trainer.  But this cannot be done in isolated classrooms by isolated teachers.  Educators must work to change the structure of education itself.  That is, educators must work as citizen activists to even out the funding of schools, no matter where they are.  They must work to change the administration of those schools.  Schools can’t be run effectively as stalags; they must become places in which students embrace the rules.  Neither of these two things can be achieved independently.  A classroom teacher crammed into a classroom of 35 students, in a school that encourages students to see themselves as targets of a cruel and bureaucratic authoritarian school regime, cannot have much hope of transforming her corner of that school into a garden of authentic learning by empowered students.

That doesn’t mean that teachers don’t try.  In my career as a middle- and high-school teacher and teacher mentor, and now working with lots of people training to be teachers, I have seen a depressingly predictable pattern.  A new teacher steps into her new school, determined to be a different kind of teacher.  She wants to guide students to embrace more than just the dry facts and regurgitative lists of historical details.  (My experience is mostly in history and social-studies classrooms, but I’m guessing it is similar no matter what the subject.)  She attempts to empower students, but finds that both the school administration and the students themselves reject all of her attempts.

For instance, instead of simply telling students about the Civil War, she plans a research project in which students will develop their own research questions and use primary sources to explore the authentic past.  She is not trying to do it all on her own; she devised a practical teaching unit based on student use of the incredibly rich resources at the Valley of the Shadow website from the Virginia Center for Digital History and the University of Virginia Library.  This website is the answer to her prayers, she thinks.  In one place, it offers military records, letters, newspapers, and even battle maps of various units in the war.  She devises a clear step-by-step guide in which students will select one participant in the war and track his or her experiences throughout the Civil War.  Her plan is to entice the students to generate their own questions about the Civil War.  Why did so many Virginians oppose secession?  Why did families go to war?  What did it mean for their lives?  The new teacher’s hope is that many—in her fantasies she imagines most—of her students will jump at the chance to find answers to these questions, once they see that the Civil War was more than just a chapter in a book.

What happens?  First of all, the school gets in the way.  Second, the students themselves reject her attempts to empower them as learners.  Here’s what can happen: In order to run this unit, the teacher needs students to have access to the website.  They need computers.  Over the summer, the teacher made sure to familiarize herself with the school’s technology.  She was thrilled to hear that the school, thanks to a federal grant, has three laptop carts with fast new computers.  Great.  She reserves the carts for the days her class will need them.

Some of the students, however, can’t log in.  They forgot their school username, perhaps.  Or the laptops have not been maintained properly and they won’t turn on.  With a classroom of twenty-eight students, the teacher can’t adequately help each student figure out how to get online.  When students can’t sign in, they start doing other things, non-educational things.  Soon the teacher is fully occupied with the frustrating task of telling students they can’t just poke each other with pencils, or worse.  Meanwhile, those students who have managed to get online notice that the teacher is not really paying attention to them, so they begin to check their Facebook accounts, ESPN, or other non-Civil War-related websites—whatever sites young people find interesting these days.  They’re not allowed to see those sites, and the school has put in place an online screen to block access to non-educational sites, but every student knows how to circumvent that screen.  When a teacher wants to use Youtube, however, the block will prevent that.  Meanwhile, of the class of twenty-eight, there may be a few students who persevere in following the directions the teacher laid out.  They may be exploring the Valley of the Shadow website.  But when and if they have a question about it, a question about the nature of the Civil War or the organization of the website, they can’t get the teacher’s attention because she is busy keeping other students from punching each other.  Soon enough, they realize there’s no real reason for them to keep at their assigned task.  The more polite ones may just wait for the bell to ring.  The more energetic ones will join in with the pencil-poking and punching.  Two days later, the new teacher is called in after school to the principal’s office.  The principal has been told that students in the new teacher’s class have been using laptops to access porn.  Turns out the laptops had mementoes of their surfing experiences that popped up the next time a teacher tried to use the laptop cart.

What can the teacher do?  When she tried to make the regime more useful and less dictatorial, she was beset from both sides.  The school culture made it difficult.  First of all, with a large classroom and not enough technical support, there was no way for her to get all her students up and running on their laptops within the class period.  But more important, since most of the classes in the school functioned with a stern authoritarian teacher, students viewed her attempt to loosen that discipline as an opportunity to be exploited, rather than as a chance to engage in learning.  Even worse, even when some students managed to access the website, they tended to avoid engaging with the material.  Instead, they did the very minimum amount of work they could do to get by.

What can the teacher do?  She can quit.  And lots of new teachers do.  As Barry Farber called it twenty years ago, the high rate of teacher turnover is a main cause of the “Crisis in Education.”  In the 1980s, over a third of new teachers left the field after four years or less.  More recent surveys by the National Education Association indicate that the number of teachers who leave the profession within five years hovers around forty percent.

More depressing, like the students who stay in school but disengage from the dictates of the school regime, the new teacher may keep her job but accept the necessity of dumbing down her teaching.  Instead of exploring the Valley of the Shadow, she may revert to stern, authoritarian recitations of historical facts, punctuated by perfunctory examinations of student knowledge.  The students won’t learn, and she won’t teach, but she and they will get through each day.

In order to avoid this outcome, a truly progressive solution has to do more than transform classroom methodology.  It must transform institutional education itself.  This will mean that all teachers must act as more than classroom leaders; they must become political actors as well.  It will also mean that all adults become active educators by engaging with the educational regime.  It will mean that all adults, teachers and otherwise, must demand and enact changes in the ways schools are funded.  They must change the ways those schools are operated.  They must demand that teachers in all classrooms and administrators at all levels put student engagement at the top of their lists.  Even if their children are not in those schools.  Even if they can afford to move to a higher-income area in which these problems are not as glaringly apparent.

A single teacher in a single classroom has very limited options.  In order to make each classroom more progressive and more effective, we need to change the entire system.  Schools, after all, are the collective public institution of our society.  We must shape them to be the vision of the society we want, not merely the holding pens for young people trapped in the society we have.

 

FURTHER READING: Barry A. Farber, Crisis in Education: Stress and Burnout in the American Teacher (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991).

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by Adam Laats on December 19, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 19, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/19/progressive-education-iib-bumps-in-the-road/

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION II: Breaking Rocks and the School Regime

What are schools for?  Throughout American history, schools have been processing & containment units.  As Michael Katz wrote over forty years ago, public schools have always been “conservative, racist, and bureaucratic.”  If a student came from a wealthy family, the school trained that student to be wealthy.  If a student came from a poor family, or from a beleaguered ethnic minority, schools trained him to remain poor and put upon.

This has been done in big ways and in small.  On a social scale, this has been done by keeping African Americans segregated into underfunded schools.  Before the Brown decision in 1954, this was done explicitly and legally.  At some point since then, it has shifted to being done as a result of social segregation.  Poor people live clustered in poor areas.  Their schools are funded by property taxes on property that is not worth much, from people who do not have much money to give.  As a recent U.S. Department of Education study noted, schools with poorer students tend to pay their teachers less, likely because those schools hire the least-experienced teachers.  Once those teachers get a few years of experience under their belts, they tend to migrate to schools where the students come from more affluent families.  In other words, the poorest schools get the newest teachers.  The most experienced teachers serve the more affluent schools.  Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule.  Many teachers choose to remain in less affluent schools, but it is hard to resist the siren call of a more affluent school or district.

At the human level, this has been done by maintaining dictatorships in every classroom.  Teachers have remained authoritative figures, imposing the cruelties and absurdities of a biased society directly onto its young members.  There is no simple accident in the fact that schools and classrooms get more dictatorial as the students tend to get poorer and darker-skinned.  It is a direct result of the fact that school is used to impose society’s injustices on the young.  For those who benefit from a privileged role in society, the yoke is light, easy to wear, even comfortable and flattering.  They can have classrooms in which the teacher divests his authority and encourages the students themselves to take over.  But for those who are at the bottom of the economic scale, classroom practice becomes an obvious imposition of an unpleasant and unwilling obedience on students who have no good reason for complying.

It ought not to be a surprise that high-school completion rates match very closely to socio-economic status.  As schools become more and more like prisons, students will naturally view them more and more as unpleasant impositions.  As soon as students can get away, they will.  But even for those who remain in school, there are plenty of ways to avoid engagement with the educational regime.  In order to have any sort of meaning, education must be a process in which teachers, administrators, students, and families agree on the importance of the process.  Students don’t necessarily have to enjoy practicing math tables or reading about the Boston Massacre.  But they do need to buy into the notion that school is a place where they can and will do tasks that, in the end, have some meaning for the students themselves.  If they do not, then no amount of imposed authority will be able to force them to learn.

Consider this analogy: there is obviously an enormous difference between working out at a gym with a personal trainer and working on a chain gang breaking rocks.  With a personal trainer, a person has willingly engaged in this enterprise.  Despite the difficulty of the tasks assigned, the person willingly puts himself or herself through the routines.  No surprise: he or she has signed up for this kind of work.  Not that he or she won’t gripe or try to avoid the hardest parts of the workouts.  But in the end, a person working with a personal trainer agrees on the purpose and function of the training.  He or she is much more likely to work hard at it, even if he or she doesn’t like it.

That is very different from the imposition of physical labor as a regime of external punishment.  A person sentenced to such hard labor will not embrace the work.  He or she may be forced to make the motions, but he or she will never go beyond the absolute minimum of effort.  The two experiences are worlds apart.  Yet, in some ways, they are the same.  Both workers are being pushed to work hard.  Both are being pushed to work harder than they would work on their own.  Yet working at a gym with a personal trainer is understood as a privilege, a luxury even.  While working breaking rocks is a punishment.

The educational implications are obvious.  In schools for poorer kids, there is often a perception that students and families have not bought into the process.  Instead of opening up the school regime to encourage student and family buy-in, the depressing American tradition has been to impose sterner discipline and harsher authoritarian structures in order to force students to accept their roles as learners.

That is exactly the wrong approach.  It encourages students to see the schools as an entirely punitive institution, one that can and must be evaded or fought against.  For some students, that means leaving school at the earliest opportunity.  For those who remain, it means putting forth the absolute minimum required effort.  Learning can’t happen that way.  And the proof is seen in test scores and academic achievement measures.  When such scores are low, policy makers respond by saying students must require greater supervision, less intellectual and physical freedom, and a harsher, more demanding environment.  They push for military-style discipline, uniforms, and classroom pedagogies that devolve into teacher-led chants.

Such responses might be effective if students really were sentenced to punitive physical labor.  But in schools, real results can only come out of increased student embrace of their learning.

 

Further reading: Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Teachers College Press, 1968); Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine Revisited (Longman, 1989).

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by Adam Laats on December 7, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 7, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/07/progressive-education-ii-breaking-rocks-and-the-school-regime/

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).

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on November 26, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 26, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/11/26/progressive-education-ic-why-come-to-school-cont/

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).

3 Comments
by Adam Laats on November 23, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 23, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/11/23/traditionalist-education-ib-discoveryof-what-continued/

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