Author: Greg

The educationist Buzz-of-the-Month Club has many items in its lineup at any one time because each of them takes months, or sometimes years, to run its course and then decay from cutting edge to trailing edge in footnotes and storage rooms.  Like the dark rooms in the Tower of London where the Rack, the Iron Maiden, and Skeffington’s Daughter are stored, we can find books, reports, and other relics of Open Classrooms, New Math, and Whole Language for our horrified incredulity. Did people really think that converting a school into Grand Central would improve learning? Did people really think that grade-school boys and girls would count better by learning set theory? Did people really think that students would learn good English by reading bad English, or that their hunger of imagination would be satisfied by trying to digest “pieces” whose hero does community service as a “consequence” of “inappropriate behavior”?

Yet all these things had the sanction of “research” when the Buzz-of-the-Month Club first offered them. Obviously “research” is not enough warrant. I do not mean to offer a blanket condemnation of research as a tool of education but to say that sometimes it is misguided, and that when it is, it should be rejected. We do this using the remedy Jacques Barzun calls the “judicial temper,” operating under the guidance of what Richard Hofstadter calls “the collective experience of the human race.” To the argument that it is not scientific, I would answer that science gave us Open Classrooms and New Math, and rest my case.

But the move to on-line “schools” is proceeding with no precautions at all: little or no research, and no respect for collective experience or the judicial temper, which weighs and judges, letting experience and common sense operate on evidence and testimony. The Temper tells us to treat certain evidence and testimony with caution. In another context we are warned against McScience, that is, tendentious “science” that is funded by private corporations or the foundations associated with those corporations. When we finally get “the research on” on-line “schools,” as we certainly will, the Temper will have to weigh the possibility of its being of this corrupt kind.

There are some impediments to the success of the judicial temper in keeping on-line education at bay. One is a massive retreat from the old vision of education as a public good, which resulted in the commitment to education by California’s late governor, the father of its current governor, and the heyday of the University of California and California’s public schools, from one of which I was graduated the valedictorian. Now some schools graduate them in litters, and not because budget-cutting has made them lean, mean and efficient.

Another impediment is the pressure within education circles constantly being applied by educationists wielding their brooms and wrecking-balls in the service of Transformation. The most alarming thing about the transformationists is their airborne certainty and absolutism. One of them recently said, “When observed from the 20,000-foot level, the basic building blocks of higher education—its priorities, governance, instructional design, and cost structure—have hardly budged.” This is meant to be an indictment, but a moment’s thought will tell us that some of this supposedly antediluvian higher education is eminently successful, and the world is beating a path to its door, while some is producing “graduates” who cannot make correct change[1] at work. That difference can hardly be attributable to a systemic breakdown. But more troubling is the writer’s metaphorical perspective of great height. Who does she think she is? And with what transformation will she be satisfied? There is no way from reading the article to tell. And anyone who has looked down from 20,000 feet in an airplane knows how little humanity  we actually see from that height.

That detachment from humanity is the last impediment I want to treat. What kind of inhumanity are we readying in our schools when we move towards online “schools” that focus narrowly and relentlessly on the curriculum map, instructional delivery, and “value”-“added” “metrics”? A lot of the planning seems to forget that it is for people, not parts. Real teaching no less than “scripted teaching” is being replaced by “blended learning,” but where do the students fit in as human beings? Let us listen to one of them, an American, from whose essay this is taken:

Before school starts, all students receive their schedule for the year, and the first thing my friends and I always did was compare classes and teachers. The teacher, even more than the subject itself, was the most important detail of the class. How the teacher acted, how the teacher looked, how the teacher was personality-wise—these were all essential to us. The way one acted around a teacher could make or break a year. Should I act formally? Should I be sassy? How much trouble would I be in if I turned in a late assignment? Before even meeting these people, I have created a set of possibilities for them using my imagination.

I am not being in the least facetious when I wonder what hopes and images students will cultivate as they confront their blended learning screens, and how they will use them to feed their hunger of imagination. Instead, I will contrast these sorry and defective visions with my colleague the math teacher Mr. P. When I was at a summer workshop one year, I saw a video of a math class being conducted at the Phillips Exeter Academy by a gifted teacher. On this particular day the students were working in small groups on their separate problems, coming to the teacher when they had questions or needed help. It had an effect on my teaching, but I bet no one would have watched it to learn math. I have seen Mr. P. likewise getting his students to work on the whiteboards, as he chaffs and joshes and explains them into an understanding, much as the Exeter teacher did. He also gives traditional chalk talks. Regardless, at the end of class he is usually surrounded by a knot of students with questions. Most students admire him, and work as much to please him as because they dote on differentiation. One of these students was giving his ToK Presentation in my class, and opened it with two quotations on a PowerPoint slide: one by Immanuel Kant and one by Mr. P.  What inhumanity are we proposing in an alternative system in which students do not have such anchors to humanity in their screen-filled education?

This week’s material will at first seem disparate, but the theme connecting all of it is that we must look behind the numbers.

The lesson of the first story is that such stories may leave out important material, and that sometimes this material runs counter to what has been included. We read  that teachers are second highest in well-being of all jobholders, exceeded only by physicians. Those who have read Diane Ravitch’s claim[1] that the average teacher lasts under five years and that the modal year[2] of the profession is the end of year 1 must wonder why members of a profession so blessed run away from it in such numbers that the steam-shovels of Teach for America are barely sufficient to fill the breach. It turns out that the very survey that supplied this “information” has more, rather more, to say. As against “well-being,” teachers surveyed turned out to be dead last in ratings given their working environment and in particular their relationship with their supervisors: it seems that an all-too-common figure in the School Office is the Beast from the East. That may explain why teachers’ stress levels are the second highest of any profession, according to this same survey. The obvious question one has of such seemingly contradictory data is how a group of people who are treated badly and stressfully can also have well-being. The answer appears to be in teachers’ capacity for protective detachment from their work environment: less than a third of all teachers are “engaged” with their work, the rest evidently being highly detached. The news story incompletely reporting this survey seemed to find it a proof that teachers are not the suffering masses of legend, but a more complete look at the numbers tells a rather different story: To protect their personal well-being from the depredations of the workplace, a majority of teachers cultivate detachment and disengagement from a dysfunctional professional environment.

The survey actually portrays a dire situation because the strongest correlate of student engagement is teacher engagement. Students can tell if their teachers are on auto-pilot, and they respond by disengaging themselves from what is to be learned. If teachers are protecting the well-being of some “core self” that they see as different from or outside their professional lives, it is no recommendation of the quality of those professional lives. On-line lessons will end up producing the same results, their mechanism mimicking human disengagement. No one will be fooled when a screen says “Way to Go!” after a right answer.

Unfortunately, when a screen says “6/6 for your writing,” some people will be fooled into thinking that the software behind the screen has actually graded the writing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Software for grading writing is made with a shovel-load of questionable proxy values in place of actual understanding. This is how Les Perelman of MIT could have produced the famous baloney-feast that received a perfect score from a program for grading writing.  Behind the number lies a vacancy of understanding. It may be appealing to a professor to think that he can have a break from grading, but the professor must not be fooled, or go along with foolery. By contrast, Professor Barzun, with his grim “news” that teachers must “work like dogs,” has the right of it. And it is subtle, non-machinable work. Sorry, Professor: please roll up you sleeves, fill your red pen, and get down to it.

The last case for looking behind the numbers takes us to Ralph J. Bunche High School in West Oakland, 90% of whose students have had trouble with the juvenile justice system or lived in foster homes. The program reported in this story teaches the students at Bunche High how to build or restore right-minded human relationships and to instill a sense of justice behind what they do. One adjunct professor of law notes that this will be a “multiyear endeavor.” In that she speaks a truth at odds with baloney betterment programs like RAT and VAM (RAce to the Top and Value Added Metrics) and their annualized nonsense. Many of the students at Bunche have some very basic things to learn—things not captured in the numbers of “Value”-“Added” “Learning.” If Jameelah Garry has learned not to slug her classmates when she dislikes their clothing, and if she has learned to confide her griefs in others rather than acting them out in anger, then she has learned something very important. If her teachers have been there for her but were to receive “ineffective” ratings because girls like her are not academic fireballs, a grave injustice would be done.

It has been two and a half years since I lamented the sad story of Atlanta’s cheating scandal, so it was a relief to read that the schools’ former superintendent was just indicted for “racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements.” As we wait for justice to be done, let us consider some of the problems that may have led Atlanta, and perhaps other places, to this sorry pass. Not all of them are criminal, but following any, let alone many, of them may bring people to the edge of a very slippery slope.

(I don’t mean to single out Atlanta. I guess that one of the main reasons that city is now in the headlines is not unique wickedness but an unusual dedication to prosecution, including funding the fireballs who probed for years to amass their evidence. One prosecutor claims that his earnestness gained him no friends in Atlanta’s business community, which didn’t want this kind of publicity.)

1. Readers of these postings will know that when social-science “instruments” are used for social decision-making, a “corrupting pressure” is placed on that use, and the very social processes themselves tend to become corrupt. We don’t use knives as screwdrivers, and we don’t bring knives to gunfights (I hope), so why do we use measurements of social processes as arbiters of social decision-making? This misuse should stop.

2. Sometimes no corrupting pressure needs to be exerted because the influential person is already corrupt. If individual corruption alone were the problem, it could be rooted out when found, but people in positions of administrative responsibility not infrequently buck up or tolerate their corrupt colleagues rather than reprove them, leading to a state of institutional corruption. At one school I happily no longer work at, one administrator submitted fabricated statistics to the school’s re-accrediting agency. A second administrator, to whom I reported this fraud, made no response, and the submission was included in the school’s report. This is one example on the fly.

3. The late great Stephen Jay Gould said, “If the evidence looks too good to be true, it probably is.” People in positions of administrative responsibility who lack a moral compass should at least assume that suspicious persons with an IQ in three digits will see through some of the most egregious fraud and be deterred from committing it. These suspicious but salutary persons should remain suspicious until they have received a satisfactory explanation, a confession, or a conviction.

4. People in positions of administrative responsibility within schools and districts sometimes act as if their beau ideal of leadership is King Louis, Marshal Stalin, or Jabba the Hutt. By contrast, the famous management theorist W. Edwards Deming proposed such ideal behavior as a. Drive out fear. b. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets. c. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership. Leadership! What a concept!

5. There is widespread acceptance, or at best little questioning, of the proxy values proposed by education “scientists” to represent actual values, even when these proxy values are absurd and the use of them reveals the bankruptcy of intellect that lies behind their formulation and adoption. These postings are full of examples, but a recent favorite was the distance-evaluation of teachers by MP3 file, the files having been produced and cut by the teachers themselves. Of course the longest-running scandal is that of “value”-“added” “metrics.” The operative intellectual model for these things seems to be consensus by somnolence. Time for a wake-up call!

The I.B. course in English A Literature has a flexible syllabus with many choices left up to the teacher. Many, but not all. The rules for choosing are somewhat complicated, but their object is to ensure a syllabus that represents the possibilities of literature across time, place, and genre. This laudable goal runs into a problem: most students are of one place, and all are of one time.

One of the works on my syllabus is Matsuo Basho’s travel diary The Narrow Road to Oku. It happily satisfies many of the course’s criteria for variety of time, place, and genre, but for just these reasons—and others—it challenges students to meet it halfway. I think it important to get the students to take up this challenge. The classic rationale was given by Dr. Johnson as he visited the ruins of Iona: “[W]hatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.”[1] Flannery O’Connor had a more up-to-date formulation: “The fact that [non-modern] works do not present [the student] with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday.”[2]  Her exasperation with this state of cultural amnesia leads her elsewhere in this essay to the rather pungent assessment that “by the reverse evolutionary process children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively.” The reason for this regression, she says, is that “ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.”

O’Connor is severe, but her assessment must not be dismissed out of hand. Students unfamiliar with the historical and cultural terrain that surrounds a work new to them will, like the rigid adults they are growing into, tend to dismiss it and thereby secure their rigidity. They ask why they should work at understanding something new and strange when other things are ready to hand and beckon with their familiarity. The answer of a liberal education to this question is that understanding is liberating.

Like a history course, a course in literature, as part of a liberal education, will get students to enter the past and other terra incognita imaginatively. But it is not just the student who must have a look: the teacher must also try to make the new terrain less daunting than students first take it to be.

And there is much in Basho to puzzle over. Students familiar with the tradition of long Western poetry (and even comparatively long Chinese poetry) will be surprised and at times puzzled by haiku, a form so short it is almost over as it begins. Stranger yet is the undeniable pre-eminence Basho reportedly holds as a Japanese poet: how can a poem of just a few words be so highly admired? And there is the Problem of Action: where is it? Among the diary’s highlights are a temple famous for its silence, a helmet with a cricket under it, a grassy field where a castle used to be, and a bay with hundreds of islands sitting in it.

Ah, the bay! It is called Matsushima, and though Oku contains a haiku about it by his companion Sora, an apocryphal haiku attributed to Basho is more famous. At a loss for even the few words that a haiku requires, Basho was supposedly inspired by its beauty to have written

Ah, Matsushima!

A-a-h, Matsushima, Ah!

Ah, Matsushima!

It turns out that this poem and his famous poem (also not in Oku) about the old pond and the frog are a way into the aesthetic of minimal communication. My students found the many translations of the frog haiku fascinating, particularly the one by James Kirkup that goes

pond

frog

plop

They would sometimes find themselves reciting “Ah! Matsushima!” with amusement.  I knew I had them when I asked them whether they had heard “The Junk Food Haiku.” I then recited, “Ah! McDonald’s!/A-a-h…” and didn’t get any farther than that before the room exploded in a wave of desk-slapping hilarity and laughter. It turned out that most of them thought of a classmate of theirs, famous for his love of McDonald’s hamburgers, which he buys for lunch every day. The “poem” got back to him: that lunch hour he looked at me with a big grin on his face.

This goofiness must not be despised: it lightens the whole and helps to pace the study of kigo and kireji and other keys to understanding. So does the use of “slide” shows that let the students see briar roses and verbena and shinobuzuri cloth and sumi-e paintings. So does the use of activities done in groups, where students work together with each other rather than under the Dreary Shower, as Blake called us. In one they compare Basho’s arrival at Shirakawa and Dr. Johnson’s arrival at Icolmkill. In another they work up their own travelogue with haiku imitating Basho’s record of his visit to the grassy plain of Hiraizumi. And of course they have to prepare the “Interactive Oral Activities” required by the I.B. in its course syllabus. In these they handle historical, cultural, and literary issues having to do with Oku. Sometimes I feel like a ringmaster! At other times I recall a line of Walt Disney’s, in which he said his job was to buzz around the studio like a bee spreading pollen. But one way or another I feel that they end up entering Basho’s world imaginatively and, after an outsider’s fashion, coming to some kind of understanding of it. This opposite to stupidity is an advance in their dignity as thinking beings.

Paper 1 of the International Baccalaureate’s exam in English A Literature requires students to write a commentary on a poem or prose passage they have never seen before. At the higher level, students must proceed without even  “guiding questions.” Clearly no education that produces only knowledge of particular poems would prepare these students to do this paper. In yesterday’s lesson my own English A Literature class examined Elizabeth Bishop’s “Anaphora,” a somewhat difficult poem not least because of its title. My students—at least some of them—remember that anaphora is the rhetorical use of identical openings for grammatically parallel sentence elements, of which the most famous example is Lincoln’s statement in the Gettysburg Address that “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.” But a second, more obscure, definition comes from the Greek Orthodox liturgy, where the Anaphora is the part of the service roughly corresponding to the Canon of the old Roman Catholic mass.

I thought that this second definition could safely be overlooked when I discussed the poem with my students. I was wrong. I offered my thesis that the anaphora of the title was metaphorical and referred to the parallel and identical “white gold skies” and “brilliant walls” every morning opens with before the “ineffable creature” “the day was meant for” begins its descent to “assume memory and mortal / mortal fatigue.” I explained that the actual, literal anaphora of the poem’s lines 21 and 22 was not the key to the poem, though it was important. I suggested a parallel to Frost’s treatment of the theme in “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” which they studied last semester. As always, I proceeded by allowing the students to question and to offer their own theses. One of my brightest students suggested that the Anaphora was that of the Greek liturgy and wondered whether Bishop was treating religious disillusionment in the poem. This student’s question was more tentative than the declaration of my colleague’s student some years ago about the smut of Emily Dickinson, and its purpose was to elicit a comment from me, and a discussion. In addition to considering and finally rejecting this thesis I made the general point that we have to consider reasonable likelihood in our interpretation of poems. Was it more likely that a poet and writer would use the rhetorical definition to describe the decline of day, or that she, by no means a devoted Christian, would allude to Greek liturgy to treat a daily disillusionment there is no evidence of her having felt? And of course the poem itself would have to support this likely reading. Otherwise, as Kenneth Koch says, we “concentrate on what is not there at the expense of what is.”

During this discussion the students were taking some notes and listening with (at least the semblance of) attention. My sense was that their questions and discussion added to what they got not just about this poem but also about interpreting poems in general. That is, they gained not just knowledge but understanding. What is more, they gained it of a fundamental ability: how to read a poem. The importance of this ability has been recognize by, among others, Charles Darwin, who sadly reported having lost it in the course of his adult life and wishing that he had not.

Whether the cultivation of this ability should be taught to everyone or some people, in high school or in university, could, I suppose, be debated; but it seems hard to deny that it is in some important sense a fundamental prerequisite to an appreciation of the power and potential of language. If I am right that it involves not just knowledge but also understanding, not just hearing and remembering but also formulating and testing, then it is hard to see how it could proceed without give-and-take between student and teacher such as a discussion course allows. It then follows that this fundamental ability cannot be cultivated in an on-line class consisting of lectures or stepwise analysis without question time. It is true that a gifted lecturer might inflame a student’s interest with a fine discussion of a strongly appealing poem, but that is serendipity—not something on which to hang a curriculum.

Of course reading and getting poems is one of many fundamental abilities, the cultivation of which should constitute introductory or general courses. In any fundamental ability requiring understanding—and I mean here to include more than just reading poems—online or “blended” (!) learning will be not just a bad education but what John Dewey, in one of his lucid moments,  called miseducation. If a student ends up listening to twenty lectures on poetry and takes away from them the idea that a poem is an obscure communication that really means what the teacher says in the lecture, something profoundly wrong has happened. But how can it be otherwise if the students do not experience reading as at least in part a conversation?

Two dispiriting developments in California’s system of higher education seem to be working against the acquisition of poetry-reading and other fundamental powers. One is the growing appeal of on-line education, which plays to knowledge only and not to understanding. The second is the shameful administrative and educational disaster of not having enough places in introductory courses for all the students who want to take them. The students, thus deprived and placed on waiting lists for long periods of time, delay their progress through an increasingly expensive education that they are decreasingly able to afford.

And so the terrible inevitable has happened: California is about to pass a law requiring its colleges to accept online courses even from outside, and perhaps commercial, “institutions” for credit in these oversubscribed basics. I fear that students of the future, instead of pondering anaphora, will have to gum down a pelletized processed education, for this trend will not stop at just “introductory” courses that are “too” popular.

Whatever else Joel Klein is, he is marvelously undead. He left the New York City Schools after imposing on them a “value-added learning” program that did nothing for students’ learning, and a “basic literacy” program thanks to which literacy did not improve but at-risk reading students foundered. He went  to work for Rupert Murdoch’s mischievously named “News Corporation,” which specialises among other things in bimbo spreads and phone hacking. There he divided his time between attempts to rehabilitate Murdoch’s reputation (aided no doubt by his experience in touching up his own reputation) and attempts to make education profitable for his master’s corporation, if not for students.

Sensible and decent people in the U.S. hoped that at least one of these projects would have kept him busy in Britain, but—no! He is back. Is he here to help popularize those page-3 topless spreads in tabloids? Is he here to persuade people that phone hacking is not such a big deal? Is he here to throw his weight, such as it is, behind RAce to the Top (RAT)? Is he here to promote “national security audits” in public schools and their “human capital”?  Maybe yes, maybe no, but he is certainly here to promote a corporate vision of “blended learning” that he hopes will earn “News Corporation” a return on its own, somewhat inhuman, capital. And, not content simply to harness the power of students to earn profit for a company by “studying,” he is “launching” a new tablet computer.

In another context the late Senator Sam Ervin suggested that we must not expect philanthropic results from organizations that are not “eleemosynary institutions.” If this bit of homespun wisdom from the mid-70s’ most famous “country lawyer” does not seem self-evident, consider more details about this “educational” product. The new tablet has a game in which “Tom Sawyer battles the Brontë sisters,” no doubt with virtual paintball.  We read in the Times article hyperlinked above that this bit of e-diocy is part of a “curriculum, including video games as elaborate as anything played on an Xbox,” that will “turn students into readers” while contributing 40% of the “education” company’s profits—I fear not in that order. How can anyone believe that students will become better readers by having a battle between Tom Sawyer and the Brontë sisters? If it comes to that, I’d rather trust Charlotte Brontë on education than a commercial huckster any day.

There is a huge irony in the New York City Schools’ announcement that it is changing part of the admission exam to its gifted and talented program because of test preparation companies. To understand why, recall Campbell’s Law[1], formulated in 1975 by Donald C. Campbell. A test of giftedness should, strictly speaking, be used simply to decide whether someone is gifted. Unfortunately, that is not the use to which the City Schools’ test is being put: it is also being used for “social decision-making”—as an admission test. As soon as a test’s purpose goes from diagnosis to social decision-making, it becomes subject to “corruption pressure.” The New York Times article hyperlinked above reports precisely such corruption pressure in the form of test-prepped four-year-olds so expert in test-giftedness that one of them can brush off the psychologist’s oral instructions with a dismissive “I know what to do.”

Well, my dear, so do your teachers; and that leads to the irony. The City Schools are not shelving, or even changing, the tests and formulae used as the basis for “value-added metrics” even though they entail social decision-making that can denature the “education” students receive or unjustifiably break the careers of the teachers “evaluated.” This in spite of (or because of!) the City Schools’ spending more for books of test preparation than for any other kind. It is ironic that a school system objects to the hijacking of tests by test-preparation companies at the same time that the corruption pressures spawned by its own “evaluations” turn whole schools, whole districts, into a giant test preparation company. I smell a RAT[2].

During my second year of teaching an old nun once asked me to come with her to look at something. Sister Katharine, in her mid-seventies by then, had retired from full-time English teaching to the library, where she kept an eye on books—and on the school’s publications, including the school newspaper, sponsored by me, which she subjected to microscopic attention. My students (and I) usually escaped reproach for poor or careless writing, but the school’s newsletter for parents and alumni, which she proofread, was always letter perfect.

Sister took me to an inconspicuous door in an out-of-the-way corner of the classroom building, and opened it, revealing a closet that had clearly not been used in years. In it were many of the old materials she had used in her classes twenty, thirty, forty years before. We had a look through them. It was impossible not to notice almost immediately that the materials were prepared to a very high level of expectation. I asked her whether the students had had difficulty with them, to which she replied, “Not at first, but I retired when I found that in general, my students could no longer meet my expectations.” They must clearly have been strong students in order not to have forced her to retire earlier than she did.

Curiously, I had at that time also just read a piece by a syndicated columnist complaining that what students used to learn for free in public schools they now had to pay college-level prices to learn. It struck me that Sister Katharine was in the rear-guard against a tendency to water the curriculum of high schools and, I believe, to lower the demands made of students who encountered that curriculum.

The following year I attended a workshop offered in Berkeley by a famous local “writers’ project” for teaching writing to high-school students. I “learned” there that “the research says” students don’t read teachers’ comments on their writing and that teachers should therefore not make the comments. In this terrible lesson I became aware of an irony that Oscar Wilde, who received a “double first” at university, would have appreciated. His character Lady Bracknell asserts at one point that “statistics…are laid down for our guidance.” When Wilde wrote that line he intended it to get a laugh, but here at my workshop were “leaders” asserting that very principle in all seriousness and with devastating effect.

In this case the effect was to acquiesce in dysfunctional learning: whoever heard of a culture of learning in which students did not attend to a teacher’s comments? I certainly did, as have many of my students, particularly the ones I have now. And comments should include not just advice on semicolons but general advice, praise, and, when necessary, reproof. It has been reported that many students have trouble finishing their college education. If so, we may find the culprit in twelve years spent at undemanding tasks with no teacherly advice or admonition to accompany them.

I heard that Sister Katharine could be a tough customer, and that some of her students feared or disliked her. Professor Barzun notes that that state of relations is still preferable to one in which the student treats the teacher with casual contempt or amused disregard. Twelve years of ease and disregard, when followed by a year of unaccustomed rigor in college, are likely to have only one result except in the sturdiest and most resilient of students.

This, and not “degree inflation,” is likely to be the explanation of the recently reported phenomenon of companies that require bachelor’s degrees of their file clerks and couriers. 40% of the country’s college students do not finish their studies in a reasonable time or at all, so it can’t be that we are awash in freshly minted Bachelors. Indeed, that columnist may be wrong: students are not learning in a college they drop out of what they used to learn in a high school they persevered in. One hiring official at a company with this policy says that college graduates are serious about their careers. That is evidently proven by their degree, which shows that they can do what is expected of them.  They certainly would not have lasted very long in Sister’s classroom if they could not do that.

* * *

While in South Africa recently, I visited the house of a black South African single parent now finishing his university studies in order to remedy an educational deficit caused by apartheid and its dysfunctional schools. His boys come home on weekdays and do their homework with bedroom door open till it is finished. No TV till then, and no computers or gadgets except on weekends or to produce academic work. When dinner is served, which they eat together as a family, they take a break from homework if it is not finished and then get back to it afterwards. Woe betide them if their school diary reports multiple demerits or poor work. But they also participate in sports and other extracurricular activities and have time on weekends to visit friends. Surely this kind of accountability in a student is a reasonable expectation?

The Chinese New Year (of the Snake) has begun, but without me in China: I’ve gone to South Africa for the New Year holiday, and so will not be writing a posting this week.

Sometimes you learn more than you want to in an interview. Such was the case last week as a number of us participated in an interview of a candidate for one of our IB teaching positions. The candidate, who works at a school known for its excellent IB results, started telling us how the program is conducted at that school.

Imagine our surprise, turning to shock, as the candidate detailed practices clearly at odds with the aims of the IB program: concurrency of learning over a period of two years, and the centrality of the “Core,” particularly Theory of Knowledge. We heard that the school’s students studied some of their set texts two or three times starting in Grade 7 in preparation for some of their assessments. Imagine the students’ being told told, “Time to study Things Fall Apart again!”  They would end up loving Achebe as much as a friend of mine loved Yeats after having to write a 35-page paper on “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Loathing from A to Y!

And ToK: so much time spent preparing an essay on a topic connected with one of each student’s Higher-Level subjects that the students had insufficient time left for the rest of the ToK program. Our applicant said, “We give them Ethics in a PowerPoint presentation” because the students don’t need Ethics to score well on the assessments.

Evidently neither does the school, but it sounds as if they need more than a PowerPoint presentation to remedy that defect. One of my colleagues, a thoroughgoing professional and normally unflappable, asked our applicant, “Don’t you see any ethical problems with the way the program is conducted?” The applicant didn’t understand what the problems could be.

That is because the applicant and the school had accepted the corrupt idea that getting students to pass tests is what a school is for. George Orwell called that kind of conceptual corruption a “preparation for a confidence trick,” and Donald Campbell warned that it could lead to more than conceptual corruption, as news headlines about cheating on tests prove. Edward Tufte, the author of the famous Visual Display of Quantitative Information, warns that the “Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” is not suited to the transmission of subtle material. Evidently not.