Author: Greg

Though we usually use these words in the sense of “having a moral compass” and “bringing together of disparate elements, particularly different ethnic elements,” they have older senses that I want to note. Their Latin roots are the same: a word for “entire.” In these older senses a school with integrity would be one that hangs together, and whose aim is to nurture or cultivate the entire student. A subject with integrity is one that has a sense of coherence overall and among its parts. When the parts of a subject or of a school combine to make a genuine whole, we may say that they are integrated.

There may be many kinds of opposites to a school or a subject with integrity. I have dealt with Potemkin schools, which are shells behind which nothing complete or entire can be found, or indeed anything with even a tendency to completeness. And I have looked at courses that lack integrity, the most glaring example being the one George Orwell reports having taken as a boy. That course in history, which he called “a sort of preparation for a confidence trick,” lacked integrity in the familiar sense of being a trick, but it also lacked a sense of the wholeness of history conveyed entire. It did not teach history, it taught how to pass the Eton History Prize examination. The problem with teaching to tests is that it puts the cart before the horse, but many people seem happy to indulge or encourage this preposterous practice.

Another problem is the teaching of “skills” without subjects to give them form, purpose, and meaning. If someone taught me how to swing a golf club without teaching me to play golf, it would be a meaningless accomplishment. No one would urge me to take a course in golf-club swinging, or ball-hitting, or addressing a golf ball. Rather, a teacher of a subject with integrity would teach me to play golf, in the course of which I would learn how to do these things. I would then learn not just a number of “skills” but the integrative skill of combining them in a complex accomplishment.

In spite of the seeming wrongheadedness of teaching to tests and of teaching “skills,” The New York Times reports that “a new kind of tutoring aims to make kids smarter.” It turns out that it consists mainly of disintegrated exercises such as doing sums next to a hand-clapping noodge or tossing beanbags rhythmically while spelling a sentence one letter at a time. The idea is that this heap of “skills” will help people take intelligence tests. Intelligence tests! Just what Johnny needs: coaching in a dubious non-integrated “skills” that mysteriously combine in a “power” of doubtful value. Some customers, I mean learners, say the exercises help them pay attention. If the object is to teach kids to resist distraction, why not pay someone to offer them tutoring in a genuine subject, placing their mobile phone face down on the table and telling them to ignore it? Or, perish the thought, telling them to turn it off?

I am not sure what is at work in the disintegration of teaching and learning, but I think that it may be due in part to some version of the reductive fallacy, whereby an attainment with some integrity is analyzed into “factors” that it is “nothing but.” It works like a dissection of the goose that laid the golden egg. And I fear it may be the result of “science” with a mission to “discover” how to “deliver” “instruction” on the cheap: Pink Slime Education. Either way, it will end up offering something thin and unsatisfactory compared with the real, integral thing.

Well worth examining and thinking about is a recent New York Times interview with Andreas Schleicher, a special advisor on education to the secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the group under whose aegis the PISA tests of national (or, in the case of some Asian cities, municipal) accomplishment are administered. Items:

•     Education does not automatically founder in an urban environment: Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore are big cities with big groups of poor families, and their schools are, by and large, successful.

•     “Quality and equity [don’t] seem to be opposing policy objectives”: In Finland’s schools, the best of any non-municipal “nation” in PISA’s ambit, there is only a 5% performance variation. It is often said that Finland is homogeneous, but it is not that homogeneous.

•     An industrial model of education administration is less successful than a professional model, and the best education systems work along professional, not industrial, lines. It is not a question of unionism vs. non-unionism either: some countries with strong unions do very well, the unions being fundamentally professional rather than industrial.

•     In the best school systems accountability is horizontal, not vertical: teachers work together to plan and debrief on lessons, and they advise, counsel, and evaluate each other.

•     All other things being equal, smaller classes are better, but it is even better to have good teachers than to have small classes. (The sticking-point, not discussed by Schleicher in this interview, is in how to determine quality. But in another New York Times article, a Finnish administrator said that Finnish teachers would not tolerate “value-added metrics.” It is a sign of the advanced state of Finland’s education system that what teachers will tolerate matters, and that they have not been gulled or victimized by this preposterous hoax.)

Reading notices of the 70^th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein took me back to my job of teaching in Alexandria—the Alexandria—twenty years ago. 1992 was the 50^th anniversary, and “everybody” came to Egypt’s northern coast for the commemoration. My main reading about the battle had been in Olivia Manning’s captivating Levant Trilogy, though Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet alludes to the battle too.

(The Alexandria Quartet! One of the most wonderfully strange series of novels ever produced, it is set in and around the Alexandria of the 1940s: not just a physically and historically actual Alexandria, but also and more importantly an imaginative one. The aptly named character Mnemjian calls it the Capital of Memory, echoing the treatment also used by E.M. Forster in his Alexandria: a History and a Guide, published in the 1920s. The Alexandria Forster calls up was more a memory than an actuality, and indeed everywhere one turns one does as much imagining and remembering as actual seeing. History lies beneath every surface of land and water. My colleague the Dean went scuba diving among submerged ruins that were later determined to be Cleopatra’s palace. The Cleopatra.)

Having gone to the battleground with some friends, I decided to take a load of students there and to camp overnight at the nearby lip of the Qattara Depression. It was early spring, and I guessed that we would have fair weather. We had the supplies we would need for a basic or primitive camping trip, including water, for the site was bone dry. There is nothing relaxing about taking students on a trip, pace the uninformed teacher-bashers who say that it is nothing but babysitting; but I felt confident that we could have an interesting and entertaining overnighter.

The morning of the trip dawned, but it was unexpectedly very hot. This was a potentially serious wrinkle in the plans not just because of the limited water supply but also because a sudden change to hot weather in spring sometimes signals the appearance of a khamseen wind. One of the famous Mediterranean winds, the khamseen is known on the Italian side of the Mediterranean as the scirocco, the South Wind of Norman Douglas’s lovely book about the fictional island of Nepenthe. The scirocco can be so strong as to reach hurricane force, carrying dust from the Libyan Desert as far as Italy and France.

A friend and I had been caught in a dust storm in Saudi Arabia one time, having to drive a kilometer or so in wind so heavily loaded with sand and dust that the driver could not see the edge of the road from his seat, and could barely see over the hood. I had to lead the car, walking through airborne dust so thick that it sheeted off my clothes and scattered in ribbons to the ground. The distance from the coast road to the lip of the escarpment is some tens of kilometers, which I did not want to take at a dusty walk. And what about those hurricane winds? I didn’t want to be sandblasted either.

But we decided to take off, I telling the students that if the sky took on the threatening white glare we associated with an imminent khamseen, we would turn around and come back. At the moment, the sky was blue and cloudless. The first part of the drive, though the city, was familiar to us all: neighborhoods named Caesar’s Camp (“Caesar never camped here,” Forster tartly informs us) and Cleopatra (“Cleopatra never lived here”). Our route westward through the city followed the route of the ancient Canopic Road through a neighborhood known two thousand years ago by the Greek letter Delta, though no Hellenistic ruins were visible. Not far from our road lay Alexander the Great Street, which passed the site of the new Alexandria Library, then under construction but now completed. Everyone has heard of the old Alexandria Library, destroyed in the seventh century. Its site was apparently a little due south of where we crossed the center of town. We passed the building identified as Nessim’s palace in the Alexandria Quartet, though it is now a bank, not a private house. We passed the café where Darley met Justine—dark in ancient red velvet curtains. The students, having read Justine (Durrell’s, not Sade’s), knew what these places were.

We passed through the chaotic resort city of Agami, about which a friend had said, “There is not a single beautiful building in the entire city.” I couldn’t prove her wrong. Once west of Agami we passed fig plantations and then found ourselves in (generally) open desert. On our left at one point was an old tower called Borg al-Arab, which is, or is not, a replica of the ancient Lighthouse, depending on whom you talk to. Also in that area is Abu Mena, the Lourdes of early Christendom, where pilgrims from around the region would come hoping for a cure while taking its waters. The site is now in ruins. A nearby monastery still holds a community of Coptic Christian monks, not quite as isolated as the austere monasteries of Wadi Natrun (Sodium Gulch, named after its salt pans).

As we moved into the open desert, we became aware of a strange atmospheric phenomenon. Over the Mediterranean Sea to our right, the sky was a brilliant blue; but over the brown desert to our left the blue took on a light beige tinge from the desert below, and was less brilliant than the sky to our right. The division between the two skies was pronounced. The coastline, which was often in view, consisted of brilliantly white marl and white sand; the ocean was an incredibly vivid light electric blue, and even the waves’ foam had a pale bluish cast.

Not long afterwards we came to the village of El Alamein, which gave the battle its name; and then we found the battlefield monuments of the German, Italian, and British Armies. It was hard to believe the tens of thousands of casualties in the battle, and hard to believe the extensiveness of the cemeteries there. The students decided that the most beautiful and stylish monument was the Italian, while the German monument was most likely to last through many khamseen winds.

We turned left onto Betrol Road (Arabic does not include the letter P) leading to an oilfield on the other side of the battleground near the Qattara Depression. I told the students that we would stay in the car while traveling through the battleground because not all the land mines from the “Devil’s Gardens” had been removed, and the “Gardens” were still a deadly menace. The reason Field Marshall Montgomery had chosen this ground on which to challenge Rommel was that the Depression, inaccessible to tanks, confined the action to a controllable segment of the coastal plain.

The heat with which the day had begun was even greater now, and the students were imagining themselves under this wide hot sky being shelled and strafed. It was a sobering drive.

The Qattara Depression appears suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere. The horizon “approaches,” but it is actually the lip of an escarpment where the land falls away for hundreds of feet to Africa’s second-lowest point. The drop is sudden and unmarked. We stopped and got out.

The eroded cliffs showed shoals of fossilized sea creatures by the thousands. The students wanted to “explore,” and though I was not keen to scramble down a rocky cliff in hot sunny weather, I obliged them. We took water bottles. The exploration was draining, and I called a halt soon after it began because one of the students was looking as if heat exhaustion might come on. We slowly clambered back up to the lip of the escarpment and looked out towards the south. The sky was a brilliant painful white, and I recalled the Saudi dust storm and Chapter 50 of Gibbon:

“[A] boundless level of sand is intersected by sharp and naked mountains; and the face of the desert, without shade or shelter, is scorched by the direct and intense rays of a tropical sun. Instead of refreshing breezes, the winds, particularly from the south-west, diffuse a noxious and even deadly vapour; the hillocks of sand which they alternately raise and scatter, are compared to the billows of the ocean, and whole caravans, whole armies, have been lost and buried in the whirlwind.”

I noticed while thinking of this passage that a southwest breeze was rising and decided that we had better abort the camping trip. I was confirmed in that decision by the alarming inroads the students were making in our water supply after our hot climb up the escarpment. Though disappointed, the students brightened when I promised that we would stop at a beach on the way back for swimming (“sea-bathing,” Durrell calls it). The surf on the beach had a gentle break softened by the offshore wind that had chased us northward; but nothing diluted its brilliant color.

As it turned out the north coast and Alexandria got only a light dusting instead of the four-day sandblasting one can sometimes experience, but I was not sorry to curtail the trip. We had had the sight of the patriot graves, we had had a chance to see a land’s end that fell into a seeming nothingness, we had had a taste of Gibbon’s fiftieth chapter, and we had washed it all away with some bracing body-surfing. No, we hadn’t washed it all away because the memory remains with me and with them even as we read this week’s accounts of the battle.

In 1913, at the age of five, young Jacques Barzun went with his father to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysees to hear a new ballet by Igor Stravinsky called Le Sacre du Printemps. His father and mother, whose home was a salon for artists, poets, and musicians, encouraged his interest in the arts, whether by letting him sit on Guillaume Apollinaire’s lap when the poet visited, or by taking him to performances of music. His unusual and precocious upbringing also included emigration from France to the U. S., where he entered Columbia at the age of fifteen and graduated at the top of his class.

His interest in history started on the knee of his grandmother, who had been born in 1830 and had vivid stories to tell about the revolution of 1848. Barzun never gave up the idea, formed then, that history was a story. History became his field of academic expertise, though he also wrote about teaching, about detective fiction, about music and poetry, about art, and about baseball. (A quotation of his can be found on a wall of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.)

Barzun’s views were often controversial and sometimes provoked a hostile response in his readers. He was the only contemporary Marshall McLuhan denounced by name in The Gutenberg Galaxy; and a friend of mine, to whom I’d lent A Stroll with William James, couldn’t abide him, though he ended up being very interested in James. (His summary of that book was “Me Barzun. You James.”)

For my part, I find his writing wonderfully refreshing, particularly his writing on education. A year doesn’t go by when I don’t take down Teacher in America or Begin Here to exchange the hot air of Edspeak (which Barzun characterizes as “guff” and “flatulent Newspeak”) for his ungentle but salutary breezes. Another friend, a novelist and teacher, finds Begin Here an indispensable antidote to what he has to swallow at work.

But I have also read his works of history, including his justly famous work of enthusiastic devotion, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, with its 90-page bibliography comprising 1,500 sources gathered over fifteen or twenty years. I am grateful to that book because it put Berlioz’s whole compositions in the repertoire and made a fan of me, and I pardon his excess of devotion, for what my pardon is worth. Scholars and writers like Charles Rosen have noted it, and subsequent biographers and musicologists have corrected it; but he was the pioneer.

It is against Barzun’s biography that I note with dismay the downward trajectory of the arts and history in contemporary education: his life and writing are a demonstration, if one were needed, that art and history are vital to a sound education and civilization. Furthermore, his life and circumstances refute the “ideas” that lie behind value-added learning. Consider for example the absurd claim that one may lay responsibility for learning solely at the feet of a pupil’s teachers, which is what many value-added “metrics” do. With all due respect for little Jacques’s kindergarten teacher, assuming he had one, a five-year-old who talked about poetry with Apollinaire and attended Stravinsky’s ballets with his father has more to his education than a teacher can answer for. Also consider his position at the top of his class: with no “room for improvement” that can be captured on a multiple-choice test, little Jacques would have been a positive menace to his teachers’ value-added ratings if he had been in their classes a hundred years later than he was.

Among my new 11^th-grade students in English is one who cannot be still. I recently assigned some reading in class, and within a very short time he got up and started walking around the classroom, book in hand. When I looked at him with raised eyebrows, he said he read better when he could walk around. “Go ahead,” I said, “I like to pace too,” and then continued my teacherly pacing around the room. I have the same student in Theory of Knowledge, where during a class not long ago we took a walk in order to examine a nearby architectural curiosity, a kind of picture-gallery of ambient space inserted by the architect within the more traditionally functional remainder of the building. The students’ job was to try and explain why the architect had made the “gallery.” The wiggle-worm was wired with excitement at the chance to have a class in which he could stroll, peer, stand on tiptoes, look at the views. In both classes I have the students arrange their desks and chairs into work groups or a circle or back into rows at need. I think this student likes this part of the class better than the rest.

There are conditions of teaching that allow me to indulge my fidgety student’s need for motion. The classes are relatively small; I teach in a part of the world whose culture deeply respects education and teachers and therefore funds and otherwise supports both; the students have been successfully brought up with good work habits and generally disciplined personal habits; the students’ desks are fitted with casters & brakes, making rearrangement relatively simple and non-destructive to floors.

Many people recognize that these conditions are imperfectly available in the United States, but not everyone is thinking successfully about what their absence means for education. It is in this vacuum of understanding that we find an increasing reliance on the terrible expedient of medicating students in order to try and counteract the deficiency of their educational environment. As one doctor put it, “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.” Hence the dispensing of prescriptions comprising Class II controlled substances[1] to eleven-year-olds not to relieve an illness—for none has been diagnosed in many cases—but to improve their performance on schoolwork and tests.

It is chilling to think that administrators  and teachers could find themselves under pressure to work for the use of drugs on their students, not for medical reasons, but because they have a personal stake in the students’ test scores if the scores are tied to evaluations of a school and its teachers. Donald Campbell predicted that it would happen[2], and he appears to have been right. All a teacher has to do is describe the “right symptoms” on a referral survey, and in a few short weeks the student is doing better on tests, including the one that determines the teacher’s value-added rating. If doctors can think along these lines, why not teachers? The doctor quoted above thinks it is already happening.

Twenty years ago the best colleges and universities in the U. S. turned up their noses at the US News & World Report’s “best colleges” ratings. At the beginning of last year Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent article in The New Yorker tearing the ratings to small fine shreds. Other shredding operations have been conducted, and sensible people should consider them disposed of. Far from it: the ratings continue to make their undead way, arms outstretched, towards successive classes of high-school seniors caught up in the admissions “process.”

And not just the high-school seniors. Even very good universities that have ten or twenty applicants for each place, and that should be ignoring the ratings game, produce mailers that they send to top scorers on the SAT. Their own “thin envelope” letters note that there are many qualified applicants for every place, so why do they do it? The only explanation can be that they want to have a higher ratio of applications to admissions in order to boost their ratings.

Only such thinking can explain another phenomenon, the move towards viewing admission interviews by alumni/ae as a marketing tool. Admissions officers from good or excellent universities “explain” that an interview acts as a kind of “bonding experience” shown to be effective by market research in producing a “yes” from admitted high-school seniors. The more “yeses,” the higher the yield ratio and the resulting rating.

There seems to be no end in sight to the nonsense, for it is difficult to detach oneself from the whirligig. Gladwell notes that even the statistics about the “value” of a top-shelf degree comprise other factors than just the quality of the education received, but it doesn’t stop the clamor at the ivy gates. High school teachers and counselors as well as the parents of juniors and seniors should be helping students to look beyond the dazzle of university ratings to make intelligent and satisfying choices, but very often our role ends up being to console them when those gates slam in their faces.

During the year I started teaching in South Africa, Victoria Falls beckoned. On a visit there I took a walk along the right bank of the Zambezi River from the rain forest that surrounds the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Away from the mist, the rain forest thins to what one might call “ordinary” jungle, though I was all eyes for the first such scenery I had ever viewed. I saw a troop of monkeys in front of me at one point tossing a baby back and forth among themselves as they chattered and clambered among the branches. Were they playing catch? Were they trying to confuse the two-legged predator about which monkey had the baby? Were they trying to be sure that no child was left behind?

Then, rounding a curve in the trail, I saw in front of me an elephant—a solitary bull elephant. It looked at me, flapped its ears, and charged. I was not a Transformer, but I instantly changed from all eyes to all legs. I lost twenty-five years of my age as I ran again like the young adult I used to be (well, that’s the way it felt). Was it my imagination that felt the thumping of the elephant’s feet as it ran, its toes eager to make human jam? Maybe the thumping was my heartbeat. I then seemed to pass an invisible property line, after which the bull stopped chasing me. Some time later I stopped running and decided that my only resemblance to Dr. Livingstone was that I had seen a statue of Henry Morton Stanley near the falls.

Though at the time I seemed to lose twenty-five years, in retrospect I see that I also lost about twenty thousand years as I found myself among the trees chased by an animal seemingly determined to turn me into a grease stain on the jungle floor. It occurs to me now that this kind of time travel can also go in the reverse direction, for a liberal education recapitulates civilization. Hence José Ortega y Gasset’s claim that “if a whole generation ceased to study, nine-tenths of the human race then alive would die a violent death.” What is more, he says, “Techniques can be taught, mechanically. But techniques live on knowing, and if this cannot be taught, an hour will come in which the techniques too will succumb.”

To Ortega “knowing” is more than recall, pattern-recognition, and fulfilling job requirements as  “human capital.” It is people—not human capital—creating disciplines of study “out of brute force” because “they needed them so badly that they had to have them.” And the need is not always immediately practical: Apollonius of Perga “needed to know” about ellipses 1700 years before practical use was made of his work. Fortunately for post-Renaissance astronomy, liberal education preserved that knowledge even though it didn’t help anyone become more marketable. And liberal education preserved calligraphy at Reed College, where an ex-Trappist monk taught it to the young Steve Jobs.

Against an elephant-stampede to turn much of education into cheap or profitable dullness, some schools in the U. S. are making the right choices. A friend of mine reports substitute-teaching at a public high school in rural Wisconsin. “His” class almost didn’t need his presence as it read and discussed Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, written at about the time modern astronomy found a use for Apollonius and sixty years before the Trappist order of monks was founded. It was a time when calligraphy seemed to recede in practical importance, though it clearly kept its inspirational power. I hope that if some of those students end up in politics and education, their own liberal education will remind them what a Faustian bargain is.

“Boredom is rage spread thin.”—Paul Tillich

“I do love knitting patterns.”—Professor Dumbledore

Many teachers are familiar with those moments in school assemblies or large classes when a single action or a small chain of words provokes a response that suddenly amplifies into a cheer, a wave of laughter, or a rumbling hubbub. (Though for regrettably many teachers and their students, the momentary phenomenon at assemblies is silence.) Then, as the moment passes, the assembled students return to their modicum of shared attention and disguised private daydreams. (The silence of gadget-twiddlers is another phenomenon entirely.) One sign of the good school is that its assemblies proceed in an equilibrium of paid attention and momentary ebullience: such gatherings show that its students have learned to balance shared experience and private enthusiasm and know how to subordinate private enthusiasm to public attention at need. People leading these assemblies also have a sense of what will play at an assembly and what will not.

But this kind of attention implies something worth attending to: discipline will carry students or their teachers only so far. If students have to spend time to “learn” “Jungle Gym Math” in the classroom, they will sooner or later stop paying attention: you can’t force someone to be interested in paint peeling. The same goes for assemblies where they (and their teachers) have to listen to baloney.

The usually expected reaction to this kind of trial is angry boredom, for “boredom is rage spread thin” according to the theologian Paul Tillich. But boredom of a different kind can also be a sign of acedia. In either case, as Professor Barzun notes, boredom is highly destructive.

But it is also possible to turn away from dull conditions of life in good ways, or in ways that are not inherently vicious. Hence the old tradition of striking out to “seek one’s fortune,” exemplified by Dr. Johnson and David Garrick, who hit the road together—Johnson eventually becoming the greatest man of letters of his day, and Garrick the greatest actor. Hence also the more modern tradition of “garagism,” in which the ambitious or otherwise not easily satisfied young person composes and plays music or invents and tests gadgets and Franklin stoves in his garage. And of course there are those like Bashō who are wonderfully present-minded while being able to cast imaginatively across time and space, admiring old ponds with frogs jumping in and silent ancient temples alike.

It would be nice to think that schools help young people on their way to find life interesting or rewarding, but in many cases that is wishful thinking. It is certainly wishful thinking in the case of Jake Davis, a recently arrested member of the Anonymous internet collective. One of a number of very highly intelligent young people now shaking up the wired world, Davis, a Shetland Islander, metaphorically hit the road, finding fame and felony charges by age 18. His interviewer, expecting to find a pimple-scratching sociopath, was struck not just by how articulate he is but also by how unmarked by anger, acedia, or gaucherie. The reason I write about him this week is that he craved—and still craves—learning but got little or none of it from his school, where the only thing he remembers learning was how to knit. I am not belittling the pastime of aunts, grannies, headmasters and hackers; I am wondering what his school was doing while he was going there, in class or in assembly. It is poignant to find out that he hopes he will be able to read and learn more in prison when he finally goes there than he did in school.

To the dictum that the four basic food groups are sugar, salt, fat, and alcohol we may add a zesty youthful ramification: they are cookies, crispies, cola, and combos. As a young boy my nephew preferred carrot sticks to cookies, but statistics are laid down for our guidance, and the “norm” will help explain the extraordinary results of the famous Mischel Oreo Experiment[1].

In it the four-year-old experimental subject sat at a table in a mostly empty room facing a single Oreo cookie and a bell on the table. The subject was to remain seated and wait fifteen minutes after the experimenter left the room in order to receive two Oreos but could ring the bell at any time to receive one Oreo. The experiment ended after fifteen minutes, or whenever the subject rang the bell, ate the Oreo, or stood up.

But the Oreo Experiment was also a longitudinal study that yielded fascinating results: the “resisters”—that is, the subjects who got two Oreos—turned out ten years later to have better ability to “reallocate their attention effectively” and showed “greater executive control.” That should not be a surprise, but consider a third finding: the resisters also had “substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.”

What does self-control have to do with intelligence? Kahneman reports that Keith Stanovich, who established many of the distinctions in thinking used by Kahneman, divides thinking broadly into two types: the intuitive, rapid sort that saves one from leopards on the savannah and also saves one the time of deliberation; and a second, more deliberative kind. This second kind, which turns out to operate as a kind of back-up system or check on the intuitive, rapid thinking, itself is divisible in two.

The first we might simply call brain power or, following Stanovich, “algorithmic” intelligence—the kind usually measured on traditional intelligence tests. The second is what Kahneman calls “engagement”: the power of attending to a problem rationally or algorithmically so as to minimize the susceptibility to “cognitive errors” that our intuitive thinking leaves us open to.

This power confers an evident advantage, according to Kahneman and Stanovich. One’s intuitive thinking tells one that an Oreo is good; one’s algorithmic thinking tells one that two Oreos are therefore better; but one’s engagement with the Oreo Problem allows one to accept the cognitive challenge of getting that second Oreo.

Now, our intuitive thinking, according to Kahneman, is our preferred way of thought. There is physical and neurological evidence that deliberative thinking is more difficult, exhausting, and stressful. When possible we prefer to loaf at ease and invite our souls to cognition and leopard-looking.

The problem for education is obviously that the harder kind of thinking, as well as the ability to marshal attention that must go with it, takes a discipline that I would say must be practiced. Hence the French custom of making children wait to have their wishes gratified. Hence also our own setting of tasks in school that require not just brain power but sustained engagement for their successful completion:

• Math problems that require inventive and elaborate work, and that require the work to be shown
• Essays that require a balancing of factual detail and the control of ideas in a coherent exposition
• Projects that require recurring systematic deliberate attention
• Theses that require the gathering and interpreting of evidence in the laboratory, library, or field
• Discussions that require thoughtful answers to questions, and whose answers will in Socratic fashion be the object of further questioning
• Writing, including “creative” writing, that requires multiple outlines and/or drafts
• Games that require thinking “down the road” as well as for current perplexities and challenges.
• Homework that lasts longer than the Homework Lady requires, during which the student foregoes electronic distraction

If we don’t have these things; if, instead, we have had problems and homework that take seconds, essays written once on auto pilot, inane projects, unchallenging discussions, theses that are daisy chains of quotation and plagiarism, multiple-choice tests requiring only recall and pointing to pass, and games requiring the attention-span of a grasshopper and the strategic skills of Beetle Bailey; what kind of young adults will we end up producing?

While it was interesting and chilling to read about “doctor burnout” recently in The New York Times, I found myself wondering why the Times doesn’t run a prominent article on “teacher burnout.” The problem is serious: Diane Ravitch reports that 1) most teachers don’t last five years in the profession and 2) the “modal year” of teaching—the year of experience with the highest number of teachers—is, amazingly, year one. When I was in high school, the modal year was year fifteen. Something bad has happened, and not enough people have noticed.

Who can explain these things? Orwell tried, in his travel essay “Marrakech,” to identify and discuss the phenomenon he called “invisibility”: conditions of work or life offensive to decent people overlooked through a kind of blindness among onlookers—including those with an interest in not changing the offensive conditions, but also among those who simply want to get on and not bother themselves. The current anger aimed at unionized teachers is an opposite phenomenon. These teachers, who through unionizing have ensured that they cannot be dismissed without due process, cannot be assigned extra duties without receiving extra pay, must receive good medical treatment if sick, and must work in physically decent conditions, arouse the resentment of their fellow-citizens who are not unionized and do not have those protections. A third cause would be “educational leaders” who like Chairman Mao are always off on a Great Leap Forward or a Cultural Revolution, leaving ruins and widespread demoralization in their wake. Reading Edgar Snow’s biographical chapters of the young Mao suggests that he—and, I think, people like him—have a psychological predilection for chasing schemes: young Mao went from one questionable educational plan to the next, taking each one up enthusiastically in turn, and then dropping it like a bad habit. The child was father of the man. A fourth, evident by contrast with the working conditions of Finnish teachers, is a culture and bureaucracy of mistrust and contempt that asks continual proof, justification, verification—a bit like those doctors who, after years of professional preparation and guidance under the care of mentors are nipped at by office terriers whose job is to mistrust and second-guess their professional judgment, keeping them “in line.” What line?

But those years of a doctor’s training suggest two big differences between him and many teachers: the teachers are often inadequately prepared and then mistrusted for the work they have not been trained to do. Look again at Finland, where teacher education courses are competitive and extremely thorough, and whose graduates receive the trust of their administrators and their politicians. The fifth cause of burnout must then be poor training and poor administrative support.

Anyone who has read these postings knows that Value Added Metrics are a bizarre, counterproductive system of unreal mechanisms that result in throwing out babies with bathwater. Even their supporters in “research” admit that there are no visible, verifiable things teachers can learn to do in order to influence their value-added ratings. We have seen the goofiness of judging physical education students’ “value added” by giving them English tests, leading their teachers to have them play English games, just what they entered physical education to do. Imagine the demoralization in knowing that without any recourse, training, or counseling, you might be judged “ineffective” and fired. Some of my readers probably don’t need to imagine it.

Finally, it must be said that at many schools in the U. S., combative, assaultive, and rebellious conduct by students and parents is protected, often by the same administrators who regret having to protect teachers from arbitrary treatment. Under all these conditions, who would not feel ground down or burned out?

Do a Google search for “teacher burnout” and you will find not a single thing about most of the conditions I have just summarized, but you will find a lot of “research” about how to treat it. The problem is that this shovel-load of solutions is doing nothing to solve the problem. One website gives five ways to reduce burnout. One of them is “push out content in different ways.” This is not helpful to someone who is swamped by the imperative to present content but whose poor training and development keeps him from doing so. Another is “go home!” How helpful, just like those “desiderata” of the sixties advising us to “go placidly amid the noise and haste.” And how futile if the school menaces teachers who do not “give 110%.” A third is “know what you are assessing.” This is a kind of advice easier to give than to take; indeed, it is not advice at all. In a good undergraduate course followed by graduate work in education a teacher would already have learned what he would be assessing. What good can this advice be to a teacher who has been badly prepared? But my favorite is “establish boundaries for your time.” Try that one on your principal and see how far you get.

Actually, any ways that will really avoid burnout will also require a thoroughgoing change in thinking about education in much of the U.S. (not all, thank God). Here are six, all of which I have “done” or experienced at one time or another. Though they may be applicable outside high school, that is where my experience lies.

1.     Receive professional training from practically oriented education programs and master teachers in the field, not in the lab.

2.     Work at a school that limits your load of students to 75.

3.     Work at a school that shows students and parents the door if they are obnoxious, combative, or assaultive.

4.     Avoid a school that is undergoing a Great Leap Forward or espouses Jargon of the Day.

5.     Choose a school whose administrators admire the “business model” of Edwards Deming rather than that of Marshall Stalin. Better yet, choose a school that entirely rejects a business model of education, which is not a business.

6.     Work within school, political, and national cultures that respect teachers.

If that seems like a tall order, then something needs changing.