Author: Greg

Though I don’t usually reach beyond the little world of teaching and learning in these postings, a recent non-teaching event attracted my blogger’s attention. I refer to the crash of the most recent X-51 “hypersonic,” i.e., supersonic, aircraft, ending the aircraft’s test flight, though probably not the program. The aircraft is hoped to fly at six times the speed of sound, but of its three tests, two ended in crashes and one in a “flight anomaly,” whatever that is.

What this aircraft has in common with No Child Left Behind is that it is built in fantasyland but crashes in reality. What it has in common with the Federal college loan program is that it is incredibly expensive and enriches those who administer it without doing what it was intended to do. What it has in common with both is that it materializes an artificial dream in the cold waking world. I almost said the unforgiving waking world, but the expense of these “dreams”, i.e., marketing schemes and half-baked projects based on dubious “hard data,” is forgiven again and again.

Meanwhile, perfectly serviceable subsonic aircraft carry passengers, cargo, and bombs; perfectly good teachers go on teaching without high-tech whiteboards; perfectly good schools go on offering sound programs at wooden Harkness tables; and perfectly good state universities offer genuine degrees without the profit motive, jumped-up promotions, and phantom “content.”

It is therefore with some hope, mixed with exasperation and suspicion, that I read about a program in Washington to acquaint teachers with their colleagues’ best efforts. I have written a number of times about the importance of watching my inspiring colleagues’ work in forming my own way of teaching, and about the efforts of one school where I worked to have teachers observe and talk with each other. I welcome the chance to observe good teaching and learn from it.

But why, why must we have a shelf of slick videos produced by “a reality television company” as the medium of observation? The eighty videos, five to fifteen minutes in length, were financed by those lovers of bells and whistles at the Gates Foundation. Assuming an average length of ten minutes, we have about thirteen hours of Reality TV produced at a cost of nearly a million dollars. The problem is that Reality TV is of course not reality. These videos are “peppered with quick jump cuts, slick screen labels and a jaunty sound track:” Messrs., Mmes., Misses, & Mss. Holland for Your Teaching Pleasure. Thanks, but I have other plans than to see Plato’s Symposium turned into My Dinner with Socrates starring Sir John Gielgud as Socrates and James Dean as Alcibiades.

Some years ago a crew came to my classroom to record my English classes over a period of days for a film they were making. In its finished form it was fascinating but, finally, off-putting as a record of education. We were discussing Moby Dick, and one of the students, a keen and highly articulate boy, offered a splendid extemporaneous firework show in a thesis about Captain Ahab’s motives. The problem was that it was in an important respect wrong-headed, betraying an insufficient understanding of Ahab. The only method of evaluating this understanding live and in a properly formative way was a careful line of Socratic questioning, which would have the added benefit of enabling the class to follow their fluent classmate from an unproductive track onto a more productive one. I also needed to preserve intact the clever student’s amour-propre. It took some minutes, but my fluent student and I finally reached an agreement that satisfied both of us and left the class also with a clearer understanding. I was, secretly, very proud of those few minutes. The problem was that the edited version of the movie left out everything except the flashy but wrong-headed statement at the beginning of our dialogue. It was “good TV,” but as an instrument of teacher education it was worthless. Raise your hand if you think you will learn about Socratic questioning with jump cutting and a jaunty sound track, or about teaching music from Mr. Holland.

By contrast, a workshop on Socratic questioning that I offered at a teachers’ conference lasted hours, not minutes, and the way it proceeded much of the time was by my using Socratic techniques during our discussions. The response was favorable. Also by contrast, the Looking for Learning program that my school went through lasted years and involved teachers’ visiting one another’s classrooms for whole lessons and then discussing and writing about them afterwards. No fancy stuff, just pedagogy.

The problem is that one-eyed media are incapable of presenting the full reality of a classroom, just as a Cyclops has no depth perception. (Do you remember how Polyphemus’ thrown rock missed Odysseus’ ship? Just so did the e-Polyphemus miss my questions,) I have written about two administrators of my acquaintance who ask a teacher-applicant to teach a lesson, during which one of them watches the teacher and the other, the students. Both of them bring their non-jump-cut perceptions to a discussion of the hiring decision. TV is what Marshall McLuhan called a “cool” medium, and as a result its images are often in need of artificial warming—just what a teacher does not need. Instead, the teacher must be keenly aware of every inch and every pair of eyes in his little space, just as a naturalist sees details in an ecology that escape the TV camera. (I owe this argument to Jerry Mander, author of the 1978 book Four arguments for the Elimination of Television. One of the examples he gave of the difficulty of using TV was the difference between filming conservationist films about the Grand Canyon and about coastal wetlands. The Grand Canyon is grand, even on TV, but coastal wetlands are forever boring. I had my own experience with the truth of this insight when visiting in mangrove beach near my flat in Hong Kong. Try filming mangroves for exciting TV and see how far you get. Then come back after dark, and you will hear the indigenous bullfrogs in their weird thousands, singing nyuk nyuk nyuk nyuk as they search for mates. These amorous laughing stooges are hilarious to listeners of a certain age, but no TV show will ever have them.)

What the Washington schools should be doing is spending that million dollars to free up teachers to attend their colleagues’ lessons, or to bus them across town if necessary, and to meet about them afterwards. The Washington schools chancellor had the right idea when she said her aim was to be “very clear about what good teaching looks like.” She must now continue by putting good teaching, not good TV, on offer in her schools, and other people in Washington must leave fantasyland and dreamland when building their programs.

Holiday time, and time for an extract that has been on my mind this week (with apologies for the mandatory double spacing).

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

—from “After Apple Picking” by Robert Frost

 

“‘We don’t want to know if you can pass multiple-choice tests,’ said Stephanie Wood-Garnett, an assistant commissioner in the New York State Education Department’s office of higher Education. ‘We want to know if you can drive.’” This sensible-sounding bit of seeming practicality was reported last month in connection with New York’s pending adoption of the “Teacher Performance Assessment,” the result of a collaboration between Stanford and Pearson, an “education company.”

Actually, the statement is baloney. To see why, consider what the “Assessment” requires a student teacher to do. The candidate prepares lesson plans and then teaches for a week or so, recording the lessons as he goes along. She then offers a written discussion of what worked well and what didn’t. Finally, he makes an edited ten-minute film clip of the week and submits it. The plans, self-criticism, and film clip are then graded by “evaluators” “trained” by Pearson. After reading this I thought of my first driving examination, which I failed because I could not properly park parallel, which the examiner, present during my test drive, was able to note. The analogous situation to this test would be for me to take my own test drive alone with a recording device, make an edited ten-minute film, and send it to a “trained” “evaluator.” Would my edited film include the parallel parking? All of it? Would my self-criticism include criticism of my reversing while turning? In short, a video clip edited by the person being examined will not tell Ms. Wood-Garnett what she ought to want to know.

(Still, at least Ms. Wood-Garnett knows, or claims to know, that multiple-choice tests demonstrate nothing worth knowing. To prove it, she should persuade her colleagues in the Department to reject “Value-Added Metrics,” which are also based on multiple-choice tests of questionable proxy values. She may also persuade them to mandate conditions of teaching that do not force teachers to rely so heavily on such tests in their classes.)

Ms. Wood-Garnett’s faith in the “Assessment” is seconded by Raymond Pecheone, a “professor of practice” at Stanford, the leader of the office that developed it. He says that the “Assessment” is “very analogous to authentic assessments in other professions, in nursing, in medical residencies, in architecture.” But no, it is not “very” analogous. In a medical residency, a candidate doctor works long hours under the direct supervision of experienced physicians, who advise, correct, encourage, teach, and admonish him all the time. An analogous “residency” would entail the distance marking of a ten-minute tape of a week’s hospital rounds by a “trained evaluator.” Professor Pecheone says the “Assessment” “collect[s] authentic artifacts of teaching that all teachers use on the job.”  Some assessment! Is it teacher education or archaeology? The presence of “artifacts” proves nothing, or next to nothing.

When I cast back to my own teacher training and first year on the job to see what taught me my job, I don’t find lists of lesson plans or packs of papers on which I had written down self-criticism. I had four master teachers during my practicum. One was excellent, one reasonably good, and two useless. The excellent one monitored my work frequently and allowed me to watch him teach. We had frequent discussions of what I had done. During my free periods of the first year of teaching, I visited the classes of the colleagues who had the best reputations for teaching, and I asked colleagues to visit my classes and comment on them. I think a compendium of evaluations by these colleagues (not the useless ones) would be more to the point than a sheaf of papers and a glamour clip, which proves only that teachers can do branding too.

The ostensible reason for implementing the “Teacher Performance Assessment” is that teacher educators can’t be depended on to give rigorous evaluations the way a film-clip “evaluator” working for a profit-making company can. The problem is that similar “Assessments” have already been used on student teachers, and they only “weed out” 1 – 2% of the candidates assessed. Some rigor!

* * * * *

Next week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of my teaching career. I had thought of making a posting of it—but no, the best thing to say has already been said by Professor Barzun: “Teaching is a blessing thoroughly disguised.”

 

About a year ago I made the following posting. I’ve touched it up a bit: it speaks to some concerns I’ve addressed in recent postings, so I thought it would be worth reposting.

[Adèle] was a lively child, who had been spoilt and indulged, and therefore was sometimes wayward; but as she was committed entirely to my care, and no injudicious interference from any quarter ever thwarted my plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her little freaks, and became obedient and teachable.  She had no great talents, no marked traits of character, no peculiar development of feeling or taste which raised her one inch above the ordinary level of childhood; but neither had she any deficiency or vice which sunk her below it.  She made reasonable progress, entertained for me a vivacious, though perhaps not very profound, affection; and by her simplicity, gay prattle, and efforts to please, inspired me, in return, with a degree of attachment sufficient to make us both content in each other’s society.

This, par parenthèse, will be thought cool language by persons who entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children, and the duty of those charged with their education to conceive for them an idolatrous devotion: but I am not writing to flatter parental egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth.  I felt a conscientious solicitude for Adèle’s welfare and progress, and a quiet liking for her little self…

Jane Eyre, Chapter XII

 

Today’s guest writer was a first-rate novelist, and her words are instructive because she also happened to have been a teacher. The extract from Charlotte Brontë goes back to the 1840s, long before even Teachers College was founded, but it is worth a second look for what it says about perennial conditions of teaching and learning and about discourse on education.

Brontë spent a number of years as a schoolteacher and a governess, the experience of which gave her an understanding and clarity of thought about education that she shows in what she says about her pupil and “herself,” if we may call Jane that; for Jane, like Brontë, was earnest, grave, and reserved. Let us take a look at her observations and conclusions.

We see first of all that Adèle had to accept Jane’s authority and give up her waywardness and “little freaks.” Given Brontë’s own (brief) experience in an abusive school, we may be sure that Jane would not have wanted to impose an abusive regime on Adèle, but merely to insist on a certain tractability or readiness to meet her governess’s reasonable expectations in order to become “obedient and teachable.”

What expectation did Jane have of Adèle? Not that she “achieve proficiency” in her subjects; not that she engage in “mastery learning;” not that she become a Baby Einstein: no, Jane expected her to make “reasonable progress.” There was no question of saddling with unreasonable expectations a girl whom we in a modern mathematical metaphor would call “average,” a word Brontë would not have considered using. Nor, we feel, would Jane have let Adèle get by with work below her capacity.

Finally, Jane had an expectation of reciprocal regard and care: that Adèle would entertain a “vivacious, if not very profund, affection” for her; she, in turn, became attached enough that the two of them could be content in each other’s company. At a school where I taught, the governing emotion was said to be “unconditional love.” That seems too extravagant to be normative, but some kind of emotional tie must exist between teacher and pupil.

These seem like reasonable goals for an ordinary pupil, but they would have to maintain their integrity against five ways of thinking inimical to good teaching and learning, which Brontë names (I give them here in her order):

1.  Thinking that children have “angelic natures.” We may reject St. Augustine’s belief that children in their natural state deserve damnation[1] and yet still have some reservation about how naturally good they are[2]. This reservation is a basis of our rationalizing and justifying punishment or correction, and it helps any good teacher keep a weather eye out for trouble.

2.  Conceiving an “idolatrous devotion” to one’s children or pupils. We have in this kind of mistake the starting-point of much mischief, including what some educational psychologists call the “permissive-indulgent” style of child-rearing or teaching.

3.  Flattering parental egotism. Given the difficulty of letting down a parent who thinks Junior walks on water, leaps tall buildings, and understands string theory, the alternative has a certain attractive but dangerous appeal. Three dangers lurk in it: The parent is abetted in forming unrealistic expectations of Junior, which he or she then sometimes expects the teacher to abet with or without justification; the school is suborned in various kinds of academic fakery; and the teacher is accustomed to misrepresentation of Junior’s accomplishments. All teachers, but not all parents, recognize the first danger. Of the second we may instance cases of schools’ offering “accelerated courses” to students who can’t handle them because parents demand them. Of course the jig is up when, say, the AP test scores come back and 40% of the students taking the test get a 1 or 2. But forces other than just parental egotism lead to such impostures, so we should not just blame parents—or our attitude towards parents—for them. But teachers (and their administrators!) should find ways to keep these dangers from becoming real by giving honest assessments tempered by humanity.

4. Echoing cant[3]. This old-fashioned but excellent word refers to a kind of baloney all too common in the Ed Biz when The Biz is not echoing nonsense. A good example would be the way that Jerome Bruner’s thinking was (over)simplified or misrepresented to justify “mastery learning” and in doing so to put an onus on the teachers, some of whom did not have, and should not have been expected to have, the nimbleness of conception necessary to adapt singlehandedly a structure of learning to the developmental needs of dozens or hundreds of pupils. The basis for this onus was the cant expression that any subject can be made teachable to any pupil at any stage of development, a manifestly false position.

5. Propping up humbug. It’s too bad that the only person to use this word besides Jane is Scrooge, for humbug is forever, though its details may change from time to time. But humbug becomes dangerous when it is made into law. What else are No Child Left Behind’s demands for “proficiency” and penalties for poor performance on “value-added learning” tests than a gigantic prop to humbug? What else are the breaches of Campbell’s Law in corrupt school districts that we have read about in the last two years?

To these five ways of thinking Brontë offers five antidotes: reciprocity, attachment, expectation of reasonable progress, telling the truth, and conscientious solicitude for students. To me it is no contest.

 

[1] St. Augustine could be severe, or dark-humored. To a questioner who asked him what God was doing before he created the heavens and the earth, he answered, “He was creating hell for people who ask foolish questions.”

[2] Thus my colleague the geography teacher had a small lidded earthenware pot near his classroom door labeled “ASHES OF TROUBLESOME STUDENTS.”

[3] the expression or repetition of conventional, trite, or unconsidered ideas, opinions, or sentiments; especially : the insincere use of pious phraseology. “cant.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (16 Jul. 2011).

 

Have you been following the whirligig in which the University of Virginia’s president was fired and then reinstated sixteen days later? Fans of Edbiz horror shows are having a field day, but one serious issue (among many) comes to mind. This is the first time in my experience, either direct or by report, that an official “educational leader” or body of them (UVa’s Board of Visitors) ever admitted making a mistake and then immediately attempted to rectify it. Consider their actions in contrast with those of the Feds concerning No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. NCLB is a clearly failed scheme, hence the widespread waivers to its requirements. RAT is starting to show its stinky stuff too, with good teachers being fired and good programs impugned as a result of its irremediably flawed “metrics” and sanctions. Meanwhile, the lousy schools and programs stay that way[1], and no one is saying “sorry.” No one ever does, or at best the exception proves the rule.

The etiology of this organizational sickness is not hard to determine, and we can begin by looking at UVa. By all accounts the reinstated President, Teresa Sullivan, understood the way a university works and is best run. It does not work like a business because it isn’t one, and it shouldn’t be run that way. Ideas and education are not products, and teaching in many of its important fundamentals is not a process, for understanding doesn’t proceed, it occurs. Scholarship is more artisanal than industrial or bureaucratic—or is when not mediocre.

The good educational leader knows how to nudge things along and treats her school or college like the organism it is. Organic change takes time, and the governance of that change proceeds in line with the Burkean prescription for change by “insensible degrees.” This includes change in the structure of the organism as well as in its purpose and methods. If something doesn’t fly, it doesn’t fly.

The alternative “principles” are to be found in certain political systems and in many contemporary education and business organizations. Many  educators or leaders govern in accordance with these “principles” of management:

1.   Have one set of visionary and enabling principles set unilaterally by the “educational leader” or the other managers/administrators and propagated without substantive discussion.

2.   Do not admit when these principles are wrong, or permit any public admission. If disaster looms, change the principles quietly, issue waivers, or blame misguided predecessors.

3.   Propagandize, advertise, or market rather than achieve an equilibrium of quality.

4.   Do not tolerate dissensus, or what are sometimes miscalled “philosophical differences.”

5.   When a hundred flowers bloom, cut them down. Accept only approved species in approved “gardens.”

6.   Root out deviationists, I mean terminate the contracts of those with whom one has “philosophical differences.”

7.   When someone finds a problem in the approved way of doing things, get rid of her. “No man, no problem,” as one manager said after making a tough management decision.

The supposed rationale for upholding these principles is that those in charge have been proved by experience and intelligence to be capable of leading, and that their “leadership” should not be impeded by pesky qualms and second thoughts. The problem is that past experience doesn’t always fit someone to handle present problems (particularly if that experience is in business and the present problems are educational), and many “educational” leaders abandon intelligence in favor of thought-clichés. In an organization using top-down management, there is no reliable way to check the propagation of troublesome “ideas” or their rigorous enforcement. By contrast, an organization that is comfortable proceeding along open lines by insensible degrees can recognize and avoid large and fatal mistakes; and in an environment with real give-and-take, a leader can be given the advice that he or she needs.

An illustration of management along the less desirable lines given above is the incipient hare-brained stampede of educational organizations towards “on-line” education even though there are good reasons to doubt its effectiveness in place of education in situ[2]. Some of the stampeding herd hear “Harvard” and start pawing the ground with their hooves; others are on the run towards education on the cheap. The accounts I’ve read of Sullivan’s ouster suggest that some Board bison were spooked by the idea that UVa would plod like a tortoise behind its quick-footed betters and lose the race, whatever it is. All the principles of management discussed above then came into force as a singularly bad decision came down.

The good news is that the Board of Visitors reversed itself. The bad news is that it was news.

Here it is mid-July, and I am getting emails from students whose Extended Essays I’m sponsoring for the IB diploma. They’re at work on them this summer because they have to complete the 3500-4000-word essays during a senior year filled with other demanding assignments. Senioritis, a disease endemic to the United States, is deadly in any serious academic environment and therefore not an option, nor is leaving everything till the last minute. In the IB program, some last minutes are really terrifying and eventually back-breaking to students who have not found out how to manage their time and marshal their forces effectively. By contrast, students who have paced themselves like long-distance runners break the tape, not their backs. A good high-school education should help the students to find themselves in that position at the last minute.

For that is the only way that they will know how to succeed at any university worthy of the name. The alternative being bruited about is to water down university education so that badly prepared high school students will get Bs in spite of their deficiency. Talk about trout in the milk! High school should be the place where the ability to do sustained work and manage heavy workloads is developed. (And some of it might even start a little earlier, in middle school, to replace beanbags and bedsheets with history and courses like Jungle Gym Math with algebra or other high-school preparation.)

What can be done? A certain amount is in the hands of the teacher, who can give guidance and suggestions or structure the work to include formative assessments and milestones. But teachers who are overwhelmed with large numbers of students are in no position to offer significant mid-course corrections to those that drift. Very often they can barely finish marking the final submissions, which leaves them unable to intervene in the process of writing. If students’ classmates are as inexperienced as the students themselves, little good will come of peer editing: Can a peer be expected to exercise the kind of judgment that experience, knowledge, and understanding confer on a teacher?

And teachers cannot singlehandedly work against academic and social cultures that countenance excuse-making and magical thinking. If it is in the school’s and parents’ blood to tolerate senioritis, a teacher who does not have an extraordinary pedagogical charisma will be able to do little. If all but a few “responsible” adults in a school and at home are winking and nodding at Junior while he goofs off, the odd teacher who disapproves will injure only himself by doing so.

The school that tries to buck the prevailing culture in which it finds itself will fare no better. Imagine a school in the Land of Magical Thinking deciding that to combat senioritis, it would send second-semester transcripts to its seniors’ chosen colleges whether or not it was asked to do so. Not much imagination is needed to figure out the consequences. Nor would it help that some of the colleges would do nothing when presented with the transcript of a disastrous second semester.

Something large-scale is needed for such schools. Meanwhile, we must preserve expectations and standards of care and diligence in places that still have them.

 

Chinese education is often reported in the U.S. as a system “that stresses memorization over thinking and creativity.” While that stereotype has some truth to it, it is also in some ways wrong. We could also say that the system stresses getting results as opposed to leaving its graduates functional illiterates who cannot study at the college level. Shanghai is really trying to extend its schools’ ambit of effectiveness even to the city’s poorest residents, and such inclusiveness has not kept Shanghai from scoring at the top of the world in the PISA tests.

Hong Kong’s schools also do well on PISA, though it has an education system different from the rest of China’s, and has just modified that system to adopt its New Senior Secondary (NSS) curriculum. Onlookers familiar with international curricula have noted a resemblance to the International Baccalaureate curriculum, which certainly does not rely on memorization over thinking and creativity. One example will suffice to make this point, though many others might be instanced. In the English courses 20% of the final grade depends on an essay analyzing a prose passage or a poem that the candidate has never seen before, and no part of the grade is based on a multiple-choice test. 30% of the grade depends on oral work, including a rather demanding extemporaneous commentary on a literary passage.

In addition to public and private schools, Hong Kong has a third category, called Direct Subsidy Schools (DSS), which receive public money even though they are private. In return for that money, the schools offer the NSS curriculum to most of their students, who take the city’s school-leaving tests in their senior year. They may also offer the IB curriculum as an alternative to NSS.

If the IB curriculum stresses thinking and creativity in addition to prescribed knowledge, then a student body that did well on its tests would probably count as reasonably creative and thoughtful. What are we to say, then, about a Direct Subsidy School of my acquaintance, given the IB results of its first cohort to try for the Diploma? On its first endeavor, this semi-public school got an average score of 38 out of 45, placing it in the 92^nd percentile of worldwide results. More remarkable was its average score of more than 6 out of 7 in English, which almost every student there speaks as a second language. The picture of education in China may be more complex than the newspapers are letting on if such IB results and PISA scores mean anything. They certainly suggest that the students at this semi-public school are thinking and creating just fine, and that the city knows its educational business.

Meanwhile, in the US, No Child Left Behind is being left behind. As usual, the replacement “strategy,” called RAce to the Top, is being highly touted. But NCLB or RAT, not much seems to change. The dismal statistics continue, leaving all the Edbiz press releases sounding ominously like the military bulletins in the Proust novel, announcing French victories closer and closer to Paris.

 

That students often talk freely with each other when their teachers are nearby is a mixed blessing. We sometimes overhear remarks that help us focus on problems of learning that they’re having, and teach to those problems—something no online school will be able to do no matter how hard The New York Times flogs online learning. We pay for these moments with insights we would prefer to do without. I remember listening to one small group of students talking about how strict or lenient their parents were. The daughter of the strict parents had no sympathy from her classmates: “You have to train them. My parents are trained.”  Given the fecklessness, incompetence, and baseless confidence of the speaker of that line, I could guess what he had trained his parents to do and not to do. The insight that came to me from this listening-in was that some high-school students have been malignantly indulged. The intention is not malignant, though we know what road is paved with good intentions; but the results are.

This phenomenon is not universal, as anyone knows who has spent time teaching overseas. It manifests itself in tell-tale signs, many of which I had to “teach against” in my day-to-day work. Such teaching usually involves refusal to comply with a student’s order (an order!), coaching in manners to adopt when asking a favor, reproof of attempts to indulge in emotional blackmail, and lessons in those disagreeable but inevitable elements of the human condition such as that teachers and other adults have needs and expectations too, and that “there’s no fine thing / Since Adam’s fall but needs much laboring.”

It also involves (attempts at) demolition of magical thinking and replacing it with the Reality Principle. The magical thinking usually consists of a belief by a student (and often his parents) that success will come in spite of incompetence, unpreparedness, and ineffectiveness by some kind of miraculous concept-work, arrangement, fix, or spell, usually with the teacher as a kind of compliant medium. The Reality Principle says that a crux in a student’s education is a time for hard work and difficult choices, not plea bargaining or magic.

But there’s only so much a teacher can do to work against this kind of upbringing, which an article in The New Yorker discusses this week. The author compares some anthropological and psychological fieldwork in the U.S., France, and the Amazon jungle and concludes that the Matsigenka people of the Urubamba River are better at bringing up children than are many Americans. She notes a story by a former Wall Street Journal reporter that her, the reporter’s, daughter was “invariably the most ill-behaved child in every Paris restaurant and park she visited.” Even if the author exaggerates to make a case plain, my experience tells me that she has a point. She also has a point in her discussion of magical thinking when she talks about parents who say, “Little Ben may be unable to tie his shoes, but that shouldn’t preclude his going to Brown.” One of her stories discusses a couple of parents who hired a lawyer when their child received a failing grade in a major assessment set by his school. What is a teacher to do when faced with that kind of reaction to his professional judgment? What to do when parents undermine the teachers’ efforts to educate their children, whom they have brought up badly?

Two pernicious consequences follow on this combination of incompetence and adversarialism. One is playing out now in public discussions of universities’ need to adapt themselves to young men and women who have reached the age of adulthood but have not learned to apply themselves to a sustained job of work and thought. It is anyone’s guess what the discussions will finally lead to, but my guess is that they will not lead to an improvement in university education.

The other is to impose a system of blame on schools that does not correspond to reality or improve any real conditions. Speaking of flogging: in days of old when knights were bold, a prince at his lessons would have a commoner boy studying with him. When the prince failed to learn his lesson, the tutor would whip the other boy, called a whipping boy, as a punishment for the prince’s failure. Can you guess how well such a system of correction worked for the prince? Can you guess its effect on the morale of the boy? The system of value-added learning now being implemented in schools proposes to create a class of whipping teachers, ostensibly because all failures to learn must be laid at their feet. In reality, some of the failures lie outside the classroom.

Now that Harvard, MIT, and Stanford are offering courses online we can expect, indeed we are already seeing, the drill teams and pompom persons coming out to shake ‘em for the nascent advertising campaign in favor of “delivering” “instruction” online. Readers of these postings will know my own deep reservations about this move, but Harvard, MIT, and Stanford themselves are being rather cautious about their online offerings.

They are not fully integrated with any college of those institutions. They do not accrue credit. They do not count towards degrees. That caution only reflects the reality that online “instruction” does not take advantage of the richness of real academic residence; the benefit of meeting with colleagues, classmates, and teachers; the aid to education afforded by institutional and formal ties; and the human connections formed in real life.

I have been paying the university fees of a South African man who has been working towards his degree at a university known within South Africa for its programs in “distance learning.” During the first years of his undergraduate program he was distanced, as it were, and not a little alienated from his studies. This year, his final year, is one of live workshops, seminars, and courses. The difference to him—and in him—has been remarkable to see and hear as his emails and Skype conversations fill me in on activity, alertness, give-and-take, fascination, interest, learning, and just plain real life that he has been missing. What I see happening in the movement to turn schools into screens and clicks is a movement in the opposite direction, and, though not without possible benefits, in general a bad direction.

This is a short posting because I am doing my end-of-year marking, grading, and conferring. I’m handing back papers. I’m giving and reporting on oral and written examinations. My students are knocking at the door asking for meetings and explanations. Parents are writing. Teachers are conferring in order to work up and issue “advisor reports” on each student by an advisor-teacher. We are producing the three-page year-end reports that each student and his parents get. Summer reading assignments are being made, as well as plans for summertime remediation in writing. Would we want to give that up for a mess of pixels, never mind that it is just a click away?

 

Many of you will recall the little Chinese boy who had to go out weeping into the snow last winter in his underpants to run and do push-ups because his father wanted to instill in him a “masculine temperament.” I recall a lot of tongue clucking about Chinese child-rearing practices and stuff about tiger mothers and eagle fathers. But the tiger and the eagle have a wider habitat than just East Asia.

An article in The New York Times reports the widespread use of addictive prescription stimulants and ADHD drugs by high-school students to boost their ability to take tests and otherwise succeed at school. And why do they do it? Take Madeleine, a student interviewed by the Times reporter, who took five AP classes, went out for field hockey, and joined a number of other extracurricular activities at her school. For her the choice was easy: “Do I want only four hours of sleep and be a mess, and then underperform on the [big physics] test and then in field hockey? Or make the teachers happy, and the coach happy and get good grades, get into a good college and make my parents happy?” [emphasis added]

A number of things struck me about this report. One was that she didn’t say anything about enjoying her work or play in high school: it was all business. She even bartered tutoring and proofreading for her pills. Second, the alternative she feared was underperforming. The reason underperforming mattered more than, say, playing the game or enjoying her subjects was to be found in the alternative she sought. She wanted five things, of which three were to make the important adults in her life happy. Where are the eagles and tigers now? It is also clear which market this grim little high-performance engine was being built for: she is now a sophomore at an Ivy League college, where she uses the drugs “only” occasionally.

A seat at an Ivy League college has become a “positional good,” desirable not for any intrinsic reason[1] but for some perceived advantage or status it confers on those who hold it. The harder it is to get, the more valuable it becomes, and the more luminous its possessor (and her parents and teachers). That shows no sign of changing any time soon.

But will the study drug scene change? Already there is talk about restricting the prescription of amphetamines and ADHD drugs, but the drug-taking is only a symptom of a deeper problem and probably won’t go away even with stricter prescription standards. The deeper problem is adults who are “made happy” when Junior gets into the Ivy League or scores a field hockey goal or aces a physics test. Of course they should be happy when their children or students perform, but not only then. If they have left the poor things scrounging for drugs and flogging themselves into As and championships and pages-long résumés at the age of seventeen to make them happy, something is deeply wrong.