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Last May I noted, after googling “McLearning” and scoring a remarkable hit, that we are moving toward a view of learning that prefers “instruction” which can be “delivered” as well by a machine as by a teacher. One of the reasons I gave is that junk learning, like junk food, will be cheap to “deliver.” Now that The New York Times reports cheapness trumping quality in education, the issue is worth another look.

The place to start is with a teacher in an ordinary traditional classroom. Professor Barzun justly asserts, “Anybody who has ever taught knows that the act of teaching depends upon the teacher’s instantaneous and intuitive vision of the pupil’s mind as it gropes and fumbles to grasp a new idea[1].” This is one reason among many why “teaching is an act of perpetual discretion.”

Another is that a teacher is a coach, and coaching requires immediate adaptation to the needs of the person being coached. This is as true of the writing coach as of the golfing coach. When I have meetings with my students about their writing, each meeting is different from the others because each of my students writes differently, thinks differently, and responds differently to instruction.

The third reason is that no one can teach understanding; rather, the good teacher provides conditions in which understanding takes place. One of those conditions is provided by Socratic instruction, which seizes on a student’s own words and uses them to probe for understanding and help the student achieve it. Another is provided by what we all call “teachable moments,” which occur spontaneously throughout the day but cannot be planned or machined. The last reason to recognize perpetual discretion as an ineluctable condition of teaching, as I have argued, is that students learn best when they feel some kind of affective tie with their teacher, and ties do not come into being en masse or mechanically.

On-line learning cannot provide any of these guarantees of perpetual discretion, but on-line learning is where we seem to be going. My first experience with it came when I reviewed the material produced by a Midwestern state university for use by students at a distance for high-school credit. The school I then taught at wanted one of our failing students to use the material to get the equivalent of a high-school English course. Well, the material was shocking on two counts. One was its concentration on memory of factual detail at the expense of understanding. The other was its idiocy in, for example. asking questions of interpretation by multiple choice. I advised the school not to use it because it overlooked real understanding and had no way of adapting itself to individual students.

A former colleague of mine reports that “our” school now requires every student to take one on-line course. He reports that the students think the on-line courses stink. The teachers think so too, but there’s no avoiding the ad hominem argument addressed to teachers who say what they think: “You’re just saying that because you’re a threatened teacher.”

How could anyone think differently? What possibility does on-line software have of instantaneous and intuitive vision? This same former colleague had the good fortune to study under Professor John Searle, author of the famous “Chinese Room Argument” against artificial intelligence. But even if Searle is wrong, it would take an unusual student to form an affective tie to a Chinese Room.

And it would take an extraordinarily expensive Chinese Room, assuming one were possible, to ask effective Socratic questions or otherwise to display instantaneous intuitive vision. How much does Watson cost, which can play Jeopardy, and how much more subtle than Watson is a good teacher?

My fear is that none of this will matter. The attraction of on-line learning to its proponents is not that on-line learning is better than learning in the classroom. The attraction is not even that it is as good. The attraction is that it is cheaper. “Pedagogical” justifications will inevitably follow (cherchez la flimmeflamme), some of them based on “research” that will be treated with less caution than it deserves.

What will our on-liners do when they are faced with a life of cruxes that don’t wait for a mouse click or that don’t have choices a) through e) laid out for them? What will they do when they work for a boss who doesn’t give them a study guide for the project he assigns them? What will they do when they face an intense and brilliant Socratic professor in college?—assuming they do face him instead of another screen.

 

One of the most common disparagements heard in those sanctioned mêlées sometimes called “class debates” is the argument that “that’s just your opinion!” It is also one of the most unfortunate. An important aim in any class that includes oral discourse should be to cultivate thoughtfulness and conversation, by means of which students examine ideas carefully. It allows them to test the ideas and to test themselves. Being quickly dismissive, on the other hand, evades thought and responsibility.

Part of the blame for poor discussion and conversation lies with the teacher who allows it, but the rest must go further back. I want to start with the dictum, often taught in grade school and reinforced in high school, that knowledge is of two kinds: fact and opinion. This dichotomy, in itself unhelpful, usually goes along with a belief that opinions are somehow of secondary weight or importance to facts, evidently because not everyone agrees on them.

I’ve got news for those who hold this belief: not everyone agrees on facts either, but that doesn’t keep them from being facts. More useful than the fact – opinion dichotomy is Professor Barzun’s distinction between facts and ideas, particularly as this distinction plays out in the study of history[1], where a fact is a datum nameable in conventional terms, and an idea is “an image, inference, or suggestion that goes beyond” such data. “The statement of a fact gives the impression of ending with itself, whereas an idea leads us on.”

So far are ideas from being of secondary weight or importance that without them, history is not just impossible, it is intolerable: “the ‘bare facts’ do not interest, in the sense of engaging the attention.” One of the formative effects of history should be to allow its students to see the treatment of ideas with a deftness and judgment that they might hope to acquire or at least to appreciate.

There is not much to say about the facts of the Monroe Doctrine except that “it was promulgated in a presidential message to Congress on December 2, 1823.” How, then, does the “authoritative work on the Monroe Doctrine[2]” by Dexter Perkins run to more than 1300 pages? Almost everything that can be said about the Monroe Doctrine goes beyond the facts and enters the realm of ideas.

I almost asked How will students learn to find their way in this realm? Instead, I need to ask Whether students will learn to find their way at all. It is a serious issue when they are kept from developing and exercising their own deftness and judgment by taking a proper history course, and when “class debates” have more to do with heated finger-pointing than with examining and teasing out the ideas that come into play in the course of a genuine discussion. Are the students going to develop and test their powers of analysis and synthesis by examining Great Issues in American History (Hofstadter)? Or will they prepare for multiple-choice tests by conning “just the facts” from purgatorial textbooks, which often turn out to have strong and questionable ideas embedded in their presentation? If these ideas are presented as facts, they do a disservice to intellect and they leave the students handling them impaired in their judgment, if not in their “class debates.”

Given the constraints of money, time, and Testing-and-Accountability being imposed on schools, they may not get a history course at all. It would be a terrible loss for today’s students not to be able to discover this way of thinking about the world that has the potential to make one wiser than one had been before taking it up. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”—T. S. Eliot

 

We call the person who runs a school a principal, short for principal teacher. We call the heads of some schools the headmaster, meaning the leading master or teacher. Some women who head schools are called the headmistress, though as words inflected for gender become less popular, headmistresses are becoming less common. All these titles point to the notion that those who run schools are academics. In the UK their counterparts are often called head teachers, thus preserving the notion behind the name.

The idea that a head of school should be an academic or educational leader goes back to the Academy founded in the 4^th Century BC by Plato. The word “academy” still names schools, as do lycée and other European words based on the Lyceum, where Aristotle lectured. He is pictured by Raphael as the down-to-earth alternative to Plato, as he is actually gesturing down to the earth with a dramatically foreshortened right arm, unlike Plato, who points upward towards his “ghostly paradigm[1].”

In contrast to this model, which has worked for thousands of years and has been celebrated in works of art as diverse in time and kind as The School of Athens and The Rector of Justin, we have the newly emerging model of the head of school as a businessman.

Now, businessmen have also been portrayed in photography and other art, but I have doubts about preferring them to academics as head of schools. This doubt was crystallized in an article I recently read in The New York Times about something called the Chicago Talent Development Charter High School. Reading the article also made me think about what we name things and why: the Chicago Talent Development Charter High School is run by someone called a Chief Executive.  What a term! What, or whom, does he execute? Or is he so called in order to confer on him the prestige of someone who runs a business—and, I fear, gets an “executive compensation” package?

What does this chief executive do? In the article he tracks attendance with his laptop. Now, at the first school where I taught, attendance was tracked by a formidable ex-New Yorker called Mrs. Costello. Every morning she would call the parents of all absent students. I overheard part of one such call: “…You’re not Mrs. Gumbleton! You get in heah to school right now!” Miss Gumbleton was at school by 11:00, but Mrs. Costello didn’t get “executive compensation” for reeling her in. She was called the Attendance Lady, which said everything that needed saying. If the chief executive is not misnamed, he sounds as if he is micromanaging, something that chief executives are not supposed to do.

To be fair I grant that he must do other things, but what might they be? The school is called a “talent development” high school, but its web page did not say what that means. Is it a specialized high school like the now defunct High School of Performing Arts and High School of Music and Art in New York? The home page says, “Kids are encouraged to dream, not drop out.” How noble—but how different from what the curriculum page of that school tells us. We find there that students “take basic college preparatory courses.” When I was in 9^th grade, I didn’t dream about basic college preparatory courses, but maybe today’s dreams are more practical. Students can now fulfill their dreams, at least at the Chicago Talent Development Charter High School (CTDCHS), by taking “courses designed by researchers and curriculum specialists.” And if that alone doesn’t tap into a student’s dreams, he or she is assured that in 9^th, 10^th, and 11^th grade the courses “[t]aken in the first semester of these three grades… prepare students for the academic challenges they will face during the second semester.”  Wake me, please! When I think of dreaming, I think of my high-school classmate KC, who when we were drilling second-conjugation verbs once wrote out “Sailing to Byzantium,” which he had by heart. Also to be fair, I should admit the possibility, however remote, that there is something of the dream in the notion that the first semester of a class should prepare one for the second.

I don’t mean to say that drill should be replaced by dreaming, or vice versa. What I mean to say is that they should not be confused. To promise dreams when you give “courses designed by researchers and curriculum specialists” is baloney, and rather egregious baloney at that. Well, students are very good at telling baloney when they hear it, and they tend to react to it in predictable ways: 1) go along with it if it promises a good loaf or a trouble-free life, 2) go along with it under duress if they will be punished for saying the Emperor has no clothes, 3) resent the imposition of nonsense and the waste of time it usually entails (this is often the reaction of talented young people with drive and ambition), 4) undermine it the way bright students like the Weasley twins did when boredom and disgust with authoritarian dishonesty inclined them to subvert Professor Umbridge, or 5) walk away from it.

The Times article suggests that the number of students taking the last approach is rising, and not because the students perversely refuse to have their talents developed. The school started in the 2009 – 2010 academic year with an absenteeism rate of 10%. It is now 15%. One of the ways used to encourage attendance was to have cheerleaders shout out cheers as students arrived at school. Another was to give them pizza. I suppose that a young person starved for recognition or just plain starved might start out beguiled by an assembly-line of cheers or a slice of pizza, but eventually he or she will recognize what Dr. Johnson knew: He who praises everybody, praises nobody. He who cheers everybody, cheers nobody. The cheers become white noise: Hawthorne effects are not automatic, but depend on how the affected person interprets the cheering stimulus.

The chatter about dreams and execution in the schoolhouse overlooks a couple of things. One, typical of misbegotten statistics, is that average daily attendance often disguises another, more serious, problem: that some students miss weeks—months—of school every year. Two statisticians who went duck hunting took aim at a duck in flight. One shot ten yards above the duck, and the other shot ten yards below. They started jumping up and down, shouting, “We got it!” Like these duck hunters, a statistics-based approach to attendance may completely miss a serious problem. The other thing overlooked is that even if a school’s chief executive is J P Morgan, he may have to deal with loci of difficulty that lie completely outside the schoolhouse.

Morgan had his millions, his minions, and his eyes. What does a chief executive like the one of CTDCHS have? An attendance program developed by Johns Hopkins and “executive skills,” whatever they are; but these have not been enough to stop a rise in skipping school. By contrast, an educational leader like Mr. Moeketsi Molelekua of the Leshata Secondary School in South Africa’s Orange Farm shantytown has the charisma and conviction of an educational leader. Yet even those considerable gifts could not permanently put right the difficulties that poor students faced there. These examples may show that educational leadership is better than execution, or whatever a chief executive does; but they also remind us of the regrettable truth that an approach centered on the schoolhouse will not fix problems that lie partially or largely outside its walls.

It is therefore more than a pity: it is a pernicious mistake to adopt solutions based in the schoolhouse  like holding teachers “accountable” for the “success” or “failure” of students in their schooling as measured by their scores on multiple-choice tests. It is especially bad when another group, the chief executives, remains unaccountable and the chief problems lie outside the teachers’ responsibility.  The name “testing-and-accountability” sounds laudable but is actually preposterous.

* * *

The other article of note this week, from BBC News, discusses the enduring popularity of John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men in British schools, 90% of which set it as a required text for their GCSE (high school) students. Britain’s Education Secretary says that some British students read only two books a year and that this is likely to be one of them during one of those years.

As a high-school ninth-grader I read the book on my own and found it moving, but how things have changed! During my high-school years Steinbeck was sometimes accused of being a Communiss, and his books were considered risqué, so we got to read only The Pearl, which was safe but left me cold. I am not sure whether that was because The Pearl was a worse book or because studying it rather than reading it spoiled it for me.

One teacher interviewed for the article said that it remains popular because its length is “not too onerous when we are pushed for time in the curriculum,” though it also has the advantage of accessibility. I agree that it is accessible and laud it for that, but the teacher’s comment brought me up short. What are they doing to be so pressed for time in an English class that they can read only two books a year, one of them a six-chapter novella? Are they dreaming?

Their dreams are not airborne: the article also quotes the author of the Cliff’s Notes study guide for the book. I am not sure what is sadder: that high-school students get to read only two books a year in their English classes or that if they have to read Of Mice and Men, a six-chapter novella, they have to examine Cliff’s Notes in addition (or instead). What’s in the name English class?

As the members of the Drama Club and I headed to the airport en route to Athens and a weekend drama workshop, I should have known something was up: One of my students was dressed in a very smart traveling cloak and outfit and had a large suitcase. The sign slipped by: it was very, very early in the morning of what would prove to be a terribly long day, and I just thought she wanted to be nicely dressed for the weekend.

The flight to Athens was smooth, and we were clearing immigration when this student began to walk rapidly away from the rest of us, suitcase in tow. Telling the others to wait, I followed, calling her name repeatedly and finally catching up with her outside the terminal. Waiting for her were an older woman who looked like her and a very big man.

The very big man advanced towards me, but my student stopped him, turning to me and saying, “This is my mother. I am leaving my father [in the country we had flown from] to live with her. I won’t be going to the workshop.” The very big man said, “That will be enough.” They left.

When I got back to my other students, they had been found by students of our host school. No adults were with them except the Greek-speaking bus drivers because it was naturally thought that their guests would not require, ah, special services at the airport to handle abductions. In those pre-cell-phone-pre-internet days I could only say that I needed to speak to a policeman. From a pay phone I called the school and was told to take the bus and make the report later. (It turned out that my missing student, being 18, was entitled to do what she had done.)

Phone calls to the Headmaster and then to the father followed that morning. Both were understanding, but I remained very upset. I had told the students that their classmate would not be joining us where we stayed and only later told them that she had decided to leave us. It was of course important not to convey my upset to the students, who were looking forward to an exciting weekend.

And that is what they got. Our host school, named after an English Renaissance poet and composer, was well known for its offerings in the humanities and for its dramatic productions, as would befit a school located in the Birthplace of Drama. The workshop’s production of excerpts from a tragedy was very impressive and inspired the Club in ways I will discuss below. I also took the students on our own school tour of the Acropolis. Even there a breath of trouble blew: a man followed us, seeming to stalk one of the girls. I kept myself interposed between him and the students, and we finally left because he continued to be troublesome without doing anything overtly threatening or assaultive. As we left, a drenching thunderstorm broke, so we ran for cover to a taverna in the Plaka, where we dried out over Greek food. The stalker was forgotten.

To the students it was an altogether splendid trip, but my reaction was more ambivalent. On a school-sponsored trip into town I had a fine discussion with the school’s classicist about translations, agreeing to disagree about the relative merits of Lattimore and Fagles—that  while examining relics from the Acropolis in an excellent museum. At a round-table of academics and poets held at the school I was able to ratify my choice of Rae Dalven’s translations of C. P. Cavafy’s poems for use with my students and to become interested for the first time in the work of George Seferis. I reflected on all this in light of the abduction, which I couldn’t separate from my total impression of the trip.

Was it worth it? Later that year the students mounted a production of excerpts from Oedipus Rex. The original impetus for the production and choice of play was theirs, as were most of the production and directorial decisions. They made masks for all the characters, choreographed the Choruses to take account of the strophes and antistrophes, and made a set showing a public square in Thebes. The boy who played Oedipus was very good and diligent enough to learn some very long speeches.

On another trip I got sick. Our Theory of Knowledge classes used to take an annual weekend trip to stay by the banks of a nearby river, where we would divide time between preparing and giving “ToK Presentations” and doing such things as river-rafting and hanging like spiders from ropes, etc. On this particular weekend I spent most of both nights either being sick or preparing to be sick, and the days left me barely the time between visits to the bathroom to supervise activities as lightly as possible, and to give suitable attention to grading the Presentations. The students didn’t need to know, and did not find out, that I had been sick. Even my colleague didn’t know of my illness till I told her as the bus drove up to the school at the end. There was no alternative except to abort the trip or to cast a pall over the proceedings.

It was during the Athens trip that I decided all good teachers are also good actors. We have to give the appearance of solidity to our students even when we are feeling somewhat fragile or brittle. It is not easy.

I therefore reacted angrily to news that parents in Wisconsin, in support of some political measures against teachers taken by their legislature and governor, were saying before TV cameras that teachers are “only babysitters.” This breathtakingly ignorant formulation has no basis in any reality I have been familiar with for the last twenty-five years. A baby-sitter is a fourteen-year-old who eats popcorn and calls his customers home if anything bad happens. A teacher, by contrast, goes with his students to Athens or the riverside and summons the sense and strength to guide those students even when difficulties and sickness intrude on the proceedings. I say nothing of the classroom, less glamorous and more important.

Another argument I hear out of Wisconsin is that teachers work “only” 180 days a year. Which 180 do they mean? The 180 days of contact time mandated by law? The days “in service”? The summer study? The weekend trips and abduction management exercises, usually without compensatory Acropoles? The evenings and mornings grading papers? The time spent on preparation for re-accreditation of self and school? My calculations show that I spend at least as much time at teaching as someone else spends at a job with a two-week vacation and ten paid holidays. Teachers who live an easy life undoubtedly exist, but I don’t know them.

In any case, why just listen to me? A report on “Lessons from PISA” has some keen observations about the esteem in which teachers are held in the US and, by contrast, in the countries whose students do best on the PISA (the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment) tests. There is much to interest us in that report, but the most gratifying moment must be the question asked of a young teacher in Finland, where the world’s best schools are found, and the answer he gave:

“What made you want to be a teacher?” asked the author.

The Finnish teacher’s reply: “Because it is the most honorable of all professions”

 

A colleague of mine once told me that her intellectual hero had been the late Stephen Jay Gould, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard from 1982 until his death in 2002. She was a biology teacher and admired his fruitful explorations of evolutionary theory in spite of its detractors (they called his idea of punctuated equilibrium “evolution by jerks”), while I admired him for the blessed clarity of his writing, which was clearly governed by Professor Barzun’s dictum that “writing is an act of courtesy” to the reader.

I especially admire The Mismeasure of Man, which I read before and reread after publication of The Bell Curve. Gould had personal and public reasons to be wary of the way that statistics can be bent in their use to justify false positions or to “enable” people to draw false conclusions. The personal reason: he heard, after being diagnosed with cancer, that the median period of survival of his kind of cancer was eight months after diagnosis. He survived twenty years, having made a complete recovery, which he discusses in his article “The Median Isn’t the Message.” One of his many public reasons for wariness, handled at length in the book, was that statistical methods could be (mis)used to enforce bad ideas or to justify bad public policy.

The key exhibit in this discussion was the chapter “The Real Error of Cyril Burt: Factor Analysis and the Reification of Intelligence[1].” It takes the statistical methods and concept-work behind traditional intelligence testing and subjects them to a careful, thorough, and transparent demolition.

And well-deserved. Teachers of a certain age will remember their halcyon pupil days, when IQ scores appeared next to students’ names, branding them like tattoos passed off as birthmarks. Mr. Smith, the math teacher of my own 7^th-grade halcyon days, was a great inspiration to all of us, who looked forward to the end of the school-day because 8^th period was when we would get—not have—to go to math class. A gifted teacher, he also and unfortunately had a tongue that sometimes led him down questionable paths. One day Student X had to be excused to go to the office. After he left, Mr. Smith said to the rest of us, “You know, you are all in this class because of your brains, but X’s IQ leaves you in the dust. When he grows up, he will do anything he wants.” So he did, though not quite in the way Mr. Smith had in mind. Before he settled into a modestly satisfying professional career in a small city in the Northwest, he had an extraordinary international career as a druggie, in which he smoked, sucked, ingested and injected anything, a living illustration of “Aldous Huxley Told in Gath” or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He pursued part of this first career at the feet of Timothy Leary.

By contrast, my college friend H told me that as a boy he was classified a borderline moron[2] by his teachers, who advised his parents not to expect much from his adulthood. Against the expectation of Intelligence Scientists, his intellectual trajectory took him though the Bronx High School of Science[3], a successful undergraduate career in a rigorous pre-medical curriculum, and medical school. His IQ, at the level of a borderline moron in first grade, “increased” to 160 by the time he got out of Bronx Science, a thing that IQ was not supposed to do.

I would add another thing about IQ: it was not supposed to be used as a tool for predicting career trajectories or as a means of making fine distinctions such as the cutoff point above which my classmates took math with Mr. Smith and below which they took it with Mr. Dust. All of us of a certain age have stories like this to report about IQ tests, but few of us remember any critical examination of the idea behind the tests and labels. Professor Gould therefore did the world of intellect a service with his thorough debunking. Professor Barzun has done likewise in his intellectual-historical writing on social sciences whose ancestors include phrenology and physiognomy[4], which parallels in some ways Gould’s discussion of craniometry and its intellectual descendants in The Mismeasure of Man.

What we must carry away from this discussion into the contemporary world of education is the need to be very careful in our use of statistics to create categories and make educational decisions; above all, we must not reify statistical products whose underlying reality is fundamentally dubious.

Let us now move to a discussion of how to evaluate teachers and, as a part of that discussion, to New York City, home of much that is great and awful in American education. We will go not to the Bronx High School of Science but the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies in Manhattan. We will find there a teacher called Stacey Isaacson, who received degrees from Penn and Columbia and who “had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking [her] teaching job, at half the pay.[5]” Ms. Isaacson received glowing reviews from her principal and glowing tributes from former students. All but one of her students was rated as “proficient.” She came in voluntarily at no pay once a week during her maternity leave.

All the evidence that a normal rational human being would need to decide on the quality of her person and work suggests rather strongly that she is a paragon. Unfortunately, that evidence doesn’t matter. What matters is her value-added learning score, which shows that she is one of New York’s worst teachers. It means that when she is reviewed for tenure, she will almost certainly not receive it. It will probably soon mean that in layoffs she will be one of the first asked to go. She may beat them to the pink slip since she will probably have no trouble returning to her career in advertising and finance if she needs to. I think she ought to apply for a teaching position in Finland.

More seriously and more to the point, I think that value-added learning is precisely the same kind of misbegotten mess that Pearson’s g[6] turned out to be, if not a worse. We cannot even say exactly what value is in this addition: all we can do is infer its existence from the solutions to a formula. What is more, IQ is at least a simple quotient: contrast it with Ms. Isaacson’s score, which is the result of applying a formula[7] of astonishing impenetrability. This cloud of sigmas and enigmas, enveloping her work with data about her students and the school where she does that work, has determined that she is in the 7^th percentile of teachers.

The 7^th percentile of teachers. What does that mean? I suggest it means no more, and possibly much less, than a college-rating system of suspect reliability means when it says that College X is the 52^nd-best in the country. The suspect system of ratings means little even if it has no margin of error, but it turns out that Ms. Isaacson’s score has a margin of error so great that her “actual rating”—whatever that is—could be anywhere from the 1^st percentile of teachers to the 52^nd. This helpful rating, taken with the needed caution, effectively says that she might be the worst teacher in New York, or better than half of them, or anywhere in between. Unfortunately, this helpful rating is not being taken with the needed caution because the margin of error is ignored in the definitive casting of Ms. Isaacson on the rubbish-heap. Where is Finland?

Or, for that matter, to keep things American, where is W. Edwards Deming? Schools should be run on an educational model, not on a business model, but Deming became the inspiration of post-WWII Japanese business and its economic miracle by advocating a remarkable series of principles of business management. If the educational leaders in schools are going to be replaced by businessmen—though they shouldn’t be—at least those replacements might consider applying some of Deming’s principles:

• Drive out fear.
• Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets.
• Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

 

 

 

Myths surrounding the life and death of Catherine the Great run the gamut from salacious baloney (however enchanting for schoolboys and college sophomores) to excellent stories that, like all good myths, convey the essence of truth in narrative form. One of the best is of Grigory Potemkin, the official in charge of Russia’s newly conquered southern regions in the latter part of the reign. He built fake villages of facades and imported peasants for the Empress Catherine to see during her travels there. The object of the fakery was to impress her with the riches of the South and to justify their being conquered. Though the “Potemkin villages” almost certainly did not really exist, their mythical existence illustrates the timeless archetype of official fakery made to support false claims.

From the steppes of southern Russia we turn to two high schools that could reasonably be called Potemkin villages of learning. The examples I give are from the 1970s, so we are talking about a phenomenon that does not have a very recent genesis. A friend of mine on the West Coast, wishing to do his small workingman’s bit for the support of the schools and people of his neighborhood, agreed to take on as his construction assistant the salutatorian of the local high school. The attempt ended in failure, with my friend regretfully dismissing the student. He was ready to work, and he was eager, but he could not use a tape measure, could not read off fractions, and could not add or subtract them. The other was a graduate of a large urban high school in the East. He, too, was salutatorian (notice no “a”: these boys were graduated before schools started naming valedictorians in litters). He had applied for admission to my college, where I, sitting on the College Admissions Committee, saw his academic record. His story is sad, too. In the 1970’s the SAT had scores running from 1600 for seniors who walked on water to 400 for those who were alive and breathing but could not find the lake. This salutatorian’s score was in the 500s. There was no question of admitting him, but we felt sorry for someone who could find himself graduated as the second-most distinguished student of a school that did not teach him even how to manage a minimally satisfactory score on a multiple-choice test.

The Potemkinization of testing had not yet started to make “advances” such as the “recentering” of SAT scoring or the setting of “proficiency” exams by which random guesswork can yield a promotion from one grade to the next. Even now, some testing retains a pre-Potemkin integrity. Hence the PISA test scores or the scores of International Baccalaureate assessments, which are not obliged by local considerations to certify as genuine any panoramas of fakery.

But the Potemkin schools: when did they start? I am not a historian of education, but my guess is that the phenomenon started to be significant when the Life Adjustment Movement[1] in education found itself in the late 1950s and early 1960s having to trim its sails in the wake of Sputnik and the Communiss Challenge. We decided that if the Communiss were not going to bury us, we would have to stop offering three-year courses, with content repeated each year, in “Home and Family Living” covering such topics as “My duties as a baby sitter” and “How to be liked.”[2] The problem was in recovering ground lost to foolishness, which we turned out not to be able to do.

The late sociologist James S. Coleman in his book Public and Private High Schools identified Catholic high schools as having produced the best results at academic preparation of any large group of schools in the US[3]. He said that the reason for their success was that they acted as “functional communities,” which it turns out could hold kids to account more effectively than other kinds of school with their less all-embracing organization. I think we will find that another step in the degradation of schools was in their decline as functional communities. One of the chief forces destructive of urban Catholic education is now shaping up to be charter schools; and it seems that they are destructive of public education too—this without providing an alternative education that is demonstrably better than what it is destroying[4].

A third source is in the saturation of the fabric of education by baloney[5]. Professor Barzun, who is among other things a historian of education, even offers to explain “Where the Educational Nonsense Comes From[6],” and his explanation is convincing. Well, it is convincing to me, if not to people who continue engaging in discourse of the kind he rightly condemns.

Since these three problems seem nearly intractable, much is to be done if we are going to replace Potemkin schools with schoolhouses in which real teaching and learning take place.

 

In a posting last July I said that a teacher was not a Culligan Man—a kind of delivery boy. I objected to the metaphor that “a teacher’s job is to deliver instruction.” A teacher’s job is far more complex than “delivery,” and calling it that trivializes or oversimplifies what happens in the classroom. The metaphor is dangerous because it sets up expectations that teaching is simple and can be done by an underpaid lunk as well as by an intelligent seasoned pro. It also trivializes what is to be taught by making learning sound like a kind of stuff or—dare I say it?—a product.

I subsequently discovered that this expression is meant to run counter to “constructivism,” the educational philosophy that says a school should be a kind of attic in which the student explores and sets up his or her own lessons. Teachers in a constructivist school are a kind of custodial staff with grade books. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the comedian Jonathan Winters had a TV program in which he sometimes appeared in a large attic-like room. I picture him as the valedictorian of a constructivist school: lots of attic antics, but can he write? And what happens if a student at a constructivist school is not as imaginative in an attic as Winters?

The valedictorian of an anti-constructivist school is the angel in blue on the left of the illustration by William Blake at the bottom of this web page (the picture is taken from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), and the devil in the center is a teacher “whose job is to deliver instruction” (or a principal who insists that “a teacher’s job is to deliver instruction”). Notice how passively the blue angel accepts delivery of the instruction: this idea of schooling depends on such docility and tractability in the face of “deliveries.” But what happens if a student at a non-constructivist school is not a blue angel? (The orange angel is practicing his “test-taking skills” for the competency test that ends the school year so that he can pretend to be a blue angel by means of an Orwellian confidence trick.)

The divergence between the delivery boys and the attic antics exemplifies educationist binary thinking and excludes the subtle possibility that really good teaching should embrace elements of both constructivism and teacher-centered instruction.

The problem with subtlety is that it is messy and not easily categorized. It entails subtlety on teachers (and their administrators!) and assumes the capacity to distinguish constructivist learning from fooling around, or to distinguish “delivery of instruction” from scripted teaching. Scripted teaching! Can you imagine it? Everything is scripted, even down to a snap of the fingers to indicate to the students when to turn the page. And why not, if a teacher is a delivery boy? Imagine how many multiple choice questions the students in such classrooms can answer after twelve years.

What I find worrisome beyond the question of what kinds of learning will take place in such environments is the thought of teachers’ work becoming so narrowed and thinned out that a genuine teacher becomes superfluous. Can the attic be minded by a baby-sitter? Can the pages of the script be turned and read by a visiting fireman[1]? If  education continues its drive to make teaching uncongenial to anyone but a dunce or a doormat, maybe baby-sitters and visiting firemen will be all the schools get.

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[1] See an earlier posting for the reference. I am not taking a shot at firemen, members of an esteemed profession and necessary to urban civilization. I am saying that some firemen would be as good in front of a classroom as I would be behind a fire hose.

 

I would not paint — a picture —

I’d rather be the One

Its bright impossibility

To dwell — delicious — on —

And wonder how the fingers feel

Whose rare — celestial — stir —

Evokes so sweet a Torment —

Such sumptuous — Despair —

I would not talk, like Cornets —

I’d rather be the One

Raised softly to the Ceilings —

And out, and easy on —

Through Villages of Ether —

Myself endued Balloon

By but a lip of Metal —

The pier to my Pontoon —

Nor would I be a Poet —

It’s finer — own the Ear —

Enamored — impotent — content —

The License to revere,

A privilege so awful

What would the Dower be,

Had I the Art to stun myself

With Bolts of Melody!

—Emily Dickinson

(With apologies for WordPress’s lummox-like formatting decision to insert a mandatory single line space after every press of the “enter” key)

This poem, which my colleague and I used to set our students in I. B. English A1, became the eye of a whirlwind for some time, and as such illustrates problems surrounding the teaching of poetic interpretation.[1]

Before telling you more, let me mention the work done by I. A. Richards on poor interpretation and misinterpretation in his famous book Practical Criticism. Richards gave a number of unidentified poems to his students to interpret, and then he analyzed their work.  He found that a number of impediments exist to the sound reading of poetry. One of them, usually explicable as the result of faulty preliminary understanding, is to achieve one small tenuous insight and let that serve as the basis of a thorough (mis)interpretation of the poem as a whole.

I think this is what happened to send my colleague to my room one day after her English class, eyes wide with upset. Both of us knew that Dickinson sometimes stretches syntax and signification, but we were confident that, handled right, the poem was not too hard for sixteen-year-olds with a good command of English to get. Both of us reject the view, held by some literature teachers, that any opinion of meaning offered by a student must be accepted as valid, even if it cannot be justified by a careful examination of the work interpreted. If the opinion has its origins in careless or cursory reading, we are certainly not obliged to credit it.

So when my colleague told me that one of her students, reporting on this poem to the class, had asserted that it was “about masturbation,” we knew that we needed to do some quick but calm remediation. The basis of the student’s “interpretation” depended on a lurid and decontextualized notice of the words “fingers feel,” “lip,” and “stun myself.” Leave it to a sixteen-year-old or a graduate student in critical theory to come up with that! It is one thing to assert that this poem makes use of some erotic imagery—perhaps even autoerotic imagery—but another to say that it is “about masturbation.” We therefore decided that we should discourage students from drawing hasty conclusions about the poem’s subject matter from a cursory reading or from overemphasizing a poem’s debt to Eros. Knowing that by the time my own students appeared for their class this “interpretation” would have swept through the cafeteria, I preemptively reproved hasty overgeneralizations about poems based on cursory readings and, in particular, a view that this poem is “about masturbation.” I accompanied that reproof with some hints at how the poem might convincingly be interpreted. Since I didn’t want the students to take my offering as a “canned interpretation,” I didn’t go into comprehensive detail, but they took my point.

Eventually my colleague and I determined that “the masturbation poem” had gone back to being an ambivalent and deeply felt meditation on art, the artist, and the audience and that Dickinson’s work was not in danger of being honored during Banned Books Week. (Mind you, we would not have minded teaching a Banned Books Week poem, and indeed we taught Philip Larkin’s “High Windows,” though we allowed students who found it objectionable to demur discreetly to the study of it.)

Here is a bit of imitation Dickinson, in this case meditating on interpretation from an inexperienced student’s point of view:

Nor would I be a teacher —

I’d rather be the one

Who conjures a significance —

Not rigorous but fun —

A deconstructionist declares

My thesis — the last word —

No matter how divorced from words —

In import how absurd –

Let me end with a nod in the direction not of critical theory, much of which is repellent and unreadable, but of one of its critics, the late Denis Dutton, who wrote an article worth noting in connection with the determination of meaning. He asserts that the author’s intentions cannot be dismissed, and he proves the assertion by “interpreting” a passage of David Hume as being ironic, which of course it is. Most of us agree that irony exists, though sixteen-year-olds have their doubts. If an author’s intention didn’t matter, what would happen to irony? If intentionalism will not go away, neither will the belief that Dickinson would not have written a poem “about masturbation.” And if that doesn’t clinch the argument, there is always recourse to the poem itself.

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[1] I suspect that it also illustrates the phenomenon of chain-pulling, which sixteen-year-olds love, and that of prurience, in which love they are like the voice of Tom Lehrer’s song “Smut,” which sings, “All books can be indecent books/Though recent books are bolder,/For filth (I’m glad to say) is in/the mind of the beholder./When correctly viewed/Everything is lewd.”)

Reading Malcolm Gladwell is always interesting. A few years ago he wrote a piece[1] for The New Yorker on how difficult it is to anticipate which teacher-candidates will turn out to be good teachers, suggesting that the ways typically used to determine potential quality are not very useful. In that same article he gave a qualified endorsement of “value-added learning” calculations as useful in distinguishing excellent teachers from dreadful ones. The qualification was that it is a crude tool not meant for fine distinctions such as those regularly made by the testing-and-accountability people.

My own experience with “competency testing” using home-grown instruments tells me that it requires painstaking construction of tests, careful analysis, and great modesty in drawing conclusions. An example of a modest conclusion would be that “the 10^th-graders are not doing as badly on writing as they did last year, so the remediation we adopted might be having a good effect. Let’s take out the scores of transfer students to see whether the improvement holds up and then try to decide whether we can take credit or whether the 9^th-graders are just growing up.” Another would be that “the 10^th-graders are having more trouble making abstract inferences and putting them in good language.” Is there a problem in the program as a whole? In a part of it, for example, the way in which vocabulary is taught? In the development of the 10^th-graders’ abilities in abstract operational thinking? In our recent subscription to turnitin.com’s plagiarism-detection service?

In short, using our home-grown instruments required nearly as much judgment and subtlety as not using them, and we never, ever believed or asserted that the numbers alone told the tale. We did claim that they might be crude indicators of gross competence or incompetence or of trends in whole grades, but beyond that we did not want to venture. In my experience, the makers of standardized tests also offer caveats with their scores: there is an x % chance of unreliability; this 800-point test is valid within 50 points of the actual score obtained, etc.  We successfully resisted suggestions by administrators working on their Ed.D.s in correspondence school that we might use them as the basis of a value-added learning program. And we were fortunate that our school operated at that time on a collegial, not a bureaucratic-authoritarian, model of administration.

In a collegial system an educational leader brings others along; in the bureaucratic-authoritarian system, he prods or lashes them forward with threats and menaces instead of good sense, discussion, and generosity. In a collegial system the “crooked timber of humanity” retains a knotty integrity; in the bureaucratic-authoritarian system it is turned into lumber, planed into shavings, or thrown away. It is the system most likely to like a one-test-fits-all “solution” to educational “problems.”

Gladwell recently wrote another article[2] about the U. S. News rankings of American colleges and universities. The thesis of the article is that the ratings are shot through with unexamined and unwarranted assumptions that skew results—that do more than skew results: they “validate” sometimes invidious or adventitious distinctions between colleges. To illustrate, he gave the list of the “top ten” law schools: U. of Chicago, Yale, Harvard, Stanford,  Columbia, Northwestern, Cornell, Penn, NYU, and Cal Berkeley. He explained the calculations that lay behind these rankings and then made plausible alterations in the basis of calculation. The new “top ten”? U. of Chicago, BYU, Harvard, Yale, U. of Texas, U. Va, U. of Colorado, U. of Alabama, Stanford, and Penn.

Quite a change, and quite a plausible one. Yet another set of numbers, used by the Wall Street Journal and based on corporate recruiters’ opinions of the schools where they actually hire their rookies, identified the number one school as Penn State. Gladwell suggests that ratings of this kind may not be very solid, very accurate, or very objective.

One of the intellectual vices Gladwell notes in his article is the use of “proxy” values that can be easily quantified in place of values that are impossible to measure (but not, I would add, to judge). The main problem with the use of proxy values is that the basis for the use of the proxy is usually nothing but an unexamined assertion of its equivalence by the person using it. Since these unexamined assertions are not subject to the usual checks on misjudgment that open discussion or a good old-fashioned give-and-take can provide, they continue unexamined, transmitting to their numbers all sorts of crypto-subjectivity.

That being the case, users of such numbers ought to be cautious in the conclusions they draw from them, but that is not what is happening. People accept these ratings and the implicit fine distinctions as valid. A similar error of judgment marks the acceptance by testing-and-accountability people of the fine distinctions between competent and incompetent teachers or between good and poor schools. A moment’s thought should tell us that it is ridiculous to judge the quality of a school by examining the results of its students on two multiple-choice exams administered once a year. That sort of crude proctology by statistics should have no place in the evaluation of schools or of teachers.

In future postings I hope to suggest what might do instead.

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[1] Called “How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?” in his recent book What the Dog Saw

[2] “The Order of Things: What college rankings really tell us” in The New Yorker, Feb. 14 & 21, 2011.

In the wake of the Chinese PISA scores and Amy Chuan’s writings about how Chinese mothers bring up their children we have heard a lot of commentary about the “American system of education,” usually to extol it at the expense of Chinese practices. Much of this commentary suffers from a problem discussed by Professor Harry Frankfurt in his little book On Bullshit. It is the desire or feeling of need to express views on subjects regardless of the views’  value. When our wish or need to say something prevails over a becoming thoughtfulness and intellectual modesty, we end up with something not worth reading. And it really is not worth reading that Chinese students don’t think or that American students are creative, or whatever banality is on offer.

I suspect that people who say such things suffered from a defective education. Signs of the defect to look for in the classroom or schoolhouse:

• Participation in “class debates” where exuberance trumped thoughtfulness and fluency trumped intellectual care
• No Socratic discussions in which students were politely but firmly and relentlessly questioned to establish the extent of their understanding of the claims they made and the thinking that lay behind them
• Grading of writing that contained few or no challenges to nonsense or overstatement, or in which all compositions, regardless of merit, were given an A or a B
• No insistence on the rewriting of bad compositions, or even a working recognition that a composition can be bad
• Too much “peer editing” and not enough editing by a qualified editor or an experienced thinker, i.e., the teacher
• Approval of baloney offered with exuberance or charm
• Offering thought-cliches instead of real thinking

Actually, American education seems from where I sit to be many kinds of education, but at its best it has all the virtues ascribed to it by its defenders. Unfortunately, other processes and schemes claiming to be education prevail in many American schools. Before we could offer comprehensive praise of American schools, we would have to get the right answers from most schools to the following questions:

1.      Is the school rigorous?

2.      Do its teachers make effective distinctions between rigor and hard labor?

3.      Do they know the subjects they teach well enough not to need an “answer book” or not to be surprised by the ones they use?

4.      Do teachers make effective distinctions between knowledge, skill, and understanding, building up all three?

5.      Do teachers have the respect of students, parents, and administrators?

6.      Does the school day have schedules and practices that encourage the build-up of intellectual momentum as opposed to distraction and fragmentation?

7.    Is the school free of Bold Initiatives and Great Leaps Forward, content with modest and organic improvement where needed and recognition of good quality where it is found?

8.    Do its evaluations of teachers show subtlety and finesse, or are they gross and statistical?

9.    Are its administrators educational leaders?

10.  Do they support the teachers in their endeavors and encourage collegiality?

11.  Are the relationships among students, teachers, and parents free of legalism and adversarialism?

12.  Have students been properly inculcated in the virtue of discipline, concentration, and work?

13.  Are they learning the difference between creativity and fooling around? Is creativity rewarded and fooling around reproved?

14.  Can students have some, but not too much, fun at school?

15.  When students have laudable ideas and inspirations, are they encouraged to work them through and pursue them to something like a conclusion or a result?

16.  Are class sizes small enough that the teachers can be reasonably expected to do the coaching and Socratic instruction that their subjects require?

17.  Is the school free of competency testing for accountability, and do the students nonetheless come out of it knowing something valuable?

18.  Do its administrators understand Campbell’s Law?

The right answers to most or all of these questions suggest a school that manages to provide the best of American education.