What Did You Learn in School Today?

A number of people have been saying stuff like this, but this meme, which I first noticed today, has the longest wishlist I've seen of subjects people wanted to impose on kids.

Of course I'm in favor of getting rid of gold stars and other reward systems, and I recognize that the meme isn't necessarily about schooling; it's perhaps deliberately ambiguous on that point.  The great educational reformer and critic of schooling John Holt also advocated the introduction of "real-world" subjects and projects into schools, and Alfie Kohn has been a sound critic of rewards and punishments in general.  But then, when I was in school, we had shop class and Home Ec; "practical" subjects were not excluded even from mainstream schooling, and I doubt they are now either.

It's telling, though, that reading, writing, math, and critical thinking are notable for their absence from that list. So is science. They also are worth doing for their own sake, and doing them is its own reward.

I also think it's funny how freely people pile subjects and tasks onto kids, or at least fantasize about doing it. One size fits all! (And there's at least significant overlap between people who post stuff like the meme above and those who post the one in that post.)  I think that in practice, kids would and do resent having their whole lives regimented by adults, because they have their own interests, and not everybody is interested in everything anyway.  Like it or not, kids are also interested in electronics and other technology, and no matter how much adults choose to simplify their own lives, it's going to be very difficult to return to the eighteenth century completely. 

Kids used to learn the listed tasks from their parents and grandparents, not in school, and that's appropriate. School was where you went to learn academic subjects, not what your family and neighbors taught you anyway.  We don't really live in the kind of society where that sort of thing is possible, and that needs to be thought about, not fantasized about nostalgically.  So this meme reminds me of adults who don't want to take responsibility for educating their children in their own religion, but want the schools to do it.

Whenever I see the words "common sense," I reach for my critical thinking. This meme is a good example of why.

P.S. The meme is also confused about the individual's position in the world.  On the one hand, the logo says the goal is to be "more self-reliant"; on the other, the text talks about encouraging kids to "care about something other than themselves."  Self-reliance, of course, is a great American myth.  American pioneers and homesteaders were self-reliant only when they had to be, and even then they depended heavily on technology (guns, iron tools) that they didn't invent and couldn't always manufacture themselves.  They also relied on neighbors for help, expecting to return the favors they received.  Barn-raising and quilting bees, for example, were group projects and activities, not just because many hands lightened the work but because human beings need company.  There were undoubtedly some pathological individuals who chose the wilderness and the prairie in order to get away from neighbors; we have accounts from the wives of some such men, who weren't as interested in solitude their husbands and longed for friends, company, the support of others.  Solitude and loneliness probably contributed to the failure of many a homestead.

I've also been seeing memes from some of the same people about a more recent period.  This one is representative:

"Do stuff"!  Maybe the words "supply chain" are meant to gesture toward the human networks Grandma was embedded in, but again, this meme puts too much emphasis on the atomized individual.  Grandma also relied on government Relief, on various charities, and just plain human kindness, which she gave as well as got.  This blog post, though probably not the best history, is a reminder of the reality:

My grandfather was born in 1928 and grew into a young boy in the aftermath of the US economic collapse. Pop-pop remembers his parents opening up our hay barn for random people to sleep in on cold winter nights. He also remembers that he and his family were “not so bad off”; they were farmers so they had the land and the knowledge to grow most of the food they consumed. In fact, Pop-pop told me that anyone who spent the night in their barn was also given a plate of food for the night, which shows how valuable their garden truly was. His impressionable years during a time of great financial ruin impacted the rest of his life dramatically, from his hoarding of cash and mistrust of companies and banks, to his refusal to use air conditioners and instead spend his summers in sweat-drenched muscle shirts. When he died he left an inheritance for each of his children from a measly family dairy farmer’s income.

The writer's grandfather didn't experience the Great Depression as an adult, and that surely makes a difference in his account.  (Neither did my parents, who were born in 1923 and 1926.  I wish I knew more about how my grandparents got through those years -- they all died in the 1960s, when I was a child -- but I know they had hard times.)

America was a lot more rural in the 1930s than it is now, and more people had space for gardens to grow food.  I live in a residential area with small lawns, for instance, but I don't know what my landlord would say if I started a vegetable garden.  There are community gardens around town, but they're some distance away from where I live, and some of the ground there has been contaminated over the years by chemical waste. My father kept a good-sized garden when we moved to the country, but never succeeded in getting us kids to really participate in it.  I think all of us could do some gardening if we had to, but we didn't have to.  (Nor did my mother can the vegetables my father grew, or make our clothes; not everyone relished the memory of their impoverished childhoods and wanted to relive them.)

If there were another economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression -- and 2008, as bad as it was, wasn't on that scale -- the knowledge that people would need for frugality and self-help is still available and would surely be used.  But one always helps oneself among and with other people, with their help.  "Pulling one's own weight" is a better metaphor than "self-reliance."

The Very Purpose of School

Writing may be even worse than reading.  It takes very little time to notice and buy (or check out) a book that looks interesting, but it takes hours to read it.  It takes even longer to write a book or a blog post than it takes to read it.  I've got twenty-seven posts in my drafts folder now, and it would be longer if I hadn't simply deleted some of them as lost causes.  (I'm also carrying around some ideas in my head that haven't gotten as far as the drafts folder, but I still intend to write about them.)  If I finish this one today, there will be only twenty-six.   I'm making progress.

A couple of interesting articles went up at the Atlantic last week -- well, two weeks ago now -- and while I doubt the writers had consulted each other, their subject matter overlapped in a significant way.  I meant to write about this right away, and then my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One linked to one of the articles on Facebook, but then I was getting ready to go out of town for the weekend, so once again I'm behind.

The first article I read was Amanda Ripley's "The Case Against High-School Sports."  The lede reads, "The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student—unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?"  The trouble is, the US doesn't really "lag in international education rankings."  We aren't Number One, which is of course vitally important to many people, but we do quite well given our general lack of interest in matters intellectual, and the hostility to public education among our political elites.

Ripley begins by telling us about a fifteen-year-old Korean girl whose family moved to the US two years ago.  She's bemused by the prominence of sports, especially extramural sports, in her new high school.  A great deal of "education" money is spent on sports, facilities for sports, and support for teams that compete with the teams of other schools.

By contrast, in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny’s classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper, it was usually for their academic accomplishments.

Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same international math test.) The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from undertrained teachers to entrenched poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school?

These are good questions, but the way Ripley frames the issue makes me suspicious.  She doesn't name the "test on critical thinking on math" which ranks South Korea fourth, and the US thirty-first.  But those rankings shouldn't be taken at face value.  It sounds like Ripley might have been referring to the tests the late Gerald Bracey dissected here, particularly the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA.  (I also found this commentary, which rebuts Bracey with an anecdote and a rhetorical question.)  There's too much information in that article for me to quote it, so I'll just urge interested readers to click through and read it.  If you find it useful, try this one as well, and then this one.  But the gist is that international comparisons based on average scores on standardized tests aren't worth very much, except as grist for alarmist attacks on public education.  But that's okay, we must maintain our international competitiveness: without world-class alarmist attacks on public education, America will forfeit its right to be a world leader.

This doesn't mean, of course, that I favor the current emphasis on sports, in schools at any level or in American society generally.  This is where I agreed with RWA1, who denounced the mandatory pep sessions in his high school: I also tried to get out of attending them and when that failed, refused to participate.  I've never gone to an IU football or basketball game, not on principle but because I just don't give a damn; indeed, I would prefer that IU lose all its games, and wish there were some way that its competitors could lose all of theirs.  (Just today, I read an interesting bit in Lawrence W. Levine's The Opening of the American Mind [Beacon Press, 1996]: the literature professor Lionel Trilling "surmised that the problem of diminishing social homogeneity and unity was behind Columbia's restoration of football in 1915, in 'an effort to create the sense of collegiate solidarity among the students" [59].)   I also remember seeing a rash of student op-eds in the IU newspaper some years ago, which declared that extramural sports were important, because "students need something to cheer for," which doesn't make much sense but fits with Trilling's speculation.

Then there's this report of a California high school that "awesomely crown[ed a] trans girl Homecoming Queen."  I'm sorry, but I just cannot get very excited about this historic breakthrough: not because I don't sympathize with trans girls, but because Homecoming Queen competitions are another aspect of American school life that needs to be abolished.  Becoming the first trans Homecoming Queen, as a life goal, is like becoming the first trans Heather -- though that milestone has probably already been passed too: no achievement to be proud of.  (This article appeared on a pop-feminist site that ordinarily would be sharply critical of beauty pageants; why did they change their tune when a trans girl wins one?)  But I digress.

Ripley's article was probably written as a companion to an article in the print version of the magazine, Hilary Levey Friedman's "When Did Competitive Sport Take Over American Childhood?"  That's a good question, but Friedman doesn't really answer it.  Less obviously related, until I read it, was a post by James Fallows: "What the CEO of Facebook Has in Common with a Michigan School Administrator."  It was built around the eponymous gentlemen's agreement on the matter of immigration reform.  Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress that he came to support immigration reform not because of "the usual (and correct) tech-world argument that U.S. companies do better, and so does the U.S. as a whole, if America continues to attract and welcome an outsized share of the world's talent."  Rather, his Road-to-Damascus moment came

after he began doing volunteer-teacher work in a local public school. He found that one of his best students wasn't interested in going to college, not for any academic reasons but because of a legal barrier. The student's parents had made their way to the U.S. illegally when he was little. He grew up here and sounded and looked like other American students. But because of his undocumented/illegal status, he would not be eligible for admission to most colleges or for financial aid if he did get in. As Zuckerberg learned, this limbo affects a lot of students who are already in America, whose only legal transgression was to have been brought here when little, but whose gray-zone status keeps them from taking a major step toward future employability.

Funny thing here, though: although Zuckerberg protested, perhaps too much, that he didn't want immigration laws to be changed so as to get more international talent on his payroll, his argument seems to have circled back to just that point.  And there are problems with that.  Not because it isn't heartbreaking that young people who grew up in the US are being excluded not only from higher education but from many other important aspects of American life; of course it is. It's because it isn't just about their "employability."

After all, it's likely that as US citizens, these kids will be unattractive to many American employers anyway, because they'll cost too much.  One reason why American businessmen are calling for "immigration reform" is so that they can import highly-qualified college graduates, who were probably trained at the expense of the governments and therefore of the taxpayers in their home countries, on special visas for lower pay.  Guest workers, despite their legal immigration status, are still highly vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment by their employers.  All this reinforces my sense that competition and the "competitiveness" that our wise leaders love to stress is harmful, not only to this country but to others.  It siphons from other countries the trained people they need to make better lives for the people who remain at home, after their governments have paid for their education, either at home or in the US and Europe.

But the specter of "employability" also raises questions that have always been contentious in discussions about education.  What is the purpose of a college education?  Is it to make its graduates "employable" in giant corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, the financial sector, and so on?  It's a pious commonplace that education is not supposed to prepare students for employment, but to make them better, wiser, more rounded, citizens.  This kind of education isn't practical in the sense that would interest a captain of industry, but it's certainly practical in terms of dealing with business and with government, to ask not simply how to do things but why we do them, and then how to do something else if that seems desirable.

Just about everybody pays lip service to this ideal, but much of the discussion of higher education today focuses -- sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly -- on whether there's any point in going to college if it won't land you a better job when you graduate. And I fully agree that it's important to be able to support yourself when you reach adulthood.  But should schools and universities serve primarily as vocational schools for future employees at the public expense?  Why shouldn't big corporations train their own workers, at their own expense?

There's a lot of discussion and handwringing over skyrocketing student debt (desirable from the employers' point of view, so that employees will be afraid to lose their jobs for fear they won't be able to keep up their loan payments), and the more visible problem of unpaid internships (also desirable from the employers' viewpoint, all that yummy free labor -- contrary to the principles of free-market economics, most employers have never been able to see why workers shouldn't donate their services gratis rather than demanding to be paid for their time), and rightly so, but it misses the point.  Why should (merely potential) employees be paying to get the training that might get them a job?  If education were merely supposed to pasture and improve students' minds, they wouldn't be racking up debt in such amounts to get it; I imagine that there would be a good deal less demand for higher education in that case, but at least there'd be less confusion as to why students were seeking it.  And those who weren't interested in it should be trained in explicitly vocational programs, after they are hired.  (Some years ago a spectacularly foul person complained online that American schools are worthless, because a cashier at the drug store didn't recognize a newly-minted US coin.  But how could any school teach its students to recognize money that didn't exist yet?  The schools hadn't failed -- it was the management of the drug store.)

So I don't think I believe Mark Zuckerberg's professed reasons for his interest in immigration reform.  But just as good education doesn't mean supplying American business with job-ready workers, immigration reform isn't primarily (or at all?) about the future employability of young immigrants.  Well-educated, thoughtful graduates might be less interested in joining a corporate "family," after all.  Amanda Ripley's article is built on the same confusion about the purpose of education, expressed in confusion about the impact of school-based athletics on education.  (I think corporations -- which are often sponsors of sport at all levels -- would see sport's solidarity-building as a good thing.)  And come on, James Fallows: why should other countries care if "U.S. companies do better, and so does the U.S. as a whole, if America continues to attract and welcome an outsized share of the world's talent" -- especially at their expense?

Let me go back for a moment to the rhetorical question with which one writer rebutted (but didn't refute) Gerald Bracey's critique of international comparison testing.  After repeating an anecdote about a Chinese classroom in which a foreign visitor was dazzled by 40 students who explained "how to demonstrate two lines are parallel without using a proportional segment”, the writer asked: "Ask yourself two questions: Wouldn’t you want American kids to know geometry that well? Wouldn’t you want them disciplined and paying attention in class?"  My answer would be more questions:  Why would I want American kids to know geometry that well?  What else would they be learning in school besides geometry?  Could the author of this article explain that theorem?  Since I presume he couldn't, does he feel that he's uneducated, and can't get through life successfully as a result?  And does he think that "discipline" is the essence of education?  That article embodies a lot of what is wrong with the debate on schooling in America.

Taught to the Tune of a Hickory Stick

The Facebook friend (he's also a blogger) who'd linked to Kim Brooks's article, sent me e-mail today. Among other things he wrote:

I think for example that sentence diagramming of the parts of speech is helpful, up to a point. I think, or at least hope, that my grammar is pretty decent even if I never fully grasped the various definitions of different kinds of participles, and so forth. but as I don't have kids or know that much about what schools are actually doing nowadays, and I must admit I regard as suspect a lot of elite journalism blather about these kids these days, etc, like the fuss about that documentary that came out last year about charter schools (which I haven't seen, but it sure sounded like agit-prop advocacy for spending less on poor-district schools and union-busting).

I don't have kids either, but I learn something of what schools are doing nowadays by reading writers on education. (And by asking younger acquaintances about their experience.) What I read indicates that standardized testing has invaded schools to the extent that less and less time is available for kids to learn. This will lead to lower scores on the tests, which will lead to demands for more "accountability" and more testing, which in turn will lead to lower scores. Lower scores wouldn't be such a problem, since the scores are meaningless in themselves, but the emphasis on tests and the time wasted on preparing for and taking them will mean that students won't have time to learn. In short, the current demands for accountability, standards, and so on are a self-fulfilling prophecy, at the expense of children.

My friend, by the way, was referring to the recent documentary Waiting for Superman, which I haven't seen yet. I still mean to see it, but from reviews and interviews with the filmmaker I gather that it's based on the belief that American students compare spectacularly badly with their counterparts in other countries. Since this is false, the film's recommendations of charter schools and union-busting are irrelevant at best.

My friend also misunderstood what I'd written in my comments on Facebook. He thought that when I'd said "traditional methods of teaching don't work, for a variety of reasons", I was talking about "how students in poorer districts do in our inequitable system." While our system is inequitable, and students in poorer districts are poorly served by their schools, I was talking about all students who are schooled by traditional methods. (See John Holt's How Children Fail, based on his experience teaching in good private schools. His point wasn't that rich kids have it tough too, but that many of the faults in traditional schooling are built into the system.)

I write as one who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and went to small rural and small-town schools. After three townships were consolidated, my high-school graduating class had about 95 students in it. I remember taking standardized tests, mandated by the state of Indiana, starting in the fifth and sixth grades. For me they were a break from school routine, and I actually enjoyed taking them and (therefore?) did well on them. I did well on the SAT, too, when it came time to take it, and on other tests required for college-bound students. I was lucky: I did my required schoolwork pretty easily and quickly, so I had time to read my way through our school libraries, teaching myself the literary modernists among other writers, and using my self-taught typing skills on the school's IBM Selectrics to write during one of my study-hall periods when I wasn't studying French, Spanish, algebra, geometry, and so on. Oh, and watching TV and teaching myself to play guitar while discovering the new wave of American and British pop music along with European and American art music from the public library's lp collection. My math and foreign-language teachers taught me subjects I couldn't have taught myself, and I'm grateful to them. But most other subjects I learned on my own, because I wanted to. That's the ultimate aim of education, I thought, to prepare students to educate themselves.

In yesterday's post I wrote that I considered diagramming sentences "fun, for awhile anyway." But that reflects my own intellectuality and geekhood. When I was taking high-school Spanish, I used to recite verb conjugations as I rode around on my bicycle: trabajo, trabajas, trabaja; trabajamos, trabajais, trabajan. Much later, when I was studying Russian at IU in my thirties, my first-year instructor (a graduate student, and one of the best teachers I've ever had -- thanks, Becky!) apologized for the emphasis on grammar and structural analysis in the course; I told her that I liked those aspects of the class, because they helped me learn. For many people learning new languages as adults, immersion with a minimum of grammar is the best way to learn; but I (and I suppose others) think of grammar variously as being like a handhold, training wheels on a bicycle, a crutch, or a map: a means of guiding / supporting myself as I negotiate a new and strange territory. Students should have access to different tools and aids so that they can figure out what works best for them.

Elementary-school instruction in children's native language is different. They come to school with their spoken language already largely learned, with reading and writing to be learned as additional skills. One reason I have trouble reading Korean, I think, even though hangul is a phonetic alphabet, is that I don't know what the words I'm reading mean. Even in Spanish and Russian the words were familiar, if at times deceptively so. Learning to read English, however, meant dealing with words I already knew. Written language is not exactly the same as spoken language, but speech is a bedrock / a map / a handhold / training wheels for learning to write.

What angered me about the other commenter's remarks about traditional English grammar instruction was not that she argued for (say) diagramming sentences as one way among others of learning to write -- she claimed, dogmatically and incorrectly, that it was the only way to learn how to write well. Since yesterday I've had time to check what I thought I remembered about the effects of traditional instruction. It's well summed up by this passage in Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pages 225-6.

Grammar instruction provides a spectacular lesson on how old-fashioned dogma continues to drive beliefs and practices in direct contradiction to scientific findings. In the mid-1970s, a group of New Zealand researchers reviewed the available literature and wrote that "sixty years of empirical studies on the practical value of teaching grammar have failed to demonstrate any consistent measurable effects on students' writing skills." Nevertheless, they set out to design a test of their own, dividing 164 secondary school students into three carefully matched groups and exposing them to traditional grammar instruction, to a new "transformational grammar" curriculum, or to a course that just used the grammar time for more reading and creative writing. Three teachers rotated through each approach, so each group of students was exposed to all three teachers doing the same kind of instruction. At the end of three years, there were virtually no differences among the groups, which is to say there were no measurable benefits of traditional grammar instruction.

Returning to the question in 1991, two U.S. scholars contributed a definitive chapter to a research handbook published by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. They found absolutely nothing to challenge the New Zealanders' conclusion. Indeed, a meta-analysis performed by one of the authors a few years earlier had discovered that students studying grammar actually did worse than their peers on some measures, raising the possibility that almost "any focus of instruction is more effective in improving the quality of writing than grammar and mechanics." The major question suggested by all the data was why grammar retains its appeal "when research over the past 90 years reveals not only that students do not learn it and are hostile toward it, but that the study of grammar has no impact on writing quality." The best answer they could come up with is that grammar is easy to teach, easy to grade, and "provides security in having 'right' answers." The grammar sections of a textbook should be used as a reference tool, they concluded, and not as a course of study.

This is important, because traditionalists usually attack advocates of other approaches to teaching as hostile to "excellence," as wanting students to "feel good about themselves" rather than to learn, and so on. In reality, it's the traditionalists who favor approaches that, at best, contribute nothing to students' learning, and may actively hamper it. (They also think that insulting students who don't do so well with traditional methods will somehow inspire them to "excellence.") Students like me, who are able to teach ourselves how to read and write, may escape the worst effects of traditional methods, but what about the majority, who end up avoiding reading and writing, and regard writing in particular as a mysterious chore, unable to express themselves except by cutting and pasting other people's status messages on Facebook?