The astronomer Kepler wrote, “I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.”
Trends occur in all segments of culture. Dance (funky monkey), music (big band swing), fashion (spats), visual art (Neoclassicism), technology (the big thing last year), family structure (man and woman and children), and language (Esperanto)—all these elements of culture shift inconstantly as current tastes shuffle and re-deal. In the spirit of Hegel’s dialectic, we recognize the faults of the prevailing thesis (whip a child for not doing homework, for instance), counter it with an antithesis (withhold the whip but soundly scold the child), and arrive at a synthesis (whip the child briefly and then administer a mild scolding), which then becomes the new thesis. And so on. What is de rigueur will soon go the way of the buggy whip and venesection. But while we no longer burn witches, we continue to apply witchcraft and wild guesswork in the classroom. That is where the “thoughtless approval of the masses marches forward.
Ever since 1640 when Henry Dunster, a puritan clergyman, became the first president of Harvard (and taught all its classes, every subject offered), educational theory in America has drawn a loopy experimental design. As if students were lab rats, the theoreticians have run experiments on each generation of children who subsequently had to suffer the consequences. We have tried teacher-centered education, new math, flipped classrooms, open classrooms, phonics, normative education, Bloom’s taxonomy, constructivism, brain-based learning theory, control theory of motivation, behavioral objectives, Piaget strategies, social learning theory, cultural learning theory, and countless other trends to groom our students toward something better than what we had tried previously.
All of these tactics work to some degree, I suppose, but as in other theoretical domains, they all have flaws when used as capstone strategies. After nearly forty years in higher education, I have slogged through stacks of throwaway paperwork; all to satisfy the leaders of my college that I was all-in with the plat du jour educational plan. I, along with most of my colleagues, have sharp skepticism over the latest fashion in pedagogy, and for good reason. Because when sucking all the juice from the latest and greatest de facto educational policy, we find just the rind before moving on to something new that we are to garnish upon ourselves and our students.
The captains of education want course objectives and desired outcomes. They want to rewrite the mission statement. They want verbose reports (written in educationese) that assess every aspect of what goes on in the classroom! They want evidence-based assessments. Accreditation reports have become almost a full-time job for faculty at many institutions. They want maps, not the countryside itself. During office hours, I must tell my students that I cannot spend more than a few minutes with them because I have educational flapdoodle to grind. Of course, I say that with a smile and hope that the irony is not lost on them.
Truly, how much have we improved in the classroom since Hard Times in which schoolteacher Gradgrid demanded simply “facts, facts, facts…”? To that misguided teacher all education amounted to facts, merely that, nothing more. And since facts are slippery and change every generation, his dictum is now nothing more than an anachronism. Even admitting that, education theorists continue to bang the drum of utilitarianism. They want empirical validation. They want measurements, and those data become more important to them than the ones measured. They should know better.
William Hazlitt got it right in his essay “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” from Table Talk, Essays on Men and Manners (1822). His argument disparages the minds removed from actual experience, those who claim “reason over humanity.” He claims:
Such is the use which has been made of human learning. The labourers in this vineyard seem as if it was their object to confound all common sense, and the distinctions of good and evil, by means of traditional maxims and preconceived notions taken upon trust, and increasing in absurdity with increase of age. They pile hypotheses on hypotheses, mountain high, till it is impossible to come to the plain truth on any question. They see things, not as they are, but as they find them in books, and 'wink and shut their apprehension up', in order that they may discover nothing to interfere with their prejudices or convince them of their absurdity. It might be supposed that the height of human wisdom consisted in maintaining contradictions and rendering nonsense sacred. There is no dogma, however fierce or foolish, to which these persons have not set their seals, and tried to impose on the understandings of their followers, as the will of Heaven, clothed with all the terrors and sanctions of religion. How little has the human understanding been directed to find out the true and useful! How much ingenuity has been thrown away in defense of creeds and systems!
It may sound foolish to ignore the doctrinaire advice coming from higher schools of education, but all but a few practitioners overlook the magic ingredients in successful teaching techniques: love and understanding. Give me a teacher who loves his or her subject and students, and all theory turns to balderdash. Give me a teacher who has passion and involves his or her students in the excitement of learning, and eschew the Doctor of Education degree. A good teacher is nothing more than a person who points the way so that students can learn by their own devices. And they will learn if administrators and teachers stay the hell out of the way once the excitement begins. Stir a student’s imagination and curiosity, and nothing will stop learning. The trick is to open the gate to learning, not to herd the pack into a fenced field.
Currently, of course, digital learning is the rage. School leaders want completion rates to soar, and online classes provide great efficiency. Digital classrooms allow students the privilege of attending class in an ether cloud without ever having to meet a professor, a classmate, or a book. Instructional administrators want to push credits (like cheese samples at Costco) to students. While collecting tuition and designing curricula, the CEOs of education promote a new generation of mentors and robots, not qualified professors, to oversee coursework. Having taught online courses, I know how flawed such credit generators are. For all that, I could never be certain if the completed essays and tests that I pulled from the course drop-box were written by my student or by a paid consultant. Moreover, I found no evidence that online students learned even half as much as those in brick and mortar classrooms did. Put simply, newfangled technology, like the drawbacks of the industrial revolution, has yet to consider the humanity it serves—production is grand, money streams flow, but people (FTEs) suffer from the consequences. How do they suffer? They get credits but learn little.
This brings me to Common Core, the latest self-imposed education dictum foisted upon K-12 systems. Business and political interests want to share this enlightenment by placing our precollege organizations into this straightjacket. Make kids prove they learn. Set a hurdle over which each child must leap. Tough love. And if the results do not arrive, somebody must pay. Never mind that the plan enjoys no credible proof to show increased student achievement. Tests are difficult, often defeating. The whole fiasco (CC) is the next iteration from the self-assigned experts who think their plan will properly educate our youth. It won’t. If anything, CC will discourage more than help. And our school systems need help. Instead of throwing our floundering youth a lifejacket, we flip them a barbell and a reprimand for not keeping their heads above water. “The floggings will continue until morale improves,” a favorite saying from the military culture, applies here. Perhaps it is counterintuitive to suggest that we must remove the systems in order to fix the structure of education, but that is just what needs to happen.
Among other sensible objections, the following excerpt from a white paper states the misdirection of Common Core’s emphasis on skill training.
Skills training alone doesn’t prepare students for college-level work. They need a fund of content knowledge. But Common Core’s ELA standards (as well as its literacy standards for other subjects) do not specify the literary/historical knowledge students need. They provide no list of recommended authors or works, just examples of levels of “complexity.” They require no British literature aside from Shakespeare. They require no authors from the ancient world or selected pieces from the Bible as literature so that students can learn about their influence on English and American literature. They do not require study of the history of the English language. Without requirements in these areas, students are not prepared for college coursework. (Stotsky)
It may be obvious, but I have long thought that a good teacher attacks his or her career with passion and humility, not with schemes. Moreover, a good educational theorist would do well to pack up the surveys and clipboards and spend some time in an early education environment where learning flourishes with little more than proper supervision.
Stotsky, Bauerlein and. How Common Core's ELA Standards Place College Readiness at Risk. September 2012. Document. 9 September 2015.