THE DALLAS INSTITUTE
OF
HUMANITIES
AND
CULTURE’S
Cowan Center For Education
Newsletter Spring 2015 • Volume IV, Issue I
The 2015
Education Forum September 25-6, 2015
What is liberal learning? What is a liberal education? “liberal”—from liber, the “free one”—an education suited to a free person
Louise Cowan Diane Ravitch Matthew Crawford Andrew Delbanco Bill Deresiewicz Ben Olguìn Dan Russ Diana Senechal Some of the best teacher hearts and minds in the country in a conversation about the kind of education that everyone living in a democracy needs.
Join us, Dallas, to begin the conversation, Dallas Institute style.
From the Cowan Center Director Dear Colleagues and Friends, After a one-issue hiatus, the Cowan Center Newsletter is back in circulation. But with the exception of the column to the left of this letter—the announcement of this fall’s blockbuster Education Forum— the advent of the standardized testing season (which coincides, not incidentally, I think, with April Fool’s Day) has inspired us to dedicate this issue to matters that Jacques Barzun has sagaciously called “educational nonsense.” Now as far as educational theory goes, when I want to read the really good stuff, I take up Donald Cowan for inspiration and Jacques Barzun for ventilation, that is, in order to clear the proverbial cobwebs out of my brain. To mix metaphors, in educational matters this is the pollution that attaches itself like a zebra mussel (an allusion perhaps lost on those of you not in North Texas) to the ship of one’s heart and mind when one is trying to serve the bureaucracy, the school system that seems intent on devouring itself and all of those inside. The Cowans and Barzun are not antithetical in their views; indeed, they were dear friends. But they are different sides of the same coin, as we say. So considering the season, as much as one needs inspiration we thought that a little ventilation might be in order, so our Newsletter is given over to the latter this time around. If you enjoy Diana Senechal’s satire about the current obsession with teacher evaluations (reproduced on the back page here), do pull up the satires archived on her blog page. This gentle, brilliant soul knows how to size up a situation and parse it out with wit and irony. Although in matters like quantitative systems to evaluate teachers—taken so seriously these days by reformers as the
remedy for all educational woes—those of us who regard this as the educational nonsense du jour will probably need to remember Jonathan Swift when hoping that Diana’s, or any other solid argument, will readily change the course of those who truly believe that people can be numerically accounted for and quantified. As Swift explained, “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” (As Barzun says, “Sigh.”) But if self-delusion obscures the proper interpretation of satire it does no less in life. However, a cleansing kind of sardonic insight permeates Barzun’s crisply written Begin Here book from which the article in this issue was reproduced, beginning with Morris Philipson’s “Preface”: “For almost fifty years an intense if unsystematic self-examination about education has been going on in the United States, with different degrees of concern or despair; but apparently in the judgment of everyone involved, this self-examination continues to go on unsuccessfully.” For many of us in education, especially in primary and secondary education but now, increasingly, in higher education as well, nothing much has changed in this regard in the twenty-four years since this book was published, except, perhaps, that many of what Philipson called then the “pseudo-scientific proposals for all the remedies” have actually been embraced, systematized, and turned into a national agenda. Sigh, again. So we need our sages and satirists more than ever. Please enjoy this issue and then join us for the Education Forum in September to explore the vision that can help us remember our way.
We can lead the way. To read the Cowan Center Newsletter online, go to the Cowan Center link on the homepage of the Dallas Institute’s website: dallasinstitute.org.
“Ideas versus Notions: Introductory” By Jacques Barzun A preface to “Where the Educational Nonsense Comes From” in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
T
he word nonsense in the next section in not an insult but a description. In the last fifty years, so many school methods, plans, programs, innovations, and “experiments” have failed that they must be accounted in lacking sense, in good sense. That conclusion was implied in a recent headline: “School Reform Again – Sigh”. But the pressing need will not go away without sighing, and experience suggests that before trying once more to make schools function properly, one thing ought to become clear—the source of the nonsense, so as to avoid another round of the absurd. Many observers have blamed “the progressive school” and its putative father John Dewey. Other have found the trouble to be obsolete equipment and unbusinesslike management. Buy audio, radio, video, reprographo devices, on the one hand; and on the other, subsidize research into new methods, new ways to motivate and teach. Then use the plant all year round, set up an internal audit, and give bonuses for productivity. Dewey and progressivism, glanced at earlier, are dealt with in what follows this note. The other proposal, with its zeal for making things hum, has up to now been adopted piecemeal. It too breeds nonsense, because it ignores the nature of teaching and the purpose of school. In fact, educational nonsense always comes from zeal displacing soberness and flouting the conditions of the two fundamentals; teaching and learning. To be a school means to teach some few well-known things, for only certain things can be taught, as we will indicate in a moment. What needs attention first is the host of
2
the non-teachable that have made the modern school scamp its duty and fail. Some years ago, a new school superintendent in the Southwest calculated that by state authority he must find room in the high school curriculum for about 200 subjects. They included: driver education, sex education, kindness to animals, shopping and local resources, care for endangered species, family living, global understanding, and no sex education. Legislatures are ever ready to add requirements that sound worthy or useful. Few survive in practice, but enough are attempted to make a mockery of the idea of schooling. The head of the Nation Education Association, true to its baneful tradition, has said that “teachers must be social workers, psychologists, and priests”—three professions for the price of one, and without the benefit of seminary or graduate training. It would be seen as quackery if the stubborn will of the educationists and the foolish hope of the public had not accustomed everybody to the imposture. “The School Must Also Teach an End to Hate” is the plea of an anguished citizen. “Environmental Education,” proposes a retired professor of education. As long as these ideas are considered tenable, schoolwork properly so called remains an underground activity in a tyrannical regime. Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one’s share in the world’s work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done. Anything else is the nonsense we have been living with.
Hence the school authority’s first duty is to the settle the question, Is it teachable? Take “family living.” Can it be organized as a subject? The facts of family life, if reliable, are a mass of statistics that change every year; the rest is advice about behavior. Neither can be reduced to rules. There is
“A sure sign of nonsense in the offing is the emergence of new names for well-known things.”
nothing solid to remember and apply systematically. So this very important segment of life cannot be “a subject.” All that such Good-Samaritan courses amount to is pieties. They present moralizing mixed with anecdotes, examples of good and bad, discussions of that catchall word “values,” and they punctuate the random talk with “research” and playacting by the students—wholesale make-believe. And dangerous, too: the best and worst students alike are bored. They know they are not gain ing any new powers. Nor do they relish continual preachiness any better than adults. Are we to conclude that a proper
school can do nothing to foster ethical behavior? Of course it can—by being a well run school in the full meaning of the term. Ethics must be seen to be believed, and school life is full of situations in which decent, generous, even noble actions can take place and be known to all so as to be felt as the right thing to do. Ethics is not talk but action. One great source of nonsense, then, is trying to teach the virtues verbally. A second is engineering human traits. The aim is to reach certain results head on. For example, it is true that students are hampered if they think poorly of themselves; they need a certain amount of self-esteem. Why not give it to them? Eighty-three percent of teachers in a recent inquiry considered this their “top role.” Two states have added to their education departments a “Bureau of Self Esteem.” All this as if self-esteem were a definite commodity that one has or hasn’t and that can be produced and injected when lacking. What a bureau can certainly produce is more bureaucracy, with paperwork and jargon to burden and bewilder teachers still more. Selfesteem comes from work done, from new power over difficulty, which in school means knowing more and more and coping easily with serious tasks. Boredom disappears with progress, with perceived advance toward completion and mastery. Just as it is foolish to go scheming for more self-esteem, so it is to expect a course to pump up intelligence, like oil, to the surface of the mind. This is attempted, for example, in courses where the young “learn to analyze news.” History well-taught would enable a graduate to do just that forever after, instead of tying him down to some particular technique devised by a textbook writer and imposed for a semester on the local newspaper. A sure sign of nonsense in the offing is the emergence of new names for well-known things. Under the educationist regime English became “language arts;” the school library, “general information resource;”
the school period a “module.” A while ago, a large western city set up “literacy centers” in its branch libraries, meaning remedial courses. Notice: the new term is always vaguer than the old, making the results of the novelty harder to judge, and the work is moved to a “center,” as if success would be easier in a new suit of clothes. Why should literacy be fostered elsewhere than in a school? Perhaps the school, fully occupied by nonsense, has no room for literacy. At any rate, now that everybody knows the condition of the school system and there is talk of a national core curriculum, thinking about the teachable, the possible, can no longer be evaded. What is a school subject? First come the means of further learning, which are reading, writing, and counting. It was their barefaced neglect that made a small group of people in the 1950s form the Council for Basic Education, which in turn led to the popular formula of “Back to the basics.” But the Council never thought that the three R’s were enough, and it argued for a return to the longtried curriculum of History, English and Foreign Languages, Science, Mathematics, and the Arts, including Literature. The first common characteristic is that they are known to have been taught successfully, in this country and elsewhere, for generations. The second explains why they are teachable. It is that their facts can be organized; rules and principles can be derived to make their study systematic and progressive: one year’s work follows another rationally, even though at some points convention enters into the linking. Such are the ways in which a subject, meaning a school subject, differs from a topic. Hundreds of topics are interesting and important, but they cannot be made scholastic for lack of these features. In the topic Local Resources, for instance, a mass of facts can be pulled together about public transportation, the police and fire departments, the welfare administration, the bureaus of parks, recreation, and marriage li-
censes, the office of consumer affairs, the garbage collecting, the schools and hospitals, and no doubt a dozen other services. But nothing leads from one to the other, except the individual inhabitant who may need them, and no rules or principles emerge from surveying the lot. Supposing a year devoted to describing this civic offering in some detail, what would be left in the mind would be a haphazard collection of items, different in each student mind according to chance or special interest. What would have been carried out is not an idea but a mere notion.
“One great source of nonsense, then, is trying to teach the virtues verbally.”
Epigraph to this volume: “To remove ignorance is the sole duty of the school. To fail in that battle when the enemy is by nature inactive, when your troops are numbered in the ten thousands, and when you have spent billions on equipment is to suffer a stupid defeat. Address to school superintendents, Aspen 1967”
Barzun, Jacques. Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning. Ed. Morris Philipson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 49-53. “Ideas versus Notions” was reprinted here by permission of the University of Chicago Press—Books and Copyright Clearance Center. 3
A Satire on
Educational Nonsense —Dr. Diana Senechal
“Measure Every Teacher Now!” Shouts District New Gaffe, NY—In its rush to get all teachers measured, the New Gaffe School District has ordered its schools to use any standardized measures at all, even if they bear no relation to the subject being taught: “The point is to launch the new system and fire the bottom five percent of teachers,” said district chancellor Mark Islip. “We can’t waste time here. If we wait, the status quo will come sliding back down on us, like… a landslide. We’ve got to get the reform rolling. We can tinker with it later.” According to the new directives, teachers of untested subjects may choose from an array of approved measures. One option is to take the students’ temperatures at the beginning and end of the year. “The September temperature, that’s your baseline,” said Islip. “Then your June temperature may be higher, or lower, or the same. If it’s higher, it may mean there’s higher engagement in the class, or it may mean there’s a flu going around. We’ll take it as growth, in any case.” Another option for such teachers is to use the English language arts test as a baseline and the mathematics test as a final exam. “Hey, you never know,” said Sandy Sullivan, a Reform Implementation Consultant (RIC). “The progress from ELA to math may be substantial. Music teachers might even get a boost.” When asked what “progress” from ELA to math would mean, Sullivan shrugged her shoulders. “We have to stay open-minded,” she said. “It could mean something.” Not only teachers of untested subjects, but teachers of subjects such as chemistry and physics (which aren’t typically taught over multiple years) must use a baseline outside of the subject. “How can you have a baseline in physics, when the students don’t know any physics yet?” asked George Metropoulos, a physics teacher who, by virtue of being a teacher, clearly 4
doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “This whole thing needs reconsideration.” Metropoulos was given three options for a baseline: the previous year’s social studies test, the thirdgrade reading test, or the number of sit-ups each students could complete per minute, timed under officially approved conditions. “We’re dealing with a lot of nitpickiness and frustration,” replied Toby Winnow, an instructional coach who reportedly had “worked with” Metropoulos until the latter balked. “Clearly the baseline is going to make
“According to the new directives, teachers of untested subjects may choose from an array of approved measures. One option is to take the students’ temperatures at the beginning and end of the year. ‘The September temperature, that’s your baseline, . . .”
more sense for some teachers than for others, but in the end it makes sense for everyone. Think of it this way. The kids come in with knowledge of something. You add knowledge of something else. Subtract that something from the something else, and there’s your valueadded, after it’s gone through a stateof-the art formula. Simple as that.” What if the new measurement system results in the firing of good
teachers? “Oh, please,” said Islip. “At this point, we could fire teachers blindly and end up much better off than we are now. Research has shown that if you fire any five percent of the teachers, you will raise achievement by half of a standard deviation, and increase students’ lifetime earnings by precisely $124,932.56.” Which research has shown this? “It was on a slideshow at the last superintendents’ meeting,” Islip replied. “Those slides are topnotch, prepared by the best in the field.” “I don’t see how any of this makes sense,” said Ariane Tort, a tenth grader. “First of all, I don’t want any of my teachers fired. Second, I’m really good at sit-ups, so that means less ‘growth’ for my teachers. Should I slow down my sit-ups so they get more growth points?” “Do whatever feels right for you,” said Winnow. “Remember, this has nothing to do with you. It’s all about the teachers. I know it’s painful to see them fired, especially if you like them, but change is always painful, if you know what I mean.” He paused for a minute. “It’s painful even if you don’t know what I mean. Even if I myself don’t know what I mean, or no one knows what anyone means. In fact, that last scenario might be the most painful scenario of all, or the least painful. Wow, I’ve gotten philosophical,” he mused. “I wonder how philosophy would be measured. The possibilities are endless. That’s the wonder of the new system. So much room for innovation here. We could even give the kids a typing test.” Writer, blogger, scholar, critic, and teacher, Dr. Diana Senechal teaches philosophy at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, & Engineering in Brooklyn. Under her leadership, her students publish a philosophy journal called CONTRARIWISE, which sponsored an international competition in its second year. Dr. Senechal is the Dallas Institute’s 2011 Hiett Prize in the Humanities winner and is a senior faculty member of the Sue Rose Summer Institutes for Teachers.