EDUCATION
When you study education, one of
the most depressing revelations is the extent to which the Education
Establishment has abandoned its main responsibility. Our elite educators come
up with one pretext after another for not doing much in the way of education.
Finally, you have this vast landscape full of almost nothing, at least nothing
academic, intellectual, or scholarly. This is wildly counterintuitive. You
don’t expect to look across the educational landscape and see an empty
wasteland, although a famous professor did write a book in 1953 with that exact
title, “Educational Wastelands--the Retreat from Learning in our Public
Schools.”How do they justify this retreat? Basically, they throw out one basic
lie: “Our children can’t handle that.” Sometimes they say, “Our children don’t
need that.” The constant theme is that children are limited, unable to learn
anything difficult, and lacking in intellectual curiosity. Our Education
Establishment justifies having dumb schools by insisting that the children themselves
are dumb. Our top educators seem to think that kids are born ignorant, and we
shouldn’t disturb the natural order of things. Obviously, this is a
self-serving cop-out by people more interested in social engineering (read:
leveling) than in educating anyone. The problem now is that these silly
sophistries have permeated every corner of the country. Adults look at children
and think, they’re just kids, we can’t expect much. We need to turn this thing
around 180°. Start with the premise that children can learn far more than now,
probably ten times more. Let’s do a blue-sky exploration of what is possible.
Pick any three serious subjects at random. Here are the three that first came
to my mind: steam engines, the Olympics, nuclear physics. Children could and
should learn about these things. But it’s safe to predict that if you dared to
suggest this to our top educators, they would faint from the impossibility of
teaching such substantial information to a child. They haven’t tried in many
decades, therefore it can’t be done. submit that it’s feasible (maybe easy
given the power of Google) for any serious teacher to assemble 1000 facts,
quotations, photographs, videos, Hollywood film clips, maps and other engaging
material on each subject. During a typical class, the teacher would discuss the
most interesting 30-40 of these items to the children. Explain and connect. In
a month the teacher would cover the thousand pieces of information. At that
point the children would be brainiacs on the subject. Does someone object you
couldn’t find 1000 interesting bits about steam engines? Nonsense. You could
find 1000 bits about a single steam engine now operating. What a fascinating
subject. How do they work? When did they first show up? How are they used in
trains, ships, cars, and even toys? You can teach history through the
development and spread of the steam engine and the steam locomotive. (I think
Google Images has something like 500 pictures just under the search term
"train wrecks.")
The
Olympics?
There are no doubt 1000 hours of
film available from the last 20 Olympics. Probably a million photographs.
Probably a billion words. If you can’t make the Olympics interesting, quit.
(Did you know, for example, that every four years the best design companies in
the world compete to create entirely new graphics and signage for the next
Olympics?)
Nuclear
energy?
You can show pictures of nuclear
facilities around the planet, interiors and exteriors. Why are they so huge?
What are the scientists doing there? We can show nuclear explosions, gas
chamber experiments, famous people who worked on this. You skip the math and
show everything else. Even for younger kids, you could talk about the atom,
nuclear reactions, radiation, and what happened to that reactor in Japan.
Everything I’ve said is obvious.
The only reason it sounds ambitious is that the Education Establishment shut
down all rational thought on the subject years ago. They start from the
quackery that zero is normal: zero facts, zero teaching, zero learning. Zero is
normal for them. It’s not normal for human beings at any point in their growth.
What’s normal is that the brain focuses on interesting things and wants to
learn more about them.
Good
Education Manages To Look Easy
A century ago, progressive
education introduced a fundamental mistake into the public schools.
Basically, the mistake is that
you do kids a favor by deleting content, diminishing substance, and simplifying
everything as much as possible. Here was the theory: if schools wanted all
children to become more deeply involved in education, the best way to
accomplish this feat was to make everything more kid-friendly, more fun, more
like a walk in the park than anything strenuous or difficult. The result was an
ersatz kind of easy. An interesting feature of these progressive ideas is that
schools give up before the first day of school. There is total surrender, as if
to say: These kids aren’t very smart and probably won’t learn much, so why make
them feel bad?
Traditional classrooms aimed
high, with the understanding that only some children would get A’s. The rest of
the class would master a portion of the material, and get B’s, C’s and D’s.
Everyone knew how well they had done. So the progressive approach has two
obvious drawbacks. Nobody is being pushed to go above a mediocre level. And
nobody has any sure sense of where they stand. If every student has an A, which
students have actually learned the subject? Nobody knows. But the most profound
flaw was noted at the beginning--that you should try to pull children into
education by dumbing-down education. This is a glib superficial solution and
finally a destructive one. If you dumb-down education, you will end up with
millions of dumbed-down students. That is the outcome we are now living with.
The proper solution is to
organize education so that it FEELS effortless to the students. The school aims
high but is crafty and patient in reaching its goals. In short, good education
appears to be easy education (not the painful chaotic mess we too often see). Let’s
look at the two approaches side-by-side. Suppose the subject is geography. The
progressive classroom announces, “Learning the names of the states is a waste
of time.” The kids sigh with relief. They are kept busy learning nothing. Forty
years later they are still paying for this dumbing-down. The smart, effective
school starts teaching the states in kindergarten and first grade. There is a
lot of talk about one’s hometown and state. And what about the states next to
our state? And where have you traveled?
In second and third grade,
teachers (often pointing to maps) introduce states still further away.
Meanwhile, children are asked to draw the outline of their own state and nearby
states.So children are thoroughly saturated in American geography (let’s say
for an hour each week) in an ever widening spiral. By the fifth grade, most
children would know the names of the states without even knowing they had
learned them, in the same way they know the names of the football teams in the
NFL. And finally we reach the goal, in the seventh or eighth grade, where every
student knows the states and can write the names on an outline map of the USA.
If the school is crafty and patient, this is a very reasonable goal. Now
children will be more effective students of history, environmental science,
current events, and anything else.
The
big point: these
students would not have a sense of being burdened, of being asked to do
something difficult. The educational process would happen almost without their
knowing that it was happening. And this patient, incremental technique can be
used in all of education. Kids can learn to count in the first grade by making
change with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. Children can learn history
by learning about their own city and state. Events there give children a sense
of time and place which can be transferred to other periods.
The fundamental strategy is to
break subjects down into bite-sized morsels that every child can savor. You try
to build a sense of momentum. You try to make kids feel like winners. In every
subject, for every class, there will be points of resistance where children
start to doubt they know what’s going on. Teachers should back off, focus on
something else, go around the point of resistance. The trick is to push but with
flexibility and creativity.
Much more could be done in our
schools but we seem to have people in charge who actually scorn education; so
they come up with pretentious psychobabble in defense of methods that blatantly
don’t work. Arguably, progressive theories are the kiss of death in the
classroom. Most of the theories were devised to serve collectivism, not
teaching, so we should not be surprised
when learning suffers.
There is a science to teaching,
to organizing and presenting material. This quest can be quantified in a loose
way. Suppose you have 100 facts you want to teach to 100 kids in 100 days.
What’s the most efficient way to do this?? That's a fascinating question!
That’s what our Education Establishment should be dealing with, as opposed to dreaming
up excuses for doing nothing.
Finally, I need to add a
disclaimer. This article is about the great mass of ordinary students. As for
smarter students, certainly you can push them much harder; they will probably
regard it as fun. Indeed, think of football teams and other athletic endeavors.
The children are worked hard and pushed. But they perceive it as reasonable.
They understand why they have to run laps. So pushing students, even ordinary
students, is not the sin. It’s pushing students in an incoherent, inefficient
way that goes nowhere. All the really bad methods beloved by our Education
Establishment simply overwhelm children with unnecessary, illogical labor. Just
look at Whole Word and Reform Math. Neither method has ever looked or felt easy
to a single kid.
Why
Textbooks Are So Terrible (and what you can do about it)
They couldn’t be worse if
somebody tried to make them that way. In fact, that’s apparently what happened.
For years I’ve been analyzing Whole Word (a way to teach reading) and Reform
Math (widely used to teach math). My conclusion is that both are inferior
approaches, embraced despite huge evidence against them. You have to wonder
about the “experts” behind such bad methods.
I started to suspect that people
who would design such inefficient reading and math curricula would not stop
there. When they came to the task of producing books to teach biology,
chemistry, history, and the other school subjects, we would expect to find this
same disregard of what works best. How
could I test this hypothesis? With, as they say, a heavy heart, I realized I
had to find and study some typical textbooks. But how? I thought about stopping
at local schools to talk to librarians. I checked the Yellow Pages for
businesses that sell used textbooks....Then almost as an afterthought I Googled
this phrase: “middle school biology textbook.”
I was taken to a review of “Life
Science” (1991, 645 pages). The review was uniformly hostile, noting that
aspects of the book were “eccentric, confused, uninformed,
anachronistic...obscure....brains-off...repellent., full of nonsense.” The book
consisted of only two sections, 140 pages on ecology, and 480 pages on human
anatomy. This for ninth-graders. What an absurdity. That such a book could come
into existence, or be adopted by a single school, tells us how debased our
education system has become. Of course,
I was delighted to find my hypothesis confirmed with so little effort. I had
stumbled into a wonderful new and helpful world, namely the Textbook League, a
project launched three decades ago by William Bennetta.
This is a man who doesn’t suffer
fools gladly, or badly written textbooks. The majority of the 200+ reviews on
his site are beat-downs. In short, authors and publishers had done exactly what
I predicted. They made books (especially those for ordinary students) that were
so horrendous that you can just about rule out any improvement in a student’s
knowledge of that subject. The basic tactic is to talk around a topic, throw in
everything but the kitchen sink, and jumble up the whole mess with lots of
hardly-relevant pictures and sidebars. (In Reform Math, jumping about from
topic to topic is called “spiraling,” and it is hailed as a superior pedagogy.
In practice, it engenders confusion and prevents mastery.) But never mind. The
bigger goal of these books is to make students feel good about themselves. How
is that possible, given that students don’t learn much? Quizzes in these books
solicit opinions and feelings, not information. So students are never wrong.
Probably the single most shocking
surprise in these reviews, as I quickly scanned them, was that these textbooks
contain 600, 800 or even 1000 pages. For eighth-graders, in many cases. This is
insane on the face of it, and obviously very expensive. The vicious irony is
that half these kids are less than fluent readers. A huge book has got to be a
nightmare. You could probably cut the education budget in America 10% simply by
not ordering books that are excessively thick and overpriced.
Bennetta had the most reasonable
expectations: textbooks should be accurate; clear; well-organized; and they had
to work in the typical classroom. Fat chance. An Education Establishment that
embraced Whole Word and Reform Math was not likely to tolerate biology books
that actually taught biology. What a dreary predictable scandal our elite
educators are. Bennetta summed up for me his two decades as a textbook critic:
“I found that more than 95% of these books were completely unacceptable.
Disjointed. Silly. The whole system is corrupt at all levels. Publishers.
Schools of education. Professors who put their names on someone else’s work.
Tests designed by the same people who publish the books. I ran out of steam
when I started to think there’s nothing that can be done.” However, Bennetta’s
site--TextbookLeague.org with 225 archived reviews--remains as a powerful
witness to the decline of American textbook publishing.
WHAT
CAN BE DONE?
Now, is there any good news? An
educational landscape littered with so many useless books (and so much bad
faith) creates a desperate need for improvement. Predictably, clever people are
finding answers. New approaches are popping up everywhere.
Everyone has heard by now about
Khan Academy, with its more than 3000 videos. This is a huge interactive
website that offers almost an entire education from k-12 and beyond, especially
in science and math. Public schools are using Khan Academy because the database
can respond (24/7) to each student’s progress more nimbly than human teachers.
Khan Academy simply ignores all the bad textbooks and starts over with new-tech
solutions. But the élan vital is that Khan himself is an ernest teacher who
wants children to learn as much as possible.
Knewton is also an “adaptive
learning platform” but more corporate and formal. Millions of students use
Knewton every day. The Education Establishment won’t budge an inch on its own,
but Khan and Knewton are massive flanking attacks that might force change.
Personally, I’ve always been
fascinated by the “For Dummies” concept. It first appeared in 1991; now there
are more than 2,000 titles. A few may get bad reviews; but for the most part,
this is a great way to attack a new subject. I suspect you could discard every
book in the typical public school, replace each with the closest match from the
“For Dummies” library, and achieve higher scores at far less cost. These outlaw
books--shorter, plainer, with no glossy photos--are designed to teach. What a
concept. That’s the essential ingredient many textbooks forget.
Another good approach is to start
with the shortest presentations that are readily available: dictionaries,
encyclopedias, websites like wikipedia, specialty sites, books written for
children and teenagers, or books written for popular markets. Students can
master the short presentation, then move up to a more complete one. Teachers
could put together wonderful courses without any recourse to fat, overpriced
textbooks.
A big-thinking cartoonist named
Larry Gonick shows another road to educational success. He created the first
installment of the Cartoon History of the Universe in 1977; it’s now a
seven-volume project with 350 pages. Gonick has also created cartoon guides to
Calculus, Sex, Physics, Chemistry, and much else. An extraordinary mind who has
created an extraordinary oeuvre, Gonick was an excellent student, with honors
in math at Harvard. “But I was not,” he explained to me, “especially happy with
the prospect of spending a lifetime in a math department. I wanted to do
something to help people directly. Using comics to convey information rather than simply to satirize
was very appealing. Non-fiction comics was a vacant niche seemingly tailor-made
for my temperament and abilities.” Again,
if you throw out all the standard tomes, and replace them with Gonick’s
illustrated versions, learning would probably go up across America.
Think for a moment about YouTube,
with its more then 100 million videos. Even if only 1% are educational in some
sense, that’s more content than you can look at in many years. Then think about
all the websites dedicated to astronomy, chemistry, biology, nature, history,
languages, etc. Then add the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and the
rest of educational television. Further, a whole new universe of online schools
has opened up just in the last few years. In general, education is booming, if
not in the traditional precincts. There is no excuse for a school to use a bad
textbook.
If you insist on using a
traditional textbook, consider asking homeschoolers in your area what they are
using. Homeschooling requires a lot of patient hours at the kitchen table.
Invariably, these at-home teachers search until they find books that work.
That's why John Saxon is so popular.
My broader thesis is that our
left-leaning Education Establishment tends to embrace non-functional methods
such as Whole Word and Reform Math. Collectivism appears to be more important
to these ideologues than education. Our self-appointed experts seem to conspire
with huge publishing companies to fill classrooms with overpriced, basically
useless textbooks.
According to William Bennetta, we
shouldn’t expect these people to reform. But there is no reason you can’t go
around them.
