One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays

One way I can tell what I ought to write about is that a topic nags at me for a long time.  This example goes back five years, to Edmund White's 2018 book The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury).  In May 2019 I wrote about White's confusion of cultural absolutism with cultural relativism, his youthful infatuation with premodern Japanese culture. It would be tempting to call this confusion fashionable, if it weren't so widespread and enduring.

In that post I wrote that I intended to discuss some disparaging comments White made about the US educational system.  If five years seems like a long time for me to be bothered by them, notice that White was still fussing about something that had happened over sixty years earlier. 

I went to a Deweyite public grade school in Evanston outside Chicago, where no grades were handed out, only long written comments by teachers on how successfully a student was realizing his potential. That whole system of education was scrapped after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957; Americans feared they were falling behind in the Cold War. But in that happy pre-Sputnik era of "progressive" education, we were contentedly smearing finger paint, singing a cappella two hours every week, helped along by our teacher’s pitch pipe, and trying to identify Debussy’s Jeux or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in music appreciation class. Richard Howard, the poet, and Anne Hollander, the costume historian, had attended a similar public school in Cleveland. A poem of Howard’s starts with the line "That year we were Vikings."

Far from being the whole system of American education in those days, progressive schools were a tiny minority, and remained so.  If White hadn't been living in an upscale suburb, he wouldn't have attended a Deweyite school, even in Chicago.  His father was rich and his mother was a psychologist, both of which had something to do with his placement in such an environment.

As for Sputnik, it gave reactionaries another club with which to belabor American schools. But if they had been dominated by feel-good, academically vacuous trends (or if Deweyism had really been incompatible with academic success), it would have taken much longer than it did for the US to put its own satellite into space.  Explorer I was launched in January 1958, three months after Sputnik. The US had a large aerospace system in place already -- where did all the test pilots who went on to become astronauts come from? -- as Gerald Bracey among others explained:

Thus there were lots of reasons for the Russians to accomplish space flight ahead of the U.S.: Our neglect of ballistic missile development for 6 years after World War II; our two-many-cooks approach once we did get serious; the internecine rivalries among the services; the disregard of [rocket pioneer Robert] Goddard's achievements; and Eisenhower's thinking about long-range space policy.

None of these reasons had anything to do with what was happening in schools. It didn't matter. The scapegoating began almost immediately.*

I use Bracey here because he goes on to detail the scapegoating.  I'm old enough to remember the praise of the Soviet educational system that followed, including the five-part series in Life magazine comparing an American high school student, derided as lazy and aimless, to a driven, brilliant Soviet counterpart.  Bracey tracked down the American who, stung by the notoriety, went on to become a jet pilot, but couldn't find the Russian kid, who may not have even existed. I believe that the pro-Soviet trend expanded from the right-wing Life to such elite media as Reader's Digest; nowadays, of course, it's East Asian schools that are supposedly leaving our kids in the dust.

White's an excellent writer, and I've read most of his books, often with pleasure.  But he loves to gripe, inaccurately, about cultural relativism, political correctness, and feminists.  Sometimes he has an arguable point, but usually, as here, he's fantasizing.  

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* Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Educational Research Service, 2009), 37-38.

 

Ignorant Armies Clash

Over the weekend a young Asian-American man told me and some other white men about an experience he'd had in college -- graduate school, perhaps.  A paper he'd written was rejected by his professor because the professor considered its vocabulary too advanced or complex, so he assumed either that it was plagiarized or written by someone else.  (Compare his experience to that of the neurobiologist Ben Barres, who before transitioning to male in the 1990s was accused by an MIT professor of getting her boyfriend to solve a difficult test problem, because of course no woman could have done it.)  Luckily the young man had the courage to stand up for himself, and the professor wasn't so far gone as to refuse to let him prove his competence: which he did, and the professor changed his grade from F to A.

Now, the young man speaks English with a standard mid-American accent.  I don't know where he was born, but he was likely born in the US, or at the latest came here early enough to acquire English as fully as one would expect from a native speaker.  Maybe the professor hadn't heard him speak?  Or if he did, his preconceptions may have overlaid a Chinese accent in his mind's ear.  I don't know exactly what kind of racism drove him to this unfounded, unjustified conclusion, and it doesn't much matter, because my point is that this story gives me one more reason to cringe when someone speaks or racists or other bigots as "ignorant." 

Highly intelligent (for some sense of the word) and educated (for some sense of that one) people can harbor the most squalid prejudices and biases.  "Minority" people eager for status need to recognize, I think, that a doctorate isn't quite the crown of glory they take it for.  If you really mean that unschooled people can be, hell, are smarter than these pointy-headed professors with their diplomas and fancy words, then don't regard those diplomas and titles as signs of superiority.

It also occurred to me that this must have happened in this century.  The professor must have lived through the Civil Rights movement and other movements against entrenched attitudes; he could hardly claim to be too old to be aware of these matters, though as an academic who evidently was ready to harbor racist stereotypes, he no doubt chose not to learn from them.  Perhaps he was one of those academics who fumed against the culture wars of the 1990s, feeling embattled and persecuted for his attachment to traditional values.  Sometimes I think we need a little more cancel culture, not less.

The unFaith - Never Had It, Never Will!

I still haven't read Southern Baptist divine R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage, and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong (Thomas Nelson, 2015), but I promise you solemnly, this generation shall not pass away before I do so and write about it here.

Meanwhile, I happened on unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity ... and Why It Matters (Baker, 2007) by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons.  The authors worked for years for the Barna Group, an evangelical polling organization, and Kinnaman is currently its president.  Early in his career, Kinnaman set out to explore why younger Americans don't find conservative Christianity appealing; unChristian is his first book based on the research he conducted.  As you can see, it's somewhat dated by now: it was published during the second Bush administration, before Obama became President, before the Supreme Court struck down laws against same-sex marriage, before conservative evangelicals sold their souls to So-called Donald J. Trump, and as younger people have continued to defect from Christianity in most of its denominations.  Since 2007 Kinnaman and Lyons have published two more books on the same issue, most recently in 2016.  It'll be interesting to see how the spiel has developed, but I'm not in a great hurry to find out.

The reasons their informants gave Kinnaman and Lyons for rejecting born-again Christianity were pretty predictable.  Anyone who's listened to people talking about religion will have heard them: Christians are judgmental, hypocritical, too "political," they only pretend to like you so they can try to convert you.  The authors fret about these complaints, acknowledge that they are not unfounded, and urge lay Christians and clergy to adjust their approach.  They fill out the book with contributions by numerous evangelical writers, ranging from Charles Colson to Jim Wallis, mainly infomercials for their various ministries. These are very upbeat, but if they're doing so well, why do the numbers of churched Christians continue to dwindle?  There's nothing radical here, Kinnaman and Lyons are just rearranging the deck chairs in hopes that the right configuration will make the Titanic float again.

There's even an entire chapter devoted to Christians' treatment of LGBTQ people, and it too is what I expected.  I'll discuss it in more detail later this week -- surely that post is coming quickly -- but basically it warns against having "God Hates Fags" on the walls of your church or youth ministry's coffeehouse.  Daring, that, but almost willfully irrelevant. Very few American Christians, even the most reactionary, regard Westboro Baptist Church as a role model; they mainly use WBC as a bogeyman to show how much nicer they are. (That, I think, is what Kinnaman and Lyons are doing.) I don't blame them, since the alternative would be to rethink Christian teaching on sexuality altogether.  More on that soon; I think this issue deserves a post of its own.

While gender and sexuality are indeed hot issues for young people, it's noteworthy that Kinnaman and Lyons barely touch on race.  There's one anecdote, on page 190, about a pastor who excluded (presumably) black teens from a church youth concert in California, and a concession that "Unfortunately, stemming from our common sin nature, Christians continue to harbor prejudices regarding race, age, gender, and intelligence."  They encourage Christians to be "willing to talk with Christians of different racial and ethnic backgrounds about their political persuasions" (169), but that's about it.  From this I infer that they imagine their readers to be white, of Western European descent, which bespeaks a serious lack of imagination on their part, especially since most born-again Christians in the US are African-American males.  Nor do they show any awareness of the role white evangelicals have played in the promotion and defense of white supremacy in this country.  Once again I thought of the scholar James Barr's judgment that "the conservative evangelical view of sex and marriage, far from being haunted by sin and guilt, is light and superficial."*  I'd say that such superficiality extends to conservative evangelical views of race and other social issues, and there's nothing in UnChristian to indicate otherwise.

Kinnaman and Lyons also insist on the intellectual cred of evangelicals today.  One of their commentators, D. Michael Lindsay, leads the charge:

The percentage of evangelicals earning at least a college degree has increased by 133 percent, which is much more than any other religious tradition. Indeed, the rise of evangelicals on America’s elite campuses is one of the most notable developments in higher education over the last thirty years. As highly selective universities have sought to diversify their student bodies by race, gender, and ethnicity, they have also unintentionally diversified their campuses’ religious makeup. As Gomes said, “A lot of Midwestern white-bread Protestant Christian evangelicals at whom Harvard would never have looked in the past, and who would have never looked at Harvard, suddenly became members of the university [149f].

I wonder if that increase in the numbers of evangelicals getting degrees is due to their numbers being much lower in the past; the comparison to other religious traditions suggests to me that it is, just as women greatly increased their college participation as various (mostly external) barriers that had previously discouraged or excluded them were removed.  The quotation from Peter Gomes (1942-2011), longtime chaplain and professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University, is amusing in the context of this book, because Gomes was black, gay, and (though celibate himself) a solid advocate of "marriage equality."  I doubt Lindsay was unaware of this, but I wonder if Kinnaman and Lyons were.

Lindsay also pointed out that "Practically every university in the Ivy League was founded to serve the church, and for most of their history, these institutions have been places where faith and knowledge support one another" (148).  True enough, but this is hardly specific to Christianity: Islam and other world religions have founded universities and other institutions of learning where "faith and knowledge support one another."  There's also a strong tradition of anti-intellectualism in American Christianity, which goes back to the New Testament.  It's good to avoid stereotyping, but in all directions.  (For that matter, atheists and agnostics are not all intellectual heavyweights either.)

UnChristian held few surprises for me; it supported what I already knew about conservative Christians' efforts to make sense of and counter their dwindling presence and influence in American society.  "Young adults," the authors lament, "are less likely to support a 'Christianized' country ...   [They] are less likely than their predecessors to support keeping the motto 'In God We Trust' on our currency, the phrase 'one nation under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, or the Ten Commandments posted in government buildings.  They are also less likely than Boomers and Elders ... to favor a federal marriage amendment defining marriage as possible only between one man and one woman" (164).  Not only that: "Young adults are less likely than preceding generations to start their political explorations as Republicans" (165) -- Oh noes!  Which I welcome, of course, though I'm also concerned about what young people will replace Christianity (or the GOP) with, be it alternative religions or atheism.  As an atheist myself, atheism is the option I favor, but I also know atheism is no guarantee of thoughtfulness or wisdom.

* Barr, Fundamentalism (Westminster, 1977), 331.

The Number of the Best

There were a couple of issues I meant to discuss in Saturday's post, but they slipped my mind.  I'll address them here.

One is deBoer's apparent assumption, implicit in passages like "What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?" that people with less academic talent or achievement aren't fit for anything: only the top of the top, the cream of the crop, will have any kind of future in his Brave New World.  If we eliminate the old forms of discrimination, we can then guiltlessly discriminate against the true unequals.  Chris Hayes said something similar, if more extreme, in his book The Twilight of the Elites: people want the Number One Best in everything, and in the age of the Internet they can have it.

The same goes in a whole host of domains: the best opera soprano can, with the advent of MP3s and the Internet, sell to anyone in the world with an iPod, which spells trouble for the fifth best soprano. If you can buy the best, why settle? [143]

DeBoer tries to demur with his disclaimer that "This condition does not entail some sort of overall difference in the inherent value of different people. There are many more ways to be a good, worthwhile, positive person than simply to fit into our current Procrustean metrics for what makes you a good student."  If he really meant this, there would be no problem, but if he really meant it, why all the handwringing?

The whole "meritocratic" slogan of "the best person for the job" is built on this assumption: somewhere out there is the Best Person, endowed by his or her genes to fit the square hole you want to plug; all you have to do is weed out all the losers, for they are many, put the right peg into that hole, and everything will go perfectly.  Look again at deBoer's remark about "our current Procrustean metrics for what makes you a good student."  The real problem is that schools are torn between education, which is not Procrustean, and institutional demands, which are.  As I wrote before, punctuality, neatness, obedience, willing to think within the box, able to give the answer the teacher expects.

The other issue is interest.  It's well-known that people might want to have a career for which they lack the aptitude; it's less often noticed that someone might have an aptitude for academic skills but no interest in using them to make a living.  You can be tall, yet have no interest in playing basketball; you can have a womb, yet not want to bear children.  There are plenty of anecdotes about people of my generation who grew up in enriched middle-class homes, did well in school, pleased their parents and their teachers, and went into professions or other high-status and high-paid work, only to realize that they hated such work and left it, for carpentry, mechanics, or cabinet-making.  Or perhaps they have a talent but are, for whatever reason, unable to make a living at it, so they moved to another job -- perhaps one of those vacated by former lawyers and MBAs who decided they'd rather run a Bed and Breakfast than a hedge fund.

The person who wants a career for which they lack skills or aptitude is really only a problem if you demand that the Number One person, the Best, should have a job.  Most jobs don't require the Best,  and despite all the metrics, the IQ tests, the aptitude tests, and so on, it doesn't seem to be possible to know in advance who will do a job well anyway.  DeBoer may be correct that "human beings are remarkably static in how they are sorted relative to others in all manner of metrics of academic achievement," but (leaving aside the significance of "sorting" people in the first place), people are evidently pretty flexible in situations where they are not being sorted.  When you want someone to cut your hair, say, do you go looking for The Best, or someone who can do it competently?  How would you find The Best Hairstylist anyway?  Even if such a person existed, what would they do when everybody in your city flocked to their salon?  Answer: they'd hire more help, who might be thoroughly good at what they do, but they wouldn't be The Best.  (Also:  notice Hayes's implicit assumption that the Best is the Best for everybody, as though there were no individual differences in taste or desire.  The Best Hairstylist for me might not be the Best Hairstylist for you.)

I think that most people, most of the time, don't really care much about The Best; Good Enough is good enough for them.  But we are susceptible to caring about The Best, and this susceptibility is cultivated and exploited by business interests and others who push competitive ranking and the creation of artificial scarcity.  So the commercial media bombard us with rankings, not just of athletes but of best sellers, top-grossing movies, winners and losers.  Once you've accepted the validity of ranking what can be quantified, it's easy to suppose that we should rank what can't be quantified: the value of art, ideas, people.

(Another popular slogan along these lines is that fifty percent of the population is "below average."  This is true by definition, and therefore irrelevant.  The relevant question is, how smart do you have to be to do your job well?)

It seems to me that it's precisely at the stratospheric level of government, corporate, and other elites that competence is a problem, partly because at that level there's no accountability worthy of the name.  CEOs who destroy their companies generally get their bonuses anyway, and move on to destroy other companies.  Whether a President of the United States is competent is of no interest to his fans, as many can see with regard to President Trump but had trouble seeing with regard to President Obama.  What matters is whether the current president is the Greatest President Evar, and partisans are always ready to make that claim for their incumbent.  As for legal accountability when they commit crimes, as they often do, forget it.  Holding them accountable would do irreparable harm to the credibility of the institutions they're busy destroying -- or so the defenders of meritocracy warn us.   There isn't necessarily, or obviously, a one-to-one correspondence between the most socially-prestigious and rewarded jobs and those that are worth doing.

Our cultural obsession with ranking -- which is not quite the same as sorting -- would be harmful even if we knew how to rank people accurately and objectively.  As Alfie Kohn wrote, criticizing President Obama's harping on the importance of America's international competitiveness:

You may have noticed the connection between this conception of education and the practice of continually ranking students on the basis of their scores on standardized tests. This is a promising start, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Twenty-second-century schooling means that just about everything should be evaluated in terms of who’s beating whom. Thus, newspapers might feature headlines like: “U.S. Schools Now in 4th Place in Number of Hall Monitors” or “Gates Funds $50-Billion Effort to Manufacture World-Class Cafeteria Trays.” Whatever the criterion, our challenge is to make sure that people who don’t live in the United States will always be inferior to us.

But not only "people who don't live in the United States" -- we must also know which people who live in the United States are inferior, and keep them in their natural place.  I think deBoer believes that we can rank people without making invidious judgments about their "inherent value."  I disagree: I believe that ranking people encourages and justifies such judgments.  This is partly because people (even highly trained professionals) find it impossible to distinguish between "inferior" in the sense of lower (the literal meaning of "inferior") on a constructed scale and "inferior" in the sense of having less inherent value.  If ranking people had some positive uses, one might be able to make a case for continuing the practice while trying aggressively to prevent its harmful effects.  But I don't see that ranking has any positive value.

I'll Show You the Life of the Mind

One of the more interesting American phenomena to me is the way many of the same people who pay lip service to equality and other all-American values will, at other times, glumly but complacently declare that confidentially, y'know, everybody isn't equal and we need to learn to abandon sentimentality and live with reality.  Those who take this position range from jingoes like the late Robert A. Heinlein to nice mainstream liberals like Christopher Hayes to intellectual leftists like George Scialabba.  Most recently I came upon a post by the blogger and academic Freddie deBoer, written in a familiar more-in-anguish-than-in-exaltation mode.  DeBoer has taken some good, brave stands, but here he fell on his face.  I'm going to quote from his post at some length because deBoer has taken down his blog, and I don't know if this post in another venue will remain available:

To me, the hard political question is the gap after the gaps — the question of what to do with differences in academic and intellectual potential after we have closed the racial and gender achievement gaps. What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?

Perhaps it’s easier to say that I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that hoary old bigotries about the inherent intellectual abilities of different groups are wrong, and though much work remains to be done, as a society we are increasingly coming to shared public understanding that this is the case. Black people are not less intelligent than white, women have no less inherent talent for science, Asian people do not have some sort of genetic superiority in math. Those ideas seem to have largely been discredited and discarded by thinking people, and for that I’m glad.

The bad news is that there now appears to me to be overwhelming evidence that there are profound individual differences in academic potential, that different individual human beings have significantly unequal likelihoods of ascending to various tiers of academic performance. Educational philosophy for centuries has assumed great plasticity in the academic potential of any particular student, that given good teachers and hard work, most anyone can reach most any academic pinnacle. And the case that I would someday like to make, that I have been tinkering with making for many years, is that this appears to be substantially untrue. Instead, it appears that in general and on average, human beings are remarkably static in how they are sorted relative to others in all manner of metrics of academic achievement. In education, with remarkable consistency, the high performers stay high, and the low performers stay low. And it seems likely that this reflects some complex construct that we might call academic talent, which whatever its origins (whether genetic, environmental, parental, neonatal, circumstantial, etc) is far less mutable than has traditionally been understood,

There are many, many things that are implied, and crucially not implied, if we imagine a world where different individual students possess profoundly different academic talents.

• This condition is not rigid, certain, or unalterable; we live in a world of human variability, and individual students will always exist who start out low and go on to excel. There are undoubtedly many exceptions, in either direction. And in fact the degree of plasticity of outcomes itself is likely highly variable. The question, particularly from the standpoint of public policy, lies in trends and averages.
• This condition may be a matter of strict genetic determinism, but it doesn’t have to be. Simply because a given trait is not genetic in its origins does not mean that it is inherently or permanently mutable. Environmental and parental factors are not genetic but neither are they therefore necessarily mutable.
• This condition does not imply educational nihilism, a belief that teaching is pointless or learning is impossible. All students can learn, consistently over time, even as relative position remains stable. Indeed, I would argue that is in fact the reality in which we live.
• This condition does not mean that inequalities in environment are not real, important, or a problem. Individual academic talent is subject to the influence of external forces like any other. Poverty, abuse, affluence, chance — all materially impact outcomes, raising the less talented and restricting the more talented, or amplifying privilege and disadvantage alike. The existence of talent does not imply the irrelevance of external factors, nor does the impact of those factors erase the reality of differences in talent.
• This condition does not imply that our metrics are the correct ones, that the abilities and knowledge that we select for in our tests and schools are the only real, useful, or valid means of sorting human minds. It does not require use to believe in the wisdom or benevolence of our education system or economy. It only requires us to believe that the socially-designated, contingent abilities we have decided are worth rewarding are not equitably sorted or equally available to all.
• This condition does not entail some sort of overall difference in the inherent value of different people. There are many more ways to be a good, worthwhile, positive person than simply to fit into our current Procrustean metrics for what makes you a good student.
• This condition does not imply a conservative, you-get-what-you-deserve attitude towards economics. Indeed, I think it amounts to a powerful argument for socialism

So: good news and bad news, he's been struggling for years with the empirical facts, we have to leave behind romantic illusions and face the cold, hard but still potentially socialist music.

Myself, I don't see any news here at all, bad or good.  DeBoer anticipates that reaction:

This claim is strange in that it prompts both reactions that it is obvious, that “everyone knows” that different individual humans have different academic abilities, and reactions that insist it is offensive, undermining of human dignity, dangerous. What is clear, however, is that in the world of policy, the notion of fundamental differences in the academic potential of different individual students seems bizarrely ignored.

The first thing to notice here is deBoer's focus on "academic abilities."  Though he disclaims it in his bullet-point qualifications, he seems to take for granted that academic abilities are "the socially-designated, contingent abilities we have decided are worth rewarding," and that they the only abilities that matter.  I don't agree that "we have decided" these abilities are "worth rewarding," except in school, and the rewards they receive there are mostly of the gold-star, teacher's-pet variety.  People who excel in school are generally regarded ambivalently in our society; it's proverbial that book smarts aren't worth as much as common-sense smarts; and they are not necessary for worldly or commercial success; not even to get a job and do it well.  The most that can be said is that the years of schooling required to get many "good" jobs have increased over the past century, but this has little or nothing to do with the skills or knowledge those jobs require.  The same high school diploma that used to be a sign of unusual achievement and intelligence will now, maybe, get you a job at McDonald's.  And even that is more because schooling is intended to inculcate obedience, punctuality (the ability to regulate oneself by the clock), neatness (the ability to color within the lines), willingness to take orders, and tolerance of boredom, not the academic abilities deBoer is concerned with.

It's certainly true that "'everyone knows' that different individual humans have different academic abilities."  DeBoer says it's mainly "in the world of policy" that this platitude is ignored, but I'm not so sure.  I recently read the biologist Ernst Mayr's One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Harvard, 1993), and Mayr discussed the interesting problem that although individual variation is a pillar of Darwin's theory, scientists have often tended to ignore it, preferring to view populations as uniform; which, aside from being empirically false (as any naturalist could and did point out), rejects a crucial part of the theory they are using.  Ignoring individual variation in groups is a common, perhaps normal human trait.  It persists, I think, because it simplifies whatever question you're thinking about, but it also leads to false and often destructive answers.  Additionally, as I said, a remarkable range of people say, in public, things like "kids are not created equal," trying to give the impression that they are bravely saying the Unpopular Things that 99% of those in public life haven't got the guts to say.

While 'everybody knows' that students have differing abilities and potential, 'everybody' also tends to ignore this knowledge.  Attending to students' individuality costs more money, for instance, and those who want to destroy public education are always seeking ways to cut costs, especially for the schooling of Other People's children.  But it also conflicts with a traditional model of schooling, that of rote memorization and drill, part of whose function is to sort students, though much of it is intended to even out individual differences.  Those who stand out in approved ways may get special, individual attention and permitted to advance to actual education; the rest will not.

The traditional model is also compatible with deBoer's insistence that his "condition does not entail some sort of overall difference in the inherent value of different people."  Traditional, hierarchical, Great-Chain-of-Being models of humanity generally pay lip service to the notion that everybody has his place in God's great creation: red or yellow, black or white, all are precious in His sight.  Know your place, tug your forelock, don't be ambitious, the nail that sticks up gets the hammer.  Let me stress that deBoer isn't pushing such a model; his point appears to be that, given individual variation, he doesn't know what to replace it with.  I suggest that we already know what to replace it with, at least in practice: attention to individuals with full awareness that they have different talents and abilities.  Plenty of teachers and educational writers have addressed this over the years.

That's why deBoer's crucial question is misconceived: "What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?"  First, in the traditional model of schooling I mentioned, "traditional lines of inequality" often weren't a problem; such schools functioned in 'racially' uniform communities, and their very purpose was to sort students according to academic achievement.  This is true in modern Japan, South Korea, Europe, and other countries with programs to sort students into various vocational tracks or niches; numerous Americans have argued that the US should follow their example. Sexist discrimination was a factor in Japan, for example, but not racial discrimination.  Class discrimination also was a factor, and I am struck by deBoer's failure to mention it, especially given the role class plays in recent efforts by biological determinists to justify stratification based on IQ and other dubious metrics.  In fact, it seems to me that his crucial question is basically that of The Bell Curve, which contrary to what you may have heard, was primarily meant to address the same question deBoer asks, using the same assumptions: What will we do when we've eliminated unfair discrimination and every student, every citizen, is evaluated not by sex or skin color but by their innate ability and merit?

DeBoer also has a short post about a study of Head Start, also available at medium.com, which begins by reassuring the reader that he's

in favor of universal Pre-K on social justice grounds and believe that it’s worth it even if there’s no demonstrable educational gains, as parents should have governmental help in rearing children, particularly so that they can go back to work and be more economically secure. And I’m also in favor of broadening our definitions of success as the study’s authors call for.

But in the second paragraph he bemoans "the complete absence of any frank acknowledgment that there is such a thing as natural academic talent," etc. etc., "And until we recognize that there are persistent inequalities in natural talent, we’re not engaging in a productive discussion about real-world problems."  In the longer post he writes:

Yet consider that society: if even a moderate portion of this difference in talent lies outside of the hands of the students themselves, the basic moral architecture of our supposed meritocracy has been undermined. A system that portions out material security and abundance according to the fickle distributions of academic talent, which children do not choose, is a system that has no basis for calling itself fair. Yet if we successfully combated the forces of white supremacy and sexism to the point that we achieved a racially and sexually equal society, many people would content themselves that the work of social justice had been done. But we would continue to live in a world of terrible and punishing inequality. It would simply be distributed on different lines.

The reference to "our supposed meritocracy" may be the giveaway; it shows that deBoer is evidently as confused as most people who talk about meritocracy.  So let me explain.

First: America is not a meritocracy.  Propagandists and apologists for every society will tell you that rewards and punishments are distributed fairly in their green and pleasant land, no matter how unfair the actual distribution may be.  Whatever differences you observe in the distribution are the result of people's merit or lack thereof, though of course there are malcontents who claim otherwise.  They're just jealous of their superiors and want to drag them down to their miserable level.  Just about everybody seems to agree that people should be hired, admitted to university, etc. on the basis of their merit; the trouble is that most people are convinced that merit is connected to class, race, sex, test scores, and other markers that are not, in fact connected to merit.

Second: DeBoer is confusing inequality and difference, as so many people do, and assuming (probably unconsciously) that you can't have a society of equals as long as there are any differences between individuals.  If you believe that, you do indeed have a problem, but if you jettison that assumption the problem evaporates.  He pays lip service to the contrary position in his bullet points, but abandons it when he sums up the Problem.  In the classroom, for example, equality doesn't mean that every child must earn, let alone be gifted, an A regardless of his or her performance -- even assuming for the sake of argument that performance reliably reflects "potential."  The utility and fairness of grading should not be assumed either; there are good reasons why grading, especially competitive grading, should be abolished.

Third: The preceding is true when we move from schools to society at large.  Equality doesn't mean that everybody has the same things.  To begin with, everybody doesn't want the same things.  Nor does everybody need the same things.  I've had some revealing debates with people who confused equality of outcome with political equality, and who couldn't or wouldn't grasp that equality doesn't mean that everybody must get open-heart surgery or take insulin or get an abortion; or that everyone must live in a penthouse apartment in a big city, or alternatively in a farmhouse with a white picket fence surrounded by amber waves of grain.  None of these is more meritorious than other alternatives.

It could be said as truly that there is such a thing as natural athletic or musical talent, or other talents that are not equally distributed through the population.  As Noam Chomsky wrote decades ago, this is not really a problem either.

... The question of heritability of IQ might conceivably have some social importance, say, with regard to educational practice. However, even this seems dubious, and one would like to see an argument. It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps largely so. Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society? [from For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973, p. 361-362]

There lurks in deBoer's declaration of the Problem the assumption that the difference in potential he refers to must be expressed or discovered in competition, whether in the classroom or in the workplace, and that "material security and abundance" should be parceled out to the winners, with the losers getting less or nothing at all.  If you share that assumption, deBoer's objection that such "a system ... has no basis for calling itself fair" collapses: such a system is fair by definition.  If you don't share the assumption that social "rewards" should be parceled out to the winners of the Game of Life, then deBoer's Problem simply disappears.

Ellen Willis put it very well years ago in a review of The Bell Curve: "If I bought the authors' thesis, I would still be allergic to their politics. I don't advocate equality because I think everyone is the same; I believe that difference, real or imagined, is no excuse for subordinating some people to others. Equality is a principle of human relations, not Procrustes' bed" (40).*  Nor is equality a statement about the talents or other endowments of human beings; individuals are different, but political and social equality has nothing to do with such things.  It means that the person who is less gifted has the same right to a fulfilling life (to say nothing of basic human and civil rights) as the person who is more gifted.  (By which I mean a life that fulfills him or her, even if it wouldn't fulfill me or Freddie deBoer.  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, y'know.)  I find it interesting that deBoer, who makes much of his commitment to socialism and the left, has somehow managed to miss that.  But then, the academic talents of which he makes so much have often served to make excuses for political inequality, by fostering confusion between equality and sameness, inequality and difference.

It may be that by "hard political question" deBoer merely means the difficulty of getting American society to accept the principle of political equality.  That will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, I would agree.  But it's so difficult because people resist it so strongly.  Empirical research can't settle it, because as Ellen Willis said, equality is a principle, not a fact.  That Freddie deBoer is so confused about it is further evidence of people's difficulty in grasping the difference.  So I'm not sure that he is referring to the practical difficulty of getting the idea of equality across; he sees it as a problem because he wants it to be a problem.  And because so many intelligent and educated people agree with him, that's a problem.

* In Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Beacon, 1999).

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."

Society's Played Us a Terrible Trick

I saw this meme tonight, and wanted to weep, or maybe smash something.  Luckily I couldn't comment on it, so I decided to rant about it here.

First of all, this is not even a reasonable depiction of "our" education system.  (I wonder who the "our" is; if it's human beings in general, there's something to it, but I suspect the US is meant.) Yes, the American education system is flawed, like every other one.  But it is not a one-size-fits-all system.  It could use more flexibility, but it already has quite a lot, more than most countries do.  And I doubt, frankly, that other cultures give their children more wiggle-room; they just cram them into different, but no less confining boxes.

Second of all, not everyone is a genius.  I sent a chat message to the friend who'd shared it, with a little list: Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, Carly Fiorina.  Easy, right?  But I could have added Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Sam Harris, and gone on a long time.  Most people are not geniuses.  That's okay, you don't have to be a genius to live a happy, productive life, or to be a decent human being.  (On the other hand, some geniuses are none of those.)   The mass of ordinary human beings aren't all alike either, and their differing abilities, talents, and needs can be recognized and accommodated and nurtured without pretending that they're all geniuses or princesses.  Indeed, good teachers recognize this and will try to do it if they can, if they aren't hampered by work overload and inadequate resources; bad teachers will try to force all kids into a convenient mold, but they can be corrected, and they don't represent the whole system.

I'm currently reading The Manufactured Crisis (Perseus Books, 1995) by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, which rebuts numerous right-wing falsehoods about American education.  It's very annoying to find people disseminating nonsense from a presumably non-right-wing direction.  (The Reaganite big lies Berliner and Biddle debunked have had considerable staying power and coverage, and I still encounter them twenty years after The Manufactured Crisis was first published, often among liberal and progressive types, so I shouldn't assume that the people who are sharing this image know better.)

(Next to the above image was this meme, a picture of a lion and lioness, captioned "Every King needs its queen."  What if the king is gay?  What if the queen is lesbian?  Lions aren't monogamous anyway.  What is this shit?)

Power to the People -- The Right People, I Mean

Here's another useful bit from Lawrence W. Levine's The Opening of the American Mind, which I'm very glad I decided to reread:

Critics of the contemporary university have maintained that for too many professors there is no longer any "objective" truth; everything has become subjective.  "An increasingly influential view," Lynn Cheney charged in 1992, "is that there is no truth to tell.  What we think of as truth is merely a cultural construct, serving to empower some and oppress others.  Since power and politics are part of every quest for knowledge -- so it is argued -- professors are perfectly justified in using the classroom to advance political agendas" [158].

Levine has his own answer to Cheney's accusation, but I want to go off in another direction.  I thought that conservatives (which means not only people like the Cheney crime family but academics like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) thought -- hell, insisted -- that it's not only perfectly correct but highly desirable to use the classroom to advance political agendas, as long as the agenda advanced is the celebration of American might, righteousness, and exceptionalism.  I'm almost tempted to find a copy of Cheney's screed (Telling the Truth: A Report on the State of the Humanities in Higher Education [Washington DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, September 1992) and read Cheney's complaint in context.  Surely she wouldn't want our students to be denied proper indoctrination -- oops, I mean "instruction," of course! -- in Our Country's greatness?  That is what our schools are for, isn't it?

A Very Practical Post

One of my regular readers sent me these questions about yesterday's post:

I found your last post thought provoking…

But at the same time, how much time is there in the day to spend debating EVERY crank theory? 

If the coach teaching basic geology is a Flat Earther, should the one period per day be spent  listening to Bible verses about the angels holding up the four corners of the earth? 

What if the teacher has secret KKK or is a member of the Church of the Creator tendencies?  Let him start teaching from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

I’m not sure how practical your philosophy is when it comes to an organized, formal public school program.

I'm aware of the "practical" difficulties; which is why I wrote in that very same post: "There are other reasons to object to teaching the conflicts: lack of time, teachers who aren't competent to present the material, and the like."  Time limitations and teacher competence are serious constraints.  There are plenty of interest groups out there who demand that their specialties should be taught because they're vital to producing an educated citizenry.  Scientists, for example, who don't just want a nebulous Science to be taught: every student should be given a solid grounding in Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Geology, Geography, Biology, Genetics, and so on.  Not one of these should be scanted, that's why we're falling behind the Russians, I mean the Japanese!  (Or whoever the current economic / political rival is.)  And that's not counting all the other subjects whose boosters want to give Our Children the good education they'll need to be competitive in today's globalized, changing world.  There aren't enough hours in the day to cover everything, schools and their communities must decide these things, and it won't be easy.  In addition to the time factor you must find qualified teachers who know their subjects and are willing to work in the current deteriorating public school environment, dominated by standardized testing that is not only worse than useless, it robs the school day of time that could better be used actually learning.  Lots of luck.

On a closer reading of my reader's letter, though, I noticed a curious misunderstanding.  As it happens, he's the same person who expressed reservations about my post on absolutes, and along similar lines.  Look again at this part:

If the coach teaching basic geology is a Flat Earther, should the one period per day be spent listening to Bible verses about the angels holding up the four corners of the earth?

Now, I thought it was obvious that teaching the conflicts does not mean devoting the entire period to one approach.  A teacher who taught geology using Bible verses would fail the criterion I specified of competence.  He or she would have to be able to teach Round-Earth geology as well, just as teaching the conflict about neo-Darwinism would require an ability to teach not just Creationism but Intelligent Design and the numerous varieties of Darwinian theory.  That's not a small order, I realize.  But then, as I've said before, I'm dubious about most high-school teachers' ability to teach Darwin, even when they are devout Evolutionists: are they really teaching Darwin's theory, or are they teaching Spencer?  If your kids are being taught that evolution means "survival of the fittest" and a linear, progessive ascent from simple organisms to the Crown of Creation (us), then they are being taught Spencerism and the Great Chain of Being, not Darwin.

Besides, a Flat-Earther would still have to teach some version of geology -- igneous, sedimentary, and metaphoric rocks, that sort of thing -- in a Geology class. Bible verses wouldn't cut it; if he or she got away with it, it would mean that a lot more was rotten in the District than one bad teacher.  From my own experience and reports from others, I know that students are often taught inadequate, outdated science even when theological disputes aren't involved.  As late as the 1960s, American textbooks were being published which referred to the Jukes and the Kallikaks, a scientific-racist fabrication from fifty years before, that had been -- how shall I put it? -- long before settled in scientific circles.  And then there was my high school biology teacher, who had us dissect frogs but spent many class hours regaling us with his right-wing politics.  He got away with it, too, and as far as I know retired without difficulty after decades of service, even though everyone in town must have known that he was using classroom time to proselytize his politics.  I don't know if he had any actual qualifications in biology.  But this leads to questions about who decides curriculum, textbooks, and teacher qualification, and how, which aren't really my topic here.

Speaking of Flat-Earthers, though, here's an anecdote I've wanted to quote for a long time, from D. E. Nineham's The Use and Abuse of the Bible (Harper, 1976), pages 31-2:

It might be thought, for example, that no one could doubt the approximately spherical shape of the world or the heliocentric character of the solar system. Yet it was just over twenty years ago [i.e., in the early 1950s] that a geography student at London University obtained a first-class honours degree at London University without at any point in her papers being false to her conviction, held on religious grounds, that the earth is flat. Which at least shows how difficult it is to prove that any given statement is incompatible with what a citizen of the modern world is bound to hold.

That young woman could have done a good job teaching the conflicts in a high school geography class, though she'd be overqualified for the position.

The same goes for the KKK teacher, though I wonder which class my reader imagined him teaching.  Notice too the reference to "secret KKK ... leanings": I think that secrecy about one's "leanings" would be out of place when teaching critical thinking.  But goodness knows, we have to police the "leanings" of our teachers ruthlessly: what if they have secret Communist, or Muslim, or anti-colonialist leanings?  What if they're secretly -- gay?

These are caricatures, not any kind of critique or response to my argument.  I find them mildly alarming, in fact, because they're mirror images of the caricatures that are deployed by the Right to oppose the teaching of evolution (Our children will be taught that they are animals, and that morals are relative!) or sex education (Our children will be taught how to have sex!  When they're just six years old!) or that it's wrong to bully gay students (Our children will be taught fisting! In the classroom!).

But on one point I must plead guilty.  Should the KKK teacher be allowed to teach from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? my reader demands.  Yes, I reply -- but only if he or she teaches the conflicts, which means admitting that the Protocols have been attacked as a racist forgery, and sketches out the evidence for that charge.  Teaching the conflicts does not mean turning over the class to one position; it means examining all of them, acknowledging that there is conflict and controversy, and (as much as possible) encouraging -- indeed assigning -- students to explore the controversy on their own.  That means having them report back with their findings and to subject them to examination and criticism.

In fact, if I'm not mistaken, that's what critical thinking means.  Yet quite a few people who want kids to be taught critical thinking object vehemently to teaching the conflicts, which they tend to misrepresent along the lines my reader did: as caving in completely to the cranks.  This indicates to me that "critical thinking" in this context has some other meaning, something agenda-driven, something that sounds like the opposite of its facial meaning.  Something like teaching students a different orthodoxy, and not allowing them to question it.

And that just doesn't work, not if you really favor education.  It's just not possible to teach American history, or English Lit, or Biology, as an orthodoxy.  You can probably get away with having Biology Lab and having the kids dissect cats or frogs, but that's not going to help them much if they pursue science in college, or to understand what they hear about new developments in biology in the corporate media.

Teaching orthodoxy is not a way to educate students; it more likely will have the effect of boring students and ensuring that they remember almost nothing of what they've been taught.  This applies notably to the teaching of history, where orthodox approaches lead to students hating the subject and not retaining anything from the course -- which is just as well, because what they're taught is incomplete and finally inaccurate.  Ditto for literature: The Canon is touted as the best of what human beings have created, but it changes from generation to generation, with each change bitterly attacked by the old guard for letting the barbarians take over -- forgetting that the changes they introduced were attacked in the same way.  Teaching science as orthodoxy may work if you don't care whether most students understand the subject, and view high school classes merely as a way to sort out the few who will go on to specialize in the field; but if you want a scientifically literate lay public, it's worse than useless.

How to balance the requirement of learning to think against time and budget limitations, the pressure of standardized tests, and the difficulty of finding qualified teachers is a difficult practical question, but it doesn't mean that teaching critical thinking isn't important, because it should be a factor in most if not all subjects, not a subject in itself.  It also means students should be challenged to deal with material that may be unpleasant to them.  Teaching them to run weeping away from it is a recipe for a highly orthodox society, not one which favors critical thinking or any kind of pluralism -- and it isn't education worthy of the name.

Potatoe

I've been rereading Harvey A. Daniels's Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered (Southern Illinois UP, 1983), which I've quoted before.  This time I want to pass along another depressing bit, where Daniels quotes an article by "a Chicago City College teacher" for the Chicago Tribune, "bracketing testimony about his own nobility with dozens of student errors" (232).  Here's one of the examples of student stupidity offered up:

I was born in the state of Mississippi, where I started school in the south the teacher didn't teach much about writing the little I know I learn in high school where I attented here which isn't very much, you see.

Daniels remarks:

One wonders what Mr. de Zutter's students thought when they saw their own writing held up as examples of stupidity (and hilarity, according to the Professor's accompanying commentary) for the amusement of the million or so readers of the Tribune.  What did these students say to Professor de Zutter the next time they came to class?  What did he say to them?  How, exactly, was the work of the class advanced by the public ridicule of the students' efforts?  What about the student who had already confessed that what he knew about writing "isn't much, you see"?  What was the purpose of humiliating someone already so humble?

Professor de Zutter, and all of his colleagues around the country who have written or abetted articles in this vein -- exposés that depend on reproducing the worst sentences from the clumsiest essays of the weakest student -- have demonstrated something worse than student illiteracy: they have confirmed their own incompetence.  Teaching anyone anything requires a modicum of trust -- teaching writing requires perhaps more than teaching any other subject.  The writing instructor who is filled with a perpetual sense of outrage over his students' inadequacies, who is obsessed with the shortcomings of their past training, who loathes their attitudes and tastes, who actively expects to despise both the form and content of everything they say or write, who feels that such work is beneath his dignity, who wants to get out of teaching writing, who is so contemptuous of his students' morale -- such a person will never teach anyone to write.  His students may learn to hate their teacher, which might be appropriate.  But they will probably also learn to detest writing, which is a sad and unnecessary waste [232-3].

Daniels goes on to point out that this contempt for students is, " so far as I can tell almost unheard of among elementary teachers" (233).  Not always, though: I've long been haunted by this anecdote from Colette Dowling's The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality (Random House, 2000).

The lack of encouragement girls perceive often come in the form of criticism and even verbal abuse from coaches and parents. In tee ball, a baseball-type game for five- and six-year-old boys and girls, coaches and parents make it clear that they’re not overly interested in the girls who play. And it isn't because they can’t throw. Girls who display strength, power, or physicality when interacting with boys run the risk of being marginalized. “I know the boys don't like it that I run faster than they do,” said Amanda, the fastest runner in seventh grade. “But I do.”

... Worse, the coaches didn’t take their young charges seriously, not even the female coaches. “None of the girls want to be there,” one coach told Landers.* “Not one. If I put a coloring station in the corner, every girl would be there. ... Dads take their sons out to throw with. Girls stay inside and play dolls.”

... In the Georgia tee ball scenario, the coaches reprimanded the girls more frequently and more harshly than they did the boys – and often for the same behavior that was accepted in boys. When they weren’t criticizing individual girls, they were projecting global images of girls as incompetent. When one of the male coaches dropped a ball he was trying to throw, he said, “Look, I throw like a girl.” Apparently he felt so embarrassed, he was compelled to turn the scene into farce: “He contorted his arms and awkwardly threw the ball toward Helen, [a child] who was standing in front of him.” This grown man deflected attention from his own gaffes by bringing one of the girls onto the scene as “a prop for depicting her own incompetence,” Landers wrote in her field notes.

This male coach might have done better to sharpen his own skills, but instead he used the girls to gloss over his clumsiness. After dropping the ball another time, he said to one of the girls, “I’m a little girl. I can’t catch the ball.” Such mockery obviously sends a powerful message to girls -- not only about their abilities, but about their very worth. This coach was telling his girls they were inferior, weak, and not to be confused with strong, powerful boys. The brainwashing worked. The coach's treatment of them and the unwelcoming attitude of the boys on the team contributed to the waning interest of girls during the season [90-2,emphasis added].

When I read this, I imagine a scenario in which the parents present surrounded the coach, and when they dispersed, he was gone but for a little greasy splotch on the grass.  But it seems that the parents didn't object: they wanted the girls out of the program as much as the coach did.

It also occurred to me that the teaching of sports to children provides evidence of how social construction works.  If a little boy can't throw or catch a ball, adults will expend quite a bit of energy to teach him how.  It will take no little determination on the boy's part to get the adults to leave him alone, if he isn't interested in learning this skill.  If a little girl can't throw or catch, adults will throw up their hands and say, "What can you expect?  Girls just naturally can't do this, and they don't want to."  If a girl persists anyway, more pressure will be applied to drive her away, and it will probably succeed if she doesn't have adult allies.  There will be general agreement that it is nature, not nurture, at work in this sorting process.

This may relate to what I wrote yesterday about moral absolutism and "grounds" for criticizing it: if a society doesn't want little girls learning to throw a ball, I may indeed have difficulty answering the claim that they shouldn't.  But absolutists often try to justify and rationalize their dogmas: not only shouldn't little girls throw a ball, they naturally don't want to and naturally can't.  This sort of claim can be rebutted and refuted.  (Remember too that the coaches who tried to drive girls out of tee-ball league didn't invoke religion; religion isn't the only vector for moral absolutism.  Whatever people want to believe will, however, sooner or later find its way into religion: It's not I who say this, it's God, and you cannot go against the word of God.  This move is only effective if you want to be fooled by it, but many people do.)

It then becomes evident that the desire to humiliate students who don't measure up to the instructor's standards is not just a personal neurotic quirk: it functions, often with social support, to weed out undesirables, students whose grew up in areas with inadequate schools and parents who were unable for whatever reason to take up the slack.  (The title of this post comes from an incident that is probably mostly forgotten now: in 1992, then Vice-President Dan Quayle attended an elementary-school spelling bee.  When one of the students spelled "potato" correctly, Quayle intervened to get him to add an "e."  If one comes from a well-to-do white Republican family, poor spelling and grammar skills need not interfere with one's ability to rise in society.)

In one respect, I'm all for people who flaunt their punctuation, spelling, and grammar intolerance openly: it makes it easy to identify and pick on them.

*Dowling is referring here to Melissa A. Landers and Gary Alan Fine, “Learning Life’s Lessons in Tee Ball: The Reinforcement of Gender and Status in Kindergarten Sport,” Sociology of Sport Journal 13 (1996): 87-93.

Teacher, Educate Thyself!

There's a good post (or so it looks to me, I have no legal background) by bmaz at Emptywheel on the coming oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare." Among other things, consider the irony of the Right seeking an activist Supreme Court to overturn a law they don't like. As the post concludes, "One thing IS certain, when the dust has settled, one side will say the Supremes are beautiful minds, and the other will say they are craven activist tyrants."

There's one aside in the piece that stuck in my attention, though, and merits comment. (Also chastisement.) bmaz considers an analogy, posed by an opponent of ACA, between the individual mandate (requiring everyone to purchase health insurance) and a hypothetical federal mandate to keep everyone in school until the age of 18. What do you think of that, ya libs? asks the right-wing critic. "Anyone think the government should win?"

I'd say no, but I'm not a Supreme Court Justice. And maybe, in terms of law and precedents, they should. bmaz replies (emphasis added by moi):

Actually David, yeah I wouldn’t have a real problem with that. As a sage friend related to me this morning, there is a direct correlation between a nation’s ability to compete in a world market and the level of education provided to it’s citizens. Citizens with less, or poorer, education harm the entire nation – it’s welfare, it’s defense, its very liberties and it’s ability to defend itself against threats and enemies, foreign and domestic. I think that is exactly right; if you accept the individual mandate is constitutionally agreeable, it would be hard to see how you could disagree with an “education mandate”.

bmaz may know a lot about the law, but not about educational issues, or apparently economic competitiveness. (Notice, by the bye, how the apostrophes take over the next sentence, though that's trivial; it's just amusing.) Actually, there is no direct correlation between a nation's ability to compete in the world market and the level of education provided to its citizens. bmaz's sage friend's dictum set off alarm bells in my head, and I looked up some of the late Gerald Bracey's remarks on this subject -- it was what you might call a pet peeve of his.

In 2007 Bracey discussed a World Economic Forum report on global competitiveness which covered twelve factors in ranking nations. The WEF ranked the US #1 at that time (admittedly before the worldwide collapse of 2008), though our rankings varied widely in the twelve factors. In number 4, Health and Primary Education, we ranked 34th in the world; in number 5, Higher Education and Training, we ranked 5th. Interestingly, given what I've been hearing lately, we ranked number 1 in both Labor Market Efficiency and Innovation. Even if we don't have a federal mandate on education, it's not hurting us much.

Bracey also pointed out:

First, though, we have to take a look at the concept of competitiveness. Many people take it as a zero-sum game: If you win, I lose. Not so. The computer chip was invented in the U.S. Many other nations benefited. If some young medical student in Nigeria invents a cure for AIDS, the world, not just Nigeria, will win.

Which is a reminder that harping on competitiveness, internationally or locally, is basically a dumb idea. (I've written about that before. See also this post by Bracey.) Bracey had other useful things to say on the subject five years earlier.

But there is a broader, more objective means of looking for any relationship. The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provides test scores for 41 nations, including the United States. Thirty-eight of those countries are ranked on the World Economic Forum’s CCI. It’s a simple statistical matter to correlate the test scores with the CCI.

There is little correlation. The United States is 29th in mathematics, but second in competitiveness. Korea is third in mathematics, but 27th in competitiveness. And so forth. If the two lists had matched, place for place, that would produce a perfect correlation of +1.0. But because some countries are high on competitiveness and low on test scores (and vice versa), the actual correlation is +.23. In the world of statistics, this is considered quite small.

So, direct correlation? It doesn't look like it. Sage Friend isn't so sage after all.

There are other reasons to doubt the wisdom of a federal educational mandate, apart from its legality or constitutionality. And it's not only the Right that opposes ACA's individual mandate for health insurance. As bmaz concedes,

This is about far more than Obama’s questionably cobbled together ACA law; the law is inane in how it soaks Americans to benefit craven insurance companies. Either way, sooner or later, healthcare as constructed and/or mandated by the ACA will die a painful death, but will continue to decimate American families for years, irrespective of the ruling by the Supreme Court on its nominal constitutionality. At some point, single payer, such as “Medicare For All” is inevitable.

So, while emptywheel is a very informative and intelligent blog, its writers do have their blind spots. I wish bmaz would ditch the schoolyard homophobia too.

Freedom Is Slavery

I'm rereading John Holt's great book How Children Fail (Pitman, 1964), which has been on my mind since I wrote about rewards, punishments, and competition last week. I first thought of digging it out when a friend thought that when I criticized traditional modes of schooling, I meant how poor kids schools in poor districts suffered "in our inequitable system." As I pointed out at the time, I was thinking of "good" schools, like the private elementary schools where Holt did the observations that eventually became his book.

A mother said to me not long ago, "I think you are mistaking a mistake in trying to make schoolwork so interesting for the children. After all, they are going to have to spend most of their lives doing things they don't like, and they might as well get used to it now."

Every so often the curtain of slogans and platitudes behind which most people live opens up for a second, and you get a glimpse of what they really think. This is not the first time a parent has said this to me, but it horrifies me as much as ever. What an extraordinary view of life, from one of the favored citizens of this most favored of nations? Is life nothing but drudgery, an endless list of dreary duties? Is education nothing but the process of getting children ready to do them? It was as if she had said, "My boy is going to have to spend the rest of his life as a slave, so I want you to get him used to the idea, and see to it that when he gets to be a slave, he will be a dutiful and diligent and well paid one."

... All this woman's stories about herself and her boy have the same plot: at first, he doesn't want to do something; then, she makes him do it; finally, he does it well, and maybe even enjoys it. She never tells me stories about things that her boy does well without being made to, and she seems uninterested and even irritated when I tell her such stories. The only triumphs of his that she savors are those for which she can give herself most of the credit [160-61].

If this encounter hadn't taken place fifty years ago, the mother Holt describes could almost be Karin Fuller, who wrote the Family Circle article I criticized on making kids finish everything they start, and making them earn their piddling rewards. I've run into my share of people who talk just like that mother, and people like her are a significant force against genuine reform of our school system. While it's not really a mitigation, it occurs to me that the mother was herself parroting a line she'd picked up from other parents (maybe her own), though it apparently fit well into her mind.

Holt also mentions how often schoolchildren are given misinformation.

The teacher, whose specialty, by the way, was English, had told these children that a verb is a word of action -- which is not always true. One of the words she asked was "dream." She was thinking of the noun, and apparently did not remember that "dream" can as easily be a verb. One little boy, making a pure guess, said it was a verb. Here the teacher, to be helpful, contributed one of those "explanations" that are so much more hindrance than help. She said, "But a verb has to have action; can you give me a sentence, using 'dream', that has action?" The child thought a bit, and said, "I had a dream about the Trojan War." Now it's pretty hard to get much more action than that. But the teacher told him he was wrong, and he sat silent, with an utterly baffled and frightened expression on his face. She was so busy thinking about what she wanted him to say, she was so obsessed with that right answer hidden in her mind, that she could not think about what he was really saying and thinking, could not see that his reasoning was logic and correct, and that the mistake was not his, but hers [16].

He also noticed that while children may be conditioned to be unable to think about academic matters, they become adept at reading their teachers.

I've been looking at some of the customer reviews of How Children Fail on Amazon. Quite a few of them were written by college students who were assigned the book for an education course, and it disturbs me to see how badly most of them misunderstand the book, even when they rated it highly. It also occurs to me that a lot of the problems Holt described come largely from the structure of schools, where children are expected to sit obediently in large groups and be taught by an adult standing in front of them. That's not how we learn the basic, and really much harder, things that nearly all children pick up before school: walking, language. I wouldn't say that schools are consciously designed to make children (and therefore adults) stupid, but the great scandal is that although that's exactly what they do most of the time, most adults pretend that they are supposed to educate. That's why I don't believe the mother Holt quoted in the passage above fully meant what she said; I think she was just quoting a snappy phrase she'd heard somewhere, that made her sound and feel realistic and tough-minded. After all, if people really designed schools to make children fail, they probably wouldn't succeed even at that.