How the Program Approach Has Failed Big Education
(Editor’s Note: This article is a follow-up to the author’s “Outcomes-Based-Education,” which ran here at PJM on June 16, 2012.)
Reform: A thing that mostly satisfies reformers opposed to reformation.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
It seems that scarcely a semester goes by without the announcement, or is it annunciation, of some new and glorious educational reform which will infallibly redeem a deteriorating academic situation and restore conviction, hope, and effectiveness to those of us who have long ago stopped believing in an educational “system” that must aim up to reach bottom. Somehow we never pause to ask why the new reform is necessary in the first place, considering that the previous reform promised exactly the same putative benefits and results, as did the one before and the one before that. Moreover, each of these doctrinal miracles, each new renovation we are compelled to approve and implement, will be magically brought to pass with even fewer resources than the one that it is meant to supplant. Meanwhile, administrators refurbish their offices with thicker insulation, sallying forth into the real world from time to time to harangue the sullen and the skeptical from the shakiest of pedagogical platforms.
Naturally the “authorities” justify these new reforms and upheavals and the endless and costly paper trails that lead to them by claiming that they are making the educational system more efficient. How? By centralizing control and especially by trimming away “excess” — like student bursaries and electives, reasonable schedules, maintenance budgets, equipment stores, and library acquisitions, to name just a few — the very “excess,” I would suggest, without which education cannot survive. What is fat for the bureaucrat and the administrator is bone for the teacher and the student. Our “educational leaders,” as they are euphemistically called, are obviously unfamiliar with John Holt’s warning in his Instead of Education — a book which has been around for over thirty years — where he persuasively argues that the result of trying to make education “more effective and efficient will only make it worse, and to help it to do even more harm. It cannot be reformed.”
With the above in mind, it seems to me that we can no longer afford to continue in our usual dilatory and submissive way. It is time we took sides and proclaimed our loyalties in the eternal conflict between the penman and the postman, thought and administration, knowledge and cleverness, that is, between a capacity in the field and a Borsalino predator. In this regard, we should be deeply suspicious of the latest academic hoax or mutation, namely, the so-called Program Approach — a subset of what is known as Outcomes based pedagogy and a system fueled, let it be said, by copious quantities of theoretical methane. For the educational millennium we have entered is nothing more or less than an allegorical Bartertown whose denizens trade in the illicit goods of defunct or makeshift ideas, false sentiments, myopic judgments, and selective impressions. We are, in fact, embroiled in a situation characterized by the proceedings of the usual suspects or delegations — a dither of teachers and an irrelevance of administrators — whose deliberations guarantee nothing but a new curricular apocalypse and the further erosion of educational principles and results. As Victor Davis Hanson laments in an article for PJ Media titled “California: The Road Warrior Is Here,” the students he taught at CSU Fresno “were far better prepared in 1984 than those in 2004 are; the more money, administrators, ‘learning centers,’ and counselors, the worse became the class work.”
The Program Approach operates as a kind of conceptual umbrella. The Program is defined in an introductory document that circulated in my college as “an integrated set of learning activities leading to the achievement of educational objectives based on set standards,” a fustian definition which tells us precisely nothing we did not know prior to its belated formulation. The ministries and departments that are imposing the matching sets of “learning activities” associated with the Program like to think in terms of common “objectives” which students must “target” and which must be “housed in multi-disciplinary courses.” They subsequently proceed to “identify” these objectives as if they were transcendental substances or — on a homelier level of metaphorical exchange — bar-coded domestic products arranged on a shelf in some sort of pedagogical supermarket.
These new subjects are then given distinguishing labels such as “Major Currents,” “Communication Objectives,” “Transfer Abilities,” “Development of Learning Skills,” “Integrating Activities,” and “Knowledge of the History of the Disciplines.” Several of these objectives may apparently be achieved in one course or, variously, several courses may be required to achieve one objective. “The courses,” we are told, “become a means to achieve the essential objectives of the program” — but when, one may be forgiven for asking, was it ever otherwise? When did teachers of the better sort not teach with an array of complementary purposes in mind, goals like general literacy and research proficiency, which in the very nature of things transcend the specific determinants of the given discipline?
But Programs homeward plods its weary way. Objectives are duly tied to courses and disciplines and these latter are tidily bundled into “time units” and “fields of study” (or programs) garnished with legitimating credits and obligatory “contact hours.” The language and the mindset being put in place testify to the desire to turn the “structures” of student learning into an assortment of logic gates, computer hardware components that consist of any number of input wires (courses) and one output wire (the pre-specified objective). When more than one objective is specified, the technician can always introduce a “branching gate,” which has several output wires, to direct cerebral traffic. Since logic gates are able to perform only three basic operations, represented as “not,” “or” and “and,” the future envisioned here does not especially look like an epistemologically rich environment where human freedom, complexity, and differentiation may be expected to flourish.
So dehumanized, students and young people are on the way to becoming something quite unprecedented in the history of our civilization, hybrid creatures whose mental operations are patterned on the functioning of electronic circuitry and whose ratiocinative “elements” are meant to be easily replaceable and upgraded when necessary. The various internal circuits which form part of the larger instrumentation of the motherboard must obviously be carefully integrated if they are to work properly. Thus the culminating objective which the Programs transaction seems to envision is the aforementioned “Integrating Activities.”
The difficulty, of course, is that on the level of both reflection and feeling, which are categorically distinct from neurological activity in itself, human beings are not “integrated circuits” and simply do not “integrate” like electronic devices or programs obeying a set of algorithmic instructions. The fact is that “Integration” is only a synonym for systematic aimlessness. One of my students wrote: “I have an Integration Seminar — don’t ask me what that’s all about, I have no clue — and all we do and have done is talk about what we’ve done.” A Programs update that made the rounds at my college nervously agreed, allowing that “teachers are not sure what they are supposed to be assessing” (let alone teaching) but went on confidently to assume that all will be well once we have managed to determine “what different disciplines have in common, which could be assessed at the end of a student’s program.” The endemic arbitrariness and, indeed, futility of this proposition seems to have escaped the planners altogether.
The attitude that prevails in the committee rooms and administrative offices is one of assumed intellectual supremacy not justified by the facts. The Program druids are content with the propagation of high-sounding abstractions and accordingly spend most of their time formulating a new kind of brogue which obscures the stubborn deficits that the “target population” (a.k.a. students) brings with it into the “learning context” and which, as a pseudo-scientific creole without purchase on reality, must necessarily resist workable translation into practice.
And so what used to be known as grading becomes “a summative appraisal activity.” Knowledge is defined as “an integrated set of skills, abilities and attitudes” — but an ability is further defined as an integration of “content, skills and attitudes,” which would seem to lead to tautological saturation. Competency weighs in pleonastically as “capability and ability which allows success in the completion of a task and the exercise of a function.” The term “performance” variously signifies “an action or a group of actions” on which, mirabile dictu, “assessors will base their evaluation” or, in the words of Dianne Bateman, one of our local gurus in the yoga of reform, “any act you might want someone to perform [and] that can be directly observed and assessed.”
The list goes on. Classroom events like reading, discussion or viewing films are now referred to as “modes of stimulus…used to elicit outcomes” which are then to be duly assessed — activities which in darkest antiquity were known as studying and writing exams. Such learning, we are reminded, consists in the testable acquisition of abilities, skills, and attitudes — although it should be obvious that attitudes cannot be tested for, only hoped or prayed for. “Tests,” for their part, have undergone a lexical metamorphosis and are presently called “instruments.” I do not know how many of these technocrats really believe the persiflage they so readily and abundantly exchange among themselves and impose upon others. Probably some of them do, but I suspect a good many are engaged in the collusive promulgation of what Clayton Koelb in The Incredulous Reader calls “lethetic fictions,” that is, “a manner of speaking in which neither the speaker nor the listener [writer nor reader] believes what is said…and neither supposes that the untruth spoken is merely a surface behind which some sort of truth is hidden.” Language has indeed fallen sick.
Thus in still another Program Approach manual valiantly attempting to clarify the issue for us, we find that Liberal Arts courses:
Have been designed to complement one another in terms of the content and abilities developed over the four semesters of the Program. The Integrating Course culminates [sic] the student’s exploration of the Liberal Arts content in history, philosophy, religion, mathematics and science, the English course in literature and in critical frameworks for examination of subject matter, and the Humanities course in social and ethical considerations…All demand an advanced understanding of the Western cultural tradition, communication, research, and independent learning developed throughout the varied disciplines and courses in the Program.
Huh?
We are then told that emphasis will be placed “on the process of creation itself, rather than on the quality of the work that is produced.” One may be forgiven for suspecting that the Program virtuosos have retained the services of God Himself as a freelance consultant, except that God was no doubt as preoccupied with quality as with creation. Finally these fortunate young people will be enabled to develop “their capacity for integration, as well as their aptitude for transferring learning and making connections between various types of learning.” The Program mavens should perhaps take a look at the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who pioneered the notion of décalage — namely, that principles do not always migrate from domain to domain.
Following all this stellar and prodigious learning, students will have to pass three “assessment modules” entailing a research paper for the Integration Seminar, Group Seminar Presentations, and something called an Anonymous Assessment Sheet. What all this really means escapes me almost perfectly, as do the diverse modular elements which frame and compose the student’s competency profile, of which I count twenty-nine separate “components” spread across four columns and arranged on two levels of hierarchical attainment. The covert message which this language conveys, whatever else it might be saying, is the message of moral default and professional delinquency.
In any case, all the rodent busywork associated with the Programs reform, the manic restructuring of educational designs, and the insensate application of an inappropriate terminology must inevitably come to nothing anyway if only because our students enter upon their postsecondary careers with little in the way of scholarly equipment and intellectual substance. The prior deficits from which they suffer will render the entire operation null and void. As an illustration of what I am getting at, consider the following excerpts from a collection of term papers I did my best to grade. Their authors vary in age from seventeen to twenty one.
One of my students is apparently confused about the name and function of a church, which she describes as “a cave-like place with statues.” Another deposes that “the Virgin Mary had alot to do with religion. As well she invented a new Clamato drink.” Going one better, a more reverent essay writer affirms that “God is the major component in the universe” — the Fatherboard, I guess. Another defines a text as “a script of many printed pages and numbers at the top.” Still another is convinced that the seventeenth century poet, Robert Herrick, “seems to have some sort of learning disability” as evidenced by the poet’s inordinate fondness for words like “methinks” and “mine eyes.” A sixth deplores the fact that the Enclosure movement in sixteenth century England “left people to die of starvation by hunger.” In a passage discussing the rabbinical use of parables and stories as teaching devices, another student informs me that “the kabbinical lifestyle flewed from the Hebron kabbis in the whole land.” An eighth thinks that the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to an extinct marine animal, on the order of fossil trilobites, I would presume.
Not to be outdone, one of his classmates claims that a starfish is “a mutant interstellar space craft with fins and stuff.” A tenth laments that we tend “to take Nature for grand tit” — which is probably true enough, everything considered. Arriving at the moment in Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado when the killer reveals the trowel with which he will immure his victim, my student solemnly declares that “Montresor was in construction,” a hypothesis he goes on to support by alluding to the villain’s Italian pedigree and its connection to the cement industry. The author of a term paper on William Butler Yeats mentions in passing the poet’s troubled relations with “the Garlic League”; that this was not a typo for “Gaelic” is clear from the student’s parenthetical bewilderment as to why that particular plant should figure so crucially in Irish politics. From her reading of The Name of the Rose, another student concludes that “laughter was forbidden in 1327.” I have just discovered from a paper dealing in part with Aristotle’s Poetics that “Aristotle was a very well known and faluting philosopher of the fortieth century.”
Although the roll of such solecisms is distressingly long — and I hasten to assure my readers that these are not derived from that fake species of literature which Jan Brunvand in his amusing book Curses! Broiled Again! calls “xeroxlore” — it is important to realize that we are not dealing with a population of juveniles or aspiring imbeciles but with a representative selection of young adults crowding their twenties who hail principally from middle class families, the supposed backbone of the nation. John Taylor Gatto, who was named New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, had their number when he wrote in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling that “school children who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come…they hate solitude [and] are dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.” I’m not sure about the “violent” — though the OWS movement has me re-thinking — but my point is that these students must be materially helped, not indulged or experimented upon with novel methodologies. I am, however, convinced, assuming the privation of both bedrock knowledge and a vigorous desire to learn, which latter can be stimulated only by committed parents and passionate and authoritative teachers, that the majority of our students will remain in outer darkness waiting, no doubt, to be rescued by a passing starfish.
We have been transported, it seems, into the realm of the numinous. How all these celestial events and plenary accomplishments are expected to occur in the near total absence of previous grammatical instruction, the crippling dearth of prior reading whether voluntary or otherwise, the paucity of accumulated knowledge, a truly devastating lack of intellectual exposure to both the sciences and the arts, and the caustic and disabling skepticism of the students themselves (as attested by the hundreds of student education journals I have read and innumerable class discussions and private interviews with the journal writers themselves) is beyond at least my powers of deduction. These deficiencies are the major reason that none of the reforms enacted within living memory have ever worked and why each and every one of them has had to be unceremoniously scrapped or mutilated beyond recognition. The outlook for the Program is no different. And this is because our experts have failed to consider, to everybody’s eventual cost, the iron law of generation enunciated by poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in his Journals: “From much, much more; from little, not much; and from nothing, nothing.”
But the juggernaut appears to be unstoppable. “It is only the program as a whole,” says the Comprehensive Assessment manual we had to work with — in other words, this congeries of complementary and compulsory courses zeroing in on a welter of desired objectives or “learning competencies,” which are in themselves inherently esoteric and nonconcrete and which cannot be tested for with any greater degree of precision and accuracy than in previous dispensations — “that can prepare students to meet the needs of the future.” I humbly submit that a wholesale reform cast in a pidgin drawn from Business Management and Computer Technology with a tributary influx from the Behavioral Sciences can have nothing to do with the real nature of teaching as a discipline and a vocation.
The trouble, says E.D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy, is that far too many teachers “are not expected to have mastered particular factual and traditional information, or any special academic discipline; they are trained only to impart skills.” “The pathways into knowledge and taste,” mourns Mark Bauerlein in his Hirschean update, The Dumbest Generation, have been blocked by “the teachers, professors, writers, journalists, intellectuals, editors, librarians, and curators who will not insist upon the value of knowledge and tradition…They have let down the society which entrusts them to sustain intelligence and wisdom and beauty and they have failed students who can’t climb out of adolescence on their own.”
Clearly, a planned upheaval summoning an army of nebulous objectives with incantatory insistence and Ouija-like manipulations will meet the needs of neither the future nor the students but only those of a swollen bureaucracy that has invested heavily in the mirage of perpetual reform.
David,
Your essay raises for me the following thoughts/questions:
- What are we trying to teach kids today? Why? I would hope that we’d be trying to teach them how read, write, calculate, how to research and gather information to answer questions and solve problems, how to discern truth from falsehood, how to think logically, to appreciate history and their place in it, how to appreciate art and other elements that make up culture, how society is constructed and their part in it, etc. with the goal of making them capable of living on their own, making a living, and contributing to prosperity both theirs and society at large.
- Do we really know how kids at various ages learn? Has this changed over time? Is there anybody doing research to answer these questions?
- Why are the education elite so enamored to use archaic, obtuse language to communicate to each other and to the public? Don’t they realize how badly they come across to the public at least?
- Without discipline, how does one get the non-adult student to focus on the subject taught and to learn? When the inmates run the asylum, no one is getting well.
- As long as education is big business with big bucks and holds a virtual monopoly on the market, it will attract lots of bureaucrats to take the lion’s share of the funding as well as badly regulate that which they don’t understand from their cloud level perch. Seems the easiest way to fix this is to break up the monopoly at all levels and return control of schools to individual communities.
- We used to put kids in tracts based upon their learning differences, with more success than we have today. Why not go back to use of tracking?
There are large numbers of “progressive” education reformers around, but few are willing to defend the Enlightenment and critic thought in general. Least of all those writing with the imprimatur of Edmund Burke. Better to look to school choice and allow competition to weed out the ineffective educators. I compiled all my blogs on education reform here, and hope that some of David Solway’s readers take a look: http://clarespark.com/2012/05/03/index-to-blogs-on-education-reform/. Or look up my links to multiculturalism blogs that are just as alarming.
Leftists, who control, lock, stock and barrel the (mis)education of the youth will never stop trying to diddle the educational system.
And this is because they cannot execute their plans without (mis)educating the kiddies. And the path to do so runs straight through western academia, from kindergarten and up.
The fact that radicals are completely in control of the teachers’ unions, a fiefdom of criminal proportions, shows that the kiddies are the least of their concern. And a Radical-in-Chief, whose (mis)educators are none other than domestic terrorists, Billy boy Ayers and wifey Dohrn, plus upholds as ‘safe schools’ czar, known pedophile Kevin Jennings, well, that tells the tale.
So, whether or not Dems or Repubs are at the helm it matters not a whit. The radical left grabbed hold of the system in the 1960′s and NEVER let it out of its grip – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/11/26/the-death-of-the-west-or-its-survival-runs-through-western-academia-addendum-to-the-paradox-pitfalls-of-liberal-democracies-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
Rules for radicals and all that jazz….
I am now long retired, but need to add my comment that the infestation of US universities with Leftists was not accidental; it was a deliberate act of war by Joe Stalin (shortly before he died in 1953) to rot the US from within by destroying the US education system while subverting the youth of this country into supporting Marxism/Leninism.
After he started the Korean War in 1950, Stalin was aghast that the ChiComs could not quickly defeat the US/UN & ROK (South Korean) troops, so he decided to look for alternative ways to strike at the US – namely to destroy the will of the people to fight. His solution was to order his NKVD to deliberately install as many Communist/Leftist/Liberal professors as possible in every “important” and “elite” university in the US and Western Europe, and once they gained tenure, they heavily influenced future hiring of those like themselves. Note; the NKVD did not morph into the KGB until after Stalin was dead.
The Communists were and still are very patient in their goal of world domination, and with the disastrous state of the US education system today, it looks like they have already achieved their goal. If anyone wonders why the old Soviet Union was allowed to collapse so easily, it was because the heart of Marxism/Leninism had already been transferred into the West where it now prospers. Therefore the terminally corrupt USSR was cast off as no longer needed to support the “cause”.
You got that right. Think Barack Hussein Obama at the University of Chicago. Were the earth to open up and swallow the entire People’s Republic of Hyde Park, as well as the Ivy League, we would all be better off beyond measure.
An interesting theory. Perhaps Stalin first got the idea of sowing demoralization among his enemies after millions of his own troops chose to surrender or flee the field instead of fighting the German invasion in 1941. It adds up, at least.
Big Joe may have pushed things, but he didn’t start it.
It began in the 1830′s with christian socialists…who were to be found in seminaries and universities throughout the country. They essentially had the seminaries all tied up before the 1870′s, and most of the universities and colleges, too.
Later, the Republicans held power during the start of The Progressive Era in the 1870′s and 1890′s.
In short, we gave up republican democracy a long, long time ago, and even conservatives are the products of our socialist education and christian socialist environment, even now. But, we don’t question any of that. We might have to change our premises and assumptions, if we did.
It all went to hell after that, as far as freedom was concerned, especially after the early 1900′s.
You’re just hearing the ‘two minute warning,’ is all. The other team is way ahead …and you’re about to get buried.
Warren, by any chance are you related to the General Bonesteel who was commanding general of 8th Army and USAPAC when I was stationed in South Korea in the mid 1960s?
I visited 8th Army HQ in Seoul many times, and met several times with his 3-star General Rich concerning ordnance activities.
Dewey (of decimal system fame) and Wilson were on the job long before Joseph Vissaroniovich decided to help. I also hold universal suffrage to be a primary cause of our current ills.
The last several sentences of your post are beautifully expressed.
All the language about assessment and objectives and standards goes back to Ralph Tyler and the Eight Year Study in the 30s. He created all those terms to mask the largely affective and nonacademic purpose of what he, John Dewey, the Progressive Education Association, and those supposed watchdogs who are actually poison delivery and compliance institutions, the accreditors like North Central were actually doing. Reorienting education towards Social Reconstruction.
It’s still the purpose of all these obscuring reforms and it is still why Bill Ayers went into it. Not illegal, lucrative at taxpayer expense and foundation grants, and more effective than bombs.
The integration referred to is integration of emotions, attitudes, values, what is wished for (connative) with a very limited capacity to think. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/now-its-head-heart-and-hands-to-get-us-to-environmental-social-and-economic-justice/ The abstract mind can think for itself and everything that cultivates logic or independent rational, conceptualization is being shut down. Mostly out of sight with pressure from the above-named accreditors.
I am quite sure about all this, both K-12 and higher ed, all over the world. It is being driven primarily by UNESCO and a process called Quality Assurance tied into its Education For All initiatives. In Canada the governing documents, which I have. are quite clear that the common core is common values. A collectivist belief in an obligation to treat all people, even strangers, as if they were family.
The caring, moral obligation, Universal Love documents from Canada and the Alberta Wheel of Competency (that US and Australian educators are also using) dovetail with the poorly known Positive School Climate executive order from President Obama from last summer. In the US we are getting to precisely the same place in our Common Core implementation but with more parts and different names. The classroom mandates and intentions are precisely the same.
I have called the result Citizen Drones and that does seem to be the intended result on Western voters from a UNESCO document from 1989. The year the Berlin Wall fell the Cold War basically officially morphed into an attack on the West’s noetic system. Just like Julian Huxley wanted when UNESCO was created in the 40s.
The program approach has not failed. Failure was the goal in the first place because an independent rational individual was the true target.
(As a programmer, just to be pedantic, there’s also exclusive-or, or xor, where one is true but not both.)
It would be interesting to see a study breaking down all of the new administrators who have overloaded academia (at least at the higher end) over the last few decades, and to see where they came from and how to get rid of them. I wonder what percentage is governemnt-caused?
I also wonder what would happed if we resurrected the grade-school curriculum from 1870-or so? We could probably award every HS graduate a bachelor’s degree and save everyone a lot of money.
Sorry, thick fingers.
Funny you should mention the 1870s. I went to hear Joel Klein, former Clinton admin official and NYC School Chancellor a few months ago. He now heads an education division of Rupert Murdoch’s empire that is pushing that it’s all about using technology. I call that visual and vocational, not intellectual.
To bolster his case before the politicians and Chamber of Commerce members present he started talking about the new kinds of minds needed. The pol who introduced him had mentioned the 1960s mind. For emphasis I suppose on what was not apparently his planned speech Klein started ridiculing the 1860s mind. And I asked a similar question.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/ridiculing-the-1860s-mind-as-unsuitable-for-the-21st-century-cui-bono/ . Yes the Zombie Based learning for middle schoolers on Amplify’s site is much more appropriate. Not.
I agree with you about the old-time curriculum.
We also need to identify and acknowledge failure. Kids who haven’t learned the material should flunk, and that’s that. Never mind whether it makes the teachers, the principals, the school, the parents, or the kids look bad.
As long as public sector unions maintain a stranglehold over the American body politic, that won’t happen. The entire US educational system is a combination of left-wing indoctrination with a welfare system for bureaucratic and union parasites. It’s beyond hopeless.
College degrees are becoming less and less useful as a credential, on account of the dumbing down of the curriculum and the admission of hordes of students who lack the will and/or the capability to pursue serious academic studies.
(Just a quick and an even more pedantic side note to mzk1:
The AND, OR and NOT are the only three logical primitives need to express any logical function. For example, an XOR can be constructed as follows:
[A AND NOT B] OR [B AND NOT A]
)
The fact that radicals are completely in control of the teachers’ unions, a fiefdom of criminal proportions, shows that the kiddies are the least of their concern..The classroom mandates and intentions are precisely the same.
Those of us who really do care about the kids should take note: Eliminating public schools would have another vitally important advantage that nobody seems to have thought of.
One of the ways in which education is being “reformed” in England is the dropping of the Hebrew language from the list of officially recognized languages.
http://www.yourjewishnews.com/Pages/24534.aspx
Absolutely full circle.
Do these developers get paid by the word?
The only benefit I can see in this pedagogic claptrap is:
-much money will be scammed from clueless taxpayers
-it’s tar-like opacity reduces accountability to near zero
-it will entrance the pseudo-intellectuals that obtuse decision-makers and sheep-like parents find so necessary.
With generous doses of Ritalin, educational utopia will finally near.
Reminds me of an exchange from Neal Stephenson’s first book, The Big U. A student is arguing with an English professor about why the worst student in the class received the best grade on a recent assignment. The teacher gives a long answer about how “everyone is literate in their own minds”, and how the objectively-worst in the class was the best, because he was daring to differ from the accepted norms of decent, intelligible writing.
That book’s something of a satire, but it’s looking more and more prescint these days.
It sounds like some of the students just don’t take the classroom entirely seriously. This, I would assume, is a sign of health, in small doses.
I don’t know that I come away from your screed with any insight into what is wrong with programs as such, though apparently a lot is wrong with the bureaucracy, but that should hardly be a surprise.
Oddly enough, those quotes from student essays sound amazingly like those Bel Kaufman cited in “Up the Down Staircase” decades ago. Maybe things haven’t deteriorated as much as we think.
That being said, I would like to propose a simple rule: All materials designed to guide educational processes should be written to the approximate reading level of the grade involved. So materials designed for elementary school should be readable by an elementary school student. “In the first grade, students must learn how to add”, instead of “First grade students must master cognitive principles of basic arithmetic skills, as age-appropriate.”. If we can’t expect our students to understand complex abstract concepts, in other words, it makes no sense to try and teach them.
That sounds simple enough, no?
D
The Bel Kaufman quotes – yes, I’ve read the book – were from kids around ten to thirteen years of age, maybe a little younger.
the quotes cited above are from young people aged seventeen to twenty.
Most adults are now expected to be able to drive a car, make basic electrical, plumbing and other home repairs, mow lawns and manage finances.
With the newer technology, more and more adults are also expected to not so much read as publish news, not watch but produce professional quality media products, and similar activities once thought strictly off limits to the individual and layman.
How is it that primary education, which was once considered the domain of the average (or possibly slightly ‘above’ average parent), has not yet been widely accepted as within the scope of expected parenting, and so much more when considering the technological advances?
You overlooked one thing that will forever mark you as not quite on top of your subject: the administrators and teachers are all “very excited about it”. This is the buzz word, “excited”, we were all taught to use when in education classes in our undergraduate work. In fact, I doubt if anyone can cite one speech or discussion by an education administrator that does not include liberal use of that word.