Coming Soon to a Classroom near You: Lord of the Flies

I was trapped a few years ago in a room full of earnest educators for a talk by a high-paid expert from McGill. He had been flown across the continent to advise all of us in the English Department of that College on how to teach writing. In a full day of talking, he made only one point, or rather, assertion: writing must be taught in groups. All group decisions must be by consensus. No students should have any defined roles or tasks.

What if the students didn’t like it? Anyone who regularly dissented was to be disciplined as a “bully.”

This approach has obviously been sanctioned by social science studies, and officially found to be highly effective—because I keep coming across it. It is something of a social science dogma. This one instance sticks especially in mind because of the obvious weirdness of teaching writing in particular, a profoundly solitary pursuit, as a group activity. Yet as far as one could tell from this expert, this was the whole trick—nothing else need be done by the teacher but to enforce the group model, and good writing would apparently result.

Odd that Shakespeare or Milton never twigged to the idea.

I suspect that a large part of the attraction of the “group work” model in teaching writing—maybe in teaching other things as well—is that it covers up a tricky problem: nobody actually knows how to teach writing, and most writing teachers probably cannot even write particularly well themselves. Concentrate on group work, and you’re off the hook. You can even refuse to answer any student questions germane to the subject.

Of course, the students don’t learn anything.

Sometimes group work is valuable and necessary, and I am the first to advocate that students be taught how to conduct a meeting. But note the bizarre riders, that decisions must be by consensus and nobody should have an assigned task. Group meetings can work if and only if run under proper rules of order. These riders short-circuit any attempt to do that. They seem designed to force the groups into stalemate over procedure and so to avoid tackling the subject itself. The more so since most people find it easier to talk than to write: group discussion seems an excellent excuse to avoid writing altogether.

In all cases, group work is likely to frustrate any particularly good student. It is not just that he or she will have to carry the rest of the group intellectually; it is unfair to expect more work of the bright, but that would not be the big problem. It is that he will have to explain all his ideas and win the rest of the group over to them. In this, he will be fighting against two tendencies: first, resentment against someone who “does all the talking” or gets all of his ideas adopted—against, in sum, anyone smarter than we are; second, the genuine difficulty the less bright have in grasping the ideas of the more bright. For the poor prodigy, it will be like wearing lead shoes while swimming in molasses. He is very likely to be singled out, as well, as a “bully” for being the one the rest of the group resents—or for expressing his resentment of the process.

Any student who wants to work too hard will face many of the same problems: group consensus will fight against him.

So much for excellence.

As for the weakest students, group work gives them useful camouflage. In a group, they can avoid work; group members who give a damn will be forced to carry them. They can pass, even without having to work or learn.

Worse, given the sort of universal group approach currently advocated, they will graduate without anyone knowing this.

Without rules, it is most likely to be the participant with the strongest will—the natural bully, in fact—who wins out. He is prepared to push the hardest; the others, without rules to appeal to, will eventually give up, back off, throw in the towel out of exhaustion. It would all be rather like Lord of the Flies, that fictional paradigm of children living in groups without rules. Ralph, the responsible one, is doomed. Piglet, the bright one, is doomed. Simon, the odd one, is doomed.

Welcome to the brave new world of education.

Lots of fun for Jack and the choir, though.