The Four R's: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, and Relevance

 

Courtesy of Indeed, here is a supposedly ideal answer to the standard interview question for teachers, “What is your teaching philosophy?” In other words, this is what your teaching philosophy is supposed to be. And it is utterly wrong:

“My teaching philosophy is to make my lesson plans relatable. In many cases, when a student can’t identify with the material, it’s harder for them to gather meaning. As a literature teacher, my goal is to help students empathize with characters, places and concepts, especially when those things are different from their own life experiences. As a student, I found stories more memorable when my teachers helped me draw parallels. As a student teacher, I like to make comparisons between older texts, like Shakespeare and modern events. For example, comparing events in the plays to events in pop culture. This not only helps students understand the stories but also helps them draw their own conclusions.”

First, the need for students to “identify with the material.” They are supposed to see “their own life experiences” reflected in the material.

This is the opposite of the point of reading a book in the first place. One reads a novel to get away from one’s own everyday life, to experience the world from another’s perspective. Accordingly, the books that sell the best, that people most enjoy, are set in exotic locales and based on improbable situations: Harry Potter, James Bond, superhero comics and movies, the Da Vinci Code, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Star Wars. The surest way to bore students, and turn them off reading altogether, is to select readings that most closely reflect their own life experience. 

Moreover, this is deliberately preventing them from learning, subverting the entire point of going to school. One already knows about one’s own life situation. 

For the same reason, it is perverse to suggest that minority voices have traditionally been underrepresented in our literature or in the bookstores. Being exotic has always been an advantage. Pauline Johnson used to perform in buckskin. Grey Owl faked his Indian identity. 

As for comparing events in the classical texts to pop culture: always done these days. For years, every text I used had a chapter on the movie “Titanic”; and I could see the students roll their eyes and hear them audibly groan. Not “Titanic” again!

The problems with this approach are many. 

First, the students already know pop culture. They are not learning anything; you’re just wasting their time. 

Second, they probably know it better than the teacher. It is insulting to presume the teacher knows more than they do about such things. Why? What makes them the authority on Taylor Swift? Just because they’re older? Must the students merely knuckle under to established authority? Is this the lesson being taught? 

Third, nothing is so dated and uncool as yesterday’s biggest pop phenomenon. It is impossible to stay current. Especially in textbooks, which take at least a year from composition to publication, and then remain in circulation for years. Pop culture references will always be dated, and wincingly uncool. 

Fourth, everyone will fix on the same obvious pop culture references, going for the biggest bang, the biggest connection with the youngsters, and the thing, like Titanic, so big that even they, uncool old people as they are, are aware of it. Students will encounter the same cultural reference again and again, boring them beyond comprehension. When they could be out learning something.

A similar problem adheres when you try to connect your classic material with “current events.” Nothing is as dead, old, and dull as yesterday’s news. Text can’t possibly keep up, not being reissued daily. To compensate, “current events” in the classroom inevitably means a handful of generic topics: ecology, the environment, or “the environmental crisis”; the issues raised by new technology, considered generically; globalization; peace versus war, and such. There is an obvious problem of ideological bias; but without ideological bias, such topics are desperately repetitious and boring. Yes, pollution is bad. Yes, there are bad things on the Internet. Yes, the world is becoming smaller. Yes, peace is better than war. Snore.

Back in the old days, to avoid these problems, modern history was not taught; only classical history. Modern history, current events? Set that up as formal debates among the students. For the same reason, current novels and recent writing were not taught. Leave those for reading clubs in the common rooms.

Our ancestors had it right.

The Politics of the Public School

Early to mid 20th century school.

The Foundation for Economic Education has published a piece arguing on historical evidence that the American public school system has always been a mechanism for indoctrination.

It was based, the author asserts, on the Prussian system formed in the early nineteenth century by Fichte. And he includes some killer quotes from Fichte:

“Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility.”

“[Y]ou must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.”

“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished ... When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

That’s pretty shocking; but it seems to explain what is taught, and not taught, in the public schools. It is the obvious way to go if you want to subvert a democracy, and retain a de facto oligarchy despite democratic trappings. Whoever controls the education of children can hope to manufacture the social consensus for the next generation.

Early to mid 20th century factory.

This, incidentally, has always been the great advantage of mothers, and of women: that they have overwhelming influence over children in their formative years. Ensuring, in fact, that as a sex women could never have been genuinely oppressed by their society. Without overlooking this, feminism would never have been credible. We have been missing it in the case of the schools too.

Mostly, I suspect, because most of us grown-ups don’t really give a damn about children.

Public schools seem designed, despite lip service to the contrary, never to teach leadership, and never to teach how to think. They seem designed to turn out passive cogs for industry, human tools—the exact opposite of the intent of education in either Confucian or the Western classical tradition. The modern public school seems built on the model of the factory. 

Plato, Confucius, Aristotle.

Government does have a legitimate interest in the schools, to train for good citizenship and to encourage all to pull together in the civic enterprise. It is shared values that make a community. If you do not have them, no police force of any size or level of armament can substitute.

But to ensure and preserve a free and democratic country, it is also important that government not be the only authority with input. That is totalitarian. There is far too much opportunity here for those in power to indoctrinate suit their own interests. He who controls the schools controls the future.

Better, to begin with, if schools were run at the most local level possible. The tendency, however, has been relentlessly in the opposite direction, to greater provincial or state control, and greater federal control. Better still to give them to the various churches to administer, with some government input. Better still to allow any private corporation, in the broad sense of that term, to open a school, on a level basis in terms of tax funding—vouchers, say. Foolishly, instead, we have been moving systematically to remove all influences that might check or balance government.

I have some immediate sense of the result for American schools. I am teaching Chinese students a current American reading curriculum. Their parents, very sensibly, want them to get an immersion in American culture.

It seems obvious to them that an American reading curriculum would be built around the classics of American literature. This is of course what my Chinese students and their parents would want and need. But it is at least as important that this be so for American students, for several reasons.

First, selecting the classics more or less automatically means the best writing available. Second, classics are arrived at more or less by popular and scholarly consensus over time, a safely neutral party in terms of present politics. So they and the curriculum would be free from political manipulation. Third, a curriculum of classics would automatically select for the most interesting and most important themes, subjects, and issues, best calculated to most interest students, and so get them committed to the reading enterprise. Fourth, it would be the best model for students in how to write well. Fifth, it would give them the body of cultural allusions, of shared knowledge, they will need to read fluently—because authors will always assume a certain body of cultural knowledge in their audience. “I struck out” can mean nothing to someone who did not grow up watching or playing baseball. Sixth, the same cultural allusions are just what make up the very fabric of the American community—they are what binds any nation together. They are exactly the things a public school should be there to teach. They are just what any American needs to become, in turn, a contributor to the culture.

But the classics are not the readings taught. The texts are all recent, indifferently written, and with a dull sameness in detail. They seem always about some young girl (never a boy) who has just moved to a new school and feels anxious about fitting in. Usually, she is an immigrant. She manages to fit in by “sharing” something about her foreign culture. Something corny and touristy. This week a Japanese girl showed her new friend how to make Japanese macha tea, and her parents showed their parents how to make a (Japanese) garden. Last week a Korean girl showed her new prospective friend a jade bracelet, with her name on it in Korean characters. The week before a Brazilian girl “shared” her costume and dance routine for Carnival. And so on and on. Always something that seems pulled from some standard tourist guidebook. Gardens are a recurrent theme, perhaps because they suggest nature: this week, the supposed Japanese community garden; the week before last, a girl was helping an elderly neighbour make a garden. 

Samba dancers, Rio Carnival.

These stories are never written by an author of the ethnicity portrayed. Unsurprisingly; a real Korean or a real Brazilian would wince at the cartoonish otherness of it. Carnival? The immigrant Korean girl, for example, is named “Yoon.” Koreans speaking English invariably take an “English” name, and “Yoon” is not even plausible as a Korean name. It is a family name, not a personal name. It looks as though the author and his editors and the levels of bureaucrats who approved the text all made the common foreigner’s mistake of confusing this issue, since Korean family names come first. It would be like calling your daughter “Jones.” A real immigrant Korean would more likely call herself “Sophia” or “Meg.”

And, inevitably, the Brazilian girl is named “Maria.” She is generic.

It is all at the level of the old stage Irishman with his clay pipe, or the old musician in blackface.

Well-meaning, but wince-inducing.

In sum, these immigrants are not seen or realized as human. We are on a visit to the human zoo.

In the meantime, the reader learns nothing about American culture, and are given only a false and trivializing vision of some foreign one. My Chinese students spend their class hours learning falsehoods about Korean or Japanese culture, and nothing about the USA or any other English-speaking culture.

It is all at the same time drearily repetitive, unimaginative, trite, and boring. The range of issues and thoughts it deals with are tightly circumscribed. What one is supposed to think about them is usually clearly indicated. It is, in a word, crude propaganda. Any bright student is going to be alienated from reading.

“Culture” is stressed often as a concept, lesson after lesson. But it is defined wrongly. Culture, the textbook explains, is made up of “food, clothing, music, language, customs, holidays, sports, and symbols.”

Something obvious is missing from that list.

Merriam-Webster defines culture as: “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.”

But in these texts and their definition culture is reduced to only this last item, material traits. Beliefs, the essence of any culture, are not mentioned: religion, values. Neither are social forms: legal principles, family structures, political concepts, ethics. Confucianism, sharia, liberal democracy, the Mosaic law, rabbinical tradition, common law: not to be considered culture. “Culture” is reduced to a materialistic and superficial affair. It is just something we do for amusement in our spare time.

The text then asks the payoff question: “how do people from different cultures contribute to a community?” Demanding, by how it is phrased, that one not dissent from the more fundamental question. Indoctrination is only thinly masked as inquiry.

This question is awkward, given a proper understanding of culture, because almost by definition a community means a shared culture. Culture is the social forms and social norms of a social group. The students are being required to assert something self-contradictory. This becomes obvious to a Chinese student.

It is immediately obvious why the texts do this, and ignore most of culture: because if it was included, the problems with multiculturalism would be apparent. And its political agenda is to promote multiculturalism. But by this approach, real social problems are not just being papered over, with possibly dire consequences. Everyone is, in effect, stripped of their culture, and their humanity, and left without anything but transitory material self-interest, if that, to bring them together. And no meaning to their lives.

The question is, is stripping the curriculum of all values made necessary by multiculturalism, or is multiculturalism made necessary to strip society of all values? I suspect the latter. Multiculturalism here aligns with postmodernism.

It all might seem superficially reasonable on the grounds of “religious freedom” and avoiding controversy. The moment we start in on deeper issues about human life, ethics, or even good manners, we risk ruffling feathers; we might violate somebody’s beliefs, right? Some parent is going to get upset. So we just take it all out. Right?

But that is not neutral. Instead, it has us sending a clear and insistent message to the young that values are not important, that there are no values, or they ought to be ignored, that life is best without them, that only material things matter. Life is all just about stuff: clothing, food, entertainment, holidays.

No wonder rates of depression are probing the stratosphere. And no longer in radio contact with Houston.

And we have clearly gone well beyond that justification, to an actual deliberate attack on values and meaning as such. That seems to be the real engine driving multiculturalism, postmodernism, transgenderism, and things like the recent attempt in Ontario to force through a controversial sex education curriculum. Obviously, the concern there was not to avoid offending anyone’s values or beliefs. Values and beliefs are the things under attack. Even basic things like the distinction between male and female.

The likeliest reason why this is happening, sadly, is that any established values or meanings serve as an inevitable objective check on people satisfying their immediate desires. Put a group in power who have a guilty conscience, or who have not themselves been deeply instilled with the need for moral values, and their natural tendency is going to be to want to get rid of them all. Values, moral values, and cultural norms generally protect the weak against the strong, and give meaning to life to the poor and the socially vulnerable. They are checks and balances against raw power.

Teaching Philosophy

Don Bosco

A recent job application asked me for my teaching philosophy. So I might as well subject you, gentle readers, to it as well.

Perhaps the most direct influence on my own thoughts as a teacher has been E.D. Hirsch Jr. and his argument for the need for core cultural competence. This is what first brought me to my commitment to a classical curriculum. Without this shared knowledge, Hirsch argues, the culture breaks down. But I think there is more to it than Hirsch explores, as well; his argument is still purely utilitarian, as though cultural knowledge were itself another skill. Education cannot be just the teaching of some abstract, value-free set of skills. That is sophistry. Education is the formation of souls. And there is nothing so important to the soul as value: What matters? Without settling this initial question, literally, nothing else matters.

Our culture is our repository of wisdom designed to school the soul. Neglect the task of passing it on, and we lose both our souls and our civilization.

In terms of classroom management, my guide is St. John Bosco and his idea of “preventitive discipline.” Which really amounts to one thing: love your students. Be their true friend. I try to remind myself of this little mantra each time just before stepping in to the classroom. It works for me. This does not mean pure permissiveness; this means always acting in the best interests of each student; and respectfully towards a brother or a sister soul.

Of course, I must mention the Socratic method. It has always been the essence of good teaching. You draw students into thinking about the subject, kindling the flame within, rather than feeding them cold data. This is superficially similar to the modern idea of “constructivism,” but opposite in its premise. It is not that students are inventing their own “truths,” as constructivism wants to believe possible, but that truth, as Plato understands, generally becomes evident of itself if you brush away the lies and errors obscuring it. The same idea is really behind the scientific method: science is not some set of facts, but a method of questioning, in order to reveal the mind of God as shown by his works.

Am I saying “question everything”? Yes and no. If you accept that premise, you must begin by questioning that premise. It would be absurd arrogance to suppose you can personally do better than the combined best minds of the ages; and, in the case of revelation, that a human mind can do it without any help from God. Our obvious initial assumption is that our ancestors were not idiots, but knew what they were doing, and had reasons. Chesterton has a good standard: never tear down a fence until you know why it is there.

John Taylor Gatto and Me

A friend and colleague has been reading John Taylor Gatto, and was struck, in conversation, at how often my own views of the problems of the public schools are the same as his. I am not terribly happy to hear that someone else has stolen my thunder.; I guess it is a confirmation I did feel I had to look into this author, a former New York State Teacher of the Year who quit, declaring that the public school system was broken beyond repair.

Having read some of his An Underground History of American Education, and part of his Dumbing Us Down, both available free online, I am not that impressed. Like most professional critics of the schools. Gatto seems to me to go over the top. Everything about them, including what seem to me opposite tendencies, is wrong. He is also very bad at citing sources, and when I try to trace them, his claims turn out to be often quite wrong.

I do agree with what seems to be his solution: school choice. This is essentially what we had in Ontario when our school system was first set up by Egeerton Ryerson. The schools buildings were actually owned by the local trustees—the local parents—and they hired and fired the teachers (Donald Akenson, Being Had, p. 149. Another book I happen to be reading, about the Irish experience in North America).

Gatto points out that in 2000, New York State spent $200,000 per child over the course of an educatnio in the el-hi schools (p. 10, An Underground History of American Education). If, instead, given that that figure is accurate, each child was given that $200,000 at high school graduation age, they would likely be set for life. At least, they could buy a house, cash. However, Gatto's number seems too high. In Canada, expenses per student per year, according to the National Post, are $11,835.. Granted, Gatto includes lost interest, and is probably including the cost of school buildings. My guess is that the National Post is not.

Gatto is dead right here: “Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard” (P. 11). This is a problem with the professions generally, but one can see immediately that it is a special problem with making teachers a “profession.” Their job is to make the hard easy; their training is all on making the easy hard. As a result, they are more likely to retard than to aid their students' learning, and this is immediately in their self-interest This alone explains why home-schooled kids invariably outperform their public school peers on any measure of academic achievement.

It also explains why the brightest students tend to hate school, while schools in general seem to concentrate their efforts on the weakest students.

From the beginning, according to Gatto, public schooling was the project of people who saw themselves as an intellectual elite. As such, they were the rightful rulers of society, and they did not want their control tampered with by the unworthy rabble. As a result, the schools are by their nature deeply undemocratic and class-conscious, and the great majority of students are deliberately kept down. This explains to me why public schools do not teach essential life skills: public speaking, rhetoric, which is also to say salesmanship, debating, parliamentary procedure. If they knew these things, the masses could organize effectively and protect their interests' individuals could move ahead and assume leadership. These subjects, interestingly, are always taught in the posh private schools to which the wealthy send their children.

Gatto points out the interesting fact that of twenty occupational groups measured, public school teachers score seventeenth on the GRE. Who scores lower? School administrators, who score 51 or 80 points lower, depending whether you are measuring them against elementary or secondary teachers (p. 21). I have seen similar figures before. Yet studies show a good GRE is a strong indicator of an effective teacher. We are sending the wrong people into the classroom, and the system is upside down, with the dumbest in control.

How can this happen? Probably for the same reason that the mentally retarded do a better job on assembly lines than the normally intelligent. Anyone reasonably intelligent and honest would be driven mad by the drivel and obvious errors required for teaching qualifications, and would have to be seriously masochistic to sit for a Master's degree in education.

Gatto points out that pay is not, despite the constant demands of teachers, the issue. He points out that teachers in the US before the 1960s used to make far less, barely enough for subsistence, yet beck then the job attracted many bright and talented young men on the way up, including some who later became famous. These well-educated young men, the best teachers according to studies, are now barred from the classroom. So are seasoned professionals in their fifties and sixties with real-world experience to share.

Gatto runs through a list of famous people of the past who seemed to do very well without schooling. David Farragut shipped off at age ten. Lincoln had less then a year in the classroom, Thomas Edison had three. Benjamin Franklin had less than one, and was working as a printer's apprentice at 12.

The main effect of schooling, Gatto says, is to retard adulthood. I think this is right. There were no teenagers, and there was no teen angst, until the forties or so. It is unnatural and unkind to hold young people back from adult responsibility, and it causes immense social problems. Here in the Gulf, they are at least conscious of what they are doing, and why they are doing it. A big reason why governments are pouring money into higher ed is that they have a problem with youth unemployment, which stands at 29%. So it is better to herd and watch them in classrooms than to leave them on the street craving adventure and probably causing trouble. The same logic may well have been behind the GI Bill in the US, to deal with the glut of returning soldiers, which resulted in everybody needing a university degree for the same jobs that used to need only a high school diploma. After the First War, there was a big unemployment problem among decommissioned doughboys, and the Depression was still barely over.

Gatto points out that, at the time of the Revolution, Alexander Hamilton was 20, Aaron Burr 21, Lafayette 19 (p. 46). George Washington was pulling down a huge salary as a government surveyor at age 16.

Much is made of the exploitation of children in the Third World, by letting them work. My Filipina wife is hearing none of it. What do they expect the kids and their families to do—starve? The truth is, child labour laws in the beginning, as now, have most to do with protecting the interests of the old and already established against the young. Minimum wage laws probably do the same. Denying people the right to work is not nice.

More to come...