On Critically Thinking

The frustration and righteous anger so evident here raise yet again the question that everyone who stands on the Left must constantly be asking themselves: If this description of hegemonic practice is accurate, what can be done to combat it? If it is accurate, then the occasional appearance of such an article simply reinforces the system’s claim to openness and opportunity, and the challenge of the words is seamlessly incorporated into the ongoing narrative of liberal freedom. Perhaps what is most instructive about the recent outbreak of dissent and disruption in the Arab world is the evidence it provides that heavy-handed political and intellectual oppression is much easier to identify and attack than the more insidious operation of the hegemonic project described in the linked intervention, although the signs of cracks in that rampart of illusions are more evident than they have been for a while.

It is, I think, self-evident that much of the groundwork for the dominant ideology must be laid down early in and by the education system whose signal task it is to prepare children for their future roles as intelligent consumers and reliable political actors. It is of course the genius of the American system to have so thoroughly conflated the two roles that the central concerns of real politics have been flattened into competition between marginally dissimilar brands. The aching sense of betrayal so acutely felt by those who looked to Obama for relief from political mindlessness resembles that of disappointed purchasers of the newest hot item who find out too late that its appeal was all surface, and that underneath the high-style sheen beats the same predictably utilitarian, and distinctly uninspiring, mechanical impulses. We should know better, but the learning curve is amazingly flat: Hope trumps evidence every time.

The catalogue of obscenities is so rich with examples that in more civilized places might have brought thousands into the streets: here and here and here and most engagingly graphically here. But in a country where critical thinking and problem solving are the explicit skills supposedly being taught in schools, rampant inequalities of both resources and access are allowed to widen, and blatant injustices are allowed to persist, because the levers of power are so cunningly disguised behind the very concepts that should be exposing their existence. (I recognize the assumption here that if these things were properly perceived, they would, in fact, generate remedial action. That is a very large assumption.)

For thinking to be critical, it must operate from a knowledge base that encompasses a range of data sufficient to provide alternatives to that which is being critically examined. That knowledge base must itself be critically constructed, and rest ultimately on truth-claims that can, in some reliable way, be justified. In the age of digital information, the elements of that knowledge base are literally infinite, which makes the problem of adequate justification paramount. How many assertions purporting to be arguments rest on internet sources whose accuracy has never been checked? How much “evidence-based research” consists of a single study unreplicated and/or methodologically questionable? But if the ground rules of truth-testing are unknown, if diversity of opinion means that any claim is as good as any other, if the term “junk science” can be used to characterize anything with which one happens to disagree, then truly critical thinking is rendered impossible. When Marx called for the “ruthless interrogation of all existing reality” he assumed that there was, at least, some shared definition of what reality was. Lacking that, what looks like argument is simply whistling in the wind. And that is the activity actively encouraged by those whose interests are threatened by more substantive praxis.

When the bad guys hold a gun to your head, the reality of a coercive situation is hard to deny. When they insist that the only gun is in your imagination, and that your freedom lies exclusively in channeling that imagination so that the gun disappears, the constraints of structure have been mystified and the dire effects of inequalities displaced. The next time you read about yet another university course in positive psychology, or encounter yet another teacher who insists that self-esteem is more significant than self-awareness, remember those young Egyptians and Tunisians whose education had provided the wherewithal to not only understand the world, but to change it.

On Struggle

As is often the case these days, Paul Krugman is one of the very few audible voices that seems to be talking sense. His central point, that American jobs will be neither saved nor created through greater emphasis on education, points in two analytically significant directions. The first is towards an inquiry into why then the incessant insistence that the one leads to the other, contra the evidence which Krugman marshals as well as the common sense that suggests an employment future more responsive to credential inflation and de-skilling than to any rising demand for well-educated workers; the second aims at a related, but still distinct issue especially relevant to those whose stake in the education debate begins earlier than the job-preparation to which higher education is increasingly narrowly devoted: What ideological purposes are being served by the rhetoric surrounding the more is better mantra, and what particular participants in the class struggle stand to benefit by its instantiation?

An answer to the first question encourages a cynicism so deep that the effort to drag oneself from that slough of despond disables the critical intelligence. From POTUS on down, through the robotic mouthpiece of public education policy that is Arne Duncan, one hears of the absolute centrality of increased access to, and greater success at, the increasingly exorbitant economic shell game that higher education has become. As tuition costs rise, and middle-class (I use that term more for convenience than for accuracy) incomes decline, entry into traditional institutions of higher learning becomes more fraught with uncertainty and real existential anxiety. Recent research suggesting that even in these environments, real education – the sharpening of critical abilities and the enhancing of those skills on which a humane future will certainly depend – is rarer than one might expect, compels one to question whose purposes are being served by this too-often empty exercise and waste of both money and intellectual talent. It is easy to blame faculty, but that in itself should dissuade one from doing so: the increasing exploitation of part-time academic workers, and the de-emphasizing of the pain necessary to intellectual success, are not the outcomes of faculty behavior. If the university in its traditional configuration cannot, and increasingly chooses not to, fulfill its social responsibility to temper ignorance with knowledge and philistinism with an overlay of culture, then what it is actually doing is training, not educating, and for jobs that as Krugman so astutely notes, are today more than amenable to outsourcing and mechanizing. The exhortations to which we are being subjected are a distraction from the deep structural sources of capitalist transformation to which the American social formation is subject, and seek to obfuscate with noise the stark realities of widening income disparities and deepening despair. And that obfuscation is, must be, both deliberate and conscious: It seems to be addressing a need that does not really exist, and in its pursuit drains resources and energy away from the confrontation with uncomfortable truths about which very different things need be done. All the talk in the education-universe about 21st Century skills, and the premium the future will place on critical thinking are hypocritical twaddle if what the future really demands are discouraged and disoriented corporate drones whose “education” has driven them into debt so onerous that escape from the drudgery of their work is as unthinkable as it is impossible. This is the operation of soft fascism American style: the ideological shaping of a demoralized workforce taught to valorize its masters, distrust its neighbors, and despise those on whose backs can be laid the onus of stereotype and scapegoating. The socialization is not yet perfect, as the events in Wisconsin have demonstrated. But one must remember who the actual winners of that struggle over legitimacy were: The crowds in the street did not prevent the gutting of collective bargaining rights. It is always tempting to mistake the battle for the war, but when even that is objectively lost, the elation that at least there was a fight should be short-lived, and actively interrogated. As Michael Moore tells workers how much he loves them, and NPR flatters its liberal base by softening its otherwise consistent parroting of right-wing propaganda, one more nail is driven into the agonized fetish of effective labor militancy. A general strike, indeed; and does one think for a moment that the forces of order will hesitate to call out their dogs, and that they will be restrained by the newly awakened class solidarity they share with their targets? I doubt it, I really do.

If more concrete evidence is desired, pay close attention to the growing kerfuffle over for- profit colleges and universities. It is a sign of how far standards of excellence have declined that such places can even call themselves by names whose connotations suggest a reality light-years removed from what they actually do. The fact that these institutions are designed to extract federal funds through the agency of student grants from people already disadvantaged by their lack of cultural capital is an offense against the most basic principles of practical ethics, but what they call education is an offense against language itself. They provide a piece of paper that is supposed to grease the wheels of social mobility just enough to accelerate the flight from social apartheid that is the end point of the American economic trajectory. Their success in this crucial ideological practice is highly contested, but their ability to accumulate wealth for their shareholders is undeniable. If there is a more egregious example of how the mill of capitalist exploitation grinds fine, I am hard-put to identify it (although on second thought, there are too many examples to describe: for-profit secondary education, and primary education; immigration laws that punish precisely those enticed by the gaps in the labor market that high-priced vocational training has emptied; just for starters). I look forward eagerly to the conclusions drawn from the current congressional hearing into the more flagrant escapades of these scoundrel schools, but of one thing I am certain. Just as on Wall Street, the sidewalks of which their owners walk with the other captains of the gunboats of class-struggle, when the enterprise crashes against the walls of historical necessity, and the ruins of hopes and dreams are swept away and re-processed, it will be the workers who invested their faith and their funds in the false promises of the system whose lives will be devastated and whose resistance will be thereby defused.

On Dangerous Myths

One could not hope for a better example of everything that is misguided about American educational thinking than this article from that grab-bag of trendy ephemera, the Huffington Post. The author lays out her thesis thus:

There are many conflicting theories about why our children are not expanding and enriching their knowledge horizons — and lots of finger-pointing about what’s holding them back, too.
But there’s also a new and growing consensus that could lead to sensitive and fresh educational standards, benchmarks, models and teaching styles designed to help students discover the joys of meaningful and responsible learning.

The developing consensus will take some time to fully take hold in schools and classrooms across the country, and there are still pockets of fierce resistance, but the unmistakable outlines of this new philosophical accord are already emerging.

Now either I am one of those fierce pockets (c’est possible), or the consensus claimed is nowhere nearly as developed as the article suggests. From her enthusiasm and aura of certainty, one would expect to find reference to some carefully-researched studies that tell us something about either children or the learning process that we have not heard endlessly in one form or the other for at least  the last 25 years. Instead we are presented with those myths nurtured and then widely propagated by the schools of education to which the author is so closely affiliated, to wit:

[ T]here is a growing realization that children are constantly learning.

[T]here is awareness in an increasing number of schools that children learn differently and at different rates.

[T]here is a strong sense that the teacher’s role must change in the 21st century.

The first claim is an empty commonplace that substitutes exhortative rhetoric for substantive analysis. OK, children are constantly learning: What classroom practices necessarily follow from that fact? Isn’t it still the case that in the school the question must always be what are they learning, and what should they be learning, and how is that content best taught? I am highly dubious that there is reliable research that demonstrates that children “are naturally curious; eager to master new things; patient — and even tenacious — when it comes to grasping knowledge; and able and willing to construct their own understanding through personal investigation.” And even if there were, nothing about teaching practice logically follows. I suppose that for the very young, such assumptions do no harm, but it is not amongst them that the American education system fails so consistently. And in high school, anyone who believes that “natural curiosity” is the dominant spur towards knowledge is welcome to give their theory a reality test in any of the many classrooms I have shared with adolescents from around the world.

For the second claim, there is simply no evidence whatsoever. I have written about this most recently here, but am resigned to the fact that no one already committed to the mythology can be convinced by contrary evidence. But a consensus around what is actually a prejudice is unlikely to take us very far in any useful direction.

The third “finding” – the notion that “guides-on-the-side” are are more effective than “sages-on-the stage – is a key part of the proletarianization trajectory that has also been a central focus for this blog. Its acceptance cannot but emphasize the importance of technique over content: It is hard to know what the teacher is supposed to be modelling if it is precisely their subject knowledge which they are now encouraged to disguise. I think again about my high school students: They learned what the life of the mind was by living it with their teacher whose expertise was actually substantive rather than procedural. It will not be long before the pendulum shifts yet again toward more explicit direction and less “student-centered” learning, given how spectacularly unsuccessful the latter approach has been. And when that happens, the putative consensus being here evoked will dissipate like the smokescreen it is.

But perhaps the most egregious element of this article is its concluding evocation of an “insight” that has “truly changed how we think about learning” (one wonders seriously who this we is) – Dr. John Medina’s Brain Rules, in which we learn that:  “If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a [traditional] classroom.” I would like to suggest only that the brain is good at doing many things, and that as its faculties mature and are shaped by their environment, those things too change. There is nothing about brain functioning that has any demonstrable impact on what is taught in the classroom, or how. It is fascinating to me that the “traditional” classroom stimulated both the curiosity and the performance of most of the world’s intellectual giants long before much was known about “what the brain is good at.” If that is no longer the case, it makes no logical sense to look to the classroom model for the source of the problem, but to look elsewhere would demand some attention to the grotesqueries of the culture in which such new “insights” are welcomed.

On Improbability

Just a quick intervention regarding the rather perturbing article found here. The continuing achievement gap between African-American and white students is one of the most profoundly convincing pieces of evidence available that racial inequality still persists, and it is important to note, as Ronald Ferguson does in this article, that parental income differences account for a large part of that differential. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, when it comes to educational outcomes, class matters, and no amount of nonsense about “value-added teaching” will change that brute fact. But what should be equally startling, but obviously is not to the writer of the article is this:

At the high school here, T. C. Williams — the setting of the movie “Remember the Titans” — he found that 55 percent of white girls reported having an A or A-minus average, compared with less than 20 percent of black girls and boys.

Does anyone, especially any teacher, actually believe that this is possible, that more than half of any non-selective group of teenagers is academically superior, which is after all what a grade of A is supposed to mean? One wonders what the grading criteria might be that would allow for such an outcome at the same time one knows that they will have nothing whatever to do with academic excellence. Take a look at the average student scores on, for instance, the International Baccalaureate Diploma examination: Aside from Mathematics where the scores are bimodal, in no other subject have students anywhere in the world managed an average score above B-; the IB is taken by tens of thousands of 12th graders every year, and the normal distribution of grades survives robustly throughout the vast reams of data that the IB collects. And for those who like to think that the IB tests only an unrepresentative elite, perhaps they would like to explain why then the test averages do not compare more favorably with those found at T.C. Williams.

It’s hard to know what is more disturbing – that the gap between black and white students is so large, that so many white girls achieve the statistically improbable, or that no one seems to notice the latter quite stunning anomaly.

On Sport

I have long intended to write something about academic achievement and high school sports. My concern is not with what has been recently exercising coaches and commentators, but with a relationship rarely discussed and, I am convinced, actively ignored. When the subject of American students’ poor performance on international tests is raised, how often has it been mooted that one source of the results may lie with the inordinate emphasis placed on athletic prowess and success in the American context, and that a re-thinking of the consensus surrounding sports participation and academic standing might be in order?  I draw here yet again on the comparisons made available by my experience, by my immersion in educational cultures where the thought of spending more time at volleyball practice than on homework would be seen as demented, and in which the well-roundedness so prized in American student evaluation would be pitied as an inability to focus properly one’s energies and talents.  If it is seriously intended to improve American student academic performance, perhaps a burning of the volleyball nets, a bonfire of some very particular vanities, is a first step.

I am well aware that the research consensus on athletic participation is that it does not adversely affect academic achievement, and may even enhance it. But this consensus is much softer than is often claimed, and the most recent meta-study I could locate (Bailey, Armour, Kirk, Jess, Pickup, Sandford, et al. “The educational benefits claimed for physical education and school sport: an academic overview.” Research Papers in Education, Vol. 24, No. 1, March 2009: 1-27) emphasizes the importance of mediating factors that severely complicate the ostensible positive relationship between participation and achievement. They note that “the mechanisms by which [physical education and sport] might contribute to cognitive and academic developments are barely understood (1),” and that the difference between correlation and cause is too often ignored when the case for athletic participation is most strongly made.

The case I want to make is that most of these studies are asking the wrong question, and that anyone even vaguely familiar with the difference in emphasis placed on sports in American high schools compared with just about anywhere else must suspect that the education culture shaped by the peculiarly American obsession with corpore sano cannot but mitigate against an at best equal concern with mens sana. By way of introduction, I offer yet another experiential datum: After two years teaching in Casablanca, at the end of which time the first acceptances to Harvard and Yale for our graduates began to materialize, it was decided for reasons still obscure that the school needed a professional guidance counsellor, and a professional basketball coach, a happy combination much more commonly available than I would have imagined. The young(ish) American hired for the job made his first introduction to the senior class by asking how many of them picked their colleges of choice based on the performance of their athletic teams. The students looked at him as if he were mad: What possible relevance could such a tangential feature have to one’s choice of university? I know now that his concern was not as bizarre as it seemed at the time; for many students in this country, the reputation of a school’s teams is at least as significant as the reputation of its professors, and much more easily judged. It is that fact which indexes the cultural gap between the meaning of academic excellence in the United States and in those countries which have so unexpectedly overtaken it in the league tables by which educational self-respect is now measured.

The question we should be asking is not: Do students who play ball do better in school than those who don’t? That ignores all those mediating factors so crucial to academic success. The better question would be: How much better would these students do if they were not exhausting themselves four or five afternoons a week with 2 or 3 hour practices; if they were able to spend as much time on any one academic class as they are required to spend on learning plays; if they were not removed from class on game travel days, thereby indicating more clearly than any protestation to the contrary which pursuit is the more important? Students elsewhere are just as active athletically as American students, but that dimension of their lives is conducted outside of school auspices: it neither impinges on school expectations, nor decisively shapes the contours of school culture. And it is those contours that make the difference between an environment conducive to sophisticated intellectual endeavor, and one in which the life of the mind must struggle for breathing space against the stifling demands of a jock-friendly discourse.

I know that academic success is not everything. I know that physical activity is good for young adults, and I encourage them to pursue it. But when the school becomes the primary vector for athletic participation, strange and unfortunate things inevitably follow: The values of intellectual growth and sophistication are displaced by the very different values of teamwork and obedience to authority; the visible and measurable success of athletic achievement displaces the slow and sometimes obscure development of intellectual gifts; the laudatory recognition of athletic prowess overwhelms the respect which encourages intellectual risk-taking and academic excellence. It is ludicrous to imagine a high school trophy case in which AP scores are displayed with the same pride and flair as those of a winning football team. Until they are, one should not be surprised that true academic success (on terms not established by those who cannot match them) is so rare. But in this cultural matrix, where parents who choose a school for its academic pretensions then compel it to introduce competitive sports because “the children want it,”  that will never happen.

On Hegemony

I’ve recently finished Diane Ravitch’s new book, and am disturbed to find how completely I agree with her perceptions of the fatal turns taken by American education in the last decade. Disturbed because her elective affinity for right-wing affiliation and advice seems largely undiminished (her characterization of the Heritage Foundation as “free-market-oriented” rather underplays its rabid neo-liberal agenda!), and her apologia for past mistakes distinctly underexamined (“I too had fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures; I too had drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems”). But in tracing the trajectory of her conversion, she identifies some key features of the new model education/state that I have discussed in earlier posts, and provides some insights that merit further consideration. Since I am unlikely to ever actually speak with her (as has been engineered here), those of you reading this will have to be her surrogates, and hopefully, my interlocutors.

I want to begin with her appreciation that

 “No Child Left Behind had no vision other than improving test scores in reading and math. It produced mountains of data, not educated citizens….It ignored the importance of knowledge. It promoted a cramped, mechanistic, profoundly anti-intellectual definition of education.”

And this definition has become the dominant ideology, shaping not only curriculum, but also teacher education and evaluation. Its latest incarnation in Obama’s Race to the Top puts a progressive gloss on this profoundly reactionary program that has now had a decade in which to embed itself inside the universe of discourse within which teachers train and practice. The response to Ravitch’s cri de coeur is more, and more systematically. The intention seems to be to produce a generation of students trained to take tests, but unable to think. I know that people like  Alfie Kohn simply deny that this is happening, and insist that comparisons between American students and their international peers are misleading and inappropriate. But I wonder how much time he has actually spent in the classroom recently, and how deeply he has examined the knowledge base of those children he claims are doing so well.

What I want to suggest is that there is a clear method to this madness, that the narrowing of curriculum and the proletarianization of teaching are not by-products of this business-model of education, but its actual goals; and that the cash nexus between accountability, choice, and the testing industry is the proper focus for a Marxian understanding of why things are as they are, and becoming more so. There are two dimensions to this analysis: at one level, the training of uncritical technocratic drones supports the actual direction of the American economic future, and thus education will provide, as it has always done, the requisite workforce for the next stage of capitalist development. At another level, the narrowing of the mind inherent in this project will effectively disable any critical resistance to the process itself, and to the endgame that is its ultimate aim. As the inequalities of wealth and opportunity increase, the ability to identify their sources and organize resistance to them will diminish, and the hegemonic pursuit at the heart of capitalist culture will have been completed. One might suggest that the bizarreness of the Tea Party phenomenon is prima facie evidence that this is already well under way.

As teachers become more and more cogs in the machine of cultural reproduction, programmed in the classroom by the pettifogging demands of corporate-engineered learning modules and the relentless demands of test-based accountability, so their students will learn the lessons of compliance and ritualism so crucial to the mystification of reality. It is certainly true that the liberal arts are no certain protection against the soft fascism that is the American social formation, but their steady denigration and eventual elimination will guarantee its instantiation, and, I fear, its invisibility.

On Decadence

At this pregnant moment in recent history, as the new Republican house flexes its muscles and the realities of a new political conjuncture are reflected in the White House accommodation of the nascent hegemon, this item resonates with a bizarre and dissonant timbre. Not only are incompetence and irresponsibility being rewarded, but that fact is being defended by those entrusted with the obligation to make sure it does not happen. Assuming that not everyone involved is either consciously duplicitous or terminally stupid, there must be a reason, a rationale, for both the practices detailed and the justifications mounted.

Consider the evidence:

By order of the principal, codified in the school’s teacher handbook, all teachers should grade their classes in the same way: 30 percent of students should earn a grade in the A range, 40 percent B’s, 25 percent C’s, and no more than 5 percent D’s. As long as they show up, they should not fail.

In another case, a student who was absent 98 days in one year was promoted to the next grade, earning credits for classes including cooking, yoga and independent study. The school does not offer a cooking class, although in at least one case, the principal, Lynn Passarella, created an independent study course called cooking, given after school, to motivate a student.

Teacher turnover at the school has been near 50 percent in recent years, and some teachers said the policy of passing students had taken a toll. “I don’t know how they think they are raising these kids to think that they can do what they want with no consequences and still get good grades,” said a teacher who left due to an illness. “It’s just so wrong on so many levels.”

I find myself so stunned by this that my only response is: What are they thinking? What are the teachers without whose active collaboration such a travesty would be impossible thinking? What can the principal who I am certain feels she is doing what is best for her students be thinking? And most importantly, what are the students who know beyond doubt that they are being scammed thinking?

We have some suggestions;

Ms. Passarella declined to comment about the allegations, saying that she thought the real story at her school was how students from poor backgrounds could succeed if given the chance.

“You would have to be an epic failure to fail at this school,” said Deja Sawyers, a 10th grader. When students do not do their work, “there’s no consequences,” she said, adding that she did not get homework.

Though the school boasts a 100 percent college acceptance rate, the students’ average score on the SATs is below the city average — about 390 in both English and math. And anecdotally, some teachers say many graduates are in remedial college classes or dropping out.

Have we really become so unable to make critical distinctions that we have redefined failure as success? Has the bar been set so abysmally low that such appalling test scores are judged to be evidence of college-preparedness? One realizes that this story is probably an outlier, and that this school is not representative of anything but its own misguided operating principles. That hardly compensates its graduates for their inability to perform college-level work, nor justifies its administrators and teachers in their wholesale prostitution of their calling. And I wonder sometimes, after yet another savagely frustrating encounter with the oblivious incompetence that has become the norm in the American cultural matrix, how anomalous this situation actually is. And I wonder how much of the mindless irrationality of American politics is the outgrowth of institutions like this one which degrade whatever substantive value they might confer by demeaning both their clients and the aspirations they have pretended to fulfill.

On Proletarianization II

A short interval of theory-time: The managerial bias in the learning style/differentiated instruction complex is obvious: it provides a measure (of a very primitive kind) of how closely the teacher under scrutiny hones to the managerial edge. In a recent and most egregious appearance, we were informed that the magnetic markers which identified Essential Questions and Vocabulary must be visible on the whiteboard when formal evaluations were conducted, so that one cell of the evaluation grid might be filled with no more than a fleeting glance! Remember what the research shows: It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for you. No matter; it is not yours to question WHY, only to do and slowly extinguish whatever faint remaining spark of intellectual integrity might still occasionally flare. This slow grinding away of idiosyncrasy and diversity in the way things are taught dovetails nicely with the degradation of the content ostensibly being delivered. The more differentiation is demanded to no discernible educational end, the thinner becomes the knowledge base available to both students and their teachers. Think hard about your recent summer reading assignments for professional development: How many of them were about anything other than methodology, how to rather than what to? The fixation on technical fixes, the infinite variety of canned programs and rubrics and activities and whatever are a godsend to teachers overburdened with the pressures of administrative bullshit, but they demand less and less depth knowledge of subject matter, a problem only when that knowledge is tested and compared with that of students less constricted by the constraints under which their teachers labor. I’m not being romantic about this; a lot of poor teaching would happen no matter what the control regime looked like. But this model redefines poor teaching from an existential and moral problem to a purely technical one: If a good teacher is one who fills in all the boxes correctly and nods their head in the right places at the right time and is sufficiently breathless when senior administrators parade their authority, then what is taught has been degraded to a contingency. The more qualified teachers become, the more validations of their plasticity and shallowness they can display, the more mysterious becomes the robust lack of correlation between these qualifications and the educational development they are supposed to guarantee.

This bizarre conjunction is not, cannot be, accidental. But one sees its traces everywhere: Tasks which were once conducted by reasonable people with reasonable competency are now conducted badly by people with degrees and certificates and “educational credentials.’ Possession of the credential means you are qualified, but in a market flooded with qualifications, what are the actual performance standards internalized? David Harvey has recently written in The Enigma of Capital:

Whatever else happens in the labour process, the potentiality for a revolutionary blockage…is always threatening. It must at all costs be averted by capital, because both capital and the capitalist must be perpetually reproduced by workers through the activity of labouring. The details of how this is done are infinite in their variety…Social struggles on the shop floor and in the fields, factories, offices, shops and spaces of construction…define a potential blockage point to capital accumulation that is perpetually present and which perpetually needs to be circumvented if capitalism is to survive (105).

When the schooling process is removed from the mystifications of professionalism which have obscured its true nature, and reinserted into Harvey’s widened Marxist problematic, the contours of its particular significance to the reproduction of hegemony become evident, and its overwhelming reliance on bullshit more understandable.

On Proletarianization

Almost exactly one year ago, I posted a brief account of an article about learning styles that suggested in the clearest terms that the concept itself was fatally flawed, and that the research supporting it was dicey in the extreme. Immediately following that post, the article disappeared from the web, and without it the elaboration of my concerns with this mendacious and damaging idea became simply more difficult than I had time to construct. Thus it was with high hopes that I saw in the New York Times another even more recent analysis of the issue, and awaited the response of my school administrative team, dedicated to the goals of “research-based practice,” to findings which cast significant doubt on one of the foundational elements of the school curriculum and faculty evaluation model. I forwarded a link to the NYT article to the appropriate admin. personage, and when that failed to elicit even an acknowledgement, forwarded the complete study anticipating at least a response like, How interesting!  ‘Nowt, keine wort, like perhaps this research simply did not fit in the paradigm so arduously wrought by the corporation and its highly paid consultants, and could thus be ignored, so long as no teachers actually insisted that it be taken seriously. I left the job before that happened, after the Head told me that there was no point in discussing the paper (which she obviously had not read) because she “didn’t believe the research”!  It is to this dense field of bullshit that I aim this post.

Anyone actually reading this blog already knows enough about learning-style theory not to need a long refresher course. I want to emphasize that differentiated instruction, the evil twin of learning-style, rests on precisely the same fragile bedrock of theory and evidence, and thus if the one is shown to be scientifically unjustifiable, the other must sink into the pseudo-scientific quicksand from which it first arose. So what does the newest research demonstrate, and what implications might be drawn about the links between education theory, capitalist exploitation, and the philosophical realm of bullshit analysis? I know you can’t wait to read this.

First, the findings from the article by Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork, “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, v.9, No. 3, 2009:

The term learning styles refers to the view that different people learn information in different ways. In recent decades, the concept of learning styles has steadily gained influence. In this article, we describe the intense interest and discussion that the concept of learning styles has elicited among professional educators at all levels of the educational system. Moreover, the learning-styles concept appears to have wide acceptance not only among educators but also among parents and the general public. This acceptance is perhaps not surprising because the learning-styles idea is actively promoted by vendors offering many different tests, assessment devices, and online technologies to help educators identify their students’ learning styles and adapt their instructional approaches accordingly (106)…In summary, our efforts revealed at most one arguable piece of evidence for the learning-styles hypothesis in general. For the many specific assessment devices and interventions being actively marketed to teachers, as described earlier in this article, we were unable to find any evidence that would meet the key criteria discussed earlier (i.e., interactions of the form shown in Figs. 1A–1C). Moreover, we found a number of published studies that used what we have described as the appropriate research design for testing the learning-styles hypothesis and found results that contradict widely held versions of the learning-styles hypothesis (112)…

…[It] would clearly be a mistake to label these negative results as a conclusive refutation of the learning-styles hypothesis in general. Further research modeled on the work of Massa and Mayer (2006) may bring to light assessments paired with interventions that do meet our criteria. But at present, these negative results, in conjunction with the virtual absence of positive findings, lead us to conclude that any application of learning styles in classrooms is unwarranted (ibid).

On the basis of our review, the belief that learning-style assessments are useful in educational contexts appears to be just that—a belief…Our review of the learning-styles literature led us to define a particular type of evidence that we see as a minimum precondition for validating the use of a learning-style assessment in an instructional setting. As described earlier, we have been unable to find any evidence that clearly meets this standard. Moreover ,several studies that used the appropriate type of research design found results that contradict the most widely held version of the learning-styles hypothesis, namely, what we have referred to as the meshing hypothesis (Constantinidou & Baker, 2002; Massa& Mayer, 2006). The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing. If classification of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated (117).

Obviously, one should read this in its entirety. The distinctions made between learning-style theory in general and the meshing hypothesis which is their primary object of concern are important, but significantly less so than these devastating conclusions. Some preliminary data: On every single lesson plan at both of my recent schools, a required element was an exhaustive list of differentiated instruction plans all of which rested on some variant of the learning-style hypothesis. If one had seriously attempted to structure lessons to the specificity and detail expected by the managerial personnel, one would have been doing almost nothing else. And if it is all useless, if it has none of the effects on educational achievement that are constantly and loudly claimed for it, how can such pointless waste of time and effort be justified? I will suggest a few possibilities.

So long as teachers are frittering away their intelligence on demonstrably useless exercises, they are not really thinking about the substantive content of their field. It takes as much time to craft a “differentiated lesson plan” as it does to read a short monograph, which should matter if the goal is better teaching and greater depth of knowledge, but obviously does not. At high school level, where  any attempt to seriously maintain contact with one’s field of academic expertise is severely compromised by the demands of school meetings and athletic events and pep rallies and “pastoral” duties, the learning-style/differentiated instruction matrix is a path to burnout and intellectual frustration, and to what end? If there is nothing of educational value emerging from the process, why is it so central to the business-model of education fast becoming hegemonic in the English-speaking world? This post is already too long – more tomorrow.

On Bullshit

“It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad  for you.”  This wonderful chorus from George Carlin’s last performance emphasized many of the background hypocrisies and webs of intellectual duplicity that are the constant spurs of outrage animating this blog, but as Harry Frankfurt has taught us, bullshit is more complex than it might first appear. Certainly the utopian educational landscape I have promised to map must begin with the identification, and subsequent elimination of, the vast panoply of bullshit that is contemporary education theory and practice. This first substantive post on that project will make an effort in that direction, focusing on an assumption that entered the educational universe in the 1960s, and of which I was a fervent advocate until its deleterious results became too obvious to ignore: the notion that parent involvement in their children’s education is an unmitigated good, and the more the better.

What precisely is meant by parental involvement? For most teachers, I think it means that a child arrives at school with the necessary wherewithal to do what should be expected: to read, to think, to respond, to engage. Parents have a responsibility, to their kids and to the process of education, to guarantee a minimal level of potential responsiveness: No one expects that they determine how their children behave or what attitudes they adopt, merely that the natural barriers to academic education – sloth and willful stupidity – are mitigated to some extent by parental disincentives. I have taught in places where parents believed that it was entirely the school’s responsibility to inculcate these virtues, that their responsibility ended at the schoolhouse gate; and that worked reasonably well because it limited even logically the oversight of method and content so characteristic of parental involvement in the United States. In this country, it seems that parents too often arrogate to themselves the knowledge and expertise they demand from their “professional” teachers, and find no contradiction in their simultaneous insistence that they know what should be happening in the classroom, AND that the teachers should be professional enough to defer always to their superior insight, to their “advocacy” for their child. One wonders how many parents who unhesitatingly challenge a teacher’s marking of their child’s product would consider doing the same thing for a doctor’s prescription or a car mechanic’s estimate. I know the level of psychological involvement is deeper, but that is a reason, not a justification. The only justification foregrounds the degree to which the whole notion of “teacher professionalism” is a myth in which parents participate only when it suits their very individual purposes.

In a bullshit free educational universe, the following email message would be appropriate:

Dear Concerned Parent,

Thank you so much for your recent message questioning my professional judgment of your child’s performance. I realize after careful consideration of your inquiry that the problem lies in my inability to perceive the sunshine emerging from your child’s asshole, by which your own  views are so obviously illuminated. One might have thought that being blinded by such light would be an impediment to objective evaluation, but I realize now how utterly false that perspective must be, since you seem convinced beyond the threat of reason that what you think your child deserves is in fact what he has earned. Unfortunately, the shift in position requisite to my sharing your point of view is both aesthetically and intellectually unappealing, and I respectfully decline to assume it. I would suggest instead that you step to the side for one moment, look carefully at the incredibly elaborate grading rubric to the demands of which your child should be shaping his work, and ask yourself how much careful attention to them is evident in what your child has submitted. When we can start to discuss the work rather than the child, I would be happy to speak again.

I can feel the visceral thrill of releasing that message on an unsuspecting “client.” And until someone does, the bullshit will continue to accumulate, and the cleaner air of truth and accountability that survives will slowly putrefy. But one step at a time…