Thoughts on Education in America. Pt. 2. Elementary School

Should students be allowed to exit from college and scarcely know how to read and write? It's pretty clear that people much younger than me and my peers can't spell, and that has to be because they were not taught. Remedial (it's now euphemistically called "developmental") reading is being taught in colleges, at least two-year colleges. I know because I myself have taught it.

We're not only talking questions of the role of post-secondary education. One time, as part of my job (educational publishing), I visited an elementary school in a somewhat affluent suburban community. In one room I saw a student lying on the floor while a classmate was tracing his outline. In another room there was almost an appearance of anarchy: multiple small groups of students were working at their own pace (and maybe at their own projects) while the teacher visited them in rotation. When I was in elementary school, we sat still and listened to the teacher.

I had already had a good idea that teaching had changed. Because I worked in educational publishing—one of my first jobs—I knew that, in the hands of the "educationists" (those with Ed.D. or Doctor of Education degrees), the philosophy was that you can't teach anything if you can't make it into a game. Teaching has to be sugar-coated as fun. To not do so is to "turn the kids off." No idea whatsoever that some things have to be learned by rote memorization.

So kids today don't learn to spell. They can't do mental math and a cashier in a store would be helpless without his or her register to calculate the customer's change for her.

At least this was where education in America was several decades ago. I frankly don't know if it's  much different now but I am pretty sure that kids are still not learning how to spell.

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Stein

Thoughts on Education in America. Pt. 1. College

Well, maybe I need to refute myself. This is apropos of my January 5, 2013 posting, "What Is College For?"

I read or heard recently that employers are complaining that college-educated young people don't have the skills they are working for.

So possibly my rosy vision of the liberal education is out-of-date, the product of an earlier era—maybe in fact about 100 years ago—when a college education was the province of the rich and the college grad did not have to have a lot of concern about finding a job after graduation. Or if he was going to work, his career might be medicine or the law—two fields for which your undergraduate education would not matter much and could be almost anything.

In those days of a hundred years ago, every educated person learned Latin and Greek—two things not much studied nowadays; and, unless you read old books that might include quotations in Latin an Greek which you were assumed to be able to understand, we pretty much get along without them.

So okay, maybe I have to concede that a college education has to, to some extent and in some degree, be geared to the exigencies of finding employment after graduation.

Even if I have to admit all this, I have to wonder, where to draw the line between "relevance" to something "useful" and clearly imparting job skills, and what I might call well-roundedness? I still have to lament what is not being learned these days. Young people nowadays don't learn, and don't care about, history—which means we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

They don't want to learn about literature or art. So they have little idea of the enormous, millennia-long march of civilization. I'm probably near to admitting that that might not be "useful," but I can't help believing that it is valuable.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Richard Stein

What Is College For?

A few days ago I was again watching the PBS TV program called "Moyers & Company," which is an interview program. That episode's guest was a man called Junot Diaz, who is an author and teaches Creative Writing at MIT. Aside from much of interest in the man's background or personal story, my attention was caught by a (perhaps somewhat incidental) observation he made about a change he has observed in college students over the course of the 20 years he has been teaching.

He said that students today all seem like MBA students; that they are working for a piece of paper like one that would gain them admission to a medieval guild.

In other words (and as he himself said), parents who send their kids to school today are not doing it to build character or maturity or wisdom, or for the sake of any such changes between their temples that might be looked for. Rather, they are there just to be able to get a better job. I, let it be said immediately, am a firm believer in "liberal education." (Does one even hear that term anymore?) That is, I am of the school (no pun) that believes that what education is about is things like learning how to think logically and critically, gaining an appreciation of thousands of years of human cultural advances, and so forth. That is, gaining what once were called "humane values."

If I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Diaz myself, I would have had to chime in with the fact (or opinion) that it's not just a phenomenon of the last 20 years. When I first taught in a collegiate institution, I found the same thing—and that was 45 years ago!

So I would agree that there definitely has been a change in our society's view of college and in its expectations of college. But I have some ideas as to the cause.

First: In the 1960s and into the 70s, in the era of the "counter-culture," student protests against the Vietnam War, and so forth, students were (among other things) fighting for "relevance" in their education. That evidently meant no more "dead poets"; no more history. We want to learn about today's world, we have no interest in (or respect for) the past—including both history and writers of past ages.

Then again, there has been a big change in who goes to college. It's not just the children of well-to-do families, who might be sent to college to acquire a bit of culture before going into the family business or becoming doctors or lawyers. More students—including very many of the young people I was teaching—were the first in their families to go to college. The parents of these young people were sending their kids to college so that they would earn more money. A BA equals dollars: it's that simple.

You put the two factors together, and what you've got is, students from working-class or lower-middle-class families go to some school beyond high school and they want to become system engineers (whatever that is) or network managers—to get a good job in IT or some such field where no one cares about your pedigree. So—don't teach me history. Don't teach me literature. Just the courses directly relevant to my future career. Anything else is a waste of time.

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Stein

A Rant against Conservatives. Part I

Yesterday a guy was here to do some painting for me. This guy is very chatty, so we got to talking—or maybe arguing.

This guy is a typical conservative. His wife came up from a background of poverty, so he has no sympathy for anyone who lives in poverty; says they don't want to work.

And maybe this guy is a little more extreme than some conservatives. He seems to feel he shouldn't have to pay any taxes at all.

But like a lot of conservatives, when he argues, a lot of his facts are wrong. (I believe that these guys know that the arguments they use are incorrect. Conservative in the public eye, like politicians, do that, and this guy showed that he was doing it, too.)** He said that the property tax that he pays goes to our governor. I got out my property tax bill, and not one single item on there has anything to do with state government. It's all local and county: village, township, county, school districts, this district and that district. But nothing at all that said "Illinois."

These people are so accustomed to hearing, and parroting, common canards of the Right. They have no concern for what is or is not true.

He said he has no formal education, and that's uttered as a boast. Presumably education is a bad thing. I'm reminded of the days when I was a college teacher in a college town, in an otherwise rural area. When I had my haircut I'd hear the attitudes of the "townies" toward the university. We were faggots and commies who were there to subvert their wholesome, corn-fed offspring. They called us the "fuckalty."

And my painter reminds me of my father, who didn't know what he didn't know. Or maybe my grandfather. My grandfather always boasted about being a self-educated man. One day he gave me a problem to solve. I asked for pencil and paper, and in probably less than a minute, I had the answer for him. He was amazed. It was basically a rather simple problem in high-school algebra. But he didn't even know that there was such a tool. See, an example of not knowing what you don't know.

What does education do for people? Ideally, rather than just imparting facts, it also teaches critical thinking and has an influence on attitudes.*

And why do these conservative types, like my painter, glory in being uneducated, scoff at education and the educated? Maybe it's because they secretly know that education would disabuse them of a lot of their currently-held, incorrect ideas.
__________
*Update. On the subject of what a nontechnical education can do for you--a favorite subject of mine, see this link: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/05/26/oh-the-humanities-why-not-to-pick-a-college-major-based-on-a-s/

**Update (October 14, 2011). An example of how conservatives lie: This is from an article on Huff Post Politics:

A federal judge ruled in August that the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List had to stop making the claim on its website that "Obamacare" subsidizes abortions because the assertion is false.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Does Education Make Us Liberal?

It's widely known that better-educated people tend to be more liberal—or "progressive," as we might prefer to say since certain segments have done their best to make liberal a dirty word.

And studies have shown this, studies that have broken down voting patterns in the electorate by groups according to years of education.

(Big and important parenthesis: Of course not all college graduates, or even advanced-degree holders, are automatically liberal. It seems to me that people with certain degrees are less likely to be liberal. For example, people with MBAs are, not surprisingly, quite pro-business and often conservative according to other parameters as well. Maybe engineers are not the most liberal sorts, either.)

But the liberally-educated are liberal. (Is it a coincidence that the word liberal has these two uses?) For a long time I've contemplated why this should be so. I think important components of that education which produces liberals are literature, anthropology, psychology, and logic.

Literature and the other arts, I think, are the cornerstone of all this. I think that people who have been made acquainted with literature have undergone several processes: They have had their minds opened to a wider variety of experience and thus perhaps been made to have a more relativistic and less absolutistic viewpoint. (Studying anthropology should do this, too.) They have been exposed to writers' wisdom as to much of life and human experience, such that the reader can be sitting and reading in the most isolated and even (dare I say?) backward time or place and even so, through reading, travel the world and gain experience and wisdom and knowledge of other places and times.

Many writers, filmmakers, and artists of every sort are forward thinkers. Thus the audience whom these artists reach becomes exposed to less conventional viewpoints and perhaps encouraged to question a lot of received ideas and "truths." Remember, if it hadn't been for the value of education and the disseminating of the ideas of the forward thinkers, the radicals, many of us would probably still believe that the Earth is flat.

Psychology, too, teaches us valuable things. The people who have taken even Psych 101 and have learned about human perception would never pay much heed to the idea of seeing Jesus' or the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.

Studying logic might make us more immune to being swayed by, say, political advertising that slams an individual, rather than keeping to the issues. (In logic this is known as the argumentum ad hominen, attack on the person.) Nor as easily swayed by a lot of people who use whatever platform they've got to stir people up by means of rhetoric which, when examined, proves not logically sound. There are a lot of demagogues and such who simply use propaganda that will work on the less wary and will be seen through by those who know more about argumentation. Propaganda was used so well by Göbbels in Nazi Germany but propaganda was not new then and it has not disappeared since.

It might be another subject, how powerful interests manage to recruit masses of people to the views they want them to have, and I have touched on this in other postings.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Populace and Paradox

The voting faction of the US populace—the electorate—frequently does not seem to think very clearly. Everybody wants government-provided services, and nobody favors taxes. How do they think those services are going to be provided for? Where is the government to get the money it needs to provide services, if not from taxpayers' taxes?

Maybe people should bear in mind two extremes and think about which one they'd like better. On the one hand, Sweden is the very model of the welfare state, with health care and many other services taken care of at government expense. Concomitant with that, taxes in Sweden are high.

You could take Mississippi as the other extreme. Government expenditures, for example on education, are low. As a result, Mississippi ranks low on a lot of measures—education, health of its citizens, etc. Also directly connected, Mississippi has low taxes—and a low standard of living. Maybe when government money is spent, that money circulates and makes everybody more prosperous.

Also, polls show that the populace disapproves of Congress. Congress gets a 17% approval rating. On the other hand, when people were polled for their opinion of their own representative, 45% approved. (And historically, nearly 96% of House members get re-elected.) How can the individual congressmen be good and the collective body be bad? Maybe this has to do with a phenomenon I blogged about before: people decry pork-barrel legislation (or "pork") when some other congressman is doing it. When their own congressman is doing it, it's "bringing home federal funds to our district." I see that phrase in the materials that my own congressman sends to his constituents. A verb declension: He's advocating pork, you're not careful with the people's money, I'm helping my district. (Like "He's a tightwad, you're cheap, I'm thrifty.")

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

What Does a Self-Educated Person Know?

I just read a very interesting article in Smithsonian magazine (Oct. 2009 issue). The title is "A World Too New," and the author is Edmund S. Morgan, an emeritus professor of History at Yale. The article has to do with the knowledge and expectations that Columbus had for "the Indies," which affected the outcome of Europeans' early contacts with Western Hemisphere natives.

The entirely of the article is very interesting, but there were two very subordinate thoughts of Morgan's that struck me as very provocative.

First, he says that, before setting out for "the Indies" (the east coast of Asia, as, you recall, Columbus expected to reach), Columbus

was studying the old writers to find out what the world and its people were like. . . . Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.

I truly applaud this observation of Morgan's, about the self-educated person. My experience includes encountering several people who precisely fit that picture. Such people know a lot, but often not as much as they think they do; and, more important, a lot of what they "know" is wrong.

I wish I could identify exactly where the pitfalls of self-education lie. Maybe this—from my own experience—will help shed a little light.

At one point, for the sake of the work I was doing in my job, I decided I ought to have a little more knowledge of organic chemistry. So I got my hands on a college organic chemistry textbook.

Well, the problem was that the organic chemistry course in college usually assumes you've taken a prerequisite course, perhaps inorganic chemistry. And I had not had that course. I had had a high-school chemistry course, and no college chemistry at all. Therefore, I was at a disadvantage in trying to learn organic chemistry. I did not have the background knowledge that the book assumed, I lacked what I needed to make what the book had to say meaningful.

Not that I could gain nothing from the book. The real lesson is, if you don't have a systematic education in a field or subject, if you have bits of knowledge acquired piecemeal, you are going to have some gaps in what you know and understand, and maybe, like the self-taught people I've known, you get some wrong impressions. Imperfect or inadequate understandings are sometimes no better than a lack of understanding. At least in the latter case you may realize that you don't know something, rather than believing you understand the matter when in fact you have incorrect ideas.

Further thoughts inspired by Morgan's article in the next posting.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

The Dumbing (Down) of America

The TV news weather segment includes a "future cast"; what do the producers think the fore- in forecast means?

The TV weather also now speaks of "rain chance" instead of "precipitation probability"—which I guess is too big a word for people to deal with. Also, the heat index is now called "feels-like" temperature. Less brains are required to grasp that, I'm sure.

Another personage on TV, who hosts travel shows, usually does not say, for example, "eighteenth century" but "the seventeen hundreds." Again, I guess that they are assuming a pretty low level of public intelligence.

I just bought a new supply of mouthwash. The previous bottle was called "antiseptic oral rinse," but this one (same product, new label) is "antiseptic mouth rinse." Some marketing exec figures we are all too dumb to know the word oral. Jeez!

And objectively, we in America are getting dumber. Test scores keep falling. Students do not learn to read and write (and spell!) in grade school and are passed on to high school. They do not learn to read and write in high school and are passed on to college. Are they taught to read and write in college? Maybe the colleges try—I for one have taught "developmental" (what we used to call "remedial") reading to college students. But, of course these students should have learned much earlier, and it is a disgrace that it should fall to colleges to make a last-ditch effort to teach what are elementary-school skills.

And many colleges—scandalously—have very lax standards for admission and for graduation, and they will confer degrees on these students—who still can barely read and write!

We keep hearing that what is at risk is America's ability to "compete." I am sure that students in those countries which we fear as competitors—Japan, China, Taiwan, even India—can do a much better job of reading and writing their own languages, even though students in Japan—and even more so in China—have to learn a writing system with far more characters than English has.

I think I have given some of my ideas on what is wrong with American education in another blog posting. Here I will simply say that, when we have very low expectations for the intelligence and knowledge on the part of the public, as we seem to, those expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Americans Can't Spell Anymore

Nowadays, people's competence in English spelling is very poor, at least to judge from what I see people writing in online chat rooms and so forth. No one knows the difference between your and you're. There's also ignorance of the differences among to/too/two, there/their/they're, and even then/than. Hardly anyone, anymore, respects the distinction between it's and its. (This problem, or mistake, has become well-nigh universal.)

Some of these things are not new. I very well remember, when I was teaching college freshman English, some 40 years ago, writing (over and over and over) on student themes, "It's = it is." And it seems no one knows, anymore, how to spell a plural possessive (no, it's not the same as the singular possessive).

To my mind, the blame for this situation rests squarely with teachers. Decades ago (but after I was in school), teachers adopted a philosophy of allowing students to write with no correction or criticism of "mechanics" by the teachers—because it was thought that requiring students to pay attention to mechanics would distract them from expressing themselves and stifle their creativity.

This is part of a larger phenomenon of what is wrong with education. Teachers (and "educationists," those educators with Ed.D. degrees) want to turn all learning into a game and have enormous dread, and avoidance, of ever having to tell their pupils that something must simply be learned by applying a little effort. All out of (to my mind) an exaggerated fear of stifling the kids' fragile little psyches. Maybe this is why, according to many measures, America's kids can't keep up with those in some other countries.

However, if everybody begins to write your when they mean you are, I don't really believe that will mean the end of the world is upon us. Because of my linguistic training, I know that orthography (spelling) is arbitrary, to a degree--with English orthography being more arbitrary than that of many other languages. To spell or write homonyms the same or differently is not going to matter a great deal—unless maybe you want to worry about whether, at some future time, people won't be able to read older literature anymore. Maybe today's authors will be as hard to read, in the future, as Chaucer or even Shakespeare is for us today.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein