My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, and Learning - Volume 4

These five people were all deep into academia, education, and schools, and in different ways all came to very strong criticisms against a failing and broken system. I largely agree with all of them.

'Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling' by John Taylor Gatto

John Tayler Gatto was a public school teacher for decades. He won both the New York City Teacher of the Year and New York State Teacher of the Year awards. Eventually he left public schools and wrote books on how schooling harms children. Two quotes from the book will help you see key insights:

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

“Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

This book helped me to realize that there are teachers who spend their whole careers in government schools, to later realize that it isn't the good thing that they had hoped it would be.

'Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning' by John Hattie

John Hattie has a PhD in statistics and did a research study of over 900 other studies on education. I think there's a danger in this that it's easy to see kids as statistics, and it's easy for statistics to be wrong purposefully or accidentally. There is a strong bias to focus on what can be measured and to ignore obvious things that can't be measured. And, many things are hard to measure. Hattie does work on addressing these issues, as he says in the book:

"The fundamental thesis of this book is that there is a ‘practice’ of teaching. The word practice, and not science, is deliberately chosen because there is no fixed recipe for ensuring that teaching has the maximum possible effect on student learning, and no set of principles that apply to all learning for all students."

I like that Hattie points out how the system of schooling is broken. He has a bar graph in the book showing results of studies, and references that in his criticisms here:

"The most important conclusion that can be drawn from Figure 1.1 is that ‘everything works’: if the criterion of success is ‘enhancing achievement’, then 95 per cent+ of all effect sizes in education are positive. When teachers claim that they are having a positive effect on achievement, or when it is claimed that a policy improves achievement, it is a trivial claim, because virtually everything works: the bar for deciding ‘what works’ in teaching and learning is so often, inappropriately, set at zero.

With the bar set at zero, it is no wonder every teacher can claim that he or she is making a difference; no wonder we can find many answers as to how to enhance achievement; no wonder there is some evidence that every student improves, and no wonder there are no ‘below-average’ teachers. Setting the bar at zero means that we do not need any changes in our system! We need only more of what we already have – more money, more resources, more teachers per students, more . . . But this approach, I would suggest, is the wrong answer."

I think studies like this are interesting, but I don't think they will change anything of importance. Hattie has good suggestions, but it's unlikely that they can be made successful on a large scale inside of a system incentivized against being successful in this way. This book helped me to realize that even math can point to the school systems being broken, but it struggles with providing any useful answer.

'The Aims of Education' by Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead was a mathematician and philosopher. He gave a few speeches on education that I quite like. This essay is only 10 pages. In rereading the first five pages to get a good quote, I have a series of quotes that together really explain his thesis and argument:

"In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas" -- that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations."

"Except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment, education in the past has been radically infected with inert ideas."

"Let us now ask how in our system of education we are to guard against this mental dryrot. We enunciate two educational commandments, "Do not teach too many subjects," and again, "What you teach, teach thoroughly.""

"Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child's education be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible. The child should make them his own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of his actual life. From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery."

"Choose some important applications of your theoretical subject; and study them concurrently with the systematic theoretical exposition."

"The best procedure will depend on several factors, none of which can be neglected, namely, the genius of the teacher, the intellectual type of the pupils, their prospects in life, the opportunities offered by the immediate surroundings of the school and allied factors of this sort. It is for this reason that the uniform external examination is so deadly."

"Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow."

"The solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum."

I didn't realize until rereading this just now how closely this aligns with the tutoring concepts that I've been developing about student-led interest as a core hub with spokes of other subjects connected to it. I think I've gone further, and developed a superior system incorporating the interests of the parents as well, but Whitehead has done well here. This paper helped me realize that a genius in math and symbolic logic also saw the alternative path that education should be on as opposed to traditional schooling.

'A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form' by Paul Lockhart

This is a mind-blowing essay because it paints math not a useful skill, which it is, but as an art that a practitioner can love and enjoy like creating a poem or a painting. He makes the case, and makes it well, that how math is taught is ridiculous, and that beyond the basics math is worth doing for its own sake. The whole thing is 25 pages and well-worth the read. Here are two paragraphs:

"In place of a natural problem context in which students can make decisions about what they want their words to mean, and what notions they wish to codify, they are instead subjected to an endless sequence of unmotivated and a priori “definitions.” The curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature, seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on. No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a “mixed number,” while 5/2 is an “improper fraction.” They’re equal for crying out loud. They are the same exact numbers, and have the same exact properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?"

"All this fussing and primping about which “topics” should be taught in what order, or the use of this notation instead of that notation, or which make and model of calculator to use, for god’s sake— it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors: your patient is already dead."

This essay helped me to realize that even math doesn't need rote memorization beyond basics, it needs interest, engagement, exploration, and discovery.

'The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students' by Allan Bloom

Bloom taught at major universities in the US, France, Canada, and Israel. He published this book in 1987, before many other people realized the declining state of education in the US. Look at how strong the subtitle of his book is. Three of the books in this list have strong subtitles that help explain a lot of the problems in education. To a large extent Bloom talks about how the universities fell into the trap of the paradox of tolerance, although I'm not sure he specifically references that phrase. He talks about how everyone considers everything relative, both the professors and students as well as the institutions and society, and how that has eroded the idea of truth and led to nihilism, which is a lack of belief in anything, with a tyranny of political correctness starting to fill that void with conformity and intolerance. Here are four short quotes:

“Students now arrive at the university having been deprived of the intellectual tools necessary to understand their own tradition.”

“The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance.”

“Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.”

“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending.”

This book helped me realize that this underlying philosophy has been eroding the American culture for a long time, and will continue to do so, and how difficult and pervasive the paradox of tolerance is to navigate.

Conclusion

These five works are almost an overwhelming amount of good insights about education.

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