Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Picking up (after a month of constant travel) on my effort to build a unified field theorem of education reform, I want to respond to a strong challenge Jay issued to my use of the word “skills” in my original post.

I used the term “basic skills” to refer to the three Rs, without even thinking about it. I didn’t even stop to define it; after Jay challenged me I thought he had misunderstood what I meant by that term, so I went back and posted a clarification. But it turned out Jay had understood me perfectly well. He just wanted to challenge that use of the term.

I think this is likely to be a crucial issue in my effort to reconcile the legitimate interests of “liberal artists” with the legitimate interests of “pragmatists,” so it’s worth pausing to hash it out.

Jay pointed me to this article by Daniel Willingham: “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?” I haven’t had nearly enough time to digest it fully, I’m afraid, but I’ve digested enough of it to offer what I think is a useful next step in thinking about this issue.

First off: In a discussion of the controversy between teaching the three Rs (and all the other things liberal artists want) and teaching critical thinking (and all the other things pragmatists want), why did Jay challenge my conception of what it means to teach the three Rs and then, to back up his challenge, point me to an article on critical thinking? Why not an article on the three Rs?

Because this is, really, an article on the three Rs, and on the whole liberal arts agenda more generally, disguised as an article on critical thinking. Presumably that’s how he got it published in American Educator – an organ of the AFT! It’s the educational equivalent of the Sokal hoax. Willingham has a bunch of pragmatists – teacher union pragmatists, no less – publishing liberal artist propaganda. It’s a brilliant practical joke.

…or so I thought when I first looked at it.

But the more I look at it, the more I think the joke is as much on us liberal artists as it is on the pragmatists.

Willingham’s thesis in a nutshell:

First, critical thinking (as well as scientific thinking and other domain-based thinking) is not a skill. There is not a set of critical thinking skills that can be acquired and deployed regardless of context. Second, there are metacognitive strategies that, once learned, make critical thinking more likely. Third, the ability to think critically(to actually do what the metacognitive strategies call for) depends on domain knowledge and practice.

The idea that critical thinking isn’t a skill is the real core of the article:

Critical thinking does not have certain characteristics normally associated with skills—in particular, being able to use that skill at any time. If I told you that I learned to read music, for example, you would expect, correctly, that I could use my new skill (i.e., read music) whenever I wanted. But critical thinking is very different. As we saw in the discussion of conditional probabilities, people can engage in some types of critical thinking without training, but even with extensive training, they will sometimes fail to think critically. This understanding that critical thinking is not a skill is vital. It tells us that teaching students to think critically probably lies in small part in showing them new ways of thinking, and in large part in enabling them to deploy the right type of thinking at the right time.

Rather, critical thinking is what emerges when you do a good job of teaching content. That’s because learning “to deploy the right type of thinking at the right time” only happens when you learn a specific field. You don’t learn the scientific method by studying the scientific method (which is what is implied by calling it a “skill”). You can learn about the scientific method that way; that is, you can acquire “head knowledge” of facts about it, facts that could be regurgitated on a test. But it doesn’t make you any better at actually using the scientific method. Studying biology, on the other hand, will make you better at the scientific method because you’re actually using it. It will even make you better at using the scienfic method in all other disciplines, even the ones you haven’t studied. That’s because in your study of biology you’re learning 1) knowledge of the “deep structure” of problems in that field, and 2) “contextual cues” in that field that signal you when to do what. That knowledge, and not “the scientific method” learned as a skill in its own right, is what helps you figure out “deep structure” and “contextual cues” in other fields.

So the pragmatists, who want to focus on “critical thinking” as such, have it all wrong, and the liberal artists, who want to focus on teaching content, have it all right. Right?

Wrong.

Throughout Willingham’s analysis there is an emphasis on how critical thinking emerges from learning these content-specific disciplines in practice. You learn “deep structure” and “contextual cues,” not by studying deep structure and contextual cues as such, but by learning specific disciplines like biology. However, you learn deep structure and contextual cues in biology, not by reading books about biology, but by doing biology. You conduct experiments, you do field research, etc. You go out and solve problems and create knowledge.

Look again at one particular phrase in my description of Willingham above: studying the scientific method as such wouldn’t make you any better at using the scientific method, but it would give you facts about it – the kind of thing you could regurgitate on a test.

And there’s our problem. We liberal artists really do have a strong tendency to reduce content knowledge to “head knowledge” of facts. If you can pass a test on a subject, you know the subject. But – and here we are hoist on Willingham’s petard – that is not the kind of content-specific knowledge that leads to good critical thinking.

Obviously we need to have head knowledge. Students need to learn facts. That’s vital. In particular, for all the reasons outlined in my original post, I think the emphasis on standardized testing emerged for good reasons, and standardized testing needs to remain an important part of our educational landscape.

And I’m not giving up my position that the pragmatists, in their zeal to equip students with critical thinking, creativity, the entrepreneurial mindset, etc. have historically sought these qualities at the expense of, rather than in addition to, content knowledge – and that this has historically had devastating effects.

But I’m also sounding a red alert that we liberal artists have gone just as far wrong in allowing our zeal for accountability – which in practice has come to mean “testing” for too many of us – to drive us into a reductionistic approach to what content knowledge really consists of.

I wonder if it would help to go back to Aristotle’s concept of “intellectual virtues.” He classified the goal of education as imparting not skills or facts, but virtues. And alongside the “moral virtues” he put “intellectual virtues.” Indeed, he thought the two were not just equally important but interdependent; you couldn’t have one without the other.

He warned that a “virtue,” whether moral or intellectual, cannot be reduced to either just a personal characteristic we possess or a thing that we do. If a virtue is just a characteristic, then we’re “virtuous” while asleep or in a coma; if a virtue is just a thing that we do, then our “virtue” depends as much on circumstances outside us as on our character. Rather, virtue must be something that is both active and intrinsic.

Aristotle solved this problem by proposing that virtue is a habit. To possess a virtue means to be in the habit of doing the right things at the right times.

Now, I suppose (stretching just a little bit) that the reductionistic tendency of the pragmatists is to pursue their goals – critical thinking and so forth – as merely something they want students to do. They seek the activity but not the intrinsicness. And the reductionistic tendency of the liberal artists is to pursue their goals as merely something they want students to have inside them; they seek the intrinsicness but not the activity. It might help us to start thinking of learning as the imparting of good habits – to intrinsically possess the quality of being prone to do the right things.

But whether Aristotle helps or not, it seems to me that a recovery of good education must be neither a turn away from the practical toward the academic, nor a turn away from the academic toward the practical, but an acknowledgement that, by separating the two, we have really lost both.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Herewith I offer my first attempt at a grand unified field theorem of education reform. It’s a first attempt. Critique, suggestions, praise, horror, abomination, or testimonies of reveltory epiphanies are all equally welcome.

Most of the education space is divided into  two loosely congealed groups. There is a lot of diversity within each group, and sometimes there are nasty fights within the respective groups. But the big landscape is most fundamentally dominated by the dividing line between the two groups.

One group wants schools to focus on teaching basic skills first, and then a traditional liberal arts curriculum, to all students. The other group wants schools to be, in various ways, more “relevant to real life” – including everyone from down-to-earth, leathery-handed blue-collar voc ed advocates to pointy-headed, pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower touchy-feely progressives. Let’s call these groups the liberal artists and the pragmatists.

[Clarification: When I say “basic skills” I mean the three Rs.]

My formation and career have been entirely among the liberal artists. Ever since I read Dewey in college and recoiled in horror as if from the face of Satan himself – and indeed I can think of few intellectuals whose work has been more useful to Satan than Dewey – I have known that whatever else schools must be, they must not be what Dewey wanted.

But lately I’ve been increasingly worried about some of the stuff that leading liberal artists are embracing, and I’m losing enthusiasm for some of the core liberal artist commitments. And some of my pragmatist friends are hitting me with increasingly plausible arguments.

For example, most of what’s in this video seems to me to be not only true, but urgently needed:

And I found myself troubled by something in this exchange. Boiled down, it ran like this: Checker Finn sounded the alarm that P21, a key pragmatist organization that wants to destroy basic skills standards, even to the extent of suggesting that schools should really teach less algebra, was being incorporated into the push for national standards. Jay responded more or less with, “yes, and you should have seen that coming, because we told you so.”

Jay was, of course, right. But both Checker and Jay seemed to take it for granted not only that P21 wants to destroy academic standards, which it does, but also that the very idea of anyone wanting schools to provide practical applications, teach critical thinking or “instill an entrepreneurial mindset” is dangerous. That strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I want my daughter’s school to instill the entrepreneurial mindset.

And I don’t even buy the idea that applied or attitudinal outcomes are unmeasurable. We may not yet have an agreed-on way to measure them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not measurable. As Milton Friedman said, if you can measure it, measure it; if you can’t measure it, measure it anyway.

I think when Jay describes these things as “unmeasurable” what he really means is that they can’t be measured for accountability purposes, because that kind of measurement can be more easily manipulated. And there’s the rub; too many of us liberal artists have now reached the point where we’re only thinking about accountability, not about education.

Hence, my attempt to construct a grand unified field theorem.

I still think the liberal artists have a powerful historical case against the pragmatists. To speak in a fairly broad generalization, in the 20^th century, K-12 public schools mostly gave a traditional academic education to middle-class (and above) white kids, and all the other kids were barely educated at all (if they were even in school). That problem was bad enough in the beginning, but it actually got worse over time, not better, even as the rest of society did a better and better job of including marginalized populations. That’s primarily because the school system fell under the thrall of the pragmatists, who didn’t value traditional academic education, and were even actively hostile to it because they thought it was inimical to learning practical application, critical thinking, creativity, the entrepreneurial mindset, etc.

The practical result of such thinking has always been the same. In the white suburbs, parents are rich and powerful enough to place limits on how far the schools go in gutting the traditional academic curriculum. Fail to teach a rich white kid algebra, and his mom and dad will notice, and they will make their presence felt. But in poorer and darker-skinned communities, while parents may want basic skills education just as much, they have less ability to make their demands heard. So the kids didn’t learn basic skills, and as a result, nothing else the pragmatists tried to teach them worked either.

The rise of standardized testing was the revenge of the liberal artists. They wanted to force schools to teach basic skills to every child. And bully for them! They’ve accomplished much good in doing so.

Yet it doesn’t work in the long term. Yes, to some extent you need to hit institutions over the head when they misbehave. But that alone cannot make an institution work. You can hit some of the people some of the time, but you can’t hit all of the people all of the time – as NCLB has shown. And if you try to make the club big enough to hit everyone over the head all the time, you’ll be giving way too much power to the people who hold the club – who watches the watchmen?

What’s needed to make institutions work is intrinsic motivation. People have to want to do what they ought to do, not primarily because of some extrinsic reward or punishment but because they understand it to be good in itself. No extrinsic motivations are strong and consistent enough to keep people doing what they need to be doing day after day after day.

And on that score, we liberal artists are not offering what we need to offer. We’re just hitting people over the head with basic skills tests. Watch that video again – that’s the voice of the professional educator who wants to educate the whole child, and doesn’t understand what basic skills tests have to do with that. He even affirms his desire for “higher standards,” but doesn’t understand why standardized tests are necessary for that.

I don’t think his view is adequate by itself. I think he’s missing the value of traditional liberal arts education. But if we want people like him to adopt what we have, we need to offer intrinsic motivation for liberal arts education – and that’s going to mean connecting our concerns to their concerns.

I’ll cut out the rest of the verbiage and come to the main point: Education needs to integrate the legitimate concerns of the liberal artists – basic skills and traditional academics – with the legitimate concerns of the pragmatists – a focus on active problem solving, creative thinking, and entrepreneurial innovation.

There are two main obstacles:

1. Liberal artists and pragmatists see each others’ concerns as mutually exclusive. To pragmatists, time spent on basic skills and liberal arts is time wasted pursuing a failed 19th century model of education, time that could be spent on teaching kids how to solve real-world problems and connecting with their real-world needs. Meanwhile, to liberal artists, time spent on all that practical stuff is time that will ultimately be wasted because it’s outside of effective accountability structures that will ensure the schools teach all children basic skills and traditional academics.
2. Some people have discovered that they can get credit for talking about integrating the two concerns without actually integrating them. See for example P21, which has been making noises about basic skills and 21st century skills being a “both-and” proposition. So are they now prepared to state for the record that schools should teach more algebra, not less? Eh, not so much.

The answer? School choice, of course. It solves both the liberal artists’ problems (how do we force schools to teach poor black kids how to read, and raise standards across the board for all kids?) and the pragmatists’ problems (how do we create new models of education that will prepare kids better for real life?) without a naïve reliance on changing schools through brute force systems (the most widespread fallacy among liberal artists) or neglecting to hold schools accountable at all (the most widespread fallacy among the pragmatists).

Coming next: where fighting the unions fits into all this.