Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

For a while now I’ve anticipated that the next installment of this series would be about power. Since Jay has broached the subject, I guess it’s finally time to get around to writing what I’ve been planning!

A quick review of my Unified Field Theorem of Education Reform:

Part 1: Education reformers shake out into two groups, which I call the “liberal artists” and the “pragmatists.” The liberal artists want to teach first the three Rs, then traditional “academic” content more generally. Their strength is their insistence on tangible accountability for teaching all children; their weakness is their overreliance on standardized testing – now culminating in the current effort to create a government-controlled national testing regime which logically implies the further step of imposing a single curriculum on all schools under the control of a central authority. The pragmatists want to make education in various ways “more relevant to real life.” Their strength is their desire to create new models of education that will prepare students better for life in the (changing) world. Their weakness is their tendency to discount (in practice if not in rhetoric) the value of traditional academics, and especially their fear of accountability systems.

Part 2: Both sides undermine not only education governance (the focus in Part 1) but pedagogy as well. The pragmatists want to abstract “skills” from “content” and focus on teaching the skills; they fail to appreciate that the only way to learn skills is by leaning content. You can never teach “skills” directly. The liberal artists want to abstract “knowledge” from “practice” and focus on teaching the knowledge; they fail to appreciate that all the really important knowledge is intricately bound up with practice, and can only be learned practically.

Part 3: Liberal artists need to get over their testaphilia, and pragmatists need to get over their testaphobia. A vast quantity of what students deperately need to learn must be learned in ways that can’t be tested with the level of objective systematization the liberal artists insist upon. You can “test” practical knowledge but not in the ways the liberal artists want – and not in ways that can be effectively used as the basis of an accountability regime. Yet standardized testing, and more generally the “rote” “regurgitation” of “mere” “facts,” is always going to be a crucial part of good education. In Daniel Willingham’s language, you can’t get to the “deep structure” of problems, which is what the pragmatists want, until you’ve first mastered the “surface structure,” which is the rote facts the pragmatists disdain. You have to walk before you can fly.

Running through all this is the tension between governance and pedagogy. Once we decide what we want schools to do, how do we structure the system to try to get them to do that?

The links beteween each camp’s pedagogy and governance, both in their good and bad aspects, run much deeper than it may at first appear. What’s really at stake is our view of the human person.

An analogy to politics will help here. In modern political philosophy there are basically three anthroplogies on offer. They give rise to different political systems.

• You can be cynical about human nature, thinking that people are basically bad. This leads more or less directly to an explicitly authoritarian, implicitly totalitarian tyranny of “enlightened” despots. Because people are basically bad, no one can ever have legitimate power (no one deserves it) and the world will really operate by illegitimate power no matter what you do. So you might as well give the power to the smartest people so they will at least make things run more smoothly and everyone will have an easier time of it. Machiavelli and Hobbes fit this model.
• You can be naive about human nature, thinking that people are basically good. This also leads more or less directly to an explicitly authoritarian, implicitly totalitarian tyranny of “enlightened” despots. Because people are good, they will naturally want to cooperate to make everyone better off, which of course means putting things under the control of the smartest, best people. And those people ought to have the power to coerce everyone’s cooperation, becasue such power won’t really need to be exercised very much – just enough to encourage people to get over their less powerful selfish tendencies and live into their natural desire to benefit others, which is (underneath the superficial layer of selfishness) really their deeper and stronger desire. The payoff from giving dictatorial power to experts is huge (because the experts are not only smart but good and trustworthy) and the cost is small (because the power won’t have to be exercised much). Rousseau and Hegel fit this model.
• You can take a mixed view of human nature, thinking that people are both basically good and basically bad. They need freedom to do their good stuff, but also enough restraint to keep them from getting out of line and destroying other people’s good stuff; the rulers, in turn, must be strong enough to restrain violence, but not so strong that they themselves become unaccountable. This is the anthropology of liberal democracy, freedom of religion, and the entrepreneurial economy; Locke, Montesquieu and Madison are its architechts.

The thing to note is that societies cannot be counted on to remain faithful to one model. In particular, the mixed model on which liberal democracy, freedom of religion and entrepreneurial economy are built is really darned difficult to maintain. We are constantly falling away into cynicism on the one side (e.g. Cass Sunstein, Catherine MacKinnon, Saul Alinsky) or naivete on the other (e.g. Michael Lerner, Alan Wolfe, Jim Wallis) with the same disastrous consequences every time.

How does this relate to pedagogy and governance in education? I propose that education needs to be based on a mixed model, but is constantly falling away into one or the other of two truncated models – and that’s why substantive education issues are constantly being hijacked by brute political power.

Look at the liberal artists. How did we get to a point where the people dedicated to the full flowering of human knowledge represented by “traditional academics” are in the process of reducing the content of education to what can be measured by bubble tests – and lining up to create a national dictator that will reach into every school in America and crush everything that isn’t bubble tests?

It’s because their anthropology privileges intellect over action. A human being is a mind that has a body. What they want is to educate the mind. The body is really of no concern to them. Even the mind is only of interest insofar as it knows things – the mind’s ability to do things through the body is not interesting. Re-reading my first post in this series, this is really clear in the exchange between Jay and Checker about whether schools should teach things like “entrepreneurial attitudes.”

Checker Finn’s ideal school

This anthropology implies an aristocracy of intellect. The system should serve the interests of those who are capable of learning. The liberal artists think they’re egalitarians and democratizers because they stick up for the poor black kids who want to learn – and, as I have said over and over, they’ve done us a great service. They have indeed been the great titanic warriors against race and class aristocracies. But there are other kinds of aristocracies as well. The liberal artists only stick up for the kids who want to learn in a certain way: the intellectual way, the bubble test way. They want the whole system to serve only the kids who desire to know for knowledge’s sake – and that’s not most kids. What about the kids who want to invent new things, or acheive greatness in other ways, and who might be willing to learn academics as a stepping stone to that but not for its own sake? They’re chucked into the maw of the intellectual tyranny.

Ken Robinson was wrong (in that video back in Part 1) to attribute this anthropology to the Enlightenment; it is actually far older, and has historically been associated with undemocratic power structures. Mind/body dualism was the philosophy of Greco-Roman aristocracy – Athens was the only democracy of any importance in the ancient world, and it executed the great dualist Socrates. Even during the Enlightenment, those who strongly embraced mind/body dualism (like Descartes) were strong supporters of traditional power structures. It was those who challenged mind/body dualism, like Locke, who ushered in democracy.

What about the pragmatists? It’s tempting to say that they have the opposite problem – they think kids are bodies that have minds. But that’s actually wrong. The strength of the pragmatists is that they’re not plagued by mind/body dualism.

Their problem is egalitarianism. They don’t want education to result in inequalities – no inequalities of life outcomes, but more fundamentally, no inequalities of educational outcomes. To draw a distinction, even in thought, between those who can accomplish more and those who can accomplish less is itself wrong. Anything that tends to reinforce the appearance of such distinctions, or (worse) explicitly assume such distinctions and build on them, is in principle radically evil.

This explains their testaphobia and their general aversion to accountability systems. It also explains why they are de facto but not de jure hostile to traditional academics. They have no objection to academics in principle – provided the illusion of equal outcomes is not punctured. But, of course, it always is. Much safer to stick to content-free, purely “practical” projects that teach “skills.”

The picture offered to us is one of glorious diversity in which every child is radically different, and none of the differences matter.

“You can think for yourselves!”
“Yes! We can think for ourselves!”
“You are all individuals!”
“Yes! We are all individuals!”

Naturally, while the liberal artists are striving to build an aristocracy, the pragmatists are striving to build a tyranny of the majority – the mob rule of unlimited democracy. This was their original sin going all the way back to John Dewey, whose perfidy begins right at the beginning when he sets out to redesign the whole educational enterprise to produce, not the fullest possible flourishing of human capacities, but people suited to fit the new, radical political system that early 20th century progressives were working so hard to build. Human beings are little clay figures just waiting for Dewey and his acolytes to mold them into the politically convenient shape. All the worst aspects of educational pragmatism can really be traced back to this original politicization of the project.

So both camps find substantial resistance to their desires – the liberal artists, in children who are capable of achievement but don’t highly value knowledge for its own sake; the pragmatists, in children who are capable of excellence (even the kinds of excellence pragmatists claim to value) and need special nurturing to achieve it.

And both camps, their vision cramped by narrow anthropologies, fail to see the legitimacy of this resistance. To them, the resistance appears to be simply obscurantism. Hence they feel perfectly justified stamping it out by force.

And naturally, when they seek power, they both reach for the strongest of all social weapons in modern culture – science.

Say that you favor a given approach – in education, in politics, in culture – because it is best suited to the nature of the human person, or because it best embodies the principles and historic self-understanding of the American people, and you will struggle even to get a hearing. But if you say that “the science” supports your view, the world will fall at your feet.

Of course, this means powerful interest groups rush in to seize hold of “science,” to trumpet whatever suits their preferences, downplay its limitations, and delegitimize any contrary evidence. If they succeed – which they don’t always, but they do often enough – “the science” quickly ceasees to be science at all. That’s why “scientific” tyrannies like the Soviet Union had to put so many real scientists in jail – or in the ground.

This was, again, the original sin of Dewey and the whole “pragmatist” movement in early 20th century philosophy. The goal of that school was to undermine the philosophical structure of knowledge on which real science depends, so that they would then have a free hand to bend “science” to their will. I believe it was George Orwell who said that philosophical pragmatism amounts to saying that truth is determined by who has more guns.

But the liberal artists are no longer very much better. They didn’t used to flatten their understanding of a good education down to the level that could be measured “scientifically” on tests. But the imperative to seek power and crush resistance has driven them to that point.

How, then, do we escape from both aristocracy and mobocracy, and undo the tyranny of science? Stay tuned.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

This week Jay highlighted the fact that a study showing a positive correlation between test prep activity in the classroom and improved learning is being portrayed as having shown a negative correlation between test prep activity (“drill and kill”) and improved learning. At this point it’s not known (at least to me) where the error arose, and I don’t have anything to say about the question of who said what. But I think it illustrates how the whole subject of drillandkillaphobia needs to be revisited.

Lately I’ve explored in some depth how testing has come to be the focal point of the fight between the two great factions in the education space, the “liberal artists” and the “pragmatists.” Liberal artists have gradually come to invest all their hopes in standardized testing. Pragmatists have gradually come to invest all their fears in precisely the same thing. This is a mutually reinforcing circle – over time, the liberal artists increasingly think testing must be good because the pragmatists hate it, and the pragmatists increasingly think it must be bad because the liberal artists love it. So naturally the battle line over testing has become more and more absolute.

The problem, as I’ve tried to show, is that this dynamic causes each side to reject something that’s essential to good education. The liberal artists seek curricula (or standards that can only lead to curricula) that emphasize sterile head knowledge of facts to the exclusion of practical problem-solving. We don’t know how to test what Daniel Willingham calls “deep knowledge” of subject area content, and even if we did the tests would be almost infinitely vulnerable to manipulation if they were ever used for accountability purposes. But we do know how to create rigorous tests for head knowledge of facts, so the liberal artists define “subject area content” to mean simply head knowledge of facts.

The pragmatists do the opposite. And since I was pushing pretty hard last time to emphasize what I thought were the dysfunctions of the liberal artists, I’d like to balance the scales with something about drillandkillaphobia.

Merely mention the subject of testing and it seems that pragmatists instantly jump to the conclusion that you want schools to look like this:

Now the interesting thing is that these days, they will engage in the most hysterical drillandkillaphobia while all the time affirming that we need to keep standards high, content knowledge matters, etc. To some extent I think that must be intentionally tactical – P21 knows that its flavor of loosey-goosey crunchy granola doesn’t sell these days, since they’ve lost a lot of battles in the war of ideas. But I don’t think that explains all of it. Take another look at that Ken Robinson “Changing Paradigms” video, where he begins by saying that of course we don’t want to lower standards. Clearly he, at least, really means it. It seems completely obvious to him that there’s no contradiction between his attacks on testing and his affirmation of high standards.

And that’s the problem. It seems so obvious to him that he fails to even take the question seriously. (That was one of the key points in Willingham’s stimulating critique of Robinson’s video.)

If the liberal artists need to get over their testophilia, the pragmatists need to get over their drillandkillaphobia. I’m not aware of any hard evidence linking test prep to worse outcomes. Sure, lots of people are really convinced that it must be the case, but that’s hardly a solid ground for making policy. (The floor is open in the comments section if you have some hard evidence you want to share.) And it’s not like this is a new question. I’ll admit that I haven’t done an exhaustive review of the research (again, if you have, the floor is open) but Jay and I conducted a study a while back showing that attaching rewards and penalties to a test doesn’t change the results; that would seem to speak right to the heart of drillandkillaphobia. This new Gates Foundation study, finding a positive correlation between test prep and learning outcomes, would seem to be another piece of evidence against it.

People can’t learn what Willingham calls the “deep structure” of practical problems until they’ve learned what he calls the “surface structure.” You can’t get from the pool deck to the bottom of the pool without passing through the surface of the water; similarly, you can’t get to deep (i.e. practical) content knowledge without first getting shallow (i.e. factual) content knowledge. If you like, it’s “merely” or “sterile” head knowledge. But head knowledge it is and head knowledge it will remain, even after you add the “deep” part.

People learn head knowledge by memorization. And any kind of memorization will appear, to those who wish to stigmatize and delegitimize it, to be “merely” “rote” memorization. You can call it “regurtitation” when people know facts, and in a sense you’re right – but people do need to know facts and be able to summon up that knowledge as necessary, whether you call that “regurgitating” or not. And for everyone but the real genius students, gaining head knowledge of facts will involve some kind of “drill.”

As the pragmatists themselves never tire of reminding us, real learning is hard. Well, yes it is. You can’t learn if you don’t memorize stuff. Memorizing stuff is hard and unpleasant, and it’s a lot more so for some kids than for others. That’s the world; deal with it.

I fully admit that if you really want to learn you are never just memorizing. You must be trying to understand the facts you absorb – understand their significance and the connections between them. But while it must be more than memorizing, it is never less than memorizing. Of course, if it must be more then by definition it can never be less.

Take that great, perennial boogyman of rote memorization – historical dates. People whine, why does it matter in what year a certain event occurred? Well – why does it matter? If you stopped and seriously asked that question and sought out the answer, you might . . . well, you might learn something.

The great irony, of course, is that at the same time the pragmatists are pushing this new bout of drillandkillaphobia, they’re working hard to impose a federal-government controlled system of national testing – excuse me, a totally “voluntary” system of “common” “assessment” that has nothing to do with the federal government, nothing to see here, move along, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. That really is an attempt to handcuff real learning and turn us all over to the benevolent dictatorship of soulless men in white coats who must be trustworthy because, after all, they’re scientists. And that, of course, was always the original sin of the Progressive movement, in its educational form as in all other forms. Handing over all power to a tiny priesthood is the very epitome of “democracy” as long as we’re careful to call the priests “scientists.” But now I’m broaching a whole new and much deeper subject, one that will require another post to handle with any justice.

(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.