On Modern Education
Speaking as an educator of almost thirty years, the free-thinking student is generally undesirable if that freedom of thought has no tether to knowledge of facts, ability to reason, or capacity for meaningful expression. We long ago abandoned teaching students how to think in the disciplined, rigorous ways that require the use of valid logic as the framing guide in which accurate and deep understandings of history, the arts, science, and mathematics can be brought to bear upon a problem, proposition, or idea at issue. Modern American pedagogy offers not even so much as a worthwhile mechanism by which to implement standards for effectively, consistently teaching and insisting upon proper grammar, even though mastery of constructive thinking and expression are at the very heart of shaping a young mind for higher expressive thought and communication. From long and grueling personal experience, I can assure readers that, unless one is very much in love with subject matter at its deep, technical level, teaching is no fun when it requires as much discipline, effort, and continuing thought on the part of the teacher as on the part of the student.
When I was the director of education at a school for court reporters, I had an English teacher with a Master's degree from a most reputable university. She resolutely refused to teach English grammar, even though the course to which I had assigned her was "English Grammar I." She hated grammar, did not understand essentials of it, and knew very well that "grammar is dead," anyway. She wanted to give her students "writing assignments" because that's what is important: all students have to do is write and write—and especially, they should write about their feelings and their opinions—and they will get the education in English they need. She stormed into my office one night after class, frustrated to no end because my curriculum was hard-core grammar, and she was supposed to have covered the topic of what are called "gerunds" that night, and she simply could not, for the life of her, understand what these gerunds were all about. She said, "F*ck gerunds." I fired her.
Ultimately, she was the winner in a way. The accreditation board for the school finally ordered me, under threat of pulling the accreditation, to abolished the two-course sequence in English grammar. I was told, "Grammar is dead."
It is important to point out that exceptional writing does not flow from perfection in form and grammar. I have invited a number of bloggers to contribute at Websites of Dark Wraith Publishing, and many of these writers are not top-notch grammarians; nevertheless, they are good or great writers, and that is why I deem their work important and worthy of publication and exposure to a wide audience. My assessment is good, too: the ability to write well is, to some extent, a gift, but it is a gift enhanced by elements of early life in school, at home, and in other venues that brought forth something special, perhaps not entirely well-formed in terms of grammar and composition lessons retained, but special nonetheless in terms of essential understanding of what makes for a good read.
People learn in different ways and, to some degree, at different rates; and it is surely insufficient to anticipate that teaching will, in and of itself, be enough. Some students will emerge of their own accord as great in math, writing, art, or some combination of areas; most, however, will have to be given years and years of prescriptive, structured, and (unfortunately) repetitive lessons to induce retention and usage. Higher-level expectations brought to bear too soon and in inappropriate venues do not have positive effect and can, in many cases, have disastrous long-term consequences. This is true whether it be the average fifth-grader being taught algebra or the college student being harangued to write and write, regardless of individual ability to form essential thoughts, much less the capacity to express thought in a readable way.
Specifically, that fascination with simply "writing" at the expense of writing from clarity of thought and productivity of expression has gone from brushfire in the 1980s to full-blown conflagration in the current era. Colleges have become nearly obsessed with "writing across the curriculum," holding seminars, pumping out e-mail newsletters, and going so far as to stand upon the precipice of evaluating teachers in part upon how much they integrate "writing" into assessment and evaluation at the course and classroom levels. The assumption, of course, is this: if students write and write and write, sooner or later, they'll write well and communicate meaningful thoughts about the subject matter at hand. (I must note, here, that I am valiantly resisting the urge to conflate this myth with the somewhat erroneous idea that, if a bunch of monkeys are allowed to type long enough, a Shakespearean sonnet will emerge from one of their pages of random characters.)
Old methods and methodologies are the stuff of trash bins when it comes to academia. Our education system flits from one pop-academic airhead theory to the next, and I have seen enough of these brainstorms pushed into service to make me thoroughly suspicious of anything new, whether it be a new idea about how teachers should be "learning facilitators" or some new, high-tech toy the IT department has been suckered by academic-corporate marketers into buying for every classroom on campus. As the uselessness of one pedagogy or toy after another becomes too obvious to ignore, and as a new crop of academics desperately publishes reams of research to get doctorates or tenure, what do we get? Why, we get a brand new banquet of pop-academic airhead ideas, the latest and biggest of which these days is stampeding the ivy under the banner of "assessment," which is the Son of Frankenstein billowing forth from the "accountability" craze that expressed itself legislatively with the abomination of No Child Left Behind and other initiatives that have now fully infected and misdirected critical and precious resources in schools from kindergarten through college.
Whatever the academic fad du jour might be, the results are predictable: in K-12, teachers who are, themselves, the products of woefully inadequate education from their youth clear through to their suspiciously easy degrees in education are expected to impose upon their students standards that the students cannot meet because the teachers cannot teach to standards that are utterly detached from genuinely worthwhile arcs of education; and all of this happens in the context of administrators whose academic training is even more miserable than that of the teachers they oversee; and those administrators are flogged along by school boards comprising ambitious know-nothings cowering to the mindless masses of voters who will shoot down pathetically inadequate school levies, then go out and mortgage their lives to the hilt for their own consumption overdrive.
Do people want something better? No, not at the price they have clearly, unambiguously—over and over again, from one school district to the next, from one state to the next—demonstrated that they are willing to pay. No, not at a price that would include a direct cost in the fifty to sixty thousand dollar-a-year range for starting teachers; no, not at a price that would include giving up the economies of scale of giant, mausoleum-style, mass-education schools and replacing them with lots of small, intimate, localized learning centers; and, no, not at the awful price of resolutely and consistently standing up to pop culture by telling the kids, "No, no, no. Not television, not your iPod, not your friends at the mall. First, foremost, and every day and night, your studies... and I will be there to support, help, and believe in you."
The price of educating kids the right way—the way a whole lot of people know very well is the right way—is far, far too high.
Oh, yes, and one more thing. No more of this 'some people just aren't good at math or science or reading or whatever' nonsense. Do Americans have even the slightest clue as to how ingrained in our culture the excuses for academic failure are? Finding excuses for failure are so much easier than living for reasons to succeed.
As a side note, when the kids decry the difficulties of living in a household where parents insist upon high academic standards, those youngsters can be comforted with the certain knowledge that, when they grow up, they can go on the Oprah Winfrey Show and tell the world about how terrible their childhoods were. (Dear GOD! Expectations?! O, the horror... the horror!)
I need to address one last, really important matter, here. To be a good teacher means commanding respect rather than demanding compliance. The teacher who bullies, cajoles, threatens, and otherwise terrorizes students is doing nothing even remotely related to teaching.
The same goes for the society, itself, and its instrumentalities in law enforcement: we are ruining one generation after another of kids by terrorizing them with massive police raids at schools, making them accept that they have no privacy or speech rights we don't "let" them have, and refusing to deal with the school bullies who create miserable hierarchies of brutality.
And finally, the same goes for parents: violence in word and deed is not merely the raised voice, the threatening hand, or the inappropriate willingness to punish; violence can also be done to children by giving them the awful example of a parent unwilling to live a circumspect life, full of learning, occasioned by fun and games, and always willing to show love even in the most difficult of times. It is, indeed, hard to grow up; do it, anyway. It is also hard to remember being a child; do that, anyway, too.
Here's some good news. At the end of the day, nothing of what I wrote above is actually important, necessary, or even advisable. We are in the decline of Empire. Quite honestly, we would be wasting our time trying at this late hour to do for our children that which we willfully declined to do when we had some chance of making their lives better than ours. At this point, it is better to go out and spend that tax rebate check, bemoan the price of gasoline, and whine about all the ills of society that some new President should fix at the behest of an electorate standing in the breach of a society unable to cure itself through the will and personal sacrifice of its citizenry.
Here's one last piece of good news. Given the current state of our education system, only a few of today's kids will grow to adulthood smart enough to grasp who is to blame for the grim world in which they will live. At the very least, we had damn well better hope these kids don't figure it out before we are all safely in our graves.
The Dark Wraith has spoken.
Comments
Wrote Progressive Traditionalist:
Wrote kelley b:
Good Afternoon, Dark Wraith and associates
The ability to reason cogently is the greatest skill an individual can have.
It is also a good way to get in a lot of trouble with Authority.
While the ability to reason with numbers is an essential skill in understanding the natural world, we all think in words. Mostly. So I would agree with our host that an understanding of grammar and language structure is essential to being able to communicate with other humans.
English is skill I also regretably had to learn on my own, growing up in a rustic area of the South.
Not all areas of the South have an education problem. Certainly affluent families never had to go too far to get an education in private schools. Hence, my conclusion: the dismal state of public education and the resulting inability of most Americans to reason is something that some highly educated affluent people approve.
You can not be an aristocrat without the support of many serfs.
Wrote Progressive Traditionalist:
It is also a good way to get in a lot of trouble with Authority.
Try writing a satire and see what happens....
Wrote Dark Wraith:
Good evening, Progressive Traditionalist.
Although I have no use for the idea that literate people have no need to learn mathematics—and I have made this point very clear in meetings and seminars where mathematics education was assumed to be secondary to literacy—I am mindful of my experience as an undergraduate and graduate student wherein I was in the company of mathematically gifted individuals who were utterly crippled by their incapacity to communicate, to socialize, or even to hold non-hostile conversations. The first stark examples of this I encountered were several young undergraduates who were, by all accounts, math geniuses. They could learn extraordinarily difficult mathematical concepts without batting an eye. They were quite different from the rest of us who were gifted in math but still had our times of tribulation when it came to one kind of problem or another. Those virtuosos had an utter disdain—I mean, a literal hatred—of English grammar, art, literature, history, and anything else that was not quantitative and underpinned by rigorous, symbolic theoretical representations. This attitude infected the whole of their personalities and made them unfortunately very difficult to engage, even in passing conversation. Although I, myself, dislike "collaborative" work, I can do it, as can most others who are somewhat on the loner side. Those ultra-gifted fellows simply could not, and it made for quite a bit of challenge for the department because everyone knew these guys were going to be the cream of the crop when it came to math at the frontiers, but even getting them to work with their advisers and grad committees was a real chore.
Hence, I am truly reticent to get anywhere near the arena of recognizing mathematical ability, in and of itself, as an adequate alternative to a much more well-rounded, communication-based substrate of early learning experiences.
My other example comes from grad school. The first year of economics training was more or less nothing but a brain-beating experience in relatively high-level mathematics of a theoretical nature. The primary areas of work were in vector calculus and probability theory.
For me, it was all pretty easy because I had a Bachelor of Science in math; but this was not the case for others. Specifically, the American students were, for the most part, simply out of their league. The Chinese students were, on the other hand, just fine with all the math. By the second year, most of the American students were gone: some had gotten jobs, some had moved to other universities with econ programs not as mathematical, and still others jumped to other grad programs that were easy by comparison (MBA, poli sci, etc.).
Interestingly, however, in the second year the Chinese students were on the ropes because they were facing the more applied courses where mathematical skills were only part of a broader slate of abilities needed to understand the material, construct the dimensions of problems under consideration, and communicate ideas and solutions.(Although there were plenty of Chinese students in my one field area, econometrics, there were none whatsoever in my other fields, urban economics and development economics.)
The few Americans still around in the program were doing better. This also applied to the research work, as well, since research begins with formulating problems, communicating the issues at hand, and then designing a research path to derive clearly communicable answers to clearly communicated problems formulated. The American students were better at this because they had the broader slate of skills at their disposal.
The conclusion I drew from these experiences—and at that time I had already become a teacher of remedial math courses for undergrads—was that the essential skills most people need to do math are skills of language and expression, not math, per se. For me, the math is obvious; but this is not the case for most people. Simply expecting most others to function by my learning method, see-math-do-math, fails utterly; and, if the truth were to be told, that's a really good thing because math that is genuinely usable begins with comprehension skills and expression abilities. If I can get students to think in clear ways, and if I can get them to then articulate clarity of thought into clarity of expression, I am on the right road to getting them to learn the math they'll need to be not just productive students in a well-rounded, liberal arts college education, but also productive workers in their careers and jobs, as well as clear-thinking, good citizens in their individual capacities as members of the public body.
That, for what it is worth, is the perspective of the Dark Wraith.
Wrote trog69:
Math has been a gargantuan thorn in my side. I realize how important math is to understanding many things I am interested in, yet I am unable to even figure out how to translate a word problem into a coherent algebraic equation. there is some disconnect that I haven't been able to overcome, that makes me unable to insert the variables properly. Extremely frustrating. I had absolutely no problem in the introductory algebra course I took at the Comm. College, but the next course, beginning algebra or whatever it's called, was a nightmare that took less than 3 weeks for me to drop like molten lava. The teacher's Greek(?) accent was no help, nor the fact that he was supplying the answer to the problem on the blackboard before I had finished writing out the equation. Answers to my ever-more puzzled questions became gobbledygook.
My lack of education frustrates me constantly.
Wrote trog69:
I look forward to reading the forecasts from your link at the sidebar, but first I'd like to mention that I've just this minute finished watching an interview(diavlog) on Bloggingheads.tv between Robert Wright and Robert Reich and one issue discussed was the Bear Stearns bailout. Mr. Reich proposed that the taxpayers should receive some type of equity out of this transaction, rather than just funding the bailout itself.
Wrote trog69:
Last Tuesday, for instance, the Fed dropped short-term interest rates another 0.75 percentage points to 2.25 percent, hoping to revive financially squeezed banks and encourage consumers to borrow and spend.
While this may encourage consumers, the banks seem to have no intention of fulfilling the wanna-be debtors desires. There has been no movement downward of lending rates so far.
Prolly just waitin' 'til Memorial Day or sumpin, to make it more spatial, nowhutahmean, Vern?
Wrote Lisa Ranger:
"She said, "F*ck gerunds." I fired her."
Now, had she said, "f*cking gerunds," that might've been a different story. . .
You say "decline of the empire," and I am inclined to agree. But you do not say, "destruction," or "end," so won't making the effort to behave well still be important? Perhaps without recourse to all the indulgent distractions, people will have little choice but to return to a semblance of sanity in terms of entertainment, etc. Do you think?
Wrote Dark Wraith:
Good evening, Lisa.
When people are deprived of their bread and circuses, they will have to make their own food and entertainment.
For food, they will take from their young; for entertainment, they will make the wars that eat their young.
The Dark Wraith recommends the Old Testament for some fine examples.
Wrote Lisa Ranger:
Dark Wraith,
I have moments of unjustified hopefulness. You're probably right--people have proven themselves rapacious and selfish throughout the ages. "Me and mine" is their motto, so when you say "take from 'their' young," I presume you mean in the collective. I find the selfishness which only cares for one's backyard as discomforting as not caring for any backyard.
Probably always has been a war of all against all, with the learned overlay of a thin civility to protest otherwise.
Wrote Lisa Ranger:
Addendum: While Voltaire was right, in that we should tend to our own garden, we must not use up all the fertilizer and all the bulbs, etc. We must have an awareness that pesticides we might choose will run off and possibly poison a neighbor's plot. So while tending one's own plot is necessary, it must be with an eye to the community's garden, as well.
Ah, Spring's in the air. . .
Wrote crzypt:
Greetings Dark Wraith,
Your comments on the students of yours who were exceptionally good at higher math, but complete disasters when it came to 'normal' interaction with other humans certainly brought back some memories
My first (and only....) formal instruction in Geometry was given by exactly that sort of person. The guy was so in love with the "purity" of mathematics that when asked for a single practical application for his field, as an aid to my own motivation to take him at all seriously (his Standard Uniform of piss-yellow Lacoste shirts and plaid golf pants certainly wasn't helping matters....) , his indignant response was "Practical applications don't matter. My task is to teach you how to think"
Given that my heroes at the time included the likes of 'practical men' like I.K. Brunel and Henry Maudslay, this obvious contempt for the Real World (as I saw it) was enough to set us on a collision course from that moment on, ultimately resulting in my being removed from his class by the school Administration. Presumably, Plaid Man registered a complaint with higher levels about my habit of studying hopelessly practical texts like Guitar Player and Fine Woodworking magazine (literally) right under his nose, in preference to listening to anything he had to say in class
The sad thing is, that as I grew older and finally shook off my early hatred of the subject, I found many uses for Geometry and even started to enjoy it to a limited extent. While I will accept my full share of blame for being a stubborn kid, I would also point out that a simple demonstration of how useful the 3-4-5 triangle can be for constructing a Big right angle (such as found in most building foundations, for instance) would've opened my childish mind, not closed it for decades to come
I sometimes still think of Plaid Man sometimes, though, and wonder if he can look at a four-centered arch and see the same thing I see: a shape of sublime beauty, expressed in physical space. Or does he turn up his nose at the 'corruption' of his Pure and Noble discipline?
Hmmmm....
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Your host of this Weblog is an award-winning college teacher and writer who specializes in economics, finance, mathematics, business administration, computer hardware and software skills, and English grammar and composition. His extensive writings on the history of the English language appeared on About.com in the avatar of the Selig Wraith in the 
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Hello, Mr Wraith.
I have, on a number of occasions, defending the teaching of algebra and higher math to those students whose course of study lies in other directions as practical instruction in an empirical system of logic. For many people, this is the only instruction they will ever receive in that area.
It is refreshing to see you apply the same argument toward grammar here.
And yet I wonder, why is it, exactly, that you would claim the primacy of grammar over algebra?
I understand that thought is expressed through words. Yet there are certain types of thought for which words are entirely insufficient, such as geometric shapes.
Please explain.
Also, I have a friend that teaches English. The book Eats, Shoots & Leaves is her favorite resource for punctuation.
Not so sure about general grammar.
Note the sentence fragment above, as this makes two.