MGTutoring.com. A Rational Perspective on Education.

In “Arne Duncan, Among the Scientists” (Curriculum Matters Blog on Education Week; August 25, 2009 12:21 PM) Sean Cavanagh writes:

[Secretary of Education Arne Duncan] also stressed the potential for the money to help states and schools recruit new teachers in math and science. Today, too many students are taught by educators who don’t know the content in those subjects, the secretary noted. He made another pitch for differential pay for math and science teachers, as well as for teachers in other high-need subjects, possibly spec-ed and foreign languages. He also mentioned the importance of increasing access to AP programs, and singled out a teacher-training program, the University of Texas’ “UTeach,” for helping produce the “next generation of great leadership” in schools. Interestingly, those remarks came on the same day that the Dallas-based organization that’s seeking to replicate the UTeach model and expand AP access said that its participating schools have seen a major increase in AP passing scores.
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Overall, American schools need to churn out students with better math and science skills, said Duncan, who, as he has previously, cited mediocre U.S. scores on international tests as a source of worry.

“We’ve become complacent,” he told the audience. “We’ve sort of lost our way. This is huge challenge for us.”

© 2009 Editorial Projects in Education

And they are looking to be complacent in the future.  Sean Cavanagh, in “Grounded in Content” (Published Online: December 4, 2007, Published in Print: December 5, 2007)  gives us an illustration of the fact that UTeach seems to be the same old John Dewey-influenced mess:

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We’ve accepted a Trojan Horse into our midst: mainstream modern education. It has a nice appearance, but within carries an element of destruction.

We want to believe that it produces students who, upon graduating from high school, are competent (or better) at reading, writing, math, history and science.

We believe high school graduates should possess the math skills they need to make change, balance a checkbook, finance a car, invest in savings instruments, and understand science. They should possess the political and historical background knowledge they need to make intelligent, considered decisions when voting. They should understand science so they can contend with issues of “global warming,” technology, health, and medicine. They should be able to write logical, developed prose for everything from work, to letters to friends and family, to testimony in courts of law.

It is clear that, regardless of whatever else it may accomplish, the primary role of education should be the systematic, conceptual training of the young by teaching them the general knowledge and thinking skills needed for adult life.

But we are seeing few students graduating with such training today. Education, like a Trojan Horse, might look good on the outside, but inside it is dumbed down, it is about non-conceptual “social activities.” This is necessitated by the major theoretical underpinnings of mainstream modern education: the philosophy of John Dewey.

John Dewey said, in “My Pedagogic Creed,” that:

“the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities;”

“language…is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. … When treated simply as a way of getting individual information…it loses its social motive and end;”

“there is, therefore, no succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum;”

“education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”

This is a clear call — one that has been put into practice — to de-emphasize and neglect the conceptual training, the general knowledge, and the thinking skills students need.

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It is well documented that there is a problem with mainstream modern American education (including some of its streams and tributaries): many high school grads are unprepared for college level work; illiteracy in our culture has been increasing for decades; standardized test scores are up while the difficulty level is dumbed down; many are ignorant of basic science and history; many high school grads record poor writing skills, an index of poor thinking skills; businesses report that they are getting more and more people out of school who do not have the math, writing, reading, thinking and communication skills needed for the job.

To save education and the country, President Obama and Congress are pumping millions into education via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to improve the infrastructure of education, “reform” education, and get “better” teachers into teaching.

Another reformer, Alex Klein, writing in Education Week  (“What I Want When I Teach,” June 11, 2009), proposes saving education through “merit pay”. Mr. Klein argues on the basis that “studies over the past 15 years have conclusively and consistently shown that the largest determinant for student success is teacher quality.” He suggests measuring “merit” with National Assessment of Educational Progress tests “coupled with…district- or school-level human evaluations.”

These proposals sound nice, but they hinge on the mainstream of education improving itself. Its track record, however, through all the other decades of “reform,” strongly indicates that it will hire and promote more of the same methods, ideas and curricula — all of which it is holding onto with a passion — that have gotten us where we are today.  Teachers colleges, likewise, will continue to train teachers in the methods, ideas and curricula that have gotten us where we are, but with increasing vigor, since “reform” is ringing in the air.

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Group-think, “consensus,” determines truth, Dewey said — and in consequence the trend in education is to focus on and push “group work.” Having students — our very children — alone reading or writing is anathema to the “progressivist” program. Their program does not focus on the full intellectual flowering of the individual (again, that’s our children we’re talking about!), does not focus on the full development of the cognitive virtues, powers and strengths of the individual for her own sake. After all, the Deweyians believe, in the individual there is no truth. Truth to them is in social interaction.

Yes, there is some individual work today — but only as an artifact of the past, only to “satisfy” people until the “progressivists” complete their program of “social change.”

If, that is, they are allowed to complete it; if, that is, they are not challenged; if, that is, no one stands up for rights, reason, reality and the individual. Some people stand up for the right things, thank goodness.

In “Solitude: A Flashlight Under the Covers” (Education Week, Published Online: May 27, 2009), Diana Senechal writes to remind people of the value of individual work:

Online social networks are not the only forces tearing away at solitude. Schools bombard students and teachers with the rhetoric and practice of group work. Students must learn “communication and collaboration,” according to proponents of so-called 21st-century skills. Teachers must “facilitate,” according to proponents of the workshop model. State standards include a substantial social component in every subject; one could easily have a “standards based” math lesson with no math at all, only group processes.

Schools seem to have forgotten that students need ample quiet time for thinking, reading, and puzzling over problems. Even a whole-class discussion can be much more quieting and contemplative than a room buzzing with little groups. It is not at all good to be visibly “engaged” at every moment; one also needs room to collect one’s thoughts and separate oneself from one’s peers. Why is this not recognized?

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Mr. Campbell identifies some important reasons why schooling is in the bad shape it is today: too many teachers and professors regard teaching as “moral training,” i.e., as pushing their own point of view on students; and too many teachers and professors train students in irrationalism: reason to them is evil or to be avoided, but going on emotions or ‘gut feelings’ or what the student is told is good.

Ask yourself what it accomplishes, if students cannot think for themselves. In what periods of history do we find people who cannot reason and think independently? Is such a state of personal identity and of social mores values we should strive to achieve? Who does it benefit, if students cannot think for themselves? What do people use for guidance, when they cannot use reason to guide themselves individually by facts and reality?

In “The Classroom Without Reason” by Douglas Campbell (April 27, 2009 on the National Association of Scholars Website), Mr. Campbell — lecturer with the Department of Recreation and Parks Management at California State University at Chico, CA — said, after giving some examples of discussions he’s had with students in which the students would be unable to articulate a reasoned viewpoint, but were instead emotionalistic:

Where does such [irrational, emotionalistic -- MG] thinking in university students come from? The answer is that it comes from the university itself. [And from primary and secondary schools!! -- MG] As further evidence I offer the following example. Recently, I completed a required program of instruction that was intended to improve my teaching. Among the required readings were two particularly disturbing books presented as critical to our personal and professional development. The first, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, by Stephen D. Brookfield, stated that our job is “to increase the amount of love and justice in the world” and “change the world.”[1] Brookfield described faculty with an “anti-collectivist orientation” as “obstructionist dinosaurs standing in the way of desirable innovation and reform”(249).

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