Anthony Cody notes that the definition of education has become increasingly utilitarian, thus narrowing what is taught and learned only to the skills that make students college-and-career ready. Joy in learning, aesthetic delight in the arts, the intellectual pleasure of history and literature take a backseat to that which is marketable. Are we all meant to serve the needs of corporate America?
He writes:
“One of the undercurrents fueling concerns about the Common Core is the relentless focus on preparation for “college and career.” Education has always had dual aspirations – to elevate mind and spirit, through the investigation of big ideas, and the pursuit of fine arts and literature, and the service of the economic needs of individuals and society. What we are feeling in our modern culture is the absolute hegemony of commercial aims, as if every activity that does not produce profit is under assault.
“And in our classrooms there is a parallel assault on activities that do not “prepare for college and career,” which has been redefined, in practical terms, as preparation for the tests that have been determined to be aligned with that goal. Preparation for college and career has begun to feel more and more like “preparation to make yourself useful to future corporate employers.”
Cody finds that Mario Savio’s famous rant in 1964 against the ties between the university and the corporations presaged what is happening today. Savio might as well have been speaking for the moms and dads of today when he said fifty years ago:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Cody adds:
“In our classrooms, the use of standardized tests to measure and monitor learning, and the imposition of ever-more tightly managed and even scripted curricula, make teachers and students feel as if we are part of a machine. The canaries in the coal mine are the students who do not fit in. But our modern system has a pharmacological answer for that, as this recent New York Times magazine article reported that more than one in ten children between ages 4 and 17 are now diagnosed with ADHD, and many of them are medicated daily. That is 6.4 million children. Before the early 1990s, this number was less than 5%. What has changed? According to the report,
“During the same 30 years when A.D.H.D. diagnoses increased, American childhood drastically changed. Even at the grade-school level, kids now have more homework, less recess and a lot less unstructured free time to relax and play. It’s easy to look at that situation and speculate how “A.D.H.D.” might have become a convenient societal catchall for what happens when kids are expected to be miniature adults. High-stakes standardized testing, increased competition for slots in top colleges, a less-and-less accommodating economy for those who don’t get into colleges but can no longer depend on the existence of blue-collar jobs — all of these are expressed through policy changes and cultural expectations, but they may also manifest themselves in more troubling ways — in the rising number of kids whose behavior has become pathologized.”
“Our education system, in attempting to make everyone fit the same standardized mold, so as to be of maximum usefulness to future employers, is medicating those who don’t fit the mold.”
Cody ends with a veiled prediction that spring 2014 may see the biggest effort ever by parents to remove their children from standardized testing.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am scared for Preston’s education.
Elaine Sweeney
Who is Preston?
Yes. It has become too outcome focused and not focused enough on the experience and time well spent the children are having. We have also reduced our “mission” and focus through language that is too limiting and not timeless enough (like “career and college ready” and “21st Century skills.”
I have sent the following to my sup, my state sup (who was kind enough to call me on the phone to chat about it) and my principal (whose door is always open for chatting about the direction of our school). Some people say mission statements are just words—but words are what we use to keep ourselves grounded in focus; and lately the words we use to describe the mission of public education are pointing us in a stifling direction.
My idea:
The mission of __________, encompassing students, families, faculty and staff, is to participate in a thorough and well-balanced (elementary) education that is encouraged by resourcefulness and the joy of discovery; aided by dedication to teaching and learning; strengthened by community within the school and in connection with our community at large. We are partakers in the merits of equitable and data-informed planning, and guided and governed by democratic ideals as espoused in our (State Constitution) for the purpose of enlightening our students to seek truth and deliberately become respectful stewards of that which they impact as they work towards opportunity in their futures.
—–
It sure beats the heck out of “stakeholders” and the relativism of “21st Century skills” (which, by the way, we are 15 years into and have 85 to go. . .so unless we truly think we’ve mastered the 21st Century, we elude ourselves). Furthermore, it is a larger vision than simply college and career (take for example the little kindergartener we lost a few weeks ago to a fatal accident. . .are we to assume her education meant nothing because she never made it to the level of “college or career ready”? Surely not).
—————–
When I have mentioned tweaking CCSS to make it useful (and to not waste what has gone into implementing it so far), I mean to use it for standards. But not, as Anthony illustrates, for standardization. There is a difference. And a way to do that. I think.
I just finished listening to “Makers”, a book by Chris Anderson that describes the future of manufacturing technology and marketing in our country. Anyone reading this book would see the preposterousness of standardized testing as a means of increasing our country’s economic well-being… we need to move in precisely the opposite direction if we want to play to our country’s historic strengths. Standardization will yield high test scores and conformity but will not fuel creativity and individuality… and creativity and individuality is what makes our country and our economy strong.
Not to be pedantic, but Savio’s eloquent and prophetic speech was the furthest thing from a “rant.”
Would that we had a cohort teachers today willing to “put themselves upon the gears” of the vicious social vandalism and looting that goes by the name of education reform..
Part 1
Anthony Cody has missed the main point, the “raision d’etre” of public schooling. Cody writes that “Education has always had dual aspirations – to elevate mind and spirit, through the investigation of big ideas, and the pursuit of fine arts and literature, and the service of the economic needs of individuals and society.”
However, the main purpose of public education was to prepare a citizenry for democratic citizenship. And today, that ought to be the theme of genuine education reform, reform that restores to pubic education its original mission, that of cultivating democratic citizenship.
Democratic governance is supposed to be “of the people, by the people, for the people. It’s supposed to promote the general welfare of “the People” Indeed, the Constitution specifies that as one of its core purposes.
A democratic society is predicated and contingent on a citizenry that understands and is committed to democratic values. Pericles defined them more than two millennia ago: openness, popular sovereignty and majority rule, equality, justice, tolerance, and promoting the general welfare. In any democratic society, the people ARE the government. Aristotle noted that democracy (demos) is the populace, the common people. Thus if all citizens are part of self-rule, then they are “a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.” That is the essence of the social contract.
In Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, the first power provided to Congress is the power to tax for the “general Welfare of the United States.” And yet, there are those who claim that taxation is “evil.” That it destroys “freedom.” It seems that many of these same people are the ones seeking to rob the public treasuries, diverting taxpayer money from promoting the general welfare to pumping up private bank accounts. Many of these very same people are engaged in a type of education “reform” that blames public schools for the travesties and problems that they caused while simultaneously trying to cash in on public school funding.
democracy:
My reading of the American Revolution is that taxation played a very big part in triggering the whole thing – not to mention the various post-Independence rebellions. I think you are grossly simplifying how the powers established in Article 1, Section 8 actually get implemented, i.e., who and what is taxed and at what level.
The US is also a Representative Democracy which operates differently than Democracy in Ancient Greece.
I am currently reading Glenn’s The Myth of the Common School. I also just finished John Taylor Gatto’s History and Jonathan Lyon’s The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America. The debate over the role of schools in engendering practical skills versus civic attitudes is long-lived and apparently endless. I, along with Ben, see no reason why they are presented as mutually exclusive. I do not see why the absence of a “whiff of democratic citizenship” in the mission statement is something to be alarmed about. Now if the content of the history and social studies curriculum did not accurately and extensively address the Constitution and our form of Government then that would be alarming.
I believe taxation *without representation* was the big issue. Not taxation per se.
Dienne:
In part, yes and certainly that meme was used as part of the political struggle. However, the levels of taxation and what was taxed also played a significant role in fueling the struggle for Independence. During and after the Revolution the issue of taxation, both its form and level, were major issues as they remain today. For example, Britain had an Income Tax 100 years before the US.
Bernie, the thing that played the biggest part in the American Revolution and the founding of American government was personal freedom, that is, the idea that there was a dire need to protect and enlarge the rights of the individual against the government (of which taxations was a part).
The Declaration extols “unalienable rights.” The Preamble to the Constitution spells out the purposes for creating a new government, among them to “secure the blessings of liberty” and to “promote the general welfare.” The Bill of Rights were explicitly tacked on to the constitution to ensure that rights were protected.
It’s be a myopic mistake to think the Revolution was simply fought over “taxation.”
democracy:
I absolutely agree and never thought otherwise. The issues of individual Liberty was and is far more critical. The debate over what is good for the individual and what is good for the group is (and should be) never-ending. Issues of taxation are but manifestations of that deeper debate.
Part 2
Public education holds a unique place in democracies. It’s important (and not simply for “elevating the spirit” and for “the pursuit of fine arts and literature”). It’s why Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1794) that “The influence over government must be shared among all men.” It’s why many early advocates for public schools –– Jefferson, George Washington, Horace Mann, for instance –– agreed that democratic citizenship was THE primary function of education. Aristotle called it “the character of democracy,” later described by University of Chicago social scientist Earl Johnson as “the supreme end of education in a democracy.” John Dewey put it this way: ““the democracy which proclaims equality of opportunity as its ideal requires an education in which learning and social application, ideas and practice…are united from the beginning and for all.”
But look at the Mission Statement form the Common Core standards initiative: “The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.”
Not a whiff of democratic citizenship. Zilch.
Many of the big-money foundations –– Gates, Walton, Robertson, Bradley and Koret Foundations –– push “market-driven” corporate-style “reforms.” They are supported by the likes of Pearson (the testing behemoth), ETS (think College Board and PSAT, SAT, AP, and AccuPlacer), ACT, Achieve (funded by big business), McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin and Microsoft. And by big bankers (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan) and hedge-funders. And by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
These groups have pushed incessantly for corporate and upper-bracket tax cuts and laissez-faire regulatory policies, which caused a huge pile-up of deficits and debt, and led to a shattered economy. The supply-side policies these organizations pushed to have enacted led to increases in poverty, millions of lost jobs and houses, a corporate culture that fosters off-shore tax evasion and funds oligarchic ideology, and gross income inequality. They broke the economy. But the perpetrators point the finger of blame at public education. The Chamber says the Common Core standards “are essential to helping the United States remain competitive” in the global economy. The Business Roundtable says that increasing student achievement via the Common Core is vitally important to increasing U.S. competitiveness (the Roundtable even resurrects the “rising tide of mediocrity” myth).
The big lie is the American “competitiveness” is tied to student test scores. It’s not. The U.S. already is internationally competitive. When it loses its competitive edge, it’s precisely BECAUSE of the policies the “reformers” (the Chamber, Roundtable, Gates & Walton Foundations, etc.) have championed, and want even more of.
Democracy matters. A lot.
I’m worrying that it doesn’t matter enough.
In fact, American competitiveness is tied to the fact that we’ve been able to have a relatively stable form of democracy for a long time and because of that, other countries are willing to trust our dollar. In short, other nations believe that we will do what we say we will do. This is significant given our resources. We WILL lose the edge when we start showing our cracks from the inside. It is imperative that we teach our children how to DO democracy.
I agree with democracy, but I’d argue that before all else education has always been about the development of the mind through the training and use of our intellectual and sensory faculties, including “big ideas”, the fine arts, and literature; that was the point of the trivium and quadrivium. The economic benefit was always secondary (or at least indirect)—Those who were well educated tended to make wise decisions and investments that were ultimately profitable.
The great failure of modern “education” (really schooling) has been the conceit that we can mold our children into productive units by applying various techniques of teaching that provide only the “economically useful” aspect of education under the banner of “efficiency”. This was the nonsense of Taylorism applied to public schools by the élites of the late 19th Century, who wanted to enshrine their political and economic domination. CCSS is just the 21st Century version of this oligarchic utopianism.
Is this nostalgia for the good old days that never actually existed?
I went to the equivalent of an exam school in the UK. The type of enrichment outlined by Anthony simply did not exist except in the most perfunctory way. The broad-based intellectual curiosity portrayed in the movie The History Boys did not exist in my school. I do recall going to see Othello at the Old Vic with Sir Laurence Olivier and a lecture by Sir William Bragg on Crystallography at Imperial College – but these were “events” and bore little relationship to what took place in the classroom. Most enrichment activities were after school and were primarily student driven, funded and coordinated. For example, as a Sixth Former, I took over and ran the Chess Club arranging matches and selecting teams. Brooklyn Castle, another good movie, depicts a type of nirvana that is the exception that likely proves the rule.
My first introduction to US schools was through Wiseman’s High School (1968) – a dark, somber and thoroughly depressing depiction of school as a type of total institution (Etzioni). I don’t recall the teachers or students evincing any “joy in learning, aesthetic delight in the arts, the intellectual pleasure of history and literature.”
I asked my wife who taught HS German and French for close to 15 years in the 70s and 80s and again a few years ago, the extent to which her schools had this kind of joy in learning, aesthetic delight in the arts, intellectual pleasure of history and literature environment. She laughed in disbelief but added that her first US school did have an excellent Band. Apparently she was one of the few teachers who organized outside cultural activities such as a trip to see the stunning examples of Federal Architecture in Portsmouth’s Strawberry Bank and a trip to Boston to see Mozart’s Magic Flute performed by the Salzburg Marionette Theatre after working through the libretto in German. It was the first time many of her students had actually been out of New Hampshire.
I strongly suspect that joy in learning, aesthetic delight in the arts and intellectual pleasure of history and literature are reflections of the attitudes and interests of individual teachers rather than attributes of a school system – unless there is a critical mass of such teachers in a school. It is hard for me to imagine that teachers would not continue to project these same attitudes and interests with or without standardized testing.
Does anyone have any evidence to support that there has been a change in the frequency and scope of such enriched school environments? According to the following NCES report there has been some small reduction in resources but hardly at the level that warrants a sky if falling piece.
Click to access 2012014rev.pdf
Maybe some nostalgia but we can certainly say public schools are far removed from the ideal Dewey advocated and to which some teachers and school districts tried to emulate. I remember there being a piano in one of my elementary classrooms and that one of my teachers could play the guitar. Because she had these skills and more autonomy than teachers today music didn’t have to be a pullout class only. And of course we mustn’t forget that because of the limited opportunities for women, the most talented of a generation may have found themselves in a classroom.
Emmy:
Interesting. To what extent was the Dewey ideal ever met.
I fully agree with your last point. As a doctoral student in the 70s, I was a TA for courses at a Graduate School of Education. The women were far more accomplished than the men – by almost an entire GP. (At the undergraduate level, where I taught economics, there was no discernible difference.)
It’s one thing to not meet an ideal. It’s quite another to institute revanchist policies that seek to efface those ideals, which is what so-called education reformers are doing.
“I strongly suspect that joy in learning, aesthetic delight in the arts and intellectual pleasure of history and literature are reflections of the attitudes and interests of individual teachers rather than attributes of a school system – unless there is a critical mass of such teachers in a school.”
My own school experience back in the dawn of time [50s-60s] supports this. It was a college town dominated by intellectuals, musicians & artists w/a scrappy leftist political bent. Tho schools were overcrowded by the baby boom, there were piano & art supplies in every [rural] elem classroom; a good 50% of ms & hs teachers had the time & the academic freedom to delve way beyond the basics. Although I agree such teachers would “continue to project the same
attitudes and interests with or without standardized testing”– the number of annual stdzd tests reqd there today (about three/yr compared to 1 every 3 yrs in my day) would preclude sufficient classtime to pursue curriculum to anywhere near the same depth.
S&F Freelancer:
Do you have data on the actual frequency of these tests and how much time actually is devoted to them? There is much noise but little data that allows the actual sizing of the issue. Would testing be such an issue if it no longer played a role in the evaluation of teachers?
My wife tells me that Parochial Schools used to require batteries of standardized exams at the end of every school year that were handled by the Diocese. These reinforced the curriculum but she says they appeared to have little impact on how teachers taught: Some were inventive and stimulating and some were uninspiring and drudges.
Bernie, I know of no actual studies of this. However, I do know that test prep for K-12 schools has been a BOOMING INDUSTRY in the U.S. ever since NCLB. One assumes that if schools are buying Test prep books in enormous quantities that they are actually using them, which means that they are spending a GREAT DEAL OF TIME doing test prep. And, of course, all of the basal programs have been infected with the test prep virus. Almost all have a test prep feature in every lesson–typically one that concludes the lesson. There is also a booming industry in practice tests–lots and lots of companies who sell these. So, it’s not a matter of just how much time is spent actually taking the tests but how much time is spent doing test prep per se and of the extent to which the rest of the curriculum has been distorted. I have not met a teacher or administrator in many years who has reported to me anything but a situation in which the testing has basically become all important. Typical comments include, “Well, it’s February, so the school year is effectively done. We’ll spend the next few months preparing for the FCAT.”
Robert:
I would prefer actual focused data before drawing conclusions, preferably from steady state conditions rather than at the beginning of a new curriculum and curriculum driven assessments. Many text books already have chapter or module tests attached. Teachers decide how to use such tests. Without seeing these dreaded tests it is difficult for me to assess the need for and usefulness of extensive test prep. You may be correct as to the distortion of the CCSS-related testing protocols.
I would also prefer to see the actual additional costs of CCSS materials before hanging too many publishers from the nearest lamp posts.
“Would testing be such an issue if it no longer played a role in the evaluation of teachers?”
NO, NO, and NO. Testing would not be such an issue.
VAM is suffocating the profession, plain and simple.
Threatening careers and livelihoods using invalid, unreliable, and unproven assessments has over-pressurized the system. Stressed out teachers cannot possibly be at their best in the classroom. The degree to which VAM has demoralized and divided teachers cannot be overstated. A pall has been cast over the profession that is debilitating teachers and pushing many excellent and experienced veterans out the door much sooner than they wanted. Gloom is the operative word, a very bad, bad vibe in my district.
Testing would still be an issue even if it were decoupled from teacher evaluations. The testing is an issue because it is dramatically distorting curricula and pedagogy. Just yesterday, an elementary school teacher of my acquaintance told me that at her school, kids are no longer going to do YA novels because, or so her administration has decided, the time has to be spent doing “close reading” of short selections LIKE THOSE THAT WILL BE ON THE TESTS.
Robert:
But what did your acquaintance actually mean when she said they will no longer be reading YA Novels? I understand the value of such reading and the need to encourage it, but where and when is such reading taking place? Is it done collectively in class? (This was how we did our set books for O-levels in the UK and it was tedious beyond belief.) Are her students somehow being prevented from reading YA novels outside of class time. Is this focus really something new? Wasn’t it the basis of the SRA reading labs of the 60s and 70s? My wife’s HS English Literature books appear to be exclusively anthologies that are suited to such detailed analysis – but my wife assures me she had weekly outside reading she had to do as well. How is the CC approach different from this earlier approach?
Bernie, let me share where I am coming from. I earn my living as a freelance writer of educational materials. So, I see a LOT of what publishers are doing in response to the CCSS. I cannot talk about specific products for obvious reasons, but I can say that in almost every case, what I see is lessons about particular works being distorted because those lessons have to deal with some particular predetermined standard rather than with whatever students need to understand in order to get at a particular work.
Think of this: Suppose that you are going to be teaching Beowulf to 12th graders (In the U.S., most high schools do English lit in 12th grade, though some do world lit at that level). Now, there are many, many ways to approach teaching Beowulf. My preferred way is to emphasize how very, very ALIEN to modern sensibilities the poem is. The poem mentions people and events from the late 5th century C.E. (15 hundred years ago). The poem itself was written down in Anglo-Saxon 3-to-6 hundred years after the events that it describes. So, it’s very, very old, and life, then, was extremely different from anything that kids are familiar with. I like to have kids imagine that they are archaeologists trying to piece together the ways of life, values, customs, beliefs, rituals, material culture, etc., of the peoples who lived in these times. The reading of the poem provides an opportunity for kids to learn a LOT about what a CULTURE is–the sum of all artifice transmissible by a people from one generation to the next. I see study of the poem as an opportunity for kids to experience, in their imaginations, what it would be like to live in very different worlds. To the extent possible, I want them to imagine what it would be like to inhabit the skin of a 5th century Dane or an 8th century monk. And that means a lot of work. Where did you live? What did you eat? How did you plow the earth? What did you wear? How were decisions made? What rules did you follow? With whom did you associate? What roles did different people play? What stories did you tell? How did you sleep at night? What were you afraid of? What were your hopes and desires? What did you wonder about? What did you admire? What do we take for granted today that was not present then? I want them to consider why our word “lord” comes from the word hlaf-warden (guardian of the loaf) and our word “lady” from the word hlaf-digge (kneader of the loaf). I want to take the kids outside an let them try plowing the ground, in the late spring, with a digging stick. I want to play for them a clip of James Burke, from the Connections series, attacking a side of beef with a broadsword and to imagine what it would be like to face THAT in battle. I want them to experience, in their imaginations, the precariousness of a life perched on a rocky outcropping in the middle of a harsh winter by a cold northern sea. I want them to imagine plunging into a bog and seeking out a cave beneath it. I want them to play a handheld harp and recite to it.
So, I see study of the poem as part archaeology, part method acting–as archaeology in service of imaginative recreation so that kids can begin to understand WHERE WE CAME FROM AND WHAT OUR ANCESTORS FACED.
But the typical publishing house editor, today, will see the poem as one of three hundred occasions to practice the list of abstract, general skills for formal analysis that make up the CCSS in ELA. Reading the poem will be boiled down to, say, identifying two themes and tracing their development (literature standard 11-12.2) and analyzing how the author’s choices concerning how to structure parts of the text contribute to its overall structure (literature standard 11-12.5).
And so, a lesson that grows out of the specific text and that builds, richly, on the possibilities that text presents becomes just another exercise in generalization about literary form. What a horrific diminution of the possibilities!!!!
But that is what is being done in the name of the Common Core.
I think of the authors of these “standards” and think, “Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Robert:
That sounds like a splendid month long effort. I genuinely mean that. But where and in how many HS is such a lesson currently being taught?
Bernie, that particular teacher is in a school in which, each year, the class as a whole would do a few YA novels together, and part of what work would be teacher led, part guided, and part independent. In each case, there was an opportunity for an extended study of a particular people, place, time, set of circumstances. One novel took place in India and dealt with a child bride who was widowed. Another dealt with the Lodz Ghetto. Kids would learn a LOT, in the first case, about a culture very different from their own. They would learn a LOT, in the second case, about the Second World War, the Nazis, the Holocaust, and the Resistance. Those units are out. In their place–disconnected selections, an incoherent curriculum. This bit of practice on standard x with this selection. That bit of practice on standard y with that selection. Here’s why that is a problem: Knowledge builds on knowledge, and many essential skills are learned not through explicit instruction in them but through practicing them in some meaty, meaningful context.
Robert:
I am not trying to be argumentative because the specifics you provide are a welcome relief from what I see as generalized and largely content free arguments that are very difficult to assess. In addition, as I have mentioned before, I am much more attuned to mathematics than to ELS. But less me ask, why cannot books like Homeless Bird be assigned as outside reading with in class discussion of the book once some kind of book report has been completed? I recognize the value of the holistic approach and reading and working a rich book in class seems valuable. But is there really so little value in the more focused work during class or could essentially the same issues/standards emphasized in the CCSS be covered using a text like Homeless Bird? My apologies if my questions are too naïve.
Well, Bernie, I learned that way of approaching Beowulf from a teacher named Chris Ney who headed the English Department at Munster High School, in Munster, Indiana. Of course, I took it in directions that Ms. Ney didn’t. But today, I’m pretty certain that if Ms. Ney is still teaching, she is working with a new CCSS anthology that contains NONE OF THAT and under administrators who are telling her that her kids need to be spending that time doing the test prep practice in the new online prep product that they have bought.
How wonderful, Bernie, that you know Homeless Bird! I am impressed! The problem is that the standards for literature at any particular grade level are a small selection from among all the skills that might be relevant to the study of particular literature. If one is to have students study Homeless Bird or Yellow Star or Charlotte’s Web, one should begin with the text and ask, “What is key to understanding this text?” not “Where in this text can I find something that I can use to teach standard x.”
Robert:
Actually I have not read the book – but I will find it and read it today. I figured out which book it was from your description, read the available sample and checked the length to estimate how long it might take to read and work through. Clearly it is relatively short compared to a book by Dickens – which makes it logistically easier to handle in class.
You will notice, Bernie, that the math standards are VERY different from the ELA standards. The former are basically a curriculum outline, as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago. The latter are not, though they severely constrict possible curricula.
I have a question for you about the math standards, since this is your area. Increasingly, we are asking kids to UNDERSTAND abstract mathematical principles (e.g., the concept of the variable or of the function) at earlier grades. Now, some kids, we know, are born to this–the little Eulers and Ramanujans. But there seems to be a lot of evidence from FMRI studies that in most people, areas of the brain that do highly abstract reasoning develop very late. I suspect that if instead of attempting to do math per se in the early grades, we focused, instead, on pattern recognition activities designed to develop fluid reasoning circuitry in the brain and introduced formal mathematics much latter, kids would learn more in three years than they now do in twelve. We know, for a fact, that most graduates of our schools, a few years out, are effectively innumerate and that most a) believe that they are terrible at math (have learned that) and b) are math phobic/hate the very idea of doing any mathematics. So, clearly, our approach isn’t working all that well. Is it possible that that’s because we are asking kids to turn a Phillips screw with a butter knife–to do tasks for which they have not yet developed the mental tools? It may well be possible that by starting math so early, we are faced with a damnable choice between a) rote instruction in symbol manipulation without understanding and b) attempting to teach highly abstract understanding before the machinery in the mind for that kind of reasoning is in place. Perhaps MOST PEOPLE simply don’t have the equipment, at age seven, for that kind of reasoning. Perhaps, in fact, it doesn’t start being developed in most brains until around age 16 and isn’t fully in place until the mid 20s. I know that this sounds like a radical idea, but I think that there is evidence for what I am saying.
Now, it is also true that there are some kinds of general, abstract reasoning that is hardwired from birth–the ability to generalize perceptual specifics, to make inductive inferences of some kinds. But perhaps what we are doing, in our ignorance, is teaching kids, most kids, to hate math by having them do it before they have the mental tools to do it properly. Perhaps this is a developmental issue. What do you think?
Robert:
My personal view – largely based on my own experience, I hasten to add – is that Math concepts should be taught in a sequence related to the tasks a student could be expected to deal with – today or perhaps historically, i.e., functional numeracy. At sea, trigonometry and spherical geometry were and are really quite important. 19th Century Commercial Arithmetic books covered a lot of necessary and complex arithmetic. Surveying was a basic 18th Century skill and required an understanding of plane geometry. Today, students may need to learn computational methods (computers and programming) and probability (discussions of and efforts to manage risk) earlier than in decades past. I think a similar perspective is embedded in the math sections of PISA.
I still have a hard time understanding why some mathematical constructs such as number lines are introduced – while they may be fundamental mathematically, they are not essential to any math dependent real task that I can think of.
That’s quite interesting, Bernie. I, too, have wondered whether the main math curriculum might not be built around learning functional skills in computer science, business, and economics with, perhaps, “advanced” courses in pure mathematics taught at the upper levels. Such an approach would treat mathematics, as needed, as a tool for accomplishing tasks in the course of learning other disciplines so that the answer to the question, “What is this good for?” would be built in. I wonder about the value of the approach that we have been taking. Are we better off to have all kids come out of school being able to built websites in HTML and program in a couple of languages or having them having sat through Algebra I and II classes, the content of which they have almost entirely forgotten three years later?
Robert:
The difficulty is that you need Algebra I and II, if you are going to do any meaningful science – especially Physics but also Biology and Chemistry. There the physical analogs and relevance are readily to hand. Perhaps the answer is to integrate more closely math and science to a much greater extent. Try measuring an accelerating body without basic algebra or measure refraction without plane geometry plus trig and in Biology growth dynamics are helped with both probability and calculus. It would be interesting to see how math curriculums in other countries are linked to their science programs.
Bernie, I very much want kids to get Algebra I and II, for the very reason that you mention. But again, I suspect that by the time kids get to Algebra I and II, they have already been turned off to math by instruction that was developmentally inappropriate. My suspicion, and this is just a hunch, is that UNDERSTANDING what is happening when one manipulates mathematical symbols involves highly abstract, general reasoning, the mechanisms for which are not yet developed in the mind of the child before about the age of 14 or 15 at the earliest and that what we are doing, now, is turning most kids off to math by starting it too early. Again, I suspect that the early years ought to be devoted to activities designed to develop fluid intelligence and that if the study of mathematics per se were put off until later, kids would learn much more in a much shorter period of time and they would enjoy what they are learning a LOT more because they would understand what they are doing. But, again, this is not my area of expertise. I just know that most of the adults that I know–even highly accomplished professionals–are pretty much innumerate. And most of them learned one thing from their schooling–that they want to avoid mathematics in their lives at all costs.
Robert:
It is worth exploring in more detail. But I see no reason why a 10 year old cannot work out why the area of a circle is pi r squared at a relatively young age as opposed to just applying a formula. But perhaps I am missing your point.
I have looked at the Japanese math programs. They don’t do that sort of integration. But it is, in fact, the case that science instruction and math instruction in the U.S. in K-12 are almost entirely separated. Physics, for example, is an almost entirely mathematical science, but there are high-school physics texts that contain almost no mathematics. So, we are doing precisely the opposite of the sort of integration that you are talking about. No wonder kids think the stuff is useless. They’ve never used it for anything.
Same for economics. Economics is a mathematical science. But the high-school economics texts are math-free zones!!! Weird.
Robert:
When I first came to the US in the 70s, I was a TA and taught statistics to teachers in a Graduate School. I was stunned when there were HS economics teachers who could not transpose an equation or read a graph. This was supposedly a selective Grad School.
I don’t know about the upper-level (secondary) science and economics texts used elsewhere–whether these contain much math. I remember seeing, years ago, an article about high-school physics texts in Russia. If my memory serves me, the article explained in some detail that these were highly mathematical, unlike ours.
Given that around 20% of first year undergraduates take remedial coursework and the freshmen to sophomore persistence rate is 77% and 54% for 4 year and 2 year institutions respectively, I’m not surprised that college and career readiness is a point of emphasis. This is a situation that places many young adults in a costly and stressful transition. The persistence rates, however, are not only a matter of academic readiness. Individual and economic factors play a significant role too. Remedial placement is often based on a single assessment, so it is likely that there is over placement into remedial, non credit bearing courses too. There is room for improvement, but this is not entirely an issue to lay at the feet of K-12.
Developing an educated citizenry and curious and competent learners are also priorities to be balanced with the college and career readiness emphasis. A one size fits all approach will fail to meet any of these goals. A standardized curriculum focused solely on preparation for high stakes assessments might produce an improvement in ACT, SAT, Accuplacer, or Compass scores, but it won’t provide students with a deeply established and flexible competencies that will help them succeed in higher education or the workplace. It will not encourage curiosity and it will not prepare them to be well-equipped citizens participating in the complex issues of the modern world.
well said, Stiles
But Robert where is such a narrow focus on standardized tests actually being implemented so that it replaces an existing pedagogy that provides “deeply established and flexible competencies”?
Bernie, see my note, above, about teaching Beowulf and my note, below, about teaching Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
@Stiles: The real problem is that the tests we use, like ACT, SAT, Accuplacer, or Compass, are very badly flawed, They don’t do much.
The ACT and SAT predict very little about college success. And Accuplacer and Compass are just as bad at predicting how students will perform at community colleges.
The makers of these tests are some of the strongest and loudest proponent of the Common Core standards (and all of the testing they will generate).
democracy:
Predictive validity studies of SAT type tests suffer limitations due to restriction of range issues. At MIT, for example, 96% of Freshman have SAT Math scores above 700. Interestingly, at Cooper Union they use SAT-like tests as part of the admissions process into their highly regard Engineering program but not for their similarly regarded Art program – which apparently is based on a portfolio assessment. The usefulness of a test really depends on the issue you are trying to address (and the direct and indirect costs of conducting it).
People do not recognize the extent to which the Common Core State Standards [sic] in ELA distort curricula and pedagogy, but such distortion is having dramatic effects on every lesson being produced for every online and print education product being created today. The Publishers’ Criteria that accompany the standards [sic] call upon teachers to have their students do “close reading”–to start with very close examination of the text itself. However, for each grade level band, there is also a list of Literacy standards. and the creator of the text (online or print) has to make sure that any lesson that is created addresses these standards.
So, the creator of a lesson is presented with two competing and conflicting directives:
to attend closely to the text itself and only to the text (not to external sources), or
to use the text to teach some subset of a particular list of standards
In other words, the author of the lesson can EITHER start with the text and address whatever aspects of that text are important for understanding it, or she can start with the standards [sic] and address one or more of those as it is reflected in the text.
Now, suppose that you want to teach that recognized masterpiece of American literature, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” (This used to be, back in the 1960s, a staple of American literature texts until the fundamentalist lobby in the U.S. got it removed. Let’s suppose that our author is courageous and is ignoring that lobby.) Now, understanding what is going on in Jackson’s “The Lottery” requires some background. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a lot of work was done by cultural anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists, psychologists, and others on ritual across cultures. Durkheim wrote about the key role of ritual in creating social cohesion. Sir James George Frazier wrote a massive work, The Golden Bough, about what he believed to be a universal fertility myth among our primitive ancestors. According to Frazier, ancient peoples practiced fertility cults in which they worshiped an Earth Mother who annually took a consort. From their union came the annual fertility of the land. Central to this mythos was the notion that every year, the consort died and was then resurrected. According to Frazier, peoples throughout the ancient world had rituals that reenacted parts of this annual story of the Earth Mother and her consort. The Earth Mother was associated with the moon because of correlation between the lunar cycle and menstruation. Her consort was associated with the sun–a source of generative power necessary for rebirth. The sun was widely believed by the ancients to be annually reborn or resurrected at the Winter Solstice, and the ancients, according to Frazier, practiced a form of sympathetic magic by which a representative of the fertility deity–the mother’s consort–was annually chosen and then, at the Solstice–ritually killed and resurrected (by replacing that representative with a new one.
Now, at the time when Jackson wrote her story, those ideas were current. They are not so today. In order to understand what is happening in Jackson’s story, one needs this background–one has to understand that the story presents a reenactment of an annual fertility ritual that continues to be carried out even though its original purpose has largely been forgotten by the townspeople. Texts do not exist in isolation. Now, providing this background would violate the Common Core principle of attending to the text and only to the text, but as this example clearly indicates, one often has to do that because texts do not exist in isolation. In order to understand texts at any depth, the reader has to know what the author has taken for granted–in this case, knowledge of the ancient fertility cults and their annual sacrifices.
Suppose, then, that the author of the lesson on “The Lottery” says to herself, “OK. Let me base the lesson, instead, on one of the standards at this grade level (CCSS level 11-12). In order to do this, one has to find, among those standards, one or two, at least, that cover whatever is most central for understanding this particular text.
Standard RL.11-12.1 deals with texts in which the key ideas are not explicitly stated but must be inferred. Now, perhaps, we are getting somewhere, for perhaps one has to infer that what is going on in the story is an annual fertility ritual. But there is a problem with that one, for at one point in the story, a character says, explicitly, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”
So, let’s go to the next standard, RL.11-12.2. This one deals with analyzing the development of how or more themes or central ideas of the text over the course of the text. Perhaps one could base a lesson on looking at the themes of a) blind adherence to tradition and b) fertility rituals. But there are two problems with that: These are two very different notions of what a “theme” is–one is a message; the other is simply a topic. The other problem is that while these themes are developed, this is a short text, and arguably the methods of development of these themes are side issues, issues that are not really key to understanding the tale.
And so on, through the list of standards. The general problem is that the standards are a priori. They exist prior to actually examining the text, and typically, seeing a given text through the lens of some standard means not attending to WHATEVER IS NECESSARY FOR UNDERSTANDING THAT TEXT but, rather, to the preexisting standard. The curriculum developer ends up manipulating the work that is done with the text so that it fits one or more of the preexisting ideas–whatever happens to be on the bullet list for that grade level–i.e., fitting the text to a Procrustean bed. It’s one thing to start with a text and ask, “What is necessary in order to understand this?” or “What are some fruitful ways into this text?” and it is another, altogether, to start with one or more preconceived notions of what is important in TEXTS IN GENERAL.
These problems with individual texts get acerbated when one looks at a unit as a whole. In the past, editors of 11th-grade American literature texts chose selections as representatives of currents in the history of thought in this country (e.g., they would look at the ideas of the Puritans, then at the ideas of the Transcendentalists). This approach was extremely valuable because those intellectual currents have consequences for how we think today. The fundamentalist right in the U.S. is not explicable except in terms of the Puritan inheritance, and various developments of the 1960s (hippie, New Age, and environmentalist thought spring to mind) are direct inheritances from the Transcendentalists (who drank heavily at the then emerging springs of translations into English of the Upanishads and other Sanskrit texts). Now, in the CCSS era, the curriculum developer throws over the coherence of a historical perspective on thought and literature in this country for units built around abstract standards. So much for curricular coherence.
There are many, many other problems with the literature standards as written. I’ll mention just one. The literature standards are, almost all, descriptions of abstract skills having to do with analysis of literary forms. It’s those that are to be tested. But why are the standards [sic] almost all descriptions of abstract skills? Again, the fact that these are abstract skills related to works in general contradicts the more general CCSS directive to attend to the text itself. There are other important things to do with literary works besides analyzing their formal structures. Reading literature is NOT like reading a laundry list—it is not something done SOLELY for the information content. For someone to have a truly important experience with a work of literature, she has to enter, imaginatively, into the world of that work and have a concrete experience–an imagined experience. If one skips over that crucial interaction and goes directly to discussion of abstract notions like “development of theme over the course of the text,” one has, in effect, instituted a study of literature that SKIPS OVER THE LITERARY EXPERIENCE. The CCSS encourage the sort of awful teaching of literature that, for example, reduces the reading of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” to a list of the symbols that the author used. There are, of course, many ways to approach literary study with kids that encourage this entering, imaginatively, into “the world of the work.” However, making the abstract skills employed when reading the ONLY POINT of instruction is not one of them. It would be possible to put together creative, exciting, incredibly valuable curricula that emphasized this entering imaginatively into the world of the work, having an experience there, and then examining the meaning of that experience–curricula that get at HOW LITERATURE WORKS AND WHY IT IS MEANINGFUL–but such curricula would be incompatible with standards [sic] that are ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY devoted to “mastery” of abstract skills of highly abstract formal analysis.
None of this sort of thinking about the consequences of framing the standards [sic] as they were framed was done. The standards [sic] as written have very, very dramatic effects on the actual curricula being produced, and by and large, those effects are disastrous.
Every publisher in the U.S. is now beginning every project by making a spreadsheet with the list of standards in one column and the list of lessons where these are “covered” in the other. And so the lessons become little independent lessons on the mastery of abstract skills of formal analysis in disconnected texts. That’s a really lousy way to approach literature, and the approach actually contradicts what the material AROUND the CCSS says. It does so because there is a disconnect at the heart of the standards [sic] between the general ideas that the authors of these standards [sic] had (close attention to the text itself) and the standards [sic] themselves, which are, in the literature domain, a bullet list of abstract skills for formal analysis. Of course, standards for literature could be formulated in many different ways. They don’t ALMOST ALL have to be descriptions of skills for abstract, formal analysis. But it seems that the authors of the standards [sic][ never stopped to think, for a moment, about what those alternate ways might be.
Of course, a careful reader of “The Lottery” will recognize that it instantiates a Western, rationalist view that these “primitive” rituals are simply awful superstition. In effect, it presents a hegemonic, one-sided argument. One does not get from this story an appreciation of the value of a worldview that treated the natural world in a personal way. It would be fascinating to embed experience of this story in the context of study of works that embody that other view, the famous 1854 speech by Chief Seattle, for example. Taking that sort of approach would raise VERY DIFFICULT, fascinating, and currently important issues and get at the heart of how literary works at times challenge and at time PRESUPPOSE dominant paradigms of the cultures in which they were created.
So, what would a literature curriculum based on the idea of developing in students the ability to enter imaginatively into the world of a work and have an experience there look like? Well, it would look very different from ANY that is currently found in literature textbooks, and it would NOT be compatible with a list of standards [sic] that consists ALMOST ENTIRELY of descriptions for skills of formal analysis. However, it WOULD get at the key aspect of the literary experience. One thing is certain, such a curriculum would be extremely active. It would have to be participatory, and it would very likely involve a great deal of ORAL work, going back to the origins of literature in communal, spoken performance. A very strong argument can be made that early literature instruction should be all about developing in kids a habit of imagining, as they read literary works, being there—in the world of the work. This is something that happens automatically in cultures with strong, pervasive, communal oral traditions but it’s not something that happens, automatically, in our culture, especially now, with the decline of imaginative group play among children.
Unfortunately, having this mandated, invariant, top-down bullet list of standards precludes any such development of an alternative approach to literature because the pressure is on to “cover” that particular bullet list.
And that’s the point. If one considers the design space of POSSIBLE curricula and pedagogical approaches in light of the standards [sic], it becomes immediately evident that the standards [sic] preclude MOST OF THESE. That is, they dramatically limit possible development of curricular and pedagogical approaches. And this is true in EVERY domain covered by the ELA standards, not just in literature. In every case, there are important alternative approaches that are incompatible with the particular learning progressions and outcomes to be measured at each grade level found in the CCSS.
Bernie, there is a reason why, if you correct for the socio-economic status of the kids taking the tests, our students LEAD THE WORLD–it’s because of a lot of very creative, informed, transformative teaching that is being KILLED OFF by a relentless emphasis on abstract formal analysis in preparation for the test.
Now, I am a BIG FAN of abstract formal analysis, but the thing about such analysis is that it has to be EARNED. One can’t skip over the concrete, specific work. The abstraction comes AFTER THAT. The Publishers’ Criteria issued with the CCSS, at least in its first version, acknowledged as much, but the abstract list of standards encourages a kind of teaching that cuts to the chase–practice the skill for the test, for the test, the test, the test. All that matters is THE TEST!!!
Don Marquis ends his poem “The Old Trouper” with this line, spoken by the Old Theatre Cat to Mehitabel, the cat of ill repute: “Come, my dear, both of our professions are being ruined by amateurs.”
Robert:
I have lost track of what this is in response to.
Robert:
I missed this post earlier.
It seems to me you are saying that the way textbook writers are addressing the new ELA standards is to work them in small chunks and without reference to the full context of the article or book that is used – partly replicating the way these standards are tested. In so doing the standard is being addressed in such an artificial manner that little real learning is taking place and it is more or less like saying you read Shakespeare because you read Lambs’ Tales. Do I have it right?.
That’s very well put, Bernie. Reducing Shakespeare to one of those tales by the Lambs. But it’s worse than that, for at least the children’s tale remains a tale, not simply an occasion for exercising a skill from a bullet list.
And here I am just talking about the literature standards. The standards for vocabulary, language, and writing are WORSE, much WORSE, than the literature standards, but for very different reasons. The vocab, grammar, and usage standards instantiate folk notions about how kids learn these things. The writing standards don’t seem to have been thought about at all. They are boilerplate at every grade level, with minor variations. They simply have kids writing in three “modes.” Much to discuss there. It appears to my that the authors of the standards must have been running up against a deadline and so decided not to think about writing at all, about the specific skills that competent writers have mastered and what a sound learning progression for acquiring these might look like. If you like formulaic five-paragraph themes, you will love the writing standards in the CCSS.
Interestingly, the notes accompanying the standards stress the importance of related reading in a knowledge domain both within and across grade levels. An example is given of kids reading many works, over several years, related to “the body.” Good advice. But this extended work in particular knowledge domains is one aspect of the CCSS that is pretty much being ignored.
One of the problems with the standards is that their authors did not think about the differences between different kinds of learning. Some learning is done explicitly. Some is done automatically given the right sorts of inputs. Some is learning of world knowledge (knowledge of what). Some is procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). And standards for each would have to be phrased differently to make any sense–to accord with how learnings of these various kinds take place. Procedural knowledge, for example, benefits from operationalization–spelling out a procedure or various procedures, often not optimal procedures but fairly concrete heuristics that suffice.
The standards remind me of the poor engineer who insists that all switches in a system be, for aesthetic reasons, identical-looking levers, whatever the actual human interactions and affordance consequences of that that decision. Gee, this lever raises the fuel rods. This one lowers them. But making them look the same is prettier.
So, if one looks at the vocabulary standards scattered throughout the CCSS, one finds vague general standards about learning level-appropriate academic and general vocabulary. But one also finds a bunch of standards that are, like the lit standards, based on formal analysis. The student will learn some Greek and Latin roots. The student will learn these prefixes and suffixes. The student will use such and such context clues. But we know that vocabulary is learned not, primarily, through explicit instruction but in semantic groupings within a knowledge domain which which a person has active engagement. And we also know that a sign of that vocabulary being available for active use–that it has been fully incorporated into the language system in the person’s head–is that he or she can use the vocabulary with its full range of inflectional and derivational affixes–that is, can use it grammatically. So, sound vocabulary standards would look very different from literature standards. They would have to be connected to reading, writing, listening, and speaking in particular knowledge domains, which means that knowledge domains would have to be specified–or, at least, a variety of alternative possible domains–along with the vocab to be encountered within those. And, a reasonable test for actual acquisition of active vocabulary would be the ability to use it correctly in situations requiring inflectional or derivative forms. This does not, emphatically does not, mean that those inflections and derivations should be studied explicitly–only that one can use this as a means for testing for transfer of the vocab from passive to active status. At any rate, the point is that if the authors of the standards [sic] had known anything at all about how language is learned, then the standards in the various domains would look very different from one another. These standards [sic] ROUTINELY commit category errors–treating learnings of completely different kinds as though the were of the same kind.
Robert:
You must be a night owl.
Your comments remind me of the notion of teaching your kid how to ride a bike and having to write a computer program or detailed procedure to do the same thing.
This problem of treating vastly different kinds of learning done in vastly different ways as the same sort of thing is particularly egregious in the area of the language standards that deal with grammar. In brief, here is how the grammar of a language is acquired: a child is born with an innate system of grammatical principles hardwired into his or her head. Then, particular parameters of that system are set by the spoken language to which the kid is exposed. VERY LITTLE of the grammar of a language is learned through explicit instruction. Now, kids come into school having experienced VASTLY different ambient linguistic environments. Some of those environments are EXTREMELY impoverished syntactically. In other words, the full range of grammatical forms of the language were not present in the some kids linguistic environments, and so the innate language acquisition systems in those kids’ heads have not had the inputs needed for intuiting the full grammar of the language. That crucial step having been missed, there is no way that the kid will then become a competent reader, for he or she will stumble on the syntax of something as simple as a correlative conjunction or a relative clause. It’s extremely important that schools recognize this and create for such kids compensating syntactically and morphologically rich SPOKEN LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENTS–exposure to and practice in oral language of considerable syntactic complexity. But, instead, we PURPOSEFULLY give kids a diet, instead, of written language that is PURPOSEFULLY syntactically impoverished–leveled material–in the name of appropriateness to the grade level. BIG MISTAKE. The kids who have missed that automatic construction of the complete syntax of the language–the material in the ambient spoken environment necessary for setting all those grammatical parameters, will NEVER CATCH UP, no matter how much remedial reading instruction is done.
Find an understanding of THAT in the CCSS in ELA. You will look in vain.
But what you will find are a few random grammar rules (And I do mean random–there is no sense to what is taught at what grade level. None) based on old, prescientific, folk models of grammar (A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea), as though NONE OF THE SCIENTIFIC LINGUISTIC RESEARCH AND MODELING OF LANGUAGE THAT HAS TAKEN PLACE IN THE PAST FORTY YEARS HAD EVER OCCURRED! If your aim is to teach kids to avoid certain “nonstandard” forms (Bernie and me love our English class), then the way to do that is NOT to teach a folk theory of grammar (This is the nominative case pronoun. This is the objective case pronoun.) but, rather, to have kids RELEARN the paradigms through modeling, memorization of sentences employing them, interactive practice of them, etc. Find that in the CCSS in ELA. You won’t. But the best way to do this is through LOTS AND LOTS OF EXPOSURE TO ENGAGING ORAL LANGUAGE and LETTING THE INNATE LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE DO ITS WORK). Find that in the CCSS in ELA. You won’t.
Robert:
I will talk to my wife about some of these questions, since she is currently teaching ESL to would be graduate students. Her Masters is in Linguistics and she is always commenting on my grammar. Most kids in England learned basic grammar through diagramming sentences and then rediscovered it when learning classical or foreign languages – or at least I did. My wife used to complain how hard it was to teach German and, to a lesser extent French, when her students had a limited understanding of grammar constructs.
The analogy to teaching a child to ride a bike as opposed to writing a program for a bike-riding robot is a superb one, Bernie. It’s exactly on target in many cases. One of the things that we’ve learned from AI but that educators have not yet learned, unfortunately, that some things that look easy are actually really difficult, and the reason why they are difficult is because there is dedicated machinery in the brain that does the hard stuff.
It’s unbelievable how many people there are who still believe that the vocabulary that people know is what they have been explicitly taught and that they have been explicitly taught the grammar of their primary language. For example, the CCSS in ELA seem to have been written by people who still believe those things. Now, an explicit model of a grammar is an interesting and useful thing to have, if you happen to be a linguist or a teacher, but the brain has built in mechanisms for learning the morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonetics of a spoken language, and one needs to teach the grammar to kids in the way that nature has designed the human brain to learn those things. But it’s a mistake to think that because the brain is designed to learn the grammar of a spoken language automatically, one should IGNORE grammar as a domain of instruction. If we are going to persist in trying to teach prescriptive rules for “standard” English and use of the full range of syntactic forms, then we have to understand that what we are attempting to do is to reset parameters of a grammar that kids have already internalized and that we need to do so in ways that work the way the learning of a grammar actually works–not through explicit instruction but, rather, through exposure to the paradigms and occasions for using them, not through explicit description of them as one might find in, say, a traditional grammar book (folk grammar) or in contemporary scientifically informed textbooks like Carnie’s Syntax: A Generative Introduction, Radford’s Minimalist Syntax, and Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English. Teaching phonics is a different matter altogether because there is no dedicated machine in the brain for intuiting sound-symbol correspondences. Instead, the brain applies general pattern recognition systems, linked to its language systems. So, as we learned during the whole language fiasco, phonics has to be explicitly taught.
Robert:
Now you need to talk to my wife. She gets excited about this linguistic stuff.
On the other hand I am fascinated by the notion of heuristics and cognitive processes and how to identify what makes the difference between average and outstanding performers in different fields.
It’s a mistake to think that one “learned grammar” by diagramming sentences. It’s important to distinguish between grammar (subscript 1) as the internalized grammar of one’s spoken language, which is learned automatically, and grammar (subscript 2) as some explicit model of a language.
Consider this: Every native speaker of English knows that
the great green dragon
is grammatical, whereas
the green great dragon
is not.
There are rules governing the order of precedence of adjectives that every native speaker “learns” (it might be better to say “acquires”), but these rules were NEVER EXPLICITLY TAUGHT. The brain has mechanisms for learning this rules AUTOMATICALLY. However, and this is important, the rules can only be learned by children if they are exposed to a linguistic environment in which a lot of spoken language that uses these stacked adjective phrases occurs. If a child grows up in a linguistically impoverished environment, then the innate mechanism for intuiting the grammar of the spoken language will not have the resources that it needs to do its job, and then, the child will not be able, unconsciously, to employ that internalized grammar (grammar sub 1) when reading.
It appears that there is a short window of time, from very shortly after birth through about the age of 14, in which that innate language acquisition device is optimally operative.
Now, a scientific approach to teaching language in the early years would involve extensive diagnostics to get a view of the grammar (sub 1) that the child has already internalized and then remedial ORAL LANGUAGE WORK involving exposure to and use of spoken language that is syntactically and morphologically rich enough to incorporate those parts of the spoken language that the child has not yet incorporated into an internal grammar of his or her language.
Instead, what we are currently doing is IGNORING the differences in what kids have learned of grammar (sub 1) when they come into school and giving the challenged kids (those who show difficulties in learning how to read) a sole diet of INTENTIONALLY syntactically and morphologically IMPOVERISHED WRITTEN LANGUAGE (leveled materials)–exactly the OPPOSITE of what they need if the innate language acquisition device is to have the materials it needs in order to do its job. The Reading community hasn’t caught onto this yet, perhaps because many of the education professors who teach Reading haven’t studied contemporary syntax and language acquisition in classes given by folks over in the Linguistics department. But if a kid has a poorly developed internalized grammar of the spoken language, no amount of instruction in reading per se is going to turn him or her into a proficient reader. A fully developed internalized grammar of the spoken language is a prerequisite.
Robert:
You would know better than I. I am just saying that is how I was taught explicit grammar rules. I do not doubt that we have a language capacity, just as we have a walking and grasping capacity.
I think that there is a role for the teaching of explicit grammar rules. It’s useful for advanced students to have a vocabulary for talking about language–what the author did in this sentence–for example, and that phrase-structure trees are useful for teaching possibilities for sentence variation in writing. But the grammar (sub 1) of a spoken language is NOT learned through explicit instruction. It is acquired from a syntactically rich ambient linguistic environment by an innate language acquisition device dedicated to doing just that in the same way that a bat doesn’t consciously do calculus in order to intersect with that bug in the air but that the bat’s brain does the functional equivalent automatically because it’s built to do that.
Robert:
I wonder how it differs with second language acquisition. So many questions, so little time.
Bernie, one of my interests is in studying the heuristics that are actually employed by accomplished writers, in the real world, when writing to try to piece together what sane writing instruction would look like. For example, we are still teaching kids that a paragraph is a group of sentences with topic sentence; a group of sentences connected to that topic sentence, introduced by transitions; and a concluding sentence that summarizes the whole. This is the model introduced by Alexander Bain in his grammar a hundred and fifty years ago. But look in the real world, and you will ALMOST NEVER find a paragraph organized in that way. That’s one not very widely used way to organize a group of sentences. So, the question is, how do people actually organize sentences in discourse? Well, they have an enormous collection of intuited ways that ideas can relate to one another. Well, typically, a writer has in mind a general direction that he or she is heading in and a very large toolkit of internalized schemata for ways in which ideas can be related, and he or she lays down an idea and then chooses from among those schemata something that advances in the direction in which he or she is headed. So, the question becomes, how do we get that large toolkit of schemata for ways that ideas can be related to one another into kids’ heads? One doesn’t do that by teaching them to write the five-paragraph theme in one of the three modes using a boilerplate model like the Bain paragraph for the body paragraphs of that theme and organizing them in one of four overall arrangements (order of importance, order of familiarity, spatial order, order of occurrence).
Robert:
I would amend your statement to add a criteria to avoid the problem of the lowest common denominator, to wit:
So, the question is, how do people, who are widely viewed as highly effective writers or speakers, actually organize sentences in discourse?
At what age is this level of language mastery appropriate? Currently isn’t this kind of stuff taught in College rather than Middle School or High School?
The most important thing that we can teach kids about reading literature is that you have to be willing to go down the rabbit hole, cross through the wardrobe, into the world of the work and have an imagined experience. It’s that experience that then has meaning, that has significance. The formal analysis comes afterward when one asks, “Why do readers of this have such an experience?” Find that in the literature standards [sic] in the CCSS in ELA. You won’t. Again, the literature standards [sic] in the CCSS in ELA encourages an approach to instruction in literature that skips over, leaves out THE EXPERIENCE OF THE WORKS.
And the point is not that people should necessarily agree with what I think should be our approaches to instruction in any particular domain (e.g., early childhood literature instruction, vocabulary instruction, writing instruction) but that IN A DEMOCRATIC STATE, COMPETING IDEAS ABOUT LEARNING PROGRESSIONS should battle it out in a free marketplace of ideas. NO ONE’S BULLET LIST SHOULD BE MANDATED. Instead, scholars should be free to make their suggestions for standards, learning progressions, curriculum frameworks, pedagogical approaches, etc., AND schools and teachers should be free to adopt and adapt these AS THEY SEE FIT. They shouldn’t be waiting until the Politburo meets again to tell them what they must teach and at what grade levels. Having a free marketplace of competing ideas is extraordinarily important because that’s how real innovation comes about.
In a democratic republic, public education should nurture and teach the character of democracy.
What is “the character of democracy”?
Thanks for your (and anyone’s responses)!
Duane:
Good question.
Now about MIT, …
Well, certainly, one characteristic of democracy is that it is messy. It doesn’t appeal to folks with power and a rage for order.