Robert Shepherd was pleased that Susan Ohanian joined the honor roll of the blog.
He wrote this:
“Susan Ohanian’s website is a garden of many, many delights. I love this bit she posted from Albert Einstein, who was a pretty bright guy (and who had some truly wonderful ideas about education):
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture. . . . Such men [as Henry Ford} do not always realize that the adoration which they receive is not a tribute to their personality but to their power or their pocketbook.
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just look at the date on this statement by Einstein, 1929. Not a bad fortune teller. Here we are now. Einstein, Ike, Orwell, Dick Tracy many have predicted the future in both technology and where humans are going and where we are going the way we are going will lead to our demise.
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Einstein was not only a genius, he was a member of the American Federation of Teachers, Local 552. Am wondering if there is a correlation.
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Students are not widgets. We should not be attempting to standardize them. Neither is it desirable for us to do that. Standardized students are not what a complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs. Besides, the whole standards and standardized testing regime is antithetical to what should be fundamental purpose of education,which is to create learners–people who are intrinsically motivated, for their own reasons, to learn.
“I can’t imagine there’s a student in America who gets up in the morning hoping he can improve the state’s test scores.” —Sir Ken Robinson, Time magazine
A little gift for the readers of this blog:
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Just too beautiful for words…
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Thanks, Robert. I wrote this poem in 1969 when I was 22. I think it’s apropos of what’s going on with Bill Gates et al. What we have here is totalitarianism light.
revolution through re-volition
regenerate the psychic apathy
with brazen naïve beauty;
overwhelm the slogan-shriveled
minds with stone-hard-tender
truth. drag the lost
pathetic hordes to greet
the glory of the sun un-
til their tears of shame-
faced fearful outrage wash
away the crumpling worn-up
patterns, liberate long
held potential energies for
energizing health.
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Delightful, Sheila. Thanks for sharing this!
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More!
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I believe Einstein was talking about cultural standardization, not educational. I doubt he would have considered knowing how to read, write and do math and understanding some science as equating to “standardization” as he was using the term.
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How can you separate culture and education? Is education only “knowing how to read, write and do math and understanding some science”. Sounds like you want cultural drones who do their work and don’t ask questions.
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No, I want school to teach the basics so that children are prepared for higher learning every step of the way. When children learn to talk, they aren’t considered drones because they are learning a basic skill everyone else learns. The same holds true for other basic skills such as reading, spelling (a lost skill), vocabulary (stunted due to whole language teaching), grammar (a lost skill), writing (a poorly taught skill), math (a poorly taught skill), history, science, social studies, geography, and government. Massachusetts has proven that rethinking curriculum works. I guess I would like to know how you think the drones in Massachusetts are being harmed.
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Equating the laughable list of vague, highly abstracted, generalized skills that makes up the CCSS in ELA to knowing how to read and write is quite a leap, I must say.
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Standardized tests arrived in earnest with WWI, ten years before the big E penned those wonderful words.
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Issuing a single set of one-size-fits-all, mandatory standards for all students is not like setting a single ISO standard for production of, say, #10 screws. It’s like issuing a single set of standards for production of shoelaces, winning football teams, 3D printers, and theodices. Ludicrous on the face of it.
And that’s before one even begins to delve into the manifold absurdities of this particular set of “standards” being foisted on the country by this tiny group of self-appointed arbiters or even begins to think about how better standards might be entirely differently conceived at their most fundamental design level, at the level of the categorical definition of “standard.” The CCSS in ELA are so retrograde, so poorly conceived, that I’m beginning to think it shameful that English teachers haven’t simply hooted the authors of these “standards” off the national stage.
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Any thoughts on the uniform curriculum at South Side High a school in Rockville Center? All students take the same classes through 10th grade, the same English classes through 11th. Students can only take calculus as seniors, not allowing those that are capable of more to achieve more.
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How uniform? The same curriculum for kids with severe cognitive deficits? for kids with no knowledge of English? for the kid with an exceptional gift for mathematics or drawing? for the one who plans to be an auto body repair person and the one who hopes to be a graphic designer? for the one with passion and aptitude for computer programming and the one with passion and aptitude for dance? for the introvert and the natural leader?
Your question raises many other questions: How uniform is the population served by this school? How much autonomy do teachers of particular classes have to adapt the curriculum to their students’ needs in light of their own expertise? In general, Procrustean beds are a terrible idea except in very stable, uniform communities (the Amish come to mind) where it can be expected that most will fit those beds very comfortably (and even there, there need to be allowances for outliers and for the natural diversity within the relatively homogenous population).
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Here is what she posted to me about the math curiculum:
For teaching economist….all take algebra in 8, geometry in 9, advanced algebra/trig in 10. Kids who want more, take an every other day advanced topics course along with advanced algebra.
11th grade–IB math methods or math studies
12th grade–AB calc, BC calc and or AP stats
When you worry about “the strongest”, you leave everyone else behind.
The very strongest students in my local high school take graduate math courses at the university in 12th grade. I would say she has chosen not to worry about “the strongest”.
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Robert D. Shepherd: your point is well taken but let me extend it a bit more.
Where to start? Ok, the Holy Edumetrics of High-Stakes Standardized Testing. Surely he could not possibly think that they measure only a small sliver of what is important about human beings and that the measurements are inherently imprecise. **Referencing the shared standards and understanding among psychometricians themselves.** After all, he was perhaps THE numbers guy of all time, surpassed only by Dr. Steve Perry: “Men lie and women lie but numbers don’t.” [re rapper Jay-Z]
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
But surely stuffing one’s head with facts, facts, facts during extensive test prep at the leading Charter Centres of Compliance must be the sine qua non [essential element or condition] of education.
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
But what about the prompts on standardized tests? A lone quote, in isolation, surely cannot deny the intellectual growth experienced while deciphering prompts.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
The structured routines of the no-excuses charter chains must be effective—the students learn lots and lots of skills by tracking and listening and finger wagging and trying to keep their boredom and restlessness under control.
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Ok, a broken record. Well then, without being told what to do and what to think, how could Einstein possibly have come up with new ideas? Or maybe he was the Promised One of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN?
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Sure, an evasive touch-feely answer. What about grit grit grit and rigor rigor rigor?
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
Another touchy-feely response out of place in Twenty First Century Cagebusting Achievement Gap Busting EduExcellence.
Ok, he couldn’t possibly have understood giants of the modern ed business like Michelle and Eva and Pitbull.
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
Seems he just couldn’t give straight answers. Let him just try to explain something complicated like, say, one of his favorite talking points.
“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
Turns out he was a lost cause. What can you say about his totally misguided criticism of multitasking:
“Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”
Although in his defense, he may have had the edufrauds in mind when he observed that “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
Bottom line, he probably would have disputed the 100% graduation rates of so many charter schools and the trustworthiness of VAManiacally-based teacher evals.
Genius is soooo overrated.
🙂
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I have said this many times here, but I will say it again. There is much to like in the framework around the new standards–in the Publishers’ Criteria and in Appendix A. Reasonable people could have issues with some of the material in that framework, but it seems to me quite solid as a set of general recommendations to developers of curricula and objectives to be measured. The CCSS in ELA themselves, however, are a list of highly abstract, generalized skills, and linking high stakes tests to THOSE will inevitably undermine the very goals of the CCSS ELA framework, leading to content-agnostic curricula and learning materials narrowly focused on “covering” the list of skills. We are already seeing a lot of educational materials hitting the market that consists of lessons on random content with a focus, in each lesson, on particular CCSS skills but without a coherent overall curricular progression. A list of standards is not a curriculum, but when you make a particular list high stakes, this results, inevitably, in people’s treating that list as a curriculum, and the list precludes the development of alternative lists, alternative sets of standards, keyed to curricula that DO have a coherent progression.
Let me give just one example. At every level, the CCSS in ELA call for teaching narrative writing, informational writing, and argument. Now, ideally, people would recognize that something like “the ability to write convincing arguments” is a VERY broad skill description. If one studied a dozen people who are competent creators of written argument, one would find that each had a VAST number of specific competencies, including things like a) all the competencies that go into making for subject-area expertise, giving the person something to say; b) internalized schemata for the overall structural forms of various specific kinds of argument writing (e.g., an abstract for a scientific paper, a press release, a radio public service announcement; a press kit backgrounder); c) internalized schemata for various logical forms that arguments can take, inductive, deductive, and abductive, and for the ways in which arguments of each kind can fail; d) internalized schemata for a vast number of specific ways in which statements, propositional and otherwise, and the components that make them up, can be related within discourse, both within and across statements; e) more or less explicit command of a wide variety of rhetorical techniques; f) a command of the vocabulary of the domain of the discourse; g) a sense for the key role played in argument by definition and a working knowledge of varieties of definition, ostensive, stipulative, genus and differentia, definition by example, definition by synonym, etc.; h) command of the grammar of the language; i) understanding of techniques for engaging and motivating the target audience and of what that audience does and does not already know. I have barely begun to list these competencies, each of which can itself be anatomized enormously. One could go on and on, but you get the picture.
A curriculum will build specific competencies that people who can write good arguments have. However, looking at the CCSS in ELA, curriculum developers will inevitably skip right over all this necessary anatomizing of the skill of “argument writing ability” and produce lessons dealing with the general skill (e.g., lesson after lesson on writing the five-paragraph argument theme), and someone who argues that in order for students to come out of school able to produce sound arguments or any other sound writing, they need to have working, internalized schemata for the myriad ways in which two ideas can be connected within a discourse will be shouted down or ignored because he or she is talking about something that a) isn’t in the standards and b) isn’t on the test. And so, important underlying competencies will not be developed in students, and the whole enterprise of teaching the writing of arguments will be narrowed to a few precepts for creating five-paragraph argument themes. This is but one example of one of the ways in which producers of lists of standards create unintended narrowing of the curricula, especially when all focus is on the one thing that matters–the measurement of the generalized skill on the high-stakes test.
My advice would be for people to start with curriculum development and then work backward from the curriculum to the observable, measurable objectives, but curricula and objectives form a hermeneutic circle, and each most be continually refined, improved, tinkered with, in light of what is discovered in practice about specific aspects of the other. Which raises another issue with the standards: they are not a LIVING document, informed by continuous improvement based on actual practice in actual classrooms with actual kids using actual, varying curricula.
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“. . . but it seems to me quite solid as a set of general recommendations to developers of curricula and objectives to be measured.” and “. . . the observable, measurable objectives, but curricula and objectives form a hermeneutic circle. . . ,”
Robert, what is the “measuring device” with which one can “measure” these supposedly “measurable” objectives? How is that “measuring” device calibrated? Who determines the calibration? Can this supposed “measuring” device even exist? Under what conditions does this device work or not work? How can we be sure that the device is properly calibrated?
Me thinks that the answers to those questions will not be found!
And what is your definition of or what do you mean by “hermeneutic circle? (and yes, I am familiar with what it means in philosophical discourse).
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Duane, I think that you and I are on the same page about summative testing. I had in mind the sorts of very specific objectives that a mentor measures formatively, in the course of instruction, both as a learning tool in and of itself and as a checkpoint. Such devices would be legion, as various as what is being learned.
About the hermeneutic circle. I suspect that you already know this, Duane, so I apologize in advance if I do overexplaining here. Heidegger put it best, I think, in his “The Origin of the Work of Art.” When we ask, “What is art?” the natural procedure is to look at some works of art to discover their characteristics. However, doing that presupposes the answer to the question. One cannot gather the works to examine unless one already has a notion about what “work of art” means. We are left with no alternative but to plunge in, based on pretheoretical, accepted, rough, vague views, ones that are mostly unexamined, given. We could approach this scientifically, statistically, and ask, “Well, what do people think a work of art is?” But then, once we have gathered together these pieces, these works of art, and have started examining them, we shall start developing critiques of the category, and the critique will inform what works we choose to include withing the circle “works of art” in the future, which will in turn affect our definition. All I am saying is that standards and curricula should be fluid, with our practical experience of curricula informing our ongoing development of standards and our practical experience of standards and their measurement informing our ongoing development of curricula. And when we have that sort of practice, what we shall find is that our nations about what constitute standards and curricula will change, and that’s a good thing. I oppose top-down, totalitarian, across-the-board standards because kids differ and because we get more innovation when we have competing standards and curricula and when individual teachers and teacher groups are empowered to submit those to continual critique and refinement. But I also oppose them because they presume that we already know what we are doing far better than we actually do, and we need something like the procedure that Heidegger outlines for defining art in order to be able to challenge our own assumptions and so hit upon new, exciting, creative approaches. My first reaction, when I saw the CCSS in ELA, was that like the state standards that preceded them, they were breathtakingly unimaginative, pedestrian, a reflection of the vague notions of what Heidegger would call “Das Mann”–a crystalization of the dullest received opinions about what should be the objectives of the English language arts.
BTW, as you probably know, there is a lot of science on the subject of how we form categories that is relevant here. See this essay of mine on approaches to writing instruction:
Click to access Natural_Prototypes_2.pdf
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Robert,
Thanks for the link, quite interesting. 🙂
What I am getting at with my questions is “Why measure?” Why is there this discourse of measurement? Why should “measuring” have such top billing in our discussions on the teaching and learning process?
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And I imagine that it goes without saying that I support voluntary, competing standards and curricula that are continually being refined–ones that would serve as models to be mined by specific groups of teachers (and students!) working in collaboration with one another, subject to local community sanction and general guidelines placing limits on those sanctions and allowing for a great deal of academic freedom.
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I agree, Duane. Measurement should be the least of our concerns, if by measurement we mean summative assessment as usually employed. However, if we mean by measurement inventories, diagnostics, exercise or sharing or display of newly acquired world or procedural knowledge (e.g., let’s see what I can do with these new wings), well, then that’s measurement worth attending to. I am even willing to grant importance to checks of readiness for the next stage in a cumulative learning progression, as long as those are very learning-context specific. But yes, generally, there is all too much talk about measurement and for all the wrong reasons. It seems to me obscene that we are wasting this time and energy and money (piles and piles of money) on issues related to summative measurement (high-stakes testing, teacher and school evaluation) when we have really serious questions to be debating: How do we combat child poverty and abuse so that the basic needs that are prerequisite to their learning are met? What should we be teaching? How do we address the insane, obscene mismatch between what kids do in school and what flourishing in their lives will require? How do we identify childrens’ proclivities/inclinations and build upon those, given that they are not blank slates? How do we redesign school so that children have experience with a much wider variety of possibilities for productive lives than they do now, so that they and their parents can make informed choices about what tracks they wish to follow? How do we redesign school so that there are widely divergent tracks appropriate to widely divergent kids and the widely divergent lives that they will lead? How do we design learning experiences in light of the fact that we now know that MOST learning is NOT explicit, neither explicitly taught nor explicitly attended to but happens because of innate, automatic cognitive processes? Under what conditions and how should we be harnessing those automatic processes and under what conditions and how should we be making those explicit and training kids to subject them to critique? I would say that figuring out how to tell kids that they are failures ought to be pretty damned low on our list of priorities!!!
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And Einstein’s mother pulled him out of school for failing. Gave him a violin which inspired him. Say no more
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