[education 2] explanations for the dumbing down
This situation is also rife on the other side of the pond. One in four schools in England, according to the chief inspector [Ofsted], offers nothing better than mediocrity [42].
The fashion [44] in education over the last two decades has been Humanistic Education, which advocates point out is not secular humanism. They say it is not a religion, it enhances the teaching of the basics, it’s supported by years of research and experience, supports many goals of parents, encourages parent involvement in the schools; Humanistic education is not psychotherapy, is not responsible for the increase in drug and alcohol abuse, vandalism, teenage pregnancies, violent crime and other problems besetting our nation's youth, is not a panacea, is not necessarily synonymous with good teaching, is essential for preparing young people to be citizens in a democracy and humanistic educators believe that schools have a role to play in the "values education" of students.
Downunder [65], this sort of thing drives on the process of dumbing down: Emeritus Professor Hedley Beare, who helped draft the National Education Assembly Declaration in Australia, published a text, ‘Creating the Future’. In it he wrote that ‘it is funny, we still perpetuate the notion that there is a teacher in front of a class who is wise, and there is a group of students who are ignorant, and it is a transfer of knowledge from the wise to the ignorant. But that doesn't prevail any more.’
Dr. Ken Rowe, from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) [66] tried to correct this notion: “59% of the variation in student’s learning outcomes was due to the quality of teaching. Teachers make the difference. (ACER 2001)” but his was an almost lone voice.
Critics say [47 through 52] that: the orthodox belief promulgated in our schools today is that grammatical ability is not something that has to be taught and ask, ‘Where did the educational theorists get this idea that a child’s grammar develops naturally, with little or no outside intervention?’
The answer to this is that with the publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957 and continuing to the present day, Noam Chomsky of MIT led what can only be described as a revolution in linguistics, one consequence of which was the widespread belief that language acquisition is largely an autonomic process dependent upon unconscious interactions between an innate, internal language acquisition device and the raw material of the child’s linguistic environment. It was this idea that led educators in the National Council of Teachers of English and editors in the major textbook houses to move decisively against traditional grammar instruction.
So, education professors began teaching their students that grammar textbooks contained nothing but irrelevant skill and drill, that the internal language-learning mechanism was autonomic, that “teaching grammar” made as much sense as teaching breathing, that what one should do was expose kids to language and let their grammar develop naturally.
Education theorists ousted traditional grammar based upon a misunderstanding of contemporary linguistic science, and then they compounded their error by not putting anything in its place to address the problem that traditional grammar instruction was attempting (however badly) to address — the problem of how to reduce the number of errors in student speech and writing from the age of nine through young adulthood.
This has been an unmitigated disaster. Firstly, teachers have to recognize that they have a window of opportunity in which to expose students to syntactically rich language. Secondly, because the unconscious, internal language-learning mechanism breaks down in many respects by the age of nine or ten, teachers must recognize that older students will not learn, simply by reading and writing a lot, to remediate the grammatical errors that they have incorporated into their personal grammars in their early years.
Critics conclude that while traditional grammar is, indeed, little more than a pre-scientific, folk model of the language, it nonetheless, like other bits of folk wisdom, has its place, and that place is in later elementary and secondary school classrooms.
From teachers themselves comes bitterness over what is happening [68]. ‘There are really not enough words to describe the absurdity of so-called "liberal" educational theories that this blogger came across during his teacher training: false dichotomies between different forms of learning that I would expect one of my brighter senior pupils to spot within about four minutes; the ludicrous notion that telling a pupil they're wrong represents an "authoritarian theory of knowledge" - are just a couple of the symptoms of the other-worldly disconnection with reality that so disfigures our educational system.’
Inclusion [67], the idea that all children, including those with disabilities, should and can learn in a regular classroom -- has taken firm root in many school systems, although it is not specifically required by law. This is one of the major factors in the dumbing down. Another has been the admirable idea of not leaving even one child uneducated in either or America or Britain but when it was institutionally enforced through the 1989/1990 National Curriculum in Britain, supported by Ofsted, the lower end was slowly raised to the centre of the ability spectrum all right and the centre was where teachers taught to, as this was as far as those lower end achievers could aspire. However, the percentage of required time to teach the programme versus the available time to teach was around 110% and this created time pressure on teachers.
They were also under pressure from the plethora of Attainment Tests and the result was that the big losers were the higher achievers, who had to mark time for the simple reason that there was little time to devote to them. Nor were teachers being taught at teacher training level in how to specifically cater for these. So step in private schools who specifically aimed at the upper end and league tables and the simple mathematical formula was established: high achiever = money required.
Thus there was constant pressure on the ‘pass grade’ downwards and that is reflected in this comment [45]: Stephen Timms, the School Standards Minister, [speaking of GCSE and A levels] said that students should feel a “real sense of achievement” over this year’s results, although critics again saw “grade inflation” in the improvement. Grade inflation is a scandal but it is hotly denied, naturally, by schools.
Turning to universities, admissions policy has to share a large part of the blame for the dumbing down[60]. Many state-funded universities have open admissions policies, which basically means that if you have a high school diploma you can be admitted to the university. While this attitude follows the American ideal of equality of opportunity and strikes many people as a more just and humane system, it produces high school and college graduates with minimal reading and writing skills. This system also produces a large number of college drop-outs.
What is actually taught has a way of perpetuating itself. Educators base their practices, of course, on research [53 through 56] but this area is, in itself, flawed. Which research and which innovations often depends less on the quality of the findings than on the channel through which the research comes to the school's attention. Currently, a poorly recognized but longstanding educational doctrine called "developmentalism" permeates the public schooling community. The dominance of this learner-centered pedagogy is in no small part an accident of history. Accepted teaching practices of [former days] were often harsh and punitive; thus progressive methods were a welcome alternative.
Over the past 75 years it has emerged and reemerged under a variety of names. In the 1920s it was called "progressive" and "child centered." Today it is termed "reflective" and "learner centered". Uncertainty about learning outcomes was not considered a pedagogic weakness by progressive education's founders. Neither John Dewey nor progressive education's great popularizer, William Heard Kilpatrick, considered conventionally prescribed educational objectives to be the proper aim of schooling. Instead, both argued that schooling should seek the emergence of an individually defined and broadly conceived intellectual development.
How did it stand up? [57] Follow Through was a huge federally funded research project of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was launched in 1967 by the Ninetieth Congress in response to President Johnson's request to "follow through" on project Head Start.
Nine educational models were compared in 51 school districts over a six-year period. Of the nine, all but two were learner centered; and contrary to the prevailing educational wisdom, the two exceptions significantly outperformed the field. Of greater significance, five of the seven learner-centered models produced worse results than the traditional school programs (i.e., the nontreated control groups) to which each Follow Through approach was compared.
And yet researchers remain learner centred, flying in the face of conventional wisdom. Why? [58] Both researchers and most school personnel are indoctrinated in learner-centered thinking, and powerful incentives encourage them to remain loyal to that point of view. For researchers, funding is a prime incentive and funding is tied to institutional support. Grants also pay what are called "indirect costs" for the use of the institution's facilities and other forms of overhead.
Then there is research publication. In order to advance their academic reputations, researchers must publish. Research that is not published is assumed to be of lesser quality, and rightly so. Research that is published in the most respected journals is stringently peer reviewed but those peers are influenced by the current fads.
Then there are the schools. The learner-centered view is more attractive to researchers because it is more easily marketed to the schools, requires vastly more materials and is therefore lucrative. Learner-centered instruction also appeals to students, seeking to accommodate them, rather than shaping them. Thus the whole incestuous business perpetuates itself.
So, even if we accept that the system is an unmitigated disaster, the question has still not been resolved: was this due to incompetence and certain system dynamics or was there something more conspiracy oriented? Consider these:
[69] UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, which annually surveys the attitudes of high-school graduates entering college, found that record numbers of them were "increasingly disengaged from the academic experience". These students had spent less time studying or doing homework than ever before, and were more bored with school than any cohort that ever entered post-secondary education. Charlotte Iserbyt's book suggests, that there is nothing accidental in the process and that it was the result of a networked policy and agenda.
This is backed up by the scrutiny of Ronald Reagan’s ambivalent approach to education [70], where he called for many educational reforms:
a. calling for an end to free tuition for state college and university students,
b. annually demanding 20% across-the-board cuts in higher education funding,[2]
c. repeatedly slashing construction funds for state campuses
d. engineering the firing of Clark Kerr, the popular President of the University of California, and
e. declaring that the state "should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,
while at the same time: In campaigning for the Presidency, Mr. Reagan called for the total elimination the US Department of Education, severe curtailment of bilingual education, and massive cutbacks in the Federal role in education. Upon his election he tried to do that and more.
In my first post, I referred to a concerted policy of attack on intellectualism and as yet, I concede it has not been finally proven; thus that will constitute another topic in itself in the next few days, although I would urge you to go back to the Amazon book link [69] and review the readers’ comments on it.
The issue of distance vs liberal-arts education is too much for this article to cover. It also will be treated in the near future.
The fashion [44] in education over the last two decades has been Humanistic Education, which advocates point out is not secular humanism. They say it is not a religion, it enhances the teaching of the basics, it’s supported by years of research and experience, supports many goals of parents, encourages parent involvement in the schools; Humanistic education is not psychotherapy, is not responsible for the increase in drug and alcohol abuse, vandalism, teenage pregnancies, violent crime and other problems besetting our nation's youth, is not a panacea, is not necessarily synonymous with good teaching, is essential for preparing young people to be citizens in a democracy and humanistic educators believe that schools have a role to play in the "values education" of students.
Downunder [65], this sort of thing drives on the process of dumbing down: Emeritus Professor Hedley Beare, who helped draft the National Education Assembly Declaration in Australia, published a text, ‘Creating the Future’. In it he wrote that ‘it is funny, we still perpetuate the notion that there is a teacher in front of a class who is wise, and there is a group of students who are ignorant, and it is a transfer of knowledge from the wise to the ignorant. But that doesn't prevail any more.’
Dr. Ken Rowe, from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) [66] tried to correct this notion: “59% of the variation in student’s learning outcomes was due to the quality of teaching. Teachers make the difference. (ACER 2001)” but his was an almost lone voice.
Critics say [47 through 52] that: the orthodox belief promulgated in our schools today is that grammatical ability is not something that has to be taught and ask, ‘Where did the educational theorists get this idea that a child’s grammar develops naturally, with little or no outside intervention?’
The answer to this is that with the publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957 and continuing to the present day, Noam Chomsky of MIT led what can only be described as a revolution in linguistics, one consequence of which was the widespread belief that language acquisition is largely an autonomic process dependent upon unconscious interactions between an innate, internal language acquisition device and the raw material of the child’s linguistic environment. It was this idea that led educators in the National Council of Teachers of English and editors in the major textbook houses to move decisively against traditional grammar instruction.
So, education professors began teaching their students that grammar textbooks contained nothing but irrelevant skill and drill, that the internal language-learning mechanism was autonomic, that “teaching grammar” made as much sense as teaching breathing, that what one should do was expose kids to language and let their grammar develop naturally.
Education theorists ousted traditional grammar based upon a misunderstanding of contemporary linguistic science, and then they compounded their error by not putting anything in its place to address the problem that traditional grammar instruction was attempting (however badly) to address — the problem of how to reduce the number of errors in student speech and writing from the age of nine through young adulthood.
This has been an unmitigated disaster. Firstly, teachers have to recognize that they have a window of opportunity in which to expose students to syntactically rich language. Secondly, because the unconscious, internal language-learning mechanism breaks down in many respects by the age of nine or ten, teachers must recognize that older students will not learn, simply by reading and writing a lot, to remediate the grammatical errors that they have incorporated into their personal grammars in their early years.
Critics conclude that while traditional grammar is, indeed, little more than a pre-scientific, folk model of the language, it nonetheless, like other bits of folk wisdom, has its place, and that place is in later elementary and secondary school classrooms.
From teachers themselves comes bitterness over what is happening [68]. ‘There are really not enough words to describe the absurdity of so-called "liberal" educational theories that this blogger came across during his teacher training: false dichotomies between different forms of learning that I would expect one of my brighter senior pupils to spot within about four minutes; the ludicrous notion that telling a pupil they're wrong represents an "authoritarian theory of knowledge" - are just a couple of the symptoms of the other-worldly disconnection with reality that so disfigures our educational system.’
Inclusion [67], the idea that all children, including those with disabilities, should and can learn in a regular classroom -- has taken firm root in many school systems, although it is not specifically required by law. This is one of the major factors in the dumbing down. Another has been the admirable idea of not leaving even one child uneducated in either or America or Britain but when it was institutionally enforced through the 1989/1990 National Curriculum in Britain, supported by Ofsted, the lower end was slowly raised to the centre of the ability spectrum all right and the centre was where teachers taught to, as this was as far as those lower end achievers could aspire. However, the percentage of required time to teach the programme versus the available time to teach was around 110% and this created time pressure on teachers.
They were also under pressure from the plethora of Attainment Tests and the result was that the big losers were the higher achievers, who had to mark time for the simple reason that there was little time to devote to them. Nor were teachers being taught at teacher training level in how to specifically cater for these. So step in private schools who specifically aimed at the upper end and league tables and the simple mathematical formula was established: high achiever = money required.
Thus there was constant pressure on the ‘pass grade’ downwards and that is reflected in this comment [45]: Stephen Timms, the School Standards Minister, [speaking of GCSE and A levels] said that students should feel a “real sense of achievement” over this year’s results, although critics again saw “grade inflation” in the improvement. Grade inflation is a scandal but it is hotly denied, naturally, by schools.
Turning to universities, admissions policy has to share a large part of the blame for the dumbing down[60]. Many state-funded universities have open admissions policies, which basically means that if you have a high school diploma you can be admitted to the university. While this attitude follows the American ideal of equality of opportunity and strikes many people as a more just and humane system, it produces high school and college graduates with minimal reading and writing skills. This system also produces a large number of college drop-outs.
What is actually taught has a way of perpetuating itself. Educators base their practices, of course, on research [53 through 56] but this area is, in itself, flawed. Which research and which innovations often depends less on the quality of the findings than on the channel through which the research comes to the school's attention. Currently, a poorly recognized but longstanding educational doctrine called "developmentalism" permeates the public schooling community. The dominance of this learner-centered pedagogy is in no small part an accident of history. Accepted teaching practices of [former days] were often harsh and punitive; thus progressive methods were a welcome alternative.
Over the past 75 years it has emerged and reemerged under a variety of names. In the 1920s it was called "progressive" and "child centered." Today it is termed "reflective" and "learner centered". Uncertainty about learning outcomes was not considered a pedagogic weakness by progressive education's founders. Neither John Dewey nor progressive education's great popularizer, William Heard Kilpatrick, considered conventionally prescribed educational objectives to be the proper aim of schooling. Instead, both argued that schooling should seek the emergence of an individually defined and broadly conceived intellectual development.
How did it stand up? [57] Follow Through was a huge federally funded research project of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was launched in 1967 by the Ninetieth Congress in response to President Johnson's request to "follow through" on project Head Start.
Nine educational models were compared in 51 school districts over a six-year period. Of the nine, all but two were learner centered; and contrary to the prevailing educational wisdom, the two exceptions significantly outperformed the field. Of greater significance, five of the seven learner-centered models produced worse results than the traditional school programs (i.e., the nontreated control groups) to which each Follow Through approach was compared.
And yet researchers remain learner centred, flying in the face of conventional wisdom. Why? [58] Both researchers and most school personnel are indoctrinated in learner-centered thinking, and powerful incentives encourage them to remain loyal to that point of view. For researchers, funding is a prime incentive and funding is tied to institutional support. Grants also pay what are called "indirect costs" for the use of the institution's facilities and other forms of overhead.
Then there is research publication. In order to advance their academic reputations, researchers must publish. Research that is not published is assumed to be of lesser quality, and rightly so. Research that is published in the most respected journals is stringently peer reviewed but those peers are influenced by the current fads.
Then there are the schools. The learner-centered view is more attractive to researchers because it is more easily marketed to the schools, requires vastly more materials and is therefore lucrative. Learner-centered instruction also appeals to students, seeking to accommodate them, rather than shaping them. Thus the whole incestuous business perpetuates itself.
So, even if we accept that the system is an unmitigated disaster, the question has still not been resolved: was this due to incompetence and certain system dynamics or was there something more conspiracy oriented? Consider these:
[69] UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, which annually surveys the attitudes of high-school graduates entering college, found that record numbers of them were "increasingly disengaged from the academic experience". These students had spent less time studying or doing homework than ever before, and were more bored with school than any cohort that ever entered post-secondary education. Charlotte Iserbyt's book suggests, that there is nothing accidental in the process and that it was the result of a networked policy and agenda.
This is backed up by the scrutiny of Ronald Reagan’s ambivalent approach to education [70], where he called for many educational reforms:
a. calling for an end to free tuition for state college and university students,
b. annually demanding 20% across-the-board cuts in higher education funding,[2]
c. repeatedly slashing construction funds for state campuses
d. engineering the firing of Clark Kerr, the popular President of the University of California, and
e. declaring that the state "should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,
while at the same time: In campaigning for the Presidency, Mr. Reagan called for the total elimination the US Department of Education, severe curtailment of bilingual education, and massive cutbacks in the Federal role in education. Upon his election he tried to do that and more.
In my first post, I referred to a concerted policy of attack on intellectualism and as yet, I concede it has not been finally proven; thus that will constitute another topic in itself in the next few days, although I would urge you to go back to the Amazon book link [69] and review the readers’ comments on it.
The issue of distance vs liberal-arts education is too much for this article to cover. It also will be treated in the near future.
posted by James Higham @ 20:47
2 Comments
2 Comments:
James, nice two articles, I'm looking forward to more.
One point. You lead us through cause, effect and policy (even if denied) and then say 'This is backed up by the scrutiny of Ronald Reagan’s ambivalent approach to education...' etc.
'Medow' in the readers comments (Amazon link to[69])says 'Armed with such well-organized information may help to convince the American public of the need to put a stop to the U. S.Department of Education -- as President Reagan had announced that he would do.'
My confusion is this; if learning to minimal standards is the unspoken policy to enable a social elite more power, would not Reagan's policies have
a) helped to achieve this and
b) raised the dichotomy exemplified by Medow's belief that Reagan's policies were right as they would have destroyed the system as it then existed?
ScotsToryB
Sorry to take so long - I had another attack Sunday and am only back online Monday morning.
...raised the dichotomy exemplified by Medow's belief that Reagan's policies were right as they would have destroyed the system as it then existed?...
What you say is correct insofar as the unwritten agenda goes. My only question is - in terms of right and wrong in the community, 'right' does not appear to be the word for him - perhaps 'effective' is better.
Post a Comment
<< Home