The education factory

My experience working in education has done more than anything else to make me skeptical of the radically narcissistic, relativistic, and even nihilistic drift of the contemporary cultural left ... which is to say of our contemporary culture, dominated as it is by a leftist notion of morality limited to liberty and equality without solidarity, authority, or sanctity.

Since we have lost a sense of sanctity, nothing really matters to begin with ... at least not in ultimate terms, at least not in any terms greater than the pleasure or the pain that a thing does or does not bring to an individual's isolated, atomistic sensibility.

Since we have lost a sense of authority, there is no reason for any of us to defer to anything that anyone else past or present, near or far, might have to say, since there is nothing they ever could say that would carry any greater weight than what we already know.

Since we have lost a sense of solidarity, we don't need to know what our peers might think or feel -- our brothers, our sisters. We have no peers, no brothers, no sisters ... only our wholly self-sufficient personalities, our wholly self-sufficient sensibilities, our wants, our needs, which it is our "right" to fulfill, to indulge as we see fit, with no regard for anyone else.

What this all amounts to is what Christopher Lasch called *The Culture of Narcissism* in his excellent -- and sadly still relevant book -- from the 1970's.

In some sense, education is all about "ecstasy" in its etymological sense of *ekstasis* or "stepping outside oneself," transcending oneself by looking outward, rather than inward, looking at other people with other thoughts and feelings in other times and places, instead of oneself with one's own thoughts and feelings in one's own time and place.

In a culture in which -- as our most prominent philosopher and theologian tells us -- "we [always] are the ones we are waiting for," there is never any need for any patience with anyone or anything else besides ourselves ... and to an already great and and an ever-increasing extent, students today can't see the "relevance" of anything besides what brings them pleasure and shelters them from pain.

Most of education brings the former -- "ecstasy" -- but also the latter -- "stepping outside oneself," and the latter is the part that breaks the deal to a very large degree.

Shakespeare (or Jesus or whomever) can be "fun," but not when he "harshes" one's "bliss."

To the extent that Shakespeare (or Jesus or whomever) "harshes" one's "bliss" -- and it is the "right" of one's "bliss" not to be so "harshed" -- them *screw* him (and Him or whomever) and also screw anyone who *doesn't* say screw him (or Him or whomever).

On that cheerful note, bon jour.

Excellent, serious observations by Rufus and Jourdan. Now it's time for a smackdown.

These students are all such special snowflakes.

"I will read 8 books this year, and 2300 web pages."

"I buy $100 books that I never open."

"I spend 3 hours on Facebook every day, and 1 1/2 hours studying."

Um, who's fault is that, fool?

The point of learning is that the teacher is supposed to have a better idea of what's relevant than you do. But students don't want to hear that; they're too special.

Send these snowflakes to a real heat wave of a class, like physics or organic chemistry, and see how much sympathy the prof has when you don't get it 'cause you're spending only 30 minutes a day on the course. You don't get handed an F. You earn it.

Rufus - That comment is just astoundingly excellent. Well done. You've outlined the future platform of the coming Right in just a few words: restoring the sense of solidarity, authority and sanctity, bringing back humanity and decency to our culture.

My job is to point out where the water is. Whether or not they drink is up to them.

John M.,

I don't disagree with you.

I'm imagining the left-right, conservative-progressive distinction differently from how you seem to do.

Our entire culture -- morally, politically, and economically -- is *liberal* or *libertarian* in the classical sense of the term.

I have no problem with it being liberal -- at least in that classical sense -- so long as political and economic liberty are governed and moderated by something other besides moral laissez-faire, something besides the narcissistic, self-centered culture Lasch describes, something other than liberty and equality, without solidarity, authority, or sanctity.

Perhaps the biggest of the many "big lies" in circulation today is there is any real difference between the "progressive" paradigm of moral laissez-faire and the "conservative" -- or rather the right-wing libertarian -- paradigm of what "progressives" like to call "consumer culture," which is really just moral laissez-faire expressed in material terms in an economy prosperous enough to allow for such expression.

The past eight years have seen a catastrophic collapse in the fortunes of the right-wing libertarian mode.

One can only hope that the next four years will see a similarly catastrophic collapse in the fortunes of the left-wing libertarian mode.

Perhaps then the culture can begin to "come to Jesus" in a figurative and also perhaps, at least for some, in a more than metaphorical sense.

Do they come to class with the basic understanding that learning is not a passive act, that they have to be engaged with texts and lectures?

The answer I think is no, most college students don't. K-12 education thrives on conformity and compliance (inevitably so, you can't compulsorily educate children and teenagers without it). K-12 institutions might encourage students to think about specific academic subjects, but they don't encourage you to think about what you're doing and why you're doing it. Much easier to do as you're told. I suspect that many students who succeed in this kind of control environment then float on to college because it's expected of them. They attend class because its expected of them, and conform to the external requirements of the institution because its expected of them, but they've never made an affirmative, heartfelt committment to the kind of active learning that college requires. So they drift through college without any real agency or engagement. Being the kind of proactive, engaged learner that can take the college experience and run with it requires that a student choose to be such a student. But if you are free to choose something, you are also free to not choose it. The thought of kids choosing not to go to college frightens (perhaps understandably) a lot of parents, guidance counsellors, etc., and so they focus on the choice of where to go to college rather than on whether to go to college, and you end up with a lot of kids who, out of conformity, fear, or the desire to please, unreflectively choose to enroll in college and end up like the kids in that essay. We've made college the path of least resistance for a lot of middle-class and upper-middle-class kids, so we shouldn't be surprised when we end up with a lot of apathetic go-with-the-flow types in college. Many of them will wake up a little later in life, but they won't get another shot at being an undergrad.

I agree with Dean, up to a point. Nothing good will come out of sending more kids to college, because if anything, that's going to do nothing but make the higher education system worse than it already is. But there's nothing wrong being an anthropology major, or majoring in any other liberal arts major, and those of us who have chosen such majors don't lack the "real everyday skills" required to do a lot of jobs out there. The problem is that huge increase in the number of students attending college and the creation of more and more specialized majors to appeal to them has made it appear that people who major in, say, anthropology or Latin or intellectual history don't have anything to offer employers. After all, it's much easier for an employer to limit their search by looking for a major that's tailor made to match the job they're hiring for. Increasingly, internships and entry-level jobs are becoming major-specific, even when there's no need for it.

Communications? Journalism? Education? Some career-oriented majors just don't need to exist, or at least they don't need to be as popular as they are now. If fewer students went to college and some of these bad majors died out, then those of us who went to college with a real passion to actually learn to reflect more deeply about the world we live in would have an easier time on the job market, and those who are just looking to get career training can go to a technical school, and things would be better for everyone.

May I respectfully point out that the No Child Left Behind Act was promoted by a conservative administration and passed by a majority-conservative Congress?

With much and deserved respect to post-secondary teachers, they are reaping what conservatives have sown: students whose only "respect" is for their test scores, and who have lived while K-12 teachers have been stripped of the last vestiges of their authority over the learning process.

Please, don't rehash the tired arguments about teacher competence. That is a worthy subject that has no relevance to the reprioritizing of "necessary skills" from critical thought, rational argument and personal initiative to test preparation and grades as a basis for self-esteem. The "feel good" paradigm is societal, not political, in its source. Politics simply has latched onto it, as it does with any psychological factor, to manipulate the votes.

There's been comments about how people are in school who don't want to be there, thus the "just do enough to get by" attitude, doing it to please someone else, with no sense of personal stake in the outcome.

We see them. And we see something else. Much of what is "taught" in college is irrelevant to our lives. Irrelevant to our jobs. Irrelevant to our nation. Irrelevant to our society. Just plain irrelevant.

And we call it "education".

You don't think that our young adults notice that much of what's being tossed at them has political underpinnings or purposes? Do you wonder why they react cynically?

How many of these people's lives up to this point taught them just to do enough to "get by"?

There's well more than enough blame to be spread around for it.

I would suggest that every now and then, these people visit an institution that doesn't have these issues and find out what's different. They DO exist. My son is in one. He'll have a degree in a few years. And he won't be playing in class. He won't be disengaged. If he is, he'll flunk out.

But most wash out before it gets hard.

The difference is: People who are there want to be there. They want the result, which is not the degree, but the knowledge.

This was interesting, as is this combox discussion.

One thing that I think is undeniably true is that we're still, as a society, committed to an Industrial Revolution-era type of education. I've dabbled a bit in reading Dewey and his educational theories, though I'm far from having any particular competence in discussing them, but even a casual reader of Dewey can't help but be struck by the utilitarian and pragmatic element of his thinking: education isn't about "virtue" or any high-minded notions, but about creating good, functional citizens capable of excelling in industrial environments, whether in the workplace (for boys) or largely at home (for girls, who would be expected to bring modernity into the home front, improving efficiency in the home as much as their male counterparts were doing outside of it).

What interests me is that even the secular humanist Issac Asimov seemed to think this model of education was unsustainable. I've mentioned his 1951 story, "The Fun They Had," before--in it, two children from 2157 find an antique paper book (not a screen with words on it) that tells stories about "school," which is not sitting in front of a mechanical teacher (computer?) in one's own house, but going to a classroom with other children every day and being taught by a person (a funny idea to them, since a person can't possibly know as much as an electronic "teacher"). Asimov seemed to take it for granted that the increasing desire to meet individual student's educational needs, combined with advances in technology, would eventually make the industrial age model of education obsolete. Of course, he didn't foresee the societal changes that would remove both parents from the house, making his futuristic education model impractical for most families.

Speaking as someone who has experienced homeschooling both from the student perspective and from the teacher perspective, I think one of the biggest problems with the "industrial" type of education is the repetitive way in which information is conveyed. Students are given the material to read; the material is then explained to them in painstaking detail by a teacher or lecturer; students are then assigned to write about the material; finally, the students are tested on the material. You can see the "industrial" aspects: the material must be "geared" to be digestible by the average student, and if the average student needs this much exposure to the material to receive an average grade on the final test, then the rest of the class must slow down or speed up to that speed to accommodate the majority.

However, even a truly "average" student will not need this much exposure to the material being taught all of the time. The student who struggles with writing might be exceptionally good at math, for example; the student who generally struggles with math may find a unit on fractions completely easy to understand. The practical result is that students learn how to be efficient, and will only put forth as much effort as is required to receive an acceptable grade (the definition of which may depend on the student's own ideas, on pressure from parents or the absence of that pressure, and so forth).

By the time the student reaches college, education has, in many fields, ceased to be about learning and has instead become a process for the short term absorption and regurgitation of information in order to achieve a specific grade or degree. The students are disengaged because there's no reason for them to be engaged; the highly motivated students will receive the same degree as the less motivated ones, and few employers (many of whom themselves maintained B or C averages) are impressed by a high GPA or the fact that a job candidate graduated with honors. Only if the highly motivated student's goal is to continue within academia, where such things are valued, does it make sense for him or her to put in the extra hours of study and work necessary to achieve those high results--and these students will be chagrined by the existence of a handful of other students who can maintain the "C-slacker" lifestyle while pulling off A-averages anyway, because they learned how to game the system while they were still in elementary school.

This has gone on too long, but if you take this dynamic and add it to an increasingly incoherent college-level educational model which spends more time deconstructing the idea that there's anything useful about studying the achievements or writings of Dead White Males, etc., than actually teaching anything, while simultaneously reinforcing the students' preconceived notions that only those things which are "relevant" to their lives as twentysomethings with few responsibilities are worth learning in the first place, you have the perfect recipe for the kind of educational dysfunction on display in the video.

Franklin,

With all due respect, the problems we're discussing here long predate the advent of of No Child Left Behind, which was itself a misguided attempt to address those problems.

I do not support No Child Left Behind, but I do find it ironic that the teachers' unions, which support state intervention into every *other* aspect of public life, do *not* support state intervention into their own professional lives.

It's as textbook an instance of NIMBY hypocrisy as one could ever hope to see.

Every other industry besides the education industry needs further regulation -- regulation of every back yard but the education industry's own.

Nightstalker - while your son's assignment was indeed useless (from the perspective of someone who was in training to teach), I have three quibbles:

First - IQ scores do not, as most people wrongly believe, demonstrate intelligence or even correlate to intelligence. They correlate to reading ability and little else. Mine is around 140 (last I took the test), and that makes me a much better reader than most of the population. But that's about it.

Second, Standardized tests, especially those like the SAT or ACT (equally useless), only measure facts that can be memorized. They don't present a skilled student or even a knowledgable one. I took those tests, didn't even try (even on the SATII content tests), and still did better than something like 89% of my peers. Again, I didn't even have to try.

Third, with the system the way it is now, teachers are so overregulated, it's ridiculous. You can't actually teach anymore. You have to regurgitate facts and dumb them down enough to make sure all your students can understand them while praying that you don't have to fail a student of the opposite gender or a different race or ethnicity. You'll get a warning, and the grade will be "administratively changed" if you're lucky, and you'll get sued if you're not. As a male, the biggest worry was this: not having my door open and my video camera on. Lesson plans took a back seat to "am I going to get sued for sexual harassment because one of the girls in my class got a B on an assignment".

It's that bad. That's the big reason guys don't go into teaching. Our edumacation system needs serious reform, I'll agree. But we as a society would never tolerate the kinds of changes that are necessary for it to happen.

I'm chiming in simply to say thanks to Jourdan, Rufus and Erin for some of the best online commentary I've read in ages.

quote: "People always talk about the mediocre students, and its true. But let's not forget the mediocre professors. We could shut down 70% of the universities and colleges in the United States and society would not lose one drop of knowledge. All the serious majors would remain, such as physics, English, math, economics, and the only professors left to teach them would be the brightest and most serious of their profession."

This is just completely untrue. If we shut down 70% of the colleges and universities in this nation we wouldn't have enough properly trained doctors, nurses, business people, teachers, etc. The medical industry is the largest employer in my county. Without the nursing program at the college where I teach, our local hospitals would have a very hard time finding nurses.
Our colleges and universities are some of the best in the world. That is precisely why thousands of students from all over the world come to study in the United States every year. Our high schools, unfortunately, are a different matter. I have some bright students. But I also see freshmen every semester whose high school education neither prepared them for college or for the workforce.

rr

I should state my personal bias. I will also point out that it is a perpsective spanning over 45 years, all of it in public schools and with firsthand knowledge of the parochial schools as an alternative, and the last 25 of it living with a public school teacher in an urban and unionized district, and that I have no agenda other than the education of our children.

All other things being equal -- meaning I'd like to caution all of us about seeing the anecdotal at the expense of the general truth -- which child is a better student: the one with straigh-As or the one with straight-Cs?

The correct answer is: you don't know. The correct question is: are these students achieving to their native potential?

That is the true test of quality education. Not the college degree, not the high salary, and definitely not the asinine comparison of the test scores of one cohort compared to that of a completely different cohort.

Rufus is quite correct. The problem goes back much farther than NCLBA, and it rests squarely on the shoulder of the adults who have long held that competition is a net benefit in education, that self-esteem should be based on how one child compares to another child, or the criminal waste of time trying to teach C students A-level course material.

Not all children belong in college. Not all jobs by any stretch of sanity need a baccalaureate degree. Competition rules the process, and that is the great evil the rest of you -- if you'll please forgive my passionate anger -- should be looking at.

Don't blame the teachers for the culture that's being ingrained into children by their parents and society-at-large. By all the gods get off your high horses and stop expecting teachers to be the guardians of morality. They are members of your community, not pillars of it. Many of them have children, but all of them have something most of the rest of us don't have: a general perspective on child development, a clear understanding of not just that children are different, but why they differ.

Talk to any teachers who have been at it for more than 20 years. Ask them what they'd rather have: complete autonomy and authority over their students, or a partnership with parents and community. You (general) have been complaining that they have the former while expecting them to be perfect at it, while all along they've been desparate for the latter.

And with due respect to the teachers out there of less than 20 years tenure... you really don't know any better, and I hope you avoid burnout before finding a school that actually gives you authority to go with your responsibility but doesn't expect you to be superhuman.

Quick personal story: My IQ is 165. I was a National Merit finalist. I'm a natural speed reader with over 95% comprehension and retention. (Well, at the age of 52, I'm sure that last statistic has come down some.) I also have less than three semesters of college credit. While I was one of those "elite" students who really did belong in college, I was woefully unprepared for it through no one's fault but my own. The "system" waited for my commitment, for my effort, gave me every open door it had, and it took no responsibility for my refusal to give them. That is the way it should be, the way it was 35 years ago for me, and that way is precisely what has been under attack from the outside all along. It's almost dead now. Congratulations to our society, which will have generations of people who feel good about themselves with little or no valid reason to feel that way. They will run into my children, some of them, and have their incompetence rubbed in their faces by young adults who know what they know, understand their limitations, and have self-esteem based on knowing they try their best and that failure is a consequence, not an evil to be feared.

Todd, that's a very difficult thing to face and handle. Please don't take this as advice, but rather a description of our experience that may differ from yours to a lesser or greater extent.

My wife and I -- mostly from her professional training, but from my own experiences as well -- hold to the fact that every child is different. We encouraged them to try new things, to expect failure as an integral component of learning, and to come to us whenever self-esteem issues come up. I'd be posting yet another long essay to go into any detail, but the core principal is that your child will develop at her own natural pace. Development "wisdom" is a guide, not a diagnosis. The first milestone is the advent of abstract reasoning, physically supported in the brain starting at about the age of four -- symptomized by the incessant "why" questions, amongst other (annoying) things. ;-)

Preparing a child to learn must include preparing her to learn from her mistakes. Achievement must always be judged for the child, and not versus other children. My personal analogy is dance, because I've been a folk dance instructor for many years and seen hundreds of beginners to a handful of ones capable of performance. When I face a group of beginners, I make it clear that achievement is by their standards, not mine, not the choreographer's or the cultural ambassador's who went to the village to learn the dances. Correction should be encouragement as well, the best examples are two phrases I learned from a mentor: "The other left foot!" and "It's more important to be going in the right direction than being on the right foot." My greatest reward has been seeing the most awkward doofus (their choice of term, not mine) laughing and smiling in the dance circle or line right alongside the best and most precisely styled dancers.

Franklin -

Thanks for the comments.

In general, I am fairly good at abstaining from harmful rhetoric when talking outside of my close circle of friends/colleagues. :-) Unfortunately, this means that my wife has to bear the brunt of it. :-)

Just want to say despite his harmful rhetoric I still love my husband. :)

In terms of sitting down with a teacher, I am wondering at what type of schools one attends to be able to sit down with a teacher. At our private Christian school I get the sense the expectation is for us to send our child, pay our tuition, volunteer at the school as needed but more or less get out of the way. We will get a 15 minute parent teacher conference in November and I assume another one in the spring, but it is hard for me to imagine my expectations for my daughters learning to matter at all. As long as she is "up to grade level" and "not a behavior problem" then from their perspective there is nothing to talk about.

I feel sorry for the students now a days with the pull of the internet. I can only imagine how hard it would have been for me to abstain from it at that age, as I had a hard time of abstaining from much of anything in college and I admit even at my advanced age at times I find the pull of the internet a distraction.

Thanks. It is an interesting experience picking a school for your children. One quickly realizes that even if one is willing to pay for private school that ones ideals can't be met unless I suppose one were to homeschool. However, even if one decided to homeschool unless the homeschooling parent could meet their own ideals they would have the same problem. I think parenting is an exercise in realizing ones ideals and ones reality are often at odds.

Well...resume your discussions and I'll get back to my work. :)

I attended Kansas State and as a matter of fact, I think I had Marketing in that very room in the video. Now, over 20 years later (and as a lecturer myself at UC Berkeley) I realize that Kansas State was largely an education factory solely existing to grant degrees, with little concern about whether the students were learning anything worthwhile. I WAS one of those students, figurative speaking, in the video. I recall some classes that I went to less than 5 times and still received a B. I went to my first Business Policy class and thought to myself: "this class is basically bull__it. I'm only coming back for exams." Although I had a few professors that were great, I recall some others whose idea of a lecture was reading out of the textbook to the class. Poor professors, combined grad students instructors who didn't really speak English, left me with a less than favorable education experience. But I didn't know it at the time; and don't get me wrong--I had a really great time at K-State and drank a ton of beer, I just didn't learn a whole lot. I got a great job when I graduated, but I never really learned to think.

The students I teach now are nothing like me when I was in school. They are engaged, they come to class, they think critically and they do their work. Why? I think part of this is due to the fact I only have 28 students, I know all their names and I care deeply about their experience in the classroom. (Also, I can't recall the last time I used a chalkboard!) Moreover, the University sets a high bar for admission and most students have had to work hard to get where they are. While students are here, the University expects excellence and for the most part gets it; most students don't have time to go out drinking every night like I did. At Kansas State we weren't expected to give much and we didn't—and we found more interesting things to do in Manhattan.

Erin Manning wrote:

"This has gone on too long, but if you take this dynamic and add it to an increasingly incoherent college-level educational model which spends more time deconstructing the idea that there's anything useful about studying the achievements or writings of Dead White Males, etc., than actually teaching anything..."

I am a faculty member at a university closely related to the one depicted in the video. I don't know where you get the impression that *any* time is spent at universities denigrating "the achievements or writings of Dead White Males". Maybe in English departments? (In the 1980s?) But that's just one small piece of university life. In philosophy all that's ordinary taught is Dead (and Live) White Men, and this is no big deal. In the sciences, nothing of the cultural war you are speaking of.

The maker of the video is right in many ways, but I think it has less to do with culture war than that comment, and others here, suggest.

Hi,

This is a wonderful opinion. The things mentioned are unanimous and needs to be appreciated by everyone.

robinson

education jobs careers