The Education Blame Game

Examiner column for December 18.

    Everyone bemoans the level of thinking and writing skills in our youth. High school teachers wonder what they were doing in middle school, college professors wonder what they were doing in high school, and parents slap their foreheads and wonder what went wrong at every level.

    “Kids can’t write.” “Kids can’t think.” The blame game takes place daily in the media and at water coolers.

    What is wrong with our educational system that children can’t use the apostrophe or the comma? Or can’t read a memo and figure out when a meeting will take place?

    This is the spot in my column where I am supposed to come up with a solution.

    Too bad I don’t have one. But what I do have is a perspective on what’s been happening in our high school and college classrooms for the past 30+ years, and I can say with authority: our children are not less well educated than we were.

    Yes, they care less about the comma and the apostrophe. When current email protocol includes “btw yr rite---lets see yr fmly @ xmas,” should we wonder where those rules of yore have gone?

    So part of the problem is that we use an archaic measure when we judge education. Mechanical correctness is not a fair measure---ask any teacher of learning disabled students, for whom “correctness” is not even a possibility.

    As teachers find out quickly with LD students, their intelligence is not impaired by their difficulties with spelling and punctuation. “Correctness” is as much a function of visual memory as it is a function of educational level. LD students can think critically as well or better than those who score high on a “correctness” scale.

    I’m not endorsing abolishing standards for correctness: when I make an error in an email, I am mortified and humiliated. (If a Ph.D. in English literature makes an error, I assume irrationally, then our whole civilization is on the skids.)

    That logic is part of the problem. Because we were taught that “correctness” was the most visible signal of a good education, we continue to impose that standard. Once we give up these preconceptions, we can measure the education of our youth more accurately.

    How should we judge learning? One way would be by the level of questioning. Past generations were often afraid to question, but that’s not true anymore. Today’s students love to question.

    They question partly out of curiosity and partly out of cynicism that they know what we will say before we say it, but are delighted when what comes out of our mouths is unexpected.

    They want the reassurance that there are answers out there in the world, but are intrigued by the notion that some questions do not have answers---or at least not easy ones.

    Clearly the ability to ask questions shouldn’t be the only measure for education, but blaming others up and down the line isn’t an answer either. It’s time for society to ask better questions in assessing learning, to give up correctness as the standard, and to concede that maybe the old measure isn’t the only measure.

Comments

[Bob F.]

Correct, as always! I find today's youth at least as well educated as my generation of aging bboomers--by today's standards. A comparative history piece on the implicit standards of each generation would certainly be interesting. It usually is embedded in the complaints of the older generation.

[Susan Ariew]

The "blame game" is also just a form of oversimplified thinking about learning. The assumption behind it all is that learning is linear, and that if something is taught that automatically means that it's learned. People who know how complex learning is know that it's not quite that simple. That is why rewarding teachers for good student scores on high stakes tests is a bankrupt approach to assessing learning and it again ties to the assumption that learning is simple, linear and totally measureable once something is taught. Too bad it isn't that simple.

[Sandee Wright]

"the old measure isn’t the only measure"
Exactly.

What percentage actually DO question, are encouraged to question, and rewarded for questioning? And, what is the quality of the questioning? There are thinkers and then their are effective thinkers. The same would be true of 'guestioning' and the motivation behind the questions. We don't want to evaluate on questioning alone, but on the quality, the sharpness, the focus and appropriateness of the questions. We want to teach students HOW to effectively question, to strategize, to analyze, and to synthesize what they have learned from their questions. To encourage just 'questioning' for questioning's sake and be pleased, is analogous to taking comfort that my baby just vocalized, thinking that this means he is now able to speak English. AP students are more likely to reason critically. But what of the non-AP student? Is it true that much of the environment at our schools reward and promote the compliant student - the one who does the homework, submits it in the format required, in the timeframe required, and without needing to ask questions?

Have we moved away from the memorize-regurgitate process, that I was raised up in, to such an extent that our children, on the whole, DO ask questions -of their teachers, of their parents, of their society? Or, do we identify these individuals as too-active, too disruptive?

Encouraging critical thinking and questioning is a messy, time-consuming proposal for the classroom teacher. It takes hard work and a risk-free, secure environment - as well as the support of parents. Until we reward good reasoning skills, i.e., critical thinking - as the outcome, too few students will take up the questions that really matter and move beyond, 'why do I need this education?' to 'how can I change the world?'

Teaching critical thinking skills, strategic/Socratic questioning skills, and creating environments that encourage them, will lead to gains in test scores and the learning we say we want. Most importantly, it will lead to the type of future citizen we say we want.

It isn't simple. It will take a paradigm shift for the educator and for the parent, who him/herself was raised in the schools that taught compliance not thinking/questioning - who themselves, are not
comfortable with the ideas and concepts of 'critical thinking'. At any rate, it's time to get at it.

[Erica]

These are such thoughtful comments, and I totally agree. To Sandee's point about the regular student, I've found that questioning skills and synthetic reasoning are exciting to most non-AP students, but very mysterious to the more literal-minded. There's a place for both in every classroom, at all levels. Thanks for sharing your views!

[David]

A good column that highlights the central core issue--how should learning be assessed? With the Secretary of Education pushing new "learning outcome" language, this is going to be the key issue with us for some time. . .how do I know if I am helping the student "learn" anything? What seems lost in this debate is an even older question: the relationship between student and teacher. If teachers simply transmit content, then learning assessment is easy: either the content has been mastered or not. But from the earliest "academies" students have come to teachers for much more than content. . .

[Rmoore]

Thank you so much for your comments on this widespread habit. I can understand people outside the education community wondering what we are doing...but the picking apart of educators by one another is disturbing. A great way to break oneself of this ugly little habit is teaching the same students at more than one level. Some schools accomplish this with looping (moving teachers along with their students from grade to grade). In our small, rural high school, I had that experience several times. It was humbling to realize that I could not blame last year's teacher for what students appeared not to know--and I couldn't use the excuse that it had not been taught!
It did force me to look at how I taught, and how students actually learn and retain information.