Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

or, Are You Smarter than a Five-Year-Old?

Children today are not always taught the old fairy tales, the old nursery stories. Indeed, there is a systematic campaign in some quarters not to teach them. Too often, they are not politically correct; they have no place in the common Marxist/”cognitive science” agenda to alter the culture and control thought for political purposes.

But mostly, we just don't understand them, and don't get the point. I recall in grad school the professorial assertion that they were products of the human unconscious, mostly of psychological interest; the argument was over whether they were truly “pure,” or “mixed with ego.”

No kidding—apparently they were written by people when they were unconscious. I wonder if Hans Christian Anderson realized he was asleep?

Apparently, too, they made no more sense to the Freudians and Jungians than the contents of a typical dream.

Yet fairy tales and nursery tales are the encapsulated wisdom of mankind. In this, the Marxists are partly right: they are our initial social programming. Cultural literacy is an issue here; but more than that, without our fairy tales, we lack our user's manual for life, and are doomed to repeat all our ancestors' worst mistakes, without benefit of their prior experience.

Which, of course, predictably, is what is commonly happening these days, since we have largely forgotten them.

Because of global warming, for example, as we all know, the world is going to end. A correspondent wrote recently, “we are spitting ourselves out... of existence.” Before that, we were going to destroy the world with overpopulation, or pollution, or ozone holes, or resource depletion; we are still running out of oil, and water. But in fact, even in the worst case scenario, even if we grant that it is completely proven, there is no real probability that global warming could end human life on the planet. Nor, realistically, could overpopulation. We ought by now to realize that the idea that “the end of the world is nigh” is almost a human instinct, and we ought accordingly to be skeptical of any such assumptions, ever.

But isn't that the moral of the story of Henny-Penny? That foolish people are always prone to stampede into such panics, and that this makes them prey to any unscrupulous person ready to exploit this instinct for his own ends? Any child who was paying proper attention during Henny Penny's sad tale should be proof against millennial con games of all sorts--including those used so skillfully by charlatans like Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.

How about the laments of feminists? Many of us have accepted their claims following the simple logic that, if there were not something wrong with their current lot in life, they would not be complaining. This is a common formula throughout the feminist ethic, and the victimhood game more generally: if a woman feels oppressed, or feels threatened, or feels harassed, ipso facto, obviously, she is. Recognized “victim groups” have gotten quite far on the same formula—believing it, to be fair, completely, themselves.

But this simple logic should, in a properly-educated child, be immediately tempered by the story of the Princess and the Pea. It is, instead, precisely those most used to privilege who will complain most loudly of their lot—for they are those least inured to oppression, threat, harassment, or discomfort of any kind. One who has always been a slave—why and when should he dare take it into his head to object?

Accordingly, recent immigrants from South Asia, Africa, or the Arab world complain loudly of the discrimination they have faced, here and at home, and are given affirmative action programs. But these are wealthy members of the upper class in the countries they come from. Did the dirt-poor Irish, Polish, Ukrainians, or Armenians of two or three generations ago complain similarly? Just the reverse—because they really were poor, and really did come from a history of oppression.

Missing this important insight, we tend to systematically increase the privileges of the most privileged, and the oppression of the most oppressed, all the while believing we are doing the opposite.

And how much of the world's current folly could have been avoided if only a five-year-old who knew the story of The Emperor's New Clothes had been consulted? It has been rightly observed that the craziest things of all are those things commonly believed by academics: global warming, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, affirmative action, political correctness, speech codes, queer studies, Fascism in its day. Most are based on a simple logical fallacy that should be apparent to a casual observer within a few minutes. The Emperor's story explains succinctly why this is entirely likely to be so. If it is possible for any intellectual phony or slacker to convincingly present something as “believed by all the best authorities,” then, even if we personally suspect it makes no sense at all, most people who want to appear intelligent and well-educated will pretend to believe it as well, and assert it with that much more energy to avoid the suspicion that they do not really get the point. Anyone who becomes an academic, in turn, considering the hard slog it requires, is probably deeply invested in projecting the idea that they are unusually smart, and deeply insecure about it. The child who truly understands this is protected against most such nonsense, and knows enough to think for himself.

Aesop's Fables, of course, are full of such lessons. The perpetual urge for a big, powerful government with detailed laws and regulations to impose proper order upon us all is well analysed in the fable of King Log and King Stork. The scapegoating of “rich corporate interests,” “rich capitalists,” “rich Jews,” and so forth, and the notion that governments can pay for everything by simply confiscating thier wealth, has been a common fallacy, or con job, in Marxism and well beyond. Hitler, Mugabe, Amin, all tried it. Most left-leaning governments base their core policies on it, in milder form. All with eventual results easily predicted by any child who knew the tale of the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs.

And the apparently shocking, unheard-of notion that scoundrels might take the chasuble of priesthood in order to exploit the vulnerable? It should not so surprise anyone who was once read the story of the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. They would be far less inclined, as children, to fall for it; nor would they be inclined as adults to suppose it reflected somehow on the truth of the Catholic faith. Any more than the wolf's actions reflected on the true nature of sheep. How cockeyed is that?

We will probably never end the horror of child abuse. But our present efforts, besides being terribly expensive, are probably also making matters worse, by scapegoating fathers, by weakening families and by handing children over to professional bureaucrats who necessarily have no special feeling for them. Here's a perfectly cost-free measure we all can take: any child with access to nursery stories would at least be partly armoured against emotional abuse, by far the worst aspect of the problem. They would know the dangers of evil “step-parents,” and what they are capable of. They would understand that parents do not always love their children. They would have understood that parents can also envy their children. They would have learned that the fault was not necessarily theirs, and understood that there was still hope for the future. This is indeed one of the most common lessons of the nursery tales: consider Cinderella, or Snow White, or Rapunzel, or the Ugly Duckling.

Sexual abuse of children, pedophilia, is another hot topic currently. Want to “street-proof” your kids against sexual abuse? What could better “street-proofing” than the stories of Hansel and Gretel, or Little Red Riding Hood? The nursery tales are even far more realistic than modern treatments as to its probable source. Don't even trust grandma--you never know...

Sadly, these lessons are largely or completely lost in modern retellings. In the versions most common nowadays, everything scary or violent has been stripped out, supposedly to protect little ears from any possible hint that all is not wonderful in this world. It isn't. Real wolves are not huggable. In doing so, we are in fact setting our children up for all the real horrors the stories only ask them to imagine.

Of course, the politically correct will object that our nursery tales are only about our own culture; they are no longer “appropriate” for a globalized, multicultural, world. Perhaps they are cultural imperialism, in a multicultural classroom; perhaps they teach intolerance.

Nothing could be further from the truth: only academics could believe this. Nursery stories delight in that which happened not only “long ago,” but “far, far away.” As a result, they systematically encourage multiculturalism, globalism, and an interest in other cultures. Of all forms of literature, they are the most open to assimilating from other cultures. Few familiar English nursery tales are originally English: Grimm is from Germany, Anderson from Denmark, Lafontaine from France, Aesop from Greece, Uncle Remus from Africa, the 1001 Nights from Arabia, Persia, and India. The Nightingale is transparently from China, and the original Cinderella lived in Korea. Folklorists find near-identical stories told in areas and cultures as widely dispersed as Tajikistan and Tonawanda—among the Iroquois Indians.

Besides being of vital importance to individual children, and to the adults they become, this stratum of nursery wisdom could, if emphasized in our education systems, actually become an important element of international, and indeed global, understanding.

Make sure your kids don't leave home without it.

Western Civilization in One Volume

According to the theories of E.D. Hirsch, developing reading fluency is largely a matter of “cultural literacy”--that is, knowing the information that a good writer will assume in his audience. This is an important way in which reading differs from listening: a speaker can judge his current audience and their comprehension, and adjust accordingly. An author cannot, and must make assumptions. Cultural allusions, metaphors, and casual references are not in a dictionary: if a student does not catch the reference, he may not even recognize it for an allusion.

Students entering college, therefore, must have the cultural background the authors they read will typically assume, or they are going to struggle with the readings.

Hirsch found this to be a problem for ill-educated native speakers. But it is bound to be doubly a problem for ESL students, coming from a possibly quite different culture. What does this mean but a different set of cultural references and assumptions?

This leads to an interesting, and vitally important, speculation: what are the snippets of information that a foreign student should have, and may not have, in order to be able to read English fluently at the college level? Hirsch has his own ideas, of course, but they are specifically for American students studying in America; and, of course, one is free to differ on what is important.

I'm thinking in particular of ESL students, many of whome can be from a dramatically different culture, from China, Africa, or the Arabian Gulf. They may well need a background, not just in English-speaking culture, but in European civilization generally. What do they need to catch up on?

This will of course differ widely country to country. The best precise mix could be determined by each individual institution or even teacnher through a standard questionnaire testing for knowledge of each element of this set of basic materials.

Of course, some will raise the objection that Hirsch's ideas have faced in America: that such an established canon “privileges” the culture of dead white European males, and so is a sort of cultural imperialism.

That is not our affair. We are not, presumably, obliging anyone to learn English, or to study in North America. Assuming that they do want to learn English, however, and to study in North America, the authors they are going to have to read in a North American or British college are, by and large, going to be dead Europeans. If we have Marxist notions of perfecting the world by deliberately changing the culture, our ESL students are not the place to do it; any more than we have the right to alter the rules of English grammar to suit our own preferences. That would simply be malpractice.

Here are a few ideas I have come up with. Other suggestions are welcome:

Plato's Cave
Aristotle's Law of Non-Contradiction
Aristotle on the syllogism
Aristotle's argument for the Prime Mover
Anselm's Proof of the Existence of God
Occam's Razor
Descartes' Meditations

Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar”

Genesis
Exodus (highlighting the Ten Commandments)
23rd Psalm
John 1
Luke's birth narrative
The Sermon on the Mount from Matthew
Matthew's passion

The Lord's Prayer
The Nicene Creed

Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”

The US Declaration of Independence
The US Bill of Rights

ML King Jr., “I Have a Dream”

Concise summary of Robert's Rules of Order
The Wedding Ceremony from the Book of Common Prayer
The Miranda Statement

Faust Legend
Story of Jonah
Story of Daniel
Story of Job
Story of Odyssey
Story of Iliad
Story of Robinson Crusoe
Story of King Lear
Story of Romeo and Juliet
Story of Hamlet
Story of The Merchant of Venice
Story of Moby Dick


Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Donne, “No Man is an Island”
Rudyard Kipling, “If...”
“Casey at the Bat”
“In Flanders Fields”
“Twas the Night Before Christmas”

It seems to me that all of this could fit into one printed volume, and might be dealt with in one semester of work. I think every ESL college prep program should include this course. Had they read all of this, I suspect that the average ESL student would in fact be better prepared for reading at the college level than is the typical native speaker at the time of college graduation; for, as Hirsch pointed out, our own schools now neglect to teach this.

On Classroom Management

A friend sends along an article from the LA Times about the difficulties teachers face. The subhead reads: “Among the top reasons why teachers are deemed unsuccessful or leave the profession is their inability to effectively manage student behavior, experts say.”

Nicely put, that: "deemed unsuccessful."

Of course, everyone today is worried about maintaining order in the schools; this is the stuff the newspapers love. Kids today have no discipline, and schools have become free-fire zones.

And, indeed, "classroom management," or running a disciplined class, seems always to be the number one thing that school administrators value in teachers. Probably many parents agree. It also seems to be the one thing teachers currently most value in themselves. It is, as the article implies, just about the essence of the teaching profession these days. But should it be? Does it have any relation to actual learning?

There is no question that an orderly, compliant class is much more comfortable for the teacher. It is also easy to observe and evaluate. Indeed, it is about the only thing it is possible to evaluate reliably in a one-hour "classroom observation." This may be one secret of its current prominence, since good teaching is, by comparison, difficult to define, difficult to evaluate, and impossible to evaluate in any one-hour classroom observation. Given that it can be evaluated, this would at least require a lot more work on the part of administrators.

But what about the kids? Is it good for their education? At best, it seems tangential—a question of babysitting, not teaching. Even if it is really important, the simple and less expensive thing, surely, would be to hire a security guard to handle it, a bouncer, and leave teachers to teach.

The studies just have not been done showing that a more orderly classroom results in better student achievement. And consider: for comparison, are the adult societies that can put up the best show of public order the most productive societies? Outstanding in this regard would be countries like North Korea, Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union... By comparison, public events in a country like the US, Britain, France, or Hong Kong, tend to look relatively chaotic. But which type of society has proven, over the long term, more productive, in either practical or intellectual terms?

Why wouldn't it be the same with classrooms?

Of course, there is a necessary minimum, with students not strangling one another and vandalizing the property. Countries that descend into true chaos, like Somalia or Afghanistan, tend to be least successful of all. But they equate, precisely, to a classroom of children without an adult present—that is not a likely scenario in our schools.

Short of that, it is hard to believe that the presence of an adult in a room of twenty or thirty children—not to mention an adult with the power to evaluate you, send you to the Vice Principal, or give you a detention--is not in itself sufficient to accomplish that much.

Beyond that, in the middle range, some may argue that relatively more orderly societies like Germany and Japan are preferable to relatively less orderly societies like Italy and Korea. But at best, that is a point on which reasonable people can differ, more a matter of personal preference than anything objective. Historically, both have been about equally successful economically and intellectually.

So, on the whole, the current emphasis on “class management” seems to be beside the point. Except that excessive order is almost certainly harmful; yet this is what the present system favours. How natural, or healthy, is it really for a young child to sit still and quiet at a desk for hours at time? How educational is it? In fact, we have definite evidence that we learn better while we are physically engaged, and moving. Aristotle insisted on it, which is why we have the word “pedant.” It means “walker.”

The model of the orderly class at its desks was surely designed for the convenience of the teacher, and the system, not for the best education. Some have argued that it is based on the model of the factory, and sees children as products rolling off an assembly line.

Some will probably point out, and with justice, that students do not sit still at their desks nearly so much as they used to any more—nowadays, they are moved around into different configurations for “pair work,” “group work,” and so on. This is true; but it is still pretty sedentary, and it maintains and even accentuates the teacher's total control over the students. Now it is not enough that they sit silently where they've been planted; they must also get up and march about efficiently at the teacher's command.

Besides not being conducive to learning, all this teaches one particular lesson above all others: conformity. This is, I submit, not a good lesson for a future citizen of a democracy, or of a pluralistic, tolerant society, to learn. Nor is it good for creativity, human progress, or for any serious later intellectual inquiry.

This need for discipline also prompts teachers, I think, to deliberately select boring material. They cannot afford to get the children too excited: excited children tend to make noises or run about. Unfortunately, we also know that maintaining interest is the one great essential for learning. Plato insisted on it as the teacher's chief duty.

It also does two more things that we probably do not want to happen. First, it weeds out of the teaching profession anyone who does not themselves highly value conformity—which would also mean, probably, that it weeds out the brighest teachers, the best scholars, the most creative teachers, those least inclined toward prejudice, those most sympathetic to children and their special needs, and those most likely to make a special effort for a student who needs it. Second, it not only gives free rein to, but positively encourages, teachers who are inclined to be bullies. The profession, by its nature, is probably already a magnet for any born bully: it's the fastest route there is to significant power over a large number of others. We badly need to set up barriers to prevent this. Instead, currently, we are virtually requiring it.

I think it is a very bad sign if, when you stroll into the teacher's lounge, the students are spoken of as adversaries.

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/classroom_discipline/8217

Yet that seems to be the common case in teachers' lounges everywhere.

It seems to me that anyone who does not feel a positive affection for all their students should not be teaching. This is what Don Bosco, the great Catholic educator, considered the key to all good teaching: you must love all your students, and be a friend and advocate for them at all times. Nor did he have the luxury of instructing only the well-behaved and well-bred. Just the reverse: his schools were strictly for the urban poor, abandoned street kids, the boys in the 'hood. Boys' Town, in the US, based on his principles, repeated the experiment with the same striking success. Any discipline was handled by the children themselves. St. Philip Neri, another great Catholic educator, said of his rowdy students, "I don't care if they chop wood on my back, so long as they don't sin."


Something is very wrong with teaching, if “class discipline” or “classroom management” has become or remains the linchpin of the profession. And I'm not at all sure it is the students' fault.

The Abell Report

There is precious little useful data in the social sciences. However, Maryland's Abell Foundation has crunched all the available studies to determine what makes a good teacher. Their analysis (http://www.abell.org/publications/detail.asp?ID=59), interestingly, arrives at all the same conclusions I already have, working deductively. The evidence, at a minimum, adds some reinforcement to common sense.

First point: studies show that good teachers do make a difference in student performance. Roughly, the students of a good teacher learn twice as fast as those with a bad teacher. It follows that it is indeed worthwhile to try to improve teacher quality. But how do we do this? Insist that they all have proper training in “pedagogy”?

Well, no. Obviously, the Education Schools have a vested interest in proving this is so, and access to the funding to do the relevant studies. Nevertheless, no study to date, according to the Abell survey, has shown that graduates of ed schools teach any better than those who do not go, in terms of student achievement. Studies also indicate that teachers with higher degrees in education (M. Ed., Ed. D.) do not produce better student results. In fact, a table aggregating sixty studies on the issue (Abell, p. 18) seems to plainly show, on balance, that they produce worse student results—the more education a teacher has in education, the worse a teacher he or she becomes.

Since modern teacher education stands and falls on its supposedly “scientific” basis, plainly, it falls. We should be spending no more money on Education Schools, or on hiring teachers with such qualifications. It is at best worthless, with some indications it is actually harming our children.

So, in choosing teachers, what criteria should we use instead?

No suprises here, at least for me. The single clearest indication of who will be a good teacher is how well the candidate does on a test of verbal ability. The present paper cites directly 20 separate recent studies that produce this same result.

That's what good teaching is, in the first instance: being able to explain things clearly (and, even better, engagingly). The traditional training for a career as a teacher in the past, in the West and in many other cultures, was in rhetoric, and the final exam was often a successful performance in a debate.

Now we need to refer to a fact cited here before, and mentioned again in the present report: those entering Ed Schools at every level regularly score lower on the verbal SAT than those majoring in almost any other subject. Leave aside why this is so—it necessarily means that selecting our teachers from Ed School graduates produces a lower quality of instruction than choosing randomly from holders of any other degree. It is not just that the schools do nothing to teach the one essential teaching skill: they also, for whatever reason, repel those who already have it.

The present study theorizes that the greater verbal ability measured in the best teachers is a proxy for greater intelligence, and that this is the relevant factor. It might well be; nothing correlates better with IQ than the size of one's working vocabulary. And studies also show that the graduates of more “selective” colleges do better as teachers than others. They also show that the holders of avanced degrees in the subject taught produce better student results, at least at high school level.

This too, is simply common sense. Other than an ability to communicate well, the second logical requirement for a good teacher is knowledge of the subject taught. Intelligence is ability to learn quickly; and those who attend a better college presumably also learn more in the same amount of time. And this always matters; you cannot teach what you do not know. Even at the elementary level, a good general knowledge, a wide grounding in the history of human thought, makes a difference. This is precisely the value a living teacher can add: fielding those unexpected questions. Otherwise, the student could do as well on their own with a good book. Moreover, someone who has spent a few years devoted to a given subject obviously has some personal enthusiasm for it: if nothing else, enthusiasm and interest shows, and tends to rub off.

Unfortunately, as the authors of the Abell study point out, academic excellence of this traditional sort is given no status in Ed Schools. When I was going through the system and looked into the possibility of a teaching degree, back in the mid-seventies, there were absolutely no academic requirements for Ed School in terms of marks or schools attended: if you held the general BA, it was purely first-come, first-served.

Rumours hold that the same attitude persists in the marking of students once in. For, the authors of the present study note, the Ed Schools and the teaching profession have developed a distinctly anti-intellectual culture that resents those with other academic qualifications and backgrounds. They are presumably representatives of the oppressor class.

Rather obviously, by circumventing this system, a private school could easily achieve better results at a lower cost. And that is exactly what we find: private schools achieve consistently better student results at roughly half the cost per student; so does home schooling.

In other words: our Ed Schools are a net drag on our society.