The Factory School

To fix the schools, we need better teachers. We need a better curriculum. But there is one more thing we need, and it is also easy to get, if we have the will. We need better classrooms.

The schools we have now are basically modeled on factories. This is supposedly for efficiency. It does not work. Children are not identical, like car parts, and cannot be treated as such. Worse, treating them as though they are identical objects is an awful lesson in civics in a free democracy.

It is not possible to pitch a lesson properly to all the students in a large class. The dumbest will not get it, and will be left behind. The smartest will be bored out of their minds, and tune out. Most teachers worry only, if at all, about the dumb kids, and tend to slow it all down. Making it worse for the smartest ones.

There is no way around this, in a large class.

Ironically, it was probably better in the old one-room schoolhouse. With a mix of students at different levels, there could be no attempt to have them learn in lock-step.

We used to stream students, to reduce this problem: there were dumb classes and smart classes. This has become politically incorrect. By this system, kids were consigned when young to permanent failure. So we threw them all together into one class, making the problem worse.

The current “efficient” system is insanely wasteful. Properly, no student need fail. Everyone can learn anything; it is just a question of how long it will take them. We end up putting kids through twelve years of schooling, and they come out the other side, and perhaps have learned little or nothing. We have wasted their childhoods.

Fortunately, we now have a simple solution: we teach with computers. With computers, each lesson can be automatically paced to suit each student. If a student does not get the point of a lecture or explanation, he or she can watch the video again, or watch another video on the same topic.

Down with STEM. We Need ROOTS

Improving the quality of teachers is not the only thing we need to do to improve the schools. The curriculum is also a problem, and as much of a problem. We are endlessly perverse in what we choose to teach.

I know there will be howls of protest over this, but the truth is, we waste kids' time in teaching them so much science and math. Everyone but the kids loves STEM. But STEM is not the way to go.

Yes, these fields are important for a lot of good jobs; and important for the advancement of our physical comfort. But for the majority of students who will not go on to STEM careers, it is pretty much a waste of their time. As the old saw goes, how much of your high school algebra did you use today? When today did you need to work out the circumference of a circle? Yet the time lost studying these things kept you away from learning things that might have been important to you in your real life and real career.

If, on the other hand, you do need these bits of knowledge in your job or your life later on, you have almost certainly forgotten them by then. You must pick them up again on the fly anyway—which, fortunately, is easy enough, when and if they are important to you.

Teaching science is an even worse time sink; at least the way we teach it now. We teach it as a set of known facts and “laws.” This is really the antithesis of science, which relies on taking nothing on authority. Inevitably, a significant portion of the “facts” and “laws” the typical student learns in public school are disproven a few years later—sometimes before the text goes to press. The student then wastes his time not just filling his head with useless information, but with things he will later need to laboriously unlearn, or look a fool.

We ought to teach the history of science, to show what science really is: a method, not a set of conclusions. And, of course, we ought to teach the scientific method. We claim to do that sometimes now, but we really never do. We will assign the class an experiment with a known, pre-ordained conclusion. Then, if the experiment does not produce the intended results, we require the student to explain why it failed. This is still teaching the opposite of the scientific method. Moreover, it seems deliberately pointless and boring.

At the same time, there are a lot of essential things, things everyone needs, that we do not teach. Most important among them are ethics and religion. They are, and have always been understood to be, the essence of an education. Unless you understand your goal, nothing else makes any sense.

But these are things we cannot teach in public schools. We do not want government teaching ethics and religion: that way totalitarianism lies. The only solution seems to be either funding all denominational schools, or school vouchers.

Aside from this, we need to teach basic skills: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Which we do, but not very well. Unfortunately, the best way to teach such basic skills is through direct instruction, or as teachers currently call it disparagingly, “drill and kill.” Memorization is itself an invaluable skill, and we ought to teach it deliberately: the practice of memorizing things is of value over and above the value of the things memorized. Unfortunately, far from teaching it, we currently tend to prohibit it.

Beyond and after this, we need to teach rhetoric, parliamentary procedure, and logic, which we do not currently teach at all. For any position in life, it is important to be able to think, to persuade, and to avoid being conned or manipulated. And it is important to be able to work in groups. Yes, we currently make students work in groups, endlessly, but then we do not show them how—or more often, we set up the groups so that they will not work. They become no more than tools for conformity and bullying. Kids need to learn how to run a meeting.

We need to teach basic bookkeeping—vital to any business, but also vital to anyone else, for personal finance.

On top of this, as I think E.D. Hirsch has demonstrated, there is a good case that we need to teach a core of shared cultural knowledge. Without it, you are left outside the cultural dialogue. You cannot read a good newspaper or a college text. This is where history and literature, in particular, come in. And that does not mean some recent book by a “minority” author, for the sake of supposed diversity. And it does not mean the history of some “minority” group. By the logic of the need, that means looking at the most familiar and established authors, and the aspects of history everybody has been most familiar with over the past generations. All those dead white males. Otherwise the exercise is pointless, and another huge waste of students' time.

Teaching a second language might be a good idea, but certainly not the way we teach it now. Growing up in Quebec, we all studied French from grade 3 through high school. And I doubt anyone ever became fluent in French as a result.

The problem was with the goal. It is crazy to try for conversational fluency in a classroom. Conversational fluency comes with speaking practice. It is almost impossible to manage this in a classroom. At best, it is a wildly inefficient use of student time and resources. If you want fluency, you get it on the streets, in the playgrounds, watching TV, hanging out with friends, shopping in the stores. In a classroom, the only useful approach is the old, now always disparaged and condemned “grammar-translation method.” It is universally condemned because it will never make you fluent in the language. True enough, it that is what you want. But it will give you a reading knowledge. This gives you access to all the most important thoughts and all the most important conversations in that language. That is not such a small thing in itself. More importantly, in having to analyse grammar, it will teach you how language works. And to understand how language works is to understand how thought works.

For the same reason, even apart from its own utility, and perhaps even as a suitable replacement, it would be immensely valuable to teach all students how to program. Unlike geometry or algebra, programming skills have an immediate practical payoff. You can make things, right away.

These are the things that everyone can benefit from knowing. If a student then decides to go into some STEM field, that is the time to learn what is specific to that field.

Of course, we are all charging full steam ahead in the opposite direction.

The Light that Failed

One of the saddest things is the world is to see the light of learning go out. Especially in your own children. And I have seen it several times.

At age three or four, kids always seem to be looking forward with great excitement to at last going to school. Certainly my kids were.

By about grade three or four, they always hate school.

Something is wrong here. Love of learning is spontaneous. All of us naturally love to learn.

And that craving for knowledge does not disappear: it is redirected outside of school to learning how to skateboard, how to twerk, how to beat some video game, how to solve Rubik's cube, how to photoshop a picture, how to do almost anything. Learning something new is one of life's great joys.

Only in school is learning considered subversive. Children are actively discouraged from learning, and only “bad” kids fail to get the message. Time taken learning something is seen as time taken away from school.

How could we manage to screw things up so badly?

To begin with, without a free market, any enterprise soon comes to be run for the benefit of the employees, not the customers. Our schools are there for the teachers and the administrators.

Notably, the dumbest university students end up in education, excepting only those who major in public administration—and therefore the dumbest run the schools.

One test in Massachusetts showed that most aspiring public school teachers in that state--73%--could not achieve math standards required of their grade 5 students. The students are on average smarter, and know more, than their teachers. How's that likely to work?

There is a simple principle here: you cannot teach what you do not know.

And another: the best students will be the best teachers. These are the experts at how to learn.

Currently, we are recruiting the worst.

It may be, as many argue, that the best students do not want to be teachers. But it might be worth testing that hypothesis. It may be instead that the best students do not want to go to ed school.

By all reports, you learn nothing there. It is just a lot of busy work. This would be especially frustrating to anyone who is a good student and who loves learning. The educational theories they promote are usually pop psychology: right brain-left brain, “learning styles,” and other notions that never have any scientific basis, nor any basis in the humanities. They have all been pretty comprehensively disproven in the massive “Operation Follow Through” project in the 1970s: every technique sponsored by an ed school did worse than the control.

On the other hand, anyone who has survived classroom life as a student for 16 years or more, particularly at an academically rigorous college, necessarily has a thorough grounding in teaching techniques: in what works, and in what does not work. He or she is not likely to learn anything more of value in a few weeks of classroom observation at ed school. Nor is there any scientific basis for believing classroom observation tells us anything of importance.

In order to justify their existence, the ed schools must continually come up with new theories to teach their students something they do not already know, something that would not have occurred to them naturally, or that they would already have been exposed to in 16 years of classroom attendance. Almost inevitably, these tend to be extremely bad teaching ideas--things no competent teacher would have done. Which the ed school graduate then feels required to introduce to the classrooms of the wider world.

How would that work?

And there is another problem. Any self-governing profession is in essence a cartel, in which the members get to choose their competitors. They have a vested interest in not selecting someone much better at the job them themselves. Accordingly, once the teaching profession established itself as the special preserve of the academically inadequate, it began to work hard to keep good students, and good teachers, out; out of the ed schools, and, if they survive, out of the schools themselves. My daughter, who has been going to a private school, asks, “Why do the best teachers always get fired?”

It is true. And obvious enough to a ten-year-old.

The best prescription for improving the schools is 1) do not hire grads in education, 2) bust the teachers' unions, 3) do not put hiring decisions in the hands of teachers.

Hire the candidate with the best marks from the best school, measured by SAT score required to get in, with a major in the subject they will teach. A grad degree in the subject if available. This is not complicated.