Unreal Conditional

The Ontario English Curriculum

Looking over the Ontario high school English curriculum. It’s changed a fair bit from my student days. As it should have. Back when I went through, it was heavy on literature, and on narrative and poetry specifically. That suited me, but it was not practical. We were never even taught how to write an academic essay. We did not read any essays. Let alone the varieties of writing important in business and technical fields. We were taught nothing of rhetoric; outside Shakespeare, we did not read any great speeches. We did not debate or study argument. And no film or TV or radio or newspapers or magazines or comic books or songs. That was already out of touch with reality then—for this, not hardbound books, was where we absorbed the largest part of our English and English lit. It would be far weirder now, with YouTube, the Internet, and so on. And Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize.

You may argue that, from such a historically smaller sample, it is less likely for truly fine literature to be found in these newer media. Fair point; but at the same time, if you want fine literature in the future, you want to train upcoming writers in these living forms. Train them to write poetry and short stories, and they will live and die in garrets unread.

So it is good to see the curriculum expanded in this way:

“The reading program should include a wide variety of literary, informational, and graphic texts that engage students’ interest and imagination – for example, novels; poetry; myths, fables, and folk tales; short stories; textbooks and books on topics in science, history, mathematics, geography, and other subjects; biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and journals; plays and radio, film, or television scripts; encyclopaedia entries; graphs, charts, and diagrams in textbooks or magazine articles; instructions and manuals; graphic novels, comic books, and cartoons; newspaper articles and editorials; databases and websites; and essays and reports.”

However, I suspect this has been done for the wrong reason, and so probably not well. The curriculum is now entirely skills-based; the point is to develop the skills needed for employment. This is no doubt why literature has been de-emphasized. This sounds reasonable, but E.D. Hirsh Jr. has demonstrated that learning only skills and not the specific content of a culture leaves one, by college level, illiterate. One needs a certain body of shared knowledge to make sense of a new text.

So it makes sense to pare this back to make more room for skills; but this makes the precise selection of the texts to be read all the more important. They had better be the real classics.

And for the rest, the curriculum is badly wrong.

Another of my frustrations back in the day was that the literature we got was always from England or from America. We did not get to see much Canadian writing, and I thought and still think that was alarming. Again you could argue that, with a much smaller pool from which to fish, the quality of Canadian materials would be lesser. But there is a second consideration: that was pretty discouraging for a Canadian kid who wanted to be a writer. The natural inference was that such things were not possible here. And it becomes a hard claim to sustain now that Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize. Canlit has long seemed to be more popular abroad than at home. It’s the colonial mentality at work.

But that, sadly, has not changed. The curriculum now acknowledges the narrowness of featuring only British and American writers. So where does it go? Anywhere but Canada. “They should be exposed to literary works drawn from many genres, historical periods, and cultures.” Likely leaving even less room for the Canadian experience. The colonial mentality dies hard.

No wonder the damaging myth that “there is no Canadian mainstream.”

There is also an obvious problem with building an English curriculum on writings from non-English-speaking cultures. Valuable as they might be in some ways, they are in translation, and so are not models of English.

Okay, so what if you just have English writing set in other cultures, or featuring non-Anglophone protagonists?

Fine—cultural appropriation. You can’t win on that one.

Or choose pieces written by a tiny minority in the given country who are fluent in English. To begin with, you are automatically not getting an authentic perspective, then, but that of a Westernized elite who are just as likely to be out of touch with the real culture and ordinary life as any Western visitor. And you are fishing in a very small pond; quality is sure to be less.

And this need for diversity is an entirely fake problem. There is no need for intervention to make sure classes include texts reflecting unfamiliar backgrounds. Everywhere and at all times, an exotic locale and exotic characters are things readers automatically seek. Why else did Shakespeare set so many of his plays in Italy or Greece instead of Sussex? Why did Coleridge wrote of Xanadu? Why did Gulliver set sail instead of stay in Middlesex? Why are the James Bond movies always set in some exotic locale? Why do people want to read about cowboys or knights errant or Hobbits or Wookies and Ewoks? Because they reflect so well their own life experiences?

The likeliest result of the current curriculum is to introduce worse writing along with a boring sameness.

And that is only the beginning of the troubles with this new curriculum. Along with wanting to have something to reflect every race and culture, it also wants to balance selections to appeal to both males and females. That is, in principle, a good idea. Most things in schools today are cruelly biased against boys.

But they get this so wrong it is hard to believe it is not malicious.

“Resources should be chosen not only to reflect diversity but also on the basis of their appeal for both girls and boys in the classroom. Recent research has shown that many boys are interested in informational materials, such as manuals and graphic texts [they mean charts and graphs], as opposed to works of fiction, which are often more appealing to girls.”

This is just not credible to anyone who knows any actual boys. Both boys and girls equally like works of fiction. Girls like romances and fairy tales; boys like stories of adventure and hero legends. Both boys and girls find manuals, charts and graphs boring; but they both equally need to be able to read them for employment purposes.

Image from The Boys' Book of Adventure. Note the exotic locale.

So what this imaginary division suggests in practice is that all the interesting stuff is chosen for the girls’ taste. The boys get nothing.

Inevitably, the curriculum also wants to put something in for the LGBTQ lobby as well as feminists. “In inclusive programs, students are made aware of the historical, cultural, and political contexts for both the traditional and non-traditional gender and social roles represented in the materials they are studying.”

This is contradictory. By definition, non-traditional gender and social roles are not going to be commonly represented in the tradition. Forcing them into the curriculum will mean using inferior materials that do not reflect the cultural or historical context. Catch-22.

Inevitably, modern critics have decided Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim were having gay sex on their raft. 

Of course, this means that any fictional girl who dresses as a boy to be with her lover is now going to be declared transgender; and every story of a close male friendship is to be read as implying gay sex. Aside from doing serious violence to the texts, this is going to make sex seem far more important than it really is to students at an age when sex is already likely to unduly preoccupy them. And, with all due respect to homosexuals, a kind of sex that is unlikely to lead to a happy life. Gays themselves commonly make the point that the gay life is not a gay one: leaving aside any possible discrimination or vulnerability to disease, it becomes inestimably harder to find a life partner. And one has no children.

Another of the problems with the high school education I got is that we were never taught to think. I always thought that was deliberate. We were being indoctrinated instead, to make us useful cogs in the machine. We were never taught debate, or logic, or the logical fallacies, or parliamentary procedure, or the real scientific method. We were never taught to question what we read. If it was in the textbook, it was so.

So it is initially heartening to see the new curriculum refer to the need for “questioning the text.”

Unfortunately, this is only mentioned as one in a string of other “comprehension strategies”: “predicting, visualizing, questioning, drawing inferences, identifying main ideas, summarizing, and monitoring and revising comprehension.” That looks like lip service.

One of these things is not like the other ones. Studies show an average student can pick up how to predict, visualize, identify main ideas, and summarize from any text in one class hour. One lesson. Doing this tired little routine again and again with every class is just tiresome, tedious and brain-numbing. Great way to teach a kid to hate reading…

And later we learn what “questioning” means. It is not following and testing the logic, or close observation of the details for hints of deeper meanings—the two things that make reading worthwhile. It means “to look beyond the literal meaning of texts and to think about fairness, equity, social justice, and citizenship in a global society.”

In other words, it is not questioning the text at all, but imposing politics on it. Far from being taught how to think, the students are being more aggressively indoctrinated, in a particular political point of view.

This is a lazy way to dismiss a text without having to address it: you call it “racist,” and then you do not need to consider what it is saying. And it is again too easy to do to merit class time. Anyone can probably learn to do it in another hour.

And seeing everything as political is totalitarian.

Comprehending a text turns out not to be, according to this curriculum, discovering its meaning. Instead, such comprehension skills “help students understand that reading is a process of constructing meaning.”

Which means you get to decide it means whatever you (or the powers that be) want it to mean. That’s a trick that does not need to be taught at all. Anyone can do it without any training. You don’t even need to be lucid.

Teacher prompt: “How might audiences of different backgrounds listening to this radio drama interpret it differently?”

The goal of comprehension should be to establish the correct, or most plausible, understanding of the text, not to examine different ways it could be misinterpreted; at least without acknowledging that one or another reading must be a misinterpretation.

In evaluating a text, students are supposed to consider

“What information is omitted in order to sustain the point of view? Whose interests are served by this point of view?”

This seems to omit the possibility that any statement might actually be true. There is no truth, apparently, and all statements are to be accepted or rejected purely on whether they serve your interests. Or those of the powers who run the school.

So why have English studies abandoned meaning and comprehension? Why have they given over to what Jordan Peterson calls “cultural Marxism”?

I think the component of the Ontario curriculum on “media studies” gives us an essential clue.

Note, to begin with, that the term “media studies” is illiterate: text is a medium, just as is film. Whoever wrote the curriculum is just throwing everything that is not print into one undifferentiated barrel, without considering it properly.

When the document speaks about print, it specifies the need for “correctly applying the conventions of language – grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation.” But when it turns to non-print media, the only concerns mentioned are:

“Students must be able to differentiate between fact and opinion; evaluate the credibility of sources; recognize bias; be attuned to discriminatory portrayals of individuals and groups, such as religious or sexual minorities, people with disabilities, or seniors; and question depictions of violence and crime.”

“Students’ repertoire of communication skills should include the ability to critically interpret the messages they receive through the various media.”

There is no special reason to study non-print media for this. All of these considerations are equally relevant to written texts. Why is this under “media studies”?

On the other hand, each medium has its own distinct grammar and vocabulary, comparable to but different from that of print: the mechanical and rhetorical considerations. Things like composing a page to draw the eye in a natural movement; or how to suggest the passage of time in a shot. And these are not even mentioned.

Why is this? Two reasons, I suspect, or two aspects of the same reason. First, in all probability, whoever put together the curriculum, and no doubt the average high school teacher too, figured they had to feature all these new high-tech things to be hep and look as though they were the authorities. At one point, the author of the curriculum explains,

“Skills related to high-tech media such as the Internet, film, and television are particularly important because of the power and pervasive influence these media wield in our lives and in society. Becoming conversant with these and other media can greatly expand the range of information sources available to students.”

This is pathetic. It implies that, without the far-seeing leadership of the Party, the average young person might be utterly unaware of things like movies, television, the Internet, video games, or graphic novels. Rather than the Party being roughly a century behind them.

But even in comparison to the average student, the average teacher, and the author of this curriculum, has no idea how to make a film, or lay out a web page, or design a video game, or compose a newspaper. They need to b.s. their way out. Politics and political correctness serves to cover for the fact that they do not know what they are doing; that they have no idea what is correct in any other sense.

At the same time, like everyone, they no doubt fear the unknown. They do not understand these media. And so they automatically suspect them of being nefarious: uniquely likely to lie, too subvert, to do evil. Comics are depraved. Television is depraved. Video games are depraved. They are a tissue of lies promoting racism and violence. Good reason not to have to teach about them in detail.

Now we can perhaps zoom out, to use the grammar of film, and see that the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the English curriculum generally; indeed, of the Humanities and the Social Sciences generally. Although not because of new technology. The problem is that in general, the people in charge in these fields do not know what they are doing or what they are talking about. Few people can write well, and few classroom teachers have the first idea how to write. Nor is it easy to understand Shakespeare. So it is safer to talk about politics, and suspect all authors of racism.

Beyond this, all the Humanities lost their proper raison d’etre a couple of generations ago when the schools and the academy dropped religion. The point of the Humanities is to form a human soul, a human character. They are training for a human life. But without an established system of values, one has no destination. With no destination, one has no idea in which direction to proceed.

So what to do? Postmodernism and political correctness. There is no meaning anywhere anyhow; it’s all politics.

So too, for a slightly different reason, with Social Sciences. Social Sciences emerged, in effect, as a non-religions replacement for the Humanities, supposedly based on science instead of theology/philosophy. Year after year, however, this new scientific approach has produced no useful and reproducible results. The reason is simple, and should have been predictable. In fact, it was predicted by Kant. Humans are not objects; they are independent subjects. They cannot and will not be passively studied as might a rock formation. So again you cover the nakedness of your field with easy and arbitrary political shibboleths and virtue signaling.

Nor does this curriculum actually evaluate anything.

The curriculum explains that evaluation should be in five categories: “Works Independently, Teamwork, Organization, Work Habits, and Initiative.”

Basic rule for good teaching violated: you do not evaluate on anything you did not teach. That is fundamentally unfair, and not related to learning. The curriculum does not include anything about teaching teamwork; this would be, essentially, parliamentary procedure, and it is a valuable skill. It is not clear that it teaches much of anything about how to work independently, or about developing good work habits, or developing initiative either. If it teaches organization, it is only in the limited sense of how to organize a sentence or a paragraph.

And, glaringly, there is no category included for evaluation the skills supposedly taught: say reading comprehension, or correct grammar.

The evaluation as given is only, it seems, of not causing the system any trouble. Given they exhibit the desired character traits, any student should be able to coast along through the system without developing knowledge or new skills. This conceals any possibility that they are not learning.

There are other flaws here.

“Effective teaching approaches involve students in the use of higher-level thinking skills and encourage them to look beyond the literal meaning of texts and to think about fairness, equity, social justice, and citizenship in a global society.”

Leave aside, this one time, the demand for political correctness. What is meant here by “higher-level thinking skills”? Who knows what that means?

They are presumably referring to Bloom’s Taxonomy.

This is a misunderstanding of it. By “high” and “low,” Bloom meant that “higher” forms of thinking were based on “lower” forms, as a pyramid would be based on its foundation. He did not mean that “higher” forms of thought were somehow better than or preferable to lower forms. He could not have; this would require a value judgement, and you can’t get there without an underlying religious assumption, of what the purpose of mankind and of life really is.

It follows that the LOWER forms are of greater utility. So the most time and the greatest emphasis should be on them. This curriculum, instead, calls for a concentration on the HIGHER forms, reading “higher” in ignorance to mean more valuable.

That is, in effect, standing a pyramid on its head. If Bloom is right, it is not likely to be a solid educational foundation.

Note too here the call to look beyond the “literal” meaning of texts. This too is ironically illiterate. In literary theory, looking beyond the literal means looking for metaphor, symbolism, unspoken implication, or allusion. This is difficult—the ability to do so, Aristotle says, is the sign of genius. Unable to do so, the curriculum designers yet again substitute politics.

It must be soul-crushing for any student who is particularly bright.

And one more thing, that sticks out like a sore tongue to any language teacher:

“Teachers need to encourage parents to continue to use their own language at home in rich and varied ways as a foundation for language and literacy development in English. It is also important for teachers to find opportunities to bring students’ languages into the classroom, using parents and community members as a resource.”

This is politics interfering with education. The consensus in the field of language learning is the reverse: one learns a new language fastest through total immersion. Ironically, the best research that this is so comes from Canada. In most language schools, use of the first language is prohibited.

To appease the current dogma of multiculturalism, the curriculum says the reverse.

How to Evaluate Schools

PISA rankings of education systems by scores on standardized tests. Green is top third.

A lot of our opinions on what schools and school systems are best are based on the results of standardized tests. This is true of the PISA rankings of OECD countries, currently treated as the gold standard. On this measure, East Asian schools do particularly well.

But critics point out that this is artificial. Standardized tests are not real life. Striving for high test scores can mean teaching and studying to the test, and this may steal time and effort from more valuable learning.

Chinese and East Asian schools have their critics. Some complain that the Chinese method, heavy on memorization, which works so well for standard tests, does not teach independent thinking or creativity.

I agree with these criticisms. Standardized testing is a factory method. The acquisition of skills is not the primary goal of education. Traditional education has always considered it more important to teach morality, character, good judgement, and the ability to think independently.

But how then do we measure this?

There is actually a good and simple measure available: graduation rate.

The schools considered most successful should be those that have the fewest students dropping out short of completion.

To begin with, this is a measure of the value the actual consumer finds in them. We sell students outrageously short if we imagine they do not have any interest in or ability to evaluate their own education.

You might argue that it is easy enough for any school to lower academic standards so that nobody fails and everyone finds it easy and fun; and so everyone stays in school.

But I doubt this would work in practice. I did say dropout rate, not failure rate. I warrant that few students drop out because they find a school too tough academically. If they do, arguably, that school is not doing a good job of educating, only of weeding out. It would be like a doctor who accepted only healthy patients. In my experience, students drop out because they find school boring, or corrupt and dishonest, or disrespectful, or a waste of time.

But even if this issue of logrolling or grade inflation is a consideration, it is easily met by controlling for student scores on the standardized tests. Given, then, two groups of students who score in the same range on these tests, coming from different schools, which group has the better retention rate?

Surely, after all, a large part of a school’s or teacher’s job is to inspire.

And producing students who stick to the task of getting their high school graduation is a good quick measure of their morality, character, and good judgement.

Compare schools on this metric. The school that comes out higher is a better school.

Not incidentally, private and charter schools consistently score better than public schools on this metric.

How to Write Good

Just uncovered a cache of my old writings from high school, ages 12-16. Some good bits, but the prose was embarrassingly purple at times. And too much reliance on cheap thrills: sex and violence.

I could have used some guidance.

But I also noticed that, whenever there were markings in red from some teacher’s hand, they were wrong.

For example, I began one story:

“Mr. Bones watched the violent plaid socks silently follow each other down the stairs. He was in the habit of wearing socks to bed …”

And the teacher writes:

“opening is misleading at first reading – would be improved by changing the to his.” (Meaning the socks—“his violent plaid socks.”)

And that would 1) kill the little surprise or puzzle that lures the reader into the story; and 2) remove the introduction to the theme of the story--which is the protagonist’s detachment.

And wouldn’t anyone of average intelligence be able to grasp that I must have deliberately avoided “his”? And that there must be a reason?

And wouldn’t anyone of average intelligence have been able to work out what was actually happening by reading the second sentence? Did that really involve a great mental challenge?

Next teacher’s note: I had written

“He sat down in front of the window and placed his victim, a jar of pickles, on the counter before him.”

The teacher’s red hand had struck “victim” and inserted “target.”

That ought to do it—authors should always strive for the blander word, right? Avoid anything that might spark any mental images?

Exactly wrong, of course.

As a matter of accuracy of meaning, too, “target” is incorrect. You do not need to take aim to get a pickle in a jar. The image is absurdly wrong, like that of shooting fish in a barrel.

And “victim” foreshadows what happens next—looking through the pickle jar, Bones witnesses a rape outside the window—as if it were happening in the jar. So “victim” here conveys the idea that the rapist is treating his victim just as Bones does the pickle. “Target” breaks this careful thread.

All frustratingly lost on this reader.

I can only remember two teachers at any level who ever gave me useful guidance in writing. I adored both of them, perhaps for this reason.

Dr. Smith, in grad school, caught me mixing metaphors.

Mr. More, in grade 6, wrote “stop using big words just to show you know them.”

Great advice, which I have never forgotten, and which I still struggle to follow.

But there is obviously something fundamentally wrong here. We are hiring people to teach our children to write who instead mislead them. It is like hiring French teachers who cannot speak French.

But then again, come to think of it, I had that too.

This is a notorious problem among editors, who spend much of their careers fixing the result. There is a stock phrase among editors, also the title of a book, “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins,” to describe the many writing “rules” people are taught in school that make their writing bad.

We need to do a better job at hiring teachers.

In the meantime, as the reader has perhaps also noticed, there is a huge market for remedial writing courses.

Schools: A Manifesto

Adam Smith remarked that “there is a lot of ruin in a nation.” Sometimes it amazes me that Canada or America manage to stand, considering how badly we get things done. This gives at least the impression of a civilization in decline. I thought that when I first left to wander, first to China, imagining that they must surely do things better elsewhere.

I have since learned, through my travels, that as utterly screwed up as everything is in North America, it is exponentially worse everywhere else.

At the same time, if we could only start to do a few things a little better, it could make a vast difference. And, if some other more innovative society does so and we do not, the current dominance of America could end swiftly. We have no cause for complacency.

One key to a successful society, perhaps the sole key, as we have said here before, is shared values. This almost goes without saying: if we have a shared goal, we will work together. If we do not, we will not. But, remarkably, the educators and the scribblers and the artist of our time and place are busily dismantling any found shared values.

But then, how does one get to shared values?

That would be the second key to social success: proper education.

As a good general principle, the society that gets education closest to right is the society that will have the most success in all its endeavours. Education is the system or method of passing accumulated knowledge and wisdom on to the next generation. It is the sine qua non of civilization. Do it wrong for one generation, maybe two or three, and civilization is gone.

And we are doing it wrong.

Not only is our present system, in North America, not reliably passing on the information; it seems to be spending most of its energy encouraging students to reject any established cultural norms, knowledge, or traditions whenever encountered.

Unless there is some innate higher civilization underneath and concealed by our own—an utterly improbable premise—this can only end in rubble and ruin.

How can we fix this?

First, abolish the teachers’ colleges.

Unfortunately, as soon as I say “the schools are in a mess and they need reform,” I simply join a chorus with every professor teaching at every teacher’s college in existence, and more or less with every teacher in every classroom. That the schools are a mess is the eternal and fundamental premise of all teacher education already. As a result, as we see no results from any of this agitation, school reform itself has been given a bad name. It always seems to be a massive expenditure of money that ends up making everything worse.

There is a reason why all the “educators” say this, and it is opposite to my reason for saying so.

It is a simple and obvious truth that anyone who has themselves sat in a classroom daily for fifteen years or more—as anyone who enters a teacher’s college almost necessarily has—has a very good education in what works and does not work in the classroom. Nothing they can now be taught in one or two years is going to make a difference.

In order to justify their existence, however, the teachers’ colleges must necessarily teach their students something they do not already know. Which can mean, necessarily, only one thing: they must declare that whatever we do now, everything we do now is wrong. And they much teach their acolytes something else, something utterly counter to either tradition or intuition or common sense. In sum, to justify their existence, they must deliberately teach them how to teach badly. And insist on this as the one “correct” way to teach.

This result was demonstrated rather well by “Operation Follow Through.” A few decades ago. The US federal government sank a large amount of money into a very large trial of various proposed new approaches in the classroom, fitting the latest educational theories, in hopes of improving the chances of disadvantaged students. The result: every approach sponsored by a school of education turned out to do worse than the control—worse than the way the randomly selected “ordinary” classroom of the time was conducted. The one approach that did better, and consistently, was proposed not by a professor, or even a teacher, but an advertising copywriter.

As a result, the results of the study were generally ignored. They left no place for the ed schools, after all. The approach that was proven best, “direct instruction,” basically a good old fashioned lecture with Socratic elements, testing for comprehension, has never been generally implemented. Those fashionable educational theories persist, unaffected by all evidence.

The current success of Khan Academy, however, is based on the same method of direct instruction. Khan, unsurprisingly is another ad man, not a teacher or professor of education.

Salman Khan

Similarly, home-schooled students consistently do better on standardized tests than those who attend a public school. In what other profession would you expect such a result? What would it say, for example, if patients did consistently better if they kept away from doctors or hospitals? If accused parties did consistently better if they did not hire a lawyer, but represented themselves in court?

It is not just that the ed schools force their graduates to deliberately teach badly. The truth is, any bright student or any student with common sense, including the teachers, knows at some level it is a scam. To a bright student, at best, ed school looks like a frustrating waste of a year during which they could instead be doing something interesting, like thinking. And going to one will lose them much respect among their intellectual peers. But worse than that, realizing that it is a scam, and still going, means that the system selects out teachers for proven dishonesty. Given that the chief value of an education is in teaching good morals, and the most important part of imparting morals is setting a good example, this too selects out for the worst teachers.

Self-evidently, those who will make the best teachers will be those who have been the best learners. It is those who know best how to learn who can teach others how to learn. Next to that, and equally self-evidently, those best qualified to teach a certain subject are those who know that subject best.

And so it is obvious how we should select teachers, and it is not how we do it now. It is, however, how they do it in Finland. Funny that—Finland pretty consistently leads the world in student results. It is also how they traditionally do it in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Korea, with their Confucian traditions—rounding out the list of world-beating education systems.

We should hire the best students from the most rigorous programs, holding the highest degrees, in the subjects they are actually going to teach.

What, you will ask, about those teaching in lower grades? After all, how much higher math do you really need to know to teach grade three arithmetic? Surely this is all wasted. They need instead to understand children and how they learn, right? “Pedagogy.”

Good question, to which there is a good answer.

Did you never wonder what the Humanities were all about?

People scoff at students who go into the Humanities as layabouts, saying there is no job at the other end. Indeed there is not, but that is our big mistake. The job is teaching.

The whole point of the Humanities, obviously, as the name itself says, is to teach someone how to be human. They constitute the bedrock knowledge and skills everyone needs, whatever else they subsequently do with their lives. Accordingly, it is what should, no must, be taught at the lower levels.

There is a lot of solid evidence that not doing so is harmful in a very direct sense. E.D. Hirsch has shown that it results in functional illiteracy at the college level. Another recent study demonstrated that the single best predictor of high later academic achievement is having been read to as a child—having been read, that is, the traditional stories.

Instead of teaching them to everyone, we are now teaching them to no one. In fact, we are not even teaching them any longer at the college level, in course labelled “Humanities.” This is a fairly inevitable consequence, a generation on, from not teaching them in childhood—nobody is now competent to teach them at college level, and so the thread of civilization has been broken. A perfect way to destroy not only uncounted individual lives, but the entire civilization.

Accordingly, to restore our education system is now going to need to be a two-step, and at least a two-generation, process. First we need to restore expertise in the Humanities. We need to form a new professoriate.

The best way to do that is, presumably, the way it was done the first time, back in the Middle Ages. Expertise was established by public lectures and public debate. The good news is that this is immensely easier to do now than it was then, thanks to wider dissemination over the Internet, and its interactive possibilities. It is indeed liable to happen spontaneously, as people shop for individual courses from individual instructors online. 

A 13th century debate between Catholics and Oriental Orthodox scholars.

Only the Humanities, you may ask? What about STEM? Isn’t that what we need to be concentrating on?

We only do harm by teaching science in elementary school. What they need to know is the scientific method: specific scientific “truths” we teach now are only too likely to be found wrong well before they graduate college. Or even before the science texts themselves go to press. It is a bit of a cottage industry among scientists to point out how many things in the current school texts are flatly wrong. By teaching science as a body of knowledge instead of as a method of inquiry, we have also only fostered the damaging but now endemic popular notion that science is a cosmology, a religion, a body of received truths. This is profoundly anti-scientific, and must later be un-taught if they are ever going to accomplish anything in the sciences.

Of course, nominally, there is often a dutiful attempt to also teach the scientific method. Students are made to do “experiments.” But these are not experiments at all. The expected result is always known beforehand, generally explained beforehand, and if the experiment does not produce this expected result, the student is informed he must have done something wrong. This perfectly inverts the scientific method, as well as being an obvious waste of time to any thoughtful student. A great way to queer them on the scientific method.

It hardly needs to be said that teaching technology is even more futile. Technology is changing quickly enough that anything taught in this regard in grade school is almost certain to have been a waste of time by college graduation.

What about teaching basic math? Granted, a hundred years ago, you could make a case that everyone should be able to “do their sums.” Even at the time, there were actually simpler methods available than the memorization of sums and times tables and such that we used: there was always the abacus, or the Japanese string method of multiplication. But today, even the poorest of the poor, even in a poorer country like the Philippines, generally carries a computer in their pocket. Few even bother to do a calculation in their head, when it is so much easier and more reliable to pull out their smart phone. Even if they don’t, the next guy can for them. Knowing basic addition is no doubt still marginally useful, but probably not the best use of everyone’s time, in terms of any practical utility.

What about higher math? Yes, it cannot so easily be done by calculator, but, at the same time, it is not something everyone needs to know. There is, for most of us, the inevitable question: when was the last time you used your high school calculus, or trigonometry? If you actually had call to do so, were you actually able to remember it?

In other words, for the majority of students, even higher math is wasting their time. For those who need it, the computer is again the answer. They can actually now look it up, including any relevant formula, as needed. They can go to Khan Academy or the like for an explanation, if needed, and are more likely to be paying attention now that it has some practical value.

The one branch of math that probably should be a part of everyone’s education is the one branch of math that always was: geometry; or as it used to be called, “Euclid.” Not that everyone will have any pressing need to calculate the radius of a circle in their future life, but solving geometric problems in Euclidian style teaches logic.

Languages, on the other hand, have always been a part of the Humanities. But we also have it all wrong on teaching languages. We now teach only modern languages, with the idea that being able to speak French, say, will be useful for any Canadian, or Spanish to an American, or Chinese to some future importer or exporter.

But how many of us, in English Canada, actually graduate high school able to converse in French?

Almost no one.

Odd, that, because competent polyglots insist anyone can pick up spoken French within three months.

Even were this not so, we are on the verge of having reliable live translation available for multiple languages on any cell phone. Such products are already being widely advertised.

In other words, again, we are simply massively wasting student time, and taxpayer money.

Languages have always been taught, but it is folly to think one can best learn to converse in another language in a regular classroom, which by its nature can offer few real opportunities to converse.

Notice that the languages traditionally taught were always “dead” languages, classical Latin or Greek or Hebrew or Sanskrit. Nobody alive actually knew how to properly converse in them. That was not the goal.

The goal of learning a foreign language was that consciously learning a language and how it works, as if it were a watch mechanism, is learning how to think. Language is almost functionally coterminous with thought. For this, the ideal approach was the old “grammar-translation method,” which forced you to analyse the logic of each sentence, rather than memorize vocabulary. It is rank heresy to suggest or recommend teaching the grammar-translation method today, of course.

Other things are not taught that obviously should be taught. Mnemonics, which is to say, how to memorize something. It is true madness, for example, to try to teach a modern language, involving a large new body of vocabulary, without ever teaching students how to memorize. No wonder nobody ever ends up learning the language. As a language teacher myself, it is endlessly frustrating how the typical modern language course spends each new semester teaching almost entirely the same things taught the previous semester, with little evidence that the students have remembered any of it. But being able to remember things is also an essential life skill. If you cannot remember, you cannot learn. Anything.

Far from teaching it, it is now rank heresy to ask a student to memorize something. A wonderful teacher at my son’s school was fired for it.

Also essential and generally taught at private schools, yet suspiciously ignored at public schools, are the skills needed for leadership: parliamentary procedure, which is to say, how to run a meeting. Rhetoric—notice that it was an ad man who did so well at conveying information in Operation Follow Through, and an ad man who built Khan Academy. Instead of teaching this, our schools are busily teaching that all advertising is evil: their supposed courses in “media literacy.” Debate; most importantly, logical fallacies. Most people have no idea, and this leaves them open to constant manipulation and disastrously bad decisions. These are skills we all need, and society itself needs to function, and we do not regularly teach them.

These all fall under the Humanities. The Humanities are, in essence, the corpus everyone needs to know: the fundamentals of history, philosophy, literature, music, art.

On top of this, and crowning this, of course, the essential foundation of any true education is values--religion. There is no way around this: if you do not know what your goal is, the meaning of your life, you cannot come to any further conclusions about what should or should not be taught or learned or known or done. Without knowing your destination, any path is as good as another.

Ideally, given that we are committed to religious freedom, rather than imposing some state creed—an awful idea, surely—this means a system of school vouchers rather than having state-run “secular” schools with all religious references carefully laundered out. Such a school is not religiously neutral—it is anti-religious. It teaches students it is necessary or advisable to have no values. Which is destructive not only to themselves but to society as a whole.

Infinitely better if parents can enroll their students in religious schools of their choice, run by religious institutions.

To prevent social fragmentation, the core values expressed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are, by definition, the core values to which we all must subscribe as Canadians. They need to be taught, systematically, as well as honoured in practice, in all schools. The government’s role should be to ensure that this is done. In the US, the equivalent would be the values of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

A New Mechanics' Institute

Oxford Union

Few seem to understand that a functioning democracy, and a well-functioning civil society in general, including businesses that work, depends crucially on the skills of parliamentary procedure and formal debate. And few seem to understand that these do not come to us spontaneously, but actually go against natural instincts. The natural instinct, after all, is to get upset if anyone disagrees with you.

The English are so good at this. It fits the politeness and decorum of the national character; although which came first is hard to say. Englishmen out for a pint together will debate in these terms; and will deliberately insult one another to harden each other up. Nothing beats the Oxford Union; but watching debate in the British House of Commons, after being used to Ottawa question period on C-Span, is itself a revelation.

We are foolish to suppose that this can be easily and automatically ported to any other culture and society at will. It does not work nearly so well even in Canada or the US. Let alone, say, Vietnam or Iraq. Yet the US government, for one, never seems to get this. It was striking wisdom for the Emir and government of Qatar to understand, and begin the long work of introducing their people to democracy by first setting up debating societies everywhere, hosting the Doha Debates, and sponsoring Al Jazeera. That is the way it must be done, and it will take at least a generation.

More troubling is that, through ignorance or design, the skills of parliamentary procedure and formal debate are rarely taught in the public schools, and never as a core subject, even in Canada or the US. They are, of course, taught rigorously in the British or Canadian private schools. 

House of Commons, Ottawa

This is the best way imaginable to create and perpetuate a class system. It means that only the upper classes, who can afford to go to these exclusive schools, learn how to organize and run things. There is also good evidence that it was deliberately done, back in the original “Progressive” era of the 1920s and before. “Progressivism” was always, and still is, about creating and protecting a North American ruling elite.

And this suppression of essential knowledge, as well as being discriminatory, is destructive to society as a whole. Because there is no way any longer that we can keep the unfashionable masses out of management; we need more managers, and progressively fewer dumb and obedient robot helots, as technology advances. And the general population also has the right, in our system, to decide essential matters for all of us, through the ballot box. For the sake of all, they (we) had better know how to make good decisions.

We are seeing the bill come due now, with Antifa goons rioting in the streets and shouting speakers down. And these Antifa goons, note, are generally the nominally better-educated among us. We let the previously unprepared, after all, go to university, opened those gates wide, and flooded the higher levels of the system with folks who have no idea what the various buttons and levers do.

Well-intentioned, no doubt, itself an attempt to end the class system, but ill-informed.

All of this is brought to mind by a unit I am being asked to teach at the moment, on how to write an opinion essay. Something I know something about. I am doing it now. 

Mechanics' Institute, Toronto.

Good thought; good idea. But the person who wrote the curriculum, the subject expert himself or herself, obviously has no idea how to do so, let alone how to teach it to someone else. Their instructions are incoherent; they cannot seem, in their own mind, to even distinguish claims from counterclaims, pro from con. They do not grasp the actual structure of an argument.

Their assigned essay topic illustrates the problem: “What can be done about China’s pollution problem?” Following, inevitably, a little lecture about China’s pollution problem and its supposed causes.

In other words, rather than getting to form and express an opinion, the student is being told the “correct” opinion in advance. On a topic on which there is essentially no disagreement. Raise hands, everyone: who here is in favour of pollution?

And no, this is not a Chinese thing. This is an American curriculum.

Isn’t this also what has happened to our current politics, and isn’t this a pressing problem?

Over a century ago, wealthy philanthropists launched “Mechanics’ Institutes” in major cities, where the poorer among us could learn skills needed for the new world of industrialization. 

Mechanics' Institute, London, Ontario

We need something like that now again. We need a movement to teach and study debate and parliamentary procedure; how to run a meeting. We need it on the night-school model of the Mechanics’ Institutes, too, because even if the public schools were to instantly reform and introduce the subject, that still sacrifices all the adults who have already completed school. Worse, these same adults are the teachers we have in the schools today. Until they learn it themselves, as we see from my current curriculum, they cannot competently teach it.

Qatar is way ahead of us on this one.