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.