Right Wing Nation

It all started on D-Ed Reckoning, then Text Savvy. Actually, it started a long time ago. But these were the articles that prompted me to write this.

Read any objectivist education blog, and the authors zero in on constructivism. But here’s the thing: Constructivism really isn’t the issue.

Groupthink is the issue. Granted, constructivism, or its unwarranted application, is a part of that groupthink. But groupthink creates many, many, many problems other than constructivism.

Orson Scott Card has an insightful column entitled Groupthink and the Intellectual Elite, and one of the things he does is summarize Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, an explanation of how academic groupthink isolates researchers from reality — and relieves them of the burden of proof.

I have discussed how Chomsky and his followers nearly destroyed linguistics with groupthink, here and here. Groupthink has long been the standard, as Card points out at the beginning of his column, among the humanities. One of the results of the development of the laughably entitled "feminist theory" was the redefinition of the term “interdisciplinary.” Traditionally, an interdisciplinary program was one which allowed the cooperative research of scholars from various fields. An example would be a Latin American Studies program, where, say, a historian and a specialist in 16th century Mexican Spanish (from the history and Spanish departments, respectively) could work together to translate a historical document. But "feminist theory" changed that.

Interdisciplinary came to mean giving equal weight to all ideas, no matter how nutty, and no matter whether they are grounded in reality or not. We saw this in the late 70s and through the 80s in anthropology, when Marija Gimbutas and her followers cooked up their groundless "matriarchal Europe" theory out of myths and legends, with no evidence to back it up (Gimbutas, by the way, is not a linguist, though her followers claim that she is). These “feminst scholars” and their groupies redefined “interdisciplinary,” so that now, interdisciplinary refers almost exclusively to programs that exist solely to indoctrinate and convey no meaninful, evidentiary content, such as all those "Wimmin of Color Studies" programs. Changing the nature of interdisciplinary programs is precisely how postmodernism crept from the humanities into the social sciences. It also led to groupthink practitioners’ lifting ideas and theories of which they had no knowledge from other fields, and “applying” them to their own ideas. Postmodernism’s intellectual bankruptcy in the form of “all narratives are equally valid” leads the groupthinkers further down the yellow brick road. And groupthink breeds more, and more destructive, groupthink.

The problem with academic groupthink is that it is seductive. The one thing you will see in all examples of academic groupthink is that the practitioners refuse to question their views, much less do any actual research to test their hypotheses. And institutionally, groupthink is self-perpetuating. Smolin discusses this when he points out that only string theorists get jobs and grants. Chomsky’s stranglehold on linguistics has faded some, but to this day, if you wrote a non-Chomskyan dissertation, you will find it difficult to get a job in a linguistics department.

The problem with ed schools isn’t constructivism; it’s groupthink. Educrats refuse to consider the validity of their views. Educrats refuse to consider any research that does not support their views. Remember the "new" NCTE standards, and then how the NCTE came out a couple of days later and said that nothing had changed? That’s academic groupthink at work. The NCTE is incapable of even considering that their views are not correct. To borrow a phrase from the liberals, practitioners of groupthink are wearing blinders. And the longer the groupthink reigns, the more disconnected the practitioners become. This is why ideas with productive applications, such as, yes, constructivism or portfolio assessment become trends, and are grossly misapplied (”whole language” is fundamentally flawed, and has no productive application).

I was fortunate. I got into linguistics precisely because it was so apparent to me that Chomsky was utter horseshit (I was fortunate that the faculty member teaching that class did as well — and later became my committee chair — considering that my questions were something like, "Let me get this straight, there’s this invisible particle there, and then we move it there, and then we move it there, and then we delete it. Does everybody buy into this?") Most got into linguistics because they were seduced by Chomsky — and groupthink.

Groupthink allows no competing views to be voiced or heard. Groupthink — particularly academic groupthink — justifies itself with the notion of superior intelligence. If you do not follow the party line, you must be stupid. We see this in the political atmosphere on campuses — consider the Columbia University fiasco last month. But it began with academic research, not politics.

Practitioners of groupthink use language to cover up their lack of substantive thought. Consider this example from Card (I’ve seen many like it):

There are whole departments where English has been effectively banned and replaced with “Theoretics,” a language designed so that the speaker can make the listener feel stupid without the speaker actually having to be smart.

I will give you a genuine example taken from a course description at a real university in the United States. Keep in mind that this is designed to be read by the public — by the students who are deciding whether to take the course.

And please, don’t be disturbed if you can’t understand anything being said. Your noncomprehension is the purpose of Theoretics. If you understand any part of this, it means that the writer failed.

I will offer a translation afterward. So when you get confused, just skim until you start recognizing the language as English. That will be me talking again.

A Passage in “Theoretics”

“Narratives of Race

“This course takes as its central object the idea of race. Race is understood as a social construct that designates relations of structural difference and disparity. How race is treated is a crucial issue in this course. It is in this question of “the how” that the term narrative becomes salient. The term narrative intentionally focuses attention on the material practices through which we have come to define race as a social construct. This terminology, “narratives of race,” spotlights an interest in investigating the historical events and visual and verbal images employed in the linking, patterning, sequencing, and relaying our ways of knowing race and its social relations. Implicated in the construction of race is its production and deployment of the moral and intellectual values that our academic disciplines bear. In considering such values as part of the investigation, this course includes careful comparative analyses of the ways in which the disciplinary systems of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and politics are used in the making and remaking of the academic and social grammars of race. Thus the analysis necessarily includes an intertextualization of the several academic disciplines engaging the question of race.”

Here is the translation: “This is a course about what we mean by ‘race,’ particularly at the university.” All the rest is smoke, endlessly paraphrasing this slender meaning.

Why didn’t they just say that? Because the unreadable language is a code that reveals the hidden message:

“In this class, there will be no content. You will not have to understand anything about the real world. You just have to have all the correct opinions — which you already know — and then learn to speak Theoretics fluently and parrot back to the teacher the same empty language that you see here in this course description. Anyone who thinks for himself or disagrees with the teacher will be abused and ridiculed. When you have achieved complete incomprehensibility, with the right attitude, you will pass the course.”

This is precisely the sort of babble educrats use amonst themselves, and with the public. If you try to confront them with actual research that calls into question their views, they descend into this babble to avoid the issue, like this nonsense:

It seems to me that one thing educational theory has been unable to address is the possibility of multiple theoretical perspectives, the possibility that there is no one taxonomy, set of standards, methodology, etc., that will define The Way to do education.

Certainly, any approach to learning theory that suggests that an experiment can be conducted in (say) a double-blind model in order to test hypotheses in terms of (say) achievement of learning outcomes in my view demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the enquiry.

We need to move beyond consensus, beyond sameness.

Meaningless, all of it. But to see groupthink at work, go read this meaningless twaddle, then read the comments.

You can’t "engage them in dialogue," because if you do, you’ll either get meaningless babble, or they’ll call you an "empiricist" or a "logical-positivist" or an "objectivist," all of which are the academic equivalent of screaming "racist!" "Empiricist" is, to these monkeys, a pejorative — and that tells you all you need to know about the legitimacy of their ideas. But academic groupthink is so impervious to criticism that once established, it is nearly impossible to dislodge.

And that is the problem — not constructivism. It could just as easily be “socially responsible math,” or “fuzzy math,” or “whole language theory” reading, just as it could be (and is) “contrastive rhetoric” and “multiple intelligences.” Whatever the trend du jour is, you see. That’s what makes it groupthink.

Here are two examples.