Right Wing Nation

Everybody knows how I feel about educrats, teacher accountability, edufads, and politics in the classroom. But the things that are wrong with education aren’t just pedagogical; in fact, I’d say that most of what’s wrong with education isn’t pedagogical, and though some of it may be enabled or enhanced by teachers, they don’t bear the primary responsibility.

Some of these are related. Some aren’t. All, however, have major impacts on education.

Illiteracy

Forget math. Forget whole language and phonics. Forget reading programs. Even if we could wave a magic wand and see reading scores skyrocket over the next five years, it would solve nothing.

Students. Don’t. Read.

Reading proficiency doesn’t mean a damn thing if students don’t read. Even the ones who do read crap (I just got a reading list meme, and half the books were no-name, supermarket novels). I really have no idea how well my students can read, because they don’t. No, it’s worse than that. They won’t read. Give them an assignment they have to do and they do it without much complaining. Ask them to read ten pages, and you might as well shoot the family dog to judge from the moaning and yowling — and then they never do the reading.

How do I know? Because I run stats on tests, remember? I can see what questions students missed, and in what percentages. And the questions that come solely from reading assignments are the questions most students miss.

That’s how I know.

When did reading ten pages — most of which is charts and tables anyway — become cruel and unusual punishment? And how do we fix it?

Technodazzle

I have been incorporating technology into my classes since the 80s, when it required getting Unix accounts for all my students on the mainframe, so I’ve been paying attention for two decades. And in just the last five years or so, we’ve gone from one extreme to the other, from at best skepticism to dazzle-eyed, mindless, technoworship.

Geeky was the new cool ten years ago. Today, it has become the new idiocy.

I’m not going to lay the blame at any one door. Instead, I’m going to say we all share responsibility for this. But don’t kid yourself: When undergraduates don’t understand why they can’t use LOL! in a research paper, we have a serious problem.

Moral relativism

Why do we have so many students cheating? Because they see nothing wrong with it. Hey, if everybody else is doing it, it can’t be wrong, can it?

That’s what I have gotten every time I have caught a student cheating and talked to him about it. And I’ve noticed that in the last few years, students show no shame or embarrassment, no guilt, no remorse.

They’re little sociopaths. They have no moral compass. And there we have the problem with moral relativism. It’s wholly and essentially amoral. You don’t cheat because it’s wrong. It makes no difference how many others are doing it.

Back in my day, everybody’s mother said the same thing when we said, “But everybody else is doing it!” The reply was, “If your friends were all jumping off the top of a building, would you do it too?”

Don’t parents say that to their kids these days?

You don’t steal exams because it’s wrong. You don’t call your teacher a bitch because it’s wrong. You don’t call your classmate a nigger because it’s wrong. Period.

We don’t need another reason other than this: It’s wrong. That’s the point of morals and ethics. Relative morals aren’t morals, merely excuses for immoral behavior.

Lack of responsibility

When we were kids in school, we were held responsible for our grades. There were no parents running to teachers demanding that their kids’ grades be raised. School administrations never demanded that teachers raise students’ grades.

If we brought home A-minuses, we were severely punished for it (and folks, nobody did “time-outs” back then). If I got an A-minus, it was my responsibility, and I paid for it. Sure, I had some bad teachers. One was extremely bad, and everybody in the school had trouble with her. I made the mistake of complaining to my parents about her after she’d given me an A-minus. I didn’t sit down for a week afterwards. Yes, my parents knew she was a problem, and yes, they knew every kid in school had trouble with her. But that wasn’t the point. My grade was my responsibility, and my parents were not going to let me get away with foisting it off on somebody else.

Sheesh. I sound just like my grandfather.

When I started teaching, students mostly took respnsibility for their own performance. But that has changed. Students blame everybody for their poor performance these days. For a while, everybody was dyslexic. Now, everybody is learning disabled. Or they partied too much (yes, this is considered to be a reason now to get your grade bumped up). Or their roommate is a real jerk. Everything except the fact that they didn’t come to class, didn’t do the work, and as a result, failed the exam.

Office hours have turned into one big whinefest.

Narcissism and entitlement

This matches perfectly with my personal experience:

NEW YORK - Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

I don’t want to be vulgar, but no shit. It took a study to demonstrate this?

I’m speshul, you’re speshul, we’re all so very speshul! I have had few students I would say were remarkable in any way. They may be at top top third of the curve compared to what secondary and primary teachers have, but the only remarkable thing about them is how average they are. I’m not denigrating them. But they’re not special.

However, they all think they are. Every student thinks the rules don’t apply to him — just everybody else. Every exam, students come up and say they can’t be there so they need to take it late. And every time they do, I point to the line in bold at the top of the syllabus that says: No late exams will be given! And every time, the student insists that he should be exempt.

Group work is turning into a nightmare. Every student in the group is a narcissist who believes the world revolves around him, what he wants to do, his schedule, his lifestyle, him, him, him. Put five people like that together and how much work do you think they’ll get done?

The other side of narcissism is the sense of entitlement. I first noticed this not with my students, but the MBA students who taught for us. Student teachers would cancel classes (forbidden, of course) because they wanted to take an early weekend. Student teachers would just inform us that they wouldn’t be able to teach for a week so they could go on some trip, and expect us to say, “Oh, thanks for telling us!” and work around them. Student teachers would bitch and moan about being required to come to teacher training sessions every week.

That was an administrative nightmare. When undergrads started showing the same sense of entitlement, it became an educational nightmare. And they believe they’re entitled to everything: special treatment, exemption from the rules everyone else must follow, their grades, everything.

The “self-esteem” crap has got to go. If anything, students have way too much “self-esteem.”

Intellectual laziness

We’re endlessly entertained by Jessica Simpson’s acne, Britney Spears’ wearing no panties in public, and the most recent idiotic comments by the airheaded morons in Hollywood. This isn’t a recent phenomenon. It’s been gaining ground for a long time.

Part of it is what I call the Zero-Sum Theory of the Brain, which I first observed with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. The Zero-Sum Theory of the Brain goes something like this:

Some things are important to know; others are not.
We have only a finite amount of brain power and memory.
Therefore, if we don’t learn unimportant things, it will free up our brains to learn important things.

The Macintosh was — and still is — marketed on this theory. Hey, why should you have to remember that “copy” copies files, when you can click a cute little smiley-face icon and do it? The Macintosh will free your mind to do more important things!

Except that nobody ever learns more important things — that’s the major fallacy of this currently-fashionable idea. We see it in education with “We don’t do drill-and-kill so our students can focus on higher-order thinking!”

It’s Zero-Sum idiocy.

And related to the above:

Bumpersticker intellectualism

I once inherited a class from an academic moron — a blithering idiot, endlessly impressed by any vacuous technobabble or buzzword (as academic morons always are), and uncritical of anything preceded by “research shows” (though never did he check to see if, in fact, there was any research in the literature). And though all academic morons excel in using vacuous, meaningless buzzwords, edubabble, and technobabble to make themselves sound as if they really are saying something, this particular moron was The Master of Obfuscation.

He had created the content for the lecture portion of the class, and from beginning to end, every bit of it was drivel. There wasn’t a single source in his slides — no doubt because nearly everything was lifted from a newspaper or magazine. It was dreadful. The content contained nothing even remotely academic.

What was truly abominable about the course “content” was that is was nothing but a string of soundbytes. His teaching philosophy was to destroy context and replace it with “a narrative,” that is, to create a “story” and inject little context-free soundbytes into it.

In one example, he differentiated “data” from “information” something like this:

Data

• Has no context
• Ex: rows and columns of numbers

Information

• Has context
• Charts, graphs

At first, nothing appears problematic about this distinction, but if we look a bit closer, at least two serious issues arise. First, he ignored the fact that the “context” provided by charts and graphs can easily be misleading, and often is (whether deliberately or not is another issue). This is why in a paper or report, graphs and charts are nice, but we always want to see data, just so we can check. The bigger issue, however, is in what isn’t here.

Data. Information. What’s missing?

Knowledge. The word “knowledge” appeared nowhere on the slides for this lecture. The word “knowledge” appeared nowhere in the entire semester.

This is a problem because it is an example of what I call bumpersticker intellectualism, reducing content to a series of loosely-connected (when connected at all) easily digestible soundbytes. “Data” is here a soundbyte. So is that pretty pie chart (”Information”). But knowledge, the integration of critically evaluated data and information, doesn’t appear in the course.

This isn’t a university or public education phenomenon. Turn on almost any one of the so-called educational shows (either kids’ shows or what passes for documentaries these days) and you are fed a string of those context-free soundbytes. It’s almost as if what passes for knowledge is a big Trivial Pursuit game.

It’s so much easier, isn’t it, to spew out meaningless little bits of trivia and seem educated, than it is to actually understand something in context? It’s hardly surprising that an intellecutally lazy population has reduced knowledge to little meaningless bits.

Irrational tolerance

Why do we tolerate this sort of behavior anywhere, much less in our schools? Even teachers display intolerable behavior.

Or how about this (hat tip to Shrewdness of Apes)? Why are barbarians like this not in prison where they belong?

So why do we tolerate this sort of behavior? However you may feel about Bobby Knight, he refused to tolerate even the slightest display of thug culture on his basketball team (in the meantime, the NBA has turned into a gang-worshipping bunch of thugs, most of whom probably belong in prison). No pants hanging off the ass, no bling, no hip-hop talk, no rap. He refused to tolerate it.

It’s not just thug culture. It’s bad behavior. We tolerate it, then turn around and wonder why kids are assaulting each other and teachers in the classroom.

I tell my students the first day of class that I expect them to act like responsible adults. I tell them what I will not tolerate, and I don’t. Yet somehow, students don’t whine about how “intolerant” I am, and in fact, give me extremely high evaluations. They even come talk to me in the office just to talk to me semesters after they were in my classes.

You can’t tell me that authority doesn’t work. It does, and for the same reason that tolerating bad behavior produces more bad behavior. Tell students up front what you will not tolerate, and they won’t do it.

It’s a messed up, self-obsessed culture, full of “victims” who are somehow never responsible for anything they do and entitled to everything they want.

We need to reassert morality and ethics. We need to reassert personal responsibility and end this culture of endless victimization and entitlement. And we need to act before we commit cultural suicide.