Need Everyone Agree?: Changing Resisters to Supporters.

Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true. -- Familiar idiom.
	Powerful Persuasion?

Here is a thought experiment to try with your friends, family or students:

a. Fill in the blank with a goal, a situation, condition or event, to complete the following sentence:

Wouldn’t it be a better world if everyone could agree on (Goal).
You could substitute other phrases for “a better world” such as “nice,” wonderful,” “a real moral improvement,” or “peachy keen” or “healthier.” Pick something you can get your group to agree on as a substitution.

b. Once you have your statement, e.g. Wouldn’t it be more environmentally sound for people to agree to ban all automobile traffic from inner city commercial areas?, ask your participants to speculate as to who would likely agree to the statement (and why) and who would likely oppose it (and why).

c. Using the chart available at Assessing the Likelihood of Implementing Change , (ALIC) locate your supporters and resisters and the proportions of each you estimate there are. Fill in Line A on the chart.

d. Continue using the above chart to speculate how much you would have to change the percentages of each subgroup to bring them to the likelihood of supporting the change (here, agree with the statement.) Fill in Line B on the ALIC.

e. Considering the Ways to Overcome Resistance suggested by Kotter and Schlesinger in the ALIC, fill in the grid block the likelihood, or your group’s likelihood, of finding the resources to implement these ways, e.g. education & communication, participation & involvement, … etc.

Now consider the following questions:

1. Is the goal well enough defined to be operationalized to avoid a slow shifting (creep) of the target? (See Operationalization.)

2. Consider some of the costs involved in implementing the changes needed; would they be worth the benefits hoped for? Consider who it is who would perceive the achieved goal as a benefit; and, who would think it to be a cost. (You might want to revisit step b. above at this point.)

3. Considering the costs involved in implementing the changes needed, would it be wiser to redefine the Goal so as to shrink the budget needed? (This is a very common practice in all institutions, public and private.)

4. Are the needed ratios of supporters and resisters (see Line B in the ALIC) likely to remain constant through the change process?

To examine these issues further, if you are involved with education, see POLITICS, CONSENSUS AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM

If you are involved with other kinds of organizations, or if you want a more general overview, see Employee Resistance to Organizational Change

Cordially
--- EGR

Public School Reform: a Major Tactic in America’s Hidden "Class" War

During the period 1985 – 1986 I spent about 15 months, officially and unofficially, as the headmaster of a small, struggling private school in an affluent and very status-conscious suburb of Philadelphia. Not infrequently I attended meetings for headmasters or parents of private schools. At these meetings, one of the most pointedly disregarded “elephants in the room" was the issue of social class. It was “un-American” to broach such a topic among these proclaimed “conservatives,” who often mistook narcissism for devotion to the philosophy of Edmund Burke.

But it was very clear that the regnant opinion in such gatherings was that there was no competition between private and public education. They were "different" schools for "different kinds" of people. In fact, when a bill was introduced into the Pennsylvania "legislature to provide tax relief to the parents of children who were attending other than public schools, people involved in private schooling, excepting the impoverished Roman Catholic parochial schools, successfully opposed this approach to “equalizing” education

Why? As the headmaster of a famed, old school near Philadelphia put it, "We wouldn’t want the wrong people to come knocking at our door just because they could afford tuition with government money."

There is no clamor to reform private or parochial education. It is not because such schools are highly successful or efficient trainers in scientific, literary or mathematical skills; in fact, many, many are not – after all, what is an admissions committee for? And many of the most "successful" students are the most "surreptitious." (See Cheating Well)

But, let's just call their behavior, "discretely in-group-goal-oriented." They are, after all, training to be masters, not servants. (See Peter W. Cookson, Jr. and Caroline Hodges Persell, Preparing for Power: America’s Elite Boarding Schools. New York: Basic Books, 1985)

To examine some related issues, see an analysis done by one of my graduate students, a school principal: Pre-Critique Draft of Major Paper on Class Bias

Cordially
--- EGR

Can Education Be Made A Science?

edited 5/21/20

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. -- Albert Einstein

Let's specify more precisely what the question of the title, Can Education Be Made A Science?, is intended to mean. It should be understood to ask, Can technology and methods be developed which will give us (human beings) control over the production of outcomes designated by educational goal statements?

We can analyze this question by breaking it into several related questions:

a. Can we cause people (the average person?) to learn? That is
b. Can we cause people to be either moral, skilled, or well-behaved?
c. Can we cause them to be this way whether or not they want to be this way? i.e. against their will.
d. Better yet, can we cause them to want to be this way? (Advertising seem to manage to do this surprisingly well -- check your teenager's clothing,)

The short answer to all of these questions is: it all depends. What might surprise you is what it depends on.
The first big, very big thing an education science would depend on is

1. our conceiving of educational goals whose outcomes would be the effects of solely our actions.

For example, suppose a religious community chose as a goal of education, Being accepted by God into Heaven. If they also believed that it is by an omnipotent God's grace alone that people achieve such acceptance, then, logically they must relinquish the hope of a science of education, since to think that humans have the power to compel God to accept them is incompatible with this belief.

Two other conditions, no small things, either, are:

2. that there be a workable consensus on goal outcomes (and the steps toward them); and
3. that the outcomes be unambiguously defined. (This crucial step is too technical to discuss in a blog. See the article and linked articles given in the reference on the bottom.)

Many an educational reform proposal has died for failing to meet conditions 2 or 3. Just consider the widely encountered goal statement, Prepare the student for the 21st Century. Who knows what is being specified here? And how many people agree on it? Would it have come to be a political issue in the U.S. if much of any consensus existed? (See What does Consensus mean, anyway?)
Recalling Einstein's quote above we might wonder about another issue. How much reliable experimentation would we have to conduct to determine both ends and means of our sought-after "scientific" education? After much fanfare most so-called "Best Practices" research has yielded minuscule results despite grand expenditures! (For a set of pertinent blogs, see Best Practices Search Results.)

If we are desperate to answer yes to the question as to whether education could be made a science, we might wish that the words science and education slip from their traditional moorings and come to be applicable in ways that satisfy us. (Which "us?" Which "ways?")

Advertising campaigns might do the trick. Celebrities might be pressed into service to convince people that educators are primarily scientific technicians, rather than the kind of magician they are often made out to be in the sitcoms. (See Technician, or Magician: Can You Tell the Difference?) Free promotional samples of technology would no doubt be welcomed by cash-strapped school districts whose political governors are almost always happy to concede on the minor matter of language: science? education? Whatever!

I am reminded of the principal in a high school in Philadelphia (circa 1990) who, when directed that all students were to take a course in Algebra -- even as staff ratings were to depend on student success -- did the following. He arranged for the lowest accomplishing students to be given an arithmetic-review course, which was called "Algebra-X." This "reform" was promoted throughout the systems high-schools. And so the superintendent could publicly claim that all students in Philadelphia high schools were studying algebra. (See Reform by Redefinition.)

For references and to examine these issues further, see Can There Be a Science of Education?

Cordially -- EGR

Charades of Evaluation: mis-connecting cause and effect

updated 4/23/19

"…passing a failing student is the #1 worst thing a teacher can do. … Changing grades is the most undermining contribution to a student’s failure, but above all else – it invalidates your data. Putting aside creating and submitting inaccurate school data for the moment, entering a 'false grade' will make it virtually impossible to reliably measure any improvement of your skills as a teacher. Your improvement will now be based on unsound and worthless data." -- M. Cubbin (8/2/15) The Business of School

"… Is the Customer Always Right?" -- Farrington, Frank (1915) in Merck Report, Volume 24 pg 134-135

Pseudo-Evaluation. Data are not fundamental. On their face, data cannot be distinguished from outputs of a random number generator. Data are like shell chips on a beach mixed in with sand; or, like foam on the tide. (For an article relating “data” and “objectivity,” see Can Criminal or Immoral Behavior Be Dealt With Objectively?)

Far more important to know is what the processes are by which the putative data are collected. And even more critical is knowing which theories connect the data and collection process to what supposedly they indicate.

Much “data-collection” is like trying to identify proportions of bird-species during a fall migration. If the process were merely to tally varieties of southward flying objects, we might well end up confounding red-winged blackbirds with jet planes and monarch butterflies. (See Is It Really a Test? Or Just Another Task?)

In the above epigraph, Cubbin presumes a connection, presumably ideally possible, between school grades, student failure, and teacher skill. Using teachers as graders cuts costs, but is begging for inconsistency: not, because teachers may not “know their stuff.” But, because many institutional processes can overrule even the best of teachers’ judgments, e.g. administors’ prerogative, special education policies, or political involvement in the grading process. There is little consensus, when interest-group push comes to shove, on either goals or concepts appropriate to education. (See What Does a Consensus Mean, Anyway?" )

Requiring teachers to grade then grading the teachers is like judging baseball coaches using their players' batting averages. There will likely be only a tenuous, if any, connection between the data and any causal relationship to coaching (teaching) efforts. (See Power Failure: Losing the Series; Blaming the Bat Boys )

The Diploma-Holder Markets: is the customer always right? An important assumption Cubbin seems to make is that markets for test-passers are comprised of persons looking for those who possess certain proven skills. This is only a minor proportion of the markets for certificate- or diploma-holders.

Consider these other markets for whom actual skill levels are a distant, if even, a second consideration to applicant grade-point average:

a. Colleges, public, private or commercial, who have external, e.g. federal, or foundational, funds available for applicants with a certain grade-point average -- especially if the recipient institutions have tight budgets;

b. Institutions legally required to have certified staff but faced with employee scarcities, e.g. hospitals, clinics, civil-service;

c. School districts needing both adults certified as teachers, and students with birth and health certificates, in order to be run at even somewhat remove from peak efficiency;

d. Government administrations pursuing certain public policy initiatives that depend on items a, b and c, preceding; e.g. special education, affirmative action, STEM (Science, Technology & Mathematics); and last but not least,

e. the children applicants, legacies, to colleges which favor (paying) parents who are past graduates.

If skills really counted, there would be something like board standard examinations to be passed; normally, to be retaken at standard intervals. Teacher grades would not be accepted in place of board exam results. (See The Dangers of Diplomas)

But where the sheepskin alone is most important, rarely will the sheep’s diet be.


For examples and to pursue the issues raised in this essay, see

1. “Data-Driven”: a slogan to distract from organizational disagreement?;

2. Classification Error in Evaluation Practice:
the impact of the "false positive" on educational practice and policy

Cordially
--- EGR

Rites, Rules, and Regulations: constraining, or enabling competition?

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. -- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations Book I, Chapter X, Part II

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in a condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. -- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 1, Chapter 13.

Taming Leviathan. People tend to fear guns and pitbulls, unless they can control them for their own purposes. Similarly with competition. Corporations work to forestall inroads by employee unions. Unions, once accepted, struggle to establish closed shops. Sectarian priesthoods struggle against each other even as their laities, unless severely tamed, pursue religion despite priestly warnings against going beyond Church walls.

Bluntly put, whether competition is looked upon as a benefit or a threat depends upon who is looking and whose interests are threatened. But it is a widely-used, critical stratagem to obscure or deny this insight into idiosyncrasy.

So it is that we often hear those who feel threatened by possible competition -- whether “liberal” or “conservative" -- to decry “selfish individualism,” “lack of social conscience,” or “pernicious relativism.” Those who see that same competition as offering them an advantage welcome it as “personal liberty,” “transformative social benefit,” or “a fundamental social dynamic.” (See Believer vs Atheist, Conservative vs Liberal, and other distracting frauds.)

Moral Talk. The assumption of the moralist -- and I don’t mean to dismiss or demean it here -- is that human actions can be evaluated not only on a scale between effective-ineffective, or wise-unwise but also as good-bad. What makes the moral dimension special is that good-bad characterizations are intended to prescribe or proscribe for everyone, whereas a single individual’s action may be judged as effective-ineffective or wise-unwise for his purposes alone without prescribing or proscribing that action for others.

“How many divisions does the Pope have?” Joseph Stalin is purported to have said, dismissing Winston Churchill’s concern with the Pope’s influence. Clearly, moral importunity can be proferred where either knowledge or power is lacking. The ancient philosophical chestnut is accurate: Is is not Ought. And even evils themselves can be morally recommended, whereas non-facts and unwisdoms are not.

”Moral” Language as Constructive. There is an interesting use of moral language which has little or nothing to do with Good or Evil. Imagine that you are involved in a game. You and your competitor are being closely watched by a referee of some sort. Ask yourself, why, when you play, say, chess, (or baseball, or scrabble…) you should follow the rules of the game?

Well, if your intent is to best your opponent at chess, (or baseball or scrabble) then (being caught} “cheating” invalidates any result you might accomplish by your deviance. “Game-morality” is constitutive morality: what it is you are doing is only recognized and awarded as such if you concede to the restrictions of the game's rules.

Whatever game-competition occurs, only occurs by virtue of the moral framework of the rules. All your boxing skills matter little if you bite your opponent’s ear off.

But to play a game you have to concede consensus to a framework of rules and regulations. Game-moralities are generally not controversial for consensual participants: mostly because participation is optional. An interesting point: although people may compete with each other within a framework of rules that constitute a game, competition among people is not possible across the boundaries that distinguish one game-type (say, chess and checkers). from another. Rules and regulations define what is recognizable as within-game competition.

“Life-Morality” is not a Game. By way of contrast, morality when pursued outside of well-defined games, is not proposed as merely optional, a matter, say, of choosing a pasttime. People who propose life moralities, e.g. religions, ethical systems, class or tribal mores, etc. are not usually offering choices among competing options.

A strategem used by moralists of this sort is to not recognize differing views as competitors, but as deviants from the Truth or from Right Thinking, e.g. heretics, apostates, the invincibly ignorant, etc. Moral language in this context insinuates a consensus that tends to be highly restricted to “the faithful.” Such language is highly sloganistic, generating, even among members of a given congregation, false consensus on the meanings of basic concepts of faith. (See Slogans: junkfood, dead-weight or poison? )

So it is that you can find increasing numbers of people who hold that their personal faith alone guarantees their salvation, although their consensus on what defines such things as faith, charity, mercy, sin, salvation, heaven, hell, and even God, is rather haphazard, even when they refer, for example, to a common Bible. (See God, Church and Schooling for Democracy: American Faith in "Faith.")

Can Competition Be Moral? Those of us who see competition as an expression of individual liberty have to (a moral “have to”?) face an interesting conundrum. It is rules and regulations which provide the frameworks within which competition can be judged to be something more than merely efficient or wise. For Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, morality -- for them, Enlightenment Christian morality -- provided such a framework within which economic competition could be allowed to be “free.”

Present-day claims that fewer governmental constraints must necessarily increase benefits to society as a whole, are not so much the conclusions of arguments based on the theories of Smith and Burke. Rather, they are masks for present-day agendas of dubious morality. (See Masks: Words That Hide Agendas)

For more information on these and related issues, see Choosing The Lesser Evil: a Moral Failure?


Cordially
--- EGR

The Costs and Risks of Education: exempting the traditional.

updated 11/21/18

“We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice” -- Henry David Thoreau

Scalpels. If you were to give scalpels to toddlers, you wouldn’t be surprised if they cut themselves. But you wouldn’t -- you shouldn’t, at least -- jump to the conclusion that every person with a scalpel is a toddler.

Toddlers lack foresight and are ignorant of many a cause-and-effect-connection. So, what would you do with toddlers and scalpels; especially, if apparent grown-ups had the minds and emotional development of toddlers?

For example, some people claim to be advocates concerned about “what’s good for the environment” and they feel it necessary to, at least, remonstrate with gardeners or farmers who use weed control compounds, even such as Roundup, which leave no toxic residues in the soil. (But see How Toxic is the World’s Most Popular Herbicide Roundup?)

Toddler-minded dilletantes with weed-killers can create substantial collateral damage. But carefully applied they can help gardeners and farmers reduce otherwise unnecessary weed-control costs.

Gun Control. In the USA an issue paralleling that of our scalpels' example is gun control. With a major difference. Scalpels are not as readily available or as sought with as intense avidness as are guns (or weedkillers).

Toddlers, or toddler-minded people would be, indeed, are, dangerous with guns. But not everyone who has a gun need be a toddler, or toddler-minded, or dangerous. This is simple logic. Partisan fussing and fuming over the controversy does not change that. For stentorian voices to invoke “liberty” or “2nd Amendment Rights” does not practically address the issue of the high rate of death or injury facilitated by easy access to guns.


But neither does the suggestion that laws be passed and enforced to reduce or prevent access to guns: short time gains here may well generate longer term ills. Also, we have to consider the immediate costs of training personnel to enforce such laws and prosecute their offenders. And who is ready to exacerbate our already overgrown penal crowding situations by adding to the prison population? (And see THE COST OF ARMING SCHOOLS: The Price of Stopping a Bad Guy with a Gun)


The pass-and-enforce-laws-and-prosecute-offenders proposal comes up in this context, too, with opponents apparently willing to disregard real damage as inconsequential, e.g. merely a cost of having a “free market.”


It is at this point in the public argument that proposed restrictions are modified to suggest that education can play a role. Just as scalpels are generally restricted to those whose education has prepared them to put them to proper use, so, it is suggested, could guns be made available to those whose education in the proper use of guns has qualified them to be trusted with them. (See Gun Fun or Safe Kids? Must we make trade-offs?)


Overlooked Pachyderms. One elephant in the room is cost. How much would it cost to “educate” all those who want guns, or any potentially dangerous item, to use them carefully? This would obviously be a major expenditure. Would anyone want to have their taxes raised to provide it? And how likely is it that enough people would want to forego using these “scalpels?”

The second bigger and consequently even less talked about elephant in the room is that the possible harms risked to life and limb are, to judge by the behavior of our population, of lower priority than the convenience of maintaining ready “scalpels.”

At this point, usually, some people, holier, in their own opinion, than others, stand up and start wagging their fingers at gun-owners, particularly. Or, they may indulge in berating gas-powered lawn-mower users or loggers or fishermen for despoiling the environment; or, for being unwilling to “reduce their carbon footprint.” (Surely, it is the practice of lemmings to reduce their carbon footprint to the absolute minimum.)

But are these same people willing to give up highways, bridges, sewers and electric lines, automobiles, airplanes, inoculations and police protections to forestall the injuries and loss of lives which are typically, although inadvertently, consequent to their construction and maintenance? (See Schools are spending billions on high-tech security. But are students any safer?)

An easy example is that of a highway on which occurs a certain number of deadly accidents a year. No doubt this number could be reduced using additional safety devices and surveillance methods. But as the cost per life that might be saved goes up substantially, the interest in raising taxes to pay for it does not. This explains the common practice of many a township’s avoiding installing traffic lights demanded by worried parents until and unless some critical carnage occurs at the intersection.

Similarly, it has been the practice in some public school districts, if students show persistent high rankings on SAT’s, to try to induce new teachers to leave -- usually by burdening them with extra duties or less attractive facilities -- before they get tenure and merit substantial salary increases. Who need pay for experienced teachers if the kids do just as well with greenhorns? (See Do We Really Need Better Teachers? What For?)

On the other hand, in schools, “scalpels” frowned on by outspoken community members are often categorized as instruments of “violence.” And “violence,” it is preached, has no place in schools! So, for example, karate or riflery classes, as well as certain kinds of shop classes are unlikely to be found even in high schools. Can’t trust those teen-age tots with such “scalpels!”

But traditionally esteemed activities, as risky as they may be, are OK! Just think football, basketball, wrestling, hockey, lacrosse and even rugby and fencing. Such sports are not even readily characterized by their enthusiasts as violent. After all, they are traditional, school-approved activities! They can’t be violent! (See Permissible School Violence)

Nonetheless, it remains a feeble moral position, indeed, hypocrisy, even, to complain about the collateral damage brought about by the practices of other people while disregarding the risks of one’s own collateral inflictions.


To examine these issues further, see Pursuing Educational Targets: 
What is the Collateral Damage?

Also, see Buffering: Enhancing Moral Hazard in Decision-Making? .


Cordially
--- EGR

Forget Vision, Forget Mission: the Devil is in the Details!

revised 1/21/19

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. -- Thomas Jefferson

The fish rots from the head down. -- Proverb of contested origin.

A basic tendency of organizations is to fulfill the rule: “The Organization Comes First! Long Live the Organization!”

A second basic tendency within organizations is to fulfill the rule: “The Leadership Comes First! Long Live the Leadership!”

There is no organization so dedicated to benevolent goals, so committed to sacred purposes that it cannot be corrupted from within by the very persons trusted to keep it, day-to-day, on the paths of righteousness. (See why at Mission versus Function.)

The leaders of the great institutions that strongly influence our lives, School, State and Church, instead of pursuing Nurturance, Openness and Truth, can hide behind their organizations’ noble façade to pursue Hugger-Mugger, Skull-Duggery, and Buggery.

There are those dedicated people within the organization who recognize these bitter truths and struggle against them. The great remainder of others, the naïve, wishful faithful, if not cannoneers, are just cannon-fodder.

To see how these tendencies work in public and religious organizations, see Religion, Intelligent Design and the Public Schools: serving God to Mammon?

Cordially
--- EGR

Name-Dropping Is Not Enough: faking it with buzzwords

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. -- Matt. 7:21 KJ

A graduate student asked me to recommend him for admission when I was an advisor in a university doctoral program. He was in his regular life a businessman as well as a long-term elected official in a nearby township where he was expected to decide on such things as policies and contracts.

I asked him, “Considering you’re already fifty-seven, why do you want to go to the trouble of studying to get a doctorate?”

He said, “Because I want to speak with authority on how our school district should be run, and not always be suspected of just trying to feather my nest with contracts.”

I said, “Anyone can appear to have authority if the audience is ignorant enough. And if they use impressive buzzwords. You know, both academia and the business world are full of them. I’ll recommend you with the understanding that – as much as possible – you'll convert those buzzwords into meaningful ideas and use them in a well-reasoned way. Your authority should be based on knowledge; not, BS!” He accepted and eventually became my dissertation student.

Schools and businesses are remarkably similar in many ways. Both in education and management, whether it occurs in the classroom or office, in a school system or in an entire corporation, lack of understanding, of resources, or of consensus is masked with buzzwords.

Words expressing the most profound of concepts can be reduced to a buzzword when they are used unthinkingly or merely to impress the ignorant. (Or to pass licensing examinations!) Some big concepts typically misused as buzzwords in education or business are, among many others: synergy, constructivism, team-player, reinforcer, measurement, accountability, win-win, knowledge, reward, market, research, post-modern, Foucaultian, Lacanian. (See Living in a Cloud of Buzzwords? Two possible remedies.)

If you don’t know what something is or isn’t; or, where it might work, or won’t; or, what difference knowing about it makes, you are merely faking authority.

To examine these issues further, see

Analyzing Buzzwords, Slogans & Mottoes: Exercises.

Also,

Using, Rather Than Merely Alluding To, Theory

Cordially
--- EGR

Is School Still Educational?

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. -- Plato

Legislation was proposed in 1995 in Colorado to do away with "compulsory education." I was interviewed by Colorado Public Radio regarding my position on the issue. I asked for clarification: What was the proposal? Was it to do away with state-mandated educational requirements, thus reopening the door to the child labor abuses that abounded in the last century? Or was it to do away with compulsory school attendance?

My interviewer wasn't sure. He said he thought the voters of Colorado were tired of seeing more and more of their educational tax dollars go to dealing with kids who make trouble because they don't want to be there in the first place.

I said that I thought that noncompulsory school attendance was probably a morally preferable situation to the present practice. But the Colorado proposal would be like scratching an itch with a scalpel.

Unless schools can reject students whose parents want them to attend, the problem of undermotivated, distracted students would not necessarily be addressed. In any case, it is not clear how student-on-student abuse will be affected by even a change to non-compulsory schooling so long as educators persist in avoiding moral commitment.

To examine these issues further, see Fear in the Classroom 
Is Schooling Still Sufficiently Educational?

Cordially,
-- EGR

Who Can We Trust to Raise Our Children?

“A village is a hive of glass, where nothing unobserved can pass” -- Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)

Does it take a village to raise a child. To be what? Village idiot? Village prostitute? Village drunk? Village ne'er do well? These are not failures of village education but roles integral to certain kinds of community life. Without the fallen, the at-risk, the tempted, those we celebrate as moral leaders would have little to do in a village. Comfortable educators purveying their wares to an increasingly comfortable clientele sentimentalize beyond historical recognition the outcomes of village life. These outcomes were usually not very good for the majority of village dwellers. The motto of village life is not "Thrive" but "Just survive."

Did my village raise its children? Yes, in some sense. Any adult felt free to tell a child what to do. Children were expected to obey. When an adult told me to hand over my mother's grocery money to him for safe-keeping, I, at seven years old, was not considered at fault for obeying. The presence of the thief was the neighborhood scandal. He was an outsider; he had to be. Only outsiders did really bad things in our neighborhood. What our neighbors did, e.g., bloodying their wives' noses, breaking their child's arm, wasn't really bad. For “our own kind,” the quality of mercy could not be strained.

To examine these issues further, see School and Family: A Partnership for Educational Success?


Cordially
-- EGR

Should Schools be Clone Factories?

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. -- James Madison

Many of us seem to long for the deep excitement, the sense of mission, the pervasive invigoration that was provided by the Cold War. Lacking the imminent threat of "mass participation in that Grand Incineration" that gave such cogency to our duck-and-cover drills, we miss the struggle against a world Communism that gave so much meaning to life and so much federal funding to U. S. industry and education.

So we dig up Frankenstein, Body Snatchers, and the Manchurian Candidate! We worry about WMD’s, terrorists, polygamists, militias, and other harbingers of the apocalypse. And we fuss and fret about cloning. We express apprehension, vexation, or reservation about the possibility of creating genetic duplicates of humans.

In reality, we have been cloning, or at least, trying to clone, educated minds for millennia. What do religious leaders want? Doctrinal clones. What do political leaders want? Political clones. What do ethnic leaders want? Ethnic clones. What do parents want? Clones of themselves.

To examine these issues further, see Cloning Student Voice

Cordially,
-- EGR

Selling Off Your Freedom: what would be your price?

updated 081718

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
And nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free
-- K. Kristofferson, F.L. Foster

Do you want to have a say in what happens to you and yours? Do you want to be able to protect and promote the things you value? What’s it worth to you?

Would you be willing to join the 1/7 of mankind that goes to bed hungry every night, that watches their children’s bellies swell up with Kwashiorkor, and their limbs wither away with their hopes? Or join the even greater number who lack medical services, a roof over their heads and reliable water and electricity?

Would you be willing to worry about pollution, tsunamis, recession, immigration, food and water scarcity and so on; or, would you be willing to have someone else worry about it if you can be left in peace?

How about if I offered you a steady income large enough to afford some minor luxury, health services for you and your children, and a comfortable pension? Suppose I told you that you might be asked to render a service at some point, but its likelihood would be of low probability. In addition, only a small number of those called would be exposed to any kind of risk.

Would you be willing to leave governance to people who made you such an offer? How many people like you, would you estimate, would be ready to accept the deal?

But there’s always a catch. Here it is: Who can you trust to make such an offer and keep their part of the bargain? The world is filled with would-be tyrants, false prophets and charlatans. How would you know what they were? How could tell them apart from the many well-meaning but merely less than competent people you meet or see in the media?

It is worth your bother even to think of all this? How did your education prepare you, and how does the education your children are now receiving prepare them to be involved and act intelligently in dealing with the real problems of living in a vast, multicultural society?

For references and to examine these issues further, see Personal Liberation Through Education


Cordially
--- EGR

For Better and For Worse: Public Education in a Democratic Society is Political

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. -- Plato

It is quite common to hear educators and other would-be school reformers express the desire to "rid education of politics." But politics should not be seen as a contamination. Rather, we should understand any decision as political if it is based on something other than considerations of efficiency within a framework of a consensus on goals.

Thus, most public decisions in a pluralistic democracy -- where consensus on any issue is normally narrow or more apparent than real -- will be political. (See G.K. Clabaugh & E. G. Rozycki, "Getting It Together (the nature of consensus)" Politics is the art of reconciling disparate ends to common means. It is not an excrescence on education; but, in a democracy, its very soul and substance. However, politicizing of educational method is likely to produce the following:

a. the most politically viable methods will tend to low efficiency; this may lead, in times of scarcity, to a rejection of the goals they are instrumental to;

b. "excellence" will tend to be perceived either as an empty slogan, or as an elitist, undemocratic pursuit; 

c. teaching will tend to "deprofessionalization" in any politically sensitive arena; 

d. expertise will be seen as antipathetic to an increasingly popular concern for "sensitivity to human differences."

Given highest priority to a goal of maximizing social harmony, the following student characteristics may be pursued as efficient means: ignorance, incompetence, impotence and irrationality. (This provides a structural explanation for public school failure.)

Such trends may, in the long run, enable non-democratic elites to gain or to maintain disproportional influence. Schools in a democracy, may not -- contra Dewey -- best serve that democracy by being run democratically. --EGR

To examine these issues further, see Pluralism and Rationality: the Limits of Tolerance. Why public schools fail.

Cordially
EGR

"The Stimulus” remains a Hypothetical Construct; or, Guessing At What Elicits Behavior

(Researchers) … have implicitly allowed their own behavior to define the stimulus… --- Blough & Millward, (1965) "Learning: Operant Conditioning and Verbal Learning," in Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 16

Our conclusions, even at the level of measurement and scaling (which seems such a firm foundation for theory building), are already a consequence of theory. A measurement or scaling model is actually a theory about behavior, admittedly on a miniature level, but nonetheless theory. -- Clyde H.Coombs (1964) Theory of Data, 5. New York. Wiley.

What “stimulus” is it that provokes anyone to harm, to kill, even, another human being? We are continually bathed in emanations from our sun as well as from distant stars. Are they part of our “stimulus environment”? Is it sunspots that cause felonies?

Parents, teachers, professors, law enforcers, juries and judges -- are all, not infrequently, profoundly self-centered. They judge the behavior of others on the basis of how they, each one of them, imagine that they personally would have or should have perceived, reacted, thought and responded.

So it is that they praise or punish, pass or fail, arrest or dismiss, convict or exonerate, commit or constrain persons under their domination to praise or to humiliation, to liberty or to incarceration or death.

It’s all too easy to talk about stimuli; after all, we’re educated, aren’t we? We’ve got the vocabulary! But it can be very hard to say what particular events, or aspects of events, constitute a stimulus.

Want to see if a rat can distinguish Mozart from Schubert? Put it into a Skinner box, starve it a bit and then feed it only if it presses the bar when an interval of Mozart’s music, not Schubert’s, is playing. The discriminatory behavior of the rat will help us identify whether or not, and to what extent, the music is a stimulus.

Having made the acquaintance of many an intelligent lab rat, I would bet its pressing responses would show a correlation with the snatch of music from the composer we have chosen to reward it for upon presentation. We will likely find out that some difference between the Mozart and the Schubert matters.

Is it color that matters? Not for us humans who hear only sound (but, perhaps so, if we have a rat with synaesthesia). Maybe one piece of music has a sound of a frequency that the other doesn’t. We’ll have to investigate that. The behavior per se doesn’t give us the answer. It just helps us focus the question: what precisely, if anything, is the stimulus?

And has the rat learned anything about Mozart or Schubert? Or even that one interval of sound or the other relates to them? What do you think? Wouldn't you have to put this to a test?

How much education, intellectual, physical or moral, is so much Schubert in a Skinner box?

For references and to examine the issues raised in this article further, see Can a Consistent Behaviorist Finish an Experiment?


Cordially -- EGR

Does Schooling Help Develop Conscience?

Everything that a teacher does … to enhance formal operational thought is also … enhancing the development of principled morality. -- Michael Schleifer "Moral Education and Indoctrination" Ethics, 86,2, 154-163

Complaints from Kids about School:

In public school you can’t pray when you want to. (My Mom worries about this.)

Big deal! In most schools you can’t even pee when you need to! (Besides, it’s not that anyone much wants so much to pray; other things are funner.)

What’s going on here?

Any kid can tell you: school is about learning rules, even if lots of them don’t make much sense. (Some nasty kids even say the rules they tell us are for our own good are really to make life easy for teachers!)

You can get into trouble for doing things that are not wrong, like coming in a little bit late, or forgetting a book. (Oooh! You’re gonna get in trouble!)

You can even get into trouble for doin' what is right, like fightin' back against a bully.

What’s going on here?

And we’re supposed to read and memorize what is in the books they give us. But my dad says it’s a load of crap! (Oooh! You said “crap!”)

But my parents say I should do what they tell me to and I’ll be OK. I’ll even get good grades!

That’s what they learn in school.


For references and to examine these issues further, see Moral Education: Indoctrination vs. Cognitive Development?


Cordially
--- EGR

Caveat Emptor: The Coming School Voucher Disaster

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. -- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Book I, Chapter X, Part II

Americans in the education business, like most peoples who work to maximize their personal benefits for minimal cost, are much more like poker players than like philanthropist saints. Gaming the “free market” pays far better than does supporting it.

Of course, it has always been the practice of those in the “uplift” biz, educators, clergy, social workers and the like, to pretend to an almost otherworldly disregard of their own needs and benefits, while pushing the idea that they sacrifice in the service of others.

The business world is a jungle. Genghis Khan is a role model. Relatively few people accept a morality as strict as that preached by Adam Smith to be the backbone of a free market economy. Bullshit and fraud are the language of daily discourse, even though the Nicespeak promoted by advertising is the politically correct dialect.

It is really little different in the education business. Only wishful thinking blinds us to the malfeasance that is far from rare and that serves as an incentive to much institutional development. Vouchers for education will provide the economic wheelers and dealers, who already loot the public treasuries, one more easy entrance to pillage.

Our kids, our hopes and dreams, are involved in education. Therefore, let us permit hope to triumph over experience. Let us, resolutely, continue to believe that, someday, in the not too distant future:

a. no child need be left behind;
b. all adults, educated thoroughly and efficiently, will participate in the processes of self-governance;
c. most kids, and adults, will be math whizzes, and champions at Jeopardy;
d. all Americans will be financially schooled, intelligent consumers -- particularly of education; and
e. America, the New Jerusalem, will finally achieve “alabaster cities” whose gleam is undimmed by human tears.

All this from the viking of Genghis Khan and his Poker Players, pretending to the priesthood of the Free Market.

What is liberty without … virtue? …It is the greatest of all evils… -- Edmund Burke

For references and to examine these issues further, see Charter School, Vouchers and America's Growing Divisivemess.


Cordially
--- EGR

Knowledge, Freedom, Wisdom: Are These the Point of Schooling?

edited 3/21/20

Who are a little wise, the best fools be. – John Donne

It is not accidental that we speak of sending our dogs to “obedience school.” Show horses, too, are schooled. Indeed, any circus animal that that is to perform in public receives “schooling.”

Such training is necessary since the natural impulses of dogs, horses, elephants and tigers are not attuned to cooperating with or supporting human social purposes believed to be desirable. So must it be thought to be the same with human children, to judge from our practices of compulsory schooling.

“But unless they go to school, kids would run wild and grow up to be, at best, anti-social ruffians.” Perhaps. But does this mean that incarcerating them for ever-increasing periods of time -- think of the movements to do away with recess, summer vacations and free Saturdays--, will make them (and us) healthy, wealthy and wise?

So what if they do learn a little math; and less writing? And even less history? Whose benefit is served if they learn to spout scientistic slogans about human nature and the universe? For example, “All human behavior is generated from the brain according to the laws of nature.” Or, “According to the latest research the universe is finite (or infinite, or multiple -- pick one or more).” How is it possible to take seriously supposedly “scientific” pronouncements about “all” of anything from individuals who inhabit a mere speck of dust in a remote corner of the (or “a”) universe during a minuscule interval of time?

The previous statement is not an attempt to beat up scientists: just the popularizers and propagandizers of “science” whose overextended conjectures end up in the schoolbooks students are exposed to (usually in textbook chapter summaries, or supporting materials). (See The Curse of Knowledge vs The Dunning--Kruger Effect: an instructor's dilemma.)

For good reason, public educators in our pluralistic society attempt to distinguish between religion and science in constructing curriculum. What they often miss, however, is that being skeptical, or anti-religious, does not, in and of itself, qualify an idea as being scientific.

To examine these issues further, see Questionable Assumptions in Social Decision Making


Cordially
--- EGR

The First Teacher-in-Space: remembering a pointless tragedy serving questionable purposes.

It has been some 25 years since the space shuttle Challenger rose from Launch Pad 39B to carry to their deaths Commander Dick Scobee, experienced Mission Specialists Judy Resnik, Ron McNair and Ellison Onizuka, along with Pilot Mike Smith and Payload Specialist Greg Jarvis. Also aboard for no really good reason was the newly-designated Teacher-in-Space, Christa McAuliffe, a novice.

Had Christa McAulliffe died in a a genuine effort to highlight the importance of teaching and schooling it would have been different. But the whole Teacher-in-Space effort was just bad faith public relations -- eyewash for an administration that had gotten itself into political hot water by giving nothing but empty platitudes and slashed federal budgets to teachers for four long years.

The death of Christa McCauliffe is a metaphor for all the phony pronouncements of lofty schooling goals that no one takes seriously. The death of Christa McCauliffe is a metaphor for every conscientious teacher working without resources who is piously told that he or she could, if they only tried, do better.

To examine these issues further, see Late Night Thoughts on the Death of Christa McAuliffe


Cordially
--- GKC

What You Don’t Learn in Teacher Training: Effective Student Motivation

Everybody’s talkin’ at me.
I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’.
Only the echoes of my mind.
– Harry Nillson Aerial Ballet (1969)

Can you imagine anyone’ s attending a course called, “Controlling Your Smoking Habits” in a “school” called “Tobacco Growers' University?” How about attending a course called, “How Used Car Salesmen Lie” at the “Automotive Dealers Institute?”

I had a graduate student complain to me once that the facts and considerations that I presented in class tended to diminish her “enthusiasm” for entering the teaching profession. I asked her in response if she would go to a doctor who was enthusiastic but barely skilled rather than someone like the TV character, House: little charm, little optimism, but with a ton of competence and no b.s. Her choice was clear, and wise.

Suppose you had been explicitly trained in what might motivate kids of all ages to perform on command – “on command,” because this is what your supervisor, your principal, your school board members and your kids’ parents will expect you to do. (Not that they themselves could do it!)

If you had such knowledge of motivation you would soon discover how infrequently you could use it, because the behavioral foundations for its success were lacking both in the students and in the school environment. Kids who don’t try to read, or can't play without bullying, or are unwilling to pay attention to anything that doesn’t deal with gossip, toys, games, or movies – and for teenagers, sex and violence – are difficult to get involved consistently in classroom activities. (Let’s not even get into the typical class interruptions your administrators believe it to be a matter of life or death to make at any time of the day!)

Just as a skillful doctor could tell whether you have been not taking your medicine or straying from your exercise plan or diet, so would you, a motivational expert, be more likely to recognize the many outside influences that undermine a student’s motivation for school activities.

Just think about who and what those outside influences might be. Would they welcome your observations on how they interfere with or fail to support student motivation?

And, by the way, would the course you took called something like, “Classroom Management,” have been more honestly labeled, “Keeping Up Your Teacherly Enthusiasm While Your Class (and Career) is Going to Down the Tubes?” Would any university or college permit their "cash cow," the Department of Teacher Preparation -- or something similarly named -- risk rocking the boat by teaching its students how parents, politicians, school administrators and college professors all contribute to stultifying student motivation?

To examine these issues further, see Motivation: why is this a worry?


Cordially
--- EGR

Education without Indoctrination: is it possible?

Training. Schooling. Education. Indoctrination. All related, but not the same. Does it matter? Only if you care about getting what you want, knowing what you have, and who pays for it.

I regularly read the ACTA updates and often sympathize with their policy positions. ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, is hardly a rabidly liberal organization. Their slogan is “Promoting Academic Excellence and Accountability.”

Yet in their Update January 6th 2011 they reveal one of their resolutions for American education:

Bringing a robust exchange of ideas in the classroom. Schooling should be for education, not indoctrination.

I suggest that some careful thought shows their resolution to have some problems.

Let’s consider a contrary idea: Education is Schooling together with Indoctrination. However, indoctrination is not one simple kind of thing.

What is Indoctrination? Indoctrination is:

any attempt to teach (or anything taught)

a. without justification, or

b. without justification understood (or accepted) by its recipients as having a reasonable basis.

There are two kinds of indoctrination schools might engage in:

a. that which supports organization functioning, e.g. study your lessons, pay your tuition, come to class on time, do what your professor assigns you, and the like.

b. doctrines and practices relating to school function externalities, eg. religious, political or social doctrines.

It is practically often difficult to keep these things separate. If you can identify an ideology, that makes it easier. But what about beliefs in the desirability of higher education? Or in the desirability of certain curriculum? Or that certain achievements, e.g. degrees and publications, are worthy of recognition? Or that degreed people are worthy of respect merely because of that degree?

Such beliefs are generally taken for granted, institutionalized in the structure of the school. But the fact that they are disputable is indicated by the existence of course electives, for one example; or by any variation from a lock-step curriculum.

A professor may invite challenge and debate on the desirability of various economic systems. He is unlikely to invite challenge or debate when it comes to the syllabus content, or classroom or grading procedure.

To examine some importantly related issues further, see Trading-Off "Sacred" Values: 
Why Public Schools Should Not Try to "Educate"

Cordially
--- EGR