J K Rowling on teaching

I've been re-reading book 5 of the Potter series, in preparation for the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on July 16 (47 days, 14 hours!). This time around I was very aware of some commentary on teaching methods in the book.

On page 239, a new and awful teacher of Harry's Defense Against the Dark Arts class is introduced. She speaks to them in a simpering voice as if they were 5 years old, makes them answer "Good afternoon, Professor Umbridge" in unison, then tells them to put their wands away. She writes "Defense Against the Dark Arts: A Return to Basic Principles" on the board, followed by the Course Aims:

1. Understanding the principles underlying defensive magic.
2. Learning to recognize situations in which defensive magic can legally be used.
3. Placing the use of defensive magic in a context for practical use.
   

After that they are told to read Chapter 1 of their textbook, Defensive Magical Theory, which is deadly boring.

In previous years, the students fought off dangerous creatures and spells and gained hands-on practice in defending themselves. But you'll note that the course aims don't mention actually using magic, which Hermione points out (after raising her hand first, and waiting to be called on, naturally).

"Using defensive spells?" Professor Umbridge repeated with a little laugh. "Why, I can't imagine any situation arising in my classroom that would require you to use a defensive spell, Miss Granger. You surely aren't expecting to be attacked during class?"

...

"Surely the whole point of Defense Against the Dark Arts is to practice defensive spells?" [said Hermione.]

"Are you a Ministry-trained educational expert, Miss Granger?" asked Professor Umbridge in her falsely sweet voice.

"No, but--"

"Well, then, I'm afraid you are not qualified to decide what the 'whole point' of any class is. Wizards much older and cleverer than you have devised our new program of study. You will be learning about defensive spells in a secure, risk-free way.... [I]t is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about."

...

"And what good's theory going to be in the real world?" said Harry loudly, his fist in the air again.

Professor Umbridge looked up.

"This is school, Mr. Potter, not the real world," she said softly.

This teacher becomes surely the most hated character in the books, after Voldemort himself. What's more, she seizes more and more control over the school as the book progresses, outlawing student groups, wresting disciplinary power from the heads of the school houses, and conducting evaluations of the other teachers. I know I've been using the term a lot lately, but in the 5th Harry Potter book there is a creeping fascism which is (for a Potter fan) enraging to witness. Dolores Umbridge is at the heart of it.

Professor Umbridge, it transpires, is literally trying to prevent Hogwarts students from learning magic, both in her own class and by intimidating other teachers. The Ministry of Magic fears the school, its headmaster, and Harry Potter, and doesn't want any competitor to its powers. Talk about "dumbing us down"!

Harry and his friends respond by forming a group and secretly learning defensive magic on their own time, with excellent success (in spite of the lack of a Ministry-approved educator). All very interesting!

A few more choice quotes

Following on yesterday's post, I wanted to share some more observations from the leading educators who shaped our current school system. I also want to add that I am not saying teachers and principals in today's schools have this sort of oppressive view of schooling; they clearly do not. But they operate in an institution set up by men who said things like this:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

That was said by William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education. Harris admired the Prussians, and German philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, and was quite the trendy fascist. He also wrote, for instance:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

And this:

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.

On this excellent page of education quotes, you can find John Dewey quoted as follows:

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

. . .

The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent.

Many of these beliefs about education sound rather communist. Karl Marx also wanted the State to rear children, first in nurseries and then in schools. The Communist Party would talk about molding children like wax into "real, good Communists," just as John D. Rockefeller said, on the subject of American public education: "In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands."

I suppose you could sum up the early 20th century in the industrialized world as a period of the centralization of power and wealth, and a belief on the part of the robber barons that a gross inequality between elites and "the masses" could be maintained through scientific management, without fear of revolution. An enormous pillar of such management of the populace has been the public school system, which has gone on in its heavily centralized, overly managed, overly administrated form, ever since the days of eugenics and behaviorism. Every round of reform just seems to add one more hassle for teachers to deal with-- suddenly math or reading has to be taught in a totally new way, or there is yet another topic which must be addressed, yet another "competency" for children to attain, yet another test to be prepared for. No Child Left Behind is straight out of the 1920s, and that's about the worst insult I can give.

It came as a shock to me, after my eyes were opened by John Gatto, that there have been people all along who understood what compulsory mass schooling was really about. First of all, parents didn't yield their children willingly. Even Ellwood Cubberley, one of the key founders of our school system, admitted as much in his Public Education in the United States, as quoted by Gatto:

The history of compulsory-attendance legislation in the states has been much the same everywhere, and everywhere laws have been enacted only after overcoming strenuous opposition.

. . .

At first the laws were optional...later the law was made state-wide but the compulsory period was short (ten to twelve weeks) and the age limits low, nine to twelve years. After this, struggle came to extend the time, often little by little...to extend the age limits downward to eight and seven and upwards to fourteen, fifteen or sixteen; to make the law apply to children attending private and parochial schools, and to require cooperation from such schools for the proper handling of cases; to institute state supervision of local enforcement....

Doesn't exactly sound like parents were grateful to the state, and couldn't wait to send their kids to school. Sounds like 13 years of compulsory schooling was fought for tooth and nail by those in power.

Secondly, there were notable social commentators who pointed out the nature of the public schools, though somehow I failed to come across these until recently. H L Mencken had this to say:

That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

Benjamin Disraeli noted (somewhat earlier, in 1874):

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

There has to be a better way.

Fascism then, fascism now

A long time ago, I read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a futuristic novel in which humans are grown in labs and designed to be of a certain class (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon). As babies they are trained by Pavlovian methods-- loud noises and electric shocks. In school they are taught to memorize not just ordinary facts but a prescribed class consciousness. Henry Ford is their God, and their lives are in every way mechanized. Any disobedience and you're sent to the superintendent of psychology.

When I first read the book, I enjoyed it, but it didn't resonate, it didn't creep me out the way it does now. I didn't understand that when it was published in 1932, the scientific management of the entire population, a forced regimentation carried out through eugenics, behaviorism, and schooling, was exactly where we were headed. I didn't realize then that Hitler never had an original idea in his life. I didn't realize that, for instance:

Some of the primary and more famous Americans and companies that were involved with the fascist regimes of Europe [from the 1920s to the 1940s] are: William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush, National City Bank, and General Electric.

After all, the European fascists had a lot of the same ideas as the powerful elite in our own country. The Nazis didn't spring up out of nowhere, nor were many wealthy people shocked by their ideals-- at the start.

The reason for my detour into history is that public schooling as we know it was designed during this era, directed by a powerful and well-funded group know as the Educational Trust. As I have mentioned somewhere before, Rockefeller and Carnegie gave more funding to the public schools from 1900 to 1920 than did the US government. Let me give some examples of the oppressive intent of leading educators, from John Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, Chapter 2:

Meanwhile, at the project offices of an important employer of experts, the Rockefeller Foundation, friends were hearing from Max Mason, its president, that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, "the control of human behavior." This dazzling ambition was announced on April 11, 1933. Schooling figured prominently in the design.

An executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected "to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force."

The Nazis wanted children to be raised by the State rather than in families, though this was not entirely implemented. But in the US schools were also used to usurp the role of the family. At a time when Woodrow Wilson was publicly announcing that most children should forego a real education and be prepared for manual labor, one does wonder if there was much academic purpose to public schooling at all. Consider this (still Gatto):

Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 Social History of the Family notified the nation’s academics what was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true, the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts."

. . .

[In 1929], the famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, announced, "Academic subjects are of little value." William Kirkpatrick, his colleague at Teachers College, boasted in Education and the Social Crisis that the whole tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts.

These "experts" were experts in the scientific management of people, which is to say, they were expert in oppression and regimentation. Consider the words of Ellwood Cubberley, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education:

Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.

. . .

Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand.

Eugenic engineering of the populace was also to be put in place through the schools:

Rockefeller had been inspired by the work of Eastern European scientist Hermann Müller to invest heavily in genetics.... Müller preached that planned breeding would bring mankind to paradise faster than God. His proposal received enthusiastic endorsement from the greatest scientists of the day as well as from powerful economic interests.

Müller would win the Nobel Prize, reduce his proposal to a fifteen-hundred-word Geneticist's Manifesto, and watch with satisfaction as twenty-two distinguished American and British biologists of the day signed it. The state must prepare to consciously guide human sexual selection, said Müller. School would have to separate [out] worthwhile breeders....

You might think that these overtly fascist intentions on the part of the creators of modern mass schooling had faded with time. But John Gatto also pored over government documents from the 1960s and found continuing evidence of similar intentions:

[T]he gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967.... The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators—nothing less than "impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future America in which "few will be able to maintain control over their opinions," an America in which "each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number" which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings.... Readers learned that "chemical experimentation" on minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which now accompany the practice of forced schooling.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project identified the future as one "in which a small elite" will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will largely disappear.

You might think that somehow these fascist influences have been overthrown, but then why do we have poll results like these, from earlier this year?

A significant number of US high-school students regard their constitutional right to freedom of speech as excessive, according to a new survey.

Over a third of the 100,000 students questioned felt the First Amendment went "too far" in guaranteeing freedom of speech, press, worship and assembly.

Only half felt newspapers should be allowed to publish stories that did not have the government's approval.

I've mentioned in previous posts that while 35% of American adults feel politics and government are too complicated to understand, only 4% of homeschool graduates agree. Schooling is capable of removing the will to democracy, it would appear.

So here I am, so far outside the box in my attitudes toward schooling that I hardly know where to start or what to say the next time someone asks why we've decided to homeschool. "Because the fascists aren't getting my children" won't go over too well.

And yet what can I say, when I keep coming across quotations like these?

Is it not ironic that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?
– Royce Van Norman, "School Administration: Thoughts on Organization and Purpose," Phi Delta Kappan 47(1966):315-16


The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - "state indoctrination."
– Jonathan Kozol


Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.
– Winston Churchill


Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
– Vladimir Lenin


Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
– Joseph Stalin

From the mouths of babes

Friends and family will have seen many of these, but I thought I would put up a small collection of funny things A has said in recent weeks. It's off-topic, it's apropos of nothing, but I hope it's entertaining. Without further ado:


"I want an instrument, Mom. I want some cymbals and a piano... oh, and an accordion-- but that's all. Okay?"

A, brandishing a long pair of tongs: "Look, I'm a brave knight!"
me: "Oh, and is that your sword?"
A, looking at me like I'm a moron: "No, it's for picking things up."

"Mom, I made a seat belt on your chair-- with tape!"

[in the car] "Don't turn yet, Mom. We have to wait for this human to get out of our way."

[commentating as she kicks a ball around]: "And it's Super A. doing her spin-around and kicking the ball... and here comes Bratty Brat! But A. horns it away and -- SHE GOALS!! And Bratty Brat gets a foul."

"Well, it wasn't very nice of that fungus to eat our bread."

"Maybe the people who live there get annoyed a lot and that's why they call it Illinois."

"It's not snowy today, it's nice and grassy."

Me: "You've got to get in bed-- do you know how late it is? It's eight thirty, that means THIRTY minutes past eight o'clock."
A: "I'm not impressed."

[just when I was about to announce that I was losing my patience]: "Mom, are you losing your pressure again?"

[after stubbing her toe]: "It's all that chair's fault-- even if it doesn't have a brain!"

"Why did Harry name his owl Hedwig? ....well, I guess owls do collect twigs to make their nests... and they do have heads. So I guess that's why he named her Hedwig."

What we've been up to

One reason I love the unschooling idea is that learning happens at no particular time and yet all the time.

A. learned that 2001 is how you write "two thousand and one" from Harry Potter's broom, the Nimbus 2001. She informed me that her broom (she's been riding our kitchen broom around the house) is a Nimbus 2008, eight being her favorite number. She's also been practicing reading numbers by looking through our Harry Potter books and announcing things like "Look, I found Ron's name on page... does four eight make forty-eight?" Or trying to memorize the page number where she can find a picture of Dobby.

In reading Harry Potter to her, I sometimes assume that she'll be annoyed by the words and ideas that aren't familiar. The vocabulary is pretty varied, and (for instance) the social commentary about the Dursleys, or that the Weasleys are poor while the Malfoys are rich, goes over her head. And yet she's clearly not bothered by it, or she'd stop me and ask questions. I have to resist the urge to define words or explain plot elements... I need to learn to relax! Kids are amazingly able to enjoy books and movies even when they comprehend only part of what is going on.

A. is asking questions that stump us, these days. What does 'information' mean? If one travels back in time, what direction is that in? How does a girl ladybug know that a boy ladybug is a boy, when she wants to mate and lay eggs? Why are there two 8 o'clocks in a day?

T. has been dancing to marimba music, which is hilarious. He gets a very serious look on his face while doing this, which is particularly funny when he's waggling his behind. He's also made up a baby sign for music/dancing, in which he spins his upper body back and forth (rather violently) and then looks up at me like "Get it? Dancing?"

T. has also been looking at a lot of books. I don't read them to him, because he seems offended by the idea that anyone but him would decide when to turn the pages. He whacks the pages with exciting pictures, chews on the corners, etc. But hey, he knows the word 'book', and I think he's learning the names of the animals.

Another big hit has been the weather webpage. A. understands the local radar and gets excited about where the rain is going, and whether or not it's headed for us. She also likes to look at the temperature maps for the country, and she gets the idea of blue for cold and red for hot. She gets excited about this too, as in: "Wow, they're going to be really hot in Texas today!"

In other news, this week T. learned how to climb stairs. I can step over the baby gate, but A. can't. And when I go to take it down, T. is right there like a little Houdini trying to make his escape upstairs.

Better get back to the husband and kiddies now.

The cost of busing

In yesterday's post I mentioned peak oil and how this will affect the public schools, due to increased costs for student transportation. I wanted to say a little more about that.

It's not easy to find national statistics involving busing costs, perhaps because school funding is partly through local taxes, and because schools outsource transportation in various ways. I read in a couple of local news articles that school busing costs are second only to payroll expenses, but there was no specific data to cite, and I don't know if that's true nationally.

Urban sprawl has been one contributor to increased busing. In Maine, public school transportation cost $8.7 million in 1970, or the equivalent of $37 million in 1997 dollars. Furthermore, between 1970 and 1997 the state saw a decrease in its K-12 population, losing 27,000 students. Yet it cost $54 million to bus students to school in 1997, or close to 50% more than in 1970 (adjusting for inflation). The increase is attributable to urban sprawl, according to this report.

School choice is another factor which can increase the prevalence of busing and the length of bus rides. For instance:

Pinellas County, Florida: "Under [the new school choice plan], high school students begin their day at 7:05 a.m., busing costs have jumped $11.7 million in two years, and a $23 million special reserve account will be depleted by next year."

Consolidation of schools, which saves money due to reduced administrative and operating costs for the closed buildings, typically increases the distance to school for many students, and requires more money for transportation. Right now, while gas is still cheap, the savings may outweigh transportation increases. But when these school boards vote to consolidate, have they taken into account $5/gallon gas, and what that will mean to busing costs? Not to mention that consolidation steals more time from our children's lives:

Saltsburg, Pennsylvania: "Proponents on the board have argued consolidation is necessary to increase efficiency and control future tax increases--in the face of insufficient state subsidies.... But residents have charged that Saltsburg students' safety and energy levels in school will be compromised by extended bus trips of up to an hour in length, including travel in heavy traffic on Rt. 22."

What do the schools do when facing student transportation costs they can't pay? Here are a couple of examples from the past month:

Leominster, Massachusetts: "School officials plan to ask the City Council for more than $900,000 to solve a transportation shortfall in fiscal year 2006."

Westford, Massachusetts: "A new $225 busing fee will be collected from students in grades seven to 12 and from elementary students who live within two miles of their schools. State law mandates free busing for all elementary kids living beyond two miles from their schools."

Right now, oil sells for somewhere around $50/barrel, depending on the week. A French investment bank recently predicted that oil would cost $380/barrel by 2015. Estimates like this are contentious, and I don't want to make this a blog about the price of gasoline, but for a slew of reasons I tend to agree with the more pessimistic predictions.

If the price of oil is multipled by 7 or 8 within the next decade, what becomes of the consolidated school districts which can barely pay transportation costs even now? What happens if they've sold or torn down the old buildings they didn't think they'd need, because centralized schools were supposedly better? What happens in communities which are wedded to school choice?

I'd like to think the public schools were taking into account permanently higher and permanently rising gas prices. But since even GM and Ford are ignoring the trends (GM's best idea is a hybrid Yukon in 2007-- does one laugh or cry?), I doubt many local school boards are preparing for the oil crunch.

The good news is, they'll be bringing back the small, non-age-segregated schoolhouse. The bad news is, in the interim school districts will go bankrupt. Between sprawl and centralization, there are now 450,000 school buses in operation, which take 23.5 million children to school every schoolday (see here for details). School buses get 9 miles to the gallon, at best. And every year from now on, we will have less oil than the year before. Well, I mean to say... you do the math.

Peak oil

Part of the reason I've missed a few days of blogging recently is that I've been reading about some other issues, namely looming economic crises (take your pick), and peak oil (which is enough to give a person high blood pressure). I had some thoughts about homeschooling while I was reading about this kind of stuff.

For one thing, I thought about the giant new high school "campus" in our district. The school buildings are set back so far from the road that even if you lived across the street, you'd have a half mile walk to school. But no one does live across the street, because the school campus is on the edge of town in an industrial / commercial area. Every student who attends the new school will get there by car or bus.

Given that we have now, it appears, hit peak oil, my question is: has the school district factored in costs due to the inexorable rise in gas prices? (I am certain the answer is no.) Are school districts nationwide, who have invested in these far-flung "campus" schools, prepared for gas prices of $5/gallon? $10/gallon? Because that's not 20 years away... it's more like 5. I imagine they will abandon bussing and demand that parents deliver their children to school themselves, which will be no small cost. We'll have quite a few more homeschooling families when that happens.

Secondly, I've noticed that many homeschoolers have vegetable gardens. I'm probably aware of this because I, myself, detest gardening. (About a year ago I was at the dentist, and I realized that it is literally true that I would rather have my teeth filled than weed.) I'm going to have to change my attitude somehow, because food prices are about to go way up. In the United States, the average distance a piece of food travels before reaching our homes is 1,500 miles. I ask you, what is going to happen to food prices when the cost of gasoline quadruples? Not to mention that pesticides come from oil, and fertilizer comes from natural gas (which is also at its peak production), or that agribusiness irrigation systems and harvesting machinery are entirely dependent on fossil fuels. Are we ready for $7/pound tomatoes and $10 for a dozen eggs?

Yes folks, it's time to plow up the lawn and buy some chickens....

Seriously, though, I think many homeschooling families have an advantage here. We have the time to teach our children to plant, weed, water, harvest, and cook. This will be useful when we all have Victory gardens (only this time it will be victory over fossil fuel dependency). Homeschoolers can acquire and/or pass along more practical knowledge with our kids learning at home.

Reading about the post-oil world is enough to give a person heart palpitations, but at least we will have the flexibility to prepare for a very different future way of life, as need arises. And the kids can help us milk those cows.

Dropouts

My dad is a high school dropout. He left school at age 16 and became a car mechanic. You may therefore be surprised to learn that he also has a PhD, and has worked as a research scientist (in chemistry and workers' health) for over 25 years. There are a lot of smart people that don't find school to be a good match for them.

Nobel-prize winning playwright George Bernard Shaw dropped out of elementary school, saying that he could not learn what did not interest him. Nor did Jack London, Charles Dickens, or William Faulkner complete school. Churchill hated school and was (initially, at least) near the bottom of his class, even while he read advanced books. And then there's the Mark Twain quote at the top of this blog-- clearly he didn't think too highly of formal schooling (nor did he finish school).

According to one article I found:

Of the 400 famous 20th-century people examined in Victor & Mildred Goertzel’s 1962 study "Cradles of Eminence," three out of five despised or did poorly in school. The creative and exceptionally brilliant Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein were believed to be mentally disturbed by their schoolteachers; both left school to study on their own.

Also worth quoting, from the same article:

Eight men became President of the United States with little or no schooling (George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland). Benjamin Franklin had no formal education beyond the age of ten. John Major, British Prime Minister from 1990-1997, never finished high school.

A lengthy list of famous dropouts from past and present times can be found here and here. A lot of very rich men dropped out of school: Andrew Carnegie (he didn't even finish grade school), Rockefeller, Kirk Kerkorian (billionaire), Ray Kroc (founder of McDonalds), and so on. The IT industry was largely started by Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Paul Allen, all of whom dropped out of college.

It's a fact that a person with more formal education will earn, on the average, more than someone with less education. But some of that is by agreement, so to speak-- corporations pay higher salaries to more educated employees, even if the education doesn't inform their job. I have several friends who do not use their degree in their job, but without that degree they would undoubtedly make less money. Another friend of mine was once told that it was too bad she didn't have an MBA or they'd pay her $20,000 more per year for the same work. (That was right before she quit.)

The site "Education Pays" admits as much when they write: "Even in jobs that do not require college degrees, workers with degrees usually earn more money than their coworkers without them." Or: "Workers with higher levels of education also generally earn more than workers in the same job who have less education." Essentially they are saying that you will get paid more if you have completed more schooling, even if your degree is irrelevant to your work.

This is why people loved to talk about all those young IT workers raking in the big bucks. What was surprising about that was that they did it without formal education in their field, since there was no such thing at that time. You had to pick up manuals and books and learn it yourself, for the most part-- shocking!

I don't mean to imply that I'm against college education, but I worry that a bachelor's degree is becoming necessary for admission into the middle class, even while that education is often unrelated or very loosely related to one's job. The IT boom didn't require colleges or universities. Many college graduates do work which is in no way improved by their degree. The long list of accomplished dropouts proves that other options, other paths are open to a few. And yet for the vast majority of us, without a college degree we are sure to face discrimination. That's what I don't like.

Channel One

In my first post, I mentioned that my brother once got in trouble at school because he was reading while he was supposed to be watching TV. This was because the schools had signed up for Channel One, and had promised their students' attention for 12 minutes per day (10 minutes of news, 2 minutes of advertising).

A site called Commercial Alert has a good page on the Channel One program, including these reasons why it doesn't belong in schools:

1. Misuses the compulsory attendance laws to force children to watch commercial advertising;
2. Wastes school time;
3. Promotes violent entertainment;
4. Wastes tax dollars spent on schools;
5. Promotes the wrong values to children;
6. May harm children's health;
7. Corrupts the integrity of public education; and,
8. Promotes television instead of reading.

Apparently some kids are being punished for not watching the news clips and the advertisements, moreso than my brother did (he was merely verbally admonished). One of the press releases issued by Commercial Alert read in part:

Child advocates sent a letter today to Ohio Governor Bob Taft asking him not to allow local school systems to punish children who won't watch Primedia's Channel One in the public schools. According to the Toledo Blade, two Ohio children were held in a juvenile detention center on October 6th for refusing to watch Channel One and TV in public school.

That's clearly ridiculous. Would they be sent to a juvenile detention center for refusing to watch an educational video? No, of course not. But in this case, not watching threatens the finances of the school, because Channel One provides audiovisual equipment in return for the captive audiences. Apparently that causes some schools to punish rebellion against Channel One very aggressively.

Over the course of one school year, a week is lost to Channel One, and kids spend a total of a full school day watching advertisements. The products advertised include James Bond and horror movies, candy bars, soda pop, and expensive name-brand clothing.

I suppose that a few parents and teachers feel that the "news" aspect makes it all okay, because news is educational. But I even have a problem with the news, if this is used in elementary or middle school. News reports can be upsetting, for one thing, even traumatizing to sensitive children. On the Channel One website today's top news headline is "At Least 50Bodies Discovered Across Iraq as Violence Escalates." Secondly, I don't believe that you can have perfectly unbiased news reports. I'd rather seek out multiple viewpoints and discuss how they differ, rather than having my child receive one news report which is presented as objective.

Channel One has indeed received some stiff opposition from students, parents, and various advocacy groups. But I think it serves as an example of the way that the captive audience in a school is sold to marketers and advertisers, and that trend is growing. Several examples can be found here, and there was an article on this in The Nation in 1999 which is still relevant.

Well, I'd better go wash the marker off the baby now.

Dyscalculia

Never heard of dyscalculia? According to this article by a dyscalculia expert:

Dyscalculia is a collection of symptoms of learning disability involving the most basic aspect of arithmetical skills. On the surface, these relate to basic concepts such as: telling the time, calculating prices and handling change, and measuring and estimating things such as temperature and speed.

I am more than a little bit skeptical about this label. Screening for dyscalculia can cost hundreds of dollars, as can specialized tutoring. Students who are diagnosed with dyscalculia can receive special education through the schools, and a new market in educational materials targeting kids with dyscalculia has sprung up out of nowhere. The cost of education just went up again, and for what? Does this label actually help a kid learn math? Well, maybe it does, if it's the only way a child can receive decent math instruction in school. The expert column I cited above goes on to say:

Dyscalculic learners lack an intuitive grasp of numbers and have problems learning number facts and procedures by the usual methods of teaching. Even when these learners produce a correct answer or use a correct method, they may do so mechanically and without confidence; they are anxious about it.

One objective of remedial instruction should be to improve learners' self-esteem by giving them real-life exposure to mathematics as a part of everyday life: ingredients needed in baking a cake, checking the change after purchasing something, or making estimations.

First of all, read that first sentence again. Why do we diagnose the child with a disability rather than questioning the teaching methods, if the problem is caused "...by the usual methods of teaching"? Secondly, how is it that we classify relating math to the real world (as in Family Math) as remedial instruction? Why should we expect most kids to learn math without real world context?

In spite of the assembly line expectations of mass schooling, some of us will not learn math as easily or at the same age as others. What's the big deal? We all have strengths and weaknesses and our own developmental timelines. John Gatto wrote, in an essay in the Wall Street Journal:

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints.

Treating deviation from the average as a disease or a gift depends upon this cultural idea we have that everyone can meet the norm, the average, the median. Just as 98.6 is not the normal temperature for all people, and only 5% of babies are born on their due dates, not all of us will learn arithmetic in kindergarten or grasp phonics by 1st grade. Testing kids once a year to check that they aren't "falling behind," often labeling them as disabled if they are too far behind the norm, ignores human variability. This is not a quality control process, in which a child is deficient if they haven't learned X by point Y on the conveyor belt.

Of course, I'm swimming against the tide, here. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Neurology classify dyscalculia as a neurological disorder, currently estimated to affect 4% of the population. You just wait, though. As soon as the term catches on, that prevalence estimate will rise, and every other mom at the park will know a kid with this neurological disability.

Consider this excerpt from Gatto's The Underground History of American Education:

Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about "the perfect organization of the hive." He said standardized testing was a way to make lower classes recognize their own inferiority. Like wearing a dunce cap, it would discourage them from breeding and having ambition. Goddard was head of the Psychology Department at Princeton, so imagine the effect he had on the minds of the doctoral candidates he coached, and there were hundreds.

During the first two or three decades of the 20th century, wealthy industrialists and other elites created our current assembly line system of education. Our societal expectation that all students should follow some "normal" educational path comes from an extremely dehumanizing era in the industrialized world, in which standardized testing, marketing, eugenics, behaviorism, and "scientific management" all came to the fore. Why haven't we thrown this age-segregated, prescribed, inflexible system out the window? Why is western education dominated by ideas that were in vogue right alongside eugenics? Why do we think it's okay to manage our children the way Henry Ford managed the manufacture of cars?

As Einstein said: I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings.

Read it and laugh

My mom found this quite funny essay on homeschooling, and I wanted to pass it along. Here's a short snippet:

The first official homeschooling notification that I produced for Maine education authorities sounded as though I intended to open a branch of the University of Heidelberg.... I was pretty well prepared to speak to a joint session of Congress should it become necessary.

New Alfie Kohn article

I still haven't found time to finish Alfie Kohn's latest book, Unconditional Parenting. (So far it's excellent!) But it turns out the latest copy of The Nation features a short article he wrote on the "Supernanny" TV show phenomenon. You can check it out here, I highly recommend it.

Measurement

Lately A. has been really into measurement, only without the units. She'll ask me whether she's taller than a hundred, or whether a billion is bigger than a giant. Or whether "a little bit of juice" means less than twenty. The other day she told me: "Mom, I love you as much as quintillion, but I only love T. as much as 5."

Interestingly, she made up her own units of time measurement, as in: "Is an hour like counting to 100 in the slow way or the fast way?" The slow way of counting seems to be roughly like counting seconds. But she hasn't really grasped seconds yet; the numbers make sense to her, but the units don't.

Another thing she does is, when you mention a number such as 15, she'll often say, "You mean 15 like in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15? That 15?"

It seems she is understanding numbers in some new concrete way, and that has coincided with her sudden interest in measurement, addition, and subtraction. I found some good suggestions on this page for helping young children understand units of measurement. (This list of ideas might be useful, too.) We'll be doing some of this stuff in the coming days. A. gets very frustrated when I can't answer questions like "How many is T.?" And I'm like "How many what? Inches? Pounds? Months?" She'll be happier if she can get a handle on units like these.

It's always amazing to me how a kid will hit a certain developmental phase and suddenly they just take off in one area, like walking, or letters, or math. If you try to push them to do a task before they've hit that milestone, it's like pulling teeth, whereas once they hit that point, good luck stopping them!

Dirty phonics

I assume, or anyway I hope, that A. isn't the only 4-year-old out there who thinks you can make any conversation humorous by inserting the word "poop" someplace. I don't think I've gone a full day without hearing that word in quite a while. And she's said "penis" with such frequency since T. was born that I'm starting to wonder if Freud wasn't on to something with that whole penis envy theory.

Today A. got out our reading primer, and I sat down next to her to do some reading. She really wants to read, but she's frustrated by how long it takes to sound out the words. She managed "Hal had jam" and "A gas cap" and then gave a big sigh and pushed the book away.

So I got out the Magnadoodle and wrote "A big fat cat went poop." And let me tell you, it was a hit. I promised her it was a funny sentence, which motivated her to get through it, and sure enough, she laughed hysterically.

We made a little book today, full of "poop" and "fart"-- whatever A. wanted me to write. She's already read through it twice, and she's memorized some of the words by sight (cat, dog, rat, big). Parts of it sound like an early reader, so in a way it's like 4-year-old satire: "A cat went poop. A big fat cat went poop. A big poop."

So there's another thing you can't get in school.

And speaking of homeschooling advantages, I will I never have to explain to A's teacher that she currently refers to her brother as "Penis, the Boy Genius." (Actually, I don't know where that came from!)

Schooling on steroids

Imagine if teenagers went to school at 7am, had classes until 5pm, then were kept at school for independent study until 10pm, after which they went for private tutoring, finally falling into bed at 1:30am. Why am I making up such a ridiculous thing? I'm not. That's reality in South Korea:

Oh Hyun Chul, a 16-year-old high school student with a crew cut, is what South Korean parents would call a "good" kid.

He wakes up every weekday at 6 a.m. and is at school by 7:20. He does not return home until 1:30 a.m. the next morning, after an evening spent in after-school classes and tutorial sessions at a private institute.

That leaves him with about four hours of sleep. But he finds nothing unusual about it; most of his friends - and most of the nation's high school students - are doing the same.

"I snatch a nap here and there, during 10-minute breaks between classes and on the bus," the lanky teenager said.

"We have an old rule of four versus five. You can enter the college you want if you sleep only four hours a day, but you won't if you sleep five or more. You get used to it."

This is, obviously, an untenable system. This past weekend close to 400 students held a protest in Seoul, in part to mourn the deaths of 15 fellow students who have killed themselves since February. A major Korean newspaper editorialized: "If students have the time to protest, they should use that time to study."

One reason parents and students put up with years of misery is that Korean employers apparently place so much emphasis on where a student went to college and what grades they got while there (see previous link):

In South Korea, the college a student attends "virtually determines his future for the rest of his life," said Kim Dong Chun, a sociologist at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul.

A worker's salary, position and prestige in his 60s often have less to do with his job performance than with whether he passed an exam to enter an elite university when he was 19.

A friend from South Korea once invited me over to watch DVDs of a popular Korean TV show, in which three bachelors competed for a date with a bachelorette. The three men would walk onto stage, ready to answer the bachelorette's questions. On the screen beneath each of them was listed their age, the name of their college, and their GPA.

College admissions were at that time based on a single exam score, so I guess this test also influences whom you can marry. According to the above article, during testing mothers would go to church to pray, and the Korean Air Force would suspend flights so as not to bother the exam-takers.

The problem this year is that the Minister of Education and Human Resources-- a title which hints at what is wrong with Korean schooling-- decided to include high school grades in the college admissions criteria. At first glance, using grades as well as the exam score seems like a good idea, as it makes for a more well-rounded assessment. Unfortunately, it has created extreme competition between students, which in part led to that recent student protest:

The new college admission system requires teachers to grade students on a relative scale in an attempt to prevent inflated grades. Through the plan, which aims to normalize public education, the ministry hopes school assessment will become more reliable to universities and colleges by putting more weight on school grades in the admission process.

Students criticize the relative grading system, however, for allowing a limited number of students to obtain certain grades and causing fierce competition among peers.

I couldn't believe what The Korea Times had to say about the protest:

It is deplorable that hundreds of high school students took to the street Saturday night to hold a candlelight rally to protest against the new college entrance system, which will give more weight to high school performances. No matter what the circumstances, their protest is intolerable in light of the challenge of the government authority even by teenagers who ought to be groomed away from social problems as much as possible.

South Koreans must feel that their extremely rapid industrialization is the result of the mass socialization of schooling, and therefore they are still willing to put up with this inhumane school system. However, they are eliminating any chance of moving into a post-industrial, post-assembly-line economy. They are raising a generation of young adults who will be incapable of critical or truly scientific thinking, who will be incapable of innovation, who will merely be automatons in the workplace.

Furthermore, they can expect to see an enormous decline in their birth rate. These pressure cooker societies with extensive and strict schooling, constant competition, high real estate prices, and demanding work environments are not exactly designed for having children. Just look at Japan.

What a totally family-destroying, immoral, miserable system. And in the end it will only harm South Korea.

Lies my teacher told me

That's the title of an excellent book by James Loewen, about history and the way it is taught in our schools. I read it some years ago, and at the time, I focused on the history itself. I learned quite a lot, as I think most Americans would.

Take Christopher Columbus, whose initial voyage across the Atlantic is told in melodramatic and almost entirely fictional detail in most textbooks. Columbus was in fact well equipped for the journey, he enjoyed excellent weather, there was no threat of mutiny, he (and everyone else) knew the world was round, etc. As for his subsequent journeys and the violence and eventual genocide his men committed against the Arawak and other peoples, well, the textbooks have little to say. A contemporary of Columbus', the historian Bartolome de Las Casas, wrote: "What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind." But you won't find descriptions of such offenses in American schoolbooks.

Loewen has a larger point, besides correcting misinformation. He asks: How do we get such bad textbooks? Why is history taught as a series of boring, disconnected, and whitewashed details to be memorized (and shortly thereafter, forgotten)? And whose interest is served?

Loewen says (pp. 12-13) that high school students usually say history is their least favorite subject, and that when ranking 21 high school subjects from most to least relevant, students rank history dead last. And yet, historical novels are often bestsellers, historical movies usually do well (Dances with Wolves, JFK, etc), PBS series such as Roots, Eyes on the Prize and The Civil War were incredibly popular, and The National Museum of American History is among the three most popular Smithsonian museums. As Loewen puts it:

Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh-graders.... American audiences, even young ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.

What has gone wrong?

We begin to get a handle on this question by noting that the teaching of history, more than any other discipline, is dominated by textbooks.

Fast forward to page 272:

Ten chapters have shown that textbooks supply irrelevant and even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions and facts in their treatments of issues from Columbus' second voyage to the possibility of impending ecocide....

Despite criticisms by scholars... new editions of old texts come out year after year, largely unchanged. Year after year, clones appear with new authors but nearly identical covers, titles, and contents. What explains such appalling uniformity? The textbooks must be satisfying somebody.

On page 288 Loewen explains that many textbook publishers provide the whole package: text, videos, lesson plans, quizzes and tests. And of course the texts themselves provide the key definitions, the review questions, the discussion points. Thus a handful of textbook publishers control the vast majority of all teaching of history to our schoolchildren.

Loewen quotes two researchers, William L. Griffen and John Marciano, who analyzed how history texts presented the Vietnam War (p. 275):

Textbooks offer an obvious means of realizing hegemony in education.... By hegemony we refer specifically to the influence that dominant classes or groups exercise by virtue of their control of ideological institutions, such as schools, that shape perception on such vital issues as the Vietnam War.... Within history texts, for example, the omission of crucial facts and viewpoints limits profoundly the ways in which students come to view history events. Further, through their one-dimensionality textbooks shield students from intellectual encounters with their world that would sharpen their critical abilities.

Or, as Loewen summarizes it, "...the controlling elements of our society keep crucial facts from us to keep us ignorant and stupid." He goes on-- please excuse the lengthy quotes, but I think this is a fascinating paragraph:

Most scholars of education share this perspective, often referred to as "critical theory". Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, "School is in business to produce reliable people." Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: "It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically." Henry Giroux, Freire's leading disciple in the United States, maintains, "The dominant culture actively functions to suppress the development of a critical historical consciousness among the populace." David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot tell us when this all started: between 1890 and 1920 businessmen came to have by far a greater impact on public education than any other occupational group or stratum. Some writers on education even conclude that upper-class control makes real improvement impossible. In a critique of educational reform initiatives, Henry M. Levin stated, "The educational system will always be applied toward serving the role of cultural transmission and preserving the status quo." "The public schools we have today are what the powerful and the considerable have made of them," wrote Walter Karp. "They will not be redeemed by trifling reforms."

However, Loewen himself does not entirely buy into the above synopsis of what is wrong with the teaching of history. He criticizes the system in which state committees must approve textbooks before they can be purchased by school districts, and therefore publishers want to please everyone all the time, resulting in bland, all-inclusive texts (all-inclusive when it comes to petty details, anyway), which avoid controversy or conflict. (Here is another problem with increasing centralization in our schools.)

Whatever the cause of our boring history texts, I believe that it serves whoever is in power for the population to be ignorant of history. I am convinced of this because of my own experience in reading Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States. If I had to summarize what I learned from that book in one sentence, it would be this: "The less privileged classes will not win anything from those in power without a fight, but it is a fight they can and do win." This is not a message the powers that be want us learning. They want to tell the story of Great Men who committed Great Acts and suggest that collective action by the public plays little to no role.

It will suffice, however, if we simply know as little history as possible.

Homework

I've been wondering whether the amount of homework given in schools is increasing, which seems, from my personal observation, to be the case.

According to a March 2000 Detroit News article titled "Students and Parents Are Buried in Work":

Today, U.S. fourth- and eighth-graders receive more math and science homework than most other children worldwide, according to an international education assessment of a half-million children, including 30,000 in the United States.

"We tend to give a lot of homework," says William H. Schmidt, a Michigan State University statistics professor who is national research coordinator of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study. "Both in the fourth and eighth grades, we tend to give among the highest amount."

For example, almost half of U.S. eighth-grade science teachers assign homework three to five times a week, according to the 1996 study. That's true of only 12 percent of science teachers in Germany and 4 percent in Japan.

However, according to an October 2003 article in the Chicago Sun-Times titled "Studies Agree: Homework Load Light":

The 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study showed American high school seniors tackle "an extraordinarily light load'' compared to their counterparts in other countries, the Brookings report contended. U.S. 12th-graders tied for second-to-last among 20 countries in the amount of time spent studying.

Notice that the two conclusions are based on the same study.

Back to the Detroit News article:

The nation's public school students are spending more time than ever on homework -- more than most students in the world, and the nightly grind is starting in earlier grades.

A 1997 University of Michigan study found that 6- to 8-year-old children spent on average more than two hours -- 129 minutes to be exact -- doing homework each week, nearly triple the 44 minutes they spent in 1981. For 9- to 12-year-olds, the amount of time climbed to three hours and 37 minutes weekly, up from two hours and 49 minutes in 1981.

But, according to the Chicago Sun-Times piece:

The typical U.S. student, even in high school, does not spend more than an hour a day on homework -- an amount that hasn't changed much since the 1980s, according a report to be released today by the Brookings Institution that summarizes four U.S. studies on homework trends.

The report's author, Tom Loveless of Brookings' Brown Center on Education Policy, said complaints of kids weighed down by heavy backpacks and homework overload are the exception rather than the rule. The most interesting study he reviewed, he said, was done by UCLA, in which college freshmen nationwide were asked how much time they spent on homework or studying as high school seniors.

In 1987, the first year the question was asked, 47 percent of kids said they spent more than five hours a week on homework as high school seniors. But the figure has shrunk every year since, and hit a record low of 34 percent in 2002....

Brookings' results jibe with a study called "A Nation at Rest: The American Way of Homework," which contends that for the last 30 years, only about 10 percent of high school students spent more than two hours a day on homework.

There's no real contradiction here, it's just that homework is increasing for younger students, but not, apparently, for high school students. Each of the above articles has chosen to focus on a different age group and therefore comes to a different conclusion.

Certainly, it looks to me like homework is increasing, but we live near a college town with an "excellent" school system, and our own district is also affluent. I still remember the first time I saw an elementary-school-aged child walking home, pulling behind him a backpack on wheels, clearly chock full of books. I was literally nauseated. Since then I've seen this so many times I've realized it's just the way things are in these parts. Your kid hits second grade and you buy them a small suitcase on wheels in which to cart their schoolbooks home each night.

The Detroit News article is full of anecdotes which support this notion of greatly increased homework in elementary schools. Notably, the article provides this partial explanation:

Homework increases may be more typical in affluent school districts, according to Harris Cooper, a University of Missouri psychology professor and homework historian.

"My sense is that the amount of homework is increasing in particular kinds of school districts -- generally affluent with parents who are professionals and want their children to get into competitive colleges," he says. "That's a big part of where the pressure for more homework is coming from."

Fred Riley, a counselor at Southfield's Levey Middle School, also believes that "demanding" parents are responsible for more homework. "The homework load has increased tremendously -- kids are being inundated," says the 15-year veteran of Southfield and Detroit schools. "Parents, especially those at some of the prestigious schools, feel they're not getting their money's worth unless the kid is just bogged down with homework."

It's not just parents who send their kids to private schools who may be concerned about getting their money's worth. You will pay about $50,000 extra for an average house in one of the two "good" school districts in our area, compared to neighboring districts. Two different parents I know, whom I've told about our homeschooling plans, said they wouldn't homeschool because the whole reason they had moved here was for the schools-- the implication being, if they homeschooled that would turn out to have been a waste of money.

If more homework is given in more affluent districts, then I wonder if a lot of homework studies which appear to show benefits aren't simply picking up on socioeconomic status. Sure, most studies attempt to control for SES, but you can only control for a variable insofar as you can measure it, and it's quite difficult to encapsulate SES in a single number. I worked as a statistical consultant at a major university for 3 years, and you can take it from me that SES is usually measured by annual income alone. That doesn't tell you about the wealth of the school district, nor the parents' education level. And as we know, in the public schools, parents' education level has a large effect on academic achievement as measured by test scores. If the only thing you've removed from the equation is the direct effect of household income, there's a lot still left over that could be causing higher achievement in those affluent districts which love to pile on the homework. It has long been my opinion, as a statistician, that you cannot fully control for or remove the effects of socioeconomic status, regardless of the subject under study.

As long as the myth persists that educating children is highly difficult and time-consuming, parents may continue to believe that more homework equals better education. And if the parents who are determined that their children be well educated are the ones who accept or demand more homework, the potential for a significant but artificial correlation between homework and achievement will persist as well.

The "Book It" program

Prior to the past week or so, I had never heard of the "Book It" program, in which Pizza Hut gives a coupon for a free personal pizza as a reward for some minimum amount of reading. I must have been living under a rock! I don't know how I missed it, because it's everywhere. According to the Book It website, over 900,000 classrooms use this incentives program, which I'd estimate includes at least 20 million children. That's not quite half of all K through 12 students in the US. They have modified the program for preschoolers, with at least a million pre-K children enrolled, receiving pizza coupons for being read to by their parents.

In the parents' section of the Book It website, Pizza Hut associates itself with research which does not actually have anything to do with the Book It program specifically:

Do you want to know the secret to making your child a better reader? Time. Extensive research has proven that reading aloud to a child is the single most important factor in raising a reader. It takes only twenty minutes a day. Your child’s teacher will teach your child how to read. Your job is to teach your child to want to read....

Student achievement is significantly bolstered by just 20 extra minutes of reading each day (Block, 2003).

Am I supposed to be surprised that kids read better the more they read? What has that got to do with pizza?

The parenting literature and our school systems promote rewards and incentives so universally that it goes unquestioned that providing pizza in return for reading is an acceptable system. Never mind that, according to the NIH:

Obesity in kids is now epidemic in the United States. The number of children who are overweight has doubled in the last two to three decades; currently one child in five is overweight.

Never mind the disturbing trend toward commercial advertising and marketing in the schools. Incentives for reading seems like such an obviously good idea that school districts boast about how many of their classrooms use the program, and include it in formal school improvement plans.

But where is the proof that Book It has positive effects? How do we know that a) kids aren't faking their reading logs, b) kids are, in fact, reading more than they would have even without pizzas, c) kids are not simply reading easier books to rack up so many pages or books completed, d) Alfie Kohn is wrong that extrinsic motivators (pizzas) will decrease intrinsic motivation (enjoyment of reading)? What of Robin Grille's claim that fast food incentive programs result in lower reading comprehension ability and a decline in other, unrewarded reading?

Where is the frickin' research? I have Googled every imaginable phrase involving "efficacy," "improvement," "achievement," etc and "Book It program" and I'm not finding it. Nor do I see any study results on the Book It website that show the program improves reading. Pizza Hut instead brags about the number of books students reported reading as part of its program. Fine, but we have no way of knowing whether that's more than kids would have read even without the pizzas, and we have no way of knowing whether they chose easier or shorter books. Nor do we know if kids now feel they should be paid to read, because reading is a job, reading is drudgery.

We have no proof, that I can find, that Book It improves reading ability: speed, comprehension, grammar, spelling, or vocabulary. And yet, we're using this as a part of the reading curriculum with close to half of all K-12 students. If anyone has any hard facts on the program's efficacy, please do leave a comment! Because I am utterly mystified.

Peer tutoring

Now here is an idea you would think might appeal to cash-strapped school districts: peer tutoring. This involves students tutoring slightly younger students (often with a 1 or 2 year age gap). I'll provide some excerpts from an article in the "School Improvement Research Series" which took a look at the current literature:

Both tutors and tutees have been shown to benefit academically from peer and cross-age tutoring in elementary mathematics (Britz, Dixon, and McLaughlin 1989; Damon and Phelps 1989a; Pigott, Fantuzzo, and Clement 1986). Math skills addressed in this research included ratio, proportion, and perspective taking, among others....

Researchers have also noted significant beneficial effects on the language arts achievement of tutors (Rekrut 1992) and especially tutees (Palincsar and Brown 1986; Wheldall and Mettem 1985; Wheldall and Colmar 1990; Giesecke, et al. 1993; and Barbetta, et al. 1991). Language arts areas examined include story grammar, comprehension, identification of sight words, acqusition of vocabulary, and general reading skills. Most of this research involved elementary students (some were middle-schoolers), and positive results were found for both short- and long-term tutoring....

Research studies in the areas of peer and cross-age tutoring in science, social studies, health, and art are too few to permit firm conclusions about the achievement effects of these practices.... However, some positive achievement outcomes were noted (Rosenthal 1994; Bland and Harris 1989; Maheady, Sacca, and Harper 1988; Thurston 1994; and Anliker, et al. 1993).

Studies whose main focus was the affective outcomes produced by peer and cross-age tutoring have generally revealed positive results. These include improved attitudes of younger students toward older ones, increased "internality" of locus of control, and improved school attendance (Raschke, et al. 1988; Dohrn 1994; Imich 1990; and Miller, et al. 1993).

In short, having students teach other students is beneficial, and I can't see how it could cost much (if anything). So why don't schools use peer tutoring?

The cynic in me, steeped in John Gatto's essays, says that they don't want to use peer tutoring because it suggests that, quite possibly, a child can learn from another child (even when the tutor is of elementary school age) better than they can learn in a large group classroom setting, taught by a trained teacher. If the purpose of every institution is to survive and grow, then schools will not promote the concept of peer teaching, because it competes with the notion of certified teachers.

Another reason, of course, is one of practicality. With strict age segregation, you don't have kids mixed together with slightly older kids; they're in different rooms. You would have to go out of your way to mix the rooms together, which would involve coordination between teachers. And the very system of age segregation can only make students wary of students of another age or grade, which might impair the tutoring process (it certainly couldn't help).

Then, there is a belief that older children are dangerous to younger children in some way. When I was in high school, our school district consolidated. The "old building" at the high school became a junior high, while the "new building" became the entire high school. There was parental outrage that the junior high kids would be in proximity to the older kids. I am not sure if it was violence or peer pressure they feared, but it was assumed by all that a strict division between the buildings was of utmost importance, to protect the youngsters. (Frankly, if you set up a system of age segregation in which older students have more antipathy than empathy toward the younger ones, there might be some real cause for concern. But such segregation is an unnatural system.)

Lastly, I suspect parents would not feel they were getting their money's worth and would protest at having their child taught by another student. Regardless of what the literature might suggest about peer tutoring, the certification of teachers implies that educating a child is extremely tricky, a task to be undertaken only by professionals.

It is the schools that have structured themselves using strict age segregation, and the schools which have promoted the idea that an education is a difficult and complex thing to bestow (too complex to make peer tutoring marketable to the community). Thus they may have cut themselves off from a technique which would be (it seems) free, and academically beneficial.

An inspired rant

Just wanted to share this scorcher by George Bernard Shaw:

. . . and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to the turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow-prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: A book from which no human can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.

--from the preface to Misalliance (1909)

The little things

I was excited about homeschooling from the start, but I find that the little benefits are dawning on me day by day.

For instance, that we will be spending a lot less money on clothes. Have I mentioned that my kids hate clothing? Have I mentioned that many days I never get out of my flannel pants and sweatshirt? Not to mention the lack of peer pressure to wear brand names.

A. has dubbed the letter combination "oo" the "ghost letter". This is in reference to me telling her that a string of o's would make a sound like a ghost (which I imitated). I am so glad no one will ever tell her there is no such thing as a ghost letter, or in any way disdain her nickname for a double o.

I am happy that A. will, in all likelihood, never again receive a Valentine bearing the likeness of The Incredible Hulk, Barbie, The Little Mermaid, or the Power Rangers.

I've realized that (for example) there is no reason I can't explain the concept of multiplication before A. has mastered addition. I think I was overly worried about the possibility of confusion, for instance in not wanting to start French until she was reading English reasonably well. I've now decided not to be so hesitant. If A. wants to know what "eight eights" makes, I'm free to explain that eight times eight is 64, even if, to her, 64 is merely a number on the Chutes and Ladders board which is more than halfway to the end. Maybe she'll get the gist, maybe not. But my answer to her questions will never be "It's not time to learn that yet."

My kids will grow up with the Peters Projection map:





...and they will know that Greenland is not as big as Africa. We have this hanging on our wall upstairs. I plan to take it down and re-hang it, upside down. The only reason north is at the top-- and consider all the positive connotations to "up," "above," and "top"-- is that the white people live there.

My kids will not ride a bus with no seat belts. (Anybody else think it's unthinkable that the only vehicles not required to have seat belts are the ones that transport children? Insert expletives here.)

My children will never experience the horror of dodge ball, of hitting the volleyball after it went out of bounds, or of being continuously picked last for sports teams. (Have I given myself away?)


I've also tried to think of little things my kids might miss out on by not being in a formal school. So far, I can think of one: they will not know the joy of surreptitiously passing notes during class. Possibly other missed experiences will come to mind, but so far, that's all she wrote.

"Cultural warfare" post is back

Thanks to Google's wonderful web page caching feature, I was able to find an old copy of my "Schools as cultural warfare" post and simply paste it back in! Unbelievable! I'm tempted to buy Google stock.

Because we aren't pigeons

At the moment I'm reading Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting. Kohn claims that the vast majority of current parenting books focus almost entirely on controlling children's behavior through some combination of sticks and carrots, without trying to understand the emotional states underlying a child's actions. In other words, current parenting advice is behavioralist.

I didn't know, for instance, that "time out" as a strategy comes from an article published by one of Skinner's colleagues in 1958, titled "Control of Behavior in Chimpanzees and Pigeons by Time-out from Positive Reinforcement."

In a previous post I touched on arguments that punishments and rewards are not actually that effective. In Unconditional Parenting Kohn writes (p. 33):

Intrinsic motivation basically means you like what you're doing for its own sake, whereas extrinsic motivation means you do something as a means to an end--in order to get a reward or avoid a punishment....

What I want to emphasize is that extrinsic motivation is likely to erode intrinsic motivation. As extrinsic goes up, intrinsic tends to come down. The more that people are rewarded for doing something, the more likely they are to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.... [T]hat basic proposition has been proven by literally scores of studies with people of different ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds--and with a variety of different tasks and rewards.

Now, I admit, I am not above using bribes. I had fantastic success with them when potty training A (took like two weeks, including weaning her off the bribes). But I've also tried to set up reward systems only to find that within two or three days the bribe is no longer sufficient to induce her to (say) get dressed without being nagged. [For some reason, both my children despise clothing. Dana Carvey says he had to negotiate a daily "naked time" with his kids-- I can relate!]

I haven't used these methods very often, but in A's case it was just a pointless exercise. Worse, using bribes produced an "Oh yeah? And what are you gonna give me if I do?" attitude. I imagine that had I used punishments, those would have produced the converse attitude, namely "And what are you gonna do if I don't?" In other words, using these "extrinsic" motivators turns into a spiral of bribes and threats, in my experience.

Giving a child a reward or heaping on praise carries with it the implication that the task they just accomplished is an unpleasant one. It teaches them also that we have a system of tit-for-tat economics, even in our closest personal relationships; this is antithetical to generosity. Behavioralist methods necessarily draw our focus to the behavior, rather than to the state of mind, which ultimately treats the symptoms and not the causes. And then, to top all that off, it doesn't even work. A child paid to get good grades has poorer academic achievement, according to Kohn, then one who is not paid.

Consider this from John Gatto:

The schools we've allowed to develop can't work to teach nonmaterial values, the values which give meaning to everyone's life, rich or poor, because the structure of schooling is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and sticks. Working for official favor, grades, or other trinkets of subordination; these have no connection with education - they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not freedom.

How do kids in formal schools so often lose their love of learning? Maybe it's because they're taught for 13 years that learning is so unpleasant that only through the threat of disciplinary action or being held back, or the bribe of good grades or favors, can anyone expect them to undergo an education. Kids are admonished to stay in school on the basis of earnings potential, sending the message that short-term sacrifice (because learning involves suffering) will pay off (literally) in the long term. There has to be a better way than using methods that were developed on pigeons, rats, and dogs. But the schools, already possessed of the fear that a child left to its own devices will prefer not to learn anything, ever, or that kids not warehoused and trained to behave will wreak havoc and chaos in the community, is well prepared to believe that inducements-- carrots and sticks-- are entirely necessary. That if you remove these devices, the school cannot function. And so we use the modified pigeon method, and demean education in the eyes of the students.

My mom taught writing classes at a 4-year university, a few years back. She once overheard a student say something that I fear sums it up for too many students. "Man," he said, "I can't wait till I graduate and I never have to learn anything again."