Vi Hart, Ken Robbins, and Elitism in Education

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People have been sending me links to articles by (and about) Vi Hart, a musician very interested in mathematics.

Firstly, I immensely admire anyone who has an interest in several disciplines, such as Ms Hart.  As Ken Robinson points out often in his speeches, a lot of creativity takes place at the interface between traditionally distinct disciplines.  It doesn't have to happen, but these interfaces are often very fertile places for creativity.  (Even within the field of mathematics, some of the most interesting advances take place at crossover points; at the border between algebra and geometry, for instance, as in the case of the resolution of the Fermat conjecture.)

But the subtext of some of both Ms Hart's and Dr Robinson's conversations present a picture of people doing absolutely brilliant things, in mathematics or dance or music.  So they are contributing to yet another sort of educational myth that is not helpful: the myth that everyone can gain renown and self-fulfillment if only they can discover that elusive little nook of knowledge or skill that has been thus far neglected, to illuminate their own special corner of the dark that remains.  I don't want to be labeled as someone who thinks that a day will come when there is nothing left to be discovered, but a hidden assumption in present-day academia is that anyone who is sufficiently well trained and motivated can make a significant original contribution in their desired field.

The point is not whether that is true; there are almost insurmountable semantic problems surmounting the epistemological ones with that statement.  My problem is with this requirement for delivering on-demand creativity.  The educational experience of everyone can be vastly improved if we go on the assumption that everyone has to be basically functional in the vast majority of occupations out there, as well as appreciative of what other people are doing.  [In addition, everyone must have the capacity to learn on the job.]   Great specialization should be for the few; this is sort of an axiom today, even if it isn't explicitly recognized, and I think it holds true.  I very much doubt whether Ken Robinson's remark that "Intelligence is distinct" is true for the vast majority of people, if he means that everyone is a genius at something, if we only knew what it was.  One thing we might all lay claim to is to be a genius at appreciating and understanding a variety of subjects and thinking modes.  Now that is something we should all strive for.

Both Robinson and Hart say, quite convincingly, that children are bored in school, and we know this.  But it isn't necessary to be brilliant to be happy.  I'm not advocating universal mediocrity at all.  But there are many principles that an organized system of education must recognize:

1.  Everyone must be competent at a minimal level of language and mathematics.

The reason for this is simple: modern society needs lots of engineers.  The learning curve for engineering is very long, so we are obliged to start kids off early.  On top of this, modern life requires a fair amount of numeracy, so the early mathematics we teach little kids is not wasted.  So we cast a wide net, but this leads to Ken Robinson's accusation that we're trying to make university professors out of everyone, or at the very least, engineers.

Language is acquired naturally (in most educated homes), but literacy is usually acquired only with effort on the part of both students and teachers.  But the path to self-directed discovery is often through books, and the skills required to read at a sufficiently sophisticated level take time to form, so, yes, language must be taught from childhood.

Everyone must learn basic life skills, and if these can't be learned at home, it is not unreasonable to expect society to arrange for them to be taught somewhere.  If the population at large can't learn basic life skills somewhere, it is going to be everybody's problem.

2.  The Teaching profession is poorly paid.

Therefore, most teachers are either poor achievers, [otherwise they'll be out there doing something different,] or great idealists (or possibly both).  However, nature has endowed most adults with an interest in guiding children --this could be viewed as a social survival characteristic-- and teachers are often frustrated by the poor achievement (and worse, the poor attitudes) of their students.  As a result, on the average, a teacher is a disgruntled person, (probably just a little short of the level of disgruntlement of a postal worker,) and the classroom experience of a typical student is therefore fairly negative.

3.  A significant proportion of the education of a child must come from its parents and its family.

Modern Society (I was about to say: Western Society, but I changed my mind) is structured in such a way that employed individuals are required to give an enormous amount of time to their employer (who would rather have one worker working 80 hours a week than two workers working 40 hours each --because of the expense of providing benefits, if that wasn't clear).  As a result, parents do not have time to be involved in any sort of activity that could be considered educational.  A lot of things can be transmitted at the family level: values, interests, attitudes, skills, and only least of all, knowledge.  Increasingly, parents want the schools to parent their children, but this is unreasonable.  The child must be inculturated into the family microculture, or the parents will ultimately be unhappy with whatever the school supplies.

Increasingly, modern adults have not even seen viable models (examples) of parenting.  For every parent who remembers his or her own parents in the role of people who presented them with useful and interesting ideas and values, there are ten who can barely recall extended time with their parents at all.  Ken Robinson is clearly not thinking of this sort of dysfunctionality when he points the accusing finger at schools.

4.  Most of the mathematics a child needs in order to be ready for grade 9 can be taught over one summer.

This seems like a contradiction of my earlier remark that the learning curve is long.  But consider that producing an Engineer starting from grade 9 is already a long curve.

So why do we pester these little ones with mathematics in Grade 2?  I don't think it is really necessary.  As Ken Robinson suggests, dance, art, music, geography, descriptive biology, social studies, these higher-level disciplines are more suited to young children.  The lower-level, analytical subjects and skills can probably wait.  The exception is probably very basic arithmetic, and language.  We can hold off on long multiplication until College, as far as I'm concerned.  [To explain, I use the term "Lower-level" to describe the analytical level of a subject, in which you go down into the abstract fundamentals of a subject, and "Higher-level" to describe subjects that can be discussed at the intuitive or experiential level.]

5.  A great deal of what education must provide is: what to do with leisure time.

This is an ongoing trend, that increasingly people get limited satisfaction at work; most of the satisfaction they get is in their leisure time.  If one's leisure activity is all video games, this would be tragic, but there are other leisure pursuits: learning the Law, learning psychology (arguably of limited usefulness), reading, physical culture, playing golf, working with underprivileged youth.  It would be a great thing if society were to be enriched by the things people do with their hobbies as with their formal contributions at their main occupations.  Already, in most colleges in the US, the curriculum does make desperate attempts to remedy the narrowness of the experience and interests of students.  I tend to measure these things relative to my own educational experience, but all I learned about Anthropology, Western Literature, philosophy, linguistics, world geography, politics, European and American history (which I suspect is all the history there is, for most people!) was by reading on my own, encouraged by my family.  A movie could serve to motivate interest in the history of the Holy Land (Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia), in the history of Germany (Sound of Music!), WW2 (Counterfeit Traitor, Counterpoint), the Renaissance (The Agony and The Ecstasy).  This indirectly points to the fact that a major problem with modern education is that adults have little leisure time, and consequently little time to "waste" on their kids.  I sincerely wish such influential figures as Ken Robinson were more aggressive in studying the societal factors that influence the success of organized education.  The single biggest factor that could change education for the better (over a minimum of two generations) is a smaller work week, or a shorter work day.

Quality of life, too, is measured by most Americans in terms of where they live, which translates directly into living in a suburb far from work, and a long commute to the workplace.  So even if the work day was shortened to 5 hours, people will be led to seek homes even further out in the country, and commuting times would probably expand to take up the extra time, thus increasing the frustration of everyone still further.

6.  There is a subtle difference between sparking the interest of a child, and entertaining the child.

For some reason, I find myself trying to be more entertaining in the classes I teach.  I do realize that this is different from presenting the students with topics that might motivate their interest, but at the college level, the difference is not really huge.  But at the elementary level, the teacher who takes desperate measures to keep his or her student engaged (because of administrative pressure) could be creating children who expect to be entertained, rather than those who are predisposed to having their curiosity stimulated.  Even in college, there is a trend for teachers to use video in class in quite inessential ways.  Unable to keep the attention of their classes, they look for a snippet from a movie that will do it for them.  Textbook authors could step in to provide pointers to possible snippets they can use, and we have a spiraling tendency for this snippetation of the curriculum, with students expecting a certain amount of entertainment in every class as a matter of course.

Ms Hart seems to think that a mathematics teacher who is really interested in his or her subject could inspire her pupil to greater achievements in mathematics.  (She does not say so in so many words, but this is as much as I can get from her statements.)  This is hardly a new idea; interested observers such as the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) has said that teachers of mathematics should know significantly more mathematics that that of the level at which they are required to teach, and the subtext here is that we hope they will be inspired by their deeper knowledge of the subject to love it, and to impart their love for it to the students.

Geometry is a case in point.  One of my jobs is to prepare teachers to teach Geometry.  They often come in either bored by Geometry or afraid of it and it is a lot of work to remedy this situation over 56 contact-hours.  I have sometimes doubted whether my approach to Geometry preparation for secondary teachers really works, but they will certainly not doubt that I at least love Geometry, and there are generally at least a couple of students who enjoy the subject by the time we're done with it.  The rest of them should not be teaching Geometry, but I have no way of preventing them from doing so, as long as they obtain a fairly good grade.  If enjoying Geometry were to be a criterion on which they were scored for their grade, I would have the really disgusting situation of a whole lot of undergraduates pretending to love Geometry.  Nuff said.

Ultimately, all this talk of fabulous achievement on the part of Educationists is either naivete, or political rhetoric, or wishful thinking.  It is fine to keep saying that such-and-such a factor will encourage "brilliant" achievement in the process of persuading us as to its efficacy; there is something to be said for enthusiasm.  But to claim that every student can be a genius is misleading.

[To be continued]