Education Reform looks to Successful Businessmen for Advice

[See below for a late addition to this post.]
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Mano Singham, in his blog, remarks that he recently saw a headline saying that Rupert Murdoch was speaking on Education Reform at a think tank. He remarks that Bill Gates has also been weighing in on Education Reform. There is a general trend, he observes, to look to successful businessmen for advice about “how to fix” Education.

Generally speaking, we realize that someone who is smart, and has a good understanding of complex systems, and people, and society, can have something useful to say about  education, among other things. But Murdoch?  His achievements have been very specific, and mostly to do with the aspects of society and human behavior that seem most distantly removed from children and education.  Bill Gates is probably a better choice, but Education is an endeavor that requires shepherding along enormous numbers of people and children, whereas Bill Gates's world, one imagines, involves small human forces, most of whom listen to him fairly well.  He and his wife (as Mano Singham points out) have studied the problems of education closely, and have useful ideas, possibly, about harnessing technology for education.  But Murdoch?  Perhaps we need to harness wire-tapping and sensationalism more enthusiastically for our younger people, who will be Murdoch's readers some day?

Public education is not the sort of problem that everyone imagines.  People have confused qualifications with education, and until that is resolved there is going to be a lot of frustration.  There is training : a specific preparation for a specific purpose.  There is qualification : a credential from some authority that someone has certain abilities.  Education is something far less tangible, and very little of education takes place in schools; it is something that used to happen in homes.  Education will continue to happen or not happen in homes for the foreseeable future.

Still, it is convenient to address a number of related problems under the general heading of "Education", even if different people mean different things by the word.  As it is in the US, one can agree that the popular perception is that education is not healthy.  What are the symptoms of this particular patient?

(1) The US has developed an array of measures of success of the education system, most of them based on tests administered to students at various grade-levels. On the individual level, the tests are a measure of how well the particular student is doing. But in the aggregate, the tests measure how well the students in that particular batch, or school, are doing, and ultimately, how well the education system is doing. Finally, American students are measured against students in foreign countries, and people are upset at the fact that our students do not do better.

(2) Many students, once they’re out of school, find it difficult to take jobs that are demanding. If the employer administers a test, for instance, the applicant may not measure up, and will not get hired. So in a situation where unemployment is high, employers can be choosier. They can hire truly qualified applicants, they can fire employees for even minor cases of incompetence (I don’t know whether this is really happening), and most annoyingly, they can hire based on prospective employees being recommended by friends and family; in other words, Nepotism can become a factor. At any rate, a general complaint could arise that US workers, in some areas, at least, are not suitably well educated for certain types of jobs. This can be seen as a shortcoming of the education system.

(3) At every ‘seam’ in the education system: when a batch of students progress from elementary school into middle school, for instance, the teachers have an opportunity to assess how well the incoming batch has learned the ‘basics’. This is not quite fair, since the purpose of education is not to prepare kids for more education primarily. [On second thoughts, modern education is actually all about preparing to gradually take the reins of your own education, so, indirectly about preparing for more education.] But it has to be admitted, this is certainly one method of assessing how well the previous segment of the education system has delivered the goods.

Taking into account all measures of education quality, and taking into account the fact that ultimately each locality has local control over their curriculum and instruction, there is some evidence that ---at least in some subjects--- the younger generation knows less than its predecessors, while in other areas it probably knows more.

One reason kids don’t do well is that they do not work very hard at schoolwork. One reason for that, in turn, is that students don’t care about school very much. Each family has its own culture of how it regards excellence in education, but the majority of students I can imagine tend to take their cue from their fellow-students on the less-motivated side of the median.

Another reason kids don’t do well is that education is considered as something done to the kid, rather than something that is done by the kid.

Yet another reason kids achieve less is that their teachers know that much less than their predecessors. A math teacher of the sixties, for instance, probably knew a lot more mathematics than some math teachers of today. On the other hand, all teachers of today have been pumped full of information about education psychology, and education methods, which are intended to make even the least charismatic individual into a teaching star. It appears that education psychology and education methods have their limitations, and ultimately education content raises its ugly head. (Students who have a hard time in college ---my students, significantly--- blame it on the fact that their professor(s) have little training in methods, and almost all their training in content.  This is a fact of life that has to do with maturity: the more mature one is, the less one needs one’s teacher to fuss with methods, and the more one needs to have good information. But increasingly, college students are not ready for “just the facts, Ma’am,” they need all the bells and whistles, and stickers. And games. (Sometimes I have to do Calculus Jeopardy to motivate my class. And even then, they do not do well.)

Honestly, Education is one thing in which Teamwork works well. Can a big businessman fix a problem that requires cooperation, when most of what works in Big Business is competition?  Mano Singham asks us what makes anyone think that just because Murdoch, or Gates, or Jobs made it big in business and industry qualifies them to suggest repairs to the education system.

And he suggests the answer: the big successes in the US are businesses and industries, and we have come to revere business leaders and industrialists so much that we think they can solve any problem. True, they can solve any problem that has to do with efficiency and profit. “You have to get rid of X,” they will say; “Any student in Business 101 knows that!” In the Corporate World, it seems, hanging on to X would be laughed at.

So, we cannot rely on Educationists to “fix” education. We cannot rely on Politicians to fix education, and we cannot rely on Businessmen to fix education. To whom can we turn?

[Added later:

A friend had posted on Facebook the inaugural address of the new President of Brown University, Dr Christina Paxson. She says:

I believe that much of the current criticism of higher education stems from a short-sighted misconception of its fundamental purpose and a lack of imagination about its potential. We are not in the business of producing widgets, in the form of standardized “career-ready” graduates. Instead, our aim is to invest in the long-term intellectual, creative and social capacity of human beings. If the men and women who come to Brown are to make a positive difference in the world over the course of their lives — lives that will extend well past Brown’s 300th anniversary — they need more than specific skills or the mastery of discrete bodies of knowledge. Yes, I hope that our students get jobs shortly after completing their educations, and we do all we can to make that happen. But if our students are to be prepared for “lives of reputation and usefulness” in the 21st century, they must leave here with something much more nuanced but ultimately more valuable than the skills of a particular trade. Their ability to effect change will depend on the capacity to think analytically and creatively, to consider social problems from a diverse array of perspectives, and to understand how to navigate in an increasingly global and technologically driven world. And that is our role — to impart not just the curriculum of a particular course, but the underlying frame of intellectual curiosity, integrity and imaginative thought.

This tension, between immediate utility, on one hand, and the long-run benefit to society, on the other, also runs through discussions about the value of research. Again, these concerns are not new. In 1939, the same year that Wriston was defending liberal arts education, Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, published an essay in Harpers titled “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.” In it, he made the case that the most significant discoveries — those that were ultimately of the highest value to society — were made by “men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.”

People do not become presidents of universities for nothing; this sort of eloquence does not come cheaply.  She has captured the sense of things I have been struggling to say over several years.

When most people talk about the problems with education, though, they are not talking about the sort of education Ms Paxson is.  They are talking about the education that makes a student useful.

I have just finished grading a test for students in my lowest-level class. Some of them were unable to multiply 13 times 13.  Some of them were unable to add fractions.  On top of teaching them Trigonometry and such things, I must now teach them how to add fractions.

Does life in the 21st century require a student to be able to add two fractions, given that they have calculators?  Most of us will affirm this strongly, so long as it isn't we who have to learn to add fractions. A lot of things are being relegated to the area of things other people have to learn to do (on my behalf!).  Nobody wants to learn to replace a doorknob, to take out the garbage, to feed the dog, to wash the dishes, to vacuum the floor; what people aspire to, most of all, is to escape drudgery.  And education is beginning to be viewed --by students-- as drudgery, rather than a gateway to knowledge, or discovery, or whatever.  Not by every single student, mind you; but enough of them to make a teacher’s job increasingly distasteful.

In the nineties, briefly, there was a desperate hope that young people in the Third World would subject themselves to the drudgery of education, while we employed them.  But labor costs are going up, and rightly so.  And so is unemployment, and it looks very much as if we're going to have to do our own work in the very near future, and some of us need to find work, to earn a living.  Maybe we never expected work to actually be work, but that's what it looks like.  We're going to have to get our kids to really learn stuff, and then they're going to have to go out and really work.  Bummer.
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[To be continued.]


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