Thinking Beyond Competition

April 25, 2010

A conflict of visions in education

Filed under: education, educational politics, Politics — Tags: , , , — vipulnaik @ 3:58 am

As I listen to and read much of the recent work in education, I am struck with what seem to be two very different approaches to thinking of education: the John Dewey-inspired Progressive Education paradigm (here’s the Wikipedia entry), and the more “traditional” idea of the teacher. [FULL DISCLOSURE: I am largely on the traditionalist's side. Moreover, all the teaching and teaching-related work that I do (which includes calculus teaching) is done from a traditional perspective -- as is expected by those who have assigned me this work. So, luckily, I do not have to deal with a conflict between my educational views and my educational practice.]

Some of the more important differences include:

  • Constructing versus receiving knowledge: The progressive paradigm includes the belief that students should create, shape, and discover their own knowledge, whereas the traditional paradigm includes the belief that subject-specific knowledge and skills should be handed down from teachers to students. One of the common slogans adopted by the progressives includes: “the teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.” (Google it).

  • The role of memory and practice: The progressives rail against “rote memorization” (such as memorization of the multiplication tables), “plug and chug” (such as learning and mastering procedures such as long division by hand) and “drill and kill” (repetitive practice based on a combination of memorization and mastery of fixed, clearly defined skills). Traditionalists, on the other hand, generally view mastery of the basics as important stepping stones to the acquisition of other, more complex, skills.

  • Perceived relevance and enjoyment: In line with the view that students should create, shape and discover knowledge, progressives also generally believe that the knowledge should be and appear to be relevant to the students and that they should enjoy and have an engaging experience with it. More precisely, they often place a higher value on the enjoyment/engagement of students and students’ perception of relevance than on externally defined criteria of skills. Traditionalists are more likely to sacrifice student perception of relevance, and even student “enjoyment,” to ensure that students meet externally defined criteria of the skills needed to reach the next level. This is not to say that either side is against what the other side stands for, but rather, that each side thinks differently about the nature of the trade-off. Thus, if a traditionalist encountered a student who wasn’t engaged with the material, the traditionalist might use a combination of incentives and a change in teaching methods to make the material more interesting to the student or convince the student to plod through the material regardless, while a progressive might change the content being taught to better engage the student.

  • Practical application: Progressives believe that a lot of the knowledge that is traditionally drilled into students in school does not have a lot of practical application. Some of them would rather teach students more practical things (such as using nailpolish or cooking). This does not include all progressives — some of them believe in things that are fun just for fun’s sake even if they lack practical applications. Progressives do unite against the teaching of rote skills that are not used by most people in day-to-day life, or for which there are special tools, such as calculators. The traditionalists by and large eschew the use of school or college for practical skills that (they believe) can easily be learned from parents and peers and prefer to have formal educational resources devoted to academic subjects that students are unlikely to “pick up” on their own.

  • Equity and social justice: Here, the fault line is more complicated, because neither side accepts the claims made by the other. The progressives argue that the traditional approach to instruction worked only for a “privileged elite” and their new approach is more suited to the masses who are disillusioned with and disengaged from traditional education. They often link this to equity for people from socio-economically deprived backgrounds and/or link it to a broader social justice agenda. Traditionalists argue, on the other hand, that a good traditional education and the knowledge and skills it imparts are the best bet for a person from a deprived socio-economic background to rise in life. They accuse the progressives of lowering standards and lowering expectations and trying to cover up inequities in educational attainment rather than addressing them. Thus, progressives often valorize people in socio-economically deprived communities for giving kids a good time in school, while traditionalists valorize the turning around of “ghetto schools” into schools that perform great on the usual academic tests of excellence. (The actual successful schools and individuals emphasized by both sides often overlap, but the aspects that they tend to emphasize on, and the way they frame the narratives, are very different).

While these fault lines are hardly set in stone, the regularity of the differences in the policy views and recommendations of people from these two schools of thought calls for some deeper causal explanation. Why is there a consistent lining up of people on one side or the other of this debate? To understand this issue more thoroughly, I take up one example — the math wars, which I describe below. I choose mathematics for two reasons. First, I know more about mathematics, and have some personal interest and experience with mathematics education, so I can better interpret the merits of various arguments. Second, the issues in mathematics are, relatively speaking, less dependent on the problems of social and cultural context, and of the subjectivity associated with different values and goals, than are the issues in, say, history or political science or literature. Hence, the role of political or religious agendas is likely to be minimal or, at any rate, easy to identify and separate from the substantive pedagogical and subject matter issues.

The Math Wars

An excellent and balanced introduction to the math wars can be found in Carmen Letterell’s book The Math Wars (Amazon link). A clearly biased (though ostensibly neutral) view can be found in Winning The Math Wars: No Teacher Left Behind, published in the context of Washington State, a state in the northwestern United States (Amazon link).

The two broad camps are the “reform” camp and the “traditionalist” camp. The reform camp generally supports: decreased use of paper-and-pencil calculations, decreased use of rote memory (such as multiplication tables), elimination of learning general standard procedures (for things such as multiplication of multiple-digit numbers, long division, squareroots, etc.), increased use of calculators, increased focus on group assignments and collaborative work, increased focus on “real-world” problems and modeling, greater focus on “higher-order conceptual understanding.” Traditionalists oppose the overall thrust of these proposals, arguing that paper-and-pencil computational skills, basic rote memory, and computational fluency with basic procedures, are necessary to being able to understand and concentrate on harder mathematics. The reform camp has been particularly influential in setting curriculum standards in the United States, though the extent to which these new curricula have percolated into actual classroom practices is unclear. Here are some references:

The above links give a fairly comprehensive picture of the nature of the debate between the two sides in mathematics curricula. A similar debate also rages in higher education, including college education. Here, the reformists seek to impose a form of calculus instruction called “reform calculus” that focuses on group work, word problems, real-world modeling, and collaborative learning, while decreasing emphasis on paper-and-pencil computation of derivatives and integrals, as well as the execution of rigorous proofs.

Here are some links to discussions of the various sides of the issue:

Something worth noting is that the debate at the elementary school level is largely focused on computational fluency versus “higher-order thinking skills.” If viewed strictly in terms of content preferences, this might suggest that those who favor higher-order thinking skills at the elementary school level will also focus more on higher-order, proof-based reasoning at the high school level and the college level. In fact, the reverse is the case: those who favor rote learning and computational fleuency also (generally) favor more rigorous proofs at higher levels of learning, while those who favor “high-order thinking skills” usually tend to de-emphasize proofs. What is happening here? It seems to me that, despite the somewhat different rhetoric, the reform curricula are essentially progressivist in orientation. What can explain this fault line?

Defining the conflict of visions in education

In the realm of education, the progressive views largely dominate schools of education in many developed countries including the United States and the United Kingdom, and some other developed countries. (Interestingly, many East Asian countries such as Singapore and Japan do not seem to be very influenced by progressivism). Progressive education has emerged under different names: free learning, open education (in the 1970s — not to be confused with open education as the term is used today for freely available online educational resources), child-centered learning. Some offshoots that embrace parts but not all of progressive education are exploratory learning, inquiry-based learning, and discovery learning. While these differ radically in the amount of structure and prior preparation and structuring done by teachers (with Moore method inquiry-based learning being far more structured than traditional education while some versions of Dewey-inspired learning being completely structure-free) they all share a few common features — a decrease in emphasis on acquiring a mastery of basic facts through repetition, and an eschewing of the teacher as a teller or imparter of knowledge. Even if the extent is different in each case, the direction relative to traditional learning is the same.

My first exposure to the progressive trend in education was through devastatingly critical articles in City Journal such as Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach by Heather MacDonald and The Bomber as School Reformer by Sol Stern. I was naturally skeptical about whether critics of progressivism were exaggerating its flaws. But my personal experiences with some progressive educators at the University of Chicago, whom I heard out at various conferences and meetings, seems to indicate that the portraits drawn by MacDonald and Stern are not caricatures.

While schools of education (that train most of the elementary and high school teachers) are bastions of progressivism, large numbers of parents support more traditional methods. This is partly explained by the fact that with traditional methods, parents feel more in control and are better able to keep tabs on how the schools are educating their children. Also, interestingly, as is clear from the math wars, a large number of mathematics and science professors and researchers, i.e., people who actually do and create the subject, favor traditionalist approaches. Carmen Letterell says that of those mathematicians who are actively involved in/concerned about school level mathematics education, the majority advocate traditional approaches (with modifications) over reform-based approaches.

On the other hand, most mathematicians and science researchers who are not actively involved in the subject may easily be swayed by either side depending on framing effects. Certainly, they appreciate the importance of computational fluency. However, in my experience, mathematicians who are not very involved in education underestimate the usefulness of mathematical skills to the rest of the world and so are more diffident than necessary about the need for others to master basic mathematical skills. Part of the reason for this may be that the level of mathematics that most mathematicians engage in is truly irrelevant to most people.

The upshot of all this is that those in the educational research community (and many in the education community) generally favor reform approaches while those among parents and researchers who are actively involved with educational issues generally favor traditional approaches. What can explain this?

Sowell’s conflict of visions theory

A few months ago, I read Thomas Sowell’s thought-provoking book A Conflict of Visions (Amazon link, Wikipedia entry, a review by Charles Murray, review in Cato Journal).

Sowell uses the term “vision” to describe a “sense of how the world works.” In this sense, a vision differs from a theory, which is a more specific description of how specific things work. The vision a person holds may, however, affect the theories the person considers plausible or can come up with. Visions also differ from “values,” which more closely describe how you think things should be.

Sowell argues that the historical fault lines of politics and political ideologies result not so much from differences in values but from differences in visions. In the book, Sowell differentiates between two visions — an unconstrained vision, which believes that human beings are capable of great things and it is society’s institutions that hold them back, as opposed to the constrained vision, which holds human beings as fallible individuals who can do both great and horrible things, and which relies on society’s institutions to create the right incentive structure to get people to do the right things. In Sowell’s view, the unconstrained vision focuses on dispositions (what people feel, what they want to do, what they are capable of) while the constrained vision focuses on incentives (does the incentive structure provide adequate rewards for doing things that help others?). Sowell also notes that the unconstrained vision is generally found more on what is often termed the Left while the constrained vision is often found on the Right, but that this is not a defining characteristic. (Sowell at least makes a superficial attempt to appear neutral in the book, though his sympathies with the constrained vision are not a strain to judge).

In a later book, The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell lets loose his wrath on the unconstrained vision and all the damage it has wrought. Here, he rechristens the constrained vision as the tragic vision and the unconstrained vision as the vision of the anointed. The latter book is more full of current debates, and as such, the application of the paradigm of visions in some of these is not clear. Nonetheless, as Charles Murray points out in his review, Sowell’s basic causal explanation of the distinction has, over the years, become an important tool in understanding the different ideologies and policy views. Sowell’s basic dichotomy was picked up on and further elaborated upon by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate (Amazon link, Q&A with the author).

Does Sowell’s theory line up?

In Sowell’s conflict of visions paradigm, progressivism would arise from an unconstrained vision and traditionalism would arise from a constrained vision. Certainly, at a purely phenomenological level, the fault lines align well. Progressives have more rosy and positive beliefs about the abilities of children to construct and discover their own realities, and less respect for the institutions that force children to learn seemingly arbitrary rules to better conform to society. But can Sowell’s theory go beyond accounting for phenomena to explaining why certain groups consistently embrace progressivism? In other words, why do education professors (and many of their students, who go on to teach at schools) promote a romantic, unconstrained vision of a child’s potential to flower through self-discovery?

One explanation may be based on what their areas of expertise are. The parent whose child is trying to learn mathematics is dealing with the child, so the parent knows the limitations of the child. The mathematician knows the mathematics, hence knows the difficulty or the counter-intuitiveness of the mathematics and the need to “memorize” it or “master” it even if true and full conceptual understanding has not been attained. The education professor, on the other hand, is dealing neither with the child nor with the mathematics. (It is also notable that many education professors don’t actually teach classes to little kids — they usually teach only at education schools). The education professor is dealing with the theoretical possibilities for how somebody might best learn, and hence is less constrained by either a real child or real mathematics. This lack of constraint may be viewed as a good thing (thinking outside the box, stepping back and getting a broader perspective not available to those steeped in the problem) or as a bad thing (reality-free thinking).

Another explanation is based on the incentive structure. Education professors are not rewarded according to the quality of education they provide — they are rewarded based on the beauty of their educational theories. Thus, if it is true that progressive educational theories “feel” nicer to casual readers, or to their colleagues in the education theory profession, these theories will be more likely to be created. On the other hand, parents are more concerned about the outcomes of individual students, while college mathematics teachers are concerned about the quality of input into their high school level courses. (Not to mention those parents who are also mathematics professors).

The most controversial explanation: education professors are just not that good

Building on the previous explanations, another possibility is that most education professionals just don’t know that much about teaching and learning, and moreover, don’t like teaching and learning. In other words, few people who are passionate about the academic aspects of education go on into the field of education. Their own bitter experience with education as measured traditionally leads them to devalue it. How can this be?

Year after year, SAT and GRE scores as well as college GPAs paint a consistent picture: those majoring or intending to major in education are generally at the bottom in eduational attainment (see these three posts, all based on this data collected by Roessler). This should not be interpreted as saying that they are worse than the average person in the national population, but they are likely to be at the bottom of their college class, and are also likely to feel alienated by the intellectual demands and grading systems of the colleges they attend.

This is not a recent discovery. On Pages 24-25 of his book Inside American Education (1993) (Amazon link), Thomas Sowell writes:

In 1980-81, students majoring in education scored lower on both verbal and quantitative SATs than students majoring in art, music, theatre, the behavioral sciences, the physical sciences or biological sciences, business or commerce, engineering, mathematics, the humanities or health occupations. [...] At the graduate level, it is very much the same story, with students in numerous other fields outscoring education students on the Graduate Record Examination [...] Professors of education rank as low among colleges and university faculty members as education students do among other students. After listing a number of professors “of great personal and intellectual distinction” teaching in the field of education, Martin Mayer nevertheless concluded: “On the average, however, it is true to say that the academic professors [...] are educated men, and the professors of education are not.” Given low-quality students and low-quality professors, it can hardly be surprising to discover, as Mayer did, that “most education courses are not intellectually respectable, because their teachers and textbooks are not intellectually respectable.”

In his book Market Education: The Unknown History (1999) (Amazon link), Andrew Coulson makes a similar point from a somewhat different perspective:

(Page 140) Part of the anti-academic attitude of many teachers can be explained by the fact that education majors are less academically able, on average, than most other college students, usually scoring lower on standardized tests of mathematics, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. When high-school seniors take the Scholastic Assessment Test, they are asked to specify the field they plan to study in college, with the option of choosing “undecided.” This allows their test scores to be tabulated against their intended field of study. The results of these tabulations show that prospective education majors received the lowest mathematics scores out of all ten discipline choices — including “undecided” — every year between 1978 and the present. They fared only slightly better on the verbal portion of the test, sometimes rising from last to next-to-last place. [...] Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. A decade-long study that followed more than a thousand college education students through the first part of their careers found that those with the least academic aptitutde were the most likely to enter the teaching profession immediately after graduating from college, and to stay in it once there.

(Page 141 — 142) When teachers are asked to evaluate their own college education, their responses are split sharply between the practical and theoretical aspects. [...] Questions on the value of these [theoretical] classes often elicit responses such as “what a waste of time”, “useless”, and “they don’t translate well into the classroom.” [...] It is hard to say how much of this negative perception is due to real shortcomings in teacher education, and how much is due to a lack of interest in the academic underpinnings of teaching on the part of education majors. Some European investigators [...] have suggested that the students see theory and practice as totally separate, and since they cannot bridge the gap between college lectures and classroom experience, they do not see the value of academic studies. On the other hand, the overall quality of college teacher-training courses has been broadly criticized, both by academics and by outside observers. No doubt both these causes are involved.

Does all this mean that the effect of teacher-training programs is limited to the practical know-how that students pick up during their in-school assignments? Not entirely. Attitudes about education are also shaped by the college of education environment. A study of U.S. ed school freshmen conducted inthe late 1980s found that they began their studies with traditional educational views (i.e., the teacher’s role is to actively convey a body of knowledge and skills to students) — more traditional, in fact, than the view of liberal-arts majors as a whole. By the time they finished their degree, however, education majors had not only caught up with but passed their liberal-arts peers in the direction of progressive educational thinking (i.e., the teacher’s role is to facilitate the child’s self-directed educational experiences). [...] Their findings, moreover, have held true in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

The evidence suggests that those entering the field of education, both as education professors and as teachers, are not the best academic performers. Is this a cause of their dislike for academics and standardized testing and standards and rote memorization, or a consequence? Do they enter the field of education with the spirit that if you can’t learn, you might as well teach? And, if there is merit to this theory, how does it relate to Sowell’s conflict of visions paradigm? These are questions to which I don’t know the answer, but they seem to be questions well worth asking.

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