Eddication

[jsburbidge]

 "After all, damn it all, we can’t have the boys runnin' about all day like hooligans—after all, damn it all? Ought to be havin' a first-rate eddication, at their age. When I was their age I was doin' all this Latin and stuff at five o'clock every mornin'. Happiest time of me life. Pass the port." - T.H. White, The Sword in The Stone

 

Literature

 

The foundation of all education from the late ancient world on was dependent on literary studies.[1] "Grammar" meant not only learning the written language but learning its use in authors who were models to follow or at least quote (Virgil, pre-eminently, in the Latin West).

 

In the Nineteenth Century there was a transformation from classical to vernacular studies (though Classics is recently enough a core requirement that when I was born Latin was required for University entrance for non-science students in at least some universities).  

 

There followed a gradual shift from the study of vernacular classics to such contemporary and local works as are assumed to be able to catch students' attention.

 

In my day, I got Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Hardy, Dickens, Twain, Samuel Butler, Conrad, Tennyson, Eliot (T.S.), Browning and Pound in addition to Heinlein, Tolkien, Bradbury, Davies, Laurence, Atwood, Knowles, and Salinger. My daughter got Shakespeare; the government has now allowed Shakespeare to be dropped from the curriculum. The rest of her set texts were recent bestsellers. No challenging or classic poetry made up any part of her curriculum.

 

Of course, the way to take this turns on what the purpose of an education in letters is.  Although one might think that the shift reflects an academic/critical turning away from the idea of a canon - and it's arguable that that is an influence on the curriculum - it's generally clear that whereas the older aim was to provide an elite with the tools of a shared culture in the service of rhetoric as a preparation for a public role, and the aim of, say, seventy years ago was to acculturate the populace with a common culture of high prestige, the aim of the present curriculum is to ensure that most people have a grasp of business English, and that the rest have the basic literacy needed to read signs and essential notices and to be able to do basic online navigation.

 

(The mediaevals classed all literature / poetry as "ethics", and an education in letters was a moral education. Some element of this view of the end of an education in literature survived into the Twentieth Century, but seems to have died under the twin attacks of teaching letters as a purely pragmatically useful discipline and the shock the mid-century had on the assumption that a good cultural education would bolster ethical behaviour (see Steiner in Language and Silence for his discussion of the impact of the Shoah on this assumption). The last trace is that we have a curriculum designed to inculcate "Canadian Culture", without further investigating what the end of a cultural education is generally.)

 

Ignoring the question of whether this change in aim is a good thing, does it work?

 

In Ontario, at least, the OSSLT gives a partial answer. The test assesses basic literacy: the base skills needed to function as a generic worker, or as an informed consumer, or as an engaged citizen. For anyone who regularly reads anything at all, passing it is trivial. Specific preparation is available, and, as schools are in part graded on their students' performance, there's incentive to provide that preparation as well as to teach to the test generally. I will note that the skills required to pass the OSSLT are not sufficient to write a competent university essay or compose a business report.

 

The government's data indicate that, consistently, over 90% of the "academic" stream English students pass the test on first try.  About 40% of applied English students pass on first try (this has fallen over the years from 50%). (Special needs students are excluded from these figures.) It's reasonable to assume that some part of the numbers reflects ESL students, though the numbers of students who speak mainly another language at home sits at 7%; some ESL students also get special assistance.

 

A majority of students take the academic stream (this is in contrast to my day, when a majority of students took the 4-year courses and left the system at the end of grade 12; about 30% of my class went on to Grade 13).[2]

 

So a majority of students pass the OSSLT on the first try but a significant minority do not. As far as the success of the curriculum at encouraging reading goes, a questionnaire administered as part of the test indicates that about 30% of girls and 15% of boys read fiction at all regularly (the parallel numbers for reading websites (in any way) are 55 and 46%).

 

I am not sure this counts as a success. I am likewise not sure that taking that level as a baseline is useful, even pragmatically; one would ideally expect a somewhat higher level of ability after ten years of training. And I have a good deal of concern about the retreat from an aim to educate the whole person via letters to an aim to educate baseline competent work[place drones. 

 

Mathematics and Natural Science

 

Although there is a long history of formal training in mathematics and some subjects we would now call "science" as part of the standard curriculum - arithmetic and geometry make up two of the four parts of the quadrivium, and astronomy is a third - the Anglosphere has generally been fairly poor at doing general mathematical training going beyond ciphering. At the very high end mathematics was considered acceptable - Cambridge had its Tripos as it's distinctive degree. Similarly the US produced a trickle of very highly skilled mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, but general mathematical literacy was not widespread. (One can look at C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures for a sense of what England was like.) One of my father's cousins, born in the 1920s on a farm, became a prominent physicist; the rest of his family, who were by no means stupid, remained farmers. 

 

The shock of the Sputnik launch turned the low level of mathematical and scientific training into something About Which Something Must Be Done, at least in the US and Canada. Math and science curricula were beefed up - I was one of the early cohort taught with the "New Math" - and analysis was added as a high school topic. The aim was, if not to produce a mathematically and scientifically aware public, at least to feed more people into technical jobs and generally improve numeracy.

 

I am poorly situated for evaluating the mathematical education I received. I have a natural aptitude for math and would have absorbed my primary school curriculum regardless of the skill of my teachers, although I will note that it struck me as repetitious, slow, and unambitious and today seems to me all the more so. By high school I was one of a set who got to skip out of math classes in the middle of the year to prepare for math competitions. The senior math teachers were competent - one had an M.Sc. - and I know of three engineers and two software developers among the members of my 60-odd Grade 13 class, plus a couple of medical doctors.

 

I can, however, assess the curriculum, and the teaching skills, provided to my daughter, who is not good at math. In general, the curriculum was not well designed - it would have been well matched to neither the very good nor those struggling with math; the teaching quality, not only in elementary but in secondary school, was on the whole poor. (I recall one good chemistry teacher.)

 

The level of training for public school math and science teachers has declined; they now staff at least in part by shoving teachers with no strong math or science background through short qualifying courses and let them cope with curricula which they barely understand.

 

As far as results go - I work in a field which requires broadly mathematical skills, and certainly a high degree of abstraction, and the majority of my co-workers have been and continue to be those with English as a second language, i.e. immigrants. In the same organizations, as soon as one moves to other skill sets the proportion of native-born Canadians rises dramatically.

 

EQAO results show similar patterns to those in the OSSLT results for English - about 80% of Academic level students score at or above the provincial standard, and about 40% of Applied level students to the same. Of the Academic students, only about 35% indicate that they like mathematics.

 

Part of this problem boils down to money. The government is unwilling to provide the funds necessary to compete for competent math and science graduates in a workforce where those skills carry a premium.

 

Part is cultural; the cliché that the Chinese, even as expats, tend to do well in math and science classes has no grounding in genetics but it does reflect a culture which takes brute force studying seriously. The English, Americans and Canadians tend to be a little suspicious of the bright, and "intellectual" carries negative connotations which it lacks in France and Germany.

 

History and Civics

 

Compared to literature and mathematics, history is a latecomer to the elementary curriculum. Works of history, especially classical history, were sometimes covered as literature: Tacitus, Caesar, Plutarch, Thucydides, Herodotus. But modern histories were rarely of such a status (and Gibbon, who had the status, took a classical theme for his substance).

 

In the 18th and, more, the 19th Century, a standard narrative was imposed on recent history, with an agenda which made it an appealing subject for childhood formation: the Whig Interpretation of History, with (in England) industrialism, parliamentary democracy, and laissez-faire ideology as the pinnacle of a curve of progress beginning in the Renaissance. (In the US and France, substitute other forms of representative democracy and an emphasis on more sudden dislocations than in the long curve of British history). This cascaded to the imposition of teaching this history as a formative influence in the young.

 

Of course, school children were not given Macaulay to read, at least in general. (When they were, it was more likely to be the Lays of Ancient Rome than the History of England.) Schoolbooks had a schematized and simplified version of essentially the same story. That story served another more general purpose (aside from generally equating progress = good = liberal values): it provided a basic grounding in what otherwise might have been taught as straight civics.

 

With the extension of the franchise to larger and larger groups in the Nineteenth Century (beginning in the Eighteenth Century in the United States) it became a real concern to ensure that the population as a whole had the minimum understanding of civics and the public domain to participate well. This led to significant emphasis on civics classes in some jurisdictions and, everywhere, the provision of history / geography / "social studies" classes designed to support that function.

 

This pattern has continued, mutatis mutandis: Canadian children no longer learn about the Princes in the Tower, the Armada, the Commonwealth, and the repeal of the Corn Laws, but they get a narrative including Wolfe and Mackenzie and MacDonald / Laurier / King (to which some coverage of aboriginal peoples has now been added) which has the same general ends.

 

(Even high school history has almost nothing to do with learning how to do history (distinguishing between primary and secondary sources, assessing reliability, developing and supporting a thesis based on research): it's essentially narrative divorced from sources and with an utterly spurious impression of certainty attached to retailed events which are, at best, probable reconstructions.)

 

It has failed miserably. It never was much good at giving the population a good historical sense, but that might be an unfair criticism given that that wasn't really it's purpose. But the populism of the past decade in the Anglosphere reflects a population which hasn't even progressed as far as the Bourbons[3]: they have not even absorbed the past, let alone learned from it.

 

In Canada, this became blatantly obvious in the reactions to the Harper prorogation of Parliament, where the specious justification that people had "voted for the government" and having the Governor General potentially choose another PM would violate that: one of the first principles of Westminster-style representative democracy is that one votes for an MP, not a government, on the basis that the MP will use his or her judgement as seems fit to them over the term of the ensuing Parliament. (This includes crossing the floor, which is, properly understood, an assertion of democratic principles - it means that a leader can't just abandon the principles an MP ran on and count in their continuing support - rather than a denial of them.)

In the US and Britain the recent political circuses have displayed for all to see that whatever the population as a whole was doing in school, it was not getting an effective grounding in civics or history.

 

Future prospects

 

The common theme in all these areas is a twofold failure: first, the failure to provide genuine universal education at the level intended and, secondly, shortcomings in providing an education which will provide effective grounding for those going on to greater specialization.

One obvious cause is an unwillingness to spend money.  Large class sizes, poor training, curricula which are shaped in part by what half-trained teachers can pass on (teaching serious literature, real math, and historical research techniques is probably beyond most school teachers; certainly capability in all three together is probably as rare as hens' teeth[4]), and one-size-fits-all curricula can all be remedied, over time, by enough money.

The second cause seems to me to be a third rail of politics: recognizing that there are gradations in inherent capacity which constrain effective education (at one end) and ideally call for an ambitious and challenging curriculum (at the other).

This is a no-go area because either of the possible causes for variations in capacity would require unpalatable solutions.

To the degree that it is caused by variations in home (or other early childhood) environments, any effective solutions would involve not only money but an aggressive intrusion inside family boundaries. (Consider the current CAS system and all its problems, but expand the category from "neglected children" to "environments physically or socially not conducive to or encouraging of learning", including nutrition, parental literacy, active intellectual stimulation, and anti-intellectual subcultures.)

 

To the degree to which it is caused by genetic variations in capacity - and note that we have no good way of identifying or analysing such variations, as all of our current data aside from identical twin studies and the like tangle up cultural and genetic transmission, and genetic causation of complex traits is not something of which we currently have any deep understanding - recognizing and responding to it would involve, essentially, streaming from early childhood based on heredity (or early testing standing in as a proxy for heredity), which is not a position likely to be politically palatable to any current political party. It might very well have been acceptable to the Tories of Meighan's day, or Wellington's, (and possibly to socialists of the Webbs' day, given their support for eugenic programmes).

 

In both cases, it is easy to imagine implementations where the cure is worse than the disease.

 

The current trend is away from streaming, not towards it. Both the politics of the left and the "right" (neoliberal/mammonite; the real right of George Grant style conservatism no longer has any space on the public political spectrum) for different reasons shy away from tailored programmes for more capable children (although the left does support programmes designed to make up for historic or systemic inequality).

 

And both approaches would be expensive.

It is not that we have an educational system which is falling apart; it is that we have one which is effectively committed to mediocrity, and in some areas mediocrity has an enhanced impact on society as a whole (civics, scientific literacy in addressing climate change or epidemiology) or on public culture.

Any real change has to begin not at the level of politics but at the level of cultural change. And the levers for that are in the hands, not of the politicians, but of the makaris: writers, artists, musicians, producers, to the degree that they are in anyone's hands.

 

[1] We can catch glimpses in the oldest Greek literature of a different educational model, in a culture not entirely focussed on literacy, which was based on memory and ad hoc oral composition, with reading a less emphasized skill, and writing probably left to specialists. It was still based on poetry, even if not on, in the precise sense, literature. Traces of this remain in the place of rhetoric in the trivium.

 

[2] The province has indicated that it aims at ending the streaming (beginning with Grade 9 math in the fall of this year); if it does so it will probably have the primary effect of extirpating any remaining useful training beyond basic business English skills.

[3] "Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublié".

 

[4] I could teach all three, if I were also trained as a teacher. I am not representative.

Comments

[graydon]

I think you analysis is missing a couple of things. (I don't at all disagree with what you've set out.)

Nobody has ever addressed the consequence of women's lib; people don't go into teaching as a route to education and independence anymore, they go into teaching because they want to teach/it seems like the least-bad option. The effect is that you have to pay much more for teachers since you're not longer systemically forcing supply by not letting women have other avenues to university education or professional jobs. (and now you've got a big pool of very angry teachers who do not trust any politician and who view the duty of their profession as being maintaining control of the classrooms.)

Second, education drives social change. Since about 1980, the "no change! none! this is perfect!" faction has had political control, and it's not so much that they don't want to fund education as they want to prevent education. If they want to prevent change, they have to prevent education.

[jsburbidge]

The first point applies more to primary than secondary school teachers - there was always a significant block of male high school teachers (especially the higher prestige subjects like Classics and Math). But it's definitely valid as far as it goes, and it lasted for a long time. My mother in retrospect would have chosen to go into science rather than becoming a teacher if she hadn't been steered in that direction.

On the second point, I think it's true, but I also think the people with that view don't admit it to themselves. They think of themselves as upholding "values" like drill even though they are actually channelling Dickens' Gradgrind. In fact, they've been messing about with the curriculum for a couple of decades - the Liberals aren't much different from the Conservatives, except when it comes to Sex Ed., which the Conservatives see as a bone to throw to their social conservative supporters. The business wing of the parties want to see better-trained graduates but there's no other appetite for any significant change. (Most obvious change recently has been changes that have been forced by the courts to accommodate special needs and non-neurotypical students.)

[graydon]

If kids never see a primary teacher who does not actively hate math -- meaning arithmetic, which is pretty much what is sure to happen today because we're actively selecting for it -- that's it. Parental involvement where there's a lot of it will sometimes work, but for anybody else, they'll never had a comfortable relationship with anything quantified.

Agreed that there's no present political will to fix this, but I think that's symptomatic of the general paralysis of institutions. We should be doing something very different, almost everyone actually knows that, and until we start, there's going to be an increasing tangle of injustice.

[ndrosen]

I’m writing from a Stateside perspective. First, I wonder whether you (both Graydon and Mr. Burbidge) have read the works of Richard Mitchell, especially The Graves of Academe? Professor Mitchell was an eloquent and mordantly witty critic of educational blather, and also (as his emphasis shifted over time) of the ideology behind it. The typical educrat is not a political conservative, but the failure of the educational bureaucracy to teach children well (especially children whose parents weren’t educated themselves, don’t have books in the home, aren’t likely to agitate for their children to receive more rigorous academic instruction, etc.) ends up serving reactionary goals, Mitchell argued. The poorly educated may commit muggings and occasionally riot, but they aren’t likely to organize to demand intelligent reform, or to compete with the children of the elite for places at Harvard.

At least in the U.S., blind conservatives have certainly not been in power since 1980; we have had the Clinton and Obama administrations, we have had increases in spending on schooling, and we have quite a number of leftist teachers and administrators. One is tempted to believe in a conspiracy to prevent education while pouring ever more money into schooling, but I don’t seriously think that things are that simple.

One other point: I have seen the argument that smaller class sizes are actually harmful; having fifteen or so instead of thirty children in a class does not enable much more individual attention or academic improvement, and by forcing the school system to hire larger numbers of teachers, it drives down standards, and assures that some of those teachers will be incompetent and barely literate or numerate themselves.

[graydon]

Especially in the US, federal power is hardly relevant to education. What matters is very local tax rates, and pretty much the entire US public education system has been underfunded since Brown vs. Board of Education. (Secondarily, what matters is state policy, and that's never been good.)

Similarly, teacher quality is not a concern; if it was, salaries would be much better.

[jsburbidge]

"Similarly, teacher quality is not a concern; if it was, salaries would be much better."

So much this. By Canadian standards, American salaries for school teachers are very low, and have been so as long as I can remember. (And Canadian jurisdictions don't really pay enough for the type of skill level really necessary to be effective.)

To Nick's notes about the educational bureaucracy, it might be worth noting that OISE and the permanent civil servants in the Ministry faculty are undoubtedly on the left part of the (Canadian) political spectrum, but the changes imposed by the Ministry of Education from 1990 to the present have been minimal and mainly driven by funding constraints. (If a change driven "internally", like an emphasis on teamwork, is cheaper, it may take off. If it is significantly more expensive, it's unlikely to.)

(The big expensive educational expansion in the last couple of decades in Ontario was the provision of all-day Kindergarten for Junior Kindergarten, which was mainly aimed at socialization rather than education as such. It was a pet project of McGuinty's.)

[ndrosen]

As usual, you are thoughtful and erudite. If I may offer a few brief thoughts of my own: On the one hand, we cannot turn every child into a leading intellectual, a classical scholar, or a professional scientist or engineer, and with some children, it’s just cruelty to try; on the other hand, we should try to give every child the chance to get a good basic education, with “basic” meaning, among other things, providing a basis for further learning, whether of STEM, of history, of the classics, of literature, or of whatever else may appeal to the child’s interests or practical needs. This is a matter both of giving fair opportunities to the children, and of producing adults with the skills society will need.

We should educate people in civics to the degree that they will not be deceived by a demagogue and ignoramus like Trump, but I see difficulties in getting this done well. When schools claim to teach critical thinking skills, it’s often an excuse for not imparting actual knowledge that could provide material to think about. There are also complaints, sometimes justified, about political indoctrination; I could imagine a teacher telling his pupils (quite accurately) that Trump is a bad man and a purveyor of base and misleading rhetoric, yet not educating them to spot another demagogue with a different political stance and set of promises.