Curricula

[jsburbidge]

 In the aftermath of last night's leaders' debate, Metro Morning had a discussion regarding the two elements of the elementary school curriculum which Doug Ford has announced an intention to change.  Unfortunately, the discussion was shallow and unenlightening.

 

On the sex ed. front, the interviewee mainly kept repeating the (entirely true, but unhelpful) point that there had been many years of consultation on the curriculum (in fact, there were two phases: once when it was being developed and once when the government got cold feet about introducing it in the wake of pushback from (mainly religious) minorities). The problem is that, regardless of whether Ford uses it as an excuse or not, "consultation" is not the issue with the curriculum.  The issue is that although the updated curriculum has moderate support from a majority of the population – and many people feel it does not really go far enough in responding to the context of the present day (Internet, changing mores, etc.) – there is a minority of people who will not accept it regardless of how much consultation is done.

 

These are small-c conservatives, almost entirely belonging to conservative religious groups (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical Christian, Islamic, Orthodox Jewish, at a minimum). In general, Canadians tend to keep religion out of the public square, and in this case the compromise was to allow parents to withdraw their children from the relevant classes if they object to them.  This, of course, begged the question of the public policy objectives in having such a curriculum (a matter which the radio show also did not address) and the question of whether those aims effectively demand that the education should be universal. (There is some evidence that, on average, parents are much worse at providing this sort of education to their children than third parties are; there is also the aim of ensuring that everyone has a basis of the same common knowledge on matters of general importance in daily life; finally, there is the relation between this sort of education and anti-discrimination goals with regard to GLBTQIA individuals.)

 

None of this level of substantive analysis was provided, or even gestured towards. Nor was there any discussion of the politics of the matter. (Patrick Brown had avoided taking this kind of position on the entirely rational basis that the people who are opposed to the curriculum changes are almost all committed Conservative Party supporters in any case. It won't gain votes, and it may scare some away.)

 

On the other side, the person addressing the math curriculum issues was, if anything, less helpful still.  Again, they failed to address the (divergent) aims being served by the current math curriculum, and in particular why none of those aims matches, any longer, the drill to which Ford wishes to return. Or, indeed, why extensive drill has gone from being a desirable part of the math curriculum to a largely irrelevant one

 

In my day, almost all of grades four to eight was taken up in repeated drill with arithmetic and "word problems", frequently involving converting between Imperial measurements which we had never otherwise heard of. This was genuinely important because, at the time, it was (justifiably, based on knowledge then) assumed that any arithmetic anyone did for the rest of their lives would be done with pencil and paper (the fringe exceptions – slide rules and room-sized computers – were irrelevant, as they would be used only by math whizzes (engineers and scientists) in any case).  Really solid drill was one of the core components in a curriculum aimed at providing basic literacy and numeracy in a world where these were literally life-critical skills.

 

Then calculators came along.

 

Then they became so cheap they were given away like cereal toys.

 

By the time I reached the end of high school, my chemistry teacher was telling us that we needed to make an order of magnitude approximation on the back of an envelope before using a calculator (or slide rule - some of us still had them) to ensure that we hadn't made any stupid mistakes and were in the right ballpark. 

 

I'll grant that the primary school math curriculum is a mess. Having spent years assisting my daughter with her homework (which was not, pace the commenter on Metro Morning, at all difficult to do) I consider it to be very poorly structured. It flits from one topic to the next, never providing enough of a continued development of a topic to get interesting, or indeed to provide students having difficulty with an extended period of connected work.  On the other hand, it isn't any better at giving an idea of what really doing math is like than the old curriculum. (A mathematician is not particularly concerned about whether 7x8=56.  The concern is rather (1) with defining the operation of multiplication (2) showing it's commutative, associative, and distributive over addition, (3) showing that you can even get to a number like 56 generally on the number system using mathematical induction…)

 

From the point of view of learning real math it would be more sensible to give kids a term of working with quaternion or vector spaces rather than a term of drill in arithmetic.  On the other hand, very few people become real mathematicians, and only a relatively few more become physicists or other scientists who have to have a clear sense of, say, sophisticated symmetry groups.

 

A few more percent of the population become engineers, accountants, and others who, frankly, apply recipes and can normally rely heavily on computers to do the grunt work for them. (The engineers still need to learn analysis and Fourier series and the like in order to know how to solve certain sorts of problems numerically. But they don't need to be able to multiply.) They're not interested in number theory, abstract algebra, or foundations, though, except maybe as hobbies.

 

Almost everybody needs good education in doing things like back-of-the-envelope risk assessment, because humans are really bad at it, and it's important in everyday life. They need to have a gut sense of what compound interest does in order to make their way through the commercial financing world. They need a basic ability to structure simple calculations to feed to a calculator to determine things like how much paint you need to paint a room. They need some basic geometry to do certain kinds of practical handiwork.

 

This suggests that there should be three different math curricula, with only one subset being universal. How you stream or switch between them is another problem. (It wouldn't matter very much if a significant chunk of the population weren't demonstrably poor at thinkingabstractly, which makes them far more likely to struggle at math.) 

 

In none of these cases is a great deal more drill useful. 

 

As an aside, and while on the topic of small-c conservatism and curricula, I'd think that the obvious place to focus is very different: it's the humane letters curriculum, that is, in school, mainly English and History. Not only is it a quintessentially conservative concern to have the school curriculum inculcate solid cultural values but it is also traditional to inculcate those values by means of attention to European and particularly English literature and history. The recent decision to drop mandatory Shakespeare studies as part of the high school curriculum would, I would think, be a scandal to a well grounded traditional conservative. In addition the focus of the current curriculum on exclusively Canadian history and principally Canadian authors departs in its aims from the Conservative pattern of going to the "classics" for education: if not Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, and Horace, than at least Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth. And a solid argument can be made for expanding the scope of a student's view so that it takes in people who thought and acted very differently, as shown by either their writings or their deeds. I could get behind a pledge to bring back Classics, and give the curriculum a larger spine of world literature and history. 

Comments

[graydon]

Ford is in no sense a conservative; the closest Ford is to any historical philosophical movement is a Legalist.

Everybody wants more control when they're frightened, and kids are defenseless, so make school more authoritarian. It's likely to be effective politics.

I would oppose a return to the slave-society patriarchal hierarchy values which permeate the classics. I'd like to see a broad range of reading in women authors on political subjects; the suffragettes and abolitionists provide a broad range. And you can find one from pretty much any minority tradition.

[ndrosen]

I would also oppose a return to the slave-society patriarchal hierarchy values which permeate the classics, but I respectfully submit that this does not mean that the classics should not be studied. There are various reasons to study the classics, one of which is precisely to understand that humans can easily fall into slave-society patriarchal hierarchy value and practices. Those tempted to reject capitalism and modern industry should realize that the alternative is not likely to be a non-violent, egalitarian, and harmonious society.

And let us read the suffragettes and abolitionists, I agree, but let us try to understand that there were reasons, going beyond the sheer wickedness of those in power, why our ancestors largely did not recognize women as the civic and political equals of men, and why their societies often rested on the backs of slaves, serfs, or uneducated and desperately poor laborers.

[graydon]

It pretty much was wickedness. There were a number of much more egalitarian traditions -- whether we want to talk about insular monastics or village structures or the Scottish Enlightenment or even the pre-Great Harry function of the church -- the drive for supremacy in war doesn't explain all the choices the neo-classicism of the Enlightenment made.

I am quite all right with people studying classics in university, all the same; James was talking about a middle school curriculum. I'd want to leave classics entirely out of that.

[jsburbidge]

The point there is, precisely, that Ford is not a conservative, although he parrots conservative talking points. (Well, he can be considered a conservative in the sense that he wants the world to stay as it was when he was younger.)

I was careful to note world history and world literature and not just European - the narrowing down of both studies does not mean that the broader perspective need be restricted to Europe.

The classics (once one gets past the limited question of straight literary quality) are useful especially as an illustration of people thinking differently: Virgil is different from us, and Homer is yet more different from him than we are. Humans are highly programmable and our best evidence is radically different societies. And, of course, study does not necessarily require approbation of values,and encouraging of critical thought requires definitely not agreeing with what you study. (The assumptions of the Anciens are dead as as doornail; our justifications for the classics are, inevitably, going to be those of the Modernes.)

Ironically, given the prevalence of slave societies (classical Europe, India, China, Islamic Caliphate) one of the times and places relatively free of slavery was the high mediaeval period: slavery had ceased to be economic, and so institutions like English thralldom largely lapsed (they had serfs, and indentured servants, but not much in the way of actual slavery). The scaling up of agriculture on plantations is what brings it back.

[graydon]

Well, that was sugar, really. (and indigo, a little.) Luxury rather than staple agriculture and the sugar gets you rum and there goes the whole money machine.

The medieval period had a lot of social mechanisms that encouraged things to be relatively flat; it wasn't just economic incapacity. How that changed to the god-king model of the Renaissance is interesting. (not very cheering, but interesting.)

I think your examples of the utility of the classics are far more appropriate to university than middle school. I'd like middle school to manage "cultural assumptions are chosen, and voluntary" and think it was doing well if it did so manage.

[jsburbidge]

Actual classics in middle school, to be realistic, is almost no classical texts, lots of simplified texts designed to show off the subjunctive (or the ablative absolute, or the aorist participes if you're studying Greek) and some extremely filtered classical culture.

(I studied Latin in school, out of Latin for Canadian Schools, which didn't track any author very closely. I studied Greek in first year university out of a text designed for British schools, where the texts were almost all potted and simplified Xenophon. And my daughter is studying Latin out of the Cambridge Latin Course, which has more classical history but is equally modern compositions.)

Unless we returned to Nineteenth-Century (well, British Public Schools prior to about 1950) levels of classical studies, students get to read real, difficult, texts by about Grade 12, on the threshold of university. The advantage of the study in school itself is mainly as equipment for later study, and to a certain degree the stretching of mental muscles from studying a language more different from ours than French or Spanish are.

I actually do think that students of, say, 16 or so are ready for real historical, literary, and critical training, but we don't trust them enough; or at least some of them. (And, of course, many who get to university aren't ready at all.) I certainly could have used more than I got. (And at 16 I was actually taking 16th-20th Century French literature in a Lycée, along with some rather dull history of the Third Republic; but that's another story. Ontario curricula would have to mutate massively before they would resemble French curricula.)

People tend to forget the sugar plantations and focus on cotton, and to forget that it was the technical changes of the early industrial revolution which made slavery an attractive economic model for cotton.

[ndrosen]

I largely agree with you, but I do wonder whether there was some real benefit to lots of math drill. Someone who has practice with multi-digit multiplication and division on paper, and who understands why the techniques work, is better equipped to understand algebraic multiplication and division, and to grasp whether figures being thrown at him make sense, or could not be even approximately true.

[graydon]

When the scope of career available to women stopped being "teacher or nurse or secretary", the teaching profession more or less lost everybody who likes math. There are individual exceptions, but statistically, every school teacher for a couple generations now is someone self-selected for not liking math. If you want kids to like arithmetic and learn it effectively, you have to make teaching pay as well as engineering or accounting as a necessary-but-not-sufficient precondition.

[jsburbidge]

There were exceptions. My high school calculus teacher was a male with an M.Sc. from Queen's who had presumably gone into teaching out of interest.

[graydon]

I hit some exceptions, too, but in general? And especially in early grades? Systemically, math is not something anyone likes or wants to teach.

[dewline]

I think we're getting to a point as a nation - or coalition of nations - where we have enough home-grown classics to build a curriculum around, though...

[jsburbidge]

We have a number of decent second-level authors, but we haven't yet produced a Joyce, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, or Virgil, or even a Henry James or an Ariosto.

Our luck could change tomorrow, but the last fifty to sixty years has not been a good period for great or potentially great writers.

[graydon]

I don't think we need to define anybody as great; I think the folks complaining about the ways in which a canon get defined have something real there, and I think the folks noting that the way the traditional canon was constructed is inescapably tied to the construction of whiteness and colonialism are dead right. It's very difficult to teach classics in the ancient-greeks-and-romans way without hauling that in, and I don't think the effort is well-repaid compared to the same degree of effort applied to "let's get a truly global set of stories".