Category: Greatest Hits

I used to adore TED talks. I thought they’re the modern world’s answer to the old Lyceum movement. Bringing the wisdom of the our best and brightest to the curious masses, but in short and sweet format to accommodate our digital ADHD.

But the more of them I watched in my own field, the more I saw speakers butcher their subjects. Turns out they are rarely experts. Occasionally you’ll get someone on the cutting edge, but TED seems to select more for performance and theatrics than knowledge. Half of these talks are given by journalists who have only a modicum of experience in the subject, and most are wildly idealistic. The greatest sin of all is the scripted TED-brand performance. I feel like they should trademark it, with its dramatic pauses and hand gestures, a heartfelt anecdote to start it all off, a bit of pacing, some nice graphics; it’s like they’re given a formula. They have a TED hour on NPR now, and even without video, you can feel the sensationalism seeping through the speakers. Check this out:

Seth Godin is the perfect example of this phenomenon. He’s got the body language and formula down perfectly. He doesn’t seem to be any sort of expert in pedagogy, but he’s rich, personable, theatrical, and can carry a crowd. Most importantly, he’s idealistic, and wants to tell you about why the system is broken, but could be fixed if we just changed everything!

Let’s ignore the conspiracy theory level talk about how public education came about for the sole purpose of creating mindless factory drones. Maybe it had that effect, but to suggest the entire thing was orchestrated as a vast hidden scheme makes me wonder when we’re going to talk about the Illuminati or Lizard People. Instead let’s consider his eight-steps for fixing everything:

1. Inverted classroom – One brilliant professor serving millions via online video, while the rest of the teachers of the world serve as glorified assistants at in-person recitation sessions? Sounds good for the guy at the top, but you’re killing diversity of thought. If literally two or three professors in the world teach each class, they control the entire curriculum, they emphasis what they consider is important, they ignore what they don’t, and they homogenize the learning of an entire generation. The recitation teachers could fill in some blanks, but at the end of the day you end up with an entire generation of intellectual clones. Also, I hate video lectures, if you miss one thing and you’re lost for the rest of the lecture. If you can’t interrupt to ask questions, or get the benefit of others doing so, you’ll have an inferior experience no matter how great the professor is.
2. End Memorization – He seems to be going overboard, but yeah, that’s OK in moderation. We’ve spent time in our class talking about how unproductive rote memorization is. You don’t need your physician to remember all 185,000 drug interactions, but they should at least remember where the gallbladder is without having to look it up. The idea of never memorizing anything is a bit simplistic.
3. End Prerequisites – Who could possibly think this is a good idea? We use spiral curricula in modern pedagogy for a reason: you need to have a basis in the fundamentals before you can dive into advanced stuff. That isn’t unjust or unfair, it’s just reality. You can’t go sit in the electrical engineering department’s graduate signal processing class if you have no math or physics knowledge beyond high school, you won’t get anything out of it.
4. End specific degrees – we’re already moving towards interdisciplinary education, and again this is fine in moderation, but unless we live in a Star Trek like post-scarcity society without any obligation to work, you’ll need some defined skills to get a job. You cannot take nothing but poetry and art classes and then be a civil engineer.
5. Measure experience instead of test scores – Nice in practice, easier said than done. In this part he also claims that resumes as a measure of compliance will become useless, but as with #4, as long as there are employers, those resumes will be useful.
6. Teachers should be coaches – Huh, I actually like this.
7. Incorporate work into schooling – I wish he said more on this.
8. Death of the Famous College – LMFAO.

Those colleges were relevant when Byzantines controlled the Bosporus, and before the Aztecs even started building their empires. Think of all the incredible social changes the last 1000 years has brought; those colleges survived them all. The rise and fall of feudalism, the first limits on the monarchy’s power, the modern republic, the rise and fall of communism, the rise of modern capitalism, the renaissance, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the rise and fall of colonialism, the space age. Through it all, those colleges survived and flourished. I think they’ll outlive capitalism too.

No, seriously, I can envision a time when robotic manual labor and AI mental labor are so cheap that literally everyone has everything they could possibly want, and even then, those colleges will be around. Humans are social animals, and outside of the insects, all social animals are concerned with status. So long as those colleges grant status, they’ll have relevance in any society. And don’t tell me there isn’t a real difference in quality either.

The claim that attending such a college has “no relevance to success or happiness” is also bullocks. Don’t tell me that attending Oxford isn’t significantly associated with higher success rates than attending State. Of course there is a variance in outcomes, but overall there is a huge association between attending an elite college and success. Happiness is another story, but I would imagine there is at least some correlation between it and general success, money, status, and comfort in life.

He concludes by saying that we need to kill two false ideas:

1. Great performance in school leads to happiness and success.
2. Great parents leads to great performance in school.

Which is odd, because I think both of those are some of the most self-evident truths in education. Yes, Dave Thomas didn’t finish high school, founded Wendy’s, and ended up being extremely rich. But variance aside, in general someone who finishes high school will be more successful than someone who doesn’t, and someone with an MBA from Harvard will probably do even better. Is there really a debate here?

As for the parents, isn’t parental involvement strongly associated with success? Same goes for stability at home. If you find a kid who goes hungry every other night, or suffers from abuse or neglect, the last thing they want is to play around with an Arduino to make art. Helping these kids out is incredibly difficult, but let’s not pretend that we live in some fairy-tale world where having great education-minded parents isn’t an advantage. If anything, we should devote resources to helping the kids who don’t have such parents, instead of telling them it doesn’t matter.

Asking the question “what school is for” is invaluable, and Mr. Godin does have some good ideas. He really does. If he simply gets people thinking about the issue, he has done a great service. But, man… does this smell like the naïve idealism of a layman. Does Mr. Godin have any pedagogical credentials at all? His biography suggests he is a marketing executive that made a lot of money during the dotcom era, and now writes business self-help books. Perhaps we should take all of his advice with a grain of salt.

I’m at the end of my second semester of teaching. I like the way class has gone this fall. No major snafus, and the students are clearly interested and seem happy. I’ve seen their work improve. They speak up in class.

I’m at the end of my third semester as a PhD student. I have seen a lot of school throughout my life. Before coming to VT I was a student and employee at a community college, a small liberal arts college and a big university in New York City. In K-12 I was in public schools in multiple different districts, was homeschooled for a period of time, and went to an experimental, arts-focused private school for a few years.

At that school, we called teachers by their first names and nobody got grades. When I went to college for the first time, I had no idea what a GPA was.

Now my life is devoted to knowledge — the production, pursuit and dissemination of it. My students call me by my first name, but I haven’t had to explain to any of them what a GPA is. I think they have a better idea of what “knowledge” is than I do.

A lot of our readings in GEDI have emphasized a progressive, future-focused approach to teaching. Generally, they reflect a critical perspective on old-fashioned teaching methods, including any view of the academy as an intellectual silo — an ivory tower, protected from the exigencies of the real world. Hierarchies should be diminished, transparency and open-endedness should be encouraged. Although I’ve been critical of a lot of our readings about tech and education, in a wider sense, I support the vision of this course. My own pedagogical practice affirms these values, and it always will.

I have looked at this final week’s readings for a message I can take forth that specifically regards a state of affairs that perhaps none of us could have predicted — the political climate that has evolved over the last year or so, which is impacting education profoundly. Seth Godin’s discourse on bravery is applicable here.

He writes:

“Can risk-taking be taught? Of course it can. It gets taught by mentors, by parents, by great music teachers, and by life. Why isn’t it being taught every day at that place we send our kids to?”

That last question is mostly rhetorical, but I’m going to answer it anyway.

There’s a difference between school and everything he lists above. A mentor, a parent, a music teacher, and life itself are all conceptualized as singular entities. Each establishes its own rules, and the context in which young people are subject to them does not stipulate that those rules are being negotiated and undermined by other rules. School rules reflect the broad, multilateral entity that is a school, which includes the multiple functions schools serve. School rules are subject to checks and balances by many different parties. Any bravery that gets condoned within a school setting cannot challenge its most fundamental premises, and thus does not reflect the quality of bravery it takes to truly make a difference out there in society.

School rules and standards change from class to class, year to year, department to department. A school is a collective. When you’re in school, the rules that govern you — whether explicit, as in the rules listed in a syllabus or university handbook, or implicit, as in social etiquette norms — are vulnerable to change.

In this sense, schools are more like societies than they are like a mom or dad or the person who teaches you piano after school and doesn’t have to answer to the rules of any higher administration, because they’re a private contractor. But in a more important sense,  schools are different from societies. Even though both are governed by multiple purposes, requirements and contracts, schools generally have a more cohesive and comprehensible internal logic than anything which goes by the name “society.”

Schools can’t, ultimately, reward students who are brave in the sense of transgressing the very rules that define them. That’s paradoxical. This is why it’s hard (if not impossible) for schools to teach true, authentic bravery, bravery that isn’t just symbolic (like the “bravery” of playing devil’s advocate in debate club).

Heroic people in society can go to jail. Schools can’t support the development of that much audacity.

Or can they?

I think schools can teach bravery if they understand students first as citizens, as actors in society, before it sees them as students. Only then will they support the character development necessary to be audacious, to meet the world where it is today — crazy, paradoxical, unjust, and — to get real here — extremely scary.

Seth Godin tells us that “school was invented to control students and give power to the state.” He gives us a sort of People’s History of the Current State of Schooling and offers ways that educators can change this.

Hot on the heels of a tax bill that, if it passes, will seriously damage the state of higher education — we must change this.

If the classroom has a natural kinship with the real world, we must learn how to instill bravery in our students. Not so they stand up here  — not so that the terminal point of their brave intentions manifests as disrespect to fellow students or instructors while they’re still ensconced in the quasi-realism of undergrad life — but because the unique function of schools is to train citizens in the practices of being a good citizen. That sounds rather old-fashioned, but “good citizen” is a really loose term. It recognizes that no matter what you do, you act to make and change society. It recognizes that adulthood is defined by service to others. Ut prosim; selflessness.

Schools train children to become adults (in this definition of adulthood).

I’m going to end with a question for everybody. How can we preserve what is unique about schools and teaching — what has made it so that we formalize education, rather than dissolving education into the flows and practices of “real” life — while reframing our teaching practices to cultivate brave citizens?

Because now more than ever, that’s what we need.