Educational Reform Requires Fixing the American Soul

15 September 2010

Direct tinkering with education is not the way to educational reform ─ Part II of my conversation with a talented friend

This conversation, with a generationally younger Republican Party friend of mine, about reforming education began here.

He wrote back to ask about my closing sentence, “Start a movement to fix the American soul.”

How do we fix the American soul? Will it not take a visible and substantial commitment, both politically and monetarily, to our public education system to revive a passion for learning?

No.

Thinking outside the box

Thinking outside the box is necessary.

Our American penchant is to assume that fixing the closest structural mechanism to the problem is the best way. So when we think about “education” and “motivation,” we reflexively think that we can educate kids into being more motivated.

That won’t work.

Think back to your younger self

You can probably recall from your younger days that you only heard what you had the ability and motivation to receive. Part of the problem was (a developmentally appropriate) lack of brain maturity.

A significant part more was that young people's focus is usually on what they subliminally imbibe from their cultural surroundings, especially their peers.

To kids, cultural surroundings and peers are emphatically not about receiving instruction from authority figures. Peers and popular culture are generally used to combat the influence of authority.

Since school is “authority,” only students who are already motivated to learn take school seriously. The rest do not think school is relevant to their present and future worlds.

This is a cultural and family problem, not an educational one.

This is a profoundly conservative message

Family matters. Culture matters.

So how to proceed?

The more thoughtful way to approach fixing the American soul in regard to motivation and achievement is to look at what does influence kids’ motivation.

School-age children are influenced by advertising and the unspoken value judgments expressed by what American culture generally appears to value. These messages come from popular culture and the availability of mostly unnecessary, glitzy products.

In regard to motivation and achievement, the primary problems with advertising and popular culture, both of which influence our society more than education, is their brainlessness.

If we put a little thoughtfulness and striving back into culture, without the substitution being apparent, we might unconsciously (and therefore successfully) influence school kids to work a bit harder.

How ya gonna do that, Pete? ─ First, analyze what is wrong

Going somewhere requires choosing a destination, justifying its importance, and selecting the means to go there.

At present, we have chosen the wrong destination and the wrong means to get to it. We think we need to improve education because other countries are more accomplished at supposedly important school subjects than we are. Educational reformers have assumed that America’s economic success depends upon population-wide minimum proficiencies in reading, math, and science.

Is that a valid conclusion? Probably not.

There is no reason that a small minority of brilliant and well-educated Americans could not carry the innovational load for the rest of us. The larger population need only be smart and educated enough to do what it required by the innovations. I doubt that means broadly and tediously educating the figurative herds of people that we are attempting to educate now.

You can’t persuade me that China and India have managed to educate substantial portions of their populations to the standards we Americans assume are necessary for global competitiveness.

There is a hidden and invalid assumption underlying American thinking about education generally. Education is focused on the wrong people and on the wrong purpose.

Focusing on the wrong people

Americans have taken equal access in education as an axiom that requires no proof. There is little to justify this emphasis. Equality in access and presentation requires watering down curriculums so that average and below average intellects can cope.

It is metaphorically like mixing people destined to be professional athletes with the rest of us in the same setting and with the same requirements. If we muzzled the future professionals by requiring that they play nice with the less gifted among us, both groups would lose opportunities in the long run.

American K-12 education, and much of college education, has become a race toward achieving the minimum standards. These low standards are essentially adjusted to the top of the realistically achievable range that less academically gifted people can sustain. To put it harshly, mediocrity rules.

Scientific and technical innovation generally does not come from ungifted people.

Since educational resources are limited, our emphasis on equality, rather than excellence cheats gifted and motivated students by either:

(a) depriving them of wider, more challenging opportunities to learn,

(b) forcing them to tolerate incredible boredom as they slog through uninteresting drivel.

In the long run, we lower the rate of accomplishment among our gifted people and spoon feed others, who will never contribute much in the fields that they are supposedly studying.

Our nation is not so excessively talented that we can afford to hinder our most able people, while torturing our less academically gifted with ridiculous demands. That combination is the worst of both options.

Choosing the wrong purpose for the nation’s educational goal

A corollary to having chosen to dumb down curriculums, so as to drag the less talented up to arbitrary minimum standards, is that we simultaneously force people to do what they don’t want to do.

Education should not be about making people meet arbitrarily chosen norms to which many of them are not suited.

Education should be about (a) maximizing personal happiness and (b) maintaining the nation’s economic and military survival at the same time.

The happiness/survivability goal is more precise than simply saying that America needs to better educate its work force. Better educating the work force, without saying more (in today’s context), implicitly assumes that:

(a) America’s economic future combines technology, innovation, and information

and

(b) that most everybody will need to be able to contribute in these areas.

This is akin to saying that a person of average intelligence, properly educated, will understand Einstein’s theories and quantum physics. It is nonsense.

The technological world has moved beyond the average person’s intellectual ability to understand even limited components of it. Fixing education is not going solve that problem.

What ya gonna do? ─ Focus on what we really need

The two core education problems today are that:

(i) it is deficient in turning out the technicians that our economy needs,

and

(ii) it has been unsuccessful in creating an electorate that is knowledgeable and emotionally stable enough to vote intelligently.

The first problem is soluble. The second probably not.

An aside on the unachievable goal of a knowledgeable electorate

The modern technological and multi-cultural world is so complex that is unlikely that normal people are ever going to understand, or be motivated to understand, much of it.

Unless we wake up to our inadequacies, and have the humility to let more knowledgeable people guide some of this nation’s direction, our

emotion-based,

perennially thoughtless,

pervasively ignorant,

continually fighting,

obstructionist,

plutocratically-controlled democracy

is probably doomed to fall behind the more rapidly and efficiently moving combination of authoritarianism and capitalism that China displays.

Absent a new cultural direction, we will at best be educating technicians to support our plutocrats against theirs.

Technicians as a partial answer to mistaken direction

By reframing education

(i) to create a sufficient workforce of “technicians”

(ii) to support an American economy created by innovation

(iii) that is initiated by a subset of variously talented Americans ─

we take the performance burden off population-wide, allegedly equal, education.

Technicians only rarely understand the fundamental concepts and designs that underlie what they are working with. This does not matter when they have performance protocols to fall back on. By more narrowly focusing on the required specifics of various occupations, we can more effectively and precisely train workers.

Technician-level competence is sufficient for most productive activity.

Calling someone a technician is not an insult. Even medical doctors are arguably technicians because they implement a generally agreed upon standard of care (a protocol) for their patients. Medicine generally does not require a great deal of analysis, nor does it usually require much truly original creativity. In fact, going outside the customary standard of care opens physicians to considerations of malpractice. Most modern technical economic activity is similar.

A technical emphasis improves students’ freedom of educational choice

If we reorient education to turn out precisely trained technicians, we

(a) narrow the breadth of knowledge we need to cover,

and

(b) we simultaneously reduce the number of years that people need to spend learning information that they are not interested in and will never use.

Instead, we can begin to let students’ abilities and interests direct their individual educational paths.

Students should be regularly tested to see what they like and how talented they appear to be at their interests. Education should be structured to foster different routes to success, rather than forcing everyone into what is today, more often than not, a one-size-fits-all box.

If students choose to pursue that for which they have no talent, let them. But don’t drag the rest of the class down to meet their lack of natural ability.

Aside on discrimination and unequal opportunity

None of what I write should be taken to mean that I support keeping disadvantaged people down. The whole point to revising American culture and education is let kids choose what they want out of life and to give them the means to get there.

For inner city and impoverished kids the slog is unjustly long and hard. Only the truly gifted, motivated, and lucky among them currently make it out. I favor establishing precisely-focused charter schools to help all of them. Talent is wasted every day in these forgotten environments.

The overall principle remains, don’t torture those who are uninterested and who lack specialized abilities with absolutist nonsense imposed by society at large.

Recognize that the arch enemy in poverty and discrimination is cultural, not educational in the technical sense. These kids are not where they are because they are stupid.

They are there because family and American society failed them.

But what if the technical skill becomes obsolete?

It is easier to retrain technical skills, than it is to elevate aptitude levels.

Our system arguably fosters a sense of inadequacy in many of students by forcing them to learn that for which they have neither interest nor talent.

Someone with enough ability to learn the necessary elements of one technical job arguably has enough talent to learn another. This is especially so when retraining is not going to mean learning all of a generalized and unnecessary background subject.

Aside on artificially imposed barriers to occupational transitions

Artificial educational barriers to occupational transitions are common. They work against the mobility that modern economies generally need.

By way of rather extreme example, physicians and other medical providers are generally required to learn overly significant amounts of chemistry, physics, and inorganic chemistry before entering medical school ─ despite the fact that all three subjects have virtually no practical relevance to most medical practice.

The historical argument is that inorganic chemistry poses a motivational obstacle that screens out weak-willed medical school applicants. Physics and general chemistry are justified on the basis that they are sciences and physicians are scientists. Both arguments are nonsense.

(Incredibly, biochemistry and molecular genetics ─ which are relevant to aspects of medicine ─ are often not required prerequisites to medical training. Understanding the medically workable aspects of both does not really require understanding general chemistry or physics.)

In regard to pretensions of being scientists, most physicians are so divorced from the genuinely scientific aspects of medicine that they have difficulty thinking in anything but anecdotal, standard of care, or protocol terms. Whatever science ethos they imbibed during their pre-medicine days is usually long gone before they enter medical practice.

(The legal profession is similarly burdened with irrelevant educational requirements. But its stupidities are less interesting to the general reader.)

Other occupations exhibit similar guild-like educational proscriptions to entry. The requirements have nothing realistically applicable to do with the work. They are simply convenient barriers to entry.

And the barrier-requirements provide a ready source of income for the educational establishment that it is reluctant to forfeit.

This is another area where education itself is the enemy of modernity.

Aside on forced liberal arts education

Humanitarians often bemoan the retreat of liberal arts training in our schools. Liberal arts have never been of interest to the mass of humanity. Forcing it on students is stupid and essentially anti-humanitarian.

There is absolutely no evidence that liberal arts training, to the degree it exists, has made America a better or more efficient democracy or place to live.

In a revamped educational system, one in which students can choose to learn what interests them, there will be enough self-selected liberal arts students to keep that fire alive.

Putting the elements together ─ changing the American soul

Think about these elements:

(1) Students in through most of K-12 are not interested in having their values and motivation shaped by authority figures.

(2) Their focus in life comes from popular culture, peers, and occasionally their family.

(3) American culture today is mindless, narcissistic, lazy, complacent, and consumption oriented.

(4) We are apathetic about long-term thinking and personal sacrifice, especially when compared to economic competitor nations.

(5) Our educational ideas adhere to an outdated emphasis on equality of access and presentation, rather than on fostering individual excellence according to the student’s own interests, gifts, and choosing.

(6) We assume that American global economic competitiveness requires educating everyone to a high and broad standard, rather than educating most of us to a precisely-focused technician level standard.

(7) We impose silly educational barriers to occupational entry and transitions.

(8) Our politicians lie about the realities facing us, including the very real threats to American leadership posed by competitors like Brazil, China, and India.

(9) We lie to ourselves.

What are the core problems in this mix?

Lies, blindness, and archaic focus.

These are cultural problems, not educational ones.

What ya gonna do? ─ Focus on lies, blindness, and archaic focus

Complacent narrow-minded people (us) almost never change until the tiger’s teeth have latched onto them.

We can’t revamp education in the directions I have suggested without revising our societal view of the world and our threatened place in it. There are too many selfishly narrow interests involved. The educational establishment is one of them.

So we (you) are in a race. Is the tiger going to get us before we (you) open people’s eyes to the fact that the striped critter is drooling in the weeds just a few feet away?

Your mission is telling the truth

Your task is to address America’s soul by speaking truth.

You will have to attract motivated people like you to the cause of redirecting America’s attention to what is wrong with itself, rather than at what is wrong with everybody else.

You can do this in a positive manner. Americans like crisis, when it is pointed out to them in a believable way. We still like to prove that we are better than the other guys.

If we accept that our most talented people can lay the foundation for our economic success, that acceptance takes the burden off the rest of us. We no longer need to do that to which we are not suited.

If we assure kids that they will have a job suited to their abilities and interests, after investing a lesser number of years in boring training ─ they will probably be happier and more motivated.

If we recruit advertisers and appropriate celebrities to subliminally “message” this new American mission, they will.

When one considers to power and expertise of advertising, one recognizes that there is no facet of American know-how that is better suited to subliminally massaging the motivations of young people.

Many celebrities in recent decades have been impressively generous and good-hearted when it comes to giving their time to projects in the public interest.

They just need leadership to aim them.

It is all about leadership ─ the most effective components of the American experience have always been about leadership

Tinkering at the edges of education is not the way to reform it. Massive investments in education are not the way to proceed until after we have adjusted our culture.

Leadership is required. Motivating leadership. Leadership that defines a better American direction, without falling into the prattle of incessant ideological nonsense and self-serving lies.

Can we do that?

PeteFree.com

Educational Reform Requires Fixing the American Soul