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Why Johnny Can’t Get Ahead
I have a theory: American education is great at teaching facts but not much else. What it’s not great at teaching, and what fellow Ricochet member Brandon apparently is great at teaching, is how to think critically. It is such a gift to have teachers who find ways to help students understand that critically analyzing data and rhetoric is more important than mastery of any set of tasks, or any set of skills. Knowing how the war of 1812 started is great factual information and may, at some point down the road, be important to a student. But knowing how to evaluate an author’s biases and explore the depth of his data analyses so as to formulate independent thoughts from those evaluations is far more important. But it isn’t taught. At least, not that I’ve seen. I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.
I believe that so many schools spend so much time teaching facts because facts can be easily mastered, easily listed, and objective scores determined from this kind of rote memorization. It makes teaching, and more importantly, grading, easier, and less subjective. It also turns students into fact repositories, not thinkers. We need more thinkers. Anyone can repeat facts. It’s the analysis of those facts that is the really important skill that must be learned to obtain success in life.
In spite of this, the job of many teachers in many systems, particularly those where the state tests student’s performance on standardized tests, is to teach the test, not the subject. That is such a disservice. Allow me to demonstrate with my own mistakes in this area.
In 2011, I became interested in Amateur radio. The FCC at one point required a person to learn and master Morse code (sometimes called CW for continuous wave) in order to get a license. When that changed, I decided to get a license. The technician exam was heavy on theory, but like all things done by the government, the evaluation of a potential licensee’s knowledge is measured against standardized tests, and the government puts out the actual test questions that will be on the test. You read that right. There are websites that will create practice tests for people getting ready to test so that they can see if they have mastered the material. And these practice tests are made from the actual questions in the question pool.
I simply studied the questions, all 300 of them, until I knew the answers to the questions and not the material that the questions were designed to test. I went from Technician to General, and on to an Amateur Extra license in six months. I passed each test with better than 95%. And there is still a great deal about radio that I do not know, I build that knowledge every day. But in terms of understanding some things (like antennas) at a deeper level, I do not. I cheated myself.
This is what high schools have become. They are institutions that teach the materials and skills to be able to score high enough on the ACT or SAT to get into college. They long ago stopped serving the idea of molding students into useful members of society. Instead, they became about teachers demonstrating that they could produce students who could pass tests. Education, then, became about pleasing instructors by passing tests, not about learning and using the knowledge so acquired. Thus, when these students reached college what they became was Jello molds for the socialist gelatin the professors poured in. There’s no need to wash a brain that’s already clean.
What high schools need badly, in fact, what all forms of education need badly, is a curriculum built around critical thinking and success-related skills. Consider just the importance of one success skill in particular: goal setting. A Harvard Business School study demonstrated that the three percent of students graduating from its MBA program who had written goals earned ten times as much as the students who graduated without specific, written goals.
The study found that only three percent of the students had written down their goals prior to entering the program, while some 13% had goals, just not written ones. Apparently 84% of the students entering had no goals whatsoever. As Yogi Beara is credited with saying, “if you don’t know where you’re going, when you get there, you’ll be lost.” That study proved it. When a Harvard MBA gets you $158,000 walking in the door, a person making ten times that amount simply because of a series of written goals likely has enough to pay off his sizeable student debt.
Another problem with American education is that it puts subtle emphasis on things that do not matter. Prom Queens, class presidents and social clubs in high school all put value on the ability to be popular and well-liked. While these are important, to some people they all too quickly become ends of their own. It is more important to be popular in high school than smart. The blog piece by Peter DeWitt (no relation) sets out how quickly things that would be minor issues laughed off at 23 become suicide-inducing dramas at 15. We do not teach students the simple fact that association with smart, successful people is often the catalyst to becoming great in any endeavor. As a friend of mine put it, if you want to learn to fly, you don’t spend time hanging out at the submarine base. Yet that is exactly what high school has become for so many students who choose the easy path in high school. You do become known by the company you keep. It has the power to alter your life’s goals and choices. Yet teachers do not spend any time discussing this because there is no class called “Your Life 101.”
Values like persistence, perseverance, and the importance of a creative vision are not taught, and sometimes they’re difficult to teach. For these the great writers like Napolean Hill, Claude Bristol, Maxwell Maltz and even Zig Ziglar can provide the kind of mind-opening experiences that allow people to see beyond today and plan for a new tomorrow. For me, Think and Grow Rich made a huge difference in my life. Even though I am not a salesperson, Zig Ziglar’s See You At the Top was another eye-opener. There are so many others, like Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit that could really go a long way to making the next generation the very best generation. If only the majority of students could be exposed to these works.
Yet, my guess is that if you went to your local school board and voiced these issues you’d be met with a lot of “we’ll consider that carefully,” and then see a whole not of nothing because such education is not in the state’s curriculum. So the successful students get this at home, and they absorb it from their parents and grandparents. They see what they did to get where they are, and they internalize their stories and methods. Sometimes the best predictor of a successful person is the struggle of their parents.
When BLM and the other socialists talk about income inequality, they are never really talking about lifting everyone up, but bringing the wealthy down. That is why socialism has never worked. It has never worked because it has never made any life better. Handouts do not motivate people to be better, they motivate them to do less. Everyone understands this at a personal level, which means the socialists are lying even unto themselves.
One of these days I hope that teachers like Brandon manage to make the inroads in the education system that are needed to teach critical thinking and success philosophy to the upcoming generations. But as long as we keep education federalized, with bureaucrats making decisions in DC for people who live in Kansas City, that will never happen.
Published in Education
I really have to disagree with this. Making more money than that next guy is not a sign of being better than him. In fact, CEO’s tend to have a very high ratio of psychopaths. And maybe that guy who only works 40 hours a week, as opposed to cranking out 70 hours a week and making the big bucks, does so just so that he can spend time with his wife and kids.
Yay, another Willingham fan.
I am so glad this comment thread has gone the direction it has–students need a coherent body of facts and knowledge in order to get anywhere. As they continue through high school and college, they can more independently build on their knowledge store, and in turn, their foundational knowledge will help them assimilate new learning quickly.
And more and more knowledge makes you smarter, at discovering new knowledge.
Each bit of knowledge connects to many others, and these interacting facts allows you to synthesize new knowledge that you weren’t taught and that maybe no one has thought of before.
That’s the Communist method, isn’t it? Just ask the Venezuelans, and the North Koreans, and the Cubans, and the…
Wish I could like this a hundred times. Beautifully said. I agree with every word.
I spent an ungodly amount of my time through my kids’ school years raising money for our classical music program. I even started up a now-defunct youth orchestra for the Cape.
I loved the music program and the foreign language programs. I want the kids to get something in return for their work. I want us to do such a good job teaching that the teacher’s work, a little gear, turns the student’s work, the big gear, a lot.
There is nothing in this world I love more than watching kids learn how to do something.
My grandson is in a Waldorf school, and I’m so happy. It’s just as you’ve described. He knits and loves it. No drugs or alcohol for him. Or mindless video games. He has things to do with his alone time. He builds Lego cathedrals and skyscrapers. No television. Just the arts–he plays the violin–and bike riding and hikes with mom and dad. Skis all winter. So well balanced emotionally. Confident, poised.
He’s in Burlington, Vermont, so of course he works on a farm every Friday morning as part of his education. Flipping forward through the covid-19 lockdown, and my daughter–my sophisticated daughter with her master’s in English and fluent French–is now raising chickens. :-) :-) Yes, her little farmer son missed his chickens at the farm on Fridays. So my daughter and son-in-law have seven of the them. And a chicken coop. And a chicken house. :-)
Maybe not rhetoric, but talking endlessly — or screaming profanities, if you listen to the news lately.
I was in a curriculum meeting with our curriculum director, and I asked her why the teachers discounted memorization so much. I said, “Intelligence is defined as one-third memory.”
She said, “That’s because memorization came easily to the teachers when they were kids.” So they take the ability for granted.
Precisely. If you don’t incentivize excellence, only the below-average come out ahead.
Anthony,
I hate to break it to you but you and I know (and most of Ricochet) that we need thinkers. The school system thinks (or claims to think who knows what they really think) that they just need to interior decorate the classroom with the right identity groups and presto chango everything is right with the world. This is sheer idiocy, of course, but you would be accused of white male supremacy by someone who probably can do addition & subtraction but starts to have trouble with multiplication and division.
Regards,
Jim
Schools don’t teach facts. They teach regurgitation.
All unique thoughts must be cited. You are not allowed your own unique thought. If you do provide a unique thought without citation, you are plagiarizing and lose a letter grade.
You are taught to appeal to authority for every thought you possess. You aren’t taught how to gather facts to form your opinion and then use logic to defend it. Instead, you are given the opinions of others. You get to pick which opinion you want, but chances are, your choices are curated.
This is how it was when I was in high school and college. It looks to have gotten worse.
Research papers have pigeonholed thought. I originally thought I was supposed to provide my ideas and then cite facts to support my idea, but the actual enforced rule was that the ideas had to be cited, as well.
This corruption has existed in education for at least 20 years.
Actually it sucks at both. Just look at all the videos out there of students who don’t know anything about history, the way government works, basic science.
What it’s great at is indoctrination to the current Leftist political and social Pravda.
This is the way academic writing usually works at the postgraduate level.
“Congratulations! It’s your turn to write a thesis. It has to be original. It also must consist entirely of cobbled-together musings of other academics. Oh, and one more thing: If it’s not filtered through critical theory, it isn’t real scholarship.”
I was just talking to a friend who teaches at a private boarding school. A number of her students are Chinese kids (from China, that is). Her impression is that these kids are extremely good at ingesting, retaining and regurgitating information. An assignment that is open-ended or demands creativity befuddles them.
I suggested that this could reveal less about Chinese pedagogy than we might think. Having six children altogether, I can give a personal example of a kid who adores a creative, open-ended project (and are constantly coming up with their own) and one who prefers to know what the expectations are so that these will be met precisely. (The second kid is—surprise!—very good at school.) I’ve got kids who fit someplace in between—okay with creativity, but also mostly- okay with following a program.
Assuming that all human beings (rather than only American ones) can be located somewhere on this continuum, the chances are good that the Chinese kids who like meeting expectations (even or especially high ones) do well at school in China, and are more likely to be selected for opportunities to study abroad.
I’m willing to believe that American schools are more accepting of out-of-the-box thinking and thinkers, but my experience tells me that it really depends on the “box.” Conformity is rewarded. So, incidentally, is fake conformity. My “out of the box” thinker recognized that his (not particularly clever) English teacher was a real feminist. So he made sure to lace all his papers and essays with references to women’s rights and oppression and whatnot, and at his graduation, he actually received an award for his wokeness.
Well, that’s the left for you.
Yet, a critical thinker should be able to find critical facts. There is an ocean of data at everyone’s fingertips. Picking out the critical facts is a skill that a critical thinker has. I prefer that kids learn to recognize a good scientific study and a garbage study rather than remember the facts of any particular study.
Heh. I did that with my freshman comp professor. Write to the teacher for better grades.
A rarely mentioned aspect of a good education is the ability to recognize excellence, to know the difference between scholarly achievement and hackery, to have humility and an understanding of what is required for mastery of a topic or discipline. It is embarrassing that US students trail much of the world in math achievement but lead in self-esteem. The enshrinement of half-assery is an enormous problem.
It is the Chinese schools. About ten years ago I had a student in our regional orchestra who was a citizen of China, and her mother went to great expense and effort to keep her daughter in our American school. “Why?” I asked her. She said the schools in China were too rigid and too oriented to rote learning. She said Americans’ worst public school are thousands of times better than the best schools in China. She was a teacher herself. :-)
Years later I read two books on education in China. The author was Zhu Yongxin, and he has written a series of books on this subject. He is a Christian and communist, which I find to be an interesting combination, and he was the secretary of education in China for fifty years. He is one of my very favorite authors. In his books, he talks at length about the effect of the single high-stakes test on Chinese education.
Without going into too much detail, that is the biggest problem in a nutshell. A single high-stakes test that determines the students’ future combined with the one-child policy has been a disaster for many of China’s children.
I was a good speller in 4th grade, and if you got a 100 on a spelling test, Mrs. Hevenor let you hang out in the back of the class doing what you wanted while the rest of the class went over the test. It happened that there was a stack of cards of the Presidents. While the class was going over spelling, I would kill time going through the cards, playing a game with myself trying to guess which was next. Eventually I had them all memorized.
It turned out this was the most valuable thing I got out of fourth grade. From then on, I had a framework on which to hang all of U.S. history. When I came across a new fact, I’d stick it with the appropriate President and it was like putting it in a cubby hole. I could see in my imagination the line of Presidents and major facts “sticking” to them. It still helps me to this day. I can’t recite all the Presidents in order any more, but a lot of the outline is still kicking around in my head.
I think the lack of a fact-based framework on which to hang knowledge is a killer in education. Knowledge just goes on a heap and soon disappears.
Wow, great observation. Even when I read comments in favor of teaching the memorization of historical dates, I don’t often hear this important organizing power of these memory structures.
@JerryGiordano I agree with all of this. I’m not suggesting that there needs to be an innovation in electrical wiring or that children should not learn facts. Only that this is not all they should learn. They should learn to be successful too. Thanks for your comments.
Excellent points. Again, my theory is not that kids should not be taught facts, but that they should be taught how to be successful in addition to that. I disagree with none of what you’ve written.
@chuckles Duly noted!
@Quietpi I would like that a great deal. Surely we could find an HF frequency and a night during the week where we could get together. I ran barefoot in an HOA restricted area, but I’d do my best.
@marcin This is completely accurate.
@jamesgawron Good points.
@Stina There is a story from a lawyer I know who had a communist for a law professor years ago (before it was cool and cutting edge) and on his final exam he had no idea how to answer the question so he wrote an exposition on why the communist model provided a better solution to the problem than the current system. He got an A. Everyone likes to think they shape minds. Sometimes they just puff up their chest in the mirror.
And, yeah, that includes me.
I think kids must get technical knowledge/literacy, learn how to succeed, and a third thing that you didn’t mention.
Learn how to read, think, and write. Critical thinking skills, if you will.
A kid can learn great technical skills, and learn how to be a smashing success in business or some other field, without ever learning how to think. In other words, without ever getting an education, in the sense of the word that we used to use, before the era of universal, state-provided “education”.
You bring up a good point, Stina. They say that younger folks are intellectual slaves to statistics. Perhaps this is the result of not being taught to think for themselves, or to give credence to their own judgments.
Slavery to statistics is the result of being taught either