Americans Are Being Trained, Not Educated.
In April of this year, a video of Grosse Point educator Sean McCarroll passionately resigning from his job went viral. The educator of ten years and holder of two graduate degrees told the assembled school board, “You don’t respect us. If you respected us, you’d listen to us.”
Two years ago middle school teacher Deyshia Hargrave criticized the pay raise awarded to a superintendent in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana, and was arrested for speaking out. Kansas teacher Amanda Coffman resigned last year in an emotional speech delivered to the school board on a live stream. Comparing the dynamic between teachers and administration to “shouting in the wind”, she spent most of her time on camera directly addressing her students.
Professor Wesley Cecil, Ph.D. recently contributed thoughts on this phenomenon in a video on the teaching profession, sharing anecdotes of teachers quitting due to unreasonable busywork created by administrators, or outright interference in efforts to teach well. Throughout the video, he repeatedly stresses that K - 12 education is explicitly not about educating; there is nothing within the design of the system that facilitates education. So what is the purpose of schooling in the US?
The issues the United States has with education are not unique to the United States; nor are they homogenously distributed. Every state can have its own education standards, which is why there are 24 states in the country that have some allowances for teaching creationism as an equally viable concept to evolution. Charter schools add more diversity to our education standards and curriculums, while private schools serve the affluent community.
According to the results of the PISA test, an International test of 15/16-year-olds on the subjects of science, math, and reading, US students are decidedly average, with the exception of math, where they are below average. The PISA test has been a useful metric for evaluating the condition of a nation’s education system. For some like Germany, it has been the impetus for radical reform.
The contrast between German expectations and German results from the first PISA test was so great they came to be known as the PISA shock. As a result of the reforms put in place over many years, including lengthening the school day, giving more autonomy to schools, and creating national standards for students, German students rose to the top of the international rankings.
At the same time that primary education was being reformed, university education had a tumultuous series of reforms. In 2009 100,000 students protested the quality of the education they were getting following one set of reforms with signs like “save education, not only the banks”; chanting “We’re here and we’re loud because our education is being stolen”. At the heart of the conflict was how state funding was being allocated, in that it undermined the quality and breadth of education. Student Leader Mo Schmidt said that before recent reforms, "you went to university for yourself, to gain knowledge ... now people are studying for the labor market”.
This concern was echoed by philosophy professor Julian Nida-Rümelin who wrote at the time the process had “the spirit of McKinsey, not Humboldt”. Writing about how the reforms had changed education, the destructive effect of specialization took center stage, creating graduates who start their careers as “low-income half-doers”. The US four-year university system was praised in contrast as “not training oriented, but consistently education-oriented”.
Many Americans would think that perception is an idealization. As far back as 1937, Albert Jay Nock, celebrated scholar and libertarian, wrote about how education had changed since he had passed through the system;
“The difference seemed to be that while education was still spoken of as a "preparation for life," the preparation was of a kind which bore less directly on intellect and character than in former times, and more directly on proficiency. It aimed at what we used to call training rather than education; and it not only did very little with education, but seemed to assume that training was education, thus overriding a distinction that formerly was quite clear. Forty years ago a man trained to proficiency in anything was respected accordingly, but was not regarded as an educated man, or "just as good," on the strength of it. A trained mechanic, banker, dentist or man of business got all due credit for his proficiency, but his education, if he had any, lay behind that and was not confused with it. His training, in a word, bore directly upon what he could do or get, while his education bore directly on neither; it bore upon what he could become and be.”
There is nothing accidental about this transformation. When Julian Nida-Rümelin compares reforms in Germany to the management consulting firm Mckinsey, the connecting ideology between the firm and education is Taylorism.
Frederick Winslow Taylor is the father of scientific management, an ideology ostensibly dedicated to the use of the scientific method in the service of workplace efficiency. To this end he sold the message of strict separation between the responsibilities of management and labor, believing that doing and thinking didn’t exist within the same person. He was, “directly antagonistic to the old idea that each workman can best regulate his own way of doing the work” by his own admission.
To make his case he employed the paraphernalia of science, stopwatches most notoriously, advocating meticulous worker micromanagement and quotas for workers to consistently meet, not unlike the quotas overseen by machine tracking at Amazon warehouses today. While there was great enthusiasm from management, workers felt degraded by the applications of Taylorism. How could they not, when Taylor himself wrote things like, “ the workman who is best suited to doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity”.
Scientific management eventually fell out of favor, as the “science” behind it was fraudulent, labor unions vehemently opposed it, and the federal government outlawed stopwatches from government factories. However, the Social Darwinism inherent to scientific management became an enduring part of the dynamic between labor and management in the US. This is partially due to many influential people who robustly embraced it, like Reginald Heber Smith, who we have to thank for the timesheet and billable hour. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth of Cheaper By The Dozen fame applied the “science” of efficiency to raising a family. John Franklin Bobbit brought scientific management into education.
As Professor of Education Administration at the University of Chicago, Bobbit would devote a lot of his time to developing a theory of the Curriculum developed directly from the principles of scientific management. From Taylor’s idea that a worker should be assigned to a narrow mechanistic task, Bobbit advocated for very goal-oriented education tailored to fulfilling the demands of society. As in scientific management where there was no conception that a worker may have some insight that the manager does not, when applied to education there was no conception of an uncertain future or the necessity of adaptability; it was assumed that students would need to know only what was demanded by the market at the time. To Bobbit, education had no value in and of itself, it was only as good as what ends it could meet and should be limited accordingly.
Bobbit was also an advocate of tracking, the practice of splitting students by perceived aptitude into vocational tracks. The data is very clear that tracking is harmful to student achievement. Regardless of ability, students assigned to a higher ability group attain higher test scores. Conversely, regardless of ability, students assigned to a lower ability group attain lower test scores. Simply being exposed to more challenging material improves student outcomes. Tracking creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. It tells children at a very impressionable time what they can expect from themselves. The US is alone in beginning tracking in elementary school and is one of the rare countries that not only teaches less material but different content to the students in different academic tracks. Other countries like Germany that track students still teach the same core material, with the advanced students going more in-depth.
Expectations matter. A famous study by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted in an elementary school demonstrated this, where teachers were told that some students were determined by an exam to be gifted. In actuality, there was no test, and the labeled students were chosen at random. Nevertheless, the students chosen at random did show better results in testing a year later. Similarly, in studies conducted on the effect of students’ perception of teachers, James Herrell showed that when students were presented with a guest lecturer and primed to think of them as “cold” or “warm”, the student expectations influenced the presenter’s behavior. In essence, the presenter lived up to their expectations.
This effect has been demonstrated in many environments and is simple folk psychology; the self-fulfilling prophecy is conventional wisdom. Beliefs we hold about others can lead us to unconsciously behave in ways that influence the other to confirm our belief about them.
John Dewey presciently observed that scientific management as applied to education was a means of perpetuating inequality. Writing in 1916 he said,
“….the greatest evil of the present regime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and evade. Neither men's hearts nor their minds are in their work. On the other hand, those who are not only much better off in worldly goods, but who are in excessive, if not monopolistic, control of the activities of the many are shut off from equality and generality of social intercourse…. It would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form”.
The application of Taylorism to education wasn’t confined to what and how students are taught. The relationship between administrators and teachers was also deeply affected. When Ellie Rubinstein resigned from her teaching position on YouTube in 2013 she describes the lack of autonomy, micromanagement, and degrading authoritarian treatment from administrators that’s a hallmark of Taylorism, echoing the same complaints from laborers during the heyday of scientific management.
What do countries that perform well on the PISA test do differently? This is the question journalist Amanda Ripley sought to answer when she wrote The Smartest Kids In The World. Conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with students and teachers in the US, Korea, Poland, and Finland, some clear insights emerged.
In all three countries, education was taken much more seriously than it is in the US, in different ways. One thing they all had in common was the value of rigor. Throughout the book, the subject of rigor, its lack of presence in the US, and its priority as a value in countries with a strong education system are highlighted again and again.
Particularities that are unique to the US are how funding is allocated. The US has more technology in its classrooms than any of the other countries written about, an expense of very debatable merits. The US spends more on sports and has them play a far more central role in schooling than other countries that prioritize education.
In almost every developed country, school funding is tied to need, the poorest districts get more teachers and more funding. In the US, Israel, Turkey, and Slovenia, it is the opposite, more funding goes to wealthier districts, a completely backward approach to resource allocation if equality of opportunity is your aim.
Finland is a notoriously well-educated country. Teaching colleges in Finland are fewer in number and far more selective than in the US, making admission to a teaching college something prestigious, like getting into law school. Because Finnish teachers are so well educated, they are given complete autonomy, even having their own grading system. There are no standardized tests, little homework or busywork, teachers in Finland are experts who can be trusted to develop an effective curriculum.
Students are given autonomy too, with low amounts of homework and breaks between classes where they can spend the time as they wish. Ripley quotes a Finnish student who spent a year studying in the US: “In the U.S., everything was very controlled and supervised. You couldn’t even go to the bathroom without a pass. You had to turn all your homework in, but yet you didn’t really have to think with your own brain or make any decisions of your own.”
Finland spends 30 percent less per student and has 17.5 percent more students graduate from academic or vocational studies than the US.
In Finland, teachers are acutely aware of the expectancy effect and worked to treat all children equally. The US, by contrast, requires by law that teachers think about students differently. Teachers have to be mindful of students’ race and income because they have to report their outcomes to the government. Schools are judged by the test scores of children in different categories. Commenting on the contrast between Finland’s approach and the US, Ripley wrote;
“The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to think that the diversity narrative in the United States—the one that blamed our mediocrity on kids’ backgrounds and neighborhoods—was as toxic as funding inequities. There was a fatalism to the story line… What did it mean if teachers were led to believe that they could only be expected to do so much, and that poverty was usually destiny? It may be human nature to stereotype, but some countries systematically reinforced the instinct, and some countries inhibited it. It was becoming obvious to me that rigor couldn’t exist without equity. Equity was not just a matter of tracking and budgets; it was a mindset.”
Caitlan Flanagan writing in the Atlantic on Private Schools described parents berating teachers for giving their child a bad grade and teachers increasingly feeling pressured to acquiesce to parents’ demands. The pressure is credited to the increased challenges of getting into prestigious Ivy League colleges and unchecked market forces. Schooling is increasingly a business concerned with catering to customers over providing education.
In his book Dream Hoarders, Richard Reeves describes how market forces have come to dominate the US university system in stark contrast to the rest of the world. Writing about the phenomenon of “merit aid” Reeves points out how modest aid packages of partial financial aid are used to attract wealthy students who can pay more in tuition. From a mercenary perspective, it’s more advantageous to a university to provide aid of $5,000 dollars to a student who can pay the other $15,000 than to provide a full scholarship to a more needy student of $20,000. If one only cares about money, it’s obvious the school is out $20,000 in the latter case as opposed to only $5,000.
The prioritization of cost-benefit analysis in education and society at the cost of every other value is perpetuated in part by the training students receive at business schools. The current paradigm is that executive management is a general skill that can be learned and taken to any field. It’s currently believed that the same set of skills used to manage a bank can be used to manage a hospital or a school or a prison. Many of the dystopian realities people ascribe to capitalism are the result of this belief and the application of the same set of mercenary values or lack thereof to all major businesses, from pharmaceutical companies to universities. This is the spirit of Mckinsey.
Richard Feynman, in addition to being a groundbreaking physicist, had passionate ideas about how to learn. He sat for a time on a commission to evaluate textbooks for use in California’s school system. Reminiscent of issues people had decades later when common core mandated a new methodology of learning basic math, Feynman took issue with how math was being taught in that there was more focus on using the right method than getting the right answer. Feynman thought this was completely wrong; the answer is all that matters.
Quoted in the book on his life by James Gleick;
“ We must remove the rigidity of thought… We must leave freedom for the mind to wander about in trying to solve the problems… The successful user of mathematics is practically an inventor of new ways of obtaining answers in given situations. Even if all the ways are well known, it is usually much easier for him to invent his own way-a new way or an old way-than it is to try and find it by looking it up”
In analyzing textbooks, Feynman was horrified at the sheer uselessness of the examples used in the textbooks or outright falseness of the information. In his words, the writers “weren’t smart enough to understand what was meant by ‘rigor’. They were faking it.” An example he gave from a science book is a picture of a wind-up toy, an automobile, and a boy on a bicycle, with a caption asking, “what makes it go”. The answer the textbook gave for all three was “energy makes it go”, which is a nothing answer, providing no information. From a mathematics book, he lamented the uselessness of the exercises, like adding the temperature of two stars together, something that is never called for.
Like John Dewey, Feynman stressed the importance of meaningful activity and educational materials’ relevance to the students’ lives. Rote memorization and an authoritarian approach to a curriculum are antiquated hierarchical methods dating back to the 1800s. Reflecting on the pointless busywork and rote memorization of my childhood education, I can speak from experience to the ineffectiveness of these methodologies and their destructive effect on a child’s natural love of learning.
In real life, there is no problem we face that is divided into discreet subjects. The specificity of education and the decontextualization of subjects from the real world leaves students feeling like the study of history or advanced mathematics has little utility in their lives. It’s more effective to teach Shakespeare if you simultaneously teach the social zeitgeist of his time, the architecture of the theaters, and the scientific and theological understanding of the late 1500s, rather than the study of a decontextualized text among a series of texts in an English class.
Throughout history, innovation has come from a holistic interdisciplinary approach to the world. William James’ tremendous contribution to the field of psychology directly resulted from his education as a medical doctor. When Kant was educated in philosophy, mathematics and physics were seen to be essential components of the study of philosophy. The European philosophers studied in the US are never simply philosophers, they are functionally historians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists; interdisciplinary knowledge and the understanding it affords is necessary to bring novel insights into the world.
The downstream effect of the US approach to education is adults that have credentials who aren’t educated, like the MD who recently claimed vaccines make people magnetic. All over America, every day, we see politicians who don’t know basic facts about nature or read about people like the mobile planetarium operator in Oklahoma who consistently fields questions from people who believe the earth is flat. Rigor is undermined in the American education system from many angles; for mercenary reasons; out of deference to Christian fundamentalists; out of a simple lack of care. Education is not about getting a job. Education is about learning the tools to evaluate the information we are given; being equipped to think and learn for oneself rather than deferring judgment to authorities; being able to adapt to a constantly evolving society.
Democracy depends on a well-educated population that can make informed decisions. As we’ve seen through the pandemic, so does survival.