By's Musings

Reading

By 2 Comments

Education’s Big Lie, Part I: Introduction

I don’t know how to say it any clearer. I have come to the shocking conclusion that the enterprise of American education is doing society a huge disservice by propagating and perpetuating a big lie. Please do not misinterpret what I am attempting to say in this essay. I am firmly convinced that education is immensely valuable. Paraphrasing a credit card commercial campaign, it is “priceless.” For more than 65 years, my life has revolved around faith, education, and family. I am fully committed to the concept of an appropriate education for everyone. However, I am also very certain that education, as it is currently conceived and generally defined, doesn’t and can’t serve everyone equally well. To paraphrase a television commercial for a particular internet service, “Education that doesn’t serve everyone, doesn’t serve anyone.” The simplest statement of Education’s Big Lie is Procrustes’s aphorism “one size fits all.”

Caricature from 19th century German satirical magazine “Berliner Wespen” (Berlin Wasps) – Title: Procrustes. Caption: Bismarck: As I see, Lady Liberty is somewhat too large – we want to change this immediately to her contention. (He chops away her legs.) – Inscription on bed: Socialist Law. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; in Public Domain

By “one size fits all” I am surprisingly not referring to either standardized testing or the Common Core. Both of these educational fads have their good and bad points. I will explicate my views on each of them in later posts. For this post, I return to a fuller statement of my understanding of the Big Lie plaguing the American educational enterprise. The reality to which I am referring is that the American educational enterprise has pigeon-holed the mental characteristics of creativity, imagination, intelligence, curiosity, ingenuity, reasoning, and problem-solving primarily if not exclusively to the verbal region of the human brain. The Big Lie equates these characteristics with one’s facility with words. Many if not most of the instruments used to measure these mental characteristics are primarily verbally based. To improve their abilities in the areas delineated above, students are instructed to read, write, and speak more.

So many books, so little time! Illustration courtesy of Presenter Media

 

If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again! Draft; after draft! Illustration courtesy of Presenter Media

Why? Why did the teacher call on me? I don’t know the answer! Image courtesy of Presenter Media

This solution may work for many and possibly the majority of students. However, the problem with this remedy is that for a significant number of students words are more like enemies than friends. Words are at the crux of my argument against education. Ideas are considered the coin of the realm in education. For centuries in education, we have been indoctrinated to believe that ideas are formulated almost exclusively through words.  After ideas are formed, we must then use words to express those ideas, either in written or oral form. We are taught that to think properly we must use a process that is based in and undergirded by the use of words. This process is commonly known as verbal thinking. I grew up with that mindset. In this mindset, words are the cornerstone upon which we build our ideas.

Ideas are built upon a foundation of words, phrases, and sentences. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

This was the way I was taught. It is the way most of our American society has been taught for hundreds of years. I am going out on a limb now and say that this is not the only way we think or must think. It took two traumatic brain incidents (TBI’s) in 2009 to convince me that there are other ways to think.  The first TBI was the implosion of a benign meningioma due to the explosion of the artery which was feeding it. This TBI left me with a mild case of aphasia. As a verbal thinker, I found it difficult to think when I couldn’t find my beloved words.

The second TBI was a series of four tonic-clonic seizures within 30 minutes that left me in a coma for three days. When I woke up, I knew immediately something was different. I found myself no longer going directly to words to make sense of what was going on around me. I saw pictures. At first, I wasn’t certain what had happened. As I reflected on what was happening, I remember several articles that I had read that were written by stroke survivors. I was having the same experiences that they had encountered. I had become a visual thinker.

After 60 years of being a poster child for verbal thinking, words were now my second thought language, Although I was thinking in terms of pictures, I found that it was necessary for me to use words to communicate my ideas. This was extremely frustrating at times. I attempted to describe my feelings in a 2010 blog posting entitled Words Are More Like Cats Than Dogs.

Sometimes corraling words can be harder than herding cats. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Where am I going with this argument? For centuries in educational circles, words have been king.

I am WORD! I have the final say. You must listen to me! Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

A recent Google+ posting The Importance of Imagination by Elaine Roberts, a former colleague, induced me to write this series of posts. In her posting, Roberts described a situation that led her to an epiphany and two points of clarity. The situation grew out of an attempt by a teacher to test or evaluate the creativity of a class of sixth graders. This teachers’ attempt was not a standardized test. It was a writing assignment. Most educators would label this assignment as an authentic assessment instrument. The teacher gave the children the following set of instructions:

Okay. Students, your assignment is very simple. Just write me a story about anything. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

What do I imagine some of the students heard? “Blah, Blah, Blah!”

Blah, Blah,Blah. I don’t understand what this teacher wants us to do. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Even though they had previously been given a template to use in writing stories, what were the first thoughts of some students about constructing a story? I think they probably drew a blank.

“The teacher wants us to write a story. What am I going to do? How can I write a story? I don’t know what to write about.” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Taking literary license with this scenario, what did I imagine this student wanted to turn into the teacher? Simply, a blank piece of paper.

How can I write anything, if I don’t know what I should be writing about? Image courtesy of Presenter Media

What do I think the teacher’s response to a blank piece of paper woul be? Most likely, he would have said to himself, “What is wrong with this student? The wiring in his head must be all tangled up.” Now the shoe is on the other foot. The teacher doesn’t know what the student is trying to say.

“What’s up with this mixed up student? The instructions were so easy. How could not understand them? How could you turn in a blank piece of paper?” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

With respect to the spread of the Big Lie, I readily admit that my hands are not entirely clean. Prior to 2009, as I noted above, I could have been considered a poster child for verbal thinking and verbal learning. In all of my recollections of my earliest childhood, I was constantly immersed in books and words.  At the age of five, I won a Sunday School contest for being the first primary student (Grades K through 6) during the new church year to recite 100 selected verses by memory.

Yipee! I did it. I was the first to recite all 100 verses by memory.

As an academic professional, I made my living off words. Even as a mathematician, my training, and education were dominated by words. As an instructor, I constantly fed my students words.

“Okay class, who can explain Zorn’s Lemma and what is it’s relationship to the Well-Ordering Principle?” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

 

As an administrator, I used words to defend positions and try to persuade colleagues to follow my lead.

Colleagues, I know the message I bring to you today at this faculty meeting will not be pleasant to hear. I want you to know that it is hard for me to have to deliver it to you. However, we are facing a huge budget deficit. I have two proposed solutions. Neither of them will be without pain. But I am bringing them to you today, to get your reactions and suggestions.” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

With what I have written so far, I should probably call it quits for this first post in this series. If I haven’t done enough to damage my image and credibility within the higher education community, I invite you to stay tuned for additional posts. Although it has been difficult at times, I have learned that we can think without words. In fact, I have subtitled Part II of the series Education’s Big Lie, “We Can Think without Words.” Even though we give lip service to the idea that “A picture is worth a thousand words”, in much of today’s world, particularly those parts of it touching the education enterprise, the most difficult aspect of working with thoughts and ideas is trying to communicate them without words.

 

By 2 Comments

Weeping over Books

Yesterday was a hard day as My wife and I prepared to down size and pack to move to be closer to our family. We went through about half of my library and we culled over two hundred books that we are donating to our local library instead of packing and moving them 600 miles to have them set in a storage unit since we won’t have room in our new apartment for the book cases needed to hold all of my books. As I held each book, I recalled why I had the book and what it meant to me when I first read it. Some of them almost brought tears to my eyes. I know some of you would be surprised to know what books I kept and what books I decided to donate. I kept several books about the Dodgers who have always been my favorite baseball team. Of course they were “da bums” of Brooklyn when I started rooting for them. However, I donated the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Ibsen. The stories of Duke Snider and the other boys of summer were important to me growing up in ways that other people wouldn’t understand. However, Poe and Ibsen can be of more help to others right now if they would take the time and make the effort to read them.

By Leave a Comment

Reading through the Week–Part I: Introduction

In the January 2012 issue of Christianity Today Alan Jacobs, Professor of English at Wheaton College and author of the recently released Oxford University Press book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, is interviewed by John Wilson, the Books and Culture editor for CT. The title of the interview “Don’t Worry, Read Happy” is a light hearted attempt to encourage CT readers to expand their horizons for reading beyond work related assignments and to read for enjoyment. The subtitle of the interview, “Stop Fretting Over What You Need to Know, and Enjoy Those Books that Bring Delight,” is a quote from Jacobs that interviewer Wilson culled from the interview.

As I read the interview, I was reminded of two of my previous blog postings that I entitled, “Relief through Reading.” I went back to look at them. I was extremely surprised that it has been almost a year since I published those posts. As far as my reading for the past year, it has definitely been up and down. I have been able to read a few books for what one could the sheer enjoyment of it. However, most of my reading has been focused on my writing projects.

The title of one book, The Curious Incident of the Upside Down Dog, might suggest light reading. It was anything but light reading. It was a bio-novel, written from the perspective of a young adolescent boy suffering with Asperger Syndrome who discovers his neighbor’s pet dog killed in her backyard. Since the neighbor finds him with the dog and “she considers him strange,” she accuses him of killing her pet. Since the boy loved the dog and wanted to prove his innocence and find the real culprit, he begins an involved search for the real perpetrator. As the boy delves deeper and deeper into this mystery, we are drawn into the mind of an autistic youth, the inner workings of two dysfunctional families, the awful truths from which both parents and neighbors tried to insulate this innocent autistic boy, and the boy’s herculean efforts to find that truth, no matter what it meant for him and his family.

I selected this book because I knew from the advertisements it dealt with Asperger Syndrome supposedly written from the inside. Since much of my writing has attempted to write about difficulties from the inside of those difficulties, the first reason I selected this book was to get another example of how this type of writing might be done, definitely not reading for the pleasure of entertainment.

The second reason for selecting this book was because of an essay that I wrote more than two years ago, but have not yet published. In that essay, I suggest the behavior of many college and university faculty members was consistent with the behavior of autistic adults. I was hoping I could glean some guidance from this book on how to write about abnormal behaviors without criticizing those individuals for behaviors that were beyond their control.

I must admit that I didn’t get everything that I wanted from the book. It was a polemic about how adults treated this boy. The best message that I could take away from the book was that college administrators have a great responsibility to monitor, hold themselves and faculty members accountable for their behavior, and assist faculty members when they seem to be straying from acceptable behavioral norms.

I started this posting with the idea of writing another light encouragement to read. However I started to approach this in a manner that went against the advice of Professor Jacobs. My first idea was to suggest a reading plan that hit each day of the week. I was working on this idea even before I saw the Jacobs interview in CT.

In “Reading Through the Week, Part II, I will outline the reading plan that I developed for me. It is a plan that includes 7 books that contain the names of the days of the week. This book list is not for everyone. It was a plan and a book list to which I was attracted. I learned something from each of the books. I found some of the books to be a challenging read. Each of the books brought me enjoyment at some point during the reading. I found this exercise has helped me to return to an activity that I enjoyed during my childhood, reading for reading’s sake and not just to complete an assignment.

By 3 Comments

Living in a metaphoric world and trying to communicate with the academy

I found two articles published this past July very significant and helpful. The first was an article in the Epilepsy Advocate magazine about Chris M., a minister and author, who found he was thinking and writing differently after the onset of epilepsy. The article may be found at http://www.epilepsyadvocate.com/default.aspx. The second article was a Chronicle of Higher Education review by Carlin Romano  entitled “What’s a Metaphor For?” which can be found at http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-a-Metaphor-For-/128079/

Why were these two articles significant for me?  After two traumatic brain incidents (TBIs )left me essentially able to think only metaphorically and unable to think analytically, sequentially or deductively, I have found it extremely difficult to communicate with the academy. This has been very difficult for me because the academy was my life for 40 years.

In March 2009, I had  brain surgery to remove a benign tumor which was discovered when I had a stroke-like event (first TBI). When I regained consciousness in the hospital after the surgery, I immediately realized something was different. I couldn’t find the right words to complete thoughts. I knew what I was trying to say but the best word to express my thoughts would not come to my mind.  I also had trouble following what other people were saying or writing. My speech therapist called the condition aphasia (loss of words). After 9 months of intensive therapy, I got to the point where usually I was the only person who realized that I was having trouble with words.

In December 2009, I had four conic-tonic seizures within a 30 minute time span (second TBI), which my neurologists blamed either on the stroke-like event or the scar tissue left from the removal of the benign tumor. When I regained consciousness in the hospital three days after the seizures, I immediately knew something else was very different.

I knew my ability to think analytically, sequentially or deductively had been severely compromised. Prior to the first TBI, I would try to think everything through analytically. After the seizures, my first reaction to any situation, problem or question was to draw a mental picture, i.e., devise a metaphor. What’s the difference? The battle between thinking analytically and metaphorically is like living in two different worlds or looking down two very different sides of the same mountain.  For 40 years, I lived in an analytic world. However, now I was living in a metaphoric world. In such a world I found that I could not rigorously define metaphor. The best I could do was to describe it using more metaphors. Notice in my account above, to describe what was going on in my mind, I had to use a metaphor. Another discovery is that even the best metaphor may not completely satisfy the need for the rigor of those living in the analytic world.

Having lived in both worlds, I found it easier to understand someone living in the metaphoric world when I was in the analytic world, than vice versa. This insight reminded me of the episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation, entitled “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” In this episode the Enterprise Crew was working on trying to understand messages from the alien world of the Tamarians. The Star Trek universal translators could translate the words but the words make no sense to the Star Trek crew. Finally Dathon, the leader of the Tamarians, kidnaps Picard and strands the two of them on the planet El-Adrel together with a common foe. When Dathon tosses Picard a dagger, several of the Star Trek crew members suggest that this is a hostile act. It is not until later when Picard and Dathon are attacked by a third hostile alien that Picard understands that the dagger was an invitation to cooperate and jointly fight this new enemy. Although Dathon is killed in the fight, the humans and the Tamarians see that they can cooperate. It is only when the Tamarians start referring to this event as Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel, does the Star Trek crew understand that the other phrases the Tamarians were using were actually  metaphors that referred to important events in their history. Thus, even though the Tamarians never could understand the straight-forward explanations the humans offered for events,  the two groups were able to communicate and understand each other through metaphors, because the Star Trek crew started using metaphors.

As I contemplate a limited future within the academy, the two articles mentioned above have given me some new hope that I can find a few good friends who will be willing to work with me so we can translate each other’s language so that both groups will be enriched.

By 3 Comments

General Education and Turf Wars

The National Endowment for the Humanities begin their booklet “50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students” with a quote by Mark Van Doren from Liberal Education: “The one intolerable thing in education is the absence of ntellectual design.” I find this ironic in that the curriculum outlined in the booklet and the process used by most institutions to arrive at their general education is a process of turf wars. I find almost nothing intellectual in turf wars. In turf wars, the largest, most powerful departments will win almost every time.

I remember the process of redesigning the general education at one institution. At this institution the general education was listed as 48 hours. As we surveyed the faculty, it was their over-whelming conclusion that 48 hours was too large. Why? Because this didn’t give students enough room to complete a degree in many disciplines within the normal four-year path to a degree of 120 hours. How is this possible? Many majors specified courses in other disciplines as requirements within their discipline. When you counted these courses and the required prerequisites for these courses, the total number of required hours for the average major was well over 90 hours. For example, the psychology major required a course in statistics. But the mathematics department required a course in Fundamentals of Mathematics as a prerequisite for statistics which was different from the general education course that was entitled Quantitative Reasoning. Thus the typical psychology major had to take 9 hours of courses from the mathematics department. In another area, the psychology major required a two semester sequence in anatomy and physiology (8 hours since these were lab courses), but the biology department required a 4-hour prerequisite to these courses that was entitled Introduction to Human Science that was different from the 4-hour lab science general education requirement entitled Introduction to Life Science. Thus, a psychology major would graduate with 16 hours of biology courses. How could the mathematics and biology departments have this much effect on psychology requirements? Because the courses in question were in their turf and they were the best judges of what was needed.

You should have heard the cries of distress and the weeping and wailing when I strongly suggested that we cut back the average number of required hours by 20 hours. I was decimating majors. Graduates would never get into graduate schools. So where did the faculty find hours to cut? They agreed to limit the number of hours required for a major to 78 unless there was an outside accrediting agency requiring more. Although, in the first survey of the faculty they said that students needed more foreign languages, then they cut out entirely the general education 9 hour requirement in a foreign language, but added a new 3-hour course in cross-cultural communications. They cut the 12-hour requirement of sequences in both United States and World Civilization and added a new 4-hour required course in Western Civilization. How could the faculty make these changes? The Foreign Language Department and the History Departments were not members of large enough voting blocs to get the votes they needed to stay in as part of the general education.

These days were out and out turf wars. Intellect and intelligence were not very visible anywhere. It was a matter of who had the votes or what treaties you could make to get the votes. Who said there is no politics in education?

By Leave a Comment

Students Are Paid To Not Attend College

The Chronicle of Higher Education posted an e-version of an article written by Ben WIeder, entitled Thiel Fellowship Pays 24 Talented Students $100,000 Not to Attend College. The Thiel in the title is Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal. The $100,000 Fellowships are meant to encourage 24 very talented students to spend two years developing their business ideas instead.  The whole idea has created a stir in higher education circles.

The whole article may be found at http://chronicle.com/article/Thiel-Fellowship-Pays-24/127622/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

One of the fellowship winners highlighted in the article is Jim Danielson, who was an electrical-engineering student at Purdue. Mr Danielson is quoted as saying he “learned more about his field on his own than in the classroom.”

This comment from Mr. Daniels  reminded me of a portion of Mike Rose’s story, that he tells in his autobiographic book “Lives on the Boundary.” Mr. Rose’s related an incident from his graduate education in creative writing when he became overwhelmed with hour after hours, day after days of studying in the UCLA library, reading essay after essay about the poems they were reading in class. He finally gathered up all his courage and went to see the chairman of the creative writing program. Mr. Rose told the chair that we was learning more about the poems they were reading and studying in class by writing his own poetry. The chair shook his head,smiled and said in effect, “That’s not the way we study poetry here.”  Some institutions will permit and encourage students to learn by doing, others do everything they can to discourage that type of learning activity.

I find this ironic since Aristotle said all free men should be educated in the three forms of knowledge, theorica, poeises and praxis. Theorica was the reflective contemplation of knowledge received through all of our senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching); poeises was the production of objects of value (such as writing poems or painting a picture–poeises is the word from which we get our word poetry); praxis was learning by doing (praxis is the word from which we get our word practice – More than once people have said the only way to learn to teach is to teach, and that you really never learn medicine until you practice medicine.) It seems that poeises and praxis are both learning by doing. What’s the difference? I believe the primary difference is that the goal of poeises is to produce a product of value. It is to create an inanimate object of value; while the goal of praxis to enable the individual to affect changes in people whether oneself or others.

In many of our institutions, particularly liberal arts institutions, the primary, if not the only emphasis, seems to be on theorica. We also tend to restrict our sensory intake to seeing and hearing.  In Ancient Greece, the full orbed theorica was held up as the pinnacle of knowledge. However, beyond a rudimentary introduction to it, further study in  it  was reserved only for superior students, the best of the best. Does this have any implications for our higher education system of today?