I am to be a PhD student!!

I just got news this evening that a journey that started around a year and a half ago is ending in my favor. After a long process of looking at PhD programs in education, I just recieved word that I was accepted for admissions by my first choice: the University of Delaware!

UD has one of the top 10 education programs in the country and I am very excited (I anticipate accepting the offer, contingent on financial considerations). I am to study under Dr. David Blacker, who specializes in the philosophy of education (and jurisprudence).

Of course, as in any good drama, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that in these economic times, UD is unable to garauntee funding to all entering grad students, and I will not hear about whether I will be supported for a while (I have no idea how long that is). I don't anticipate a big problem here, but one never knows.

It has been a long and passionate process - from looking at schools and narrowing down choices to filling out the arduous applications - but I feel like it is finally coming to fruition.

I am to be a PhD student in education. This is truly awesome.

Are the SAT's Discriminatory? Yes, and...?

Many educators and education professors have suggested that the SAT is a faulty test because it unfairly discriminates in favor of those who grow up in affluent, book-laden, and educationally rich environments. Against this, John McWhorter has written a recent article arguing, in essence, that throwing out the SAT is " throwing a baby out with the bathwater."

I cannot expand much on the content of McWhorter's wonderful article, but I do want to clarify his argument a little. What McWhorter is really saying, and I agree, is that even if the SAT discriminates in favor of students who know fancy words like "lugubrious" and can do advanced algebra, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this fact. In fact, discriminating between students based on who can handle the material being tested better is basically what tests should do.

The major line of argument against the SAT is that the test discriminates against those who may never have had occasion to learn "college words" or learn advanced math (even if the lack of opportunity was due to no fault of their own). Of course, this begs a question: are students who do not know how to do these things the students who are capable of being in college? As McWhorter points out, "as most of us would suspect[,] mastery of advanced vocabulary is vital to understanding the texts presented to a college student." If a student can't perform to a certain standard on the SAT vocabulary test, then regardless of whether their lack of ability to do so is environmental or not, this student may well not have the requisite knowledge that college demands.

What is unfair about that? It is sometimes argued that penalizing a student with a college-inhibiting low score on the SAT for something that may not have been the student's fault is unfairly discriminatory. (Why deny a student the opportunity at college simply because their parents could not afford private school, books, or tutors?) This is best answered as a question: Are the purpose of college admissions tests (a) tests designed to filter applicants based on their ability to demonstrate desired skills; (b) instruments for administering social justice?

For those who might actually have answered (b), here is a thought experiment. Before becoming a lawyer, every student must take their state's bar exam, testing their readiness to practice law (the same way that every medical student must pass a series of exams before practicing medicine.) As law is highly specialized, the purpose of such tests are to "weed out" the prepared from the unprepared. It would be a catastrophe if we argued - as we do about the SAT - that the tests are unfair because they discriminate against those who might not have had the money to go to a top 100 law school. Even though the tests might discriminate thus, the fact is that the "weeding out" process of the tests is necessary to ensure that only those who are prepared to practice law actually practice law.

The same logic should be applied to the SAT tests. The question is not whether they discriminate (they do), but whether the things it tests are actually those things that are prerequisite for a successful college career. We need to get past the idea that the SAT's are wrong because they discriminate against students (who may have gotten higher scores had they lived in more affluent or academically rich environments). Until that sad day where we make college admissions a tool of social justice, and suggest that mathematic and vocabulary ability is unimportant to predicting college success, then I agree with McWhorter: Long Live the SAT.

Against "practicing without a license"

Below is a review of Stanley Fish's recent book "Save the World on Your Own Time," where he takes the college world to task for getting away from instruction and instilling knowledge and, instead, preaching and instilling preferred values.

I cannot say enough great things about the book and professor Fish's thesis. I am very much in agreement with all but a few minor details. I strongly urge anyone concerned with the proper role of educators to read it.

_________________________________________________________________________

In "Save the World on Your Own Time," former professor and dean Stanley Fish is quite clear on what he wants: "I want a university infected by no one's politics, but by the nitty-gritty obligations of teaching and research." (p. 16) Fish draws on his own experience in academia, as well as the usual highly publicized examples a la Ward Churchill, to argue that the academy is focusing less on teaching and more on preaching. And unlike those like David Horowitz and Dinesh D'Souza, Fish does not simply want to make political discourse by university faculty more "balanced," but to remove it all together. As Fish writes repeatedly, teaching political ideas (how to think about them, the history of them, etc) is different from preaching political ideas.

That the latter is happening on a pretty large scale is not much in dispute. From Ward Churchill being removed from the U of Colorado for comments made after 9/11, to universities taking collective stands on policy issues, to the "speech codes" that several universities have experimented with over the past decade, Fish documents this trend quite well.

But what to do about it? Fish wants us to "return" to the "proper" job of universities: to teach students how to think, rather than what to think. Teach about ideas, rather than endorse ideas. Let's avoid the rhetoric, contra Derek Bok and Martha Nussbaum, about the universities' responsibility to promkote tolerance, democracy, pluralism, or any other value and accept the fact that universities are not in the "making good citizens" business, but in the "making educated citizens" business.

Does this mean that universities should not talk about values, politics, literary ideas, etc? No. "You can probe [a] policy's history,...explore its philosophical lineage... [and] examine its implicaitons... but you can't urge it on your students." (p. 24) Will this make the university stale or self-censorious? Fish offers persuasive reasons to suggest that self-censoring can lead to more excitement. Anyone can offer and talk about their opinioins; it is quite more exciting to show students how to analyze and talk about ideas then it is to opine about them.

Some of Fish's other ideas will doubtless rub some the wrong way. For instance, many people take it as a given that the goal of a university is to promote social justice, democracy, pluralism, multiculturalism, or some other such value (other than the pursuit of truth and knowledge). Fish says no! This is the job of the counselor, clergyman, television pundit, and politician; for an academic to preach values other than pursuit of truth and knowledge is to, in effect, "practice without a license."

Fish even gets into a juicy discussion on the "intelligent design" movement, and argues quite persuasively that the very subordination of pursuing truth to pursuing "democratic pluralistic debate" is what gave rise to this fiasco. Some may think it is a stretch, but Fish is quite convincing in his suggestion that our infatuation with keeping debates as pluralistic as possible has gotten in the way of our asking whether a certain position is true or the opposition worthy. (ID exploits this by focusing less on the "theory's" scientific merits and more on the value of "democratic dialogue.")

My only real complaint about this book is that I was hoping to hear Fish's take on the dilemma caused by professors at once having to take positions in publications (particularly humanities publications) while expecting not to let students find out their biases. (The Ward Churchill incident is a good example, where Churchill seemed very neutral and fair in his classes, but was fired becuase his writings rubbed people the wrong way.) Should we not expect professors to take iconoclastic positions in print for fear that their students might find out? Or is taking strong positions okay, so long as one keeps their research and teaching seperate? I think I know where Fish would come out here, but I was hoping to hear him discuss this very vexing and pertinent topic.

All in all, though, the book was well argued, economically written (176 pp.) and is bound to stir up an academy that needs stirring up.

The Last Professor, or, What Are the Humanities Good For?

Yesterday, Stanley Fish wrote an interesting blog post reviewing a book that's main premise was that that collegiate humanities are dying in favor of more practical and marketable disciplines. In an iconoclastic twist, though, the author of the book does not decry this trend, but simply speaks of its inevitability as universities rightly become more pragmatically career-focused. Gone are the days where "healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting." Today, universities focus on career preparation.

No one with use of their senses disputes the factual accuracy of this trend, so the only question left is whether the trend is desirable. Should schools focus on personal cultivation or career preparation? Should the proper end of a university education achieve well-roundedness or a marketable skill? (As a high-school teacher, I do not limit the question simply to higher education, but also to K-12 education at large.)

In all honesty, I am of mixed opinion on this score. In the end, though, I think the situation must be left up to the market and individual consensus. Put simply, education should do what individuals who pay for it want it to do, and what will see the best 'return' (whether social or economic) on its investment.

Per the author of the book which Fish reviews, I think the public has largely spoken as to what it wants to see from university education. Humanities departments are declining and fewer students are choosing humanities-based majors (largely because they are realizing that there are few jobs for philosophers and literature majors). None of the ten most popular majors (as measured by CNN) are "humanities disciplines," but more employable areas like biology, education, and marketing.

While it can always be debated as to whether this trend is desirable, the question this begs is: "Desirable to whom?" Since universities must compete for funding from prospective students and businesses (who can "shop around" for where to spend their money), universities must cater to the desires of those in a position to give them money. Both of these groups of consumers have decided that focusing on employability and creating graduates that can get good jobs provides a better return on their investment than would focusing on creating "well rounded" students who can appraise poetry as well as business finances.

So, in a market economy, where the universities must cater towards the desires of willing consumers, whether the decline of the humanities is desirable to professors, academics, social theorists, or anyone not a consumer is somewhat irrelevant. As long as universities offer a service to paying customers, they must cater first-and-foremost to those customers' expectations.

A different story exists, of course, with regard to K-12 education, which does not function primarily in the market model. Here, education is the domain of the state and, while one can choose to pay for private education, the majority of students receive "free" education at tax-payer expense. Thus, the tax-payers and their representatives are the ones who decide what schools should do.

I have no statistics on this point, but recall hearing of several surveys which suggest that taxpayers expect schools to raise citizens first, and potential workers second. This makes sense because the historic rationale for public education seems always to have been that informed citizens capable of participating in civic activities need to be taught the art of thinking and appropriate mores (this at least, according to founders like Jefferson, Madison, and Washington). This is also evidenced by the relatively modern additions of subjects like math and science into the curricula, compared with subjects like civics and literature.

As a high school teacher, however, I think that the goals of producing "well rounded" students as well as future workers are not mutually exclusive. It is true that over-focus on one can only be done at the expense of the other, but there is no reason these cannot be done simultaneously as well as in complimentary ways.

In order to see this, though, we have to give up on any idea that there is any single purpose to education. Different subjects have different purposes; while algebra and technology education may prepare students to enter the workforce, literature and civics prepare students to be good citizens and people. I do not see any reason why these subjects cannot have different purposes yet coexist peacefully (and the only people who seem to think they can't are committed partisans like scientists and humanities professors).

Producing "well rounded" citizens as well as future members of the workforce not only can, but should, be done conjointly in K-12 education. While colleges can afford to be more specialized than K-12 - and thus more narrowly focus the scope of its curricula, K-12 education must retain a broad focus. As it educates everyone, including the many students who will not go on to college, it must raise both whole individuals and well-prepared workers. For students not going on to college, it is equally unjust to raise good, but unemployable, citizens as to raise good, but not "well rounded," workers. Thus, I cannot see the logic in any suggestion that the "main goal" of K-12 education be in one of these areas at the neglect of the other. Not only can K-12 education focus on both "well roundedness" and employ ability without conflict, but they should continue to do so.

As dodgy as my answer may seem, I simply don't think that the "liberal arts v. college prep" question has any good final answer, other than to say that it is continuously up to the "consumers" to decide and redecide the question. At the university level, this is easy to do because it fits the market model and, as such, must compete for business by offering what customers want. K-12 is stickier because schools do not directly compete with other schools for money, but the question can be answered by parents telling the school system what they want to see (as long as policy-makers care enough to listen).

As a lover of the humanities, I am very sad that I have to agree with the author of the book Stanley Fish reviews: whether or not we like it, the humanities are gradually dying at the collegiate level. I am comforted, though, by the belief that those who love the humanities will find a way to keep them alive without the help of universities. I know I will.