Why Don't Students Like School (A review of Willinham's fantastic new book)

A new book by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has come out entitled Why Don't Students LIke School? I am generally skeptical of books claiming to take the latest brain/mind research and apply it to education primarily because of the "brain based ways of learning" fad promulgated by motivational speaker Eric Jensen (and preached unquestionably in professional developments). I picked this kone up, though, primarily due to a blurb on the back of the book by education theorist ED Hirsch, who I very strongly admire. Surely, any book Hirsch reccomends is at least worth a shot.

I was right. This book is fabulous in its 'back to basics' approach. Willingham's main point seems to be that the best way to increase a child's ability is repitition, repitition, repitition. By increasing the number of facts a child can recall automatically, one increases the amount of 'free space' a child has available to think. [ex.: (3+4) - (2-1) is a lot easier when one can recall the math facts automatically.]

Anyway, I strongly, strongly reccomend this book to all concerned with education theory. I hope this book gets used within the schools, but suspect that Jensen will be the continued drug of choice, as his theory manages, unlike Willinham's, to confirm all the constructivist impulses that educators have been in love with for the last 20 years.

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If you are a teacher, like myself, you have doubtless been inundated by advice about teaching to multiple intelligences, active (rather than passive) learning, teaching students to think rather than memorize facts, etc. If so, then you can't afford to pass up this book, which will provide a very helpful guide as to why some of these well-intentioned ideas are wrong, and what it means for you as a teacher.

Dan Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? is a book applying findings of cognitive psychology to the world of education. Sound a lot like Eric Jensen and his wildly popular book Teaching With the Brain in Mind? Well, unlike Jensen - who educators hear a lot about - Willingham is a PhD in cognitive psychology (while Jensen, who has a bachelors in English, is "working towards" a PhD from an online university, while making his real living as a motivational speaker). Long and short: Willingham is the real deal and I move to suggest that this book infinitely deserves more popularity amongst educators than anything Jensen has written.

Willingham's basic theme is that, despite everything you've heard, nothing works to increase student ability like factual learning and practice. In fact, one of his first ideas is to point out that what seperates the excellent student (or adult) from those performing less well is their ability to recall facts. The more facts you know about your subject, the more you can understand your subject because of significantly less energy spent on fact recall or retention. With facts learned to automaticity, more time can be spent on higher-order concept learning, and once that becomes automatic....etc.

While that may sound mundane, think of how many times you as a teacher have heard the idea of "rote memorization" and "regurgitation of fact" denegrated. Of course, Willingham is not advocating the strawman position that teachers do nothing but drill, drill, drill and enforce memorization of text passages. (No one actually holds that position!) What he reminds us, though, is that the critical thinking we hear so much about teaching our kids simply CANNOT happen without giving kids the requisite background info that must be employed to think critically. (One cannot critically reflect on whether the revolutionary war was justified without some big factual understanding of Colonial American and Empirial Britian, for example.)

Another big idea in educaiton that Willingham works to dispel is the idea that we all have different learning styles - auditory, visual, kinesthetic, etc. Cognitive science, in fact, has shown the opposite: with minor variation, we all learn very similarly. While I may have a better memory for visual phemonena than you (who may be better at remembering sounds), we remember IDEAS not through the media in which they were delivered, but by...thinking about them. When memorizing words and definitions, we are not being asked to memorize sounds or visuals, but ideas, and the fact that I am an auditory or visual learner does nothing to predict what presentation method will help me memorize the best. (The amount I studied, of course, will.)

I don't want to give the impression that Willingham's book is about bashing education icons and maxims. It is not It is a book for teachers designed to bring up ideas we may not have thought about, and to suggest how to apply these ideas to our classrooms. Each chapter is focused around a question ("Is Drilling Worth It?" "Why is it So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?") and gives a detailed, but engaging, answer. At the end of each chapter, the author makes several concrete suggestions for how the answer can shape how we teach as well as reccomendations for further readings.

All in all, this is one of the single best education books I have read, and cannot wait to share it with fellow educators. As mentioned, I sincerely hope that this book becomes as widely devoured as those by Eric Jensen and Howard Gardner. Willingham offers a valuable and very constructive counterpoint, especially to Jensen's "brain based ways of learning."

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Anyone looking for more can visit Willingham's website, where there are plenty of good articles and videos.

The Narcissism Epidemic (book review)

There is a fabulous new book by Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell entitled The Narcissism Epidemic. Twenge's previous book studied the rise in narcissistic values in today's teenagers and twenty-somethings, where this book studies this distrubring trend as applied to all age groups.

While reading this, I could not help thinking about many of my students, from the girl who will not hesitate to talk about how hot she is while insulting other students like its nothing, to the student I work with who has behavioral problems (that many teacehrs erroneously beleive stem from poor self-esteem rather than an inflated ego). I would not only reccomend this book to all concerned citizens, but particularly to educators.

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"Narcissism is the fast food of the soul. It tastes great in the short term, has negative, even dire, consequences in the long term, and yet continues to have widespread appeal." (p. 259)

For all intents and purposes, The Narcissism Epidemic is something of a sequel to Jean Twenge's previous book, Generation Me. Wheras that book focused on the younger generation's (and gen y's) increase in narcissistic behavior, this book focuses on the same trend as a nation- and worldwide phenomenon. From our ever-increasing obsession with fawning over the lives of the rich and glamorous (Real Housewives of Orange County, anyone?) to our rampant consumerism, this book tells the tale of a nation in a very strange state of decline. In a sense, we are loving ourselves to death.

The first few chapters start off with the hard numbers. Twenge and Campbell have administered, and chased down, several experimental studies which demonstrate a very clear trend towards a more narcissistic attitude in the population. Young people list "being famous" as an important life goal far more frequently than their predecessors, the rise of platic surgery has increased FIVEFOLD in the past ten years (which COULD be explained by the fact that it has become more affordable, but the increase is so large that this explanation is unlikely to be the MAIN one). More and more newspaper articles and tv shows focus on narcissistic themes than in years past. Infintitely more people, when given the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, yield results consistent with narcissism than in years past. In other words, the rise in narcissism is thoroughly documented here.

From here, our authors talk about everything from whether narcissists tend to suffer from low self-esteem (quite the opposite, as many self-help gurus and educators have yet to figure out), whether narcissism helps one get ahead in life (only if you are a entertainer, it seems), and whether narcissism has its root cause in the well-intentioned self-esteem mmovement of the seventies and eightgies (you betcha!).

As an educator myself, this last point was one of the most fascinating for me. While students today often do not think twice about cheating, disrespecting teacher and peers, or expecting grades without doing the work, we continue to mistakenly believe the problem to be low, rather than way too high, self-esteem. All the while, Twenge and Campell are careful to distance themselves from the view that we should NOT praise our kids or ignore their self-esteem, which is far from what they are saying. They are simply pleading for moderation. Praising a child's virtues is different from overpraising their every move. The authors use the obsesity analogy: just as recognizers of the obesity epidemic do not want us to stop eating, but only eat in moderation, recognizers of the narcissism epidemic are only suggesting that we praise in moderation (while also encouraging hard work) rather than going overboard like we have been.

There are also some timely chapters on how narcissim played a key role in the 2008/2009 recession. While everyone is quick to blame the banks, consumers, and the government, we seem squeamish about criticizing what the three groups had in common: unbounded and irrational greed! Consumers were buying houses and things they did not need so as to satisfy increasing desires to live high on the hog (without having to earn it). Banks focused on quick profits rather than prudent investments in their willingness to dupe consumers into predatory loans. The government just wanted to see everyone own a house (which somehow became a right rather than a privilege to be earned). Twenge and Campbell do a great job in showing that for each group, the culprit was greed, narcissism, and a belief that everyone could have everything without having to (as in years past) exercise hard work and prudence.

But how to stop these trends? Unlike the previous book, Generation Me, the Narcissism Epidemic focuses many of its pages to offering suggestions on how we get out of this dizzying mire of narcissism. Most chapters conclude with a section called "Treatment for the Epidemic" and the last sixth of the book is made up of chapters offering "Prognosis and Treatment." Some suggestions are - or should be! - quite commonsensical: teach your children prudence, work-ethic, and that it is not always about them, regulate the credit industry, teach prudence and humility in school, participate, and encourage others to participate, in social clubs that nurture a sense of community. Some are interesting but quite fantastic: tone down the fevered pitch of product advertising, make "less is more" a new societal catchprase, tax luxury items more heavily (as a libertarian, I am not a great fan of government regulation.)

[One suggestion that Twenge and Campbell infuriatingly left off the list is to let irresponsible spenders feel the full consequences of their action. As it stands now, the government is doing the opposite by penalizing those not in debt by forcing them to "bail out" those who are. Message: narcissists are more important and deserving than the average Joe.]

Whereas I gave Twenge's earlier book a three star review, I am giving this book five stars. Unlike the previous book, this book was more cohesive, well-documented, and contained focus not only on the problem but on possible ways out. As an educator, I urge every parent and educator to read this book so that we can see exactly what the misguided self-esteem movement has led to. As a citizen I urge everyone to read this book to get a sense for the import of narcissistic values and how they threaten to make a great country significantly worse.

How Can Smart People Do Dumb Things? (Dysrationalia?)

Below is a review I recently wrote about a book called "What Intelligence Tests Miss." The author's argument is that while IQ is a valid concept, basing estimations of intelligence on it alone overlooks an equally valid concept of rationality. As we all know, "book smarts" and "street smarts" do not seem positvely correlated (one can have a high amount of one with a low amount of the other.)

As an educator, it is frustrating because I often feel (a) that the idea of IQ is unjustly inflated and does not give the whole story; and (b) alternatives like Gardner's "multiple intelligence theory" are more politically and socially good-sounding than they are scientifically valid.

Stanovich, I think, offers an interesting "middle view." I would love to see his ideas fleshed out a little more.

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We are all familiar with the phenomenon of those who have high IQ's doing things that seem stupid. This leads to the distinction between "book smarts" and "street smarts," but strangely enough, we call BOTH of these things intelligence. We recognize both the absent-minded professor and the low IQed entrepreneur as "intelligent." How, though, can the term "intelligence" apply to two seemingly non-correlated things (being book-smart and street-smart)?

Psychologist Keith Stanovich has an interesting idea: maybe "intelligence tests" measure intelligence (as traditionally defined) but not a wholly different faculty of rationality. To Stanovich, the difference between intelligence and rationality is the difference between the "algorithmic mind" and the "reflective mind," or, the difference between the ability to employ algorithms and the ability to think about and CRITICALLY employ algorithms. (I might say that intelligence may be the ability to map or write a sentence and rationality is the ability to formulate arguments and write a persuasive essay.)

The first half of Stanovich's book is dedicated to showing that while IQ tests are a valid measure of a faculty of general intelligence (he does not deny that IQ tests measure a very real thing), it simply does not measure all that we understand to be good thinking.

Stanovich, though, is also a critic of those like Gardner and Sternberg who want to add to the number of "intelligences" (musical intelligence, naturalistic intelligence, creative intelligence). These things, he says, inadvertently beatify the term "intelligence" to be a be-all-end-all that it is not (by implying that any good mental work must be called an "intelligence" rather than a "talent," "skill" or "proclivity.") Instead, Stanovich makes the point that intelligence is simply one component of good thinking. The other, often overlooked, ingredient is rationality (and he alludes to several studies which show these two faculties are not very positively correlated. One can have high amounts of one and low amounts of the other.)

What I thought and hoped Stanovich would do next - what he did not do - is offer a sense of how we can test for RQ (rationality quotient). While the first half makes the case very well that rationality should be valued and tested every bit as much as intelligence, he does not follow it up by showing how such a thing might be done.

Instead, Stanovich devotes the second half of this book largely to cataloguing and demonstrating "thinking errors" that distinguish rational from irrational thought. For example, humans are "cognitive misers" by nature, who like to make decisions based often on first judgments and quick (rather than thorough) analysis (a likely evolutionary strategy, as ancestors that were quick and somewhat accurate probably did better than those who were slow and very accurate). Also, humans often put more emphasis on verification than falsification, and fail to consider alternative hypotheses in problems, preferring often to go with the most obvious answer.

All of these, while interesting, have been better and more thoroughly documented in other books by decision theorists and psychologists. All Stanovich needed to do was refer us to these, at most, devoting a chapter or two to examples. There is more important work for Stanovich to do then rehash what we can just as soon read elsewhere. Instead, I think he sh old have begun outlining ideas on how to test for rationality. What would such tests look like? How would such tests affect our educational system (focused, as it is, on IQ)? What would test questions even look like and how can they be adjusted for by age/grade level? Are there pitfalls?

None of these questions were answered, and Stanovich's argument is the worse for it. Stanovich himself notes that one big reason for IQ's predominance in the psychometric world is that it is measurable (which is a big strike against many of Gardner's "multiple intelligences"). Ironically, Stanovich's failure to suggest ways to measure RQ will likely have the same effect for his idea as it had for Gardner's.

It is a shame, though. As an educator concerned both with the undeserved predominance of IQ and also the failure of concepts such as Gardner's "multiple intelligence" to offer a serious challenge, I quite like Stanovich's germinal idea. As we all know that rationality is a key component to good thinking, and it is hard to think that it is positively correlated to IQ, it would be interesting to find a way to measure RQ as a valid supplement to IQ. It is simply too bad this book did not explore the practical questions involved with his tantalizing suggestion.

Interestting, if only in theory (Review of Adler's "Paideia Proposal")

Here is a book review I wrote for philosopher Mortimer Adler's "Paideia Proposal," - a conservative work arguing for education reform. Adler is somewhat of a critic of "progressive educaiton" and advocates for a more "liberal arts" type of k-12 educaiton. For those unfamilar, Adler was also a vocal advocate of educating with the "great books" of the Western canon.

I agree with some of Adler's ideas about restoring rigor and discipline into educaiton, but I disagree with his very monolithic "one size fits all" approach, as well as his view that k-12 education should not utilize electives or vocational training. Even though I dislike many excesses of "progressive education," I see much value in a utlitarian approach to education that sees education for what W. James might call its "cash value" to students, rather than as an end in itself (which it can be to many, but will not likely be to all). In other words, Adler treats all students as if they are "bookish," managing to suggest that those who are not simply need to be molded to be so.

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Mortimer Adler's "Paideia Proposal," ("paideia" means "education" in Greek) is a book which intends to offer a stern antidote to many "progressive" ideas in education. One might call Adler an educational conservative - an "essentialist" who believes that education is of value in itself (and should not be justified by its utilitarian value). Adler also believes in the value of a liberal arts education for all, the role of order and discipline in education, and the value of cultivating the intellect as the primary goal of k-12 education.

Adler's Paideia proposal "breaks" education into three types which students should receive in equal measure:

(a) knowledge acquisition: this is where direct teacher/student instruction goes on, and where the student learns to store and recall facts.

(b) developing of intellectual skill: this is where the student "learns by doing," and practices the skill under the teacher's facilitation.

(c) increase in understanding and insight: this is where students learn to evaluate, analyze, synthesize, and create ideas from ideas. Students engage in teacher-led discussion and reflections while learning "higher order thinking" skills.

I agree with these goals, but disagree much with Adler's approach. A key criticism I have of Adler's writing is that, like many philosophers of education, he speaks of students as they exist in theory rather than in practice, and tends to see them as a big monolithic group (while he says he doesn't).

Put differently and bluntly, if I had a child, I might be tempted to send it to a Paidiea school, but would be hesitant to suggest that every child should be forced into this model.

What makes the Paideia project unworkable in practice is Adler's insistence that "one size" of education "fits all." Alder does not believe in tracking of any kind, dismissing it as very undemocratic (by which he really means unegalitarian). He writes as if things like differences in intelligence (by the measure of IQ) do not exist. He repeats frequently the idea that "all children are educable," but turns it cleverly into "all children are capable of learning and absorbing the same stuff as all others." (He does bring this up as a possible criticism but dismisses the problem with high-sounding rhetoric, intimating that naysayers simply don't believe in equality.)

As a special educator, I think this idea of a "one size fits all" education is a pleasant sounding disaster. As one of my colleagues put it, "It is not a God-given right to comprehend Algebra II," by which he means that some simply learn slower, and are more limited than others. (I think Alder would realize his mistake when he put a child with Downs Syndrome, mental retardation, or autism into his Paidiea school.) Alder's point that we should challenge all students is well taken, but he doesn't seem to take seriously the FACT that students differ not only in "learning style" but in innate ability. To subject each child - regardless of ability - to the same curriculum is as unfair as hasty and strict tracking.

The other disaster in Adler's proposal is the idea that all K-12 education should be non-specialized and non-vocational. Under Adler's proposal, electives are essentially abolished and, as he says, we should "eliminate all the non-essentials from the school day." If it doesn't have to do with cultivating the intellect, we don't want it.

This would not only make school a positively dreary place for kids to be (eliminating any classes that might appeal to those not budding philosophers) but it would also lead the non-college-bound out in the cold. Alder suggests several times that all vocational training should take place post-high-school, meaning that school would no longer prepare students for a vocation at all, and those who can't afford to put off work after high school to receive additional training would be ill-prepared to start a career.

Like many schemes philosophers make about how to reform education, the Paidiea Proposal would make for some very interesting private schools. Like the Montessori method, this system might work for some or even half, but certainly not for all. Many students - those who might go into blue collar vocations - would likely do poorly in Paidiea schools. Adler might suggest that I am being pessimistic and "undemocratic," but I would charge him with utopianism and...being a theoretician rather than a statistician.

As long as differences in ability exist (and the fact is unfortunate), the Paidiea proposal, by expecting different abilities to access the same curricula, runs the risk of being as unfair as those he charges with excessive differentiation.

On Schemes and Schools: How We Got "Here" from "There"

Below is a recent review I have written of Diane Ravitch's bok, "Left Bac: A Century of Failed School Reform." In the book, Ravitch attempts to give an in-depth history of the progressive turn in education and its excesses. In the end, she argues that progressivism bears the responsibility for the Amreican education system losing its way. While I disagree with Ravitch on a number of points (she is very anti-utilitarian when it comes to education, and I cannot see education justified any other way), her historical arguments are very persuasive. Highly reccomended!

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Diane Ravitch's "Left Back" is both a history and a polemic. As the subtitle suggest, Ravitch does not only cover the history of educational ideas over the past century, but the history of "failed" educational ideas. As other review rs suggest, Ravitch's book is a history of, and argument against, progressivism in education.

Most of this book centers around two recurring dualisms of 20th century educational theory: essentialism v. utilitarianism, and learning as transmission between teacher and student v. learning as natural student-led proces.
The debate between essentialists (like Bagley) and instrumentalists (like Dewey and Thorndike) was over whether educational learning was valuable in itself or whether its value derives from its utility. In Left Back, Ravitch demonstrates that the concept of justifying education in utilitarian terms (how useful it is to students' lives) may have been an interesting idea at one point, but, like many ideas, it was pushed too far. Not many people - even the eseentialists - would argue that education should not have utility to students lives, but the overselling of this idea by progressives resulted in everything from hastily done tracking (tailoring instruction to students' predicted 'station' in later life), to the stripping away of academic rigor (why take biology when one can take a class on how to grow plants?).

The debate between those who argued for teacher-led education versus those who argued for student-led education was an outgrowth of the previous debate. The 'student-led' advocates (William Kilpatrick, Carl Rogers) rediscovered and revamped the Rousseauian idea that the best education is a non-coercive process of letting the student explore what she likes, and fostering her creativity. By contrast, the 'teacher-led' advocates (Leon Kandel, Michael Demiashkevich), believed that learning was as often an artificial process that necessitated the teacher being a teacher, and that part of s good education was learning things beyond what one would learn on one's ow.

In each debate, the progressives (utilitarians, student-led believers) won the day, often in spite of public outcry against them. In fact, one ironic theme in Ravitch's book is that while the progressives constantly invoked the word "democratic" to support their various cure-alls, the movement was, at every turn, undemocratic. Progressives always saw themselves as superior to the clamor of "reactionary" parents (who audaciously wanted their kids to learn subject-matter), were constant enthusiasts of tracking students at an early age by their predicted 'stations' in life, and constantly spoke of "creating a new social order," rather than educating independently-thinking students.

The undoubted hero of the book is William Bagley (an education philosopher that may have been John Dewey's most serious rival that is unjustly all but unheard of today). For his part, Dewey is portrayed as an out of touch intellectual whose "innocence was [often] comical" [p. 207) Many will object to this characterization of an educational icon, but Ravitch is certainly not the first to suggest that Dewey was entirely too aloof to articulate a philosophy with any real clarity.

Some negative reviewers comment that Ravitch's characterization of the various progressive movements is an unfair and mistaken straw-man. While I have only read a handful of the plentiful original sources she cites, it is difficult to see how an author who quotes so frequently from primary sources can be said to have gotten them (many unambiguous in meaning) wrong. My thoughts are that this book is a fair portrayal of progressivism, and that the reviewers may be mad because Ravitch is not afraid to mix history and polemic.

All in all, this is a stunning work for anyone who wonders how we got here - social promotion, self-esteem movement, flexible standards - from "there." Ravitch may have mixed history with polemic, but the book is well-researched history and necessary polemic. Ravitch's conclusion:

"If there is a lesson to be learned from the river of ink that was spilled in the education disputes of the twentieth century, it is that anything in education that is labeled a "movement" should be avoided like the plague. What American education most needs is not more nostrums and enthusiasms but more attention to fundamental, time-tested truths." (p. 453)

Review of Greg Perry's "Disabling America"

Below is a review I wrote recently for Greg Perry's "Disabling America," a libertarian-ish critique of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In it, Perry takes the position that, like much other recent legislatkkion made on behalf of minorities, the ADA goes beyond putting the disabled on equal ground as the non-disabled, but makes them a quite privileged group by doling out entitlements galore.

As a special educator, I encounter disability law every day (IDEA), and see that while it was put in place with intent to help disabled students recieve a quality education, it just as often makes and keeps kids disabled. It does these things by granting "accomodatiosn" to children who may be doing nothing more than performing below expectations ("James is struggling in math. He must be learning disabled. Jane has trouble paying attention to the teachers' lecture. She must have ADHD.")

My real beef with IDEA is that many of the "accommodations" it gives do little more than reward kids for failure by expecting less and less from them the worse they do. I have been in many IEP (Individualized Education Plan) meetings where we discussed reducing the amount of work expected of x because x is failing certain classes. Thus, the less he does, the less he learns, the less he will be expected to learn in the future!


Enough! I offer you this review in hopes that you will read Greg Perry's timely book.
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Are Some More Equal Than Others? (a special educator's take)

The Americans With Disabilities Act is a sacred cow. Rarely do I hear anyone publicly say anything against it, and generally those who would like to (myself included) run the risk of being considered anti-disabled (or maybe "disabledphobic?"). This is what makes Greg Perry and his book such an asset. Perry, born with one leg and three fingers, has written a smashing critique of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and as a disabled man, probably has more latitude to do so than most of us "normals."

From the outset, I will warn you that this book is highly anecdotal and, to my mind, this is no flaw (as some will allege). We hear stories of cases involving employees who "discover" a disability (like alcohol addiciton, "chronic" back pain, or depression), so that they might sue the pants off their employers. We hear stories of disabled lawyers who sue hundreds of stores at a time (that they have been to all of the stores is often in question).

These, and other, stories will outrage, and this is by design. The subtitle of the book is "the unintended consequences of the government protection of the handicapped," and this is what Perry shows. The ADA, like other government legislation such as the USA PATRIOT act, and No Child Left Behind, doubtless started with good intentions. But like these other Acts, the ADA is rife for abuse and ends up hurting those it intends to help. As Perry notes, the ADA is rife with abuse in large part because the vagueness of what constitutes a disability; everything from drug addiction to affliction with the AIDS virus to situational depression can be called a disability under ADA, and once one is "disabled," the ADA gives wide latitude to sue and make cumbersome demands on everyone from one's employer to one's favorite mom-and-pop store. And why is the ADA counterproductive? It makes people afraid to hire and deal with disabled people by seeing them not as persons but potential liabilities and lawsuits. (It also, like affirmative action, sends people the message that an entire group of people is so bad off that they couldn't make it without hefty government assistance.)

Am a special educator, I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the ADA in education (which is actually governed by a sister law, IDEA). IDEA mandates that every disabled child - and the term is flexible enough to include practically anyone performing below grade level - be provided with an Individualized Education Plan and "accommodations" that often act as wheelchair used by a child who needs to learn to walk; in other words, much of the "help" given to students with disabilities - use of a calculator on all math work, being read to (even in high school) - do more to ensure that a child will stay disabled than learn to overcome their disability. I do not have anywhere near the malice that Perry does for IDEA - and think that in some cases, the law does some good when used well - but the chapter is eye-opening for those who've never thought much on the subject.

My biggest criticism is that Perry's book is highly emotionally charged and rhetorical. There are also times when Perry argues more out of emotion than thought. (He suggests, for instance, that most stores would become "handicapped accessible" on their own, but does not explain why, if this is so, the ADA was ever felt necessary. Nor does he see that many stores simply wouldn't bother to go through the expense in areas where, like most places, the disabled are a small demographic). The book is also quite repetitive, and I found myself skimming, rather than reading, the last two chapters. As a book designed to incense a lay audience, this book is heavy on rhetoric and anecdote, and light on statistics.

Overall, though, Perry's arguments will hold much sway with those of a conservative/libertarian bent. The ADA makes "some more equal than others" by singling some out for very special treatment while leaving others with the expense (handicapped parking seems always to be at the front of the store; the rest of us must park further away, as one small example).

Want to see a sacred cow butchered? Read Disabling America (at your own risk).

Review of Rand-Influenced Book on Education

Today, I reviewed Jerry Kirpatrick's book "Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism." It is a book that defends (a) a free-market capitalistic model of educaiton; and (b) the appropriateness of Dewey's and Montessori's methods of education in that framework.

I gave the book 2 out of 5 stars.

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First off, Jerry Kirkpatrick has written one of only a few books that defend education in an environment of the free market. For that, he deseves some praise. While I find fault with much that he says, I am in agreement with Kirkpatrick that schools need to be opened up to the competitive forces of the market.

Kirkpatrick is concerned to defend a particlar type of education - that utilizing the insights of progressive educators John Dewey and Maria Montessori - as the only proper plan of education in a capitalistic society. He suggests that in a capitalistic society, the "old way of educaiton" that teaches students to submit to the school's authority would be in contradiction with capitalism's anti-authoritarian structure.

My first objection is that, despite Kirkpatrick's argument, I do not see how any social structure REQUIRES a certain type of education. I do not see how a mixed economy or socialist country could not just as easily have a "lecture" style of education as it could a Montessori style. To suggest that a philosophy of educaiton and a philosophy of social organizaiton must be alligned is like saying that that a nation's philosphy of science must be alligned with its philosophy of social organization.

Secondly, Kirkpatrick takes it as unquestioned that Montessori's anti-authority method of education meshes well with capitalism's anti-authority structure. I do not see this as correct. When students move past high school, they will experience many "authoritarian" relationships, like that between them and employers and that between them and moneylenders. (I have even heard it argued elsewhere that an "anti-authoritarian" style of education leaves kids ill-preared to function in a capitalistic system, which involves learning to obey rules, laws, and mores.)

While I am not against the Montessori method of educaiton, I suspect that Kirkpatrick's confidence in it is exhuberant. Many well-argued books have been written outlining the dangers of current schools' infatuation with "progressive education" ideas ("whole child" education, "whole language" education, education as self-discovery rather than subject-discovery). The interested might read Stout's "Feel Good Curriculum" and Hirsch's "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them," as starting points.

In brief, Kirkpatrick makes a big mistakes, probably related to his belief in Ayn Rand's philosophy. First, he is very much against coercion, extremizing this view into the idea that coercing children is an unqualified wrong. It is interesting to note, though, that even in a capitalistic society, the need to coerce children is recognized in an almost universal agreement that kids below a certain age need to be restricted in certain ways, as they lack the executive functioning skills to self-regulate. Kirkpatrick recognizes that students need freedom, but does not recgnize that students also need a good amount of structure. Before one can be self-disciplined, one needs to be taught discipline. (One cannot just "discover" how to be disciplined.)

Kirkpatrick goes on to describe what an educaiton system in a free market would look like. I think the discusison is a bit facile to be honest. Kirkpatrick is confident that a free-market system would do away with grades, rankings, standardized tests, degrees, and certificates. I see this as a very hasty and wrong judgment that misinterprets a key role of schools: to signify to future employers, colleges, etc, that the child has mastered a certain content and acquired certain skills. Without diplomas, grades, and tests, the very term "graduation" loses all meaning. (How would we know when a chlld is graduated? How would we know when to pass a child on to the next level? How would future employers know how their perspective employees did in school?)

Kirkpatrick also sees rankings, letter grades, and degrees as very bad things. Of course, as an educator, I can attest that the grading system is what often keeps kids motivated to work harder, and without it, students would find it very hard to know where they need improvement and how much improvement they need. If there were no such things as "exit requirements" I question whether many people would see any point to education at all (aside from those who learn solely for the enjoyment of it).

Quite simply, I think Kirkpatrick's book could benefit from a lot of rethinking. Particularly, he discusses his own ideas, but not once discusses existant or possible criticisms (as for his championing of Montessori and Dewey, there are many, many critics he could have dealt with. He chose not to.) As for his facile confidence that a free-market would gravitate towards a Montessori appraoch, he did not bring up the fact that the large majority of private schools in existence are non-Montessori schools with more "authoritarian" structure. (Is there a reason to suppose that this trend would reverse? We don't know; Kirkpatrick doesn't bring it up!) There are also many critics of a free-market approach to education that not once do we hear Kirkpatrick grapple with.

I give this book two stars. One star is for being one of the handful of books discussing education in a free market framework. The second was for Kirkpatrick's very learned, but skewed, history of the transition from "classical" to "progressive" education.

Review of Stout's "Feel Good Curriculum"

Here is a review I recently wrote about another highly reccomended book, Maureen Stout's "Feel-Good Curriculum." It is a very good indictment of an overly progressive education, a la ED Hirsch

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Maureen Stout's book, "The Feel-Good Curriculum," would make a good companion to the works of ED Hirsch, author of "The Knowledge Deficit." These two authors' theses are much the same: over the past forty-or-so years, the "progressive" changes in American education have led to the decline of academic standards, the over-valuing of (a misguided view of) self-esteem, and and the turning out of students ill-prepared for the disciplined nature of the "real world."

Stout is a professor of education at UC Berkley, and like her philosophical kin Hirsch, is interested not only in demonstrating these saddening trends but in exploring their ideational roots. While the usual suspects (Dewey, Thorndike), she also links non-educators like psychologist Carl Rogers and Erik Ericksson with the "child-centered," whole child," and "self-actualization" movements in education.

These movements changed virtually everything about schooling. Instead of teaching students basic academics, their primary goals were not wo help the child reach self-actualizaiton (whatever THAT means!). Instead of seeing discipline as necessary for an ordered school, it was now seen as an antiquated stifler of student enthusiasm.

...And, as Stout points out, the movement kept on going, becoming more and more extreme despite yielding worse and worse reults. As an educator, I found myself oscillating between chuckling and containing anger as I read about current trends in educaiton - Vygotskyan cooperative learning, social (rather than standards-based) promotion, educators as facilitators rather than instructors - that I sadly recognize all too well. And as an educator, I can attest that these are trends that need to be rethought and revamped, but never seem to be; Stout hits these problems right on the head in writing about these problems, not only identifying THAT, but WHY, they are problems.

Stout ends with a section on how we can turn some of these effects around (and her suggestions sound much like those of ED Hirsch). She does not advocate a return to the dark ages where students memorize rote passages and are paddled for misbehavior. She advocates a return to standards-based, rather than "outcome-based" educaiton, readjust our views on the value of discipine, and maybe get rid of the "progressive" idea of self-esteem that equates it with "feeling good for no good reason" rather than an earned feeling of accomplishment.

This is a very, very good book. Those who read it will either be challenged to re-examine cherished views or be further outraged by problems they know too well. Either way, it is not a book to be missed.

Michael Novak, Religion, and "Blicks"

I recently finished Michael Novak's book "No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers." One of the questions Novak seeks to answer in this very cordial book is, "Why do atheists and religionists scream past eachother? Why are arguments that are so convincing to the one never convincing to the other?"

I've often wondered this myself. I am quite read and "up on" the publications made by both the "new atheists" like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and the religious interlocutors like Chris Hedges and David Berlinski. In so being, I have noticed two things: (a) each side, whether deliberately or not, caricatures the other by misunderstanding the other's point of view; and (b) each side rehashes the same arguments that seem so convincing to them, but are never adequate to convince their opponents.

In attempt to explain this, Novak explicates an interesting concept, borrowed from philosopher RM Hare, but fleshed out by Novak himself: the concept of the blick.

In short, a blick is a worldview replete with necessary presuppositions. In Novak's words:

"A blick is part of an intellectual habit, the part that shapes one's pattern of judgment concerning what is real or not real, true or false, credible or lacking in credibility... A blick is a way of viewing reality that is not usually overturned by one or more pieces of countervailing evidence." (Kindle Edition, loc. 2267)

A blick is not only a set of propositions, but the groundrules each of us uses to decide what is to count as a valid proposition, and the type of phenomena which can be seen as evidentiary. A blick is not only, then, the view that god exists, but the belief that emotion and intuition be allowed as satisfactory undergirdling reason for the claim. On the flipside, a blick is more than the view that there is no evidence for god, but includes that atheist's 'groundrule' that only what may be observed can be existentially real.

To make it even more direct, my fiancee is earning her masters in Professional Writing with a specialization in rhetoric. One rhetorical theory she was explaining to me - I don't recall its title - suggests that when one is seeking to argue to another, one needs to make sure that one is using the type of argument that the OTHER would find convincing. It does little good to argue that something is experimentally corroborable to a postmodernist with zero trust in science. It would also do little good to argue the morality of x because of its fit within a capitalistic framework to a socialist.

This is very close to the idea that, to be persuasive, one must attempt to argue within the matrix of the other person's blick, or else - as evidenced by the current debate between theists and atheists - you will talk right past eachother.

To my eyes, this makes much sense. Why do all of the books by 'new atheists' and their opponents seem to make the same arguments over and over again that are convincing to those making the arguments but never to their opponents? Becuase the arguments, more often than not, hinge on assumptions - presuppositions - that one side holds which the other side does not. God cannot be real because its existence cannot be verified? This will hold little sway to a religionist that imagine's god to be outside of space and time. Our strong intuition about the 'perfect fit' between us and the universe is excellent evidence that there must be a god? This will not do against the atheist that already dismisses intuition as evidence for an existential claim.

Interestingly, the rhetorician Stanley Fish has written on his blog about this very phenomenon. In an article called "Atheism and Evidence" he writes:

"What is and is not seen will vary with the faith within which observers look... Those who have not found the arguments of natural selection persuasive will not see what Dawkins and his colleagues see, not because they are blind and obstinate, but because as members of a different faith community – and remember, science requires faith too before it can have reasons – the evidence that seems so conclusive to the rational naturalists will point elsewhere." (paragraph 11)

The message that I, an atheist, take from all of this is, "Like it or not, we are all presuppositionalists." The biggest 'heat' that Fish took about this article was from atheists suggesting that there is no faith necessary to believe in science and/or atheism. Even as an atheist and believer in science, I beg to differ.

In order to be a believer in science you have to have several "faiths" (all of which, though, can be justified by their pragmatic efficacy). First, I have to believe that the scientific method is a reliable one for capturing the truth of things (even if I acknowledge that science is tentative, I have to believe that it's attempts are better than guesses.) I also have to believe in the integrity of the scientists and the enterprise; as many of the experiments done and results gotten are technically beyond my ken, I have to, contra some extreme theists, believe that the participants are not simply part of a grand conspiracy and can be trusted as truthful and ojective.

Lastly, in order to be an atheist that claims scientific grounds for my belief, I have to hold to the rule that that which is not testable cannot be claimed as an existant. In less philosophical terms, I have to hold that "God exists," is a testable claim that only pans out when god is detected via the senses, or that "God exists" is NOT a testable claim, in which case, it is beyond talking about.

This is my blick. And this explains why I find it infuriating to talk with the theist, as the theist doubtless finds it infuriating to talk with me. I cannot begin to enter into their mindset as I am sure they cannot begin to enter into mine. Our blicks are simply so deep and deeply rooted that oscillation between the two is difficult. (Generally converts "think themselves out of" one blick and enter into another, but this type of conversion is rare.)

The idea of the blick has helped me articulate a feeling I have always had about the difference between atheists and theists; we simply see the world and interpret experience differently. The theist regards their strong intuition of design, purpose, and goodness as evidence for God (where the atheist regards intuition as insufficient). The atheist regards the scientific evidence as making the "god hypothesis" unnecessary and absent-looking (while the theist rejects the use of sceintific reasoning as exhaustive of all there is). Either way, the two will seemingly never agree because they disagree on groundrules.

50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School (review)

Bel0w is one of my recent amazon.com reviews of Charles Sykes recent book, "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education" [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031236038X/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_title

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I work as a high-school special educator and, as such, I can attest to two things: that the advice offered in these pages is GREAT for teenagers, and that they certianly WILL NOT learn it in school! Today's youth grows up an in an "entitlement" world where the prevailing view of self-esteem is "feeling good for no good reason," rather than "earning the right to feel good." They grow up in a fantastical world where they can have instant satisfaction without going though the rigors of hard work that NO ONE is telling them is fantastical. Except for Charles Sykes.

While this book is a collection of maxims such as "Life is not fair. Get used to it," followed by several-page elaborations, the themes of this book can be summed up thusly: live modestly, accept that hard work needs to be put in to get anything out, and live with the knowledge that to get ahead in anything, you have to earn it. Sykes writes in simple and direct language that, while likely meant for adults to read, the average high-schooler could easily absorb.

To be honest, I would love to use this with some of my classes, discussing with them such ideas as "You're not going to the NBS, so hold off on the bling and spare us the attitude," or "You are not immortal" (just two of the mythes prevalent with the high-school crowd that this book so correctly corrects). Students need to hear it, and teachers (and parents) need to say it. I doubt, though, that I would be able to get very far with some of them ("Looking like a slut does not empower you," and "No, you cannot be everything you dream," may get me in trouble with parents.)

Even so, it doesn't mean that YOU can't teach YOUR kids this stuff, and I highly reccomend that you do. If you don't, they certainly aren't going to learn it somewhere like school!