ParisTampaBlog

I’ve often written about just how little is learned in the classroom. Well, here’s the best explanation I’ve seen as to why this is so. I take the text (and explanation) that follows from the Introduction to R. Barker Bausell’s book, Too Simple to Fail.

Introduction: Obsolete from every perspective

Thirty-five students sit facing a single teacher. The teacher has just provided a brief but coherent introduction to a new topic, but one portionof her class couldn’t follow what she was saying because they have had too little previous instruction on the subject at hand. Another portion of the class is terminally bored because they had previously learned 90% of everything the teacher said (or will say during the upcoming school year). A third contingent is distracted by two misbehaving boys seated at he rear of the room.

Recognizing these problems, and hoping to reinforce the main points of her lecture, she reseats the two boys on opposite sides of the room and has all the students open their textbooks to read the same page. Unfortunately, the same part of her class who  couldn’t follow her leture along with a significant portion of the students who were distracted, also has trouble reading the textbook. And of course the students who already knew what she was talking about already know everything contained on that particular page in their textbook.

Sensing that something is amiss, the teacher decides to vary her routine a bit and have everyone come to the front of the room and sit on the floor surrounding the chalkboard. Following a few minutes of jostling and confusion, the class then watches a student attempt to solve a math problem based upon what has just been taught and read about (by some). This particular student fails miserably and can’t follow the teacher’s attempts to help him “discover” his error. The remainder of the class isn’t at all interested in this process since some of them would have never made such an egregious mistake, some of them can’t follow the teacher’s explanation, and some simply  aren’t paying attention.

Later, with the students back at their desks, the teacher poses a question to the class on the topic. Some students raise their hands whether they know the answer or not; some wave their arms frantically because they are sure they have the correct answer (or simply want the attentionn); and everyone else waits for either the correct or the incorrect answer, or pays more attention to the myriad other competing activities that are constantly  going on in the classroom, somewhat analogous to a cocktail party in which we stand in a crowded room with  sounds and conversations going on all around us and must decide to what we will direct our attention and to what we will only pretend to do so.

What these and most other classroom instructional activities have in common is their mind-boggling inefficiency, the amount of time they consume, and the fact that at any given point in time only a portion of the students involved will be a actually attending to them—either because the instruction isn’t keyed to their particular needs or they are free to attend to competing activities that they find more interesting. And as if all of this were not enough, the teacher herself is most likely ill trained for her job. She probably graduated from a university-based school of education, which may have been staffed by faculty  who knew very little about how to maintain order in a public school classroom, make instruction relevant for as large a percentage of such a classroom as possible, foster learning under typical classroom conditions, or even how to teach the types of content she is now charged with conveying. And if teaching children to read is part of our teacher’s duties, she may have never even been given a cursory lesson on basic phonics instruction. In fact, it is possible that this teacher may never have enrolled in a single course that actually prepared her to teach children to read, to  write, or to understand mathematics—perhaps because her faculty were never taught that themselves. An accident of history, perhaps, due to the discipline’s early thinkers (such as Herbert Spencer, John Dewey) who were less concerned about increasing the amount students learned than they were about the philosophical and social implications of schooling. Or, of later popular theorists such as Jean Piaget, whose work would ultimately  wind up having no recognizable application to classroom instruction.

But returning to the 35-student classroom, our intrepid teacher realizes that she can’t spend any more time on this particular lesson and must move on whether everyone is ready or not….

The sad truth is that no one knows just how little value classroom instruction adds to the children’s education….

I would encourage you to read the entire introduction, if not the book. The Introduction is included in a free “sample” download from Amazon’s Kindle App, either on Android or iphone smart phones.

Now you’ve all probably had the classroom experiences that the author, R. Barker Bausell is describing. Did you at the time, or have you since, asked yourselves how this sort of thing could still be going on, at least since my own experience in one of the “better” classrooms at a prestigious private school some 60 years ago?

OK, perhaps not the “horror” of it as Marlow might say, but the inefficiency, the horrible waste of one’s time, in many instances one’s best time, that time of childhood that could have been so rich in learning experiences.

How children might best learn, and what they are learning, with or without us, ought to be at the very top of our educational agenda. But instead, perhaps because we had to do it ourselves, we go on placing our children during some twelve years of their lives, the very formative years when so much could have been accomplished, into the very same classrooms that Bausell is describing. Hélas!

In a portion of his Journal John Harvard writes about “Tackling Teaching and Learning.” The irony is that from the vantage point of our most respected if not admired educational institution this writer seems to know so little about the subject.  In fact, it’s not often that I read so many words of so little substance and interest.

I wasn’t able to finish”Tackling Teaching and Learning,” but just about the point when I stopped reading there was one comment that caught my interest, not by Michael Smith, a Dean of the Faculty  of Arts and Sciences, and whose comments were most often referred to in the piece, but by a biology professor, a Richard M. Losick.

“We spend,” he said, “a lot of time at Harvard talking about what students should learn, and far less about how they should learn and what they do learn.”

Well, I said to myself, le plus ça change …. For isn’t that what all institutions of learning, schools and colleges, have always done, talk mostly about what they’re teaching, what kids should learn. And why? Well probably because they know so little about what the kids are actually learning, and even less about how they learn.

Know it all schools like Harvard don’t like not to be in charge so they go on talking about what kids should be learning, which means they go on, as Losick points out, talking about what they know, and not about what their students might or might not know thanks to their efforts.

Robert Hahn, a leading scholar of the American regulatory process who is now a professor at the University of Manchester in England has said that putting a price tag on life was worthwhile because it would help politicians to choose among priorities and to shape the details of their proposals.

What if a price tag had been placed on a soldier’s life, would we have gone to war in Iraq? Would any result that might have been achieved, let alone the actual “result” we see now, be of more benefit than the cost in lives lost? And here there were relatively few lives lost, compared to earlier wars, to Vietnam, when there were some tens of thousands of American dead, and in the World Wars of the past century, when all lives lost numbered in the millions?

Just as we place, for insurance and regulatory purposes in regard to our industries, in most of which there are risks of loss of life, some much greater than others, a dollar value on one human life, a value that the Obama administration would place between $5 and $10 million, what if we were to place a similarly sized price tag on the life of one soldier?

Wouldn’t that bring about an end to war, war becoming simply too expensive in respect to the loss of human life for a government, any government, to bear? In a sense that’s what’s already happening. Now, much more than ever before, lives lost in wars are not soldier lives, but civilian lives, the cost of which governments are rarely if ever required to meet.

The risk of going to war for our soldiers is becoming more and more like the risk of driving a car, a risk that one readily assumes for the benefits gained thereby, given that at once the costs are limited and when they do occur are adequately met.

Is this causal or coincidental? That the high school graduation rates, not to mention the percentages of those going on to attend and graduate from college, have not changed significantly from the seventies. And that the salaries of our middle and lower class workers have not risen noticeably during that same period?

In any case both trends merit some thought, some explanation. And, as long as we can’t explain either the one or the other, which is our present situation, we are free to say, either that earlier failures in school account for the increasingly low salaries among the working population, or that the low salaries, which in a growing number border on poverty levels, account for the failure for the children, living in these borderline situations, to succeed in school.

Talking about the schools is a lot like talking about the weather, what we say in regard to both depending a lot on where we’re standing. And, there being probably no two of us standing in the same place, our differing perspectives lead unsurprisingly to our widely different conclusions.

Still at present there are those who cling to certainty, who are convinced that it’s within their power to control the weather, say by regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. And no less remarkably there are those who think we can change, and improve the schools by one or more reforms, such as holding teachers accountable for the achievement or lack of achievement of their students.

But no successes have yet been recorded traceable to the efforts of either group.

Why? Well in both, the weather and the schools, the variables are just too many, too complex, still in good part unknown, to be entered into any equations of explanation, let alone made a basis of any remedies for correction and improvement.

In regard to both humility is called for. And by reaching for much less we would grasp more.