The Graves of Academe - Richard Mitchell (electronic book reader .txt) 📗

answered in publicly verifiable measurements. But it is not an answer that a prudent educationist would want, and it would probably not win you a doctorate in any graduate school of education in America. Your committee will throw you out for several reasons: Since the teaching of anything is the design and application of appropriate stimuli, the teacher’s knowledge of mathematics, although there ought to be some, is not what makes him a teacher. We do not teach mathematics just so that students can do mathematics, but for a higher purpose, for the inculcation, perhaps, of an appreciation of Logic and Rationality; so you would be better to seek findings about Logic/Rationality Appreciation, which is exactly as easy to measure as Existentiality. Your research is, in any case, likely to give a false impression, since many private school teachers, to the detriment of their professionalism, are not legitimately certified and have probably taken more courses in mathematics than in education, which makes their possibly superior knowledge of mathematics a matter of no consequence.

In other words: Measurable things are not important; unmeasurable things are paramount. Let us therefore measure only the unmeasurable. Of course, Wundt never dreamed of measuring the unmeasurable. He claimed rather that the psychological conditions and events of humanity were not unmeasurable at all, and that the task of psychological science was to discover how to measure them. He did not suggest that we go around asking people how they felt, however, for reasons that are perfectly obvious to anyone with any rudimentary understanding of science. But he did hold, for equally obvious reasons, that the study of human psychology required the direct observation of human beings. That tenet of Wundtianism, hardly startling, has been happily accepted by educationists, for if there is one thing they have always at hand it is a large collection of captive human beings.

You have surely heard of “child-centered” education, that process that will educate the “whole child.” It sounds so decent. What could be better than centering on the child, the whole child, no less? But what, exactly, do half-baked neo-Wundtians mean when they speak of “child-centered” education? Here is an article that provides some evidence toward an answer to that question:

The Nonredundant Interactive Relationship of Perceived Teacher Directiveness and Student Personological Variables to Grades and Satisfaction

Recent research has shown that a number of student variables —�authoritarianism, dogmatism, intelligence, conceptual level, convergent-divergent ability, locus of control, anxiety, compulsivity, need for achievement, achievement orientation, independence-dependence, and extraversion-introversion — may moderate the relationship between teacher directiveness and grades and satisfaction. There is a fair degree of moderate intercorrelation among these student variables and such intercorrelation suggests that some of the found interactive relationships may be overlapping or redundant. The purpose of the present research is to develop multivariate mathematical models of the interactive relationships using stepwise regression strategies. Such models should facilitate a more parsimonious interpretation of the interactive relationships which are…

We were going to show you all of that mess and even give you the name and address of the chappie who made it, but we can’t. Before our typesetter was able to finish, a member of our staff borrowed the original (and only) copy and took it to Texas. There, while fumbling for his entry permit at the Immigration Control Office, he lost the evidence. Maybe it’s just as well. There’s no telling what those Rangers might have done had they caught him with a smoking dissertation abstract. They don’t cotton much to that kind of stuff down there.

We can tell you, at least, that the original came from Calgary, Alberta, and we have to hope, if justice is ever to be done, that the Mounties don’t want any of this stuff in their country either. They shouldn’t have much trouble getting their man — and his sidekick — in this case. The author and his dissertation adviser were so proud of themselves that they had their photographs printed right on the page with the evidence. Perfectly decent and respectable young fellows they seemed, too. Who would have thought it?

Since personology must be too subtle a science for the likes of us, we cannot explain how “personological” variables might be different from differences in persons. We would guess, though, that “student” variables are young variables studying to become teacher variables. And we’re a little disappointed by that list of student variables, a measly twelve items. In the better teacher academies, you’d never get a doctorate for such a skimpy, or “parsimonious,” elaboration of the obvious commingled with the incomprehensible.

The most instructive thing about the passage is that its pretentiousness is eloquently, although inadvertently, undone by its timidity. Notice that all those nifty variables may “moderate the relationship.” Educationists won’t take chances, even on the obvious and simple. After all, how can we be sure, without multivariate mathematical models of the interactive relationships, that different people feel different about different things?

Of course, should this research achieve its goal, we might have to change our opinions. A “parsimonious interpretation” of a “fair” degree of “moderate” intercorrelation is not to be sneezed at. Before such an awesome discovery, we’d just have to back off, treading cautiously in our best stepwise regression strategies.

Let’s try to imagine some possible facts and events that might incite such an undertaking, that is, the development of multivariate mathematical models of interactive relationships. First, be careful to remember something that might easily blow away in the storm of jargon — all of this has something to do with children in school. So we can imagine: There are some children in school. They are, in some ways, different from each other, that is, they have (could that be the right word?) different student variables. They get grades in school, probably some good, some bad, some indifferent. They are, or are not, as the case may be, “satisfied,” either by school, or by their grades, or by both, in various degrees. They “perceive,” or not, maybe, something called “teacher-directiveness.” How can these things be seen as functions of one another?

Before we can begin this research, we have to be clear about some things that might confuse mere laymen. Notice first that whether a teacher actually is “directive” or not is not at issue; all that matters is whether a student “perceives” a teacher as “directive.” This is child-centered research. Although grades do go into the hopper, it’s not because we are interested in what a student has learned or how that can be measured, but because we want to know about the student’s “satisfaction,” which depends only in part on his grade, which must be factored in with his own perception of directiveness and his own student variables. This is still child-centered research.

Bearing in mind those warnings, we can now proceed with our research. If we are successful, we can expect to be able to answer questions like this:

Who will be more satisfied with a B plus, a moderately intelligent student with better than average convergent-divergent ability but little if any locus of control, or a very bright, dogmatic student who shows normal achievement orientation but no compulsivity to speak of and does not, unlike the first student, perceive the teacher as directive ?

You can devise other such examples for yourself. The possibilities are probably infinite. None of them, however, will have any objective meaning, which would require a precise numerical evaluation of hosts of human traits, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, and emotions. In fact, that kind of study must end exactly where it begins, in a vague generalization. You and I, if asked and forced to answer, could also have said that there may be a fair degree of moderate intercorrelation between a person’s characteristic traits and the way he feels about things. This is the kind of revelation that educationistic research provides.

It does that useless work, obviously more for profit than for fun, since it is impossible that even the dullest educationist can find the ecstasy of discovery in such an enterprise, precisely because it is child-centered. Here in the shadow of Wundt, education and the presumable content of an education are not the objects of the educationist’s concern. It is the children, the students, who are to be studied, for the education is something that is being done to them with certain modifications in mind. While the originally intended modification may be nothing more than changing children who can’t add into children who can, the process of modification itself is obviously more likely to produce a “scholarship” of the kind just cited than a mere counting of those who can add and those who can’t. That scholarship, you surely noticed, is not about what children may have learned and how, but about how they feel; and it isn’t even about how they feel about what they may have learned, but about how they feel about their grades and their teacher_._ If we could hope to learn anything from such research, it would be not about education but about children. But, following Wundt, that is exactly what we need to know, for “education” is the psychologically appropriate manipulation of learners. If that is so, the more we know about the manipulee the better.

That view of “education” is not entirely without merit. Some things can be taught to some people just that way, although the system works far more dependably with horses and dogs. But human beings are immensely different from one another even while they are very much alike, and even the most avidly child-centered educationists have not yet suggested an educational system in which every child, after a stupefying battery of psychological tests, is assigned a perfectly matched teacher, who has also had all those tests. Therefore, the teaching of anything has to be a compromise, a generalized set of stimuli aimed at producing the desired responses in most of the children. In some cases, therefore, it is bound to fail.

Several things can happen when education fails, none of them good. No. I will be more precise. None of them can be good as long as we think of education as the design of appropriate stimuli to produce certain behavior in an individual human being. If we do think that, then there are three things we can think of doing when some students fail to learn, since there are three factors in our equation — the stimulus, the student, the response.

We can change the stimulus. This is a big job, for it requires changing an already institutionalized compromise designed to elicit the right response from as many children as possible, a massive system. Nevertheless, it has been done. Every simplified revision of some already simplified text is just such a change, and so is the widespread use of films and even television programs in place of books. When such a change is made, of course, it is made in the supposed interests of those who have failed to respond appropriately. That accounts for the fact that methods of instruction are designed to accommodate not the most ordinary children, but those who learn most slowly.

We can also change the expected response. If some children do not seem to learn history, we can decide to teach them civic pride and responsibility instead. This is especially attractive if we have already decided that civic pride and responsibility might well be the proper student outcomes of the study of history anyway. This is a common device, of which I will have more to say in the next chapter.

We can even try to change the student. This is hardest of all, but educationists never give up. On this matter, too, there is much to say later, but for now we must look at what happens in the Wundtian system before or unless such a change can be made. What follows, along with some notably ghastly language, is a display of one of the educationist’s most cherished