Radical traditionalist
A review of:
Diane RAVITCH, 2000, Left
Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. New York : Simon & Schuster.
UKP21-95.
By:
CHRIS BRAND (author of
THE g FACTOR and consultant researcher to the Woodhill Foundation, USA)
There
can be few who have no strong opinions about modern education, especially about
what is provided in state schools out of taxation. The twentieth century saw
the realization of the dreams of American educators like John Dewey (professor
of philosophy at Columbia University, 1904-1930) that schools should largely
replace churches as the main public providers of socialization for the young;
and higher education in the USA expanded a hundredfold to put some kind of
college experience on offer to 80% of American children. At the same time,
these great changes were accompanied by a radical qualitative shift: instead of
being about exposure to Western culture, memorization of factual material and
acquisition of academic skills, education changed in the hope of achieving more
choice and contentment for pupils and more practical relevance to everyday
economic and social life.
In Left Back
the term is used for pupils retained in one school grade while their classmates
move on -- Professor Diane Ravitch of
the Brookings Institution gives her personal summary of the expert consensus
that had crystallized in the USA by 1940: "Apparently the best way of
attacking the problems of youth and the ills of American society was to make
sure that as few youngsters as possible studied foreign languages, history,
advanced mathematics, or any science unrelated to the practical necessities of
daily living." In 1941, the New York Times recorded of one city
school, with glee: "
classrooms ran over with hammers, saws, nails, coiled
snakes in glass jars, packing boxes, posters and similar unorthodox objects
enough to give a disciplined schoolma'am of the conventional order
apoplexy." The experts had been spurred on by seeing President F. D.
Roosevelt by-pass the schools altogether and set up his own job training
schemes involving 4.5 million youngsters to help solve the problems of the
Depression.
Progressivism's most famous slogan was "We teach
children, not subject matter", so it was natural that its champions would
eventually identify a core need to 'integrate children into the community.'
Progress was soon to be monitored by purpose-created tests of "emotional
and social adjustment" and even of whether the children themselves finally
held "progressive" or "reactionary" views. According to
proponents of 'life adjustment education' around 1950, pupils (by then called
students) should have their questions answered: 'Am I normal?', 'What causes
pimples?', 'Am I expected to 'pet' on a date?' and 'Why do our teachers seem so
old?' Ravitch records the philosophy: "Any course that involved logical or
symbolic thinking should be limited to the college-bound." By the 1970's,
adolescents were offered an unprecedented degree of choice as to which subjects
and topics they studied subjects which included hairdressing, home budgeting,
garbology, insurance and hip hop music.
That 'more' has meant
'worse' is certainly the view of Ravitch, said by her publisher to be "a
leading education policy analyst" in the USA. Ravitch's analysis is that a
century of increasingly progressive, child-centred and utilitarian
schooling has been a mistake that has resulted not just in general academic
dumbing down but in special deprivation for worse-off and Black children whose
ungraduated parents are not able to provide the supplementary education for
them in the home that is available to middle-class White pupils. "The
attacks on the academic tradition," she writes, "by restricting its
availability to those who were already advantaged and diminishing access to
knowledge, undermined the democratic promise of public education." Thus
Ravitch wants a return to the traditional academic, liberal arts
curriculum in which the emphasis is on self-improvement and the
acquisition of knowledge. Her belief is that classical standards can be
maintained -- perhaps with some help from grade retention -- and that weaker
pupils can be boosted and the natural state of human equality realized.
----
Though she gives
herself 555 pages, Ravitch provides little empirical evidence that would
pursuade a newcomer to her unusual position shared in the past principally by
an educational psychologist, William C. Bagley (University of Illinois and
Teachers College, University of Columbia), who had begun denouncing
'differentiated' (i.e. progressive) education as undemocratic in 1914. Bagley
evidently took Adam Smith's view that the state should compensate for the
pressures for specialization that would be supplied by the market. However,
despite the title of her book, Ravitch is less concerned actually to
demonstrate twentieth-century "failure" than to rehearse the ideas
and arguments that have pre-occupied educationists and the media. Much of her
book is taken up with recalling the countless changes of educational dogma
(look-and-say versus phonics, multiculturalism versus integrationism etc.)
themselves also typically occurring in the absence of serious experimental
testing.
Yet Ravitch wants to
do a little more than list dead and unlamented educationists, and she plumps
for the struggle between traditionalism and progressivism as
providing her central historical theme. (For Dewey's own account of the battle,
see http://teachnet.edb.utexas.edu/~lynda_abbott/Deweyfull.html.)
It may surprise some readers that Ravitch pins her left-ish colours to the traditionalist
mast. Right-wing traditionalists want to return to the good old days of Greek,
Latin, school uniforms, disciplined classrooms and rote learning, but Ravitch's
stress is on the positive democratic merit of bringing all children up to
scratch. Whereas right-wingers would stress the need for hard work, Ravitch
holds additionally to the classic social-environmentalist belief in the
importance of state expenditure to provide high quality teachers and teaching
that will boost even the dullest child. If only.
There is doubtless a
little to be said in favour of Ravitch's liberal-arts traditionalism. Early progressivism
had its goofy side as exponents, including the mighty Dewey, not only venerated
the 'child-centred' Rousseau (who abandoned his own five children) but visited
Communist Russia around 1930 and admired its shops supposedly owned by
'independent co-operatives', its churches lovingly preserved by Bolsheviks, and
the apparent determination of its leaders to raise the aesthetic cultivation of
Russian people. Dewey recorded his admiration for the Communists' use of
propaganda and education to improve community spirit, and "the marvelous
development of progressive educational ideas and practice under the fostering
care of the Bolshevik government." In particular, the new Russian
educators were apparently employing Dewey's pet 'project method', allowing
children to work on topics connected with real community life: "I can only
pay my tribute," Dewey wrote, "to the liberating effect of active
participation in social life upon the attitude of the students. Those whom I
met had a vitality and a kind of confidence in life not to be confused with
mere self-confidence that afforded one of the most stimulating experiences of
my life." Crucially, the three R's were not taught directly but were
learned incidentally, from tasks at hand. By the late 1930's, many American
progressives had developed the unpleasant habit of calling their opponents
'fascists' and 'reactionaries' even when the progressives' opponents were
socialists. Meanwhile Russia's own progressive educators were being murdered in
Stalin's purges; and recitation, textbooks, discipline and examinations were
being restored in Russian schools. Verily, in that decade, Dewey and his
disciples served as what Lenin had been wont to call "useful idiots."
Around 1980, after
progressivism had finally swept past all obstacles -- like McCarthyism --
scores on America's Scholastic Aptitude Test had reached an all-time low; the Washington
Post said "American education is in fearsome decline"; and
America's universities by then suffering drop-out rates of 50% for Whites and
66% for Blacks -- were increasingly having to provide remedial courses.
Parents, pupils and schools seem themselves to have responded with a new
insistence on the importance of English, science and foreign languages in
school curricula. By 1989, at a national educational summit, even Governor Bill
Clinton professed agreement to new goals stressing higher academic standards
and a reduction of drug abuse. Ravitch is rightly suspicious of subjects like
Caribbean Studies that are invented chiefly to provide a few high marks for
Black students and to occupy Black staff of ethnocentric persuasions. It is
certainly hilarious that modern exponents of progressive ideas place more
stress on inducing self-esteem in adolescents than on teaching anything that
might lead to employability and thus to some justification for self-esteem.
Nevertheless, Ravitch's optimism neglects the key reasons why progressive ideas
have remained enduringly attractive.
----
To standard
liberal-left idealists, progressivism allows a proper input from consumers
into the educational process which there is no obvious reason to deny. Why
should teaching not be adapted to children's current interests and, indeed, to
their own informed choices? What, really, is the point of teaching
algebra or Ancient History to reluctant children of mediocre ability who can
never be expected to make any use of the teaching? In a world where esteem and
marriageability come chiefly via employment, were the original progressives not
right to try to provide different curricula for adolescents who plainly stated
their wishes to head, variously, towards administrative, managerial,
commercial, technical, clerical, manual or intellectual work? By all means, the
occasional study (of the learning of punctuation, in 1925) may show an advantage
for drill techniques. Yet can anyone in the computer age really want to avoid
letting computers take the strain of storing human knowledge (and of improving
grammar and punctuation)? If allowing pre-employment specialization should lead
-- as progressives liked to expect -- to 'social efficiency', just what is the
real objection of such as Ravitch? Western society is built first and foremost
on the central truth that people and societies benefit enormously from division
of labour. Why should Ravitch want to turn out children as carbon copies of
each other, chanting lists of Great Books which few of them will ever have read
with enjoyment? Ravitch likes to say she favours traditional liberal education,
but she declines to acknowledge that few pupils were ever much emancipated by
it. Adam Smith would surely have expected that, in 250 years, his personal
preference for a common school curriculum would have received some testing.
The truth is that
Ravitch has only one really serious objection to the classic progressive
agenda. This is that progressivism was for a while associated with what
Ravitch calls "the cult of IQ" and the 'racism' of those who believed
"that racial differences in intelligence were innate, real, and
fixed." For, yes, just as one may usefully talk of left traditionalism
and right traditionalism, so there is also left progressivism and
right progressivism.
About the post-1950 left
progressivism of emancipating pupils, Ravitch has just one slight
reservation. She thinks that, like other kinds of liberalism, child-centred
education does not produce conspicuously good results for less intelligent
children who plainly need guidance about what to study. Naturally, Ravitch
cannot quite express matters this way, for she does not believe in IQ; but her
anxiety about modern progressivism is plainly focussed on pupils who
are, for whatever reasons, academically weaker and less capable of intelligent
choice (at least till traditional education has taken hold. . .). Yet Left Back ends with many moderate
hopes of finding a middle way between progressivism and traditionalism.
Ravitch accepts the apparent wish of the president of the American Federation
of Teachers, Albert Shanker, to use "some form of ability grouping"
to avoid dumbing down and to deliver higher academic standards. So Ravitch does
not actually think progressivism beyond the pale. Indeed, if Ravitch
could bring herself to mention IQ, she might well urge 'Traditionalism for
the low IQ and progressivism for the high IQ.' Ravitch happily rehearses
the observations that progressive education was a success at Dewey's famous
Laboratory School in Chicago, at Lincoln School in New York, and at A. S.
Neill's Summerhill School in Suffolk, England all schools having a
spectacularly middle-class clientele. By contrast, the clearest disaster for progressivism
occurred in 1972 when an enthusiast for 'open education' introduced freedom and
choice into two Massachusetts schools having mainly Black enrolments. The
subsequent book by Principal Roland S. Barth recorded the closure of the scheme
for, among countless horrors, "a teacher would turn his back on a class,
to find only three of twenty-five youngsters left in the room when he turned
round again." Ravitch is never far from admitting the key truth that
individual differences are relevant to education.
No, Ravitch's real
problem is with the pre-1950 forms of what may be called right progressivism.
These aimed to respond not just to children's interests, needs and aptitudes,
but also to the dread phenomenon of the individual child's tested level of
general intelligence, or IQ. Once it had become clear, in the 1920's, that some
50% of mental ability variation between children was attributable to just one
factor, Charles Spearman's g factor (see e.g. Brand, 1996),
psychometrician-psychologists saw an obvious way to assist with education.
Lewis Terman at Stanford University and England's first educational
psychologist, Cyril Burt, at London University, began to urge that children be
grouped for schooling according to their IQ levels though also, where
possible, according to other psychological variations (notably in
spatio-mechanical, i.e. practical abilities).
Ravitch will have none
of this: "The widespread use of mental testing served to propagate the
belief that students' innate ability counted for more than their disciplined
effort." Like modern behaviourists, Ravitch is a believer in the value of
hard work even though she has no evidence that hard work without IQ points can
yield true academic success. It is because Ravitch is a head-in-the-sand denier
of the existence of the g factor that she is largely indifferent to such
concepts as tracking, streaming and banding. American research of the 1990's
showed clear academic and emotional gains to children -- not least to Black
girls -- from being grouped homogeneously according to IQ (Benbow &
Lubinski, 1996). By contrast, Ravitch seems to think work on IQ stopped by
1930. She can bring herself to contemplate only some limited response by schools
to children's much slighter and less reliable differences in Louis Thurstone's
and Howard Gardner's multiple 'independent' abilities. Ravitch is prepared to
advocate children being grouped according to Gardner's ever-growing list of
'multiple intelligences', but her self-denying ordinance about the g
factor means that she ignores the one really big possibility for going beyond
the otherwise sterile debate between traditionalism and progressivism.
----
Strangely for an
educational historian, Ravitch seldom avails herself of information about
educational variations that occur in other countries. Education is so shot
through with ideology that sensible experimentation within any one country
tends to be in short supply since the media pressure is for all schools to
follow the latest fashion. As it happens, Ravitch's wish for a largely
traditional curriculum to be imposed on all children, accompanied by ferocious
pressures on teachers to raise standards, is found granted in England. There,
despite Prime Minister Tony Blair having backed tracking (in major speeches of
1996 and 2000), an egalitarian and grammar school-hating Education Minister has
ensured the continuing realization of Ravitch's dreams. In England, all but the
most mentally retarded children must try to make out in Euclidian geometry and
English grammar; all must aspire to attend a university; and 'technical
schools' and 'polytechnics' have been abolished since there is so little
respect for anything but what appears to be traditional academic education (now
dominated -- unknown to parents -- by its mission of political correctness).
It remains to be seen
whether Labour's latest moves to test children endlessly and to harry teachers
will save English schools from their position (according to Labour spokesmen)
at 33rd in international league tables of achievement. What is clear
is that Britain's slide took place through the years since 1960 when neither IQ
nor any form of progressivism was allowed much influence by
educationists. These hypnotized agents of egalitarian social engineering worked
chiefly to ensure that forever dumbed-down public exams could be passed by
'hard work' and rote learning delivering the risible result, in 2001, that
girls do better than boys in most subjects. The educationists' most notable
achievement was the fourfold expansion in a generation of the numbers of
English children sent by their parents for secondary schooling in the private
sector. The twentieth-century mistake of English-speaking educators was not
that of listening to Dewey who, it should be said, recognized the evil of
Stalinism by 1937 and the impracticality of Rousseau's laissez-faire
individualism by 1938. No, the mistake was to stop listening to Terman and
Burt. Sadly, Professor Ravitch is not radical enough to have read much
psychology, so her book perpetuates the hideous mistake.
BENBOW, Camilla P. & LUBINSKI, D. (eds.) (1996). Intellectual
Talent: Psychometric and Social Issues. Baltimore and London : The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
BRAND, C. R. (1996). The g Factor: General
Intelligence and Its Implications. Chichester, UK : Wiley DePublisher.
(Available free online at http://www.douance.org/qi/brandtgf.htm.)
NOTES