Accepting the ‘Science!’ of Education Reform

Testing the Reform Template
When you keep in mind that accepting the utilitarian change to the purpose of Education, was the change of mind that ensured all of the disastrous reforms that would follow, it becomes much easier to see how we got from there, to here, through the pivoting and misdirection’s inherent in implementing the reform template. The most obviously successful of those who first led the way in applying the ‘reform!‘ template, was Horace Mann, a radical reformer with a knack for diverting the footsteps of our Founding Reformers into such unforeseen paths as would effectively conceal much of Fichte’s Prussian System of education, under an Americanized veneer. His most significant ‘achievement’ in going down that path, was helping to bring about Massachusetts’ first laws for establishing a mandatory public school system under a state board of education. It didn’t take long for the people of Massachusetts to begin realizing what the semantics of ‘a more democratic education!’ had deceived them into establishing as law:

“…After all that has been said about the French and Prussian systems, they appear to your Committee to be much more admirable, as a means of political influence, and of strengthening the hands of the government, than as a mere means for the diffusion of knowledge. For the latter purpose, the system of public Common Schools, under the control of persons most interested in their flourishing condition, who pay taxes to support them, appears to your Committee much superior. The establishment of the Board of Education seems to be the commencement of a system of centralization and of monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary, in every respect, to the true spirit of our democratical institutions; and which, unless speedily checked, may lead to unlooked-for and dangerous results…”[emphasis added]

, but the deed was done, and they weren’t successful in undoing it, as at each turn in the process, the objections of those with eyes to see, were brushed away as being over reactions, and those listening were given assurances of “Oh I’m sure they don’t mean that!”. The problem was (and is) that such a system as that, had to mean exactly “that!”, and no matter how good the intentions of ‘fitting youth to the machinery of government‘ might have been to begin with, such ideals as those are fundamentally incompatible with the ‘old’ pursuit of enabling students to develop an educated grasp of, and love for, what is real and true. Then, as now, the point of ‘school reform!‘ was to reform the collective population into the image the reformers had in mind for them, and then as now, data and data collection were key to how a bureaucracy gains power over those it’s supposed to serve. From pg. 123 of “The Myth of the Common School‘:

“…Virtually the only power that Mann and the board possessed was that of requiring annual school returns of statistics and othe information, and Mann had used this aggressively to collect the information that he then used with great effect in his celebrated annual reports (Complaints about such data-collection activities have not abated over the years!)

Mann’s requests for information, and use of the information he received, were in some respects the key elements of his influence over the development of the common school…

… Mann also was in the habit of sending out questions that sought information of a more subjective nature, generally in anticipation of basing policy recommendations on responses whose tenor he anticipated; there are no instances in which such responses appear to have caused him to change his mind about an issue!….”

Mann helped spur that progressive reorientation further onwards through another European innovation that he championed, that of replacing the traditional oral examinations between a teacher and each one of their students, with identical written tests given to the entire class at the same time. In oral examinations, teachers would ask each individual student questions, which they’d answer in their own words, which led to more questions, and answers, and so on, giving the teacher a solid understanding of how well that student understood the material they’d been covering in class, and how best to approach what they would be covering in class next, or next year.

That was not what Horace Mann was interested in, it was too individual, and contributed nothing towards using education to bring about the changes he wanted to see made in students, teachers, and the public. The answer he saw as being more of what he was looking for, lay in written tests,.

“… after visiting schools in Europe in 1843, returned convinced that written exams were superior. He wrote: “When the oral method is adopted, none but those personally present at the examination can have any accurate or valuable idea of appearance of the school…Not so, however, when the examination is by printed questions and written answers. A transcript, a sort of Daguerreotype likeness, as it were, of the state and condition of the pupils’ minds, is taken and carried away, for general inspection…”

, with written tests, Mann could replace the individual process of oral exams, a process that was itself educational, with printed tests, whose generic questions required students to recall similar (and eventually identical) answers that were pre-determined ‘by those who know best’ to fit the ‘answer key’, and which all of the other students would be trained to answer with as well. Tests such as those could be mass produced, and their scores tabulated (another form of data-collection) to give ‘exact measurements’ of what students knew, and which teachers were or weren’t ‘being helpful’ (to the student, or the reformers?), so as to use the ‘progress measured’ to further their reforms by goading public opinion into line with it.

It should be no surprise to anyone that pursuing results without regard to their causes, leads to unforeseen consequences, and as historian William J. Reese, author of ‘Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History’, wrote in a New York Times essay,

“…What can we learn from the advent of what we learned to call “high-stakes testing”? What transpired then still sounds eerily familiar: cheating scandals, poor performance by minority groups, the narrowing of the curriculum, the public shaming of teachers, the appeal of more sophisticated measures of assessment, the superior scores in other nations, all amounting to a constant drumbeat about school failure….”

Do you see the seeds of a familiar pattern in that? The promised panacea, accusations of fault over related failures, calls to increase and expand their efforts, and so on? Still more benefits found with testing, was the ability to use both the tests, and their results, to target those teachers, parents, and students, who hadn’t yet been reformed into Mann’s ideal image for them. The community wasn’t blind to what he was doing, there was controversy and outrage over what he did, and over his pressing for still more and more reforms, efforts that clearly came at the expense of those students and teachers that his test results had unfairly targeted. As matters heated up, he temporarily scaled back his efforts, before soon pushing for still more. Eventually the public did tire of Mann and he lost his re-election – but the tests, and their uses, and the data-collection, remained, expanded, and grew to the point that they are now everywhere.

The reform pattern is difficult to miss in that description of how written tests were introduced with ‘proven value’ from European uses, followed by the ‘unforeseen consequences‘ of students cheating on tests, followed by the need for progressively more tests, which then led to standardized tests, then state testing, and finally to nationwide testing standards. Once you notice it, it becomes hard to miss, is even a little bit fractal in its nature, in what’s presented in all educational reform:

1. Propose a goal from the latest educational experiment to be ‘given a shot‘ at training kids in far more useful answers and skills,
2. Trot out experts from state and commerce to brush away concerns with ‘oh, they don’t mean ‘that!‘, while assuring the public that they’re needed for ‘the greater good’ of society and its workforce.
3. That reform – whether it succeeds or fails – justifies calling for still more radical reforms to follow and be normalized into our educational system,

And when some portion of the ‘that!‘ which opponents warned about actually occurs, or an even worse side-effect follows from it, simply rinse and repeat as you double-down with the same three steps as necessary, until the ‘that!‘ which people were originally concerned with, gradually becomes what is in fact normalized and implemented everywhere.

Step 1 in the pattern, despite its lofty sounding goals always involves providing students with less and less of substance, such as worthwhile literature, to think with, under the cover of providing ‘more rigor’ that drills students in ‘key facts’ & ‘new skills’ which support whichever ideological issues the ‘greater good’ requires them to serve. The pattern as a whole is something of an Americanized version of Fichte’s methods for using schools to destroy free will and socializing conformity in a manner that effectively prevents ‘wrong think’. And whether the goal of the moment has been to produce a ‘new man’, or economic utility, or governmental cogs, or more activists, the new ideal of going to school to ‘get good grades and get a good job!‘, gradually forced out the original True North ideal of equipping a person to be a knowledgeable and moral individual who is capable of insightful thought and self-governance, as it had to – the two are incompatible contradictions that no amount of dialectical thinking could resolve.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the schooling spectrum, one of those enthusiastic students who’d taken the European Tour, Charles W. Elliott, had since become a professor at Harvard, gained his own PhD, and graduated to being the president of Harvard, at which point he introduced the radical new notion of ‘elective classes‘.

“…Contending that higher learning in the United States needed to be “broadened, deepened, and invigorated,” Eliot demanded a place for the sciences as well as the humanities in any sound program of liberal education. To counter the rigidity of the Harvard curriculum—which, following what was then general practice, was then almost totally prescribed—Eliot eliminated required courses. Under his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, a balance was struck between required and elective courses…”

That ‘reform’, in and of itself, was both an expression and a consequence of the transformation of Education – under the old view, those with something meaningful to teach, knew what they needed to teach to those who did not yet know it, and so students came to learn that from them. Under the new form, the students came to learn what they’d already decided would be useful for them to know, and they chose what classes seemed most interesting or useful for that, while grudgingly enduring ‘that other stuff’ they had to sit through to get their degree. That of course required not only adding more ‘interesting classes’ to the school curriculum to keep student’s attention (and their parents $) on task, but also soon developed into budgeting ‘uninteresting’ classes out of the courses that the college offered, a cycle which within a century would see those classes which had originally been the central purpose of that college, entirely dropped from being taught in those colleges.

Now that’s education reform.

In the end, all of ‘school reform!‘ is about reforming you into something useful to something else
Earlier in this post I mentioned a review of significant developments of the 1700s, given at the opening of the 1800s, by a professor from Princeton, Samuel Miller. One issue he mentioned in that review, was two pages of concerns he had over innovations in education that were developing in the late 1700s, that were intending to use education as a means towards ‘the perfectibility of man‘, which Prof. Miller saw as being ‘…contrary to the nature and condition of man…‘. His concerns are well worth reading and thinking through, even today, particularly as he identified that what those new theories:

“… depicted in philosophic dreams is an absurd portrait of knowledge without real wisdom, of benevolence without piety, and of purity and happiness without genuine virtue…”

, and at the close of his comments on education, he sadly concludes, accurately, that:

“…The doctrine of human perfectibility however, is too flattering to the pride of man not to have considerable currency among certain classes of society. Accordingly, the effects of this doctrine may be distinctly traced in many parts of the civilised world, from its influence in seminaries of learning, on the general interests of education, and on many social institutions. That this influence is unfavourable, will not be questioned for a moment by those who consider truth and utility as inseparably and eternally connected…”

, and while I disagree with at least one of his points (having to do with Malthus), that last point above, the folly of failing to view “… truth and utility as inseparably and eternally connected…” – that is a truth that for the most part is not only no longer recognized by us today, but if you tell someone that today, it’s likely that they’ll be surprised that you’d say such a thing. That shouldn’t be surprising, because when someone is saying we need to be ‘practical‘, or ‘pragmatic‘, or that we should ‘pay less attention to worrying about what’s right and focus on what’s useful!‘, they are declaring their own implicit belief that Truth and Utility have no intrinsic connection, that they have no real relation to each other. Behaving as if Truth and Utility are separable, is what our Founding Reformers first ‘reform’ helped make into a norm for us, as their promises of prosperity which helped ‘school reform!‘ to become a thing 200 years ago, nudged us into ignoring the fact that we were attempting to reverse cause and effect, and it’s that assumption, and our willingness to look at what we’re being promised, and not at what is being assumed and done in the name of that promise, which has led to the unending stream of dis-educational policies and laws that we’ve been imposed upon ourselves, since then.

The denial that “… truth and utility as inseparably and eternally connected…“, is a tenet of ‘Utilitarian’ belief, which is something, IMHO, that is not only unwise for individuals to accept, it is disastrous for a society to adhere to – the world we’re dealing with today is a result of attempting to treat it as an idea that ‘works’ – how does that seem to be working to you? It doesn’t work, of course. But naively believing it will, causes us to redouble our efforts when we see that the policies that we’ve enacted on its promises, are failing – we think it’s us that’ve failed, rather than suspecting that the ‘truth’ of it is a lie.

But point out to people today – whether Left, Right or Center – that “… truth and utility as inseparably and eternally connected…“, and you’ll typically be met with an exaggerated eye-roll and muttering about the need to be practical and get ‘results!‘. How many of those on ‘The Right’ who are upset over the state of our schools today, realize that ‘Common Core’ and SEL originated in the ‘school reform!‘s called for by the Right in the late 80s and 90s, which were capitalizing on exactly that reaction? And yet most of us today – Left, Right or Center – still think that we can pass laws to ‘restore our schools’, completely unaware that they are actively engaged in the very same pro-regressive effort to reverse cause and effect, that brought us to where we are.

Before we go demanding yet another ‘school reform!‘, we need to realize that our past ‘school reform!‘s have reformed us into a people who don’t even think twice about how divorced our good intentions are from reality, and until we fix that, ‘school reform!‘ will continue doing what ‘school reform!‘ has always done – reforming ‘We The People‘ away from who we once were, into who we are becoming today.

And that’s school reform.