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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

July 2, 2009

For Millennials, College and Learning Are Not the Same

One of the biggest problems in undergraduate education today is the so-called “disengagement factor.” Academic disengagement happens when students enter college, go to class, and complete assignments, but in a desultory manner. They don’t work as hard as they should, they blow off morning classes, and they don’t interact with their teachers outside of class. In the 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, for instance, 38 percent of first year students “Never” met with professors outside of class to “discuss ideas from readings or classes,” and 39 percent only did so “Sometimes.”

A study due to appear in Social Science Research contributes an interesting finding to the problem. It’s by Susan A. Dumais, and it’s entitled “The Academic Attitudes of American Teenagers, 1990-2002: Cohort and Gender Effects on Math Achievement.”

Dumais takes data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to draw comparisons between each group of high school students regarding their attitudes toward academics and social life. The investigation included questions about why students headed to college, how they rated the importance of studying, grades, etc., how they related academic behaviors to their friends’ judgment, and gender differences over time.

One finding runs against the common line: “Students in the Millennial Generation, as analyzed here, appeared less engaged in school than their Generation X predecessors.” The conclusion contradicts the characterization of X-ers as slackers and Millennials as sincere go-getters.

Another finding, though, complicates the judgment. While X-ers rated academic values (attending class, getting good grades, graduating) more highly than Millennials did, Millennials rated continuing one’s education more highly than did X-ers. In other words, even though they didn’t care as much about academic behaviors themselves as X-ers did, Millennials considered just going to college more important.

Dumais’ interpretation of that finding is: “the Millennial Generation understands the larger picture; they realize the importance of higher education for reaching one’s future occupational and life goals.”

Put it this way. For Millennials, it’s the concrete end result that counts, the degree that gets you the job. The larger educational purpose of college—that is, to become an informed citizen, a discerning consumer, a reflective mind—is secondary, if not a distraction.

So don’t be too impressed by the ambitiousness and earnestness of today’s crop of young ones, especially if you teach in the liberal arts. They’re more tactical than they appear, and we should add to our instruction a component to counteract it, namely, passing along the conviction that knowledge is a good in itself, and that the understanding of college as a four-year employment service is an opportunity forever lost.

Comment [15]

June 29, 2009

The War on Drugs From Left to Right



Here we have two pieces in the press, one an op-ed column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Bob Barr and another a story in The Nation magazine by Sasha Abramsky.

Who ever thought that the man known as the social conservative attack dog in Congress in the 1990s and the most prominent organ of the left would come together? That says something about the War on Drugs — namely, that it’s absurd.

Barr never really deserved his reputation as a culture warrior in the 1990s, a profile he acquired during the Lewinsky Affair because he appeared on late-night television shows several times a week (it seemed) to debate defenders and rationalizers of the president. (In my view, the scandal was a great big distraction, and a costly one in a dozen ways.) In truth, though, Barr was a Clinton critic long before Paula Jones showed up, and his criticisms then were about policy, such as the handling of China.

Moreover, for several years now Barr has been one of the fiercest critics of the Republican Party. After losing his Congressional seat in 2002, Barr began criticizing the Bush Administration for several domestic and foreign policy positions. He thinks the Iraq invasion was a disastrous miscalculation, he opposed waterboarding, he despises domestic surveillance and wiretapping, and, as he writes here, the considers the War on Drugs an abomination.

“Regardless of whether one is a ‘drug warrior’ or a ‘drug legalizer,’” he writes, “it is difficult if not impossible to defend the 38-year war on drugs as a success.” Drugs are just as easy to obtain now as they ever were, he observes, and the prison population has exploded 547 percent from 1970 to 2007, the “lion’s share” due to drug arrests. Law enforcement officials trot out those indictments and seizures as signs the war is working. Consider the logic: Swelling prisons signal success, even though availability hasn’t changed.

The Nation article takes up the prison population as an interesting factor.

“Onetime California governor and current gubernatorial hopeful Jerry Brown, for example, has spent decades trying to erase the public’s memory of his liberal tenure in the 1970s, when California’s prison population shrank to well below 30,000,” she writes. “As a part of that remodeling, he has assiduously courted the California Correctional Peace Officers’ Association, the trade union representing the state’s prison guards. Now, with his war chest flush with CCPOA funds, Brown won’t do anything to challenge tough-on-crime orthodoxies.”

It’s a good point. Any government program with this level of funding and systemic reach (from local police forces to Federal programs to prisons) is going to generate lots of folks whose livelihoods depend on the policy. That’s why the War on Drugs continues. Too many special interests need it and too many ambitious and comfortable politicians need them.

With California on the verge of bankruptcy, however, we might see some common sense and cost-benefit analysis come into play. With financial pressures hovering, Governor S. and state legislators may find that the political will is there to stop this fabricated “war” that has wasted so many dollars and so many hours and lives.


(Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos from Flickr users Nightlife_of_Revelry and Ctd 2005)

Comment [114]

June 25, 2009

Dropout Rates, Arts and Humanities, Graduation Numbers

Something troubling happened in the public schools in 2006. From 1996 to 2005, the high-school graduation rate increased by an average of close to one-third of a percentage point annually. But from 2005 to 2006, the figure dropped more than a full point. Here is a map of the states, from EPE Research, and you can see that the full variation from state to state reaches 35 percentage points. (Here is a story in Education Week on the trends.) The breakdowns by race and gender, too, are sometimes striking.

Here from Common Core is another report that has an interesting finding. It compares the curricula of some high-performing nations around the world to those of the United States and concludes, “Each of the nations that consistently outrank the United States on the PISA exam provides their students with a comprehensive, content-rich education in the liberal arts and sciences.” The report finds that arts and humanities requirements in school are common to nations whose students perform well on tests. Those countries share, says Lynne Munson (quoted by Education Week), “a dedication to educating their children deeply in a wide range of subjects.” The narrow focus on math and reading skills, Common Core infers, actually hinders the students’ performance on math and reading tests.

Another report appears here from American Enterprise Institute, a study of college graduation rates. The main conclusion: “Fewer than 60 percent of new students graduated from four-year colleges within six years.”

Finally, here is one of the best sites through which one can follow ongoing reports and commentary upon them. It’s called Flypaper, and is the blog of the Fordham Foundation.

Comment [23]

June 24, 2009

Another Problem With Texting


Texting is much in the news these days, especially after Nielsen released its finding that teens send and receive an average of 2,272 text messages each month. The New York Times reported on the phenomenon, as has The Washington Post, Scientific American, and a thousand blogs across the country.

Texting even has entered the realm of competition, with the LA U.S. National Texting Championship offering $50,000 to the winner. This year it was a young lady from Des Moines (see here), a 15-year-old who runs up 14,000 texts each month and advises parents, “let [kids] text during dinner! It pays off!” More than 250,000 tried to enter the contest this year.

It’s not all social stuff, we are assured. One thing the winner does is use texting to study for exams with pals, the story notes. So do lots of other kids, although the meaning of “use” may be said to vary.

Here we read a story in eSchoolNews with an alarming headline: “Students say using tech to cheat isn’t cheating.” A poll commissioned by Common Sense Media found that “more than a third of teens with cellphones (35 percent) admit to cheating at least once with them, and two-thirds of all teens (65 percent) say others in their school cheat with them.” They store information on cell phones before entering the classroom to take a test. Fully 25 percent of them text answers to their friends while the test is taking place. One out of five use their phones to surf the Web for answers. And nearly half of them use their phones to call friends to warn them of pop quizzes. Just over half admit to cheating in one way or another using their devices.

Here’s the doubly-worrisome part: “Many students do not consider this behavior as cheating.” Only 16 percent admitted that calling or texting friends to warn them of a pop quiz is, indeed, a violation. More than one-third claimed that “downloading a paper from the Internet was not a serious offense, and 42 percent said copying text from Web sites was a either a minor offense or not cheating at all.”

Old-style schoolmasters fret, but isn’t this just a matter of quick-witted teenagers living out “the death of the author”? Don’t we see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead the healthy spread of “participatory culture”? In the digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the definition of cheating. Right?


(Photo by Flickr user Cinnamon)

Comment [29]

June 22, 2009

Books, Libraries, Kids

Here is an interesting little newspaper piece out of Rapid City. It’s in the Rapid City Journal, and it reports on budgets and usage in the district middle-school library system.

The headline is “Rapid City middle schoolers may be reading less,” and the prime measurement in the article is book checkouts. In the last year, it says, “middle-school students checked out about 30,000 fewer books.” One librarian calculates the reduction as 10 books that didn’t get into the hands of each student in the area.

The librarians have no trouble pinpointing the cause: budget reductions. After the Rapid City board of education cut $4-million from the district’s operating budget, the library system restructured. Middle-school libraries closed one day per week, and the amount of money devoted to books sank for the second consecutive year. Some middle-school librarians had to split their time between middle-school libraries and elementary-school libraries, and one of them acknowledged that the book-circulating slide has hit the elementary-school libraries as well.

This year the library fund for materials reached $200,000, but only $75,000 went to books. The other $125,000 went to buying software. (As for other technology costs, the article mentions that a single light bulb in one of the new Promethium Board “interactive white boards with a projection unit used in classrooms,” costs $365.) Added to that, the libraries had to get rid of many older copies because of the lead content in the books, and they don’t have the funds to replace them.

There is, of course, a giant force in play that goes unmentioned in the article, and it’s a difficult one for librarians.

Kids just don’t read books as much as they used to. The diversion menu is larger, with lots of screen tools and toys to fill their leisure hours. Books are cheaper, and free when checked out of the library, and they have more educational value than screen hours, but no matter. Kids like technology, and printed pages appear oh so bland and boring.

The system corresponds to the trend, now spending $5 per student for books and $8 for technology. Expect that gap to widen in the coming years.

Comment [4]

June 18, 2009

Gerald Graff, the MLA, and Radical Teachers

Here at City Journal, the lively quarterly of the Manhattan Institute, Sol Stern has an essay on the influence of radical education theorist Paulo Freire on higher education in the United States. Deep in the essay it refers to the Modern Language Association as “ultra-politically correct,” a characterization common among conservative and libertarian critics, but one that, I think, misconstrues the political opinions of MLA members.

It is more accurate to say that the MLA is composed of more or less left-of-center folks, most of them moderate liberals but with a few ultra-left factions in operation, including the Radical Caucus. Yes, there is ample room for various racial and sexual identity preoccupations, but for people who want to do traditional literary scholarship that doesn’t invoke left-wing themes and goals, there is ample room as well.

It would be a mistake, though, to assume that what has made the MLA in popular representations appear ultra-PC or hard-leftist is the bias of conservative and libertarian critics. In large part it is due to the fact that those factions in the MLA that do take a hard-left line are forceful and outspoken and emphatic, enough so that they attract a disproportionate amount of attention.

I say this with admiration. I sat on two panels at the last MLA well attended by Radical Caucus members, and it was refreshing to see academics wear their convictions on their sleeves. (See here for an old statement.) They represent a position and they advocate it insistently. They don’t hesitate to dispatch wavering and soft liberals, and they won’t back off from their principles. They invite opponents into the circle, too.

Other academics aren’t like that, however, and even if they disagree with the radicals they tend to keep silent and go their own way in teaching and scholarship.

Not Gerald Graff, though. In a previous post I mentioned Graff’s criticisms of radical teaching in his MLA presidential address. An article in Radical Teacher a while back deserves notice as well.

It’s part of a forum on “Radical Teaching Now,” which appeared in Number 83 of the periodical (2008). It’s a strong challenge, and the piece that precedes it, by Andrew Ross, is a good introduction. Ross begins his contribution with a naked assertion of purpose:

“We spend most of our time in the typical undergraduate classroom breaking down the knowledge, beliefs, and values that our students have acquired from high school education, media bromides, popular culture, and family lore. It is an immensely laborious endeavor that we know is a necessary preparation in the grooming of radicals.”

There you have it, “the grooming of radicals.” Higher education is about disabusing the young of what they’ve assimilated from home, school, media, and culture and assisting them in a “radical turn.”

Here is Graff’s rejoinder to the radical teacher from the start:

“I think it’s immoral for teachers to try to get students in their classes ‘to work for egalitarian change,’ as you put it. What right do we have to be the self-appointed political conscience of our students?”

Graff notes the power inequities in the classroom and tells the radical teacher, “Pick on somebody your own size!”

Furthermore, “Making it the main object of teaching to open ‘students’ minds to left, feminist, anti-racist, and queer ideas’ and ‘stimulate’ them (nice euphemism that) ‘to work for egalitarian change’ has been the fatal mistake of the liberatory pedagogy movement from Freire in the 1960s to today.”

This is not to say that teachers must suppress their own political position in the classroom, Graff maintains. Play fair with other opinions, he argues, and you can offer your own. Indeed, “The more you fairly represent viewpoints strongly opposed to yours in the reading list, the more legitimate it becomes to push your own view. You can do that even more aggressively, though, if you invite colleagues who hold opposing views into your class, a tactic that also gives your students a model of how you can be disagreed with.”

This is to live out the model of discussion in Mill’s On Liberty, which says:

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. . . . Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them . . . He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

This means that the teacher must accept the risk that the student will leave the class agreeing with the adversary position, not with the teacher’s. Without accepting that risk, though, teaching does, in fact, turn into indoctrination.

Comment [17]

June 16, 2009

Identity and Jurisprudence

The commentary on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s speech at Berkeley’s School of Law in 2001 and published a year later in Berkeley La Raza Law Journal has proliferated in recent days, and at this point the White House regrets those 32 words (“I would hope that a wise Latina woman …”) as much as anyone.

Of course, as many have pointed out, the identity-perspective statements are not something to shy away from, not, that is, when one speaks them in academic settings. They are, instead, customary sentiments. When Judge Sotomayor uttered them at Berkeley, I imagine that few noticed them except in terms of approval. Indeed, to me what stands out in her disquisition is how routine and unimaginative the presentation is, the defense of identity-based understanding mostly a series of standard expressions.

We have some unobjectionable, common-sense assertions that people’s experiences color their judgment (“Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see”). Who would argue with that?

But then we have the extension of them to positions that off-campus Americans find altogether problematic, the “wise Latina woman” sentence and others, too.

For instance, Sotomayor cites Judge Miriam Cedarbaum’s contention that the idea that “judging should be gender or anything else based” is “dangerous,” then claims, “I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society.” That seems to many people to verge on removing the blindfold from justice, or to adjusting the scales for different identities.

Another worrisome statement follows when Sotomayor raises questions of different perspectives and even different thought processes and judgment habits across groups:

“Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning, are in many respects a small part of a larger practical question we as women and minority judges in society in general must address.”

“Basic differences in logic and reasoning”? One wishes that she had spelled those out. There are important legal and epistemological arguments behind these assertions, to be sure, but when you get down to it, people are uncomfortable with the prospect that a judge will take identity into account when deciding a case, or that one judge will reason one way and another judge another way about a case, not because of different moral or ideological positions but through some deep cognitive differences. They expect a fair, consistent standard — not a white male perspective and not a Latina perspective.

Jurists such as Cedarbaum recognize that a person’s experiences always come into play, but they need to neutralize them as much as possible. Personal experiences are unpredictable and arbitrary, which means that they can work against justice as well as for it.

Sotomayor recognizes the potential, but doesn’t see the problem:

“My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

A step is missing here. Acceptance is fine, but we need some critical distance from gender and heritage as well. We can’t stop with “hope” and the “unfamiliar” and “I simply do not know.” Precisely because of the limits of identity perspectives, we shouldn’t just accept them. We should accept them and transcend them.

Comment [32]

June 13, 2009

A Word on Rote Memorization

A while back while debating a bright 24-year-old on Canadian radio about the benefits and harms of digital habits, I played up the no-tech exercises I assign students, including the study and recitation of verse. “Yeah,” I said, in old-fogey tones, “I make sophomores memorize 20-plus lines of their own choosing out of the anthology every few weeks and vocalize them to the class the next meeting. It’s good for their minds and characters.”

The other guest jumped on the task. “Please,” she observed [I’m paraphrasing]. “Teachers need to realize that we’re in a different era, and that they can’t expect their students to sit back and take in what they or the book says and just regurgitate it.” It’s an old point going a century back to the progressives and their objections to “drill-and-kill.” The latest technology has provided a new argument against it.

In a digital age, it goes, students demand more interactivity, more initiative and creativity in the learning process. What could be worse than memorizing others’ words?

The problem with this outlook is that it misconstrues the memorization of verse (or any other kind of eloquence) as a mechanical procedure. It casts memory and response as robotic, a Gradgrind oppression.

Consider, however, what goes into the process, and what benefits derive from it.

1. Memory is a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. The more you practice it, the more tricks and tactics you discover. Memory is an art as well as an act, and as with any art form it improves with repetition.

2. Memorization of language slows you down. It makes you pay close attention to the verbal surface, so that you can’t slide past the details. Figures of speech, parentheses, and punctuation demand notice. The eye and ear have to sharpen. In a world of accelerating reading, writing, speaking, and listening, that slow reading workout becomes all the more important.

3. It builds vocabulary. If you don’t know what words mean, you can’t remember and recite them effectively.

4. It accustoms students to public speaking, which so many of them regard with fear and trembling.

5. It supplies young people a reservoir of better utterances. A little exposure to the words of Dickinson, Wordsworth, and the rest grants them a healthy alternative to the puerile patter of social networking.

6. Finally, it forces young people out of themselves, if only for a moment. To grasp the voice of the poem, they have to throw themselves into the experience of the speaker. With so much of digital youth culture fostering self-involvement and self-display, a little imagination of other selves far from their own condition helps curb the narcissism.

Se let’s have more of it. The more students groan and resist and assert, “Why do this when we can always call up that Frost poem with a few clicks?” the more they need the practice.

Comment [47]

June 11, 2009

Book Lovers vs. Book Writers Who Don't Like Books


(Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos by Flickr users woodleywonderworks and eyeliam)


A few weeks ago, popular recording star Kanye West gave an interview to Reuters, explaining among other things:

“‘Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed,’ West said. ‘I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.’

“‘I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,’ he said.”

This in spite of the fact that West’s mother, who died in 2007, was an English professor at Chicago State University. Indeed, in Time Magazine a few years earlier she compared her son to Walt Whitman (who himself, it should be remembered, had an ambivalent attitude toward books).

The occasion of the Reuter’s interview, however, is precisely the upcoming print publication of West’s collection of Kanye-isms “Thank You and You’re Welcome.” It will be 52 pages long, “some blank, others with just a few words — and offers his optimistic philosophy on life. One two-page section reads, “Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!” Another page reads “I hate the word hate!” Such nuggets might explain why Time granted the title “deconstructionist” to West: “West — who has a habit of beginning sentences with the preamble, ‘Rappers say this all the time,’ as if he were not one of the world’s most popular rappers but a kid deconstructing one — is quite bougie.” (“Bougie” signifies “middle class.”)

Contrast that effort with recent bibliophilic pieces by Vernon Klinkenborg, this one on reading books aloud and this one on rereading the same books.

The first one asserts, “But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words — and the pattern of the words — the reader really sees.” This may, in fact, explain the popularity of spoken prose and poetry by figures such as West, whose words in cold print may appear to exemplify the banality of the wise adolescent, but whose oration of them manages to electrify mass audiences. The difference is that while West sees the performance as an improvement over the written word, Klinkenborg regards it as a penetration into it.

In fact, West says that being a devoted nonreader actually helped him write his book, for he approached it with a “childlike purity.” For Klinkenborg, on the other hand, reading aloud makes books all the more important, not less.

“I read aloud to my writing students,” he says, “and when students read aloud to me I notice something odd. They are smart and literate, and most of them had parents who read to them as children. But when students read aloud at first, I notice that they are trying to read the meaning of the words. If the work is their own, they are usually trying to read the intention of the writer. It’s as though they’re reading what the words represent rather than the words themselves. What gets lost is the inner voice of the prose, the life of the language.”

West’s “childlike purity,” too, goes along with Klinkenborg’s celebration of books, not against it. In the piece on re-reading, he links repeated experiences of books precisely to childhood:

“The love of repetition seems to be ingrained in children. And it is certainly ingrained in the way children learn to read — witness the joyous and maddening love of hearing that same bedtime book read aloud all over again, word for word, inflection for inflection.”

That makes sense to me, captive as I am to a 4-year-old who demands successive re-readings of Curious George, Richard Scarry, Peter Rabbit, and Harry the Dirty Dog stories night after night after night.

Why, then, contrast books to the oral performance? Why let your success at oratory lead you into a “proud” dismissal of books?

Comment [104]

June 9, 2009

Cultural Literacy in Retreat


The pedagogical pendulum swings back and forth, but at the end of the day, in designing a curriculum, you still have to choose some texts over others.
(Image from photobucket.com)

Anybody who has sat in on curriculum meetings and projects in the humanities has experienced those awkward moments when it comes down to selecting certain contents and materials as essential and required. Traditionalists in the room want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas, and on various grounds of historical influence, civic inheritance, and aesthetic virtue they stick with a generally Eurocentric tradition.

Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning “normativities,” and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.

By now it’s an old and tired antagonism, an unresolved one. Progressives have largely triumphed in the policy sphere, but traditionalists have managed more or less to retain their focus in individual classrooms. The result is satisfying to neither side. Students leave high school and college with a few progressive attitudes firmly in place (diversity, etc.) and a smattering of canonical learning.

There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse, however, which I think partly explains the rise of the “skills” movement in education circles. What the skills emphasis does is neutralize the culture-wars conflicts inherent in any knowledge selections in a curriculum. It speaks about abstract cognitive abilities such as “critical thinking,” “higher-order thinking skills,” and “problem solving.” No disturbing questions about representation of female authors on a syllabus or about Thomas Jefferson’s racial attitudes. Instead, the skills approach promises to empower students to handle those questions better later on — not here in the classroom, but after they have graduated from the skills curriculum.

The leader today is Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, whose Web site (http://www.21stcenturyskills.org) lays out the philosophy. They have the business community firmly behind them — its board includes people from Ford, Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Sun, Dell, Cisco, Apple, and Intel — and politicians have lined up to endorse the vision. For instance, a press release by the Partnership praises Senators John Kerry, John Rockefeller, and Olympia Snowe for pushing the 21st Century Skill Incentive Fund Act, which will provide “matching federal funds to states that pair strong core courses with 21st-century skills such as creativity, innovation, critical thinking and financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy.” (Did you know that creativity is a 21st-century skill?)

In contrast to the enthusiasm of the skills proponents, a growing number of educators are pushing back. Here are several statements to take heed of:

Andrew J. Rotherham: “But while it is exciting to think we live in times so revolutionary that they demand entirely new skills, that assumption and others threaten to establish a false choice between teaching facts and teaching how to approach them — and to make the 21st-century skills movement another fad leading to little change in American education.”

Dan Willingham: “Clarion calls for more attention to 21st-century skills brings to mind a familiar pattern in the history of education: pendulum swings between an emphasis on process (analysis, critical thinking, cooperative learning) which fosters concern that students lack knowledge and generates a back-to-basics movement that emphasizes content, which fosters concern that student are merely parroting facts with no idea of how to use their knowledge, and so on. In calmer moments, everyone agrees that students must have both content knowledge and practice in using it, but one or the other tends to get lost as the emphasis sweeps to the other extreme.”

E.D. Hirsch: “There are many reasons for the difficulty of transferring critical thinking and other 21st-century skills from one domain to another, but here’s a decisive reason. A central feature of such skills is the drawing of inferences, a skill that has been mastered by all who speak a language. Every time we understand what someone says we are making inferences. The inference-making skill is observable even in six-month-old infants, as Alison Gopnik and her colleagues explain in The Scientist in the Crib.

“But inference-making is not purely formal process. When the skill fails it’s usually because information is lacking. Inference-making can be described as supplying missing premises from one’s own prior knowledge in order to complete a kind of syllogism. The purely transferable elements of thinking skills turn out to be minor elements that are easily acquired. What really counts is relevant knowledge about the problem at hand. In the scientific literature the key term is ‘domain-specific knowledge.’ Being a problem solver in one domain does not automatically make you skilled in another.”

Jay Mathews: “Granted, the 21st-century skills idea has important business and political advocates, including President-Elect Barack Obama. It calls for students to learn to think and work creatively and collaboratively. There is nothing wrong with that. Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece. But I see little guidance for classroom teachers in 21st-century skills materials. How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing, and math supposed to learn this stuff?

“However, teachers who say this approach works agree with me that the marketing of the concept has not been entirely honest or wise. A sentence from a report by the Tucson-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills illustrates the problem: ‘Every aspect of our education system — preK-12, postsecondary, and adult education, after-school and youth development, work-force development and training, and teacher preparation programs — must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st-century skills they need to compete.’ This is the all-at-once syndrome, a common failing of reform movements. They say changes must be made all at once, or else. In this democracy, we never make changes all at once. The past few months of the financial crisis prove that, once again. So please don’t tell us we have to. (Ken Kay, president of the partnership, told me that he doesn’t think it all has to be done at once, but that is not what his handouts say.)”

And Diane Ravitch: “There is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st-century skills movement. The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the 20th century. Their call for 20th-century skills sounds identical to the current effort to promote 21st-century skills. If there was one cause that animated the schools of education in the 20th century, it was the search for the ultimate breakthrough that would finally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content.

“For decade after decade, pedagogical leaders called upon the schools to free themselves from tradition and subject matter. Ellwood P. Cubberley, dean of the education school at Stanford, warned that it was dangerous for society to educate boys — and even girls — without reference to vocational ends. Whatever they learned, he insisted, should be relevant to their future lives and work. He thought it foolish to saturate them with ‘a mass of knowledge that can have little application for the lives which most of them must inevitably lead.’ They were sure to become disappointed and discontented, and who knew where all this discontent might lead? Cubberley called on his fellow educators to abandon their antiquated academic ideals and instead to adapt education to the real life and real needs of their students. This was in 1911.”

These are important voices, of course, but in their insistence upon content knowledge they throw people back upon the difficult questions of cultural literacy. That’s a place where politicians and business leaders don’t wish to tread, which means that however old the skills movement happens to be, notwithstanding its 21st-century sheen, it has a new weapon in hand, namely, the fear of choosing certain books, events, etc. over others.

Comment [23]

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