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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

The Fate of History in a High-Tech Time

When the results of history tests and surveys emerge and students perform abysmally, educators often respond by blaming the tests for overemphasizing facts and memorization. Testers would do better, they maintain, by appreciating more complex historical realities and higher-order reflections upon them. As Howard Gardner once put it in an article in Daedelus in 2002: “More often than not, history consists of lists and names and dates rather than the more challenging but more generative capacity to ‘do history’ and to ‘think historically.’”

Traditionalists and “core knowledge” educators counter that without a sound acquaintance with selected facts, more advanced critical thinking on the past has nothing to work with.

It’s a complicated debate, and it will continue as long as funding is tied to the performance of a school’s students on standardized tests. It will also go on as long as the selection of materials for the curriculum carries with it an ideological charge.

In one aspect, though, many of the parties might agree, both those that regret the decline of history into regurgitation of names and dates and figures, and those that want students to internalize core knowledge. It bears upon technology, specifically, the way in which technology as used by students actually conspires against both higher-order historical thinking and memorization of details.

A while back, a principal at an elementary school explained to me how it happens. He said that his 5th- and 6th-grade teachers are having a problem with research assignments. If they ask the kids to do a report on, say, the colony of Jamestown, they follow a predictable process. Type search terms, pull up the first three or four sites, cut and paste sentences and paragraphs into a document, add their own comments, print it up, and turn it in. They have, they believe, completed the assignment.

The digital tools encourage students to approach their work in this assemblage-like way. They save time and energy, but the process has a sweeping effect. It reduces historical material into information to be retrieved and passed along. And the process doesn’t lodge the material in the minds of the students for very long. It happens too fast, too expeditiously.

We see a paradox at work. More availability of historical material makes less knowledge of it. Ease of access lightens the burden of remembrance. If you can call up the Gettysburg Address any time, why memorize it? If a teacher asks for a paper on women’s suffrage, just put it together out of what you can find online, right? The developmental side of these assignments disappears. The finished product is all, and the mind carries on unchanged.

Young people get the message. The ready-at-hand nature of history, created by the Internet, means that they don’t really have to take in the meaning of the past, to assimilate it within themselves. With history out there on the screen, the important thing is to know how to get it and show it, not how to know it and keep it.

Ideally, however, among other things, historical materials should be part of the raw material of a young person’s character, values, beliefs. The Gettysburg Address isn’t just a bunch of words to be retrieved when the moment calls for it. FDR isn’t just a name and a face and some dates. But the Internet makes them appear so to teenage minds. The kids don’t go to sites such as History News Network or The Smithsonian to explore. They go where they can get the stuff they need quickly and in usable form. History is just information, and it takes a lot less effort to get it through the Web than in the book stacks or microfiche readers. Less effort, though, means less learning. Sometimes the easy way out leaves you empty.

Posted at 12:33:48 PM on July 24, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. Understand and very largely agree with your point and thrust I do and I do not intend the following exception to one of your examples to detract from your main point.

    You say as a case in point “If you can call up the Gettysburg Address any time, why memorize it?

    Why memorize it anyway? It is a good succinct speech and honors the men who fought and especially those who died there. It also misrepresents the aims of the seceeding States as wanting to overthrow the Federal government. But of course it’s an important document and worth our familiarity.

    But why memorize it? More to the effective point, why force schoolchildren to memorize it? We dont force them to memorize the Bill of Rights or Washington’s Farewell Address, &c.

    — Joseph F Foster · Jul 24, 09:36 PM · #

  2. Walter Ong’s work on orality and literacy is chock full of this same complaint, which arises wherever specialization, division of labor, and forms of written record-keeping converge.

    And it’s an important complaint. The balladeer who knew hundreds or thousands of songs is lost to the Smithsonian LP, folklorist transcription, anthology of verses, etc.

    But let’s remember something important here. The sort of school assignment that could be fulfilled by a simple Google-cut-paste process is a deeply flawed assignment. It’s a holdover from the days of encyclopedia-and-card-catalog assignments, which at least demanded some tedious, pseudo-research on the part of students.

    Given the ease of access to certain forms of knowledge, school assignments will need to be adapted to challenge students. The document-based-question (DBQ), for example, cannot be answered through cut-and-paste. Problem-based writing, or situational writing, also would require students to analyze/synthesize whatever they might find on-line.

    Working with middle and high school students, the main problem I see is what I call the Xerox dilemma. Students are always summarizing, digesting history into simplistic factoids and plotlines. And given the increased stress on standardized tests, students are always reviewing, digesting and regurgitating and digesting and regurgitating. It’s like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. By the end, the student has neither a command of the core facts and plots nor an ability to historicize. S/he has a catechism.

    — Luther Blissett · Jul 24, 10:37 PM · #

  3. Good points, Luther, and good question Joseph. I wasn’t clear about reasons to memorize the Address, which were as much literary as historical. Memorizing the eloquence of the past improves vocabulary, instills prose models, and, perhaps most important, makes citizens demand a much higher standard of oratory than we currently have.

    — Mark Bauerlein · Jul 24, 11:34 PM · #

  4. LB’s points in #2 are good. What Mark’s post and his book point to is that we need a two-prong attack. First, we need to resist turning students to technology just because it is there, and we need to curb their reliance on screen reading. However, we also need new methods of pedagogy that recognize that screen reading is going to be the dominant mode of the immediate future. It goes beyond just better assignments; I think we are at a point where we have to rethink how reading, writing, and analysis are taught at all levels. We simply can’t pretend that everything has not changed. I should emphasize that I don’t know exactly how educators should respond to this, especially at earlier levels of education, but I think this is a problem at educators at ALL levels should be turning to; we need to do get over a fascination with technology, but we also need to do more than bemoan the present. We need to roll up our sleeves and get to work. This will require greater partnerships with actual, on-the-ground teachers, most of whom are too caught up in the day-to-day demands of the classroom to rethink their entire pedagogy. But I bet the really good ones are already feeling their way to practical solutions to this problem.

    Part of the problem thus far is that most college professors don’t realize what a shift has taken place. They look on-line and are thrilled to see the amount of information available. (It’s still stunning to me sometimes how much there is.) They go ahead and read it much as they read things for years, or they use it as reference. But they have not realized that their students are reading it very differently (or not really reading it) than they did as college students.

    On the other hand, we can’t stick our head in the sand and just tell everyone to ignore the information on the internet. That would be just as foolhardy.

    — M · Jul 25, 08:03 AM · #

  5. There’s no reason to blame this on new technology. Students have been blandly regurgitating other sources since at least the dawn of the encyclopedia. Even CliffsNotes have been around since the 1960s!

    The expediency with which students can now cut-and-paste data from an encyclopedia merely throws into starker contrast a phenomenon that is not the new to the information age: when students do not care about or value their education, they will take whatever short cuts are available to do as little work as possible. It is easier to cut and paste from Wikipedia than it is to cut and paste from a hard-copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica; so what? I doubt that students who copied from Britannica in the 1980s retained so very much more than their counterparts in the 2000s. I say that as one of those students who cut and pasted from a hard copy Britannica throughout my elementary and middle school education. I retained scarcely any of it; to me it was just a boring, pointless homework assignment (as so many of them truly were).

    Ineffectual teaching styles, lack of proper funding, and a public that has confused and conflicting ideas about the value of education are the real reasons why students aren’t learning history. The problem is not a surplus of technology.

    — crazy horse · Jul 25, 09:53 AM · #

  6. Back in the horse-and-buggy age when I was in public school, teachers took pains to point out that the really good student wasn’t the one who could regurgitate facts on command, but the one who knew where and how to find the relevant information. Now that knowing where and how to find relevant information isn’t a matter of hours spent in the library stacks (90 percent of which consisted of unshelving books, flipping futilely through their pages, and reshelving them), but of minutes spent online, suddenly knowing where and how to find relevant information is suddenly a bad thing?

    And where, pray tell, is the control group of student papers from the principal’s salad days, from which we can make a more objective comparison? Without them, all we have is the principal’s evergreen grumblings about the way kids do things today versus his memories of the good old days. I’d bet that the student papers of yore are, when hauled back into the light of day, worse than the current ones precisely because the students had difficulty finding the relevant information. But to determine that, we’d have to have some side-by-side paragraphs, wouldn’t we.

    — Just Passing Through · Jul 26, 06:11 AM · #

  7. JPT makes a good point. To support Mark’s thesis in a scientific way would require direct comparison of some of today’s student papers with those of say, 30 years ago. Judging from my own recollection, I’d agree that most of my peers tended to simply regurgitate from printed sources rather than from today’s electronic ones. It was more time-consuming, but the end product was, I would bet, not any better. Discouraging this natural tendency in students requires careful curriculum and test design, along with some clearly communicated expectations from the instructor, I’d argue. As usual, it’s not the tools but the way in which they’re utilized that appears to be the problem.

    — Mark Koenig · Jul 26, 10:54 AM · #

  8. Actually, one of the biggest problems in education today is that there is so little emphasis on memorization. One of the reasons the dumbest generation is the dumbest generation is that they troll for information rather than commit it to long term memory. If a memory is not stored, and then reinforced with repetition, no learning actually occurs. Information is just passed through passively. The fact itself, as many here have noted, is not nearly as important as the activity of acquiring information. As with most things with the brain, if you don’t use it, you lose it. While many here seem to bristle at the idea of equating good memory with intelligence, you should really look into the recent brain imaging studies. I’m a neuroscientist, and I can tell you that there is quite a lot of science on the subject, and there’s no reason to hold to some of these flawed theoretical opinions that still seem to linger in the humanities. There really is no better way at flexing your brain muscle than the two part activity of storing information and training your brain to access that stored information. It’s a shame that the dead language subjects Latin and Greek are no longer taught, as they were once one of the best brain training activities students could engage in. And then, of course, the content learned once the language was acquired was also worth learning.

    — Nick · Jul 27, 08:44 AM · #

  9. Batting averages or ancient Greek, does the quality of the info memorized make a difference?

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 27, 11:45 AM · #

  10. …in the correlation with intelligence, that is.

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 27, 11:47 AM · #

  11. Seriously, batting averages vs. Greek? OK, I’ll bite. The difference here is really of activity and duration. You wouldn’t hit on as many areas of the brain in memorizing batting averages, and you wouldn’t spend as much time memorizing them as you would in learning Greek. In the process of learning Greek, you would first be doing heavy memorization work, both in learning vocabulary but also the many complex rules of syntactical relationships that are found in inflected languages. In the act of translation, the student would also go through a process of metaphrasing, which would make the Greek words sensible in the native language. What’s interesting here, in terms of brain work, is the dynamic between the longer term stored memories of the native language and the process of storing new and related memories from the Greek. It’s quite a bit of mental gymnastics, which is really only beginning, because the student will need to put the Greek sentence into a context to derive its meaning. This requires other areas of the brain to get involved, the so-called higher functions found especially in the prefrontal cortex. Meaning, as opposed to definition, requires more analagous thinking, that is, meaning understood through relationships that the student is able to form drawing upon their current knowledge, and in an ideal world, their experiences. This abstraction of sense will lead to host of complex relationships, between other Greek texts, for example, or other writers, or any other of the infinite possibilities that make up a human being’s own personal storehouse of information. Moreover, if the meaning is profound, as it often is in Greek, the information has both a greater probablity of being stored long term AND to be retrieved more often.

    To find the equivalent in memorizing batting averages, the student would first need to perform similar feats of duration and activity that would go into the learning of Greek, which would be something like memorizing every batting average for every team in the history of baseball. Still, the higher order functions would be lacking. And, as student’s are still developing the capacity for abstract thinking (again, the prefrontal cortex, which is still developing up to around the age of 25), the memorizing of batting averages would be a much less useful activity in promoting intelligence.

    — Nick · Jul 28, 09:05 AM · #

  12. Thanks, Nick. ‘Twas just that comment #8 touted memorization per se as an intelligence booster, and I was curious as to whether the quality of what’s memorized is a factor, too.

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 28, 09:30 AM · #

  13. I am so glad to read this discussion! I teach 7th grade English and Honors American History, and I am an “actual, on-the-ground teacher” who is constantly thinking—not rethinking. Today’s students learn differently, and the teacher who wants to engage them isn’t focusing on correcting the pedagogical past but on relating to the learners s/he currently has and meeting their learning needs. Being “in the trenches” doesn’t make one less likely to consider his or her pedagogy, but more likely to seek the most effective means for helping students learn how to learn.

    I agree with the article and most of the comments. Having earned my educational specialist degree in instructional technology, I feel confident saying that technology is simply a tool to facilitate learning and to prepare students for their future world—one that will be dominated by on-demand information and the need to think creatively in applying that information. Technology is merely another tool in the teacher’s toolbox; it is not the central attraction.

    Several of ISTE’s (http://www.iste.org, NETS for Students) student standards involve the ability to construct knowledge, to develop innovative processes, and to think critically; and they do not involve cut and paste. They refer to evolving the information to a new form. When a student can take a body of information and turn it into a new format (creating graphics and informational organizers, classifying information using novel guidelines, producing artifacts from unique problem- (or project-) based learning questions, aptly rewriting primary documents in today’s language, predicting based on current knowledge, learning to work collaboratively on complex assignments), that student has entered a critical thinking realm that will outlast fact retrieval.

    I feel that well constructed essential questions that are challenging and open-ended will go far in helping students learn to understand any content (especially history), integrate that knowledge, and then find new ways to apply that newly achieved knowledge. By learning how to address deep issues, students learn to apply their knowledge to support their point of view. Knowledge of the facts supports the process, but the facts are not the goal. Understanding (e.g., cause and effect, perspective, key issues) and the ability to relate information, to think critically, and to discuss deeply are the goals. The process leads to life-long learning.

    Students will produce what is requested. If the assignment is based on locate and regurgitate, that is what a teacher will receive. If refection and creative application are requested, the teacher will have to scaffold as each level of student needs, but the results will be far more wonderful than anything quickly gained through “Control C” followed by “Control V.”

    I applaud this article and the subsequent comments. Please do not view my “in-the-field” words as being born of arrogance. Our joint mission is preparing the next generation to lead. Thank you for letting me join your discussion.

    — An on-the-ground teacher, alias Kaceedog · Jul 28, 11:00 AM · #

  14. “If they ask the kids to do a report on, say, the colony of Jamestown, they follow a predictable process. Type search terms, pull up the first three or four sites, cut and paste sentences and paragraphs into a document, add their own comments, print it up, and turn it in. They have, they believe, completed the assignment.”

    I’m sorry, but this is just silly. If this happens in the classroom the proper thing for the 5th and 6th grade teachers to do is to explain to the students how to do the assignments properly then have them do a similar project again. If there’s a connected computer in the classroom they can all learn how to use internet sources together.

    Since when does learning stop when the homework is turned in?

    — Jonathan Rees · Jul 31, 09:18 AM · #

  15. Hey you darn kids! Get off my lawn!

    — Larry Cebula · Jul 31, 10:58 PM · #

  16. Hey Larry, thanks. We needed someone to give us a real-life example of what Bauerlein is describing. I’ve been interested in the responses Bauerlein elicits from the dumbest generation on message boards. Over and over again, their puerile remarks just serve to reaffirm his thesis, and yet they still persist. It’s amazing how many times, for example, this get-off-my-lawn comment comes up. And every time, the writer thinks he has just made some sort of clever rebuttal. It’s sad, really. So many go to the well of their imaginations, only to draw up some pathetic cliche.

    — Mike, NY · Aug 1, 08:50 AM · #

  17. On the ground, you make a number of good points, and I applaud the work that you do. I think few realize how difficult teaching is on a day to day basis. I can see that you’re a well meaning, dedicated professional, so please do not take offense to the following comments. They are mostly in objection to a number of assertions and assumptions that I’ve heard repeated in education and humanities circles that do not take into account neuroscience.

    First, you assert that students learn differently today. That’s not a defensible statement, and would mark a dramatic evolutionary leap in the development of the human brain were it true. I think a more accurate statement is that they are taught differently. Much of what you have written sums up nicely what exactly is being taught differently today. That has no bearing, however, on how students learn.

    Second, the notion of fact retrieval is troubling in your pedagogical approach. To state that fact retrieval is not the goal of education is to have a pretty poor understanding of what the brain does with information, any information. Many educators today likewise see the fact as “less important” than the process, but as I wrote earlier, some processes inspire more brain activity than others. Most importantly, it’s a false dichotomy. The brain is always engaged in a process of storage and retrieval of information. Thus, educators are also always engaged in some form of fact retrieval with their students, but perhaps not in the way that they envision it. I suspect that it is a semantic problem relating to the term fact. If we take fact to mean important information (and leave all truth values aside, which the brain is not good at recognizing anyway), fact is what gets stored into long term memory. Process entails the storage and retrieval of that information. You may change the “facts” to whatever content that you like; however, the process remains the same. In other words, you can’t simply bypass the mechanism of memory. Educators should keep in mind, though, that if the fact to be taught is clearly defined, the brain has not only an easier process of storing it, but an easier process of retrieving it later. The more complex, abstract, or poorly defined the information, the more difficult it is for the brain to store and retrieve it.

    Lastly, I’m not sure about the critical thinking argument. I’ve heard it used so often and for so many different activities that the phrase doesn’t appear to have a clear meaning. Given how you describe it, I gather by “critical thinking,” you mean that students are able to abstract meaning from a given context and to apply some sort of reformulation of it in a reasoned discourse. In more simpler terms, students are able to make judgments for themselves based on a given task. If this is what you mean, then it is most assuredly prefrontal cortex activity (see earlier post), but you must realize, too, that this capacity is limited in adolescence. It’s not that it’s not good to develop, but for the ages in which you are describing, there is still a good ten years of biological growth and development that needs to take place that is wholly independent of anything that you teach them. Some students may respond to this abstraction of information; however, others have not yet developed the capacity to do so. Some people I should add never do develop the higher reasoning functions – whether this is a biological or environmental cause remains to be seen. At any rate, I do wonder if such an emphasis on what you call critical thinking is the right strategy for students of this age group, and even beyond. For those who have not yet developed the capacity, it can be asking too much, kind of like demanding that a dyslexic just “read better;” it may in fact spur a permanent dislike for the subject taught.
    Of course, I may be misunderstanding you, and without knowing the actual curriculum and the tasks, it’s impossible to say whether or not these activities promote intelligence or, as you say, foster lifelong learning.

    — Nick · Aug 1, 09:22 AM · #

  18. Thank you for your comments, Nick. I appreciate the dialogue. Lest you think I’m an idealistic 20-something who hasn’t yet completed that “bridge” from the temporal reflex world to the pre-frontal world of judgment, prior to becoming a teacher, I was a certified and licensed speech-language pathologist who specialized in medically/neurologically based pediatric communication disorders. My heart was finally broken by the patients and families I worked with, and I sought a new challenge. Find another group as misunderstood and maligned as 12-14 year olds! They are immensely more capable than they’re typically given credit, however. I’ve been recruited for other age groups, but I like the grass right here.

    In response to your comments, I was not implying that evolution had taken another turn. Today’s students, thought, are being raised from the cradle with techno toys, preschool screen-flicker, and a very high stimulus world in which the media appeals to and caters to them even more than it did with our world. I’ve found that Seymour Papert at MIT and others have noted the failure of older pedagogy in reaching this young group, as well as the need for informed and intelligent use of technology in educating them. With an emphasis on age appropriate cognitive processing (yes, I used the “P” word), rather than simple memory alone, higher levels of understanding and ability to apply and create with new information are possible.

    The future belongs to the student who has a vision of more than facts to be reported, but a vision of being able to ask and answer deep questions that relate the information to their world—and that especially includes the lessons of history.

    While it is absolutely true that students must first learn discrete facts in order to have the necessary base, they must also be able to think with the information—to detect an argument that reflects bias or to locate information to support their own unique arguments. They obviously cannot analyze or synthesize unless they first understand and know. I was responding to the issue of students who refuse to think, who copy and paste, plagiarizing freely, and think they’ve gotten the teacher off their backs. If the same students are given problem-based tasks which challenge them to answer novel questions (those requiring deeper thought and not found on buy-an-essay sites), they are more likely to respond to the content with creativity.

    As far as the critical thinking of the adolescent, having raised three of my own to productive adulthood, I thoroughly agree with you that the abstract thinking abilities are only emerging. (The insurance companies have know about this longer that education and science combined!) That doesn’t mean that we should leave it on the backburner. Just because they’ll be closer to 25 before true judgment kicks in, they are still emerging. Ever notice the very young child who wants desperately to help, but is told s/he’s too young? Just like that child, adolescents need and thrive on age appropriate cognitive challenges. Forgive my lack of clarity; I was not flinging out every big word I knew and implying more than I have truly experienced.

    A number of writers are suggesting that we’re leaving the age of information and entering the conceptual age. Any teacher or professor who limits their students to information retrieval and manipulation will let that student down. We may discuss all we want. There was an age when the automobile and electricity divided the generations. I believe that now technology will divide the generations. We already have the digital natives and those of us trying to catch up. Technology remains a tool, not an end in itself. It’s not magic or destructive in itself. It is the tool of the future. We can learn to use it creatively to challenge our students, or we can call it bad names and use it poorly; but technology is changing the way the pre-kindergarten child approaches learning and the graduate student accomplishes learning.

    One thing is for sure: Learning how to learn and create new understanding in a community of motivated learners is not found on any standardized test—but it is one of the most important skills in life.

    Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to respond. I felt the need to respond to the wish for on the ground teachers with whom you could partner (comment 4). There are many who are so much wiser and more capable who would love to partner with you. …And now, Larry, I’ll get off your lawn. You’re right, I don’t pay taxes here. I just thought you wanted to play outside.

    — An on-the-ground teacher, alias Kaceedog · Aug 2, 10:51 AM · #

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