To: Zenaan Harkness <zen@cashpoolcomps.com>
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: trained dependency
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From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 14:47:54 +0900
In-Reply-To: <1099863337.28980.12.camel@localhost.localdomain> (Zenaan
	Harkness's message of "Mon, 08 Nov 2004 08:35:37 +1100")
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>>>>> "Zenaan" == Zenaan Harkness <zen@cashpoolcomps.com> writes:

    Zenaan> Actually, I believe that it is the system that limits
    Zenaan> teachers.

It does.  But it's not just the _educational_ system, it's all of
society.  See below for example of attempting to arrange for
internships ("apprenticeships") in industry.

    Zenaan> I believe Gatto when he says that this is by design.

Radicals always say that.  They give their enemies too much credit.

    Zenaan> It is _not_ a matter of deficient teachers, not at all

Who said the teachers are deficient?  Not me.  The teachers are what
they are; I don't see any reason to ask them to be different, and I
really rather doubt we can make them change anyway.  But Gatto was by
your own admission three times New York State Teacher of the Year,
he's way out on the right-hand tail!  He is going to have a view
strongly biased toward what can be done by a dedicated teacher, as
opposed to what will be done by a school system employee.

All _I_ said was that the total resources required will be larger, and
I want to know (a) what effect will they have, and (b) what the cost
will be.  In particular, all my own experience says that improving the
educational system will require dramatically more teacher effort per
child per hour.  If, as you and Gatto apparently believe, improvements
in educational efficiency could cut the amount of time spent in the
(improved) formal educational establishments dramatically, and thus
not require more teachers, there's still a huge hidden cost: many
billions of USD annually for lost baby-sitting services.

If you say that comparison (current school system vs. baby sitting
services) is an indictment of the current system, I'll cheerfully
agree.  That doesn't mean that the baby-sitting cost is imaginary,
though; it must be counted when discussing the potential benefits and
costs of any proposed reform.

    Zenaan> A free market for education (! schooling), would have
    Zenaan> teachers competing to educate, and learning from each
    Zenaan> other what works, _and being able to use techniques that
    Zenaan> work_.

We have a free market for education.  I'll teach you all you want to
know about economics, at your pace, where you want, when you want, if
you will pay my travel and lodging, USD 500/hour, and guarantee me an
income of USD 100,000 for the next year in case my current employer
fires me.  That's pretty expensive, but I'm sure you can find less
expensive educators if you look.  They won't be as good, but they will
be cheaper. ;-)

Funny thing is, there's no demand in that free market.  _Most people
are satisfied with what they get at school._  Those who aren't, go out
and get more, and pay handsomely for it.

I see this here in Japan all the time, which has a huge market for
education outside of the regular school system.  Even within that
regular system there is huge demand for private schooling; Japanese
families will often pay the equivalent of USD 20,000 per year for
_each_ child to attend private schools starting in the 7th grade.  And
of course all of those private schools use basically the same system
that the public schools do, they just charge a lot more, have somewhat
smaller class sizes, better equipment, and better teachers with
substantially higher qualifications.

However, outside of the regular school system, it sometimes occurs to
me to wonder when Japanese have time to work, they're so busy
acquiring various kinds of qualifications for employment and even for
their hobbies.  But in fact, with the exception of a few charismatic
teachers, _all_ such free-market educational establishments follow the
same pattern of fixed-period lectures, etc.  And even in the schools
founded by the charismatic teachers, unless you pay the exorbitant
premium to work directly with the master, you get a lecture course
from one of the senior students.

I'm sorry, but there is a lot of evidence, admittedly all indirect,
that the fixed-period lecture is an efficient way to deliver what the
customers (students and their guardians) want.  Indirect or not, there
is no evidence that the kind of reforms that you, Gatto, and company
advocate can be successfully implemented at reasonable cost.

Don't get me wrong: I'm very much in favor of programs to improve
educational choice, such as tuition vouchers and opt-outs for home
schoolers (provided their children pass the admittedly imperfect
achievement tests we have).  However, these are in general only going
to do much good for people who already have relatively good
educational environments, in particular strong support from parents
and siblings.  School reform must be primarily focused on what's going
to do good for the rest of the population.

    Zenaan> When was the last time you sent a student on a
    Zenaan> one-day-a-week "apprenticeship" at the local museum,
    Zenaan> because they had a great personal interest in archaeology/
    Zenaan> antiquity?

Never met such a student.  I've tried to arrange apprenticeships in
businesses and economics research institutes (which is where my
students want to go), though, and they don't want anything less than a
second-year MBA student, or _we_ should pay _them_ tuition.  Our ed
school regularly places foreign students as language education
assistants in local schools, but businesses by and large don't want
our students at all, until they've graduated.

I have successfully arranged no-pay internships in NGOs, and in almost
all cases the students learned nothing, though they enjoyed
themselves: they were basically put to work stuffing envelopes or
toting heavy objects to disaster areas.  But they could have just
joined the NGO and gotten the same experience (they just wouldn't get
college credit for it).  The students who did learn stuff that's
appropriate for schools to attempt to teach still didn't get very
much: they learned that paperwork can be valuable even in an
organization that can't afford paperwork for the sake of paperwork.

    Zenaan> When was the last time you spent (regularly) half day
    Zenaan> sessions on _anything_.

Thursday.  I do that once or twice weekly, depending on student
demand.  However, in practice participation is limited to the 5
students whose graduation theses I'm supervising, and I find that
appropriate; those sessions are exhausting for them, and even more so
for me.

But really, Zen, you need to think more carefully.  You know I'm a
college teacher, and that I'm not constrained by the same rules.  Yet
you simply blindly set yourself up for that.  I think this is
generally true of your argument so far.

Of course, I'm subject to the same kind of blind spot.  But the best
anyone can do is to carefully consider opposed statements.  I've done
so, and as you point out, where I've contradicted them, I've done so
reasonably effectively.  You say, "well, I'm not the most effective
advocate, read Gatto."  But that's the point: why should I?  You went
out of your way to attack the current system; I responded not to
defend it (despite your apparent inability to realize that), but to
see whether there was a reason why I need to read Gatto et al _now_.

Sure, if (more likely when, given that my daughter is now 7) I decide
to get actively involved in educational reform, I'll read Gatto and
Ilich (not to mention rereading Reich, Dewey, Thoreau, Pirsig, and
Plato among others).  But right now, you're trying to convince us that
reform is needed and practical, and I just don't see it, not even to
the extent that I would go out of my way to read Gatto yet.

    Zenaan> Was there ever a point when you effectively gave up
    Zenaan> battling the system?

As I wrote above, it's not directly relevant.  However, I can point
out that at Ohio State the only real fights I had were with the
support system for students with deficient backgrounds; the people
they hired to give individual attention to students with serious
individual needs were basically clueless, and I occasionally had to
stomp in some "advisor's" shit to get them to do a CPM analysis
_before_ the student changed majors for the fifth time, guaranteeing
that if they graduated it would take two extra years and 150% of the
required number of credits.

_That's_ why I'm less than sanguine about the ability of any "system"
to provide individualized attention.

    Zenaan> Why would such things be more expensive?

Evidently you've never tried to teach something to somebody who isn't
totally absorbed in the subject in front of them.  It is _very_ hard
work to keep the attention of more than 3 or 4 people at a time.  And
the teacher _must_ keep the students' attention; otherwise many
students will simply miss material that they do need to understand and
internalize, because in their inexperience they lack the ability to go
back and fill in by themselves.  The correlation between being a
student and needing study guidance is no accident, you know.

The fact is that the students by and large have no idea what they
need.  By that I mean I have taught master's program students remedial
college or even high-school level material for over twenty years
because those students realize _after_ they've been denied promotion
for five or ten years that it really wouldn't hurt them to know that
the average of 2, 7, 6, 4, 18 cannot be less than 2 or greater than
18.  Sure, it would be nice if they could just forget about those lost
years, but they can't.  We really want to deliver the education to
them _before_ they lose those years.

And those are people who are academically-oriented enough to come back
and get master's degrees when they realize their loss.  Not to mention
that the high school kids who are sure they're going to the NBA are
even sadder---they won't recover from _their_ loss, short of
reincarnation.  Even the ones who do make it to the NBA!

So it really is appropriate to tell students what they will need to
know later, to some degree.  They _will_ resist learning it anyway,
even though most of them are more or less aware that they don't know
everything they need to know.  They'd rather be drinking, having sex,
sleeping, playing basketball, whatever.

And most of them acquiesce in the system: it's most straightforward to
just follow the curriculum.  Really, the ones who rebel because they
think their education is lacking are like you and me: the 1% who can
and regularly do learn as much in two hours outside of school as they
do in 6 hours in it.  That's not who the schools are for.

Again, this doesn't mean that the current system is _good_.  But
reforming the system, accounting for these unpleasant facts, is going
to be expensive.

    Zenaan> Why would you not be capable of teaching in different
    Zenaan> ways?

I am capable, and I do teach in many different ways.  That's why I can
tell you with authority that the 50 minute (75 minutes at my school)
lecture is a cheap way of conveying a lot of material to a reasonably
large fraction of the enrollees, compared to the alternatives.  And
the filling in the gaps for the ones who don't get it in class is very
expensive.  That our schools specialize in the lecture method, though,
suggests to me that the real resources devoted to education are
extremely limited.

    Zenaan> How many times do I have to state this?

Please write it on the blackboard 1000 times if it makes you feel
better.  However, I read and understood your meaning the first time.

    Zenaan> It is not _us_!, not you or me!, not children! It's the
    Zenaan> goddamn fucking system and

Indeed it is.  However, that system is constrained by the resources
devoted to it.  And any alternative system has to deal with the fact
that humans have limited capabilities, and some humans are more or
less limited in some dimensions than others.

For example, I'm a good enough basketball player that ex-varsity
players will let me in their game.  But I have to deal with the fact
that I can't touch the rim any more, and certainly can't run 100m in
under 13 seconds.  Sometimes those weaknesses matter.  Similarly,
although the typical child or teacher has nothing "wrong" with him or
her, we cannot expect them to learn like you or to teach like Tony
Gatto.  And in designing educational reform, that, too, is going to
matter.

    Zenaan> it was designed to keep us normalized and minimize our
    Zenaan> actual education!

By whom?  What do "they" gain from it?

BTW, please note that I am employed at the apex of a system that
explicitly sets a goal of "normalizing" people, and my daughter and my
friends' children attend that system, so I know what that kind of
system looks like.  The American system, at least in the school
systems I'm familiar with (which includes one middle-size sort-of
inner-city system), is quite different in important ways; I would
imagine the Australian system is, too.

I don't deny that the American educational system functions, in part,
to normalize people.  But then, all social systems do.  Even the
Internet, which is more tolerant than practically any social system
I've ever heard of, has its "netiquette", and netizens spend a fair
amount of heat and light on inculcating netiquette in "newbies", and
on dealing with trolls and other such un-normalized individuals.

I do not see much reason to believe that that the American educational
system was intentionally designed to "normalize" and to suppress all
educational function, even if there are segments of the population
that receive unseemly benefits from the normalization of others.  As
I've said elsewhere, these things _do_ "just happen" and are
predictable based on our current knowledge of social dynamics.

They will happen to a system designed by Gatto, too, unless he pays
attention to those same dynamics.

    >> Neither you nor (based on your reporting) the sources you cite
    >> provide much reason to believe that the effectiveness would be
    >> spectacularly higher for the majority of the population, and no
    >> estimate whatsover of the costs.

    Zenaan> You haven't read my sources (Gatto) and you are incorrect
    Zenaan> about estimates of cost - Gatto clearly states a belief in
    Zenaan> significantly lower financial cost per student.

Financial, yes.  I'm well aware of the studies that show little
correlation between financial statistics and educational achievement
as currently measured, and I've seen examples, too.  That's why I made
a point of saying "cost" should not be measured in financial terms.

Also, the last time I noticed even NYC spent less per child than your
typical CCNA or MCSE course costs for equivalent amounts of time.  I
just don't think it's realistic to suppose that financial costs can be
reduced nationwide and still achieve improvements in universal
schooling, let alone true universal education.

    Zenaan> Some even excel (relatively) within the existing
    Zenaan> system. The fact that so relatively few do is an
    Zenaan> indictment of the system, not of students and especially
    Zenaan> not of teachers!

Simple mathematics says that if some are better than others, the worst
cannot be as good as the average.  Maybe there's just a limit to how
good the average can be, and the fact that there's a spread on the
upside just about guarantees that there's a downside, too.

Poor students (as such) don't harm anybody else, but a poor teacher
can be a setback for hundreds of students.  So "the system" must deal
with the fact that for _any_ system, even a monolithic one, some
students will learn "better" than others, and some "teachers" will
teach better than others.  If the system is more flexible, you will
need more, and more highly skilled, managers to monitor the
performance of teachers and students, and arranging that students are
associated with the teachers whose "methods" are most suited to those
students, and that "poor" students receive more attention to maximize
their capabilities.  Some of those managers will be good at that job,
others not so good.  Quis custodiat ipsos custodes?  It is very hard
to build reliable systems out of unreliable components.


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.


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