Kant Touched on This

In Austria the greater number of schools used to be normal schools, and these were founded and carried on after a fixed plan, against which much has been said, not without reason. The chief complaint against them was this, that the teaching in them was merely mechanical. But all other schools were obliged to form themselves after the pattern of these normal schools, because government even refused to promote persons who had not been educated in these schools. This is an example of how government might interfere in the education of subjects, and how much evil might arise from compulsion.

This would be the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant in his little treatise, On Education, paragraph 20. He hits on a very interesting point that seems to be the bane of contemporary education at least in the United States, and perhaps globally: a lack of trust between government and educators.


Over the past month or so, I've gotten to see several articles on parents, teachers, even a few self-aware students, opting out of standardized tests, for which the consensus number now seems to be 113 on average for an American student in the thirteen years between Kindergarten and 12th grade. One proposed solution? Accreditation for primary and secondary schools, equivalent to the U.S. university system. (Because one thing the education system across the board sorely needs is more bureaucrats…)
A little over 200 years ago, Kant was very much on the opposite side of this issue--and quite like Rousseau and Burke. He wanted a much smaller system of public schools--strangely enough, on account of their expense!--while most education lay in the hands of parents and perhaps private tutors. Yet one thing that seems to emerge out of Kant, notwithstanding massive, global economic changes since his time, is his general trust for teachers, and this in a rather interesting pronouncement, also in paragraph 20:

People imagine, indeed, that experiments in education are unnecessary, and that we can judge from our reason whether anything is good or not. This is a great mistake, and experience teaches us that the results of an experiment are often entirely different from what we expected… (The Dessau Institute) was in a certain way the only one in which the teachers were free to work out their own methods and plans, and in which the teachers were in communication with each other and with all the learned men of Germany.

Kant would not dare claim that teachers' experiments were free from mistakes, but he trusted, in general, that the experiments were meant for the good of the students, and ultimately for the society that those students would build as they came to maturity. Rousseau demanded the same kind of trust as he mentored the hypothetical Émile (and Émile's consort, Sophie); and Burke implied that same kind of trust, once again, in those teachers who would lead their students into their own (i.e. the teachers' own) tracks of discovery.

It is interesting on one side to see the call for this trust manifest in resistance to standardized tests; on the other, political conservatives might bristle about the power of teachers' unions, and their tendency to preserve on their muster rolls teachers who are demonstrably lazy, greedy, incompetent, etc. It may be worth noting of unions that their fundamental mission--especially in the public sector--is antagonistic. In good Marxist form, many unions of all varieties oppose the power of the managerial class, and to some extent rightly so. As Kant noted of the Austrian system of normal schools, the managers managed rather poorly! But the solution set for these kinds of problems tended not to be more bureaucracy and management and regulation. Rather, it often involved the people being managed and regulated speaking or writing rather loudly--sometimes violently--to the managers and regulators, and telling them to back away.

No doubt this cost a few bureaucrats their posh government jobs, but even relatively poorly-educated Americans today might remember an event in the eighteenth century--during Kant's lifetime, in fact--when a certain group of people, contemporary Americans' political ancestors, spoke out against a bureaucratizing government that was intruding itself a little too far into their affairs: the War of Independence.

In a Universe Far, Far Away

Today I have the privilege of presenting from a friend's debrief from her own teaching experience--in the eastern part of Indonesia. It's amazing to see her pedagogy, and how closely it mirrors my own reading of Burke and Rousseau:

Oh ya, about my citizenship class… my class is learning about the constitution, the history and the importance of it, also how it applies in the real life of Indonesia. So I assigned my students to do a survey in the community about what people think of the constitution. They were surprised when they found out that more than 50% of the samples knew nothing about it and even didn’t care about it. And I challenged them “What can we do?” (our class’s motto this semester is think global, act local) So my students made a plan to go back to the society and make the principles of Indonesia country be known in the society. So I approved their program. After some preparations, finally last Tuesday we went into the society. The students were working in two groups. The first group easily met friendly people, and they did their mission smoothly. The other group got rejection from the people 2 times and it made them start to be discouraged. I was afraid that they would be really discouraged and not want to go out any more. So I prayed to God for this group. In our walk back to the school, a man called us and asked who we were. Then I introduced my group to him and asked if he and his family had time to meet my students. And they said yes! So the group 2 talked with the family and really had a wonderful discussion. I’m amazed by God. He didn’t only give my student a family for their project, but He’s chosen this family to bless my group. The family was a Christian. The mom shared Gospel to my students. She emphasized to my students that God is working in Indonesia, He loves Indonesia. I’m amazed how this little project can turn to be a great blessing both for the people in the school’s neighborhood and my team. At the end of our short trip, all of my students were happy and were excited to write a paper about their project.

Some observations:

• It's interesting and inspiring to see Inquiry Based Learning here, with students asking questions and discovering truths not just about the Indonesian constitution, but also about their own community. And it seems like students might easily reproduce both paths to discovery--for the Indonesian constitution and for their community.
• The active community engagement also fits with Burke's social context. It seems to me that a subtext of Burke's "lead people into the path of discovery" is for students, fairly rapidly, to become teachers in their own turn; and doing so by taking their learning and inquiries outside the classroom… is this not some of the original rationale for homework? Both taking learning outside the classroom, and getting input and shared experiences with someone other than the teacher?
• The teacher's social engagement and sense of deep commitment with group 2, also… just, wow. One of the things I felt so often was missing in my own education was a teacher's genuine concern not just for my intellect, but for my very self. How ably can a student follow in a teacher's path of discovery, if along that path either one--and especially the teacher--remains emotionally disengaged? How open is the path to discovery, really, if the focus remains merely on the content of the learning, and does not also include meaningful care for the student?
• The involvement of the Christian family in Group 2's project also sticks out, again speaking to Burke's communal subtext. How great it is for students to see that a whole community supports their education, rather than feeling like the path of learning is one that they must walk alone? 
• Proponents of secular education might bristle at the Christian references, but I think it's important to observe here Jesus' adage that a tree is judged by its fruit. The evident motivation in the students--their desire to reflect and write about their experiences--seems to me to indicate pretty well not just that the lesson was sound, but the teaching methods, as well.

Naturally, I am glad to see some of my own thoughts and values being lived out in a far corner of the world, but I think it's also a spur and a challenge, wherever I might teach in the future. Even as I see that it is not all on me to teach the students laid to my charge, it also is my responsibility as a teacher and a scholar to engage more than the interest of those students. Thanks for the call and the reminder to invest deeply in their lives so far as I can, and to involve the larger community.

Abelard's World

Peter Abelard was a teacher around the time of the First Crusade. No doubt there were some constraints on his teaching imposed by the Catholic Church, yet the Church was also the major source of his funding. And notwithstanding the pitfalls described in his Historia Calamitata, Abelard seems not to have wanted for much during his entire time as a teacher and abbot.

Among his peers, Abelard did as most academics do today, arguing over the finer points of topics of some cultural significance--in his case a variety of theological issues, and not least the equal personhood of the Holy Spirit within the trinity. Mainstay as this was, however, Abelard was also a teacher. Burke would have approved Abelard's bringing younger scholars into the track of his discoveries, whether as a peripatetic (traveling) scholar around Paris, or later in his abbey. Modern sensibilities would likely approve Abelard's special attention to Heloïse, as well, at least until that attention became too special. And of course, Heloïse's family let Abelard know their disapproval of that liaison in no uncertain terms.

The point I want to make here is that while Abelard had no end of intellectual disputes with his peers, still he enjoyed a certain freedom in his teaching that modern instructors lack; and I wonder how much this has to do, not with changing educational norms as such--though of course they have changed--so much as trends toward monetizing everything. For any given definition of "good", what dollar value (or pound, Euro, rouble, peso, yen, yuan, won, rupee, rupiah, etc.) really attaches to a "good" education?

Whether in my own experience as a unionized adjunct instructor, or considering all the hoopla about teachers' unions in Wisconsin and California these days, or charter schools here in Michigan, I feel like so much of the debate about education concerns what amount of money to throw at what part of the problem, and accountability for how it is (or is not) spent. In Abelard's day, some 900 years ago, well, a couple of observations:

1. Money seems not to have been an issue. The Church and Western society in general at the time seemed to value what little formal education was available, and paid for it accordingly, whether privately or through the Church. Direct payment of any kind appears only once in Abelard's history--in chapter 6--and quite clearly as a ruse, rather than concerning the necessities of his life.
2. A fair bit of secular education was craft-specific, and would continue to be for some centuries after Abelard's time. JF Bosher notes in his book, The Canada Merchants, some writings on commercial education that disdained the learning of the nobility. As it should have done: the two were clearly different. Likewise with Church learning in Abelard's time: as important as spiritual and moral life could be in the medieval world, the less formal, family- and craft-based education that took place in homes across France, Europe, perhaps the whole premodern world, rarely if ever presupposed uniformity of curriculum, or public money set aside for (this kind of) education.

A critical observation here, on pre-modern France: with some 90% of the population doing farm work, monetization was of little concern. A good bit of subsistence came "free" from the land, trade in goods and in kind remained  acceptable as a form of commerce, and economic interdependence--especially across long distances--was relatively limited. Yet how many farmers would gladly have given housing space, textile work and excess crops for a teacher like Abelard to come and educate their children? Not in the state curriculum, mind, but in exactly the thing that Burke proposed: means by which to follow in the track of the instructor's musings and discoveries.

And so for a question that superimposes the mores of Abelard's time on our own: Setting aside the obvious anachronism, what kinds of economic wizardry or revolutionary shifts of mind would it take for the "educational establishment" or even world culture at large to recognize that money may not be the central issue in education?

What He Said, Part III: Burke and IBL?

In my last post, I mentioned a teaching method called inquiry-based learning. In many respects, it's awesome. I even presented it to former students recently, who basically said, "yup, that looks like what you did, and we liked it a lot." But Burke… I really like what I know of IBL, and I would gladly prefer either Burke's ideas or IBL to today's standardized testing culture and its after-effects, even into upper-level college courses. Yet what Burke proposes, and what Jean-Jacques Rousseau really played up in his near-contemporary book on education, Émile, goes one step beyond what I see in IBL.

Dear IBL folks, please correct me if I've misunderstood here. From what I have heard from students at a couple of schools here in Michigan--and a few teachers--IBL seems like a very hands-off approach, basically saying to students, "go figure it out for yourself." I like this. I do it all the time. I send my own students to the university library and occasionally local archives, courthouses and public record offices, and leave them more-or-less with the instructions, "find out more about something that interests you, and teach me something about it." I've gotten papers back that cover anything from medieval European fragrances to archaeology on Clovis Points, to the naming of Tecumseh, Michigan. Neat stuff! And my involvement in the process: well, honestly, minimal. I explain to students how my game works, set a few bounds and standards, try to rile up some excitement in the classroom, and then send them off.

Not that I take my job lightly, or pretend that it's easy. This IBL stuff on its own is a huge departure from the conventional learning and testing culture, and it takes a lot of students by surprise. Even at the college level, a lot of my students are dumbfounded by the amount of freedom I give them to go and explore. Of course I am available to help, guide, encourage, etc., especially for those who are willing to email or come to office hours, but even with those aids my personal interpretation of IBL seems to go a step too far for a lot of students, so they're left a little aimless. I try to help through jokes in lecture, and even a bit of personalizing--"I find this obscure bit of history really interesting because…"--but where they remain concerned with grades and diplomas and "how do I pass this course," IBL still fails me.

And then there's Burke and Rousseau. Especially with the latter, let me just say I disagree with how he orders things: I think modern child / developmental psychology studies might show his reasoning to be a little off as far as what gets taught when. But what both men say about relating to students, being more deeply involved at a personal level, taking a genuine (dare I say social?) interest in students' lives, I'd like to say it's gold, but in point of fact I think it's more like plutonium. I don't quite want to say, "hey look, a relational, shared-learning-experience variety of IBL is like pure plutonium," because clearly that's weird. But what I mean is that the idea is valuable, hugely powerful, and very dangerous.

On the good side, there's just basic common social sense. People do things for their friends that they would not do--at least not as willingly--for someone in a formal power structure. Maybe the work itself would get done, but would the work ethic be there? And sure enough, some students I have known at the B, C, and even D levels, once they had enough pressure, or curiosity, or simple bravery to approach me, often saw their grades go up toward the A-range. I don't think this is just because I knew a bit more about them. Rather, I question along with Burke, Rousseau and others whether that social exchange really changed something about their approach to the class.

The bad side, of course, almost goes without saying. There is plenty to say about teacher's pets, teacher bias in general, and I suppose at the extreme end of things… right. Just not good. And of course, these dangers are all (notionally) avoided by keeping teachers under an ethical lock and key. Some of that same lock and key seems like it has played into standardized testing culture and its legacy, with larger, more impersonal classes, tests given and graded by machine, and--well, not that all of them are bad by any means, but I would still venture to say the worst in online courses and virtual classrooms. IBL also allows the ethical lock and key to work, by promoting independent work among students. Good so far as that goes, but where are the real and relational affirmations that some (all?) students need to show the value of a job well done for someone?

This is another huge negative for Burke and Rousseau. The ideas they propose strike me as brilliant: in essence, IBL with a strong relational, affirmative component that makes the student feel valued, special, individual as well as independent. All to the good, yet emotionally involved for the instructor; and that kind of attention--noted in a very different, spiritual context by Simone Weil in her "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies"--is hardly commensurate with the kind of mass, industrial education that today defines the public school system. Such attention, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer's conception of God's grace in his Cost of Discipleship, does not come cheaply.

So at the end of a long post, I'm left stuck, and torn. Standing before me--and perhaps before many in my shoes--is this ideal of investing deeply in students, affirming them not just as students but as whole people, thus enabling them to learn not just for education's sake, but in the context of relational trust, vulnerability, even as Burke proposed, a shared experience of learning. On the other hand, this one step beyond a great learning system like IBL promises to be enormously taxing, for many definitions of that word. In the current system of education, I am left to think IBL may be the best that one can hope for, and even that has its limitations… I can only wonder what kind of societal change would be necessary for parents and students even to vocalize the desire they seem to have for what Burke and Rousseau apparently offered, let alone changes to the education system.

What He Said, Part II: Reading Against the Text(book)

One thing I really appreciate about Burke's quotation from the last post is that teachers are asked, not just generically to bring students into a set process of discovery, but rather into the teacher's own process. Which brings me, in this post, to an interesting question:
How many teachers ever discovered something new by reading about it in a textbook?

Perhaps the answer is many, though much of what my students have learned from my old math and literature books is historical, rather than literary or mathematical. In a sense, this is a return to my Ancients vs. Moderns post, though the stronger argument comes from my students, many of whom have happened to be aspiring teachers. Some with an interest in English have marveled at my eighth-grade reader from 1875, with its selections from Alcott, Coleridge, Thackeray, even a congressional speech from John C. Calhoun. They also start thinking much less of English language instruction today, and what passes for "literature" in our own times. The same opinion seems to hold among my math education students: one in particular tore into my 1905 copy of Advanced Arithmetic, noted the author's qualifications, and wrote a paper on turn-of-the-century debates on American math education. Again, the old appeared favorable to the new, and the modern textbook came up far short of its predecessor.

So, some textbooks are good, not least some old ones. But what of just going without? That was my strategy in college, when to save money I simply refused to buy the textbook, went to the university library, and came out better informed than other students by an order of magnitude. True, I couldn't tell my Balkan History instructor anything that Barbara Jelavich said in her survey text--which really isn't all that bad!--but unlike any other student in the class, I could cite Lord Kinross on the region's history under Ottoman rule, AJP Taylor on the Balkans and Great Power politics leading up to World War I, and Misha Glenny's fantastic book on the fall of Yugoslavia. My British doctoral program didn't even have course work, so the library and the archives became the great mainstays of my learning. And as it became my turn to teach, well… a fluke happened. Being hired three days before the semester started, I had no opportunity to tell the college bookstore what books to order, so I went without. The experiment proved reasonably successful, and I've repeated and improved it ever since.

"Good for you," a skeptic might say, but I was intrigued to see in a recent blog post that a high school teacher did more-or-less the same thing with his physics class, enabling his students to learn without textbooks. Friends from four different education programs have told me that even this experience is far from unique, as inquiry based learning, or IBL, begins to take hold across more of the education world, avoiding the canned information and step-by-step instruction from modern textbooks. Together with my own experience as both student and teacher, I'm led to ask: what happened to the textbook?

I feel like I have the start of an answer in the publishing companies that hawk their wares in the hallowed halls--not of academic classrooms or university bookstores, but of professors' offices. I ask representatives sometimes, "what's so different about this 14th edition of Western Civilization, part II, from edition 13, edition 6, or even edition 1?" The answer, in most cases: 2-3 edited paragraphs in five of the forty-seven essays, a changed sentence or two in four other chapters, a few new footnotes and references sprinkled throughout, a slightly-tweaked index, and one or two new essays reflecting the latest, greatest scholarship on subtopics that my students don't care about. Of course, a brand new copy of edition 14 will cost $150, while a used copy of edition 12 (let alone edition 2) runs about $4.50--and most of that is for shipping.

Below the college level, I shudder to think what gimmicks are at work in local school boards and state boards of education, that again foist new copies on students, with--as I gather from the students I noted above--decreasing standards of quality, at prices that I can only think verge on extortion. As much as I might favor commercial competition, even for state contracts--this is something I see and admire all the time in my research on the rise of the British Empire--something appears seriously wrong here. It's not to say that commercial profit is always about delivering the best product, but when it comes to aggressive marketing and exploiting captive markets… without dismissing all the genuine good that can come from good textbooks and good textbook publishers, something about this particular variety of market manipulation is just plain sick.

I am sure the publishers are not the only ones at fault. No doubt there are others for whom the allure of profit far trumps the value of educated students, classroom by classroom, school by school, district by district, state by state, even country by country. No doubt there is an economics of publishing that I simply do not know, and I would be glad to be enlightened. But if there really is a financial motive here, in giving our children an education that they themselves recognize by their college years is both more expensive and lower quality than it was for their forebears a century ago… is there something not wrong with this picture? Are teachers and students in this situation wrong to want to protest?

And so I return to Burke. I didn't learn history from textbooks. I learned it from lectures and office hours, from libraries and archives, from databases and article collections, and today from sites like google books and archive.org. I also learned it, and still learn it, by communicating with other historians and checking my insight against their expertise. None of this looks like textbook learning. So if I follow Burke--if I want my students to follow in the track of my own discoveries--why would I even start to set them on a different course?