The teacher lives in the world of ideas. Ideas are the currency of the instructor, what he or she shares with the kids, consciously or not. Certain ideas you may have come across are particularly important to me, if only because I’m concerned about the damage they tend to do and the confusion they tend to spread. Some of these ideas are well known. Others are more obscure, or pertain to more specialized areas of learning. I’m hoping in this post to get you thinking about these propositions, even arguing about them. You may strongly disagree with me about my views, which is great. I welcome your disagreement. Disagreement can be the starting point for dialogue. I’m just trying to shake things up—and you, too. If I criticize some sacred cows, so much the better. So here are the controversial ideas I want to skewer.
If You Are in ANY Academic or Vocational Area
The idea that reading is growing less and less important and that all information can be conveyed through pictures.
There are functions of the human brain that are uniquely supported and enhanced by the act of reading. Reading has the potential to build up the left hemisphere’s capabilities. It can enhance the connectivity between the brain’s hemispheres, helping the brain function at its highest level. Can television do this? Jane M. Healy, in her vital study Endangered Minds, offers this view:
Children must learn to use—and thus help develop—both sides [of the brain]and the connections between them. Higher order reasoning and putting language meaning together with the visual input are particularly important. In these respects skilled reading is a much better trainer than television.
Television (and simple pictures in general) cannot convey ideas in depth the way reading can. (Imagine trying to make a movie based on a philosophy text.) If we’re looking for basic descriptions of people or objects, pictures are quite useful, obviously. If we wanted to know the appearance of a new car, it would make more sense to look at a picture of it rather than describing it at length in print. Pictures can also convey simple narratives. But abstract concepts, the detailed analysis of data, internal dialogue, a third party’s subjective perceptions of an event and subtleties of emphasis can’t be conveyed by pictures. Think for a moment about a movie that’s been adapted from a great book. No matter how talented the director, no matter how gifted the writers and actors, no movie can put you inside the mind and heart of a character the way a novel can. Any movie that tried to show the entire hidden world of a character’s thought and feeling would inevitably fall short. At best, movies can only imply such things. Only words can come close to depicting these internal realities. Try this one summer: read Boris Pasternak’s monumental novel Dr. Zhivago and note the powerful, vivid, poetic language of this classic work, language used in the service of the novel’s tremendous narrative power. Then watch the movie Dr. Zhivago, which, as movies go, is quite good, beautifully filmed and superbly acted. Which work strikes you as having the most potential to enrich and enlarge the human mind? Which one seems to have the greater depth and significance? To me, it’s no contest; the novel wins easily. The old cliché is dead wrong—a picture isn’t worth a thousand words. Rather, more often than not a picture needs a thousand words.
Books, by the way, are still among the very best conveyers of information ever invented. The amount of information that a book of even modest length carries is impressive and compares favorably to that conveyed by TV shows and movies. Books force the brain to focus, manipulate symbolism and use the brain’s more advanced cognitive features. Books invite the reader to be an active participant, not just a passive observer. Any assertion that reading is becoming less vital and less necessary to the academic success of American students is quite simply preposterous—and dangerously wrong.
The idea that mastering facts is irrelevant.
In Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times there is a character named Thomas Gradgrind. In the very opening of the book, Gradgrind makes the following statements:
"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!" …"In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!" The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.
It’s pretty amusing and appalling at the same time, isn’t it? Dickens was protesting what he saw as the mindless rote learning of industrial era Britain. And much of American education now seems dedicated to proving that we are as different from the Thomas Gradgrinds of the world as possible. But in wanting to avoid the pitfalls of monotonous, factory-style learning, we’ve often forgotten a very simple truth: students need to know facts! Facts aren’t all they need to know, not by a long shot, but their mastery is still essential. Without a strong factual foundation on which to build, young people’s ideas will be formless and empty. Kids without facts will also be hopelessly lost in the so-called Information Age. This might be news to some people.
You see, a lot of folks think that since we live in a world where enormous amounts of information are at our fingertips that no one really needs to memorize or actually know much of anything any more. We can just look up anything we need to know, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. So wrong it makes my head hurt. I’ll give you an example why.
When I was in graduate school, one of my professors gave my Research and Methodology classmates and me a demonically hard assignment. We were given quotations from historical or biographical works completely out of context and unidentified. We were told to find the books from which these quotes had been taken. When we asked where we could find them, we were told simply, “In the Library.” Our professor was talking about a University library with more than a million books in it. Granted, the history and biography collections amounted to a mere few hundred thousand, but it still seemed like a gargantuan task. How did we do it? We recognized clues in each of the passages. These clues narrowed our searches down progressively, until it was possible for us to cite the exact book in which they were found. In one of the passages, the town of Braintree was mentioned. As it happened, I remembered that John Adams was from Braintree, Massachusetts and this allowed me to exclude a huge number of other possibilities.
Now you might say that your students will never be called on to do something as “useless” and arcane as that, but would you be right? The world is, in one sense, simply a huge mass of information swirling and undulating around us. The more clues we can pick out—the more facts we have at our command—the more we can make sense out of and draw conclusions from its seemingly random nature. (And no, you don’t have time to look everything up.) The more information you carry around in your cerebral cortex, the more armed and prepared you are. Life is a series of things without apparent context or identification. It’s factual knowledge that gives our experience these properties.
Those who will master the 21st century are those who can see connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, correlate highly disparate data, master highly complex subjects, and pick out exactly what they need from the Mt. Everest of words and numbers they’ll have to work with. And what will give them this mastery? Knowledge of facts. They will also be less vulnerable to deception when they hear, read or see it, because they will have the facts in their heads to refute lies and false claims instantly. It is the islands of facts that they will carry clustered in the neurons of their brains that will reach out and make at first tenuous and then increasingly strong, connections with other islands of facts. (In a simpler time, we called it putting 2 and 2 together.) I advocate making those islands as numerous and populous as possible.
The very act of looking information up is enhanced by factual knowledge. Just as we’re helped by knowing how to spell when we use a dictionary, so we’re helped by knowing something about what we’re looking for, if only to know where to begin and to see if we’re on track once we’ve gotten started.
You will be stunned by what these kids don’t know. Sometimes it will send shivers of mild panic or dread through you when you realize how factually destitute many of them are. (Example: I used to teach U.S. and European history for a local junior college’s night school program. I ran across adults taking these courses who didn’t realize the significance of the date July 4, 1776. I kid you not.) I’m not blaming the elementary or middle school teachers of your high school students, because Lord knows most of them are in there giving it the old college try. But I think there has to be a renewed emphasis on having students master a set of basic facts. Do I want armies of robot kids, simply spouting information like some kind of organic almanacs? Of course not. But I do want them to be able to have as large an area of common ground with each other as possible, if only to facilitate basic communication between them. Factual knowledge is part of what gives us a common frame of reference. Without such a frame, it’s difficult to keep a society together. There simply must be things that everyone knows. Our task is to present facts to our kids within an understandable context and in association with clearly identified themes, not simply in random lists of things to be memorized. This is challenging, but eminently doable—and utterly necessary.
Of Interest to Anyone, But Especially Those in Guidance or Psychology
The idea that the purpose of school is to enhance self esteem.
Look, I want kids to feel good about themselves. I know how it is to be down on yourself. But self-esteem isn’t something that can be conferred; it has to be earned. If you tell a young child that he or she is a valuable human, worthy of love, security and opportunity, you’re telling them the truth, telling them what they need to know. But if you simply tell a kid that everything he does is terrific, you’re doing him a tremendous disservice. He can grow up with a dangerously unrealistic view of his own abilities. Worse, he can even grow up with a sense of entitlement, as if the world owes him power and position. I happen to believe that the “average” human can do exceptional things. I am convinced that everyone has a contribution to make. And I am rock solid in my belief that the school should never demean kids or strip them of their basic human dignity. But I don’t think that the idea of school is simply to provide feel-goods for people. It’s to help them become independent adults who know their own strengths and limitations. That which we are given can be taken away from us; that which we have earned and made part of ourselves by our own effort can never be lost.
The idea that all academic competition is bad.
This is related to the belief that school should be all about self-esteem. Competition is a fact of life and we educators aren’t going to change that. It serves no valid purpose to advocate the abolition of grades, for example, or to eliminate the awarding of valedictory honors. It’s ludicrous to think that everyone belongs on the Honor Roll (what would be the honor in that?) or that everyone is “gifted” or that everyone is “honors” material. (Some people advocate eliminating gifted or honors programs entirely, which is as self-destructive a move as we could make in education.) We have all been given different gifts. I’m lousy at math and most of my classmates pulled ahead of me in it, much to my chagrin. But as I conceded my limitations in math, I was free to excel in my area. Competition, when managed thoughtfully, can be a powerful incentive to excellence. Throwing it out of our schools would be a tragic mistake.
If You Are in ANY Area, But Especially Literature or the Arts
The belief that there are no such things as standards.
Some people are under the impression that all views are somehow equally valid, that all opinions are equal in weight and that no standards of good, bad, better or worse can be applied to the products of human thought and effort. I hope this idea has largely shriveled up and died, but just in case it hasn’t, I’d like to help push it toward the graveyard. As teachers, we must choose. This is especially true if we teach history or literature, but it’s also true in other areas. We must judge what is best for our kids and what is most valuable in the human intellectual and creative heritages. No literature teacher in his or her right mind would simply let the kids have exclusive say on what should be read. (They of course should be given some latitude.) We assume the lit teacher has read much more broadly than the students and is a far better judge of what is valuable. There are books which are considered better than others; there are ideas in the sciences that are demonstrably true and those that aren’t; there are approaches to the teaching of math that are more rigorous than others. Educated people throughout the centuries have, through vigorous debate and the exchange of ideas, decided all this and as teachers we’re part of that long, never ending discussion. In short, standards are real. Ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.
If You’re in History, Social Science, or the Natural Sciences (Even Though the Science People Already Know This)
The idea that evolution is “just a theory” and that alternative explanations for the emergence and development of life are equally valid.
Organic evolution by means of natural selection is one of the most firmly established scientific truths in existence. It is every bit as firmly a part of the natural sciences as is the fact that the earth orbits the sun. Those who are opposed to the teaching of evolution often misunderstand (or deliberately misconstrue) the meaning of the term theory. In science, the word theory is not synonymous with hypothesis. A theory is a set of interrelated propositions which, taken together, explain a given phenomenon. Relativity is a theory, but it is not a hypothesis—it’s a real fact of nature. So is evolution. It is observable, testable and verifiable in every way. Every area of the natural sciences provides solid evidence in support of it. The theory itself has grown from the time of On the Origin of Species to encompass modern genetic thought as well as classical Darwinism. If you’ve been taught otherwise, you’ve been misled. (And if you have been led to believe that deep religious faith and acceptance of evolution are mutually exclusive, I urge you examine Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth R. Miller. He’s no relation, by the way, so I won’t get any money if you buy his book.)
If You Are in History or the Social Sciences
The idea that “Western” values are hopelessly evil or corrupt and that teaching such values is wrong.
I have done extensive study in the history of Nazi Germany. I have taught about the evils of industrialism’s early days. I am familiar with the general history of the slave trade. I know something about the destruction of the native peoples of the western hemisphere. I have explored some of the awful history of nineteenth century western imperialism. I have a feeling there aren’t too many people in the general population that are more familiar with the sins of the West than I am. Yet I still stand in defense of teaching what I see to be the West’s main values. Why?
It is a simple historical reality that the United States, despite its enormous ethnic diversity and wide array of influences, has deep roots in the history of Europe and, naturally, very deep connections to the history of Britain. (Our language and legal system are only two of these ties to the British people.) To ignore these connections is both unhistorical and unwise. Those who think that Britain and Europe in general, exerted only malignant influences are revealing their own narrow prejudices and ignorance. Has the West done obscene things? Without question. But that’s hardly the entire story.
Among the West’s legacies: equal rights for women, freedom of expression, freedom of religious practice, the disestablishment of religion, the rejection of cruel and unusual punishment, the rejection of slavery, equality before the law for all citizens, the idea that the state is obligated to help provide for the needs of its less fortunate members, and economic freedom. These are western values that I am proud to defend and equally proud to teach. And if you’re in history or the social sciences, you should be, too.
If we were to assert that the history and values of the West are all that students should learn, we would be on shaky ground. But to assert that the history of the West should be de-emphasized or removed from its primacy in the history curricula of American high schools is to enter the region of delusional thinking.
If You’re in the Arts
The idea that an artist’s ethnicity and sexuality, not the quality of his art, are the criteria by which he should be judged.
Robert Hughes, a highly gifted art critic and writer, has a wonderful discussion of this issue in his vitally important book Culture of Complaint. Hughes decries the emphasis some people give to the personal background of the artist, the “categories” of which he is a part, rather than any talent he may or may not possess. In this view, an artist’s ethnic origins and sexual orientation, not the quality of his work, are thought the main factors to be considered in judging his art. He uses the life of Mexican artist Diego Rivera as a refutation of this idea:
Rivera probably gave more to Mexico, in terms of self-knowledge and cultural pride, than any artist in its history, but he was only able to do so because he had absorbed and completely internalized the great tradition of Renaissance fresco-painting, which combined with his absorption in French modernism, pre-Columbian Mexican art and living folk-art to produce the tremendous results we see on the walls of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City. If you had told Rivera that quality didn’t matter, he would have laughed in your face.
Rivera wasn’t a great artist because he was a Mexican; he was a great artist because of his extraordinary talent and his understanding of the history of his own subject.
Other Questionable Ideas
The idea that texts must be deconstructed because meaning does not really exist; the idea that there is no genetic component to human behavior and that we are all nurture and no nature; the idea that America is as hostile to women’s aspirations as it was 50 or 60 years ago; the idea that non-standard English is acceptable in the real world; the idea that we should economically and socially return America back to the McKinley era; the idea that the purpose of an education is to get a good job so you can have a lot of money and buy a lot of toys for yourself and have a big house that your neighbors envy and have this really swell funeral when you die; the idea that we should be obedient little consumers at all times; “Afrocentric” history; the Neo-Confederate movement; creationism; the idea that academic writing must be obscure and incomprehensible to be of value; and the view that everyone is basically neurotic and in need of professional help. (I hasten to add that this only a partial list.)
And then there are…
Outright Lies
These include such blatant falsehoods as:
Inner city kids just can’t learn.
The Holocaust never happened.
Mao was a good man who did a lot for China.
The U.S. is just as bad as the old Soviet Union used to be.
Hatred of gays is understandable and excusable.
All Muslims are terrorists or terror supporters.
Jews run everything.
The truth is whatever the people in power say it is.
The public school system has utterly failed and needs to be abolished.
There are a lot of these lies floating around and they’ve infected and sickened a lot of minds. Be prepared to encounter plenty of people who believe one or more of them and other malicious fantasies not listed here.
Don’t be seduced by eloquence. A false or questionable idea may be expressed in the most high-flown manner; the truth is sometimes said awkwardly. If you want to be a teacher, embrace the world of ideas in which you live and work. Never simply take anybody’s word for anything until you’ve thought and read about it yourself. Every one of the world’s big thinkers made mistakes—Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, and all the rest of them. In the world of ideas, authority means nothing; logic and evidence are all. In living consciously and fully in the world of ideas, you grow as both an individual and a teacher. But don’t take my word for it.
After all, I could be dead wrong.