A Poor Substitute for Education

Here’s what Alvin Toffler did not write: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

That sentence is widely posted as coming from the pen of Alvin Toffler, but he did not create it.

While those words might rightly be seen as a bit of wisdom for those who must interface constantly-changing hardware and software, it is not good advice for navigating social and political situations. While this insight can help a person adjust to the latest version of an operating system or to the newest update of an app, it is a poor way to view the world in general.

Instead, people are most successful in understanding the world when they seek and discover the unchanging principles which underlie and shape reality. However old human history might be — let’s say 10,000 years although the oldest known writing samples are only 5,500 years old — human nature hasn’t changed during that time. While people reshape technology and fashion at a dizzying pace, human nature remains reliably constant.

Likewise, the physical properties of the universe remain the same: the laws of physics and chemistry.

All which presents itself as new and different is usually a repackaging of something much older.

Education, to be truly useful, must give students skills and knowledge which will apply in the unanticipated and unpredictable circumstances of the future. Sometimes dismissed as ‘essentialism,’ an education which helps students to understand human nature, and therefore be able to understand all people, is a meaningful key in the midst of changing appearances but steady immutable underlying realities.

Human nature is a constant, a foundation under the diverse appearances of ethnicities, languages, nationalities, religions, and other demographic variables.

This is why the ancient utterances of Confucius and Aristotle largely agree with the common sense of today and tomorrow.

What did Alvin Toffler actually write? In his book Future Shock, he wrote: “Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” In the context of changing computer systems and financial systems, Toffler is correct.

It is a misuse of his words to apply them to the essential structure of human society or to the timeless characteristics of human nature.

Charitable Reading: Why Recontextualization Is Worth the Effort

To explore texts from different eras, different places, different languages, or different cultures requires a sympathetic reading: assuming that what might at first appear nonsensical or bizarre has a reasonable interpretation, and assuming that the author was expressing, or attempting to express, a rational and plausible idea.

Recontextualization is work. It requires one to find analogues and parallels in one’s own era, own place, own language, or own culture.

The reader who devotes exertion to this task is rewarded.

Two texts which merit such exploration are books authored by Mortimer Smith. The first is titled And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education, published in 1949 by Henry Regnery Company as part of “The Humanist Library” series. The second is The Diminished Mind: A Study of Planned Mediocrity in Our Public Schools, which appeared in 1954 by the same publisher.

Smith’s prose is dated, and his examples are by now obscure bits of trivia in the history of education, but the generic principles which he puts forth endure. The insights gained from these books are valuable principles which continue to explain education in the United States.

Educational Administration: Subversive or Merely Incompetent?

People who do not regularly inhabit the workplaces of school administrators may be forgiven for imagining that they’ve been transported to the surface of Mars when they encounter the verbiage and decision-making processes of such administrators. Ordinary common sense and standard business practices count for little in the world of educational bureaucracy.

One such average human being who wound up as a visitor in the domain of educational administration was Mortimer Smith. He was surprised by what he found, and wrote a book to share his experiences with anyone else who wasn’t a full-time educational administration, i.e., with 99% of the human race.

Reviewing Smith’s book for the University of Chicago, Manning Pattillo writes:

As a member of a board of education in Connecticut, Mortimer Smith was given the responsibility of interviewing candidates for a public school superintendency. He reports that this experience was rather depressing because so few of the applicants seemed to have any real interest in education as such. Their concern, according to Smith, was almost entirely with the machinery of education, with the equipment and organization of schools, rather than with the purposes of education. And when the candidates did talk about educational philosophy, the author was impressed by the extraordinary uniformity of their ideas. Nearly all of them seemed to hold the same views and to express these views in precisely the same words. So Mortimer Smith began an investigation to discover what influences ces are operating on the public schools and why public educators are the kind of people they are. And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public Education is the report of his finding.

In the book, Smith notes that one of several causes for the inept management of schools is found among the parents and voters themselves:

This, then, is an essay about education by a layman and an amateur, and it is not written in sackcloth and ashes; it is written in the conviction that laymen that is, parents and taxpayers ought to get over their lazy indifference to the public schools and study the theory and practice of public-school education; in short, to find out what it is we are paying for and to which we so glibly turn over our children.

Smith’s message would seem to be, then, that if educational offices are staffed with functionaries who have little interest in, or knowledge of, content and curriculum, then these offices are so occupied because of under-involvement on the part of voters and parents.

How Has the AAPS Fared during the Pandemic?

There have been three (so far) academic years in which learning has been compromised by pandemic-related measures: 2019/2020, 2020/2021, and 2021/2022. The amount of loss is difficult to quantify or measure.

In the Ann Arbor Public Schools, elements of loss include lost instructional time, lost exposure to physical bound books, lost opportunities for administration of accurate assessments, etc. These could be at least approximately quantified.

Intangible factors are as real, but less easy to measure: the loss of in-person and face-to-face instruction, for example.

Among the biggest losses are three which are related to the German program in the AAPS. Ann Arbor has long been known for its German classes, starting in sixth or seventh grade, and allowing students to achieve at high levels until the end of twelfth grade.

Successful work in a German class distinguishes a high school transcript when it is read by a university admissions officer. Spanish is ubiquitous and French is relatively common, but a high school graduate who’s done significant amounts of work in German stands out.

German has suffered the same learning losses as History, Mathematics, and other disciplines. The AAPS German program, however, has long had several academic opportunities above and beyond standard classroom learning activities; these special opportunities, sadly, were also especially vulnerable to the COVID-related measures.

The German-American Partnership Program (GAPP) has been operating in various forms since the late 1960s in Ann Arbor. The program consists roughly of this: during the first half of the calendar year, a delegation of high school students from Tübingen, accompanied by one or more of their teachers, is hosted in Ann Arbor by AAPS families. Tübigen is Ann Arbor's sister city. The visiting students from Germany attend AAPS high school classes, and get to know daily life in the area by living with their host families.

The second part of the program takes place between academic years, in the middle of the calendar year, when delegations of AAPS high school students, accompanied by their teachers, visit Tübingen, usually for three weeks. The students from Ann Arbor stay with families in Tübingen and attend classes in their schools.

This program has successfully enabled AAPS students to engage in large amounts of learning, starting with but going far beyond the German language. The experiences of culture, economics, diplomacy, international relations, and communication are immense.

After decades of enriching the lives of AAPS students, the GAPP was shut down. In 2020, the German delegation didn’t come to Ann Arbor, and students from Ann Arbor didn’t go to Tübingen. The same is true for 2021, and will be for 2022.

The earliest possible hope for a GAPP exchange would be 2023. The reader is already aware of the uncertainty surrounding any long-range planning, so a 2023 event is desired but far from definite.

The loss of at least three consecutive GAPP events constitutes a major loss, not only to the students of the AAPS, but also to the entire community, as the enriching effects of this program touched families and local businesses.

The omission of GAPP events is not, however, the only loss inflicted by pandemic-related actions.

In the spring of each year, often in March or April, the University of Michigan invites those high school students who are enrolled in German classes to attend the university’s annual German Day. Middle school students are also invited, and AAPS middle school students have participated with distinction in this event over the decades. This long-standing event allows high school students to meet and interact with the university’s professors, grad students, and undergrad students. The day is spent on the U of M’s campus, giving the high school students not only a chance to explore the German language in deeper and different ways, but also to get a feel for campus activity. Again, the learning includes but goes beyond the German language: the participants in German Day explore some life skills which they’ll need after high school.

Sadly, the U of M’s German Day was not held in person in 2021, and is scheduled likewise not to occur in 2022: Again, two years of significant loss for students. What will 2023 bring?

A third major learning loss occurred with the cancellation of the annual field trip to Chicago. Students in both middle school and high school spend a day in Chicago, starting with the city’s annual Christkindlmarkt sponsored by Chicago's mayor and city council. The day also includes the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Loyola Museum of Art. Interdisciplinary learning is combined with a chance to walk through the monumental architecture of Chicago.

The annual AAPS field trip to Chicago, for all middle school and high school students who are enrolled in a German class, was cancelled in 2020 and 2021. There is some hope for 2022, but again, it is far from certain.

Such, then, are the losses of intangible and non-traditional educational experiences: learning outside the classroom. The learning loss of measurable content and curriculum is clear. There are skills which students don’t have, and facts which they don’t know: fluent manipulation of a quadratic equation, or the ability to explain the significance of the Battle of Hastings.

Also significant, but less easy to measure, are the other losses, like the three identified above.

History as a Source of Hope: The American Narrative Produces a Sense of Justice

The greatest threat to any demographic group — race, gender, religion, ethnicity — is posed by those who claim to befriend it. The person most likely to be a racist is the one who’s constantly accusing individuals and institutions of racism. The person most likely to be a misogynist is the one who spends time and energy labelling ideas and organizations as sexist.

By contrast, the greatest friend of justice is the one who explores and presents history in the calm bright light of reason. The analysis of past events, not passion, allows justice to manifest itself.

A dizzying amount of vocabulary is generated by those who claim to represent the cause of justice and who claim to be the ally of Black, Brown, African American, Latino, and Hispanic people. Yet those who present themselves as friends of the oppressed routinely have the net effect of removing hope: they offer a political doctrine which teaches groups to view themselves exclusively as oppressed victims and to seek help by making themselves reliant on paternalistic sources of support.

Hope and justice arise when individuals see themselves capable of creativity, ingenuity, and autonomy — and see themselves as individuals, not merely members of some demographic segment, as educator Stephen Tootle writes:

The students at the college where I teach are mostly poor, and most of them have brown skin. But they are not stupid and they are not lazy. They have been told for most of their lives — by people claiming to help them — that the system is rigged, that the past is nothing but a record of oppression, that they should not want to participate in our sick society, that racism is the answer to racism, and that freedom exists only to crush the weak. Yet something inside them has always led them to believe that those ideas are wrong.

The United States has offered hope and opportunity to people of all religions and races, to people of all languages and ethnicities. America’s structure is such that injustices, when they occur, are addressed and corrected. This is more than can be said of many countries, which is why immigrants continue to desire U.S. citizenship.

One aspect of the American mentality is the acknowledgement of two facts which have emerged in the history of the world: humans seek freedom, and they seek acknowledgement of their individuality. Stephen Tootle continues:

Hope brought them into my classroom. Hope keeps them going when they’re surrounded by people who not only are not supportive but are actively working to undermine their plans. They read Hamilton. They identify with his ideas regardless of such matters as the passage of time and the color of his skin — or theirs. They know that America is a land of hope.

To teach students about the history of the United States, and to teach them unapologetically about America’s promotion of liberty and individuality, is to offer hope.

Hope thus offered is more than a sentiment. It is empowerment. It is the ability to see one’s self incorporated into an ideology of empowerment. Free markets and free enterprise foster hope and foster concrete advancement for those who engage in them. Property rights create dignity and energize industriousness — a family which owns the smallest home on the smallest piece of land is motivated and prompted to act with more resoluteness than a family which holds no property.

A nation governed by freely-elected representatives is a nation with hope. These motivational lessons arise from studying the history of the United States.

Educational Policy During the Pandemic: Failure Results When Emotion Defeats Reason

In October 2020, four professors at Harvard’s School of Public Health published an opinion piece about the COVID-19 pandemic. They reviewed school policies around the nation, and found an incoherent patchwork.

Some schools were closed, directing students to “distance learning” of various forms, while other schools were meeting in person in their buildings, and a third group of schools was using a hybrid approach. The authors argue that local school boards, administrators, and superintendents had chosen one of those three options, but had made that choice without clear reason.

Jessica Cohen, Sara Bleich, Joseph Allen and Benjamin Sommers wrote:

School policy decisions across the ideological spectrum are being made largely devoid of data, threatening the well-being of our children, economy and society.

The authors take a neutral approach: whether a school has chosen brick-and-mortar presence or online learning, the choice in either case has been made on a feelings-driven basis. How parents, students, teachers, administrators, or board members perceive the situation — and how they perceive potential courses of action — are often based on passion rather than logic.

The authors prescribe a calmer approach:

Policy should not be driven by emotion or anecdote.

Decisions made on the basis of sentiment are often reactions, not responses. They are often packaged with statistics to give the appearance of being “data driven” and “evidence based,” but the reader will remember Mark Twain’s famous comment about statistics.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are captive audiences to endless floods of numbers, percentages, and charts. Such allegedly mathematical presentations are subject to gerrymandering, and should not be presented in the context of a passionate debate:

Cases in school must be reported in context — both in terms of the population size in question (not just case counts) and whether infections were actually transmitted in schools rather than in the broader community.

For any statistic presented, a thorough and calm exploration of related variables is appropriate.

The typical school board meeting is not conducive to analytical thought. Analysis should be conducted without any eye to potential courses of action, or to the emotions roused by the topic.

Data on covid-19 clusters within schools, when they occur, should also be reported alongside information on which risk mitigation measures (e.g., masks, ventilation, etc.) were in place.

Any steps taken, any plan devised, should be examined in the light of opportunity cost. The decision to do one thing is the decision to forgo every other option available.

Schools which have entirely closed their buildings need to examine what the students are doing when they are not at home. Nationwide, pediatricians report an increase in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among high-school aged patients during the months of school shutdown.

Gatherings of teenagers, with varying amounts of alcohol and marijuana, and without “social distancing” and face masks, must be factored into any decision to close schools.

Any policy analysis must ask, “Compared with what?” While remote learning is often called the “safest option,” that view assumes children are at home, safely distancing from others. But policymakers must consider that in many households, parents have to work, meaning children are often in teaching “pods,” nanny shares or group hangouts at local playgrounds. This leads to a series of mixed interactions between children and adults.

Complicating any calculations is the existence of endless variations on each of the three options: in person, distance learning, or hybrid.

These complexities make any simple generalizations impossible.

Given this reality, it’s possible that hybrid models and remote learning may not reduce infection risk relative to in-person schooling that requires masks and keeps kids in smaller, contained groups.

Keeping children out of school is not the same as keeping them at home, and neither of those is an optimal situation.

Many children, kept out of school, will not be at home. They’ll be with groups of other children, perhaps in learning pods, or perhaps simply left to their own devices to entertain themselves. Data on assignment completion indicates that student engagement with academic work is lower when school is not in person.

These patterns also vary by age. The span of Kindergarten through 12th grade allows for immense variation. Still more disparities arise if pre-K education is included in the calculation.

For those students who remain at home when kept out of school, many face a lack of mental stimulation and a lack of supervision. Their ability to ask questions and engage in discussions is hampered by the affective effects of Zoom and all other online video chat platforms.

Policy choices should not focus on just one outcome. We need a richer accounting of the costs and benefits of schooling models beyond just virus transmission. Key metrics should include student learning, engagement and well-being.

No matter which option a school chooses, there will be costs. A clear reckoning of those costs includes the net impact on the wellbeing of the students, and the economic effects which will ripple through the entire community.

The pandemic will create a net downward pressure on the total national economy for several years after it’s over. Decisions should be made with an eye toward minimizing those negative impacts, as Jessica Cohen, Sara Bleich, Joseph Allen and Benjamin Sommers note:

We also must consider economic costs associated with school policy decisions.

Schools which perhaps should have shut down for a week or two, in order to slow the spread, remained open. Those which should have opened remained closed.

A global perspective is helpful. Other nations have locked down large parts of their societies, but left schools open. The schools were safer because there was less community spread of the virus when nearly every other institution or business was closed.

China, the home and source of the virus, provides an interesting example. Many Chinese schools are running normally, or nearly normally, with classes all day every day in their physical facilities. China had, of course, a longer lead time to prepare for the pandemic, but perhaps other nations will be able to follow suit after a proportional time interval.

Looking at the national pattern of school choices, it is clear that evidence-based policy is not driving these decisions.

Mistake in policy, whether too cautious or too risky, were made when sensationalized media accounts fueled passion in the various stakeholders. Once emotion overrode reason, faulty policies were adopted and enacted.

How to Teach about Privilege

It is now standard practice, in secondary education, for students to explore the topic of ‘privilege’ in History or Social Studies classes. Much could be said about how this is done: that it focuses on a history and a pattern of privilege possessed by certain demographic segments of the population to the exclusion of other segments, etc.

The routine discussion of ‘privilege’ in U.S. public secondary eduation centers on past injustices and the present aftereffects of those injustices. The reader might greet a forward-looking approach to teaching about privilege, one in which the understood goal is the extension of privilege to a broader and more inclusive set of individuals.

The U.S. Constitution has something to say about privilege, and students should explore especially Article 1, Article 4, and the 14th Amendment in this regard.

Section 9 of Article 1 states that “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended.” This privilege ensures, among other things, that an arrest cannot take place unless the arrest is warranted, i.e., a warrant has been issued, and unless the person making the arrest is authorized to do so. Anyone being arrested must be informed why the arrest is taking place, i.e., the specific crime alleged against him. Those arrested may not be held incommunicado but rather must be allowed some form of contact. Some manner of evidence or probably cause must be presented to justify the warrant and the arrest. All of this must be done to the satisfaction of a court. If the person making the arrest does not satisfy the court, the individual is judged to have been improperly arrested and will be released.

The “privilege” bestowed by Section 9 of Article 1 is one important foundation for many civil rights.

It is relevant to note that, immediately preceding this privilege, the same section has first defined that “slaves” are “persons,” that the Constitution forbids and brings to an end the importation of slaves, and that Congress has the right to levy taxes to deter slavery. Already at the very beginning of Section 9 of Article 1 is the foundation for the abolition of slavery. It is the clear intention of the text to discourage slavery.

The text proceeds from the discouragement of slavery to the encouragement of “privilege,” and this progression can only mean that the text extends such privilege to those who obtained liberty when slavery ended.

In Article 4, Section 2, the Constitution confirms that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.” From this somewhat confusing phrase, it follows that anyone who is a citizen of a state has privileges, and that such privileges are not to be negated or abridged in the course of interstate commerce, travel, or trade.

This same section includes a reference to fugitive slaves, a reference undermined by the language in Article 1, Section 9, as noted above. The text sees the concept of fugitive slaves as a concept which will soon pass from relevance, once slavery is abolished.

Both in Article 1 and in Article 4, the mention of privilege is closely linked to the abolition of slavery and the securing of civil rights.

These mentions come to fruition in the 14th Amendment, in which again “privilege” and the abolition of slavery are linked. This Amendment extends privilege to those who had been enslaved and are now free:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In this way, privilege is synonymous with the end of slavery. Where there is no privilege, there is slavery. Where there is no slavery, there is privilege. The individual who is know longer a slave is a person of privilege.

Privilege is, then, the great goal and achievement of anything which may be properly called a “civil rights movement.” The difference between a “right” and a “privilege” is subtle.

One distinction is that privileges can be taken or given to individuals. Rights are had by individuals as a circumstance of birth.

Being born, an individual has human rights; this is true of all people, i.e., of all human beings. Being born in a particular place, an individual has civil rights; each location bestows civil rights equally on all who are born there.

Having a driver’s license, and driving a car, is a privilege, not a right.

Confusion about the difference between rights and privileges is common, and for several reasons: first, usage of these words has changed over time; second, there is more than one type of right, and more than one type of privilege; third, constitutional and legal usage of these words differs from the usage found in ordinary everyday life.

Students should find much to debate and explore in this approach to understanding privilege. A forward-looking approach will ask about how this concept is, and should be, applied to concrete situations and cases. The Constitution intends for privilege to be extended with no regard to color, race, age, wealth or poverty, ethnicity, etc.

The Constitution sets a high ideal. In which cases have we met that ideal? In which cases have we failed to meet that ideal?