Competing Methodologies in the Teaching of History

Those who are trained to teach History, and those who hypothesize about how History might be taught, create categories of methodologies. Pedagogical approaches teaching History include thematic, chronological, biographical, episodic, and others.

The thematic approach takes a theme, e.g., “increasing freedom,” and traces it through history, marking significant points: Hammurabi, Moses, Aristotle, Cicero, the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, etc.

The chronological approach is clear from its name. A “chronology” is a listing of events in temporal order, with explanations about the events along the way.

A biographical approach focuses on individuals, exploring their lives in the context of the times in which they lived.

Episodic treats history as a series of events or epochs, and explores them in turn.

There has been, and will be, endless discussions about the merits and disadvantages of these and other approaches. One common element among them all is the constant need to omit material because of a finite amount of instructional time.

It is difficult to find or construct a program of instruction which uses one of these approaches purely. They are almost always to some extent mixed with each other. Sometimes the mixing is intentional and explicit; in other instances, the mixing is done unwittingly and unintentionally.

Aside from whichever blend of approaches one chooses, the next step is to ensure that concrete and specific places, people, times, and events are loaded into the curriculum.

For example, instruction would be judged deficient if it centered on describing the characteristics of “The Age of Reason.” This would be attaching generalizations to a concept which is itself merely a construct, e.g, “people in the Age of Reason valued moderation.” A ‘construct’ like ‘The Age of Reason’ is vague and indefinite generalization, with no clear time or place. Generalizations can be helpful in history instruction, but they cannot stand alone; they must be made with reference to data and evidence.

Effective history instruction would mention, e.g., that “The Age of Reason” included authors like Descartes, Newton, and Kepler, in places like France, England, and Germany, during the time period from approximately 1590 to 1730. This more effective instruction includes people, places, and times. The books these authors wrote and the discoveries they made would complete the curriculum by adding those concrete and specific events.

Perhaps the most effective instruction would omit the construct “The Age of Reason” entirely, and explore the people, places, dates, and events, allowing them to stand on their own.

The danger which lurks for teachers is this: An instructor can spend so much time and energy developing and implementing a methodology and pedagogy that she or he fails to add a maximum possible amount of data and evidence into the curriculum. The most beautiful approach can still fail, if at the end, the students do not know who did what when.

The Liberal Arts vs. The Humanities: What’s the Difference?

In casual North American speech during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the distinction between “the Humanities” and “the Liberal Arts” is understood poorly if at all, and in common usage, no clear definition is attached to either. Many speakers of American English have the vague impression that the two are synonymous.

In reality, the two are quite different from each other.

The two terms are sometimes used dismissively, to imply that certain curricula lack rigor or real-world practicality; but note carefully that the Liberal Arts Department in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago offers the following courses: Marine Biology, Mathematical Thinking, and The Physics of Motion.

The Liberal Arts Department at Henry Ford College offers Criminal Justice and Introduction to Homeland Security. The College of Liberal Arts at Temple University includes the Department of Economics and the Neuroscience Program.

The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota offers full programs in Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics.

These examples show that the term “Liberal Arts” refers, in its true meaning, to academic disciplines including all the natural sciences and mathematics. What is the logic of this definition? The history of the phrase, as given in the Oxford English Dictionary (2009 edition), explains that it was “originally the seven subjects of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) considered collectively.”

To modern readers, grouping rhetoric in the same category as geometry, and grouping music in the same category as astronomy, might seem odd. But in the medieval educational systems, these content areas were seen to have a common thread: they were considered to be “free” topics, because they were not “in the service of” some vocational or professional training: they were unapplied. Because they were “free,” they were called the “liberal” arts — they enjoyed liberty.

Even today, many post-secondary educational institutions distinguish between “pure” mathematics and “applied” mathematics. Likewise, Biology is one of the Liberal Arts, but Medicine is professional training; Physics is one of the Liberal Arts, but Mechanical Engineering is professional training.

The Liberal Arts are, therefore, investigations into different areas of knowledge — investigations with the goal of gaining knowledge. This is in contrast to being trained for specific tasks: engineering, healthcare, legal work, business.

Under the heading of “Liberal Arts,” one finds learning about nearly any conceivable topic, learning for the sake of learning: education, not training.

What is meant by “the Humanities”?

The word itself gives a clue: the academic disciplines grouped together under the label have this in common — they all involve the experience of being human. They are experiential and therefore empirical. Music, painting, sculpture, and architecture studied by means of sense data: using one or more of the five senses.

History is a collection of individual or shared experiences of human beings in the past. Literature is the experience of writing and the experience of reading, and the study of those experiences.

By contrast, mathematics, e.g., is an a priori investigation, and has no need of specific sense data.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains what people are discussing when they’re discussing the Humanities:

The branch of learning concerned with human culture; the academic subjects collectively comprising this branch of learning, as history, literature, ancient and modern languages, law, philosophy, art, and music.

The humanities are typically distinguished from the social sciences in having a significant historical element, in the use of interpretation of texts and artefacts rather than experimental and quantitative methods, and in having an idiographic rather than nomothetic character.

The contrast to the social sciences is helpful: the Humanities tend to deal with concrete and specific examples — texts and artifacts. The social sciences look for patterns and trends which can possibly be formulated as laws — charts and graphs, percentages and equations. The Humanities might study, e.g., the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. The social sciences might study a generic description of the social dynamics which are associated with revolutions.

‘The Humanities’ is sometimes used in second sense, which is slightly narrower, according to the OED:

Literary learning or scholarship; secular letters as opposed to theology; esp. the study of ancient Latin and Greek language, literature, and intellectual culture (as grammar, rhetoric, history, and philosophy); classical scholarship.

It is clear that the Humanities and the Liberal Arts are two different and distinct groups of topics.

Thus the true definitions of the phrases. But common speech rarely honors precise exposition, and thus the current confusion and sloppy usage.

The definition in the OED notes that “in later use more generally,” the Liberal Arts are assumed to be “arts subjects as opposed to science and technology.” It goes on to note that this usage is “now chiefly North American.”

By analyzing how such words are defined and grouped, readers can develop an intellectual apparatus which can organize educational institutions.

Creating the Perfect Transcript: World Language Classes and the Admissions Process

Although it’s usually not until the beginning of a student’s senior year in high school that the application process takes center stage in a student’s activities, the transcript which is a major part of that process begins with the freshman year. If a student learns only in twelfth grade that the gold standard is four consecutive years of a World Language, it may be too late.

It is important for ninth-graders to be aware that they must start their high school career with a World Language class, and take that language each year until graduation. Other variables being equal, the student with four years will be admitted over the student with three.

Sara Harberson is the author of Soundbite, a book about the college application process, and the founder of Application Nation, a community for people navigating the admissions process. She has also worked as an admissions officer at several colleges and universities. When advising future applicants, she writes:

The most asked question I get from students is if they really need to take language through senior year — especially if they took it starting in middle school. My answer never changes, though. It's always “yes.” Because almost every college has a language requirement, admissions officers are looking for the student to have the most exposure to one single language. Language proficiency will help students when they get to college. Before that, it will help them stay competitive in the admissions process.

It’s worth noting that AP and DP test scores play little or no role in the admissions process, while enrollment in the AP or DP class can be a significant factor. So it’s important to take those classes, even if you don’t take the test. The test results often are published so late that most admissions departments have made all their decisions by then.

Allen Grove has over 20 years of experience as a professor and an admissions officer. He writes:

When a college recommends “two or more” years of a language, they are clearly signaling that language study beyond two years would strengthen your application. Indeed, no matter where you apply for college, a demonstrated proficiency in a second language will improve your chances of being admitted. Life during college and afterward is becoming increasingly globalized, so strength in a second language carries a lot of weight with admissions counselors.

“Highly selective schools such as the Ivies,” adds Grove, are clearly looking for “four years of a language.” Students sometimes receive rejection letters indicating that they were not admitted because they did not have four consecutive years of a World Language on their transcripts.

The default World Language for many high school students is Spanish. If a high school offers another language — e.g., German, Latin, Russian, Greek, etc. — then a student has an opportunity to assemble a transcript which will stand out.

Of the students who enroll in a foreign language program during their four years of high school, roughly 70% take Spanish. Admissions officers who skim through hundreds and even thousands of transcripts. A language like German or Latin will catch the eye.

The popular website Ingenius Prep is a source of guidance for the college application process. The site states:

Many schools recommend that you actually commit to the component for all four years of high school.

To compile a transcript which has a good chance of succeeding, a student should avoid taking a default language and find a more interesting language, take it all four years, and if possible, take a AP or DP class during the fourth and final year.

Too Much Conformity — Or Not Enough?

Starting sometime around the middle of the twentieth century, American society has been bombarded with comments demanding less conformity. Certainly, it is possible that a society can be too conformist. Not only is it possible, but world history offers concrete examples of cookie-cutter behavior being imposed on individuals on a mass scale.

Whether any given society is too conformist, as opposed being merely somewhat conformist, is of course to a certain extent a matter of opinion.

Less subjective is the task of identifying and quantifying the specific results and effects of both conformity and nonconformity.

Since the horrifying killings at Columbine High School in 1999, examination of social dynamics in high schools has taken on a certain urgency. What can we learn about the individuals and the motives which lie behind such killings? Can we detect social factors proactively to prevent such crimes?

Columbine was not the first high school killing spree, but it seems to have captured the attention of the mass media and the imagination of the public more than any of the previous incidents.

Efforts have been made to mine high school students for their awareness of potential warning signs that such violence may be in the offing: Students are urged to report potential perpetrators. Signs and posters tell students, “If You See Something, Say Something.” Similar slogans remind students that “It’s OK to Say” if they know of some inclination toward mass violence, and other posters tell students to “See It. Report It. Stop It!”

Such well-intentioned encouragements have not succeeded in reducing violent sprees.

These efforts to encourage students to report potential perpetrators are swimming against the current. For three-quarters of a century, a coordinated effort has been underway to make American society in general, and high schools in particular, less conformist. This effort has been by some metrics — by many metrics? — successful.

In an environment shaped by nonconformism and anti-conformism, it is difficult to persuade students to identify among their peers those who might be likely to plan mass violence.

In hindsight, many of the perpetrators of large-scale school violence were identifiable. But students have been conditioned to ignore or overlook nonconformity. Students have been conditioned not even to perceive bizarre appearances or behaviors.

Historians and sociologists can debate whether or not American society was too conformist in the 1940s and 1950s. It is ultimately a question of opinion.

At the beginning of the second quarter of the twenty-first century, however, there are measurable and observable effects arising from a steady barrage of nonconformist and anti-conformist messages.

Americans in general, and American high school students in particular, have been taught or persuaded not to notice what can only be described as weird: strange actions, speech, or appearances. Some might even consider it uncomfortable or inappropriate to be aware of another’s oddity.

Society has compromised the safety of high school students in the name of rebelling against conformism. Certainly, it is a democratic instinct to protect an individual’s right to express herself or himself. But it is also a democratic instinct to protect the population at large; doing so entails an effort to identify potential threats — those whose words and behaviors mark them as outliers.

The Other Kind of Gender Equity: Why Are Men Not Thriving at Universities?

The evidence is conclusive: At colleges and universities in the United States, fewer boys than girls are applying for admission, being accepted for admission, matriculating, or graduating. In all of those activities, girls form a clear and growing majority. Among the boys who do matriculate, average grades are lower.

This trend is increasing.

In 2021, Douglas Belkin wrote:

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

Belkin described the situation in that year:

No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year — 3,805,978 to 2,815,810 — by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

Since then, the trend has indeed continued. In 2024, the gender gap is larger than it was in 2021.

The statistical skew cuts across all the usual demographic variables: religion, income level, race, ethnicity, etc. The gender gap exists in a wide range of institutions: community colleges, four-year colleges, large universities.

Already in 2021, the female enrollment majority was nearly two-thirds of the student body, as Belkin writes:

The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high, Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and women.

Some universities have made intentional efforts to recruit more boys and to lower admission standards slightly for boys. Despite such initiatives, the gender gap continues to increase. In 2024, the skew had indeed crossed the two-thirds mark on some campuses.

What’s to be done?

The causes of this inequity are several, and so the repair will involve more than one action. Social and cultural attitudes about masculinity will need to change. Secondary educational institutions will need to change: high school.

Educational institutions are resistant to meaningful change, and quick to embrace superficial gestures which look like change. What is needed in American high schools in order to fix the gender gap?

• Rigor
• Physicality
• Competition
• Structure
• Discipline

Male students respond positively to rigor, as do female students. But in the absence of rigor, male students disengage quickly, while female students will stay engaged longer. Why? The reason isn’t important; the observable, measurable, and quantifiable outcomes are. Rigor is when students receive curricular content, and their learning is measured by their abilities to demonstrate skills (“know how”) and comprehension (“know that”).

All students benefit from engaging in physical exercise, but boys show a bigger statistical bump when they have regular movement. This can be as simple as taking a walk, a bicycle ride, or a swim most days. Outside the United States, some schools devote 15 or 30 minutes to calisthenics each morning before instruction starts. The prevalence of high school athletics in the United States blurs the concept a bit: For students who aren’t interested in team sports, they need to understand that physical fitness can be obtained by simple daily routines like walking, and needn’t involve teams, games, coaches, and officials; for students who are on a school team, they need to remain active in their off seasons, and their coaches need to ensure that practice times regularly include cardiovascular workouts and aren’t merely strategy sessions in the locker room.

Boys are more likely to invest time, energy, and attention to content area learning when there is an element of competition. Best practices include acknowledging top performers (often in an “honor roll”); celebrating valedictorians; and publishing “rank in class” statistics at the end of the school year.

Structure helps all students, but especially boys. A school which emphasizes organizational habits, promptness, and routines builds a predictable environment. There can be exceptions, but they need to be few in number, and clearly announced as such. Even the arrangement of chairs and tables and desks in a classroom can communicate order or disorder; the former inspires achievement, while the latter encourages sloth.

Boys seek a clear understanding of discipline. Rules should be few, clear, and consistently enforced. Most boys, upon hearing or reading an instruction or a rule, ask silently, “and what happens if I don’t?” They will test the boundary to see if there is a prompt consequence for violation.

The gender gap poses a serious threat to America and to the credibility of America’s educational institutions. The statistics which reveal this gap are more significant than racial and income-related gaps. If the gap is not reduced or eliminated, society and the economy will pay a bitter price.

What We Know, and What We Fail to Do with That Knowledge: Marijuana in Schools

In many areas across the United States, the possession and use of THC and related substances for recreational purposes has been decriminalized, meaning that it is still a violation of federal law, but not a violation of local law, and that local law enforcement will not act on it, and local prosecutors will not prosecute it.

In most — all? — such places, it is stipulated that marijuana and related products will be sold only to those over the age of 21.

While the imposition of this age limit is well-intentioned, it is largely ineffective. Any sufficiently motivated high school student can find a way to obtain THC products, and the use of such products by underage individuals has increased both in high schools and in other locations.

The availability of “gummies” and baked goods and other edible products containing THC has changed how THC might be detected. In the past, marijuana most frequently smoked, and detection was based on odor and the presence of smoke, as well as paper, matches, and the marijuana itself.

The switch to edibles means that detection must pivot to devices which are able to detect THC, and perhaps also to animals trained to detect marijuana-related products.

There is no doubt, however, that documentation is growing, via research reports from universities and medical institutions, about the damage done by THC to young people.

THC has a different effect on people aged 25 and younger than it has on older people. Brain formation is still taking place up to the age of 25 or 26 — individuals vary slightly — and the introduction of various marijuana products into the bloodstream and into the brain steer that development away from its optimal trajectory. Numerous studies have shown not only correlation, but also causation, for outcomes like psychosis when THC is consumed by young people.

All of this is well known. Yet significant measures among high-school age students has yet to be taken. Parents, schools, and local law enforcement should be empowered to do more and encouraged to take meaningful action to reduce marijuana consumption among teenagers.

Now is not the time for timidity.

Educational Reform: When Everyone Knows What to Do, but Nobody Does It – Remove Smartphones from Schools

Often, changing an educational system is a contentious process, filled with passionate debate. Often, such changes require the commissioning of mountains of new research to inform any decision.

But sometimes, it’s simple and obvious.

Phrases like “settled science” and “professional consensus” are often overused, misused, and abused. But sometimes those phrases are accurate. Sometimes there really is a universal agreement — or one so statistically near universal that it counts as such.

Such is the case with electronics and young people. We don’t need one more research report on this. It is clear that smartphones, social media, and electronic gaming are harmful to young people: to their mental and physical health, as well as to their academic achievement.

The consensus is amazing: liberals and conservatives, progressives and libertarians, North and South, men and women, rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats, old and young; all religions, all races; all cultures; all ethnic groups. Everyone knows this.

But nobody does anything about it.

It would be a simple act: require students to turn in their smartphones at the beginning of the school day. They would receive them back on their way home at the end of the school day.

Yes, there would be a very small number of parents who’d make a very large amount of noise, protesting this. But the law is clear, and a school system could fend off any number of lawsuits about the topic.

And more than a few schools around the United States have already done this — public schools, private schools, charter schools — and done it successfully. The benefits among the student body are measurable and observable.

Yet the vast majority of schools have not yet done this. Why?

There is no doubt that confiscating the smartphones is good for the students. At some point in the future, questions will be asked about schools who failed to quickly adopt this most obvious of policies.

College Debt: When Student Loans Don’t Make Sense

There are many reasons to seek a college or university education: to become trained for a profession, to become intellectually well-rounded, to become a reflective voting citizen, to have an active social life on campus, to seek a spouse, and many other goals.

For none of these reasons is it wise to take on a massive amount of debt. Yet many students are doing precisely that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Education is often called an investment. Any investment is judged by the returns it yields, the “return on investment” (ROI).

The clear trend is that, over the last half-century, students have been making larger and larger investments, and much of those investments have been funded by larger and larger debt. Yet the growth rate for salaries is much lower than the growth rate for tuition, and for the loans needed to pay that tuition.

If education is conceptualized as professional training, then it fails to demonstrate a reasonable ROI. If the cost of earning a degree in a profession — engineering, law, medicine, etc. — has increased much more and much faster than the salaries of those professions, then it makes little sense to burden one’s self with debt to pay for such tuition.

It is even more illogical to assume debt if one is studying, not to be trained for a profession, but rather for any of the other reasons mentioned above.

Not only is accruing debt to pay for college unwise, it is also unnecessary: the price of university education is artificially high. A restructuring of America’s colleges and universities can maintain, or even increase, the quality of such education while reducing its price. The modern American university is marvelously inefficient in regard to its use of money, as Carol Roth writes:

However, in certain arenas, debt is being pushed and utilized in a way that is decoupled with achieving ROI. The biggest arena in which this is happening is college debt. In the US, college attendees, whether they had graduated or not, owed $1.6 trillion in college debt principal, aggregately, as of mid-2022.

Why haven’t the universities been reformed to offer better educations at lower prices? Because one powerful entity has a vested interest in keep the universities in their present condition: the government.

By maintaining the status quo in regard to the financing of college education, the government simultaneously achieves several objectives: First, because the government, and not private-sector lenders, does the majority of the lending, it thereby obtains a degree of control over those who are in debt. Second, because the universities rely on students paying large sums of borrowed money as tuition, the government has influence on postsecondary education.

In many cases, the size of an individual’s debt, and the degree on which universities rely on students obtaining large sums of borrowed money, justify the use of the phrase “debt trap” — alumni are held in effective servitude if they are still paying students loans several decades after graduation; colleges and universities understand that if student loan programs were to be reduced in size and scope, then they would be forced to become efficient at delivering quality education.

If these lending practices were used for home mortgages or car loans, the lenders would be prosecuted under the RICO statutes. But in this case, the lender is the federal government, as Carol Roth explains:

To put it bluntly, college and university degrees have become the biggest legal financial scam in the country, and the US government has morphed into the largest predatory lender in support of it.

To continue tricking students into taking out college loans, a barrage of propaganda is necessary to convince the public that a college education is the only path to personal or professional success. A side-effect of such propaganda is the neglect into which the non-collegiate skilled trades in the United States have fallen.

While the colleges indoctrinate America’s youth to believe that they must attend higher education at all costs, and especially at the higher costs which comfort the university’s administrators, the colleges themselves are being indoctrinated by the government to be or to do in such ways as will incline the government to maintain a given college’s status as eligible for student loans.

Each college or university — including the private ones, which are therefore less and less “private” — must comply with government protocols in order for its students to qualify for student loans.

If a college doesn’t comply, then its students will not be permitted to take out student loans, and the college won’t get the money. The students will move on to another college, one which complies with government ideas.

Neither the government nor the university has any motive to encourage students to reflect on whether the cost of the education is reasonable. Who will warn students away from taking on debts which will burden them for decades to come?

Carol Roth explains:

The profiteering college education structure is having a major impact on economic freedom and wealth creation for young individuals, as it does not enable a good financial return, or any return on investment in some cases, for too many of those buying education. Individuals aren’t contextualizing their choices about what they want to do and what they may need to do to fulfill their future objectives.

It is quite possible to restructure America’s colleges and universities so that students get educations which are as good, or better, than they are currently getting, but at a lower price — a price which would make massive college debt unnecessary. What is required is someone with the political will to encourage such restructuring.

School Effectiveness: Time and How It’s Used

One factor in the success of any endeavor or institution is the utilization of time. This is true of schools. Teachers have time; students have time. How does the institution empower, or prevent, teachers and students from using time well?

A teacher’s time can be divided, roughly, into three categories. First, the work done to prepare for the time spent with students; second, the time spent with students; third, the work done as a result of time spent with students.

In the first category are tasks like lesson design, resource creation, curation of existing resources, assessment design, etc.

In the second category, the teacher facilitates learning activities as the students do them, presents content, moderates student presentations, etc.

In the third category, the teacher evaluates student work, analyzing that work to determine which content the students have mastered and which content the students should further practice, etc.

Schools become inefficient and ineffective when teachers are required to spend time on anything which is not one of these three categories. The main culprit in this regard is meetings. Teachers held as captive audiences in faculty meetings are being deprived of the opportunity to do work which would help students.

Other non-productive uses of teacher time include the generation of various reports for administrators and participation in evaluation processes which are so badly designed that the resulting evaluations are meaningless.

Sadly, time spent on administrative busy work, faculty meetings, and poorly-conceived evaluation processes is not only non-productive, but rather counter-productive.

The result is not only lost chances for improved education, but actual degradation of the quality of education.

This is true, too, of many “professional development” — or “inservice training” or “continuing education” — events for teachers. These events are often as ineptly conceptualized as other administrative activities.

To improve the quality of education, schools must examine how teachers are required to spend their finite and valuable time. Any use of time which isn’t preparing for contact with students, which isn’t actual contact time with students, or which isn’t used after the contact time with students to process what happened during that time — any such use of time is actively harming the quality of education by forcing teachers to waste a limited and precious resource.

The Educational System’s Romance with Numbers: Why All the Statistics and Percentages?

In the decades-long and endless debate about grading and assessing, the conversation inevitably cycles around to the observation that evaluation systems are increasingly numerical. Current teachers, students, and parents are surprised to learn that only a few decades ago, a teacher’s gradebook might have far fewer numbers in it.

A century or two ago, a teacher’s gradebook might even have no numbers whatsoever: merely rows of letter grades.

Conversely, teachers and parents from a few decades ago would be surprised to see the massive spreadsheets which are contemporary grading programs, with grades calculated to two decimal places and weighted averaging of different categories.

How did this obsession with numbers arise?

There are multiple reasons.

One reason is a desire to be, or to at least seem, more scientific and objective. But here the appearance is stronger than the reality: while endless spreadsheets might give the perception of neutral analysis, critics have noted for decades that a great deal of subjectivity can lurk behind the outwardly sterile numbers.

A second reason is that teachers in recent decades have increasingly been placed in the position of having to defend grades. While this has always been the case to some extent, it is perhaps now more so than in the past. Spreadsheets and averages provide supporting evidence for the teacher who’s been asked to defend a grade.

An entire industry of gradebook software now exists to package the basic software engine of a spreadsheet into a larger framework of education-related terminology. A large number of online or downloadable grading programs are, at their cores, simply variations on a spreadsheet.

A great deal of time and effort is spent to create complex and sometimes confusing systems of grades, largely to generate a defensible grade in case a parent militantly objects.

Perhaps a more efficient use of the system’s work and energy would be to give a modicum of unassailability to issued grades. If grades — even if they contain the inevitable bit of subjectivity — were understood to be the educated judgment of an experienced subject matter specialist, then parents and students might not feel so free to question them.

The concepts of measurement and evaluation are used throughout civilization. Customers in a grocery store do not routinely question whether the twelve-ounce package of cheese is actually twelve ounces. Homeowners being billed for using 850 kilowatt-hours in a month don’t habitually voice doubts about the accuracy of the electric company’s measurements.

Why, then, do people feel free to question the grades which a teacher issues, causing teachers to waste countless man-hours in the generation of spreadsheets in grading software, so that such numbers are ready in reserve to defend grades?

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?

The Educational System as the Instiller of Values: Instilling Despair into Students, Denying Parents Access to the Process

Vague impressions are sometimes more powerful than clearly delineated concepts. In primary and secondary education today, the general public has the impression that it’s not supposed to ask about how schools teach about sensitive social topics.

Communities have the feeling that it’s not their place to inquire about classroom discussions of controversial cultural questions, and they have the feeling that they don’t have the right or the ability to redirect public schools in this matter.

There is legitimate legislation, composed by various elected bodies, about privacy and confidentiality; there are rules and regulations by unelected agencies of dubious authority which address the same topics. The public is vaguely aware of laws like FERPA and IDEA which control access to information about a student’s educational records.

The public’s fuzzy perception fails to note that, e.g, FERPA applies to only postsecondary students, and IDEA applies to only a small percentage of K12 students. Many parents labor under the idea that it’s not their place to inspect, investigate, and sometimes adjust what public schools do. As authors Jane Robbins and Karin Effrem write,

Regardless of one’s opinions on a given issue, it is parents’ right and authority to discuss these issues with their children, not the government’s to set standardized norms about thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and beliefs. When government begins manipulating mindsets of still developing and impressionable children, the dangers are legion.

As the old proverb phrases it, schools are supposed to teach students how to think, not what to think.

Public educational systems, despite their clear denial of the fact, have ideologies which they attempt to instill into their students. On most major social and political questions, and especially on the most controversial ones, most public schools have a hidden but clearly-defined agenda.

Students, being often more perceptive about this matter than their parents, will often be able to tell you the social and political views of their school, despite the school’s claims of neutrality and objectivity. While individual teachers may have, and might sometimes reveal, their own individual ideologies, to varying extents, the institution as a whole will have an ideology as well.

Parents should be aware that their local public school isn’t a neutral playing field of ideas, but rather has assigned itself the task of promoting some ideas, while silencing other ideas. The same is often true of private schools, but they are often more transparent about the fact, being under less pressure to maintain the charade of neutrality and objectivity.

The indoctrination process is spread across the curriculum, infused into various classes and subjects. Indoctrination is also present in non-curricular activities, e.g., in middle school and high school counseling departments, as authors Mary Rice Hasson and Theresa Farnan note:

The growing emphasis on “social-emotional learning” provides cover for the government to probe intrusively into our children’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

Race relations being a topic of inflammatory passion, indoctrinators seize upon this topic, hoping to harness the powerful emotions which it evokes. The accusation of racism is wielded by those who are themselves racists, using it to silence anyone who questions their motives or actions, as Hasson and Farnan report:

The accusation of “privilege” delegitimizes a person’s viewpoint, identity, or achievements. Anyone who is not part of a protected victim class may be told to “check your privilege” or to defer to the “lived experiences” of the protected class of the moment. The extremes to which this theory leads were evident in protests on college campuses around the country, where even “white allies” were directed to the back of the protest or shouted down.

In a complete reversal, those who are unequivocally racist hide their racism by level unmerited charges of racism against others. In such contexts, the surest sign that someone is a racist is that she or he will be accusing others of racism.

This tactic has been applied to other matters of identity. So it goes with religion, ethnicity, varying income levels, etc.

The strategy amounts to dividing populations, rather than uniting them, using these categories of identity. Once they have divided the individuals into identity groups, school administrators convince them that they are powerless to rise up and find opportunities. The only hope presented to the groups is that of following the prescribed ideologies presented by the K12 institutions. Hasson and Farnan phrase it this way:

Identity politics, then, is destructive not only because it divides us but also because it induces a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and despair — a poisonous drink for anyone but fatal to those who are, in fact, disadvantaged. They become convinced that no matter how hard they work they will never succeed.

In other words, the ideology of the school is presented as the only route to opportunity or equality for the groups that have been formed by isolating them from the general population by using identity as a knife with which to chop up society.

Individuals are programmed to believe that their only identity is that of race, religion, ethnicity, etc., and that there are no overarching unifying identities like, e.g., all being residents of the same community, etc. The system’s duplicity is intensified by the fact that the institution’s ideology will not help people obtain opportunity or equality, but rather is designed to reinforce the very inequalities is claims to work to eliminate.

Ideologues thrive on despair. A type of despair is instilled into the students, which discourages the students from following those paths which might lead to opportunity and equality:

If the system is rigged against them, what hope is there of succeeding?

The tactic of the bureaucracy is not to extend “privileges” to those who don’t currently have them, but rather to take “privileges” away from those who are alleged to have them. Setting aside the questions of what these privileges are, and whether they exist, the ideology makes no sense on its own terms: if an identity group doesn’t have privileges, or is made to believe that it doesn’t have privileges, then why not extend those privileges to the group? Why, instead, destroy another group’s alleged privileges?

Parents as Primary Influences: The Major Variable in Childhood Personality Formation

Parents remain, despite technology and despite excessive amounts of time spent in school or in cyberspace, the primary influence on children. Even in cases in which it seems that parents have little influence, and other factors have greater influence, even in such cases, the parents are the primary influence by virtue of their absence — whether voluntary or not — whether parents abdicate their roles, or have their roles taken from them. The absence of a parent is a powerful thing.

Whether the hand-wringing is about bad behavior or bad grades, author Susan Demas argues that if parents are the primary influence, then they are the primary cause of many problems, but also the primary solution to the problems. Concerning low academic achievement, she writes:

As a mom, I say blame the parents. That’s bad politics, as they won’t like you very much and won’t vote for you.

When seeking solutions for underperformance, “it comes down to the” simple “principle of personal responsibility.” Parents can teach responsibility by modeling it themselves, by explaining it to their children, and by expecting it from their children.

As exhausting as parenthood is, it doesn’t mean that you get to cede responsibility to teachers and administrators when your kids are school-aged.

Parents needn’t be experts at school curricula. Simply expecting, from a very young age, that their children get up and out of bed early in the morning, help to straighten up the house, do some cleaning or other chores, clear the table after a meal, etc., all work to develop a sense of responsibility in a child.

In most cases, low academic achievement are not caused by an inability to learn. Rather, low-performing students often lack work habits, organizational skills, self-management practices, and time-management routines.

Numerous studies link achievement to domestic variables during the first five to ten years of life: an orderly environment, regular predictable schedules, adults who model punctuality and hard work, etc.

Kids are only in school seven hours a day. What goes on for the remaining 17 hours is critical. And if children are playing video games and eating junk food nonstop, or living in far worse circumstances of abuse, starvation and neglect - you can bet that will have a big impact on how they’re doing in the classroom.

Core aspects of a child’s personality — aspects which she or he will carry throughout life — are set at very young ages, and are set primarily by parents, even if parents aren’t aware of the process. If a child doesn’t respond promptly to directions given by an adult, if a child hasn’t learned appropriate tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and communication patterns for a conversation with an authority figure, be that person a parent or a teacher, then the root of these failures will be found in the home, with the parents.

Parents can powerfully model habits like getting up every morning at the same time and leaving for work at the same time, and especially doing it when they don’t feel like it: perseverance and self-discipline.

Parents can model continuing in routine duties even after enduring one of life’s painful shocks: resiliency.

I just thoroughly pummeled parents because they’re purposefully left out of our educational debate. But to be clear, they’re not the only reason American students are lagging behind those in other countries.

To be sure, parents are not the only influence on children. Society, media, schools, etc., also affect children, for good or for ill. A school which fails to deliver solid content, media which overstimulate via sight and sound, and a society which models overly-emotional responses to cultural tensions do not help children.

Making the Most of Your Campus Visit

Traditionally, high school students might visit universities during the second half of their junior year, during the first half of their senior year, or during the summer in between. Visiting a campus can be a useful experience, helping students make a decision about where they will study.

Or it can be a waste of time.

To make a campus visit as productive as possible, a student should first answer a series of questions:

Are you comfortable being an outsider, when most of the people around you have different beliefs and opinions than you?
Are you comfortable being an insider, when most of the people around you have beliefs and opinions similar to yours?
Are you comfortable being anonymous, in a large crowd of thousands, when nobody knows you?
Are you comfortable being in a small group, when most of the people around you know you?
How important is it to you to have the best possible knowledge of the topics that you’re studying?
How important is it to you to have other people think highly of you?
How important is it to you to earn lots of money some day?
Why are you going to a college or university?

That last question is central. Students go to institutions of higher education for a variety of reasons: some go to prepare for a career; others are simply interested in being well-educated. Some go to have social experiences with friends; others go to find a future spouse and eventually get married. Some are interested in earning lots of money; others are looking for a future which is personally fulfilling.

After answering these questions, the second part of getting ready for a campus visit is to write some questions to ask. A student on a campus visit should be asking lots of questions.

In addition, a student can ask questions before and after a campus visit.

Students should look at the university’s or college’s website — or read the printed literature which inevitably arrives in the mail. Looking at those things will help students think of questions to ask.

If a student doesn’t answer some questions before a campus visit, and if a student doesn’t write some questions before a campus visit, then the trip might simply be a waste of time.

Every college or university can show lots of impressive buildings, offer a sample of excellent cafeteria food, and talk about its exciting athletic teams.

Every college or university will introduce several of its students, who will tell you about all the excellent experiences that they’re having on campus.

And because every college or university can do this, visiting a series of campuses will leave a student with the impression that they’re all the same.

Or, even worse, a student might choose one school over another because the people on that campus seemed fun, exciting, or interesting. But those people were a tiny skewed sample of a large student body, and give no real indication of what the average students on that campus really are.

The bottom line: a campus visit can be a productive and useful experience, but only if the visiting high school student has prepared for the visit.