The Prime Directive

Ah, spring is in the air and a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of....Scratch that!  Actually, it's late August, school is about to start, and the newspapers are publishing their annual education articles.  Here is this year's WaPo entry, Whats wrong with U.S. schools: A multiple-choice exam with "no wrong answers",

The WaPo's is a clever article, mainly right, I think.  So, why am I unhappy with it?  Consider two questions raised by the article:

• What's wrong with teacher training, and 
• Why don't we know how children learn?

Good questions, and the WaPo raises a number of them.  But, these are the same questions that have been asked for nearly 100 years.  What the WaPo does not ask is why we do not already have some good answers for them.

Consider that schools of education have been around for more than 100 yrs.  Their faculties are doctors of education whose profession it is to research education.  How is it possible that after such a long time they do not have at least pretty good answers to basic questions?  BTW, here is a brilliant commentary on the subject, Reinventing the wheel of education, by Natalie Kramer  

But, why?  What's going on?  Are the Education Ayatollahs too busy to do the basic research (busy with what, exactly)?  Are they morons?  Or is something else going on?

After many, many years of its staring me hard in the face, it has become perfectly obvious what is going on in public education.  How could it be obvious if it took me so many years to recognize?  Here is a story about the English mathematician G.H. Hardy to explain.

Once upon a time, lecturing, Hardy was methodically working through a proof when, coming upon a key element he said, "Now, obviously..." and he paused and wondered aloud, "Is it obvious?"  He paced the blackboard.  He actually walked out of the lecture hall, lost in thought.  Quite some minutes later, he returned and exclaimed, "Yes!  It is obvious."

In the same way, I say it is obvious that the central organizing doctrine of American education, what I call "The Prime Directive", is:  Reduce The Gap!

You see, there is a chasm between academic high achievers and academic low achievers.  The provenance of this concern is, of course, marxist class warfare.  In the American context there is the additional frisson of race.  It is widely observed that high achievers are middle and upper class mainly White and Yellow, and low achievers are lower class mainly Black and Brown.
American educators are desperate to reduce this Gap in academic achievement.  Read the education literature, read their op-eds in the NY Times and the WaPo, listen to their public speeches and congressional testimonies, and you can see they think of nothing else.  Their every thought is bent upon solving this one problem.

The problem is that nobody knows how to reduce The Gap, and they cause much harm in the effort.  Consider, any time you teach something real, you must create a Gap.  Eg, suppose in a high school algebra class you teach the quadratic equation with the serious expectation that your students learn the idea and can apply it to solve problems.  Well, some students will learn it quickly and easily, some students will learn it more slowly and imperfectly, and some students will not learn it, at all, no matter what you do.  Voila!  A Gap.

Of course, the educators are not against teaching the quadratic equation, or any other idea of intellectual substance.  But, all efforts must conform to The Prime Directive.  So, if you cannot teach the quadratic equation without generating a Gap, eliminate the quadratic equation.  And so it ramifies to every idea in every academic subject.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, explains almost everything about modern, American public education.