Perelman: c. 7. Science Lessons: Beyond the "Effective School" Myths

7. Science Lessons: Beyond the “Effective School” Myths

Going to school is clearly one of the most broadly shared of American social experiences. It powerfully frames the public’s idea of what learning environments should look like ── whether in a seventh-grade classroom, a college lecture hall, an adult literacy course, or a corporate training seminar. As a result, the design and practices of our childhood schoolrooms tend to be reproduced in most education and training settings, even those that aspire to be nontraditional or “radically” innovative. Despite decades of experience with models, demonstrations, and experimental programs, the “New American School” persistently gravitates back to our familiar models of school, classroom, and teaching.
In reality, these widely shared stereotypes of effective schools routinely and profoundly violate what scientists have come to know about how people learn most effectively, and the conditions under which people apply their knowledge best in new situations. A powerful knowledge base called “cognitive science” provides the evidence. “Cognitive” refers to perceiving and knowing, and cognitive scientists work to understand how we think, remember, understand, and learn. Their research is very diverse. They observe children learning mathematics or experienced workers handling on-the-job knowledge and judgment demands. They program computers to do complex problem solving or to simulate intelligent behavior. They analyze the very nature of meaning.
In recent years, cognitive research findings have challenged much of the conventional wisdom about how teaching and learning work. Distilled, this research contradicts a number of popular myths that, at great cost, continue to shape the bulk of education and training efforts not only in America but around the world.
Myth 1: People learn best in school.
In reality, the vast majority and most productive share of human learning takes place in real-world settings outside of schools. Moreover the traditional design and practices of even “excellent” schools are either divorced from or contradictory to the natural learning abilities most people are born with

Both children and adults acquire knowledge from active participation in holistic, complex, meaningful environments organized around long-term goals. Fractionated instruction maximizes forgetting, inattention, and passivity. Today’s school programs could hardly have been better designed to prevent a child’s natural learning system from operating.

- Sylvia Farnham-Diggory*

* Schooling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1990)

Cognitive research shows that learning in context is essential to acquiring knowledge and skills that are truly useful to working and living. Context turns out to be critical for understanding and, thus, for learning. The importance of context lies in the meaning that it gives to learning through the workings of the human’s natural learning system. Human beings ── even the small child ── are quintessentially sense-making, problem-solving animals. As a species, we wonder, we are curious, we want to understand.[*]
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The human brain is designed and developed to learn through experience. And experience has no meaning except in relation to some context. For instance, we are taught in driving school that a red light means “stop.” After years of driving experience, stopping when you see a red light becomes a reflexive habit. But we go about our business every day surrounded by all kinds of red lights ── in a store window, on a Christmas tree, in a TV picture, on a toaster, and so forth ── without suddenly stopping dead in our tracks. We’ve learned to stop at a red light only in the proper context: driving a car down the street facing a special kind of red light in a device like a traffic light or taillight that is designed to be a signal.
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The inventions of spoken language to represent experience and then of abstract, written symbols to represent words and numbers enabled humans to learn from experiences that were remote in space or time. The impact of these innovations on human society of course was explosive. But learning through the transmission of abstract, printed symbols works in direct proportion to the degree that the symbolic representations hook up to real human experience. The more disconnected symbolic communication becomes from the context of authentic, personal human experience ── your own experience, not someone else’s long ago and far away that you’ve never seen or felt ── then the more meager learning becomes until it degrades to no more than mere memorization or, at worst, total confusion.
Yet education generally just wants us to be “right.” Typically, academia evaluates the success of school learning by counting the number of correct responses on tests. The public has been misled to believe that answering a predetermined number of questions correctly is the scientific way to measure learning achievement. In fact, an entire industry is now in the business of making these tests more sophisticated and “elegant.”
Unfortunately, as long as learning continues to be mismeasured by tests that mandate “right” and “wrong” facts for answers, educators are prompted ── almost forced ── to break complex tasks and ideas out of the productive context in which those elements are applied. The seamless fabric of knowledge instead is shredded into school subjects that can be “taught” and “learned” separately. But cognitive science knows that people who are forced to learn disconnected subroutines, items, and subskills wind up losing comprehension of the bigger picture, the natural context that gives their actions meaning. [Farnham-Diggory, 1990]
Real-life experiences, and therefore knowledge, do not come chopped up in discrete subjects but are invariably “interdisciplinary.” Disciplines such as chemistry, economics, calculus, finance, Spanish literature, fine arts, and American history are arbitrary domains defined for the convenience of researchers, academic administrators, or would-be specialists. Dennis Meadows, head of the Institute for Policy Studies at the University of New Hampshire, has pointed out that we would think it bizarre for a geographer to specialize in knowing everything about the surface of the earth between eight hundred and nine hundred feet above sea level and nothing else ── but that’s pretty much the way the academy attempts to organize and transmit knowledge.
This is not to deny that learners must perform simple “subtask” operations from time to time in school and in life. Indeed, studies of apprentices show that novices start with simple tasks. Nonetheless, they perform these simple tasks in context. By observing how the master executes different but related subskills to achieve the end process or product, apprentices develop a conceptual map of the target task, an advanced “organizer” that helps when they first attempt to execute the complex skill themselves.[*]
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Context-connected learning should not be confused with simple notions of practical or applied instruction as in the idea of “vocational” education. A relevant context for learning comes out of specific, real-life situations of the learner; vocational curricula often fall short by attempting to transmit skills for use in specific situations which may or may not be relevant to the learner’s real-life experience.
There are examples of educational institutions that have adapted their practices to the necessity of learning in context. ***
These examples also suggest, however, the limitation of conventional schools and colleges to adopt authentic-context learning as their standard practice. Medical and other vocational schools have a specific, real-world context of professional practice to which they can justifiably connect the total learning experience they offer.
But general education institutions serving general populations face the daunting mission of connecting learning to virtually the total spectrum of human motives, experiences, and real-life contexts. That only can be done by customizing instructional services to the needs and goals of each individual learner. HL technology now can provide that degree of fine-tuning, and can bring the sight, sound, and even physical experience of real-world contexts to the learner. The traditional academic technology of classroom, textbook, and teacher cannot.
Myth 6: Education is different from training
The scientists who study learning increasingly recognize that apprenticeship is a powerful way of organizing learning-in-context for any purpose. In contrast to the traditional view of academic learning as different from or even superior to vocational learning, scientists now speak of “cognitive apprenticeship” as the key to acquiring the higher order thinking skills that, in turn, are increasingly needed for working and living in the knowledge age.
So any kind of learning that aims to be relevant to the real world can benefit from the following characteristics that Jean Lave, Brigitte Jordan, and other researchers have observed in traditional apprenticeships.
Apprentice learning focuses on doing rather than just talking. Apprenticeship is concerned with the ability to do rather than the ability to talk about doing something. The apprenticing process arranges opportunities for practice, whereas school curricula ── where the focus is typically on verbal and abstract information ── tend to be a specification of practice. Apprenticeship learning comes through the practice of skills. The master is less likely to talk than to guide by modeling, assigning tasks, overseeing, and critiquing. Indeed, it may be quite difficult to get craft masters and apprentices to articulate what it is they know how to do. The division between academics and apprentices goes back to the classical age of ancient Greece, when the “liberal arts” curriculum was originally designed as vocational education for politics. The first and foremost goal of such instruction was apprenticeship in the skills of rhetoric, in preparation for the craft of political argumentation. So in early academia the ability to do and the ability to talk about were the same thing. But with the vast expansion of academic institutions since the early nineteenth century, rhetoric as an end became mistaken for a means of teaching. As a result, the rhetorical methods of academic vocationalism have been increasingly misapplied to a wide range of nonpolitical crafts and skills which, to be learned effectively, need doing and talking about to be separated.
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Teachers and teaching are largely invisible. In apprenticeship learning ── as well as informal on-the-job training in modern workplaces ── it may look as if very little teaching is occurring. Whatever instruction the apprentice receives originates not from a “teacher” who is doing teaching but from another worker doing his or her work, which the apprentice observes.[*]
In apprenticeship learning, the apprentice is being inducted into a community of expert practice. The community is not limited to the local “studio” but extends across space and time, joined by a variety of professional associations and by the formal history and informal folklore of the craft. Apprenticeship learning illustrates the distinction between doing and waiting it out, between an active and a passive environment.
Moreover, contrary to what may appear at first glance as an orthodox ritual, apprenticeship learning is neither static nor simply concerned with the one-way transmission of tried-and-true practices from masters to novices. In effective apprenticing there is a healthy, dynamic friction between preservation and renovation of expertise. “Change is a fundamental property of communities-of-practice and their activities,” researchers Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger observe. And they note that “inexperience is an asset to be exploited,” not just a vacuum to be filled. Precocious and irreverent apprentices challenge and inspire masters as well as follow them. Members of a community of practice all learn from each other.[*]
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Myth 10: Schooling is good for socialization.
While many of the audiences and friends with whom I’ve discussed these myths of schooling over the last several years are willing to recognize the many paradoxes if not hypocrisies of what passes for academic teaching, they often still cling tenaciously to the faith that school as an institution is needed for what they’ve been told is “socialization.” People generally are far more willing to discuss reforming schools than to seriously ponder the reality that school is an obsolete institution whose time has come and gone, and that is ready for extinction and replacement.

One of the greatest errors in education is to assume that the larger social context of the school is irrelevant or even secondary to learning.... The social structure of the school is not simply the context of learning; it is part of what is learned. What a student learns in the classroom is indeed a very small other part.... What the Burnouts learn in school is how to be marginalized.... High school, therefore, is not simply a bad experience for these students──it teaches them lessons that threaten to limit them for the rest of their lives.

- Penelope Eckert
Jocks & Burnouts (New York: Teachers College Press, 1989)

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For instance, whatever it has done for test scores, academic education following the European “liberal arts” tradition also has served to reinforce feudal class structures and ethnic/national division in Europe and the Orient. In America, the same academic conceit has bred what the late Herman Kahn labeled a “New Class” of credentialed experts infected with “educated incapacity.” The cultural bias of “liberal” academia against manual labor, commerce, and even capitalism has contributed to Europe’s festering unemployment and to America’s flagging industrial competitiveness.
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One of the major hazards is social polarization. Penelope Eckert, a sociologist at the Institute for Research on Learning, has found in her studies that a major social impact produced by the normal schooling context, culminating in high school, is to divide youth into lifelong cultures of winners and losers. “While curricular tracking has come and gone in the American public schools, adolescent social categories remain as an enduring and uncontrolled social tracking system,” Eckert observes. “It is largely as a result of the polarization between the Jocks and the Burnouts that people are thrown into a choice between two set patterns of behavior on the basis of a variety of unrelated interests and needs....”[*]
Moreover, this pernicious form of socialization is the result not of school quality or administration or location but of the inherent structure of the institution itself. In particular, Eckert finds that “the segregation of adolescents in an age-graded institution, isolated from the surrounding community, focuses their attention on the population, the activities and the roles that are available within the school,” instead of those of what we commonly call the real world.
Eckert saw that the effect was particularly destructive to the losers or “Burnouts,” who both value and need communal ties to a social network for their human and economic development. Schools not only ignore but actively oppose the Burnouts’ ties to poor, lower class, or minority communities that academia treats as inferior to the culture of school itself.
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The polarization inherent in schooling increasingly is harmful to the Jocks as well as the Burnouts. Even most of the winners will wind up feeling like losers when they fail to be anointed or treated like the “best and brightest” of their class.
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Polarization is just one of numerous subversive messages buried in the medium of school culture. Some of them are recalled by an incident from my experience as a young physics teacher in the same high school I had graduated from five years earlier.
[note: I have put the anecdote below in a box (it's just part of the text in the original) so you can skip over it if you want to go directly to the point he's making with this example; but I did think I needed to give you his example if you do want to see it.]

One of my unorthodox practices was to have my students present each of their homework problems on the blackboard in front of the class. My motive was partly laziness ── correcting homework is no fun. But my whole approach to teaching (based on zero time in ed school but twenty years as a student) was to give my students maximum responsibility for teaching themselves, and minimum dependence on me for anything but encouragement, pacing, and refereeing. The whole point of this and everything else I did was to overcome that lethal fear of failure that now as then has young Americans dropping out of math and science in droves. Doing homework on the board was practice in teamwork, helping each other, being active learners, and most important recognizing that mistakes are not failures but just stepping stones toward the truth.

Anyway, one of my students was a black girl ── a precious resource not often found in physics classes then or now ── who had a particularly hard time with this exercise. Whenever it was her turn to do a homework problem for the class, her immediate reaction was to protest, “I can’t Mr. Perelman, I’m not good at math.” And I would have to goad her, step by step, to pick up her textbook, come to the front of the room, open the book, and, finally, start by reading the problem to the class. All the while her broken record is clicking, “I can’t, I’m not good at math.”

Okay, write the first step of the solution on the board. (By now you can guess her response.)

Now I’m playing cheerleader and coach: Don’t worry. Just write something. It doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong. There’s no grade on this. You can do it. Just write anything at all.

So she writes some math stuff on the board and, the class all agrees, it’s right. That’s fine, I say. Now let’s see the next step.

“Ican’tI’mnotgoodatmath” became a kind of mantra, like “Amen” in church except a denial instead of an affirmation of faith. And so it would go, step by step, each punctuated by her inverted prayer for failure, always unanswered because she always got everything exactly right.

That, sadly, is not the end of the story. After a few months, she suddenly dropped the course. She was an excellent student, not just in the win-lose accounting of grades (I had an even more unorthodox policy on that) but absolutely: She was mastering physics, as nearly all of my students were ── I believed then as now that everyone is supposed to get an A, and if they didn’t that meant I wasn’t doing my job well enough.

I guess I didn’t do it well enough for her. I was shocked and perplexed. Twenty-plus years later, I’m still furious about what I learned from that experience. Why would someone run from success toward failure? It punctured a number of our ── my ── schooling myths, especially the ones about smart being better than dumb, winner better than loser.

With time, reflection, and insights from my students, I think I figured it out, at least partly. That girl learned, through the context of seventeen years of life and schooling, that blacks, females, and therefore especially black females are not, cannot, and must not be “good at math.” There were much higher stakes in her vulnerable adolescent heart than just another grade on a transcript. Unwittingly and with the best intentions, I had thrown her into what was virtually a life and death struggle.

Adolescence is more than anything a quest for identity: What am I going to be when I grow up? is really Who am I going to be when I grow up? This talented girl had been told all her life by teachers, friends, family, and maybe the whole country who and what she was, and whatever that might be, it had to include “not good at math.” And there I was, eager beaver young Harvard brain-jock, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt to her, her friends, her family, and the whole world that that was a lie.
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There’s nothing unique about her story. It’s happened millions of times before and since, and is still going on today. I’ve been through similar rituals with friends’ daughters in recent years who are still being brainwashed by schools and parents to not only doubt but suppress their talents.
T
hese experiences are echoes of a growing body of research showing that girls in all-female schools maintain high levels of self-esteem and accomplishment in all fields including math and science, while the confidence and performance of girls in coed schools take a steep and steady nosedive after about grade seven or eight. Detailed analyses of video records of classroom behavior show that teachers or professors, both male and female, persistently call on, praise, and encourage males several times more frequently than they do females. The teachers rarely realize they are being biased; they are reflexively acting out rituals deeply embedded in the culture of schooling.[*]
The medium of schooling delivers similarly subversive lessons to various minorities in America. Some minority cultures, some blacks and some Hispanics, seem more vulnerable to these assaults than others ── notably Asians, particularly from societies with Confucian traditions.
Just because some groups and individuals have endured and overcome these insults does not mean that the insults should be tolerated, and the victims blamed. It also does not mean that the victimization should be perpetuated by telling the victims of school-manufactured failure that they have accomplished what they have not, that they know what they do not, and that they have been released from the responsibility for learning ── which is foremost a responsibility to themselves.
In reality, the people who “flunk” academic tests or “drop out” of school do not stop learning ── they just learn other, generally undocumented and uncredited, but often sophisticated, things. Prisons provide exemplary models of spectacular learning where novice lawbreakers learn the art and culture of crime.
These are just a few facets of the dark side of the force that school passes off as socialization. “[B]y the time students reach high school,” Eckert observes, “the Jocks and the Burnouts are all too generally perceived as representing good and bad, cooperation and rebelliousness, success and failure, intelligence and stupidity.” For the losers, the lessons of socialization become articles of surrender ── Eckert finds that “[r]ather than asking themselves how they can succeed in spite of the school, Burnouts discard goals along with the means to achieve them.”[*]
The myth of the decline of schooling is that our students are failing to learn. The real outrage of schooling is that our students are learning to fail.
Still, many parents and others will ask, as a friend of mine did: How can HL technology replace the function of schools to teach children the basics of living values: work, ethics, morality, wisdom, character, strength, courage, civics, sacrifice, self-control, self-reliance, love, life, and so forth?
The answer is that the young will learn such virtues and behaviors the same they always have: from observing and adapting to the normal behaviors of their parents and the other adults who comprise the society they grow into. The question itself is rooted in the myth that schools are engines of culture. What social science knows is that schools are no more than expressions of culture. When communities of families are free to choose or control the schools that serve their children, the school staff are likely to demonstrate and encourage behaviors that are consistent with the community standards.[*] Schools reflecting cultural norms is a far cry from schools producing values and virtues.
The impotence of schools as culture factories is glaringly demonstrated by the experience of the defunct Soviet empire. A public education system backed by a cloak of censorship and the sinister threats of the secret police, gulags, and “psychiatric” institutions of a ruthlessly totalitarian regime worked for half to three-quarters of a century to manufacture a population imbued with a dogmatically definite set of socialist virtues, including atheism, internationalism, socialist realism, and disdain for material acquisitiveness. The effort failed utterly: Within days or even hours of the release from state repression, churches were filled, national banners were unfurled, “modern” artists burst from the woodwork, and the unvarnished greed of the Communist nomenklatura was exposed to public display.
What schooling cannot depose it cannot impose either. Cultures, values, ethics, and mores are created and renewed by communities of people, not by schools. Socialization is a function of societies, not of classrooms.
Beyond Mythology
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. . . Schooling and learning are at odds ── more of one means less of the other.