Socialized Education
Education: Then and Now
In 1976, I attended Muir Elementary in San Jose. My mother's boss had enrolled his kids in the "Multiple Alternative Program" (MAP) and suggested she place my sister and I in the program as well.
The idea behind MAP was that kids know more about what they are interested in than the schools, so if they filled a big open classroom with books and learning toys, they would learn faster. Progress was a subjective measure of learning as opposed to a measure against fixed standards.
Grades weren't based on whether you could do grade-level math. They were based on whether you improved — a subjective call by two hippie teachers named Sam and Angela.
As soon as I was introduced to the program, I knew I was in trouble. The kids around me spent all their time playing, as if they weren't interested in learning anything.
I had always earned top grades in every school I'd attended before (except PE), and didn't want to lose my forward momentum. I buried myself in the library full of textbooks and other reading material. I pulled out the math workbooks and did all the problems, and the same for everything else I could find.
My old report card noted that I loved reading and math, but seemed disappointed that I wasn't socializing with the other students. As if that was more important than anything else.
What is school for? To have fun with the other kids? Or to educate those kids? If its for having fun with friends, I'd rather it was at a church picnic or joint family outings. Of course I wouldn't have said that back then. Thanks to the curriculum I was surrounded by, I was an atheist. I thought people who believed in God were stupid, because that's what the books made available to me said.
I later discovered that atheistic beliefs require ignorance of observed reality, the opposite of scientific inquiry.
Flash forward to the mid 2000's: I co-founded a successful school for game developers in the Netherlands. As the first chair of my department (Visual Arts) I insisted on doing things my way, and got my way. Our intruction was rigorous and meaningful to student goals. Most importantly, we graded using fully transparent standards. The standards were published, which allowed students to determine fairly accurately what their grade would be. If they were going to fail, they knew it advance.
Then, the hippie educators entered the picture. They thought it would be better if everyone passed, regardless of effort or actual skill. They had a financial argument for this also. "The school is a business. We get a bonus for every graduated student from the government. Why should we throw that money away?"
I had no interest in teaching in a modern variant of the MAP program I experienced as a kid. I hated to watch as the school, in part my creation and something I was proud of, had its high standards eroded to almost no standards.
Students would no longer be graded on tests or intermediate projects. They weren't required to attend lectures. Attendance couldn't be used as part of a grade. Multiple teachers were present in each class as "guides" (making it very difficult to maintain lesson coherence) and a panel of 3 teachers graded final assignments. Crucially, one of those teachers had to be from a different discipline. That teacher always ensured the student passed.
For example, I'm not a programmer, but I had to grade programmers. I had no idea what I was looking at when they showed me their work. It was impossible to fail them.
It seemed to me the school was no longer serving the students. They were serving the school. As soon as that flipped, it ceased to be an education, and became a diploma factory. Individual students would still do well, but the diploma became meaningless when given to everyone regardless of performance.
I quit.
Too many schools are like this. The problem doesn't stop at the lack of meaningful education. It includes the "socialization" element, which became a big part of my program also, in the form of group assignments. When the output is money for the school, lower skill standards for the students, and uniform social indoctrination, what has the institution become? Not a school.
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A gentleman that I met working in election precincts is a psychologist that fell into supervising college dorms. He had a series of rules that he would not compromise on, and that apparently the enforcement of them achieved desirable results. He was in demand due to this success and even wrote a book on the subject.
When hired to work a particularly difficult assignment, specifically due to his past success, he was under constant pressure to loosen the very standards that brought his success and made him a desirable administrator in the first place.
We do no one any favors when we fail to set reasonable standards and expectations for them.
In separate masters graduate school settings, I had two separate major group projects lasting several months, and both with 4 or 5 group members. Invariably, 2 or 3 members were weak or even no show (or always late for the collaborative sessions). All this resulted in one or two members having to do the "group" project for the weaker members. The group idea was always stated to be that when you get into the "real world" you will have to work in collaborative groups. Sounds similar to this column. I hated group projects because you always operate at the so-called lowest common denominator. No matter how poor or unmotivated the student, everybody gets a trophy in the end!