Schools for Subjectivists
by C.A. BaylorAt the New England academy where I taught for several years, administrators decided that a senior English thesis requirement was exactly the kind of academic rigor their graduating students needed. The penalty for not completing the coursework, and achieving a passing grade, would be failure to graduate.
It seemed a simple and fair requirement, in keeping with the kind of standards one would expect at an elite secondary school. But nobody anticipated what would happen next.
A senior girl turned in a rough draft consisting almost entirely of quoted, paraphrased, and outright plagiarized material. Her teacher, who already had spent time discussing plagiarism in class at the beginning of the year, checked the passages cited in the paper and discovered what the girl had done. He highlighted several and discussed the matter with the girl in person, explaining why they were too similar or identical to her sources. He added that he did not have time to highlight all of the mistakes, but only to explain the type of error she was making; she should infer which other parts of her thesis reflected the same error. The teacher reassured her that since the paper was only a rough draft, the mistake would not be fatal for the thesis, but she needed to make serious revisions in the final draft.
At this point, you might think the student was getting away with intellectual murder: she was being given the opportunity to obtain a passing grade on an assignment that she already had cheated on. But in her final draft, she corrected only those passages specifically highlighted by the teacher. She kept the rest of the plagiarisms intact.
The teacher failed her for her twice-plagiarized paper, as required by the school’s policies toward plagiarism.
The student protested that the teacher was being too demanding and requested a meeting with the vice principal, her mother, and the teacher. After the teacher provided the evidence from the rough draft and the sources, the student began to cry. Her mother explained that the student “had worked hard” and “tried to do the right thing.”
Result? The vice principal insisted that the teacher pass the student, because she had “obviously tried to do the right thing.”
Here, a school administrator reversed the decision of a teacher who had worked hard to follow the institution’s own stated policies. The administrator succumbed instead to a student who knew how to manipulate emotions for her own benefit.
It was not the only example of emotional indulgence I was to encounter there.
In another case, one of the principals attended a workshop about “block schedules,” which allow students to attend classes that are fewer in number but longer in duration. At a subsequent faculty meeting, the principal could not persuade the faculty to adopt a block-schedule idea, and she began to cry. The faculty apparently thought this shameful appeal to their pity was a sufficient argument—or perhaps that good arguments become irrelevant when someone’s feelings are at stake. So rather than stick to their guns, they instead offered a compromise of one block-length class per cycle for each class.
What we see in these anecdotes is a corruption endemic in secondary education. Many readers of this article have adolescent children in high school. But few know the ugly reality of today’s secondary education: that neither “progressive” nor “traditional” high schools are teaching independence, responsibility, and critical thinking. What children will encounter instead is a world in which emotions are used as trump cards, written rules are disregarded, and standards are not applied consistently.
I found teaching a rewarding experience overall, in spite of the difficulties I encountered and will chronicle here. I liked the students and many of the students appreciated me, even as the administration and school philosophy got in my way.
For I also found that schools have a power to indoctrinate that goes well beyond imparting slanted information. Just as much as the curriculum itself, the way that teachers interact with students and allow students to interact with each other affects what students come to believe about independent thinking, hierarchy, equality, achievement, effort, and respect for others, to name a few.
Emotions as Gods
When I was hired, I knew I would be at odds with aspects of the academy’s politically correct philosophy. However, I also knew that I would have a lot of freedom to teach social studies the way I wanted to teach it, within the school’s parameters. Teachers were free to try interactive lectures, discussions, role-playing, or group work, and to assign readings reasonably accessible to students. I thus was able to present a more balanced picture of history and politics than they otherwise obtained. For example, I hung pictures of entrepreneurs and inventors on the wall, in addition to government figures.
But I was mistaken to think that “political correctness” stopped with preaching respect for minorities and women. It extended to not telling anybody anything that went against his intuitions and feelings. The students’ feelings about themselves and their work mattered a lot more than the objective facts about what they had learned and achieved, and whether they had made good decisions. The administration wanted teachers to “hold up a mirror to the child,” yet somehow to show him only the picture he wanted to see. If the teacher did not hold up the reflection the student wanted, it was the teacher’s fault. This, I learned, is what my interviewer meant by “holistic education” during my job interview.
In today’s liberal-arts schools, political correctness also means being able to veto unlikable speech from an authority. With administrators such as the ones I described above, it is no wonder the students feel free to prioritize comfort over truth. For example, while teaching the history of the Norman invasion of England, I pointed out the reasons why we use different words for animals we eat (pork, beef) and animals we herd (pigs, cows). One student said that was “gross.” I asked her what she thought she was eating, and she said that she knew she was eating animals, but she added—with all seriousness—that it was still rude to call attention to it. I took no position on whether eating animals was moral or not, only that one should admit what one is doing. The students should decide to eat meat, or conclude that it’s immoral and become vegetarians; but they were old enough that they should make such decisions honestly.
On another occasion, my principal castigated me for teaching a gory detail of Emperor Justinian’s reign in the Byzantine Empire. The textbook reported that people rioted against his strict policies, which included the suppression of rowdy chariot race celebrations. The book offered two primary sources from the historian Procopious. While this public record pointed to Justinian as a great leader, the private one pointed to him as a tyrant. I thought that going beyond the textbook was one of the reasons for having teachers, so I pointed out that he also punished gamblers by having their hands cut off and homosexuals by castration. (I learned this through A & E’s Biography, which markets itself for high school history teachers and students.)
Although admittedly grisly, such details reminded students how other civilizations were different from our own. I should mention that this was a Catholic school, so students were reminded daily of the world’s gory history in every room, where a first-century Roman execution device and a bleeding body hung from the walls. Any students who saw the film Alexander that year already knew that many ancient Greeks were homosexuals, and students in my class had previously asked when public attitudes toward homosexuality had changed. Yet the principal sided with someone in the class who took offense.
A liberal-arts education consists not only of integrating what one is inclined to learn, but learning to overcome one’s prejudices when they are inconsistent with evidence and logical reasoning. One of my high school teachers had persuaded me to relinquish my fear of snakes by arguing that all of the scary features of New England snakes (rapid movement, biting) were also problems with cuddly canines. Similarly, if someone is afraid of flying because of accidents, another person does him a service by pointing out that flying is safer than driving. Integrating new knowledge that challenges one’s preconceived notions is the hallmark of critical thinking.
But integration of knowledge is exactly what many of today’s schools don’t want or expect. Example: I was about to fail a student for copying a report from the Internet. The vice principal asked me if I had ever talked about plagiarism in class. I said that I had mentioned it only briefly, but that it was already discussed in English class, in the class rules (which students must read and sign), and in the disciplinary code that all students have. But the vice principal declared that since I hadn’t actually covered and verbally stressed in my own class that plagiarism is wrong, the student might not be at fault! (The implication was that I might be). How could I expect students to realize that the rules against plagiarism in English class apply equally to all other classes? How could I expect students to integrate such knowledge across different subjects?
An Emotionalist Pedagogy
For history teachers like me, pointing out flaws is an essential way to make sure students have integrated their knowledge of the material. We need to make sure that when students make one historical interpretation, it is consistent with others they make. This also forces the students to do the reading and digest it. I know of no way to help people learn by doing other than by giving them feedback on what they are doing. “It’s how we learn,” as Padme points out to Anakin in Attack of the Clones.
But apparently not when feedback makes someone feel bad. When I asked one Advanced Placement student why she did not participate in class more often, she said that I was too quick to point out flaws in her thinking. Granted, there are tactful and untactful ways to point out flaws; but her problem seemed to be that I pointed out flaws at all, which other teachers apparently did not do.
Given the behavior of the adults around them, it is no wonder that students believe this. My department chair advised us not to fail any students because smaller numbers of students would lead to faculty layoffs. I pointed out that we could always admit new students from the waiting list. If the wait-list students couldn’t handle the standards any better, they could be replaced, too. The chair said that this would be inconsistent with the mission of the school. In fact, for pointing this out, she claimed that I was belittling her abilities as a supervisor. Another example of the triumph of feelings over facts.
Students cannot reinterpret history without learning at least one received interpretation of history, plus a set of facts to question and on which to generalize. This is all part of learning how to think critically. But even as my department head emphasized critical thinking as our first priority (in a self-promoting mission statement for the department), she indulged students who felt that this requirement was too burdensome. For instance, to make sure that students were prepared to have informative discussions, I required them to take open-notebook quizzes on outlines, with advance notice. My supervisor criticized this because she believed that students were incapable of understanding the material “without first interfacing it in class.” She said that I should have them learn by discussing the material without teacher “orchestration” or provision of information. In other words, she wanted only uninformed bull sessions. Indeed, in her own class, students said things such as, “There was no draft in World War II, because soldiers thought it was a good cause,” and “Fifty percent of the Union Army was African-American”—all without being corrected publicly or privately, apparently on the theory that correcting them would be inhibiting.
Likewise, in most political class discussions that I witnessed or heard about, teachers and the best of the students rehashed op-ed-level opinions without ever discussing the background theories underlying them. Students came out of the class having recited only what they already knew or heard going in—unless they were lucky enough that other students had grasped new reading material and shared it. But there was no incentive to do that reading in the first place. Teachers mostly called student comments “interesting” and asked, “Why do you think that?” This sent students twin messages: not only is there no objective basis for evaluating ideas, but it would be beyond the pale of acceptable social interaction for a person to say that there is an objective basis. I confess that often I surrendered to these habits myself, knowing that it would be too much of a fight to persuade students about objective knowledge after a lifetime of being taught otherwise.
Class discussion has an important role, for sure. I viewed interactive lecture, or lecture followed by discussion, as the best of teaching methods. Discussion creates the opportunity for clarification. It helps the teacher to understand what students have comprehended and mastered, and what they are confused about. Teachers can sometimes spice a subject up with controversy by having students debate each other.
However, many teachers hold discussions with students who have not prepared for informed interaction. While a bull session might serve as a breather, students do not learn through a steady diet of unprepared banter. That is why a teacher should moderate and direct a discussion. Only someone who is an expert in the subject and not simply “a group discussion leader” can decide whether or not a conversation remains productive and on-topic. Indeed, educational anarchy does nothing to educate a child, thereby strengthening his true sense of selfhood. Rather, it only encourages his habits of emotional self-indulgence.
At War with Individuality
As Ayn Rand once observed, this is exactly what was prescribed by John Dewey’s then–“progressive” education: “Education is to be ‘relevant,’ relevant to the ‘real interests’ of the child—above all, to his interest in ‘self-expression.’ His ‘self,’ in this context, is his ‘instincts’ and his ‘spontaneous impulses’; their natural ‘expression’ is: action.” Within this view, the “self” is whatever unquestioned smorgasbord of feelings and cultural bromides that children have accumulated without thinking. Education, then, becomes a tool for undermining their reason by teaching them to accept this false “self” uncritically, unless it does not fit within a social consensus.
But what kind of a “self” can one have without thinking or knowledge of reality? By stressing discussion without background knowledge or the critical scrutiny of an expert, students get the message that knowledge is determined by mob consensus, not by critical inquiry. Students trained in ungraded discussions do not learn to survive by personally acquiring and integrating information, but by cooperating with and serving the group.
In fact, Dewey downplayed facts and information precisely because they encouraged selfishness and independent thinking. He wrote that “the mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, and there is no clear social gain in success thereat.”
Consonant with the “progressive” war on individuality, today’s teachers avoid calling attention to any students by treating all students as equals. My supervisor wrote on one evaluation that I should make all students feel equally welcome and valued, even a particularly disruptive one. (I had allowed the one in question to speak, and actually wound up giving her a good participation grade, but my sin was that I didn’t warmly embrace her or what she had to say.)
Many teachers even treat students as their own equals in understanding the subject matter, by being “guides on the side” rather than “sages on the stage.” A Manhattan Institute study from 2002 indicated that 57 percent of eighth-grade teachers leaned toward a more “student-directed” approach. Since the life experiences of the teacher and the students are so disparate, and their differences in knowledge of the subject should be disparate, treating student and teacher as equals is tantamount to telling the child that good scholarship is equal to bad scholarship—or, more often, to non-scholarship. And in a class of twenty or more students, as in most secondary schools, giving every student equal speaking time means that students have to listen to bad scholarship more often than good scholarship. This teaches students that the good and the bad, the productive and the unproductive, the motivated and the unmotivated, are all equally worthy in social settings. Some teachers manage large class sizes with politically correct subgroups, which are even less informed by an expert and where poor students have every incentive to free-ride on the better students.
For independent thinkers, there is always the danger of teaching authoritarianism with a “sage on the stage.” But there is an even greater danger in disregarding expertise of a subject. Ayn Rand wrote that students in bull sessions are
being taught, by implication, that there is no such thing as a firm, objective reality, which man’s mind must learn to perceive correctly; that reality is an indeterminate flux and can be anything the pack wants it to be; that truth or falsehood is determined by majority vote. And more: that knowledge is unnecessary and irrelevant, since the teacher’s views have no greater validity than the oratory of the dullest and most ignorant student—and, therefore, that reason, thinking, intelligence and education are of no importance or value.
While there is a danger that bad “subject-centered” teachers will reward students for repeating their versions of objective subject matter, there is a greater danger that mob-centered teachers will reward students for following neither experts nor objective knowledge, but simply adjusting to the pack. While I have never heard of a teacher penalizing a student simply for straying from his peers, I have heard of shy or inarticulate students who did not like the way a discussion transpired but dared not defy the teacher or fellow students. If the class were subject-centered, the focus would be on learning the skills of the discipline rather than on putting up with whatever his peers found “relevant.”
“Self-esteem” is a buzzword at every secondary school in the country, public and parochial, despite its opposition to Catholicism’s traditional virtue of humility. However, most teachers who use the term teach not authentic self-regard based on objective achievements, but the precise opposite: emotional self-indulgence. Teachers believe that to place a student’s ideas or work under scrutiny (let alone fail them) would damage his self-esteem. Students pick up on the underlying theory that self-esteem does not come from the acquisition of life skills, but can be bestowed upon them only from the approval of an authority figure or the group.
One student was determined to get my attention ahead of other students who had raised their hands first, by protesting vocally. I asked why I should give her consideration over others, and another student said, in all seriousness, “In other words, Margaret, you should have no self-esteem.” Today’s students conceive of self-esteem not as what one feels for becoming adept at flourishing in the world, but as an arbitrary belief that one is great and worthy of attention, even if at the expense of others.
Emotionalist Administration
I discovered that policies at my academy depended on who was making them or enforcing them. The administration wanted teachers who not only refrained from criticizing the school philosophy, but were not rigorous enough thinkers to be troubled by its inconsistencies, and were malleable to the administration’s arbitrary, shifting policies and priorities. When teachers failed to be accommodating, the administration was always able to fault them for poor “judgment calls.” Judgment calls are by definition decisions that cannot be made with an algorithm, and teachers have to make them every day. But a school that prioritizes judgment calls over objective standards has infinite latitude to make inconsistent decisions and set irrational policies.
For example, I was reprimanded for the “judgment call” of informing students about what Clarence Thomas said to Anita Hill. The principal admitted that had a different member of the faculty said the same thing, she would not have been reprimanded.
Teachers are also permitted to be arbitrary—when their “judgment calls” conform to administration policies, such as “grade inflation.” Some teachers at my school would override the average of scores on individual assignments and “intuit” the student’s average grade. Unfortunately, this kind of subjectivism does not seem to be isolated. In 2005, the educational organization ACT published a study showing high school grade inflation over twelve years without a comparable increase in ACT testing scores. The numbers of Ds and Fs had fallen significantly from earlier years (fewer than 5 percent of students received a GPA of 2.0 or less), and ACT estimated overall grade inflation at 12.5 percent. In 2003, the American Council on Education reported that only a third of high school students spent six or more hours on homework per week—the lowest since surveys first were taken by UCLA in 1987.
Only school administrators can create the institutional incentives to uphold objective standards. Without administrative support, the incentives favor a race to the bottom. A new teacher who upholds high standards will soon find that students are more likely to complain not only about the difficulty, but also about any other faults they find. It makes the teacher’s job more difficult to cope with disgruntled students and parents, without any compensation in pay for taking on this additional burden. If the teacher lowers standards, however, few children will complain that too many other students receive good grades, and few parents are going to create grief for the teacher. As time passes, new teachers find that they have every incentive to lower their standards.
Proponents of the free market recognize this as a form of the “tragedy of the commons”: everyone has an incentive to detract from the community good, and no one has an incentive to maintain it. Each consumer has an incentive to lower standards for his own child so that he or she can be admitted to a good college. How does a school respond to this situation? Most likely, it will lower standards. While parents may not be happy about a general lowering of standards, they are far less likely to complain about that than they are a particular imposition of high standards on their own sons and daughters.
This is not an issue limited to public education. Consider the grades at private colleges and universities, where there is school choice and consumer-driven production in the form of course evaluation. According to data publicized on the website gradeinflation.com, grade inflation is far worse in higher education, because professors know that high standards will be punished by dwindling enrollments and negative evaluations. For example, at Cornell University, where the grades assigned by professors were published as averages, students began to avoid more difficult professors. Harvard University’s Professor Harvey Mansfield writes on all student assignments the grade they deserve and the grade he will give them, adjusted for grade inflation. That’s because Mansfield realizes that without a more widespread effort to maintain standards, his grades would penalize his own students without fixing the problem.
Critical Solutions
Most of the problems listed above are associated with progressive education, and to rectify them some education reformers therefore advocate measures such as vouchers or more “traditional” education. Vouchers and moves toward privatization, it is argued, will add competitive marketplace incentives into education; traditional schools at least teach students that there are some standards independent of their feelings.
But, as we’ve seen, the abandonment of objectivity in education affects private as well as public schools. Private businesses cater to market demand, and today’s rampant educational subjectivism is demand-driven. The market produces good results in satisfying customers; but today’s competition in education is to satisfy too many customers who demand emotional self-gratification, not necessarily the best instruction.
Meanwhile, traditional education has inherent problems of its own. Traditional educators say that “duty” and “restraint” are what students need to be taught. But the answer to their lack of individual critical thinking and self-responsibility does not lie in teaching kids to blindly follow authoritarian commandments and social conventions. Children need to learn that emotions should not be indulged when they defy reason simply because they defy reason—and not because they defy age-old conventions and dogmas that are themselves often based on irrational emotions. Too often, traditional schools reinforce the juvenile tendency to see all structure and rigor as arbitrary. Rules that can be derived by reason, such as rules against plagiarism or objective requirements for a good grade, are treated on par with rules that were simply passed down from our ancestors. This causes students to believe that rules against nose rings and those against scholarly theft are all part of the same system.
The traditionalists are correct that the problems of contemporary education are rooted in values—but they unwittingly share the subjectivism of the “progressives” whom they despise. At root, the subjectivism of both progressive and traditional education lies in the belief that one cannot determine right or wrong from reason. Sharing this premise, liberals conclude that they should indulge student feelings, while conservatives counter that both emotional indulgence and reason should be supplanted by faith and tradition.
Therefore, those looking for quick, easy cures for our ailing educational system are doomed to disappointment. The illness does not stem from a lack of dedicated teachers or money, and it won’t be cured by prayer and uniforms in the classroom. The sickness of modern education stems from a much wider philosophical and cultural abandonment of objectivity.
We are suffering from an epidemic of subjectivism. And that subjectivist epidemic won’t be stopped until we inoculate a new generation with the antibiotic of reason.