*Charlotte Allen Goes To The Annual Meeting Of The AERA: *And finds
many reasons to despair
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/484gmzem.asp?pg=1>
about education schools. (Don't be put off by the article title.)
The American Educational Research Association could easily be dubbed the
American Educational Anti-Research Association, given the quality of
most of the "research" presented at this meeting.
During my four days at the AERA meeting, I vainly searched for a
single session whose panelists expressed some dissent from the
baseline principle of progressive education: that teachers shouldn't
directly impart information to their students but instead function
as "guides," gently coaching them to "construct" their own knowledge
about the subject at hand out of what they already know or don't know.
"Everyone here is a constructivist," Gabriel Reich, a genial
education professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me at
a reception sponsored by the John Dewey Society. (Dewey, a
pragmatist philosopher who died in 1952 and taught for years at
Columbia Teachers College, is regarded, alongside the Swiss
cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget, as one of the fathers of
progressive education.) Reich was trying to explain to me why it
was presumptuous for professional mathematicians (and many parents)
to be up in arms about the currently fashionable constructivist idea
that instead of explaining to youngsters, say, how to do long
division, teachers should let them count, subtract, make an educated
guess, or otherwise figure out their own ways to solve division
problems. College math professors may complain that young people
taught the constructivist way arrive in their classrooms unable to
perform the basic operations necessary to move on to calculus, but
so what? "Why should we privilege professional mathematicians?"
Reich asked. Long division, multiplication--"those are just
algorithms, and a calculator can do them faster than we can. Most
of the people here at this meeting don't think of themselves as good
at math, and they don't think math is creative. [The constructivist
approach] is a way to make math creative for many people who never
thought of it that way."
As I have said before about the "constructivist" approach: Really, I'm
not making this up.
Allen also found a few reasons for hope.
Still, all was not hopeless. For one thing, large numbers of
attendees simply ignored the research sessions and treated the
meeting like a tax-deductible California vacation. "I made my
presentation, so tomorrow we're going to get massages," I overheard
one of them saying into her cell-phone. The lounges of the Marriott
(and even the Hyatt) were chronically crowded with AERA-ites in
resort-wear relaxing and taking in the views of sailboats, palm
trees, and blooming birds-of-paradise during a Starbucks hour that
lasted most of the day, followed by a cocktail hour that started at
around four in the afternoon.
Furthermore, some of the presentations actually did involve research
that might be of practical use to teachers in the classroom
trenches, including several presentations dealing with new findings
by neuroscientists about the human brain--perhaps paving the way for
pedagogic principles based on scientific evidence of children's
learning processes rather than constructivist philosophy.
. . .
Most surprising was a paper presented by Cory Hansen, an education
professor at Arizona State, in a Teach for America session. Instead
of the expected putdowns of teachers not "properly prepared" (by
taking a full roster of ed-school courses before they took over a
classroom) or of neoliberalism-induced class conflict, Hansen
recounted the things that she and her fellow professors had learned
while teaching education courses at night in an evening master's
program for Teach for America teachers staffing elementary
classrooms in some of Phoenix's worst neighborhoods. Teach for
America teachers, already overworked and beset by myriad real-life
problems at their schools, had little use for abstract ideological
theorizing and demanded quick, practical training: real lesson plans
and classroom-management techniques that worked. In their course
evaluations they brutally criticized the program, which had been
adapted from the traditional education program at Arizona State:
"Some professors talk down to us." "I am sick of coloring for a
master's degree."
I suppose that I would rather have my tax dollars spent on California
vacations than the pernicious nonsense presented in most of those
sessions. And it is mildly encouraging to learn that a few of the
professors who attended this meeting are doing actual scholarly work.
And one last point: One of the stars at the meeting was unrepentant
terrorist (and Obama supporter) William Ayers.
(Allen makes one error; she describes the population of North Dakota as
nearly 100 percent of "Scandinavian origin". If she had said northern
European, she would have been right. Germans, most of them emigrating
from Czarist Russia, were the largest ethnic group to settle in North
Dakota.)
- 1:50 PM, 9 May 2009
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