Hiring an Expert Speaker to Present to Your Faculty? Do Your Homework: Examine the Public Record

During the 2021-2022 academic year, the Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) hired Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz to give a series of presentations to teachers. Thousands of dollars were paid to Dr. Sealey-Ruiz for a series of Zoom tele-presentations or webinars.

These events proved initially to be relatively unremarkable. This, however, changed abruptly.

One presentation was scheduled the day after a separate presentation had been scheduled, not primarily for the AAPS teaching faculty, but rather for the Ann Arbor community at large. Someone had envisioned that parents and other residents of the city would want to attend this online event. The event was quite poorly attended. Among the several causes leading to the minimal participation was a lack of publicity about the event. It is not clear whether this was due to poor planning or an internal communications glitch inside the AAPS. It was, in any case, probably an innocent mistake or miscalculation; it does not seem that anyone intended to deliberately torpedo the event.

It certainly would have been disappointing to the administration of the AAPS that so few people logged on to see and hear the presentation by Dr. Sealey-Ruiz. It certainly was also a disappointment to Sealey-Ruiz herself, although her rate of pay for the work was not affected by the attendance numbers.

What was, however, noteworthy was anger and invective which Dr. Sealey-Ruiz aimed at the teachers at the next day’s meeting. Fresh off the disappointment of the previous day’s low attendance, and apparently unaware that teachers had not been asked to attend the poorly-attended session, but rather merely informed about it, she accused teachers of a long list of failings. More precisely, the meeting had barely been mentioned to the teachers at all, buried in a multi-page administrative email, so that a few teachers were barely aware of its existence, and many other teachers not aware at all.

It seemed not to have occurred to Dr. Sealey-Ruiz, or not to matter to her, that this was simply to be explained as a communications glitch, and not as some grand statement of intent.

Instead, she continued with her embarrassing and shocking tirade, hurling reproaches in a painful tongue-lashing. It is not surprising that she would be angry or disappointed. It is surprising that she leveled a significant degree of animosity toward the faculty and that she failed to understand that it was probably innocent miscommunication which led to insufficient publicity and the subsequent low levels of attendance.

Yet the surprise might have been predicted. A survey of Dr. Sealey-Ruiz’s published works reveals hints about her temperament. She has a rather high opinion of herself. In one passage from her book Love from the Vortex, she writes:

I have come to the realization that no man on earth will ever be able to comprehend the depths of love I have to offer.

Her work is largely affective. She refers repeatedly to a concept which she calls “critical love.” Her writing makes it clear that her concept of education is driven by emotion.

In another passage from that book, she writes:

I am truly happy that you are happy. Yet, I am also sad about your happiness; for, if you were experiencing just a little unhappiness, then it could open up an opportunity for me to experience total bliss.

Given the two quotes above, and other similar texts which could be cited, the bitter outburst, captured on Zoom and witnessed live by almost 2,000 participants, might not have been a surprise.

The lesson: It might be good to screen or otherwise look into speakers before hiring them for a series of presentations.

The Omnibus Grade: A Systemic Weakness in Measuring and Evaluating Students

Educators who otherwise disagree on nearly every topic can unite around the position that the current system for measurement and evaluation, as it is found in most U.S. public school systems, is suboptimal. A semester’s worth of work in a high school class is allegedly captured in a single letter.

More detailed and nuanced grading systems are desirable, and will give more information about the student. Many such systems are possible: the readers, upon reflection, can envision their own.

Imagine that, at the end of the semester, a student were to receive four grades: a numerical or letter grade in each of three categories — mastery of content and curriculum, work habits and completion, and ranking relative to peers — the fourth grade would consist of a narrative or commentary on the student and the student’s work.

This system would much more powerfully describe the student’s experience and achievements during the semester. Again, this is simply one of many hypothetically possible systems which would be superior to current practice.

Yet the reader is ill-advised to invest much energy into the task of imagining a better grading system, or how the current system could be improved. Change is unlikely.

In order to implement any significantly preferable grading system, agreement or consent would be required from: parents, teachers, administrators, local school boards, state-level education bureaucrats, admissions officers at colleges and universities, local voters, labor union leaders, national-level education bureaucrats, and others.

The likelihood of finding a new grading system which is both significantly better and capable of obtaining approval from the above-listed stakeholders is near zero. America is stuck with a suboptimal grading system.

In the absence of a newer and better system, admissions officers at colleges and universities develop workarounds: increased reliance on standardized testing, face-to-face interviews, each institution’s own admissions test, etc.

The current high school grading system is bad, and not likely to get better.

Resilience in High School Students: Can They Obtain It?

Anyone who works with teenagers on a regular basis will report the divide between those who have resilience and those who don’t. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as:

Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.

The question poses itself: if some people aren’t resilient, can those people become resilient? Mary Pipher writes:

Resilience is not a fixed trait and we can master the skill of resilience in the same ways we learn to cook, drive, or do yoga. Growth isn’t inevitable.

Those who don’t develop resilience will “remain locked in their smallest selves cosseted by blankets of familiar but outdated ideas,” or,

Others wither emotionally over time and deal with life’s many body blows by becoming more isolated and self-involved.

In an educational setting, resilience is the ability to focus one’s self on one’s work, even if the last piece of work went badly, and even if this piece of work isn’t easy, or isn’t likely to be completed perfectly.

Resilience is the ability to override one’s emotions and direct one’s self to one’s duty — to get the job done — to “just do it,” in the words of the famous advertising slogan.

Public Conversation about Education: Not Reserved for the Specialists

If a society gives more than mere lip service to the concept of democracy, it must tolerate and even encourage open discussion about a variety of issues, including education. All the more so if members of the general public are themselves educated.

In a democratic society, there is a tension between the specialist and the general public. Technical expertise is valuable and valued, yet the resource people with these professional skills should not become exclusive or elitist. Educators possess insights corresponding to their work, but many citizens who work in other fields are capable of analyzing these insights.

Sadly, some educators individually, and the education establishment as a whole, exude an aura of elitism: author Mortimer Smith reports that “one such” leader

among the educators, referring to arguments carried on by “the nonprofessional part of society” about “the character of the skills and the methods of teaching them,” says loftily that “in reality this is not the business of society at large, any more than the kinds of prescriptions doctors give to patients should be a matter of public discussion.” (In other words, the message of the educator to the parent concerned about what should be taught and how it should be taught, is this: Mind your own business.) This unfortunately is not simply a case of individual, eccentric arrogance; the American Association of School Administrators makes precisely the same point in their claim that school board members are no more competent to pass on curriculum matters “than the patient’s family can pass on the scientific details of the doctor’s treatment.”

Such behavior merely fuels suspicions among the public that the ordinary citizens are being managed or handled, and are not part of a truly democratic dialogue about education.

Smith introduces a comparison between education and medicine. Just as a healthcare practitioner explains a diagnosis and various treatment options to a patient, so an educator should explain various alternatives to students and parents. Just as patients should be given maximum information and empowered to make as many choices as possible, so also schools should inform and defer to the decision-making of students, parents, and the community at large.

Pay No Attention to That Man behind the Curtain: The Educational Establishment’s Expectation That the Public Should Willingly and Unquestioningly Submit to Experiments in Social Engineering

In the divisive and divided American society of the early twenty-first century, one of the few clear and unifying phenomena is the inadequacy, on average, of public education. The only thing worse than a K-12 education in an American government school is a preK-12 education in that same system.

As with all generalizations, exceptions are significant: there are good public schools, and they are very rare.

A serious critic of the system will “not belittle practical usefulness as a criterion in devising a curriculum, but a school program which teaches little beyond how to fix a fuse, drive a car, set the dinner table, and enhance your personal appearance, isn’t useful enough if your aim is the development of maturity and intelligent citizenship,” as Mortimer Smith writes.

A more current version of Smith’s summary might omit the fuse, the car, and the dinner table, but include “social emotional learning” and “anxiety, depression, and panic attacks.” Indeed, emotional fragility seems to be simultaneously a goal, a virtue, and an essential part of the curriculum in contemporary government-run schools.

The passion for social engineering has even crept into private schools.

The standard response by the educational establishment, when its flaws are noted, is a non-reponse. It is rather an ad hominem attack on those who would point out the uncomfortable facts about the system. Those offering commentary on the flaws of modern public schooling are painted with the usual mix of adjectives: reactionary, narrow-minded, insensitive, and so on.

Those who analyze the American educational establishment and find it wanting aren’t simpletons who “believe our schools are hotbeds of communism,” and they are not “out of touch with the cultural realities of the times.” Those seeking something better than the current public education “don’t begrudge the amount of taxes spent on schools” and “do not believe parents can run schools.”

Attacks on public education are intellectually rigorous. Defenses of that system, when they aren’t simply deflections, amount to slogans rather than thoughts.

Behind the ever-declining amount of curriculum and content offered to students, “there is an influential group of educators, the so-called reconstructionists, who advocate the use of the schools for indoctrination in behalf of a new political, economic, and social order (their own, of course).” Mortimer Smith notes that “we often get short-changed by inadequately, or foolishly, prepared teachers, and that too often a disproportionately large amount of our investment in schools goes for non- or extra-educational purposes.”

It’s worth noting that Smith absolves the teachers. They are victims as much as the parents and students are. A new teacher, the product of four years spent in the so-called “schools of education” in the country’s universities, has been surrounded exclusively by the establishment’s groupthink, and has been isolated from meaningful commentary on the educational system — or has been taught to ignore and ridicule such commentary. It would be unjust to heap anger or blame on such teachers.

He goes on to indicate that

Citizens ought to resist current claims of professional untouchability and the implication that all educational matters are not on a mechanical plane, like buildings and bond issues.

The managers of the educational establishment preside over processes which are, they claim, “too esoteric for lay comprehension.”

The insiders who operate government-run educational systems see themselves in a role similar to the role of the rare literate person in a society filled with people who can’t read. They are the keepers of wisdom, knowledge, and insight, and the general population is supposed to revere and respect them.

The assumption of those who direct governmental education is that they have understanding which the rest of society does not, and cannot, have. The role of those outside the inner circle of educational specialists is politely to submit and never to question.

Some segments of the educational establishment justify their privilege by analogy to the natural sciences and to healthcare professionals, as Mortimer Smith notes:

Currently educators seem to have an urge for playing the role of the exact scientist which causes them to give diagnostic tests and organize educational clinics and workshop laboratories. The constant use of terms borrowed from the medical profession makes one suspect that the educator harbors a secret picture of himself clothed in white uniform, applying his stethoscope with unerring accuracy to the educational heart-beats of American youth.

Other segments of the establishment head in a different, almost opposite direction, and fancy themselves to arbiters of ethics. The moral and quasi-spiritual language includes references to “justice” and “counseling,” in the process of “healing” a student’s mental being — a process in which educators are “heroes” who demonstrate “courage” and “love.” Students are encouraged to explore “mindfulness” and “meditation.”

The words within quotation marks in the preceding paragraph are pulled from standard-issue publications for educators. Dozens of similarly devotional words are used.

Neither extreme — the educator as empirical scientist or the educator as ethical guru — offers much help to the process of learning content and curriculum. Neither moral socialization nor pseudo-scientific social engineering assist a student’s acquisition of skill — knowing how — or acquisition of information — knowing that.

Indeed, in parsing knowledge into “knowing how” and “knowing that,” it becomes even more apparent that the contemporary public school is generally good for neither.

The Educational Establishment Defends Itself with Passion and Ad Hominem Attacks, Rather than with Rational Argumentation: Defaming Those Who Criticize Public Education

Observers point out that contemporary public schooling in the United States is deficient because it ignores content and curriculum in favor of so-called ‘social emotional learning’ and ‘objectives in the affective domain.’ Such observers receive no direct response to their comments, but rather are labeled by the guardians of the educational establishment as extremists. The establishment implies that the public is morally obliged to accept the judgments of the establishment and to forgo the desire for an analysis of the critique.

The establishment thereby shames the public into blindly accepting the verdict that anyone who criticizes the governmental educational system is a crackpot.

To be sure, there are quite a few intelligent people of goodwill who work as teachers and administrators in the system. But the system itself is bent. Some knowingly foster this warped establishment. Others innocently but unwittingly empower it.

Yet it remains clear that knowledge — both the sense of “knowing that” and in the sense of “knowing how” — both information and skills — is increasingly rare in ordinary public schools.

Instead of defending itself, the bureaucracy attacks anyone who questions contemporary public schooling as those who “believe the little red schoolhouse represents the peak of educational achievement,” in the words of Mortimer Smith, who catalogs the labels thrown at those who voice skepticism about the educational establishment.

He notes that, in order to promote the current system, the previous versions of American education must be attacked. Today’s social engineers can defend the indefensible only by offering a distorted, or entirely fabricated, narrative about the past. If the current product is bad, then they simply baselessly allege that the previous product was worse.

Slandering the school of the past, activist educational bureaucrats describe “a prison presided over by steely-eyed matrons equipped with birch rods.” This is, according to Smith, “the picture educators present of American schools before the current enlightenment.”

The critics of twenty-first century public schools do not “feel that they way” they were “taught in the fourth grade involved pedagogical technique in its perfection.” There is no naive nostalgia for older forms of education, but rather a forward looking realism about the consequences of current education.

Those pointing out the flaws in today’s schools “do not habitually sneer at the mention of progressive education,” even if they “feel that its philosophical foundations are built on quicksand.” Those who desire the introduction of more rigor, and less social analysis, into public education do not deny that progressive education “has made undoubted contributions in method to all education.” The knee-jerk reactions are on the side of those defending contemporary educational trends, not on the side of those questioning them.

Mortimer Smith notes that merely because one identifies the flaws in today’s schools does not mean that one wishes “to revive the classical trivium for American high schools,” but rather is quite willing “to admit that physics and four years of Latin may not be the ideal curriculum for” all young people.

The pattern of events reveals that those who promote certain contemporary trends within established public educational institutions, when questioned or criticized, respond only by creating irrational caricatures of those who express any skepticism about the institutions. Meaningful defenses and rational argumentation are not forthcoming from the establishment.

In sum, the system responds to criticism by bullying those who criticize and sneering at their criticisms.

Passionate Ad Hominem Attacks, but No Rational Argumentation: Educational Institutions Exude Hate Rather than Counterarguments

When he began “to examine the philosophical foundations on which the structure of contemporary American public school education has been” constructed and to make “some passing references to a few of the practical consequences which have naturally flowed from widespread, if not always conscious, acceptance of the pragmatic-instrumentalist-experimentalist position,” author Mortimer Smith touched upon several significant points.

First, that the deficiencies of twentieth and twenty-first century public schooling are organic, growing systematically from premises instilled by colleges and universities, and especially by the schools of education located within them.

Second, that the damage done and being done is sometimes done deliberately and consciously, and sometimes done unawares.

Whatever Smith might have meant by “pragmatic-instrumentalist-experimentalist” principles of education, it is clear that they fail to recognize the centrality of content and curriculum, and they privilege non-cognitive activities, such as “social-emotional learning” and the “affective domain.” The reader will note the quotation marks in the preceding sentence: ever-changing and ever more convoluted jargon is one of the primary products of educational administration.

In specific instances, such jargon is ambiguous, when it serves, not the needs of students, but rather the purposes of administrators and social engineers.

Well-intentioned university students, who become teachers and educational administrators, are the victims of institutions which feed them only carefully selected ideological presentations. Thus many employees of public schools are the unwitting instruments of subversive intentions:

Learning, in the traditional sense of disciplined knowledge, is rapidly declining in our public schools, not through fortuitous circumstances but by deliberate, and almost invariably well-intentioned, design of those responsible for setting the direction of public education.

The educational complex is good at defending itself. Part of this defense is an ad hominem deflection of attention to those who would point out the deficiencies and malignancies of governmental educational institutions. A series of straw men is put forth, designed to cause the public to dismiss any criticisms as the products of unfit minds:

Mortimer Smith continues:

The hierarchy which has set up the controlling doctrines of public education in this country has a tendency, as its monopoly is threatened, to lump all critics of schools together indiscriminately as reactionaries, penny-pinchers, members of pressure groups, possibly fascists, certainly cranks.

To point out that the average public school in the United States wastes money and time, and that it by design directs students away from content and curriculum, is an intellectual exercise which can be judged on the basis of evidence. Instead, the educational establishment choses to attack the characters of those making the analyses, rather than to examine the analyses themselves.

Intense personal invective is directed at those who reveal how public education has failed both cultural life and the national economy. The intensity of these belittling aspersions results from the fact that those defending the current educational trends lack rational argumentation for their views.

School: Contribution or Competition?

Education takes place within the larger context of society. It is therefore subject to larger societal trends. One ubiquitous societal dynamic is the interplay between contribution and competition. Each individual finds herself or himself sometimes in the situation of asking, “What can I contribute to my community?” and sometimes in the situation of asking, “How can I compete to outperform my peers?”

Any and every society will have both.

On an intuitive level, competition is perhaps associated with excellence, while contribution is associated with healthy communities. Just as both are necessary in any society, so both are essential in education.

In a classroom setting, the concept of contribution fuels productive classroom discussions, and enables students to collaborate on larger and more complex assignments and projects.

Among educational administrators, and among those who hold professorships in “schools of education” at universities, there is, however, a tendency to ascribe little or no value to competition in an educational setting. In fact, they often ascribe harmful effects to competition.

The benefits of competition in education have been underestimated.

Many students find that they can achieve higher levels of motivation through competition. When a learning activity is framed as a game, the competitive instinct is awakened, and some students will devote more focus and energy to the task.

Competition also helps institutions deal with the reality of limited resources: not every undergraduate can enter a graduate program. Some manner of selection process is necessary. Competition is as good as any. Ironically, many admissions processes which hope to select students for matriculation on a non-competitive basis turn out to be simply competitions in disguise. In the most extreme of such cases, the admissions processes, in their efforts to be non-competitive, provide bizarre and perverse incentives as students compete in their efforts to present themselves as incapable of competition.

Finally, it should be noted that there is serious competition between the nations of the world in their abilities to educate their young people. The wellbeing of the nation can, and often does, depend on the younger generation’s good education.

It is both inevitable and desirable that education contain elements of competition: between students in a classroom; between students in a national standardized exam; between students applying for advanced post-secondary admission; and between nations.

It cannot be otherwise.

If a society, a school, or an educational system attempts to deny the inherent competition in the educational process, then such an attempt will be frustrated, because competition is inescapable, and such an attempt will hinder education, because competition is salutary. The attempt to eliminate competition from the classroom, the college, the university, the nation, and the world is futile and oftentimes damaging.

To be sure, it is possible to overemphasize competition. A contributive and collaborative aspect is also necessary. But in the current society, the danger of overemphasizing competition is not part of the general education system, although it can be found in some specialized niches of academia. Moderation in all things!