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!

Incomplete Education: “Interrupted Learning” or “Learning Loss”

Because education in the United States remains largely a local matter — city, county, state — it is always difficult to make national generalizations. But it can confidently be written that three consecutive academic years have been compromised: 2019/2020, 2020/2021, and 2021/2022.

The word is carefully chosen: “compromised.”

There has been some debate about the nomenclature. Some have rejected the phrase “learning loss” as too negative or too alarmist. Some have suggested the phrase “interrupted learning.”

Many of the compromises in these three consecutive years can be placed into one of two categories: reduction in curriculum and content, or reduction in work habits and study skills.

The degree of these deficits varies from city to city, county to county, and state to state, but in any case, a college admissions officer looking at applications from students who graduate from high school in 2022 or 2023 will need to do some reckoning. Universities will doubtless need to increase remediation efforts.

America Needs More Male Students: The Shortage of Boys at Colleges and Universities

In September 2021, The Wall Street Journal featured an article under the headline “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College” and provided data to describe a phenomenon which was by that point in time already well-known: more girls than boys were matriculating at colleges and universities in the United States. Likewise, more girls than boys were obtaining both undergraduate degrees and graduate degrees.

This trend is separate from the question of whether the U.S. is sending too great a percentage of high school graduates to universities. However one might answer that question, it is a concern distinct from the ratio of boys to girls in higher education.

The article began by stating a pattern already established in various publications:

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, large amounts of federal, state, and local funding has gone into explicit efforts to encourage girls to attend post-secondary institutions. To which extent, if any, that funding is responsible for the current gender gap is open to question.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

Over time, this disparity could lead to a significant shortage of professionals. The societal and economic impacts will take time to manifest themselves, and take time to be corrected.

In the past, there was a time at which a gender gap existed in the opposite direction: when more boys than girls attended, and graduated from, institutions of higher education. The problems caused by that old gender gap were different from the problems which will be caused by the current gender gap. A scarcity of men with college diplomas will present society with a different set of challenges than the scarcity of women with college diplomas formerly caused.

The Birth of Black History Month

In the 1920s, people began to observe a week-long period of time, dedicated to exploring the history of African-Americans and their achievements.

Around 1970, the expansion of the week into a month became an increasingly favored idea. An unsigned wire service story, found in newspapers in early 2021, explains:

The week-long event officially became Black History Month in 1976 when U.S. president Gerald Ford extended the recognition to “honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” Black History Month has been celebrated in the United States every February since.

President Ford’s attachment to the concept of Black History originated several decades earlier. In the early 1930s, Gerald Ford had been a star football player at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was team MVP for the 1934 season.

One of Ford’s friends on the team was a player named Willis Ward. The University of Michigan had African-American plays on the team since 1890. Gerald Ford and Willis Ward were roommates when the team went on the road.

In 1934, a crisis developed when Georgia Tech was scheduled to play Michigan. The game was in Ann Arbor at Michigan Stadium. But Georgia Tech had stipulated that it would only play if Willis Ward were benched for the entire game.

Gerald Ford was outraged at the racist action. He threatened to resign from the team, and hundreds of U of M students protested the situation - by some counts, over a thousand. In the end, Willis Ward told his teammates to play the game and to win for him.

The Michigan players were motivated by Ward’s words, and Gerald Ford especially so. Michigan won the game, and Ford distinguished himself in tackling the Georgia Tech players.

Buddy Moorehouse, who directed a documentary film about Willis Ward and Gerald Ford, explains that “During the game, there was this player on Georgia Tech that was using racial slurs and talking trash. Ford and this other Michigan lineman put a hit on this guy that knocked him out of the game.”

Ford apparently hit the Georgia players with particular ferocity, angered by the injustice which they had inflicted on his friend.

Willis Ward and Gerald Ford remained friends until Ward died in 1983. Their experiences on the U of M football team shaped Ford’s thinking. When Ford endorsed Black History Month, it was merely an extension of his college teamwork.

Paper and Ink: Physical Books Prove Their Worth During the Pandemic

The trend toward various forms of online education, which had been growing for more than a decade, accelerated massively during the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, which shut down most American brick-and-mortar schools in March 2019. Students from kindergarten to postgraduate found themselves doing, or trying to do, nearly everything online.

The strengths and weaknesses of online learning have been listed and analyzed numerous times. Journalists and educators have discussed the various versions of distance learning, and the associated advantages and disadvantages, at great length.

It is clear that staring daily for many hours at the screen of one’s laptop — or iPad or iPhone or Android or tablet or desktop, etc. — is not healthy, mentally or physically.

Physicians have catalogued the problems created by an overexposure to the blue light which screens emit. Psychologists have long known about the numerous problems which result from too little time spent outdoors and away from anything electronic.

One helpful factor in this situation is the simple book. Students who must spend hours on their devices will benefit mentally and physically from turning off the electronics and reading a book. The same text — whether it’s a newspaper article, a poem, or an explanation of chemical reactions — is processed differently by the human brain, depending on whether it’s read on a screen or read from a physical book.

Retention, focus, and comprehension are better with physical ink-and-paper documents.

Some over-eager proponents of online education had envisioned a world in which a single tablet device — think Nook or Kindle — contained dozens of books, and a student would spend hours reading from this single source.

That was precisely the wrong prescription.

For those students who, during the pandemic, had access to physical books — math books, history, literature, etc. — learning became richer, because it was not confined to the screens of their laptops.

Nobody really wants to read all of MacBeth or Hamlet on a smartphone. Students can study more effectively from several pages of algebraic equations or chemical diagrams on paper than from arduously scrolling up and down endless webpages.

Moving forward, schools can work to ensure that physical books are available to supplement what’s done online.

Online learning will not go away anytime soon, and it certainly has some benefits. But the very best type of distance learning will be that type which offers physical books, in addition all that’s online, to the students.

Online: The Human Factor in Education

Despite the ceaseless drive toward “remote learning” or “distance learning,” the drawbacks of online education remain stubbornly obvious. Authentic human presence and human interaction prove to be factors which improve the quality of learning and intellectual development.

To be sure, there are some specific instances in which online learning is effective: primarily when there is a highly motivated student who has excellent self-discipline, work habits, organizational skills, and study routines; and when the curriculum and content have relatively little ambiguity and little conceptual complexity.

But whether at the secondary or at the post-secondary level, such examples remain rare. For this reason, observation reveals the desirability of in-person instruction. At the University of Michigan, Professor Steven Clark reports that

We can record our lectures, but what we know from past years is that students who don’t come to class but watch the lecture at home struggle to master the material.

Online learning, in those instances in which it is most effective, places an extra burden upon, and requires more effort from, the student, in order to achieve equal or lesser amounts of learning. In addition to being less effective, online learning is less efficient.