Batgung

I don't normally find much to love in the New York Times, but I thought this article was quite wonderful. What's it about? How your kid isn't going to get into Harvard. It's written by a Harvard alum who, as is the custom at that school, helps the university screen out the majority of its thousands of potential applicants. Here's how he describes one of his interviewees:

What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs [note: just a few points off perfect --ed.]. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake.

Yikes. The author also cheerfully recounts the hopelessness of getting his own four kids into the big H.

I recalled immediately skmama's comment in this thread when I started reading this article. It's aimed at answering a simple question: what's the best way to raise a smart kid? The bottom line? It's better to praise and reward him for working hard than for 'being smart'; in fact doing the latter is the potential source of big problems. The article is from Scientific American magazine, and note that the author did some of her research in -- you guessed it? -- Hong Kong.

One of my favorite essayists, Joseph Epstein of the Weekly Standard, has contributed quite an effort to the latest issue.

Titled 'The Kindergarchy: Every child a dauphin', Epstein rues the excessive efforts so many parents make in trying to raise 'perfect' children. There's perhaps a bit much about his own childhood growing up in Chicago (and his parents sound a little too far over on the uninterested side of the continuum to me) but many of his conclusions struck me as very sensible. One such theme: it's best if children grow up thinking for themselves and not depending so constantly upon others' approval and praise. That's a common-enough notion, even today.

But Epstein parts ways with the current conventional wisdom in his blunt assertion that you can't prepare your kids to be free-thinking and self-reliant; conversely, building up kids' sense of their own specialness and hyping the value of their outspoken but immature opinions is likely to backfire:

Why shouldn't parents do all in their power to make their children's lives less bumpy, more concentrated and carefully planned, thereby increasing their prospects for a happier, more satisfying life? No reason at all, really, except that trying to do so often comes to seem so joyless and the children who emerge from such ultra-careful upbringing so often turn out far from the perfect specimens their parents had imagined.

As a teacher at Northwestern University (not long retired), I found the students in my classes in no serious way I could discern much improved for all the intensity of home and classroom attention most of them received under the Kindergarchy. A very small number, those who had somehow found passion for books and the life of the mind, were remarkable, a number proportionally probably little different than in any generation of students; the rest were like students everywhere and at all times: just wanting to get the damn thing called their education over with and get on with life with the best start possible.

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn't become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint--and maybe a touch of the fear, too--that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were.

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

Growing up with only minimal attention sharpened this sense of one's significance. One's fierce little opinions were all very well, but without the substance of accomplishment behind them, they meant nothing.

The bit about his 'most impressive students' seems quite apposite to the Hong Kong educational scene.

Overall, bracing stuff!

Way up in this thread I voiced my misgivings with the promotion of 'creativity' as a goal of education. I've just read an absolute gem of an essay by Roger Kimball that takes on this term, and its equally unattractive fraternal twin, 'critical thinking', and gets down and dirty digging out what these terms really mean in most education schools and universities.

Kimball's essay is long and wide-ranging. He begins by identifying the assumed, if often unvoiced, function of 'critical thinking' in education, i.e. it's a cover story for a corrosive, negative cast of mind he coins 'criticismism'. I like that. Then Kimball unloads a series of intellectual fusillades against three philosophers he sees as the fathers of criticismism: J S Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Rorty, an American 'pragmatist' who died recently, but who has been extraodinarily influential in many fields.

Kimball also references several thinkers I admire, e.g. Jaques Barzun, Paul Ricouer and Roger Scruton.

Here's a brief quotation to give you a bit of the flavor:

It is an axiom of criticismism that the extent of our disillusionment is a reliable index of our wisdom: the idea that somehow the less we believe the more enlightened we are.

Great stuff, if you enjoy free-form philosophical debate for high stakes.

A very good article in City Journal tries to answer this question. A preview: the answer's not a simple yes/no.

I particularly enjoyed this article's critical look at the romantic assumptions that underlie most current western educational theory:

Central to the typical early-childhood educator’s worldview are three ideas: that it’s better for young children to learn through play than through work; that children learn best and are happiest when they can help direct the pace and content of their own learning; and that a child’s mental abilities develop at a natural pace that adults cannot do much to accelerate.

My main man Sigfried Englemann is also featured prominently; there's even a photo!

In an earlier comment in this thread I linked to a Wall Street Journal article that explained in the bluntest possible terms how your kid's not getting into Harvard.

Fortunately -- or unfortunately, depending on your perspective -- this message has not made it across the Pacific to the PRC. Just the opposite, in fact, as this article from the International Herald Tribune vividly illustrates. It describes the phenomenon of the 'How my kid got into Harvard' tell-all books that are topping the best-seller lists in the mainland. 

I'll give you the kicker to the article right here: last year, how many kids from the PRC applied for admission to Harvard? 484. How many got in? Five. 

Read the article to see how much effort is being expended in the quixotic attempt to raise that number . . . .

The following video clip from ABC News in the USA provides a concise human-interest angle on the over-selling of university education over there. With post-secondary education costs rising in HK, coupled with a bad job market for fresh grads, I wonder how long it will be before similar complaints start to be heard here? Maybe it will take a while, in that kids here aren't under quite as much financial pressure when they graduate, especially since it's expected they'll still live with their families. But that can't go on forever. Anyway, here's the clip:

Via the estimable education/Direct Instruction blog D-Ed Reckoning, comes this quite wonderful video introduction to 'progressive' educational methods in schools.

After an initial orientation section demonizing memorization and practicing-to-mastery – the classic example of memorizing the multiplication table is dumped on immediately – the video goes on to herald the advent of:

• learning by doing
• learning via projects
• a child-centered approach
• learning in practical, ‘real-life’ contexts and applications
• collaborative/group learning (aka ‘cooperating with each other’)
• promoting 'creativity'
• and finally, asserting that the world is changing so fast that we can’t hold on to the past; we must prepare our children in new ways to deal with an unknown future.

The kicker? The video was produced in 1940. It goes to show that there's very, very little new under the sun in the edusphere. The 'progressive' approach to western education today is in a sense very conservative/traditional, in that it's so very carefully preserving the views of late nineteenth to early twentieth-century educational philosophers such as William Kilpatrick and John Dewey (both of whom appear in the video, btw).

I've included a number of entries in this thread related to the plague of 'critical thinking' in current educational theory.

This essay by R R Reno, from the website of the excellent Christian journal First Things, captures my worries about its corrosive and pervasive influence in higher education. Critical thinking these days has nothing to do a Socratic quest for truth. In Reno's words it's just:

'. . . a deck-clearing operation—not to prepare students for truth, but to prepare them for life without truths.'

The long thread of comments on this article contains quite a number about Sigfried Engelmann, the father of Direct Instruction, a tightly-scripted, teacher-driven, heavy-on-assessment teaching method that's absolute poison to progressive educators.

Engelmann's ground-breaking and shockingly successful work is usually buried assidiously by the education establishment in the west, but every now and then somebody gets desperate, gives his methods a try -- and what do you know? They work.

So it is in this story reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. An Aborginal leader from the remote Cape York penisula discovered Direct Instruction, traveled to Oregon to get the good word from Engelmann himself, then implemented a DI-based program of study in his own school. It's a great success so far, but I'll be watching for backlash stories.