Class, Just Call Me Ephraim: A Word On Authority

I have made the decision that once I become a teacher I will introduce myself to my students by my full name, Ephraim Hussain.  Consequently, they will have the option of either calling me Ephraim or Mr. Hussain.  My feeling is that they will opt for the former, and that is indeed my intent by opting not to impose the conventional “Mr.” title.  Now this may seem like a relatively minor aspect of my future teaching practice, and indeed one might view my concern with the matter of how students are to address the teacher as completely inconsequential and silly.  Here is why I would strongly disagree with that sentiment.

Critical Thinking vs. Memorization

This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I will tell you about my experience taking an educational assessment techniques course completely dictated and dominated by a Pearson textbook curriculum.  Throughout the course, I engaged in a series of email correspondences with my professor, in a passionately desperate (or desperately passionate…whichever way you prefer to see it) attempt to escape the confines of classroom discussion

Stop Curving! Stop Lecturing! Stop Grading! Start Teaching So We Can Start Learning!

Two weeks ago my genetics class received the results of our second test.  The class average was a 48, and to my amazement, our professor, whom I will refer to as Dr. James decided to curve the test by 29 points, consequently raising the class average to a low C.  In response to what I consider to be “the easy way out” and a great dereliction of duty by a professional educator, I sent him the following e-mail,

My Analysis of Dead Poet’s Society

Better late than never.  I blame myself for never watching it before an educational psych class senior year of college.  This was a truly inspiring movie!

There was a clear clash between the traditional and conservative values espoused by Welton Academy as an institution, and the progressive teaching methods of John Keating.  Welton Academy’s ethos of “tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence not only discourages but makes it a crime for a student to exercise a critical political consciousness.

John Dewey: Psychology and Social Practice

This is a sort of summary and interpretation some of the first 12 pages of educational theorist and philosopher John Dewey’s work, Psychology and Social Practice.

The contemporary school practice is defined by two deeply rooted assumptions regarding the relationship between child psychology and adult psychology.  One involves the perception that, unlike the adult, the child is incapable of being the director of his or her own moral and intellectual development.  Therefore, even though our educational system would best serve the child by allowing him to be the director of his own learning, he is instead taught to be docile, submissive, and alert to teaching methods and materials which are forced upon him. 

We Students Need A Unified And Thoughtful Voice In Our Educational Lives

Allow My Friend Calvin To Explain My Reasoning

I know that, in America, teachers are demonized mostly for the wrong reasons and mostly by politicians on the left and right of the political spectrum who have fallen hopelessly in love with the “Standardized testing/Accountability” fad that has completely run our educational system into the ground……….

But folks, there are some terrible teachers out there who don’t fall into this category.  They are called college professors, and some of them just really don’t have a clue what they’re doing and the worst part is their failure to realize that they don’t have a clue what they’re doing.  

Progressivism vs. Conservatism: The Millenial Generation

“Millennials hunger to be connected to something larger than themselves, a trait that has been highlighted by many generational researchers and one that serves as a connecting point for young adults seeking a spirituality that is not about just “me and God.”http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Oct2010/Feature1.asp

I agree with the premise of this article that our millennial generation definitely has a stronger desire to be part of a community than our parent’s generation.  I am not absolutely sure, but I firmly believe, and correct me if I’m wrong, that a higher percentage of young people would define their political views as progressive as opposed to conservative.  Now when I use the word “progressive”, I do not mean progressive as in liberal.  For me, progressive means forward-thinking and willing to affect change in the world. 

Education Can Do for Society What Law Cannot

I just finished watching a very interesting PBS documentary tracing the history of discrimination against Alaskan natives by the U.S. government.  There was one moment in the program that really resonates with me, and I think has a sort of significance to a contemporary issue I’ve been reading about….. the poor state of America’s educational system.

Since 1988, February 16, has been celebrated as Elizabeth Peratrovich day in Alaska, in honor of her civil right’s activism on behalf of her people, the Tlingit, as well as all Alaskan Native Americans.  In 1945, as leader of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, she testified before the Alaskan territorial legislature in support of the Anti-discrimination Act which would have outlawed what was unofficially Jim Crow in Alaska.  In the film, they performed a re-enactment of her testimony and before she stood up and spoke, the Senators had been publicly debating the bill.  One of the Senators objected to the bill on the grounds that the law really would not change anything, something akin to this law will not prevent racism but will just force two sets of people who have never  gotten along and never will to desegregate.

And her response was this

“Have you eliminated larceny or murder by passing a law against it? No law will eliminate crimes but, at least you as legislators, can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak your intent to help us overcome discrimination.”

For my purposes,I would like to take the fragment “No law will eliminate crimes but, at least you as legislators” and alter and replace it with “Education will eliminate crimes and you as teachers and administrators and the rest of the major players in our educational system”  I will explain my reason for this radical change to Elizabeth’s words but just bare with me here…

A few months ago, on this blog, I posted the final paper I wrote for a “Philosophy of Education” class  took two semesters ago.  The assignment was to devise a societal goal for education.  Basically, what type of society would your educational system produce?  This goal was called the “Aim” in the outline.  My aim was that the ultimate goal for a compulsory, publicly funded educational system should be to create a mutually supportive society. (The Green is from my paper) I defined a mutually supportive society as one in which each and every member recognizes the common conditions that unite them, but just as but just as well respects the differences that may separate them.  By this creed, the notion of one for all and all for one becomes self-evident in a mutually supportive society.  The society supports each of its individual members with their inherent differences and the individual members support society as a whole.  By support I mean working together for the common good of the individual and society, because ultimately these two should never conflict with one another.  When we live for one another, we live for ourselves and this is why the good of the individual and the good for society should never conflict.

A society of mutually supportive people would be devoid of economic and social stratification and therefore much of the hatred that fosters conflict.  Goods and services would be exchanged on a fair basis with everyone being treated equally except in regards to their individual personalities.  What I mean by this is even though everyone is committed to supporting one another, each still retains individuality so society does not become lifeless and robotic.  An individual in a mutually supportive society would be devoid of any sort of bias that creates division in society whether racial or ethnic or anything else.  They would view their fellow individual as an equal in terms of deserving of respect and basic rights and services.

My point is that while I agree with Elizabeth, that it the responsibility of our legislators to recognize injustice and enact laws to combat injustice regardless of their doubts about the affect those laws will have on changing society, laws are not and never will be enough.  If human civilization wants to progress past the many injustices that plague our world today, if masses of people around the world (that includes especially our leaders and the wealthy), not just small pockets of concerned citizens, are ever going to take a look in the mirror and reflect upon their potential role in forging a better today and tomorrow, institutionalized education not only should stand at the forefront of this effort but needs to.  Why?  Because if you think about it, what is the life of a human being at its essence.  It is an education.  The education that we receive from the day we are born to the day we die shapes our minds, our attitudes, and our beliefs.  It is the main deciding factor in how we live our lives and interact with one another. 

I ask you what kind of an education drives racism?  What kind of an education drives discrimination?  What kind of an education makes so much poverty possible in this world?  What kind of an education makes so much war, violence, bullying, hatred, bloodthirsty revenge, poverty, racism, wealth disparity, discrimination and all the other bad things that characterize our race not only possible but so pervasive and rampant?  As intelligent and as innovative as human beings are, we have failed to devise a sustainable, efficient, and logical plan of action to deal with the underlying root of all these problems. That stubborn root would be the education, I spoke about earlier which shapes our mind, beliefs, and attitudes.  Indeed John Dewey says it best in an excerpt from his essay entitled How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Processes, 1933,

It sometimes seems, upon surveying the history of thought, that men exhausted pretty much all wrong forms  of belief before they hit upon the right conceptions.

And by god, we are still doing it, even though we know all the right forms of belief.  Notice I used the words “sustainable” and “efficient” when describing a plan of action to sever the root of all those problems like poverty and discrimination.  But so far, at least according to Dewey, our effort in severing has not been sustainable and efficient, because, still, we continue to get it wrong despite the knowledge and potential we hold.  The right kind of education will change that.

Yes, we do have elementary and high schools, universities, colleges, dubiously termed institutions of higher learning, but do our schools, especially in America, make the primary aim of institutionalized education congruent with the betterment of the human condition??  It would seem the logical thing to do, since we do start school at like 5 or 6 years old and  have our whole lives ahead of us, but alas it has not happened.  The mistake has been in hoping that laws will take care of everything. Essentially hoping that telling other people what to do and how to do it, can be the primary driver, in building a better society.  This is a grave miscalculation.  We see it every week.  In the news, some new financial scandal pops up.  People with a lot of money and a lot of power using it for no good, or preferably just letting it languish in secret tax havens to the tune of at least $21 trillion.    And then all of us with a sense of moral decency ask the inevitable questions “How do these people sleep at night?  What makes people so selfish and callous?” My answer:  It is these rich person’s education (the mind, attitude, and beliefs kind) that causes them to hoard away $21 trillion for themselves, while governments across the world remain cash-strapped and in the process of dealing with rightly disgruntled citizenry.  Ironically, it is laws on the books that allow these people to do this.  But then again we return to the same two questions.  What kind of education prompts these solvable problems to continue to occur?  The second and more important question is what kind of an education will strike at the root of these distinctly human problems.  The second is a question I was asked to address in that final paper I spoke about earlier  But, John Dewey answers both these questions, I think quite well, in an essay entitled How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Processes, 1933.

To answer the first question, Dewey cites seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke and his three classes of men

1) Men who blindly follow the source of authority, whether it be family, friends, neighborhood, country, ideology, rather than reason and think for themselves

2) Men who allow passion and emotion to trump reasoning and logic, whether it be their own or the reasoning of others.  If it does not suit them, it does not matter whether it makes sense or not.

3) Men who reason but who choose to essentially live in a box when it comes to their exposure to knowledge and new ways of thinking.  They restrict themselves, and remain apprehensive about even putting potential new knowledge and potentially new truths to the test of reason.

I said before that we have the power and the knowledge to to deal with our problems more efficiently and sustainably.  We know all the right forms of belief, right forms of thought that makes human society flourish.  The problem, Dewey says, is attitude.

Dewey then proceeds to talk about the importance of cultivating certain attitudes to answer the second question.  He calls these attitudes habits of thinking which constitute a “readiness to consider in a thoughtful way the subjects that do come within the range of experience.” (Dewey 227)

• Open-mindedness- What constitutes an active scientific invitation to new ideas, questions, and facts.  If an idea can stand the test of logic, critical inquiry, and scientific process than it is worthy of our full attention and consideration and in the process we throw out all irrational prejudices that only serve to close the mind.  I think of our intractable Congressmen and how they would have benefited from an education that cultivated open-mindedness.  I know our country would not be in such dire economic straits if they had been.
• Whole-heartedness- What constitutes the exact opposite of divided interest.  A student who is merely studying to get an A or avoid a stern lecture from his parents, but indeed the focus of his mind is elsewhere.  He or she is not fully intellectually committed to the contents of his or her studying.  It is merely an obstacle to be overcome, so that certain  unfavorable repercussions can be avoided.  As you can see, school is often the very environment where the spirit of whole-heartedness is often suppressed.  Remember yourself in class daydreaming while staring out the window at the rain or snow or sleet or hail or whatever form of precipitation happened to be falling that day, and your teacher snapping you back up to attention.
• Responsibility- What constitutes fully considering, knowing, and adopting the ramifications of taking the next step.  This kind of attitude translates to integrity.  Again, I think of the politician who rather dodge pointed questions from the media than fess up to the consequences of their policies when I think of people who don’t practice intellectual responsibility and therefore don’t have any integrity.  They will defend their beliefs to their dying day, but when anything goes wrong, their mouths stop running or they run plain BS.

These are not the only attitudes that education needs to cultivate, but certainly they are three of the most important from the standpoint of building a better society.

Works Cited

Archambault, Reginald, ed. John Dewey on Education. New York: Random House Inc., 1964. 212-228. Print.

John Dewey: What Psychology Can Do Part II

This is Part II in the series John Dewey: What Psychology Can Do which began with Part I

I said in my last post that this post would be about “Dewey’s Three Resources Available in the Work of Education Other than Psychology: Native Tact and Skill, Experience, Authoritative Instruction in Methods and Devices.”  I lied.  This one is about experience.  So I have decided not to preview any of my future posts lest I lie again.

Again, for Dewey, the value in experience is not in its quantity but in its quality.  Just as one can not practice a musical instrument haphazardly and expect to get better at it, one cannot practice teaching in a nonscientific, undisciplined, and anti-reflective manner and expect to be regarded as a “good” teacher.  30, 40, 50 or however many years of experience does not matter.  What kind of experience was it?

All you students out there, I think we have all had teachers who like to tout their experience before us as the supreme reason why we should regard their every word and method as gospel.  And that experience is not the sort that John Dewey is talking about.  No, no….. its actually the kind of experience we tend to roll our eyes at and dismiss as mere posturing.  Now this is, of course, not at all meant to demonize the entire teaching profession.  That would be absurd and irrational, and indeed teaching is my career path so I have no interest in making unwarranted accusations.  But the fact is there are many stubborn teachers out there who have been teaching for a long time and like to cite their quantity of experience rather than the quality.

After the semester had ended, I e-mailed one of my college professors to express a numbers of concerns I had with his Core 300 (one of a sequence of four required courses at my school) (Journey to Self-Hood) class, chief among them being his pedagogy.  This is what I wrote concerning the pedagogy

The first course objective, as presented in the syllabus, says “Students will maintain a “pilgrim’s journal” throughout the semester in they will record not only their reactions to course “prompts.” and to the literature under study, but also their own thoughts about the semester’s journey.  Several times during the semester, students will be asked to share some of these thoughts to aid on-going class discussions.”  My contention with this objective is that you did not encourage discussion in the classroom.  We students, had to endure a teacher-dominated style of instruction the entire semester.  Respectfully, I ask you how can a class, whose title implies focus on the individual student, ever live up to that billing if the instructor proceeds to monopolize every class period with one-sided lecture?  People learn about themselves through their relationships with other people.  Human beings are social animals, and we function most authentically and effectively in environments that foster interaction.  The class should have been more oriented towards discussion and debate, as the syllabus indicates.  The Core mission statement stipulates that “The Core curriculum moves students from the perfunctory act to the craft of self-reflection, which leads them to understand more fully the relationship between their choices and the lives they can imagine for themselves.”  These are noble and worthwhile goals for a curriculum, but I am also speaking for my fellow students when I write that these goals were not achieved in Core 300.

He gladly informed me of his teaching for 46 years and promptly told me to take a hike.  For god’s sake, I even took the time to dig up and cite the syllabus.  Apparently, he considered his teaching style and methods inviolate and consequently above any type of student criticism.  To me, that response is nonscientific, undisciplined, and anti-reflective and I am sure Dewey would disapprove.

John Dewey: What Psychology Can Do, Part I

Given that I recently made the big decision to alter my career path from aspiring doctor to aspiring teacher and educational reformer, I thought it wise and prudent to end my feigning textbook interest with the inner workings of the human body and start reading up on the great educational philosophers of the twentieth century.

I first encountered the writing of twentieth century American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer  John Dewey in a Philosophy of Education class I took two semesters ago.  Of the half dozen or so educational movers and shakers (or maybe not cause I’ve tragically begun to realize just how often our society fails to listen and learn from the most intelligent within it)  I studied in that class, he struck a chord within me.  Indeed, if I remember correctly my first post on this blog was a series of John Dewey quotes, that I found most fascinating and revelatory, and wanted to share with the rest of the world.

For the past two weeks or so, I have been reading a compilation of some of his writings and now I would like to share some of his ideas with you.  Since a philosopher’s writing can get quite tedious and complex,  I will try to do this to the best of my ability.

I will begin with his essay entitled “What Psychology Can Do” which attempts to explain the role of psychology in educational practice.

He begins by making the fairly obvious statement that the value of any theory is based on its real world application.  If it works well, it is valuable.  If it fails to live up to par in practice, it is effectively useless, no matter how much it was cheered and championed beforehand.  This relation of theory to practice sums up the relationship between psychology and education.  A knowledge of psychology or specific aspects of psychology is as useful to education as is revealed in practice.  Education is a rational process and needs to be grounded in both psychology and experience.  In order to be efficient and productive it is necessary for educational practice to be a rational experience.  This is the role of the educational psychologist: to recognize what type of psychology, if any, is most likely to enrich educational practice, thereby making a given educational experience an exercise in rationality and reason.

He goes to on to answer why psychology should have any role in educational practice.  Firstly, Dewey contends that the study of psychology holds high value for the educator in that, due to its logical and reflective nature, it makes him less likely to make student’s amassment of mere facts and figures the highest priority in his teaching style.  “Facts and things” are worth nothing lest they are subject to the inherently reflective and critical nature of human intelligence.  Put most simply, it is the quality not the quantity of knowledge that is most important to Dewey, and this quality is akin to the reflective power of the human mind and its ability to connect bits of knowledge and discern their greater meaning.  By this definition, psychology, as a discipline, is all about the quality.  It is an abstract science that engages in distillation and reflection to determine the complicated nature of human consciousness.  This high order of thinking is of necessity in a quality teacher.

Dewey’s second reason for asserting that psychology should have a role in educational practice is its value for teacher training.  Why should it have paramount value in the training of our educators?  It is for the simple reason that the educational dilemma is one with distinctly ethical and psychological roots.  It is a dilemma that must be solved by men and women who possess a clear knowledge of what is best for the human mind and what methods and devices will bring out the best of what human nature has to offer this world.  Psychology and ethics represent to education what anatomy and pathophysiology represent to medicine.  The two former are fields of study which seek to rationally explain human nature just as the two latter are fields of study which explain the workings of the human body.  How are you going to be a great educator of human beings unless you understand human nature itself and apply methods by which you can assure a positive and natural growth of mind and character?  It seems to be common sense, right?  And yet we all encounter those teachers who just completely turn us off and we wonder why.  Well, this is part of the reason.

Next Post: Opinion on Dewey’s Thoughts so far And……Dewey’s Three Resources Available in the Work of Education Other than Psychology: Native Tact and Skill, Experience, Authoritative Instruction in Methods and Devices