Notes From the North Country

Years ago, when we were in high school, a friend of mine read Ayn Rand and started claiming that self-interest was the fundamental motive behind every single human interaction.  I remember us having a debate: I would point out an instance of – to me – obvious selflessness (a soldier jumping on a grenade, for instance), and he, newly awakened, would respond by rationalizing this action as the most naked expression of selfishness (the guy jumping on the grenade is doing it for his own posthumous reputation, of course). A few years later, when we took a course on Freud one winter, a few of us began jokingly attributing each and every possible event that anyone around us did to a sexual motivation.  (One doesn’t have to stretch one’s brain to imagine the general “level of discourse” involved.)

And yet, adolescent gullibility and dorm-room-philosophizing aside, the reading of any and all motives as either the lowest and most base of all possibilities, or the trimming of all complex human interactions to the attribution of one single, overriding drive is a familiar one, a hallmark of many of the most reductive systems of thought, and one that I have seen frequently cropping up in modern thinkers and writers, especially those in the applied-postmodern / Critical Theory movement.  

But nowadays, it’s not selfishness exactly, and it’s certainly not sex that everyone sees; it’s power.  I have been struck by how much of the modern Critical Theory lens sees power – the desire to attain it, the desire to retain it, and the desire to oppress others – as the main lens through which to understand society.  This is particularly striking when paired against much of the movement’s focus on the social constructionism of all other ideals. Yet power — and the related oppression and domination — truly exist. Discourses, institutions, narratives all “function” either to protect or to preserve power; the noble are the ones who “deconstruct” these discourses, point out how they “function” (which is never as a way to attain gradual improvement of everyone, but to preserve power), and point the way toward “deconstructing” all of this, with an eye toward rebuilding it, sometimes in a quasi-utopian world beyond power struggles, sometimes presumably with one’s own tribe now in control.

But where does this focus on power as the underlying motive come from?  

For years I figured that Marx was the key theorist, and I still think that’s probably true, but I’ve been reading more and more about the tremendous influence of French philosopher Michel Foucault on contemporary Critical thought, and unpleasant college memories of reading him aside, I figured it was time to return to the God of Postmodern Deconstruction, the High Priest of Power.  

Continue reading “Foucault’s Notion of Power”

I have just finished reading Evaluation to Improve Learning by Benjamin Bloom, George Madaus, Thomas Hastings.  It was written in 1981 and contains some fascinating connections to modern-day proficiency learning in the United States and especially in Vermont.  

I have written before about the connections between modern proficiency learning (as we call it in Vermont) or competency learning (as they call it elsewhere) and earlier incarnations, including William Spady’s outcome-based education and Bloom’s mastery learning, the original version of the whole approach.  As I’ve proposed in the past, both mastery learning and outcome-based education each swept across the ed landscape like wildfires, only to burn out in nearly as short a time.  In both cases the causes were a mixture of philosophical and political, and what’s particularly interesting is the way that it does seem to me as though modern proficiency learning is somewhat here to stay, at least in my home state.  I often have cause to wonder why this is, and reading this book by Bloom and company reminds me of a very simple fact: there’s something really, really appealing about this approach.

Continue reading “Benjamin Bloom: The Father of Proficiency-Based Learning”

I distinctly remember that there was no writer I had more trouble reading in college than Immanuel Kant.  His “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” stood out to me, even during an era when I was reading tedious postmodernists and complex 19th century literature as singularly dense, obtuse, and, in the end, not worth it.  I saved that old college copy of Kant, as I did with all of my other college books, for years on the shelf, before eventually – and this is rare for me – tossing it in the recycling bin.

But over the last few years, I’ve started to see Kant’s name cropping up more and more in the work of educational philosophy writers I admire, like Nel Noddings and Philip Jackson.  What’s more, as I’ve written about on this blog, I’ve always been fascinated / repulsed by direct appeals to a kind of moral imperative – the sort of thing that has been in great supply in the field of education for many years.  It always seems as though someone, somewhere is making an argument about how a particular reform is a “moral imperative,” raising the social stakes for noncompliance or even disagreement, and cloaking their preferred philosophy, goal, or method in the language of the righteous.  When I began teaching, it was the neoconservatives; more recently, the postmodern critical theorists.  But in that time it has been everyone in between.

And so, in my ongoing question to understand how to see through such arguments, I thought that, rather than merely take such appeals to conscience and duty as just that – rhetorical appeals designed to emotionally persuade the reader – I actually want to understand more clearly the substantial, philosophical claims and implications inherent in anyone’s appealing to one’s sense of moral duty.  

Continue reading “On Kant: Sage of Duty”

Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation

By Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan

In one of my favorite books about education, 2014’s Getting Schooled, the Vermont author and educator Garret Keizer describes slogging through a particularly distasteful assigned reading as part of a Personalized Learning Community (PLC) group at the school where he teaches.  While Keizer objects to book’s slippery claims, its lack of evidence, its business-and-industry-inspired approach, and its dubious insistence that schools and teachers with limited budgets can – must – affect radical social change, he nevertheless manages to take a step back and to appreciate what’s good about the book: 

“Taken at its best,” he writes, “and shucked of its corporate jargon, the authors’ argument sounds like a modest and perfectly reasonable appeal for schools to focus on what they’re actually able to do . . . as opposed to what they might wish to do” (61).

Change just a few words and you’d have the perfect description of Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan’s 2021 education book, Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation.  Taken at its best and shucked of its Critical jargon, Safir and Dugan’s argument sounds like a modest and perfectly reasonable appeal for schools to use qualitative data to improve culture and climate and student agency, as opposed to relying on reductive standardized testing data.  

Continue reading “Street Data”

I’ve just finished reading a provocative 2020 book about education by one of my favorite political and observational writers, Freddie deBoer. deBoer writes an excellent Substack, has been an influential and perceptive blogger and a presence writing online for many years, has a background in educational assessment, and is quite simply one of the most against-the-grain, thought-provoking writers working today. His articles about education are always interesting, and I regret it took me so long to get around to reading his first book, The Cult of Smart. It didn’t disappoint.

As I wrote about in my last post, the topic of educational equity is one that has become both incredibly influential in my profession, and something that absolutely tied me in knots trying to understand what it is. What frustrated me the most was the disclarity around the term; everywhere basic questions arose whenever I read some crazy new definition of “equity” — and it was as though no one had ever thought to try to answer them. There is, I believe, so much confusion in all of our thinking sometimes about politics and about a education, and that’s why I really appreciate it when a writer grabs the bull by the horns, cuts through the crap, (sometimes) grabs the third rail, and tries to go straight to the heart of the issue to make us all think clearly about what we’re really going for.

Freddie deBoer has always been that type of writer, and he certainly does this in The Cult of Smart.

Continue reading “The Cult of Smart”

This is a first for me: I’ve spent — no joke — weeks researching a long post, gathering information, copying out pages and pages of notes, writing thousands of words, starting and restarting several different drafts . . . and I’m almost more confused than I was when I started.

What topic did this to me?

The topic of equity.

My goal originally was trying to ask: What is equity? And what does it mean in the context of education?

Turns out, there is very little agreement, and very little clarity. It reminds me of a few summers ago when I tried to unravel the roots of proficiency learning in Vermont and . . . I couldn’t do it. I just kept finding more and more roots the further down I went. Equity is similar. It’s just amazingly complex, this massive receptacle, this big moving target.

What I tried to do was to research as many definitions of equity as I could within education. But there was little agreement, and little in the way of consistent examples provided.

I think what I want to do then is quickly summarize some very, very general findings. Maybe this will help me to make sense of just what equity is . . .

Continue reading “What is “Equity” in Education?”

“Let him see this necessity in things, never in the caprice of men.”

I had been thinking to myself that I ought to return again to Emile.  I have twice now attempted to read it, each time getting a little farther, but never pushing past the third of five books.  It is a long work – my no-nonsense (possibly counterfeit? – there doesn’t even appear to be a publisher’s name on it – !) edition clocks in at a dense, dense 428 pages. As I’ve written about before, it’s not only long, it’s frustratingly un-structured, digressive.  It is also very, very rich – there is so much to absorb on each page.  I got quite a lot from it even in my previous two aborted readings, but I had a feeling there was still some deeper key to unlocking what was really going on that I just wasn’t grasping.  I knew that I needed to return to Emile again because there was more there.  Over the last few weeks, I did.

What got me interested in it again this summer was actually my attempt to read The Social Contract.  Last winter I’d read and written about Rousseau’s second discourse, a truly fascinating and striking critique of the natural rights perspective of Hobbes and Locke, and I thought perhaps The Social Contract would follow on that work, by describing a way of moving from the state Rousseau described toward something approaching a more fair, representative, more “natural” society.  But as I started reading The Social Contract, it felt strangely disconnected from the Discourse, almost more of a manual for political society that a direct answer to the remarkable challenges raised in the Discourse, and I began to realize that it was actually Emile that was a more direct response to the earlier questions.

Here are my thoughts from a third reading.

Continue reading “Rousseau’s Emile — This Time I Got It”

In my last post, I mentioned that I’d recently read two works in the same style, and the second one is the one I’ll write about here.

Susan Neiman’s book, Woke is Not Left, is a critique of “woke” ideas from a philosopher and academic who is unabashedly a lifelong leftist.  Neiman writes about how she and others she knows feel alienated from modern far-left progressive ideals, and in this book, she explains why.  The problem that alarms her is the way that the progressive left of this era has “abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint” (2).  She identifies and structures her book around three of these ideas:  a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.  All three characteristics represent key differences between the woke movement – which she says has rejected “the epistemological frameworks and political assumptions inherited from the Enlightenment” – and the traditional left, which embraces the Enlightenment ideals of universalism, justice, and progress.  “Contemporary rejections of the Enlightenment usually go hand in hand without much knowledge of it” (9).

Continue reading “Susan Neiman: The Dangers of Tribalism”

One trend I’m happy about over the past six months or so has been increase of critiques of progressive philosophies of the far left on the part of – not the right – but the center-left, and even from the left itself.  Readers of this blog know that I have spent time trying to understand and to flesh out the difference between, for example, critical thinking and critical theory, and to identify for myself a coherent philosophy of education amidst a profession that, at its highest levels, seems to have been captivated by a theory – Critical Theory – that I believe has major shortcomings.  

As I’ve written before, I think that critical thinking – and the associated liberal science, fallibilism, empiricism, and the like – is a far more coherent and far more promising goal and approach than what I’ve begun calling Criticality – a slippery word from the first that, in its various guises (critical pedagogy, critical (fill in the blank theory, etc.) represents a combination of postmodern skepticism, Marxist conflict theory, and identity-based political activism.  As I’ve written before, I think Criticality is a valuable lens, but it is just one lens.  It needs to be named, labeled, and, as best as it can be, tested by critical thinkers and old-fashioned (small-L) liberals to see if its claims are logically consistent and true.  I’ve often had the sense over the past six years that what needs to happen is for all of the far-left Critical Theory – the “woke” movement, in shorthand – to finally come under the microscope of good, old-fashioned liberal science – that is to say, for Criticality to be tested against real philosophers and real inquiry.  It’s time for the real liberals to get ahold of this stuff and to see what it’s actually made of.

Recently, I’ve read two outstanding examples of this – Alan Sokal’s journal article, which I’ll describe below, and philosopher Susan Neiman’s Left is Not Woke, which I’ll analyze in a subsequent blog post.

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The recent journal article by Alan Sokal is called “The Implicit Epistemology of White Fragility” and represents to me exactly what academic journals should be doing right now: slowing down the work of a popular and influential critical theorist and teasing out the philosophical grounding of her thinking in order to evaluate it.  

Continue reading “The Liberals are Coming”

This winter, as I have written about previously, I had been on a quest to read a number of the classics of western political thought, fueled by my desire to identify for myself a coherent understanding of the type of political goals that our society – and by extension, our schools – should be aiming toward.  For a variety of reasons that quest has been more difficult this spring than it was during the winter, but nevertheless I have continued it, albeit slowly, with my most recent (partial) reading.

John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” represents a unique place in the western liberal canon.  It was only written in 1859 – almost 200 years after John Locke’s most famous work: closer to Kennedy and Reagan than to Locke or Hobbes.  As a result, it’s a book that takes up its starting point as the period of post-Lockean natural rights-based democratic rule.  Mill kicks of the first chapter by establishing this fact: the notion of self-rule being the dominant mechanism in the societies toward which he is aiming his message in this book.  At first, he writes, self-rule seems immune from tyranny; after all, you can’t be tyrannical over yourself, right?  But you can have – as de Tocqueville knew – a tyranny of the majority, the repression of the minority on the part of one’s fellow citizens – a repression based in formal law and informal social coercion.  

Continue reading “John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”: The Importance of Free Expression”