Disrespect in Education (2014)
lukepalmer.wordpress.com
lukepalmer.wordpress.com
"...it is not a fault only to have energy for what I care about. I don’t know what I would have become if my gifts had been acknowledged and nurtured rather than ignored."
This argument comes from the same privileged perspective of the "follow your passion" line. He can only make this claim because, as an apparently gifted programmer, he is fortunate to care about skills that are currently valued in the workforce, if not in the confines of many school systems.
No one has energy for the things they don't care about. However, people do their jobs regardless of whether they care about it because it is their job. Does the author suppose anyone works as a janitor because they care about cleaning other people's toilets? Of course not. Janitors have bills to pay, mouths to feed etc.
Teaching students to learn the importance of doing their job, regardless of whether they care about it, is not an intrinsic flaw of modern education. There should arguably be less emphasis on it, and more done to nurture student's natural talents.
However, the notion that students should not be taught at all the importance of good citizenship, following orders and doing their job -- even or especially if they don't care about it -- is unpalatable. To do away with it completely, as implied, is even more disrespectful to students than the situation he describes. It is extremely disrespectful to the people who will spend their working lives doing things that they don't particularly care about, and who go home at the end of the day to the things that give meaning to their lives.
I am a janitor with a math phd that gets to have water gun fights with kids; I work at a Sudbury school. I am much happier cleaning toilets than being in some BS academic department committee or grading kids and telling them they suck. Or even worse, teaching engineering students beautiful mathematical secrets, holding them to high standards, seeing them get there, and then hearing from them that the time spent on my course was hurting them in other courses. True story.
Being supportive of life is itself a fantastic reward. Being treated with respect is what matters, not the actual work. Cleaning toilets is really not a big deal. Being treated like a piece of crap is.
Also good citizenship is not about following orders due to fear of retribution. It is looking at the world with care and compassion for others and doing what needs to be done, speaking up and supporting one another. It is about seeing the beauty in others and appreciating that. At a Sudbury school, the halls flow with such feelings as it is the natural way that communities of human beings bind together. That is citizenship.
And not surprisingly, when a person wants to be a part of a community, then they can follow community rules and standards quite easily. It is in our nature.
Traditional schools teach gaming the system, being brutal to other people. Being excluded because of not meeting some arbitrary pointless standard is just a crappy way of living. Humans learn from what those around them do. Are the behaviors of teachers in traditional school the way humans should treat one another?
Sudbury Valley School was my first thought as I read Luke's essay, so I am very excited to read your contribution to this discussion. The readers of Hacker News want a startup to fix education. But what if this startup was already founded forty-seven years ago in Framingham, MA?
For anyone who is interested in learning more about Sudbury Valley School, I recommend reading some of their articles at the following location:
This is one of the big challenges of spreading this model. It is a lean startup. By the way, for those who want to sort of see the school from the eyes of a startup, I wrote a series of blog entries using the ideas of Peter Thiel's Zero to One and making the case that the natural way to prep people for startups (and the future) is a Sudbury education.
http://blog.aisudbury.com/post/102537221611/educational-prep...
But the process if a student choose to do it is to answer the question "How has your time here prepared you for the adult world?" It is a very open-ended question and students write a thesis on it, often submitting a portfolio of what they have done.
There is an internal committee that serves the role of advisor, if requested. The committee for the defense of thesis consists of staff from other Sudbury schools who generally hold students to high standards. It is possible to not successfully defend though one can take another chance the following year if so desired.
We are a young school (7 years) and have only had two graduates so far. One submitted a portfolio of pictures along with their thesis (pursuing visual arts in college) and the other presented a cookbook (currently a chef at a well-regarded local bakery).
The defenses lasted two or three hours. Experiences at other schools vary, but it seems that it is quite a common experience for 18 year old Sudbury students to pursue the graduation.
Do you end up teaching on a regular basis? I can't imagine you just stick to janitorial work and water gun fights in the environment you describe.
The age range is also from 5-18 which adds in another level of potential messes.
I wear many hats at the school. Janitorial work is largely a few hours in the afternoon. At other times, I am largely talking with kids and staff. I do administrative work, I work on promoting the school, I write up some code to help make things move smoother, I do interviews of prospective students, I help kids with band-aids and finding lost items, etc. We are currently working on raising capital to buy a new building which has been both interesting and time consuming.
There is no teaching done here. Rarely I might get a question about math from students, but those who pursue it do it on their own. They don't want answers, they want journeys.
The life of a Sudbury staffer is one of a minimal salary. So I do teach online at a couple of places to support my family. That can be drudgery, but a burden I take on willingly as I need to. I do teach a course of my own design which is a lot more to the point of what math is and it is more fun to do. But the courses where I just teach what I'm told to teach are frustrating, to say the least.
So I am certainly not a classic janitor. But I have known many in my life. When treated with respect, they don't mind their job. When treated like crap, they despise their job, as any would do. And in a nice, pleasant environment, they do plenty of talking and their days need not be drudgery. It is about the human environment, whether red, white, or blue collar work.
> There is no teaching done here. Rarely I might get a question about math from students, but those who pursue it do it on their own. They don't want answers, they want journeys.
For students who want a journey, an expert in the field can be an invaluable mentor. I didn't learn a whole lot of programming for my dad, but he sure helped me choose directions in my journey at key points. I imagine some of your conversations put you in that role.
Thank you for the work you and your colleagues are doing. You are a source of deep inspiration for many of us.
We are still a young school with just a handful of 14+ year olds. I think in terms of content, that kind of mentoring would happen with the older ones, if at all. And it may take a sufficiently large pool before compatible interests start to emerge. More than likely, older students would end up with mentorships from external people.
But certainly the presence of a diverse set of adults being authentic about what they do and who they are is an important aspect of this model.
If you or anyone else you reference to Sudbury ever want more information, my email is my username here at gmail.
This doesn't make sense to me. It's dehumanizing to expect people to behave like robots, parts of the machine.
Even if doing a routine, manual job, people should be able to see some point to what they are doing. If it really is pointless (like lots of jobs), they should feel encouraged to speak up.
In the janitor example, cleaning is an important job that people appreciate, the janitor making an important contribution to whatever is going on in the building (hospital, office, etc). But if the janitor is asked to do pointless busywork they should complain.
Any meaningful activity incorporates a significant amount of drudgery as a prerequisite. It's like the old joke, a man lost in New York asks a passing violinist, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? And the violinist replies, practice. Either you learn this young or you spend your whole life unable to do anything that isn't superficial.
Being engaged is a state that many of us want to be in. Failure to grow in ability leads to boredom which is a wonderful negative motivator.
Consider what Frank Herbert says about this, for example: "So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, 'Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.' There's no difference on paper between the two."[1]
It's amusing in these conversations how quickly some people go from "say no to drugery and busy work" to "but its essential for discipline!", its almost as if they've been inculturated into a pathological system of education.
the discipline to do what though? To be good at drudgery and busy work would prepare you to face down boredom and learn how to overcome larger bureaucratic barriers to accessing information and to participate in us legal/civil society.
If you think I or the OP would argue anything else, then you're falling into precisely the trap I identified.
I disagree; I think that being expected to behave like a part of a machine is an essential, defining aspect of the human experience.
More likely, "was an essential, defining aspect briefly in the XX century".
That century is now over. Before that, you was expected to steer your own judgement while working on a farm (not very machiney experience), and after that, everything that can be replaced by a machine would.
Compare this to XX century school or factory assembly line where you have no choices.
"Writing the program increased my understanding of circuits a great deal, but the existence of the program itself afforded me no real advantage. Perhaps this experience is why my preferred way to use software today is as a mathematical and mind-expansion exercise rather than making a tool that can actually be used."
It came off as whiny, because it comes off as a stretch to blame the school for his inability to write effective computer programs.
With more resources for teaching it would be perfectly possible for schools to look for individual talent and work to develop it.
Supposedly the better private - public in the UK - schools try to do this already. With fees as they are, they certainly have the resources for it.
I know someone who went through public school and was in a music class of exactly two pupils. The school also worked hard to provide relevant professional contacts.
So with someone talented, a teacher wouldn't be thinking about limited time, but about whether there were any local startups/companies who might want an intern.
It's not disrespect by the teachers, so much as disrespect by a political system that tries to limit these kinds of opportunity to a tiny fraction of the population.
Going straight from being educated to educating is insular. Teachers do things because that's the way it was done to them. It's how they were taught and some sick part of their mind liked it, so they went into teaching.
From my own educational experience there was a lot of "do this, or else" which isn't really education, it's just conditioning. For crying out loud we know negative reinforcement doesn't work in animals, ask any dog trainer, why would it work in students? Give me at least as much respect as a dog, please.
Yes, this is a problem in education. I would like to see a great deal of improvement in teacher education programs. From what I've seen, many teacher ed programs that claim to be challenging simply give a heavy workload, rather than challenging people's ways of thinking about education.
There are some great approaches to education, but I don't see many new teachers learning them. Or if they do, I see them going into schools where they don't see those approaches being used. Then there's the political undermining of education that's happening in much of the US.
> It's how they were taught and some sick part of their mind liked it, so they went into teaching.
I know there are some really bad teachers out there, but this is a pretty ugly and useless line of thinking. Most teachers that you're referring to are simply falling back on what they saw in 12+ years of being a student; there's no intention to inflict on others what was done to them because they liked it.
The typical school model was designed to control students, it is unnecessary and even harmful to real education. Non-compulsory education is not just for smart kids, all children have a natural inclination to learn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Re...
But looking at my siblings and some of my friends, I hesitate to make a blanket statement about this freedom. Perhaps everyone can do well if they're given this freedom from a very young age. I don't know. But I've met plenty of people who, if given this freedom in middle/high school (12+?), would not have been able to handle it. Whether this is because they already were 'corrupted' up to that age, or whether they have different personalities, I don't know. But I've seen it happen.
The OA is reading Freire [1] (see other posts on the blog). The Infed article on Gramsci, especially the section headed 'Gramsci on schooling and education' [2] might help further. The clue is in the separation of the two functions.
The OA was obviously able to educate himself most effectively. The challenge is now to collect a few people like his childhood self and get some self-organised education going outside the system. A few hours a week. Biographies of people like Alan Kay, Feynman &c show the influence of an adult outside the system on intellectual development. The career of Brian Harvey springs to mind.
The OA is in a good place to start a dialogue with younger people around (say) social network use and surveillance (see OA's google+ feed). Direct experience of working with (say) a handful of young people will refine ideas.
[1] http://infed.org/mobi/paulo-freire-dialogue-praxis-and-educa...
[2] http://infed.org/mobi/antonio-gramsci-schooling-and-educatio...
I regret having that attitude now
kids hold adults to unrealistic expectations, they expect them to be omniscient (tbf adult don't really discourage this), and then become disillusioned when they realize that isn't the case
adults are human too, they make mistakes, they're not perfect, its really hard to figure out how to manage 30 some odd kids and figure out to best reach as many of them as possible, if they start making homework exceptions for 1 kid, do they have to start making them for 30 kids, how do you manage 30 unique homework assignments? how do you balence that with making things work less well for that one kid who would really do well with a unique homework assignment? Its actually a hard philosophical problem
I feel I didn't have any appreciation for that when I was a kid, I wish I did now
when you're a kid, you feel like adults are all up in your business, when you're an adult, you realize that its a luxury to have people who are available to turn to for help, them being in your business actually isn't that bad a tradeoff
as an adult, you want access to people's time and experience, you often have to pay for it
I recommend kids take ownership over your own education, the classes that are in high school actually cover wide wide swaths of human knowledge, and are actually applicable to all sorts of life goals
whatever you want to do in life, there are likely things in each of your classes that apply to doing that thing
you can ask your teacher whatever you like about that, figure out how to get whatever knowledge you can out of them
homework is actually a gift, the science of how knowledge get imbedded in you is actually well established, you have to work with it and apply it
homework is that opportunity, even if its not perfect, will you be able to draw on that knowledge when you're 25? how much you embedded that with homework as a 15 year will be the factor of that
I'm rambling, but public education is a far from perfect, but its a gift, and like all things in life, its what you make of it
Well one approach would be not to require students to do homework. In my experience, when I'm learning something that I'm interested in, there would be no benefit to somebody checking work that I do. If I want a second opinion, I seek it out rather than the other way around.
To me, a school that really "respected" students in the way the author is suggesting would have no need for telling students into learning anything in particular.
people don't like homework because its required, but its actually really useful if you're trying crystallize what you're learning so you can use it 10 years later
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/secretlife/blogposts/the-...
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/d...
http://www.barbaraoakley.com/pdf/10rulesofstudying.pdf
later in life, its hard to get those second opinions
people let their ego's need for 'respect' get in the way of what's best for them in the long run
people let their ego's need for 'respect' get in the way of what's best for them in the long run
I think there is more to the "respect" that the author wants than just satisfying his ego. If respect for students leads to giving students autonomy then it can lead to a meaningful change in the way that schooling operates.
I teach primary school children (aged 10 and 11) once a week. I think the author is mistaken and using a lot of assumptions to justify a very bigoted position.
Firstly, most children are not capable of making good choices for themselves. This is essentially why we teach them, if they came out of the ground fully aware and able to rationalise there would be no need for schools. My direct experience is that some children are quite self directed and can be left to pursue their interests and work around topics in their own way. Most children however find a lack of direction quite daunting and will end up not working at all if they are not given quite clear instructions.
Secondly, allowing each child to pursue their education in their own preferred mode is unreasonable because of class sizes. I have found it very difficult to support more than 5 or so children who are all doing different things, even if they are focusing on a common subject and broadly similar tasks. The only way for a teacher to reasonably teach a class of 20 to 30 or more is to give them all the same work and teach them all in more or less the same way.
The author makes the mistake of assuming his teachers were stupid or mean. Whenever you find yourself assuming this about other people you should take a step back, because there are very few individuals, and certainly no broad categories of people who are actually like this.
Please consider citing where he was "assuming his teachers were stupid or mean" — with surrounding context. Perhaps you're latching onto the least charitable interpretation, as commonly happens when people fundamentally critique our work?
I teach and manage, and solicit critique in both jobs. (The author seems to point out that both teaching and management devolve into the same thing in our society...)
As for being "stupid or mean", I'm quite capable of both, which is a concern when I have institutional power. The most stupid/mean people seem to be least capable of admitting it.
> ... the teachers’ own internalized oppression as working class. Teachers are not paid well, which makes them feel bound and powerless, which is communicated to the students ...
Here he is implying that teachers are unhappy and take it out on their students. This is a mean trait.
> The truth is that at this level of “real world”, math beyond basic arithmetic and estimation is not really useful, so any attempt to make it seem so will be disingenuous.
And here he believes his teachers were "disingenuous", which is also a mean trait. He then goes on to say
> I believe kids are smart; they will not be fooled so easily.
which shows he believes he is more intelligent than his teachers, since they didn't think kids were smart but he knows better. He also includes asides like
> they never asked what I did with my time instead of doing homework. (I wonder what they thought?)
suggesting he attributes to them a lack of thoughtfulness or critical thinking.
I am open to more charitable interpretations, however I think the author is overly critical and not in a very helpful way since his argument is so distanced from the practicalities of teaching. I will admit that I find the article personally a bit sharp, since I have been discovering how difficult teaching is. And of course I have been guilty of being stupid and mean in the past, as everyone has. However I don't think my response was disproportionately hostile.
If you were taught using traditional methods where everyone was expected to do the same thing, it is difficult to figure out a different approach all by yourself. But there are some really well-established ways to run a classroom where not everyone has to do the same thing. For example, there are various models of project-based education, where everyone is working on the same topic but students are doing a number of different things around that topic.
One core skill of a decent teacher is to differentiate instruction. Good teachers have been doing this for generations.
I haven't had teacher training and I obviously only do it part time, so I'm sure a more experienced teacher might have a different view on this. I can believe that once the kids are in the mindset of following instructions they have a hard time switching to being more self-directed.
I would be really interested to hear more about the schools that run these types of programs too. The difference in class sizes and staff numbers, as well as the background of the students surely impact how easy it is to run a school in this way.
http://elschools.org/ - This is the application of Outward Bound principles to education. It is not just taking students outdoors - you can do high-quality Learning Expeditions that never leave the classroom. It's the idea of taking a group farther than any one person could go on their own, by working with everyone's strengths and by building the skills and knowledge required to reach the goal.
Quick example: I had a class conduct a population study of starfish at a local beach one spring. Lots of different work to focus on, allowing many students to address the variety of skills and understanding they needed to focus on. Plenty of coherence to make it easy, even fun, to manage the different work everyone was doing.
> I can believe that once the kids are in the mindset of following instructions they have a hard time switching to being more self-directed.
Yes. When students come into our school, many of them take 6-12 months to start taking ownership of their own work and their own learning. They've spent 8+ years being told what to do, and many have lost the ability to trust themselves to make meaningful decisions and follow through on those decisions.
> I would be really interested to hear more about the schools that run these types of programs too. The difference in class sizes and staff numbers, as well as the background of the students surely impact how easy it is to run a school in this way.
Class size is not as important as many think. 30+ is difficult, ~20 is quite manageable - in fact, having a diversity of skills and perspectives can be really helpful when you're doing meaningful work. You might be surprised about how the background of students affects this kind of work. Students who have had behavioral issues in traditional models can often be redirected toward meaningful work - they've been behaving poorly because they want good education, by people who are willing and able to meet them where they're at. These students are actually easier to work with in this model than students who have become overly compliant.
Can you tell us why then most teachers feel they have to specifically peck this kind of children and make them "behave" (i.e. do whatever everyone is supposed to do and ignore their own sense)?
You don't have to specifically be stupid or mean - it's enough if ruining other people's lives is a natural consequence of your work. You won't be loved by those affected.
I am not a teacher by education. I do contract development work and have my own bootstrapped start up. I teach because when I look back at my own education, I wish that I had had an opportunity to get away from the mindless drudgery of being "taught to a test." I also teach because I am terrified of a world in which computers (and other electronics) are only seen/used as consumption devices.
I don't think that I am perfect teacher, but I think that this is how all teachers should be; Not someone who has an academic degree in teaching, but someone who has done the actual thing that they are instructing others to do. It is time to dispel the old adage of "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach."
But the author completely missed the point of silly word problems in math homework. They aren't silly because educators are disconnected with the real world, and they aren't disrespecting you either. They are silly precisely to convey the point that the words do not matter...much in the same way that the name of an algebraic variable does not matter.
The Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem, the Chinese Postman problem, and the Traveling Salesman problem are all silly word problems with a seeming disconnect from reality. And yet huge and seemingly insurmountable problems can be solved using them by employing a technique that is often called Projection: You take a problem you know but can't solve and project it onto a similar problem you know and can solve.
Using this technique, not only could you take an NP-Complete production scheduling problem and project it into a basic integer linear program that can be solved trivially using the simplex algorithm with cutting planes and column generation...but you could also develop the simplex algorithm itself, just as Dantzig did.
Math teachers that formulate their homework problems in terms that are immediately applicable to the real world may be more successful in getting people interested in mathematics, but if they reduce their homework problems to just those that are "real world" enough to be interesting to wandering minds, they risk destroying the creativity to solve real world problems that are actually hard. That would be a much bigger disrespect to the student than anything the author has ever experienced.
Keep in mind that how you view the world reflects not only on the world, but on yourself as well.
Another way to say it may be, if you can't see how dumb you were as a kid, have you really learned anything?
I'm not making a value judgment on that and say it is good or bad, but learning how to power through some crap work you dont like because someone told you to is a good life skill. Should we design our whole education system around learning that one life skill? No, probably not. But that skill isn't worthless.
Then you enter the workforce.....
How can we ensure that students gifts are acknowledged and nurtured? How can we make our subjects as relevant as possible?
"I don’t know what I would have become if my gifts had been acknowledged and nurtured rather than ignored." Boohoo. Two tears in a bucket. No one in this life owes you anything. The only person that ignored your gifts was you, and now you are making excuses for yourself. If you had worked harder in school, then you would have nurtured your gifts.
Respect is earned, and after read that post, I can't imagine anyone worth their salt giving the author any respect.
However I agree that this article sounds whiny, especially when it comes to the phrase you quoted. But if we look at the bigger picture the author is drawing, we can acknowledge that Education is not only about college students, it's also about students in primary and secondary school and even high school. At these levels students won't have the critical-thinking and I-will-do attitude you are talking about, they need guidance from the system. They need that the system teach them how to respect themselves by example by respecting them in the first place.
Even ignoring the "Did you get the memo about cover sheets for the TPS reports?" level of bullshit people still face a lot of bureaucracy at work and school should be helping them learn ways to deal with it.