Re: The Culture Wars Go to High School

On Thu, 04 Aug 2005 19:23:13 -0500, David Friedman
<ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>In article <mec4f115ho4t6dg9p7aegrhakip0270ggq@xxxxxxx>,
> Joyce Reynolds-Ward <jrw@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 03 Aug 2005 23:52:24 -0500, David Friedman
>> <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> snip
>>
>> >> Stories, yes, but what about nonfiction reading, as well as coming up
>> >> with the sort of analysis we now ask kids to come up with on tests,
>> >> both in-school as required by No Child Left Behind here in the US, and
>> >> the SAT verbals?
>> >
>> >1. Is that sort of analysis worth coming up with? If not, we shouldn't
>> >be requiring it. I am quite willing to believe that there are things not
>> >worth learning that kids only learn if you make them, but I don't think
>> >that supports your point.
>>
>> Depends. Do you think inferential comprehension of reading material
>> is important? Do you think being able to look analytically at a
>> persuasive passage and figure out not only that the author is biasing
>> their writing but how it's being biased is important?
>
>Absolutely. And my kids got that in part through conversation--when they
>were little I made bad arguments that they could see through and point
>out the errors in, which both they and I found entertaining--and reading
>books such as _How to Lie With Statistics_. No formal training involved,
>home or school.

I disagree. That *is* a form of formal training, David, whether you
want to admit it or not. It hearkens back to an older form of formal
training, that of tutorial training. But you set up opportunities to
learn, structured the learning experience, set it up so that they
could learn it at their level--um, that's formal. You exposed them to
books such as _How to Lie with Statistics_. That's formal learning,
of the sort that those of us who want to see our kids advance do.
That is not a norm among many families (except, perhaps, for those
here in rasff, but then again, by our very nature we're not in the
norms). It's very similar to what I've done at home with my own child
in various situations. Just because you didn't sit down and pronounce
it "school time" doesn't mean formal instruction wasn't happening.


"Informal," on the other hand, is unplanned, unorganized, and done on
the fly.


snip

>But the way you learn it isn't by having an authority figure tell you
>"this is objective and this is propaganda." It's by being involved,
>whether as participant or involved observer, in controversies, and
>seeing the irrefutable proof by one side refuted by the other. Over and
>over.

It also means that you look at past examples and compare them to the
history of specific events. World War II propaganda on all sides and
comparing the sides is a good one.

>One of the things I like about the web as education is that it's an
>obviously unfiltered medium, so anyone with any sense realizes he has to
>figure out for himself how to tell what to believe. One of the things I
>don't like about school as education is that large parts of it involve
>teaching the student to believe what the teacher or textbook tells
>him--when either might be biased, ignorant, or even dishonest.

And, of course, this is a totally bias-free statement, right....

>
>> >2. I cannot remember being taught comprehension in any serious
>> >sense--but I read a lot. If comprehension is what the SAT verbal tests,
>> >then I think an 800, before or just after my sixteenth birthday,
>> >provides adequate evidence that I could do it.
>>
>> Did you do any worksheets as part of your early school training?
>
>Not that I can recall. I learned to read before it was taught in school,
>skipped second grade as a result, and was generally reading well ahead
>of school stuff from then on. I would have regarded work sheets as make
>work, but don't actually remember any.
>
>> Any analysis where you were guided toward what to look for?
>
>I cannot recall learning anything having to do with reading in school.
>Certainly I talked about things with my father, which was training in
>thinking and arguing, but not specifically in reading.

There you go.

>> >3. I do nonfiction writing. I don't want readers who have been taught
>> >comprehension. I want readers who can think, and are interested in what
>> >I am writing.
>>
>> Sigh. Part of that thinking process *is* comprehension, David, and
>> not everyone gets that analytical process intuitively.
>
>Could be--as I said earlier, my strong point is that your claims can't
>be true of everyone, because I know people for whom they are false. I
>suspect that they aren't true of most people, but on much weaker
>evidence.

Only thing is, I can mirror your statement back to you, and have seen
but currently can't put my hands on the evidence to support my
version.

When you discuss education, you are always going to have outliers.
The danger for those of us who are highly literate, and have limited
exposure to people outside our literate circles, is that we take
ourselves to be the norm.

I don't think we are.

>
>Do you think people have to be taught comprehension wrt oral
>communication as well?

Some people do--and they are not autistic, either. It's not so much
details of meaning as it is the shaded nuances of social behavior,
both verbal and non-verbal. It really depends upon the degree to
which people have been exposed to a variety of environments. For
example, several years ago I attended a 4-H workshop where the
presenter, an Extension agent from a rural county, talked about the
need of teaching kids how to dress and communicate in differing social
situations. At that time, I hadn't thought about that as a necessity
or that kids might be in families that didn't automatically know what
"business casual" meant as opposed to "casual dress" (and yes, it
extended from appropriate dress to appropriate social conversation).

It all depends upon exposure.

>
>...
>
>> >But those problems aren't solved by teaching comprehension, as if it
>> >were a general purpose skill. They are solved by learning to understand
>> >things.
>>
>> Which *is* what comprehension teaching *is,* David.
>
>If that is what it is, then "reading comprehension" has nothing in
>particular to do with reading. Is that correct? Are you using the term
>to describe teaching people how to think clearly? That's a useful skill,
>although I'm not sure one that can be taught in the classroom.

Reading comprehension is an aspect of teaching people how to think
clearly, and yes, it's possible to make a stab at teaching it formally
in the classroom through starting with formal structures, then
teaching how to generalize those structures to other situations.


>> >Does _The Selfish Gene_ (evolutionary biology) count as a reasonable
>> >equivalent? My daughter read and comprehended that at about age twelve,
>> >and her previous "formal scientific instruction" would have consisted
>> >mostly of conversations with her parents and reading Willy Ley essays.
>
>> I have not read that book, so must ask this: was this written as a
>> popular book, or as a formal scientific text?
>
>As a popular book for intelligent adults--so at a rather more advanced
>level than an elementary or high school textbook. The author is one of
>the leading people in the field.

>From what you have said previously about your conversations with your
children, I suspect those conversations were closer to formal
instruction than you realize.
snip

>My current reading of the situation--part of what makes the thread
>interesting to me--is that you are an intelligent person who has been
>brainwashed by her professional culture into greatly overestimating the
>importance of that profession's work. If we were in a society where
>children were routinely taken from their parents as infants to be taught
>how to talk and walk, the profession would be convinced that most
>children could never learn those skills without properly trained
>instructors--and would reject contrary evidence as anecdotes describing
>a small minority of especially talented children.

What makes this thread interesting to me is that you have so clearly
been indoctrinated into a particular philosophy with regard to how
people learn and develop, and you exhibit many of the classic
presuppositions of someone of that mindset. I hesitate to use the
word "brainwash" because I think it's a bit strong, but yes, I do
believe that people from your point of view tend to exhibit
characteristics of True Believers when discussing your particular
philosophy. Some of those True Believers happen to be members of the
same professional culture I inhabit--John Gatto is a primary example,
but others exist.

What you have demonstrated, especially in this post, however, are
classic examples of "scaffolding" or "zone of proximal development"
(Vygotsky is the main support here) learning methodology as applied
both to yourself by your parents and in return to your children by
you. The scaffolding theory holds that people learn best when
supported throughout the learning process by knowledgable guides.
That is not the same thing as the theory you profess, which is more
akin to a Piagetian view based upon children as independent explorers.

>
>I will happily concede the possibility that there are some children who
>benefit by being made to read a book and then to answer questions about
>it--how many I don't know. I'm not sure if you are willing to concede
>the possibility that for many children, that process makes them less
>likely to view reading books as something they want to do and ends with
>lower levels of reading skill than if you simply left the children
>alone, aside from pointing them in the direction of books they were
>likely to enjoy.

I'm not as strict a Piagetian. I tend toward a Vygotskyian point of
view. I think that the quality of the process is more important than
the process itself, and to some extent learning needs to have some
degree of guidance--the degree itself determined by the ability of the
learner (if all schooling could be done on a tutorial level rather
than mass groups, I think we'd see vast improvements. I don't see us
as a society willing to make that kind of investment in learning.)

>
>I think we both agree that parental involvement is important. But your
>view seems to be that it is almost never sufficient, unless it takes the
>form of formal instruction by the parent. Mine is that if parental
>involvement is sufficiently absent, instruction in school may provide,
>to some degree, a substitute.

I do not think you realize the degree to which formal parental
instruction takes place in the examples you cite.

jrw

.