Beyond School

“I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates. In fact, I promise that I shall not examine them on what they have read.”
–E.H. Gombrich, preface to the Turkish edition of A Little History of the World

Schooly History: Neither Forest nor Trees (or, “History as Test-Garbage In, Test, Test-Garbage Out”)

I’m tutoring a couple of Korean students home for the summer from their Oregon high school. Like many English language learners, they’re wonderfully bright, but challenged by the readability level of their assigned  high school texts. And like many students generally, all their years of schooling in history have failed to equip them with any coherent understanding of the flow of history at all.

This I’ve confirmed with almost all students (not just English Language Learners) in high school classrooms over the years by doing this simple exercise: Scramble the major periods of history in a random cluster on the board or a handout - you know, “Medieval Period,” “Cold War,” “Roman Empire,” “Enlightenment,” “Age of Exploration,” “Classical Greece,” “Industrial Revolution,” “Greek Heroic Age/Trojan War,” “Renaissance,” “Sumer,” “Solomon Builds the Jewish Temple,” “Scientific Revolution,” “Alexander the Great,” “World War I and II,” “Mohammed and Islam,” “The Crusades,” “Egyptian Pharoahs,” “The Reformation,” “Buddha,” “The Romantic Era,” “The Catholic Church Begins,” “Confucius.” (We can quibble about this list, of course, but for now play along.)

Then tell the students: “Make a list in which you place these major historical events and periods in the correct chronological order.  Then, write the approximate dates you think each one took place or began.”

Then wander the room monitoring the students’ progress. In almost all cases, depending on your personality, you’ll either laugh or weep. It’s not unusual to see the Industrial Revolution occurring before the Middle Ages, the Holocaust during the Enlightenment, and Columbus before Confucius. Stalin was a Renaissance Man. What a muddle.

I tried this on my “advanced placement” seniors this year, and the above description fits (again, there were about two exceptions). Whatever history they’d learned seemed to be garbage in for the test, then garbage out.

Penetrating the Students to Reach the Learners

I recommend doing this with students, because in my experience, it opens up a wonderful space for asking, “How could you have gone through more than a decade of schooling and remember - or understand - so little of what you were supposedly taught of the story of our species on this planet?”

The nice thing about this conversation is that it leads wonderfully into the follow-up: “You’re about to graduate and become adults. You won’t have many more chances to get your head around this story, which truly educated adults should know. If I promise that this 5,000 year old story is really pretty easy to learn and know - as a story - do you want to take this opportunity (possibly your last) to learn it?”

The refreshing thing: By a wide margin, the answer is a very sincere “Yes.”  This conversation seems to penetrate the thick defenses against schoolwork that students have built up over the years, and get them in touch with that part of us that simply doesn’t want to be ignorant about basic things like history. It’s a wonderfully ironic “a-ha” moment that, if subtitled in a film, would read, “How the hell did I remain so ignorant of all this stuff after having it crammed into me for all these years? What a debacle! What a charade, my high GPA!”

History Teacher as Epic Bard, Students as Bardic Apprentices

At that point, the 5,000 year story of history has what it needs to be enjoyed: an eager audience, and (we pray) a skillful story-teller (I’d like to be humble here, but I know my strengths as well as my¹ weaknesses, and telling the story of the last 5,000 years as a narrative, as the real Greatest Story Ever Told - full of gut laughter, wistful “what ifs,” amazing characters and events, philosophical wonder, and chains of cause and effect over centuries, over millennia, all liberally peppered with audience-participation requests for predictions, connections to earlier episodes, summaries of why Marx couldn’t have come earlier than the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment couldn’t have come before the Renaissance, on and on - that is one of my strengths).

But hearing the story, being mere audience, isn’t enough to learn it.  Like the bards that kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive through several centuries of the Greek “Dark Age,” during which reading and writing disappeared, and the story lived through oral transmission from older to younger storytellers, the students need to rehearse what they’ve heard from teacher - and a simple, low-tech way for them to do that is simply to re-tell the story they’re hearing, episode by episode, as simple written narrative summaries.¹

Back to the two students I’m tutoring: Today we just concluded our last class together. Over the course of two or three hours of this story-telling for each of twelve days, they’ve gone from the muddle above to being able to tell the story of five millennia, with approximately correct dates, causal connections, main players and events - and with enthusiasm. That’s roughly how long it took Homeric bards to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey.

I share this simply because I find it wonderful, but vexingly difficult to implement in the school setting. In schools, bells would have stopped the story. Other classes would have choked and vitiated the story’s roots with competing homework. Large class sizes would have made the constant comprehension-checking conversations impossible - unless one of you can suggest a way to pull it off, for which I’m all ears.

I know it’s not fair that all students can’t afford this kind of private education - but I wonder if a different approach to delivering it (YouTube presentations?) might not narrow that unjust gap.  But besides that, I just discovered a book that comes very close to that “bardic” approach to narrative history.

E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World: The Big Picture for Little People, English Language Learners, and Historically Clueless Adults

Gombrich is deservedly acclaimed for his majestic The Story of Art, which was my college art history textbook; but he wrote A Little History of the World for children. The results are overall wonderful: the readability level, lexically and syntactically, is appropriate for eight-year-olds, but better still, so is the tone. By tailoring his story for that toughest of audiences, eight-year-olds - too young to pimp for grades and too alive to endure boredom - Gombrich succeeds at restoring the wonders of storytelling to world history, in a way that has both entertained me and, better still, clarified for me some of the basic stories and their significance to the bigger story. Best of all, he refuses to underrate his audience by refusing to dumb history down; the waters stay deep, but because they’re unmuddied by too many names, dates, and ten-dollar words, they’re clearer too. They never lose track of the storyline. (To see just how “deep” this history is, check out this commentary on the controversy it has caused between conservatives and progressives in England. And I’ll add my own little cavil: Gombrich seems to lose his objectivity when treating Judeo-Christianity as history, implying more metaphysical truth in it than in the other world religions he discusses. But maybe I’m just sensitive that way.)

So whether you’re a homeschooler, a parent wanting your child (and maybe yourself) to know history better, or a teacher with a textbook at frustration readability level (or pedantry level) for some or all of your students, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s almost 300 pages long, and a total page-turner for me.

And best of all: If you failed that little history challenge above, I guarantee you you’ll pass it after reading this book. The story takes care of the plot in such a clear, lucid way that you’ll never again reverse Romans and Romantics.

Bonus Video: The Perfect Prehistoric Introduction

My students spent the night in our apartment last night, and we had dinner and a movie night. I couldn’t resist showing them “The Dawn of Man,” the 20-odd minute prelude of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as I’ve done at the beginning of so many history and literature classes in schools.  It’s a stunningly realistic “Genesis for moderns,” as I see it, complete with the (technological) “Fall of Man” and Darwinian “Cain and Abel” story. Just stunning. Enjoy:

(Thanks to Christopher Sessums for tweeting me the link.)

—

¹ For you techies out there, I will add that my favorite unit design since I drank the digital koolaid employed videotaping students telling the story to class in pairs, episode by episode, and embedding those videos in a student-created wiki history textbook (scroll to bottom for student lectures) a couple of years ago; they also rehearsed all the episodes, not just the ones they orally re-presented, by summarizing them - as stories - in Moodle forums. In retrospect, this local, low-key unit seems more valuable than the splashier global collaborations these same students did in other units - and danah boyd’s findings that teens just aren’t very interested in connecting with strangers in global collaborations - because they’re more keen to extend their face-to-face school relationships with these tools instead - seems to explain this phenomenon. I was far more abuzz about global collaboration than my students, and I didn’t get it until I watched danah’s presentation on YouTube a few weeks ago.  Oh what the heck: here it is. danah starts in the middle third, wearing the wool cap:

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1. many [↩]

Now that I’ve left schooling, it’s wonderful to explore things for teaching. Case in point: Annenberg Media / Learner.org’s A Biography of America series.  It’s an astonishingly media-rich 26-part series - count ‘em, 26 half-hour PBS episodes featuring leading US historians, plus transcripts of each episode, plus interactive maps, photos, primary sources, and more for each episode - that covers US history from pre-Columbian times to the present.  And it’s free.

(Click screenshot for full-size view, including “chapter” headings.)

Can somebody remind me why, with free online resources like this, schools are spending tens of thousands of dollars on short-shelf-life textbooks, often dumbed-down and intellectually neutered (or worse, downright propagandistic)  due to the textbook industry’s fear of alienating their biggest markets in conservative Texas and California?

[Update: I should have mentioned that the US History resources are only one example of Learner.org's offerings. They have full-year courses in just about every subject area imaginable, k-college, plus professional development courses for teachers. Browse them here. Amazingly good use of US tax dollars at work via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.]

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They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within.
–Leonard Cohen

The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking their children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. The teacher and the students got to know one another. They interacted constantly throughout the day. The teacher knew each child, had a clear vision of each child’s understanding of the coursework, and worked with each child (or encouraged them to work with each other) until the teacher was satisfied each child understood the material … or was hopelessly incapable of being educated. Because this latter was virtually an admission of failure on the part of the teacher, it happened rarely.

When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with a prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them.

This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD. Then came William Farish.

Source: Thom Hartmann*, Complete Guide to ADHD, quoted on Pathfinder Academy’s “Why Doesn’t Your School Give Grades?” (cached version)

I surfed into the above article while reading Charlie A. Roy’s “Grades, Grades and More Grades!” post on his Souly Catholic HS blog. (Theologically, Charlie and I couldn’t be more opposed; humanly, I feel very close to him, enjoying his thoughts and writings, and our dialogues. There’s something about that I like very much.)

The Hartmann excerpt seems to answer a question about which Doug Noon, Jennifer Orr, and I tweeted several weeks ago, as the above screenshot shows: What are the origins and history of grading in modern education?

If Hartmann’s research is correct, the bad smell of grading comes from its rotten historical roots: grading was invented by one William Farish, a lazy teacher who invented grading in order to increase his class size, decrease the necessity for teachers to have real relationships with their students, and fatten his income. Hartmann explains (emphases added):

Around the turn of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was going full-bore. Piece-work payments were becoming increasingly popular, and many schools were beginning to pay teachers based on the number of students they had, as opposed to a flat salary.

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn.

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were “up to grade.” It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.)

• Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed whose style of learning didn’t match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.
• Grades didn’t give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter.
• Grades didn’t encourage critical thinking or insight skills, didn’t promote questioning minds. Such behaviors are useless in the graded classroom, and within a few generations were considered so irrelevant that today they’re no longer listed among the goals of public education.
• Grades didn’t stimulate the students, or share with them a contagious love for the subject being studied. The opposite happened, in fact, as the normative effect of grades acted as a muffling blanket to any eruptions of enthusiasm, any attempts to dig deeper into a topic, any discursions into larger significance or practical application of content.

What grades did do, however, was increase the salary of William Farish, while, at the same time, lowering his workload and reducing the hours he needed to spend in the classroom. He no longer needed to burrow into his students’ minds to know if they understood a topic: his grading system would do it for him. And it would do it just as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred.

Farish brought grades to the classroom, and the transformation was both sudden and startling: a revolution as rapid and overwhelming as the Industrial Revolution from which it had sprung. Within a generation, the lecture-hall/classroom shifted from a place where one heard the occasional speech by a famous thinker to the place of ordinary daily instruction.

While grades didn’t help students a bit - and, in fact, had the now well-known effect of “dumbing down” entire nations - they vastly simplified the work of teachers and schools. So they spread across Europe and to America with startling speed, arriving here in the early 1800s.

Without grades, the assembly-line-classroom would not be possible. With grades, whole categories of children were discovered who didn’t fit onto the conveyer belt, providing an entire new realm of employment for’ adults who would diagnose, treat, and remediate these newly-discovered “learning disabled” children.

Responsibility for the success of learning shifted from teachers to students: when kids failed, it was their own fault, because they obviously had a defect or disorder of some sort.

A process of sorting and discarding the misfits began (just like in the shoe factory) which, to this day, rewards the “standard” and wounds the “different.”

William Farish gained, but something precious was lost to generations of students thereafter: the mentored learning experience.

Stop and think about all of this.

We’re so aghast at “the pointlessness,” as Jen puts it, of grading, that we don’t step back for a wider view of grading’s evil twin: over-sized classrooms. We’ve become so accustomed to the historical accident of large-scale factory schools that we take it as “second nature,” not contingent and therefore changeable artifice, that teachers are expected to adequately educate one or two hundred students each week. So complete is our acceptance of factory schooling, we consider classes of twenty “small” when, I would argue, even twenty students for an hour is a recipe for poor learning - come on, do the math: one teacher teaching twenty students for an hour equals three minutes of individual attention maximum. Multiply that “small class” by the typical five-class schedule, and you have one teacher expected to somehow know and mentor 100 individuals through daily and weekly learning.

I said much the same thing in the comment I left on Charlie’s post:

It’s eye-opening that the whole purpose of grades was to increase class size so teachers could earn more by “teaching” more students at a time.

To me, class size is the other damnable impediment to effective teaching-and-learning. As an acquaintance in California shared with me recently: “1 teacher, 30 students: You do the math.” It’s impossible to effectively teach more than a handful of students - I’d say five to ten - and grading doesn’t solve the problem.

We need to expand the “radical” critique beyond Kohn’s anti-grade crusade to include an anti-large class size campaign as well.

Large class sizes plus the GPA game transforms students into grade-junkies, and teachers into mere graders. My evidence: I’ve had about 50 students ask to meet to discuss their grade this year, and how they can raise it. I’ve had three ask to meet to discuss how to write better, read poetry better, or otherwise “learn from teacher.” My take-away: they see me as a grade-giver, and school as an instrument for getting them into college, not a place to learn.

In a second comment responding to Charlie’s attempt to “wrap [his] mind around what the typical high school experience would look like without grades,” I added this:

[Y]our cry for “help” seems hopeless because you say you’re trying to envision a “typical high school experience without grades.”

Any high school without grades is not typical, right? And any high school with teacher-student ratios below 1:10 also atypical.

So to me, the problem is that typical high schools can’t work. But the Kohn article you link to suggests otherwise.

This all connects to the decision I announced yesterday to “stop working for schools so I can teach.” Some of the comments I’ve received suggest that people have defined schools as a necessary ingredient in the definition of “teaching,” and I can’t say loudly enough that that is an historical error of the largest proportions: as Hartmann states above, teachers from Socrates and Buddha to Jesus and Abelard to modern times - until that damned William Farish invented grades - were occupied with the job of helping a manageable number of learners learn to think and do through human interaction, not through grading.

Things are so bad now that we call professional graders “teachers,” when the two couldn’t be farther apart. Another comment, this time from my “Saying Goodbye” post yesterday, in response to Vejraska, who (dubiously, I say in unfeigned humility) lamented, “Another outstanding force in the arena of formal teaching leaves, and may I say that the educational system will blink and move on, while many kids will miss out on something so special.” I replied:

The students will blink and move on too. And the loss is not great - I work at the most expensive school in Korea, for the very privileged only, so it’s not like I was playing a noble role as a life-saver for the needy, the way public schoolteachers do.

I like your phrasing, though, of the loss being to “formal education.” It made me latch onto the opposite - informal education - as a decent working title for what education has always been when it was good, and before grades came onto the scene 210 years ago and ruined everything.

Informal education - “Let’s talk about your writing.” “Let’s talk about history.” “What do you think about This or That? Why?” Socratic. Mentoring. Apprenticing. Talking. Trying this and that. Playing. No bells, no grades. Knowing each other for more than 9-month terms - because so much is only ready to be learned when the class comes to an end.

On and on.

Thanks again, all. I’m excited to try teaching for real, unadministered. When your students (or their parents) can fire you for unsatisfactory work, think of the improved service you’ll give. And double that, when you think of being able to choose your students, and fire them for similar breach of learning. Awesome prospects.

In closing, for now, I’ll add a huge irony: here in Korea, parents long ago demonstrated their loss of faith in mass education factory classrooms by sending their children to night and weekend schools for more individualized learning in smaller classrooms. Schoolteachers are literally considered less important than after-school tutors when it comes to their children’s learning. These tutors do not fill out report cards and gradebooks, but they do teach their students with dedication in these private classes.

The irony? I don’t blame the parents. They’ve done the math too. Small classes with real teacher-student interaction are surely more effective than large class sizes beyond the school-teacher’s means to intimately connect with.

This may anger a lot of people, but I’m outside the box enough to expect that: I think the parents are right, though I decry the over-scheduling of their children with these extra classes. In the past, I complained that parents should drop the night and weekend classes for their children, and let the day school do its job. Now, though? I think the opposite. It’s the 40-hour day-school week that seems the bigger waste of time.

And we have that revolutionary grading and too-large classroom charlatan, William Farish, to blame. Him, and the schools that adopted his method in order to create more business by bloating education with more paying students than they could ever classically teach.

So for the record: I’m not leaving teaching; I’m leaving schooling.

—

*Thom, if you read this, I’m definitely ordering your book. And your radio show looks golden.

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In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“

–the logic of the above quote is sloppy, in my view. Both sides are right: How can we argue with the Postmodernist insight into the basic “constructedness” of all (yes, all) texts? Textual narratives are written by individuals with biases, blind spots, no direct experience, limited sources, and other imperfections. So any historical or biographical narrative, from Gilgamesh to the Gospels to Tacitus to Thomas Friedman, is indeed, as the postmodernists claim, “based on the personal interpretation of sources,” and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism and the need for evidence and logic.

But Evans is also right to “defend the worth of history.” It’s silly to think otherwise. That historians are neither omniscient, neutral, or infallible does not mean that history is unknown or unknowable. The evidence from the past - those letters, journals, books, artifacts, ruins, buildings, maps, and all the rest that we call “primary sources” - attests to the basic facticity of a person or event. Socrates existed and was executed in Athens: this seems safe to say, based on evidence from various sources of the time. But the person of Socrates, his character? Plato says “hero,” Aristophanes says “charlatan,” and a modern philosopher says “anti-democratic villain.” One person, Socrates, is defined differently by three different narrators’ personal (and “scholarly”) interpretations of him. And thinking about those interpretations, and ideally creating our own, does have value for us. Pity any democracy, for example, that is ignorant of Hitler’s fear- and anger-mongering manipulation of German voters to get himself legally appointed dictator. (In other words, pity Bush/Cheney’s United States?)

Again, the point: We need history, but we also need to understand the methods and practices of the historian - the search for evidence, its evaluation and selection, its literal “weaving” into, or omission from, narrative “text.”

Schools, as usual, generally score an F-minus in teaching students this “constructedness” of history. They’re too busy stuffing their victims’ heads with the names, dates, and summaries - the “facts” - that those victims will then be tested on. (In most cases, said victims will remember their test grades far longer than they’ll remember the content, since schools largely teach that grades are more important than learning.)

Anyway, this is a round-about intro to a comment thread I’ve been enjoying on Will Richardson’s recent “My Blogging Legacy” post. In that poignantly mind-bending post, Will imagines his children, after he himself has passed away,

. . . . turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.

At a certain point, I riffed off Will’s idea, then Christopher Sessums chimed in with this:

I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).

I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?

Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.

Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.

I shot back,

And Christopher, to throw the irresistible local flavor from East Asia in: how will these “ghost blogs” meld with Confucian ancestor worship? The laptop (or holograph) next to the photo of the deceased blogger-ancestor on the altar, behind the incense and candles?

Then Chris wrote:

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).

. . . . I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.

Then I riffed back with a fantasy history or non-fiction writing assignment - biographical writing, specifically. Since Chris then offered - threatened? - to “kiss” me in response (and though I virtually slapped him, I was flattered), I figure I’ll post that assignment idea here. I do think it’s cool enough, honestly, to pass on to any history or non-fiction writing teachers out there. Here it is:

A History Assignment I’d Like to See:

Chris, A belated Eureka-riff re: your “distributed identity”: a creative, project-based biography-writing or historiography teacher or professor could do some cool stuff treating our already-distributed online personae as “primary sources” from which student historians or biographers had to draw to construct a representation of us.

*INHALE*

What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in which X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”

I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.

It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection/omission choices and subjective bents.

Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.*

Wouldn’t that be cool? And wouldn’t students learn just how slippery history and biography are by comparing their different narrative constructions? And wouldn’t they learn, sidewise, about how revealing they can be with their online identities, when others decide to sift through them like this, and possibly think twice about what they reveal in all future posts?

—

(*Speaking of that writer’s block, it’s due to many factors: the Project Global Cooling concert went off quite successfully in a downtown Seoul nightclub last weekend, but was exhausting to pull off; I’m in the midst of moving into a new apartment; the last-weeks-of-school madness is full swing; my Airport Express wireless is wonky in my apartment; I’m changing my immigration status; my mother-in-law is still recovering from her stroke; and I’m leaving my school to take a year’s sabbatical, without pay, which necessitates its own host of preparations. Can you say “full plate”? But life is full, anyway, and I’m excited.)

Image: Quite Puzzling by Cayusa

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[Before I launch into the statistics, I want to urge you to watch the YouTube video at the bottom of this post. It's a beautiful testament to the scientific method. In it, a scientist proves Darwin right on a hypothesis that, when Darwin was alive, earned him ridicule. The proof took 150 years to come to light - and it does so in that video.]

Damned Statistics

The crisis in scientific illiteracy should be a well-known fact to educated Americans, but just in case, a few statistics from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center’s 1991-93 International Social Survey Program (ISSP):

• Percentage Saying “I know God exists and I have no doubts about it”
  • United States: 62.8% - ranks 3rd under the Philippines and Poland. (Britain, by comparison, ranks 13th at 23.8%, and even Israel is less certain about this “knowledge,” at 43%, than the U.S.)
• Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe “The Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be taken literally, word for word”
  • United States: 33.5% - ranks 3rd, again under the Philippines and Poland. (Again, Britain, by comparison, ranks 17th at 8%, and Israel ranks 6th at 26.7%.)
• Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “The Devil”
  • United States: a whopping 44.5% - ranks 1st, this time, right above the Philippines and Poland. (Britain, by comparison, ranks 10th at 12.7%, and Israel ranks 11th at 12.6%.)
• Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “Hell”
  • United States: a whopping 49.6% - ranks 1st, again, right above Northern Ireland and the Philippines. (Britain, with 12.8%, ranks 10th, while Israel ranks 5th at 22.5%.)
• Percentage Saying They Definitely Believe in “Religious Miracles”
  • United States ranks first, at 45.6%, above Northern Ireland and Ireland. (Britain ranks 13th with 15.3%, and Israel ranks 7th with only 26.4%.)

I frame these statistics in terms of “scientific illiteracy” because it seems clear that a basic understanding of what we mean by “knowing” (as opposed to “having faith”) is lacking among those saying they “know God exists.” Similarly, those who “definitely believe” in the ontological reality of “the Devil,” “Hell,” and “Religious Miracles” betray a lack of understanding of what, in the International Baccalaureate program’s “Theory of Knowledge” class, we call “Justified True Belief.” (How is “definite” belief any different, subjectively, than believing we “know,” since “definite” implies no doubt?). Finally, the fundamentalist belief that every word of the Bible is “literally” true, as I read it, suggests a belief that the contradictory creation myths in that book’s first two pages (Genesis Books 1 and 2) are to be taken as scientific, cosmological explanations on the level of contemporary physics.

The ISSP survey seems to corroborate my “scientific illiteracy” frame by including in its survey questions that measure each respondent’s understanding of basic evolutionary theory:

• Ranking of 21 Nations on Knowledge Question about Human Evolution:

The United States, as you can see, finished dead last out of 21 countries. A 44% grade on this national science test literally shows that America scores an “F” on its report card for science class. (Britain gets a C, and non-monotheistic Japan and then-Soviet satellite E. Germany score a solid B-. Remarkable, when you remember this is a survey of the general populace, and not just the educated elite.)

I know this data is 15 years old, but more recent data from 2005, as I’ve reported before, shows “that the United States ranks next to last in acceptance of evolution theory among [34] nations polled,” and “that the number of Americans who are uncertain about the theory’s validity has increased over the past 20 years.” We beat Turkey in that study, but Bulgaria beat us.

A Testament to Science and Darwin’s Prophecy Hypothesis Come True

Just watch it. Science teachers and Theory of Knowledge teachers, your students should love this:

Two Short Stories: Why I’m Writing This

There’s so much muddying of the scientific waters from proponents of Creationism and Intelligent Design going on in America. Many of our edubloggers are guilty of that. In my book, no responsible progressive will stay silent and cede the battle for scientific literacy to the forces of medievalism out a sense of social niceness. The stakes are too vital. Call me a crusader for knowledge - or just call me a teacher.

Besides that, I had two recent experiences that struck me with enough force to mention them here:

One: The Neglected Healer

My mother-in-law suffered a catastrophic stroke last Sunday morning. My wife and I rushed to the hospital and joined her family in the Intensive Care Unit in what we thought was our final goodbye to that sweet woman. (She survived, thank goodness, though twice the doctors told us her chances were less than 20%.)

After saying the only words I figured this Korean woman, who speaks no English, would understand - “We love you. It’s okay. We love you. It’s okay.” - I stepped back to let the other family members in.

Two of them bent over her and started praying intensely in Korean. I listened to the “hallelujah’s” and “amen’s” with my ears as I watched the I.V. tubes and medical monitors with my eyes.

Right afterward, the surgeon who’d just operated on my mother-in-law’s brain spoke to the entire family. They hung on his every word. When he was finished, I saw no indication of gratitude or thanks to this man who, through the power of science, had just opened my mother-in-law’s skull and saved her life with science’s healing hands.

I don’t mean to attack prayer here. I simply mean to point out that science saved this woman. Her family didn’t take her to a priest for healing. Yet they gave credit to the priest’s paradigm instead of the scientist’s.

I wish I had a Korean translation of cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett’s beautiful essay, “Thank Goodness,” written after surviving

a nine-hour surgery, in which [his] heart was stopped entirely and [his] body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping

so I could share it with that doctor. (See this post - one of my favorites on this blog - for more on that.)

Two: The Medieval “A” Students

My “Advanced Placement” seniors - 18-year-olds now, ending their K-12 education presumably ready to enter many of America’s “elite” (if you believe the hype) universities - and I recently had a class discussion about what scientists are projecting about the future of our planet. One of the students brought up the prophecies of Nostradamus, and how they’ve been “proven true” - according to something she saw on TV, I think. All the other students in the class chimed in with the same enthusiastic credulity about Nostradamus as the first student. There were no skeptical rebuttals.

I was aghast.

That moment was not uncommon. I’m tempted to say, when it comes to evidence that schools succeed in training students to think critically, that that moment was the norm. (Other teachers, please weigh in here. Is my case different from yours?)

It left me wondering how, after 12 years of daily incarceration and nightly homework, even the students with the highest grades show such an inability to think. The easy answer, as regular readers who know me will predict I’d say, is that the students aren’t thinking about learning all these years, but about making grades.

What answers do you have?

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Photo: secular, non-secular, non sequitur by Dean Forbes

Related: All posts tagged “Religion“

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