Educational policy is the most difficult task any society encounters
Any essay that attempts to discuss the fundamentals of education policy should start with the statement above.
Successful policies tend to be made under the following conditions, in approximate order of importance:-
1) Factors influencing the policy have changed little for a long time. For example, most people have a highly successful policy on breathing, because neither the need to breathe nor the availability of oxygenated air have changed significantly for the last fifty million years. Many people have a much harder time implementing a successful policy on eating, because the availability of high-energy, easily digested food has risen markedly in the last fifty years.
2) The people making the policy are the same people who are affected by the policy. For example, a higher proportion of children than retirees live in poverty in the USA. Government programs such as Social Security and Medicare essentially guarantee to the vast majority of American retirees that they will live in greater comfort than anyone lived a hundred years ago WITHOUT HAVING TO GROVEL TO ANY BUREAUCRAT. No such guarantee is given to children. I have never heard a moral or cost-benefit argument why the government should be willing to pay ten thousand dollars for an operation on a terminally-ill centenarian (without a means test) but not to pay ten dollars to vaccinate a child against an infectious disease. Clearly, the main reason for the discrepancy is because retirees vote and children do not.
3) The results of a choice are quickly apparent. For example, a large number of working Americans live essentially from paycheck to paycheck. They have experienced or imagined the negative consequences of spending one paycheck before the next becomes available, and most have learned to avoid the situation. Failure to save money for retirement has consequences that appear much more slowly, so a much smaller proportion of the population achieves a successful policy here. One reason the USA is a more successful society than most is that it has been unusually creative in ways of allowing average citizens to experience intermediate successes such as saving for a TV, a car, or a house. This is an example of learning by experience, which reminds one of the wise saying “experience is the best teacher, but the course fees!’. The USA has been unusually successful at reducing those course fees. A fairly recent example was the invention of Individual Retirement Accounts, which are gradually educating millions of Americans in financial matters. The currently-proposed idea of extending individual financial choice to more Americans through modifications to the social security system is beneficial mainly through its educational value.
4) The goal-setting procedure is independent of the goal-meeting decisions. For example, in the USA, the federal government is responsible for setting safety standards for nuclear power stations, and “wicked capitalists” then design reactors to meet those standards. Many believe that breaches of this separation were responsible for the accident at Three Mile Island. It seems reasonable to believe that the separation, however imperfect, was a factor in avoiding a Chernobyl-sized accident created by a single organization of “heroic leaders of the workers”.
5)
The policy (in particular the goal) is created and put into effect by people who (a) have
knowledge related to the policy, (b) have accepted the fact that their decisions
have consequences apart from the public-relations value of the announcement, and
(c) have the skills to persuade large numbers of people to work together in
conformity to the policy. Many would choose this (5) as the most important
condition for successful policies, and I find it interesting that I cannot find a
clear-cut example of its effect. Instead I will point out what I consider to be
an example of a failure in (b). A recent school commissioner of my county began
his term of office by announcing that he would do everything he could to reduce
the difference between the test scores of black and white students. This can
obviously be done in two ways, by raising black scores or lowering white
scores. If you take him at his word, he would obviously pursue both sub-goals,
but we all know he did not intend to be taken literally. In other words, his
speech was chosen to sound politically correct, not to describe an actual
policy. It gave me no confidence that he would take effective actions to
improve my son’s education, and I was correct.
Perhaps the most obvious demonstration that (5) is the least powerful predictor
of success is that it is the routine excuse given by dictators for their failure
to implement democratic reforms, despite the increasingly obvious fact that
democratic societies are the most economically successful in the world.
The first four conditions above for a successful policy are not met by any national education system I know of, and indeed by these criteria, most educational systems are almost indistinguishable. The one exception I know of is the American university system, where a university can go bankrupt. Unlike any other industrialized country, no government or any other institution guarantees the survival of US colleges. Most of them get a significant part of their funds from alumni donations, making an extremely weak case that they meet condition (2). Also, the various accreditation organizations weakly meet condition (4). Weak as these factors look, I suggest that they underlie the ever-increasing monopoly of US colleges in Nobel prizes for science. In K-12, standardized testing has attempted to create condition (4), and it is interesting that teachers’ unions fight standardized testing specifically on those grounds: “the individual teacher knows best what her students should be taught”.
The degree to which different educational systems meet condition (5) is complex to assess. Various groups with diverse qualifications, competence, and motivations have powerful influence on the systems. The schools that meet this condition least are probably the Moslem madrassas, and most people would agree they are among the least beneficial schools in the world.
In general, conditions (1) and (3) are unalterable obstacles to an effective educational policy in any society, and their effects can only be mitigated by focusing on the other conditions. In this essay, I will explore what could be done to create conditions (2) and (4) in the long term. Condition (5) tends to be a short-term factor which is itself created or destroyed by the other conditions.
Historically, education has deeply affected the success of societies
The first philosophers whose thoughts have come down to us lived in Greek city-states about 2500 years ago. One of them, Athens, became leaderless after a particularly ruthless leader had executed all possible successors and had then been assassinated. The assassins, anxious to avoid a repetition of the same cycle, agreed to rule Athens together, voting on all important matters. Thus was born the first democracy. Its success was a great shock to the rulers of the other city-states, and probably to the assassins themselves. Most philosophers of the time found themselves unable to deny this success, although as members of the aristocracy themselves they had little sympathy for the idea, and they began to debate the conditions for success of this new form of government.
The consensus that emerged was that a democracy could only work within the confines of a single city-state. Their arguments were not quantitative, but it is clear that they envisaged about ten thousand voters and perhaps two hundred thousand total population. The voters would be self-employed adult males with strong family ties to the community. Other philosophers (notably Plato) envisaged a larger community, but rejected democracy, preferring rule by ‘philosopher-kings’.
Before the Athenian 'experiment', Greek governments seem to have been variations on the idea of a constitutional monarchy of the kind that England achieved at Runnymede, where a king ruled, but within limits set partly by established custom and partly by popular opinion.
Reading the Greek discussions in the US, with its stable democracy of three hundred million, the argument that a democracy cannot exceed ten thousand voters sounds absurd, and most modern textbooks point out that the Greeks had not invented representative democracy, in which the population votes for professional politicians, who then rule in the name of the population. I think there was a more fundamental reason for the Greek limitation: very few of the Athenian voters would have had any formal education as a schoolteacher would define it today, though most of them had achieved a degree of self-education that would embarrass most schoolteachers of today. They were able to make more or less sensible decisions about the needs of a single city, but more autocratic cities constantly complained that Athenian policy was erratic, unpredictable, and dangerous. (The Russians and Chinese make the same complaints of the US today). There was reason for Plato’s belief that uneducated voters would be unable to control a larger Polis.
Roman history provides evidence that Plato was right. Rome became a republic after eliminating its ruling family, the Tarquins. They had (roughly speaking) a bicameral legislature, one house (the Senate) for the rich, the other for the population at large. While Rome was a city-state, this worked well enough, but as Roman conquests led to ever more complex situations, the uneducated population found itself increasing unable to agree what it wanted. This enabled, or perhaps forced, the Senate to make decisions by itself, sometimes producing plausible but false reasons for their decisions. (Similarly, presidents F.D.Roosevelt, Kennedy/Johnson, and G.W.Bush have all led the US into wars while giving false accounts of the situation.) Over time this destabilized the republic, leading to slave revolts, civil wars, and ultimately to the establishment of a dictatorship. H. G. Wells, in his “Outline of History” gives a compelling argument that the lack of general education in Rome doomed the republic.
While the Roman republic was giving way to the rule of emperors, the Chinese were developing the seed of a solution, though it was far from their purpose to create a republic. Faced with the same need to govern a large empire, Confucius and others decided to choose administrators not by wealth or family, but by education. The idea of choosing employees based on the results of academic testing is now so universal that it is difficult to remember what a radical innovation this was. By creating uniform standards across a large empire, the Chinese civil service endowed the population with uniform expectations of the government; in other words it created a single culture that outlived over a thousand years of invasions, civil wars, and governments imposed from without. Indeed, barbarian conquerors found themselves forced to adapt to the people they had conquered, and especially to the civil service.
In 1600, the British East India Company began to trade with India and later China. As it began to administer more and more of India, it faced an ever-increasing demand for administrators. Those who administered England itself were chosen from the younger sons of the aristocracy, which worked less badly than one might think, because these boys had grown up helping their fathers manage their estates, so they arrived in the civil service with some experience of administration. However, there were simply not enough such people to administer India, and members of that class were unwilling to leave comfortable lives in England for a frontier existence. Faced with an insoluble problem, the company directors apparently listened to their agents returning from China, who described a country whose administrators were chosen by competitive examination.
The Chinese examinations were all about classical Chinese literature, but the company knew it had need of accountants, engineers, etc., so it hired those who passed exams in those subjects. This was the beginning of the technocratic culture of the West today. It was such an improvement over the Chinese original that within a century contact with Europeans was diminishing Chinese self-confidence and disrupting Chinese society into a downward spiral that lasted until the death of Mao in 1976.
Why did the Chinese refuse to change, even when they could see that the old ways were dooming their country and themselves? I think the answer lies in the fact that the Chinese civil service had become a self-perpetuating oligarchy. From the viewpoint of a senior civil servant, the existing system had chosen him for his eminent position, and he would be insulted at any suggestion that the selection system would be imperfect. Since only senior civil servants had any influence to change the selection procedures, no change occurred. The howls of protest from teachers unions today when any change (other than more money) is proposed show that the same factors are alive and well here and now.
Different societies answer other difficult issues in different ways, achieving different results
One problem in discussing educational policy is the lack of fundamentally different strategies around the world. Almost all education around the world is delivered by institutions whose continued existence is guaranteed by governments whether or not the institution provides any measurable benefits whatever, staffed by people with the right to choose their successors, who must show about twenty years of subservience to their predecessors to have any chance of appointment. There is a small minority of K-12 educational institutions not controlled by governments, but they exist in an environment where educational expectations are overwhelmingly set by the government-controlled self-perpetuating oligarchies. Again, US universities provide the only exception, resulting in their near monopoly of Nobel Prizes for science. Generally, to get an idea of what might work better, one must look outside the educational system for any radical improvement.
Looking at different societies as a whole, the Soviet Union was the obvious example of a society in which all activities were organized as self-perpetuating oligarchies. It is no coincidence that so much support for the Soviet Union came from the educational establishment, the greatest self-perpetuating oligarchy in the world today. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the Soviet Union failed as catastrophically as our schools are failing.
To gain a more detailed insight into what might work better, we need a part of society which many countries organize the same way they organize education, but others organize differently. The obvious example is healthcare. In most developed countries, the government organizes healthcare providers as it does education providers, guaranteeing the continued existence of all institutions that appear to be trying to provide services, whether they produce results or not. In the United States, most healthcare providers are non-government organizations that could in principle go bankrupt.
I have lived half my life in England, where universal government healthcare started, and half in the USA. One reason I stay in the USA is my fear of the British National Health Service (NHS). My parents live in England, and although they have private health insurance, even private healthcare in England only tries to be a mild improvement on the NHS, just as private schools in the USA try to be a mild improvement on the public schools.
My parents are old enough that when I visit them, there is a fair chance that they will need to visit a hospital while I am there. The first surprise to American eyes on entering an NHS hospital is the proliferation of signs warning that police are on hand to arrest any patient who abuses hospital staff. I have never seen such a sign in a US hospital. I do not believe that Britons are inherently more violent people than Americans, so the only conclusion I can come to is that NHS hospitals’ policy is to treat patients in ways that would enrage anyone. My experiences with my parents generally support this conclusion.
In 2006, while my parents and I were having lunch in a restaurant, my father, who had been complaining for some days of feeling ‘muzzy and depressed’ suddenly lost control of the muscles in half his face. I recognized this as a possible stroke, and called an ambulance. The delays before the ambulance arrived, and in the hospital before a doctor arrived, were not markedly different from US norms. (Ambulances will only take you to NHS hospitals.) The difference came after the diagnosis of Transient Ischemic Event. My father was told to go home, and a postcard would be sent to him with an appointment for an MRI scan. Meanwhile, he was forbidden to drive, in case he dropped dead behind the wheel and killed some important citizen! Nearly two months later, he finally had his MRI scan, and a month after that he was told there was no significant brain damage, and he could drive again. This is not an isolated incident – when my mother had to be taken to the NHS emergency room having collapsed with internal bleeding, she also had to wait a week for an MRI (or perhaps CAT – I forget) machine, after which the hospital finally admitted they did not know when one would be available, so they moved her to another hospital two hundred miles away, where she only had to wait another two days to find out if she was bleeding to death. I am quite certain that in both cases, had they been in the US they would have had the necessary tests within hours. (Postscript: after I wrote this, my aunt in Chicago had a TIE similar to my father's. She was given two MRI scans and a CAT scan within nine hours before being released from the emergency room with assurances that the event was over and that there would be no long-term consequences.)
In the NHS, the people who decide on how to spend money are not doctors, but bureaucrats. As C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out in his famous book ‘Parkinson’s Law’ in 1957? the primary ambition of a bureaucrat is to hire subordinate bureaucrats. In the US healthcare industry, most spending decisions are made by doctors, who would much rather spend money on machines recommended by attractive young saleswomen. Thus in Britain untold thousands of patients die while waiting for diagnosis or treatment, while in the US it is almost impossible to speak to a live human being when phoning a doctor’s office. Of the two, I choose the US.
Even when my parents get treated by non-NHS doctors and hospitals in the UK, their situation is much closer to the NHS standard than the US standard. My parents simply have no experience of the US standard of care, and as long as the private hospital treats them better than the NHS would, they are satisfied. The same is true for parents who send their children to private schools in the US.
Armed with this knowledge of the difference between the NHS and the US system, I have closely questioned friends who have experienced the Japanese and Canadian government-run healthcare systems. From their answers, it would seem that the Japanese system is very like the NHS, but the Canadian system provides care at almost the US standard. Unless you believe that the United Kingdom is culturally closer to Japan than to Canada, the only explanation for this would be that Canadian expectations are strongly influenced by US standards, probably through TV programs like Marcus Welby, MD, which the UK government prevented from appearing on UK screens, but the Canadian government could not prevent its citizens from watching.
Applying these lessons to education
This is designed as a response to University of Pennsylvania researchers Angela L. Duckworth and Martin P. Seligman in their study ‘Self-Discipline Gives Girls the Edge: Gender in Self-Discipline, Grades, and Achievement Test Scores’ in the Journal of Educational Psychology. 2006 Feb Vol 98(1) 198-208. Press accounts of the study had headlines such as “Self-Discipline May beat Smarts as Key to Success” (Washington Post 1/17/6). Part of the study reports that schoolgirls are more self-disciplined than schoolboys, explaining their greater success there, but that other factors, such as different motivations in competitive situations, produce greater male success in adult life.
I do not doubt that these researchers have devised tests that correlate well with success in high school. The labels they assign to the test results may be open to interpretation. During army basic training, recruits are taught to crawl around keeping all body parts, especially the head, close to the ground to avoid enemy gunfire. At the end of this training, they crawl around while live rounds whine overhead. I am quite certain that measurements would show that almost all soldiers kept their heads down lower during live-fire exercises. If the researchers used head height as a measure of self-discipline, which would parallel their school methodology, they would conclude that the self-discipline of the individual varied. I suggest that what they measured as self-discipline is in fact a mixture of self-discipline and motivation, and that gender differences in school performance partly reflects schools’ greater success in motivating girls.
In many high schools, a group of boys has succeeded in gaining control of the school LAN, (the computer local area network). Some of these boys are receiving failing grades from teachers who report them to be lazy, diagnose them as having ADHD, and bully their parents into dosing them with ever-increasing levels of drugs. Meanwhile, the boys are spending up to twenty hours a week outside school hours studying how to improve the LAN performance. Even at university level, there are many instances of students (almost all male), who leave without a degree and go on to found spectacularly successful companies in the fields in which the university declared they were failures.
My own hypothesis is that on average girls are more motivated than boys to please authority figures; boys are more motivated than girls to master skills that impress their peers. The educational establishment has not traditionally placed a great deal of emphasis on presenting materials in such a way as to make mastery an integral part of social status. Indeed, schools go out of their way to keep grades private, making them increasingly irrelevant to many boys.
Duckworth and Seligman have done a great service in reminding us that success is caused by many factors, and we should also remember that it comes in many forms. Perhaps the greatest single factor in the damage done by the educational establishment is to speak as if there was only one dimension to success (the grade point average). Once this myth is established, and particularly if the GPA is advertised as a measure of virtue or individual worth, then it does become so powerful a weapon that it can never be used, rather like nuclear bombs.
In the ideal school of one thousand students, there would not be a single measure of success that has to be kept secret (as if that were possible) to avoid humiliating 999 students; instead there would be 1000 different measures of success, each with a different winner. Even if there were only ten uncorrelated measures, there would only be one chance in 512 that two students meeting at random would find that one was superior to the other in every way, so no attempt at secrecy would be necessary.
Duckworth and Seligman propose that schools teach self-discipline. This is obviously a good idea in principle, but their paper hints that this should be done by fairly coercive techniques. This seems based on the idea that successful adults hate what they do for a living, only working through fear of starvation. The whole theory that a child who chooses to receive two dollars in a week rather than one immediate dollar is, by the same mechanism, choosing to work toward becoming CEO of General Motors in half a century rather than playing with her friends today when she should be doing her homework seems to me to be something of a stretch. I think she is choosing praise from teachers and parents in a week. This is still deferred gratification, but it is credible (to me). If this is successful for girls, perhaps we should look for comparable motivators for boys. We may also help girls by doing so, since girls’ motivation does not seem to lead to boardrooms as often as Duckworth and Seligman would like.
Most successful people enjoy much of what they do for a living. All dislike some of the things they have to do. When asked why they do the parts they dislike, almost all say “to get it out of the way so I can get to the things I enjoy”. That is what I would like to see the schools encourage – some parts of the learning experience are less exciting than others, but the child is motivated to get through them to reach the exciting parts. If boys are more motivated by peer status than by praise from authority, then we should look for ways to relate learning to peer status.
One way to do this might be to involve schools in contentious issues in local politics. Road-building projects are normally hotly contested on NIMBY grounds: it would seem natural to have the high schools close to the path of the road become the collectors of traffic statistics to support the protests. A boy who could not explain the real-world relevance of algebra or calculus might change his whole attitude if he saw statistics he helped to collect used directly in a debate his parents were passionately interested in.
Because of the increasing role of standardized testing, it may not be possible to include such activities in the regular curriculum. It should be possible to organize them as paid after-school work, supervised by teachers.