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Notes -
It's a Vibes-based World for Us
The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.
Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.
This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.
But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?
The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.
According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.
The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.
Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.
Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:
Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.
Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.
It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.
I can’t believe I of all people am going to defend progressive activists, but I think you and the author are both massively underselling how formalized and sophisticated the theoretical basis for these educators’ approach is. I’m surprised that at no point does the author mention the man whose ghost looms large over so much of modern literacy education: Paolo Freire.
Freire’s The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed, along with his somewhat lesser-known book The Politics Of Education, is one of the most influential texts in teacher education of the last century. Freire was one of the pioneers of critical education - which, like any other branch of critical theory, is explicitly Marxist, and seeks to use education as a tool to undermine and destroy the existing socio-economic system. James Lindsay, of the New Discourses website, did a series of lengthy and dense podcasts in which he went through Freire’s work in excruciating detail, explaining Freire’s theories and how they have influenced modern anglophone education. (For those of you who instinctively scoff any time a right-winger calls something Marxist, assuming that this is like when Republicans call any basic government function Communism, I encourage you to look into what Freire had to say about Maoism and Che Guevara.) Every major progressive educator and pedagogical theorist of the last few decades is using Freire’s work as a jumping-off point.
One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.” He believed that the dominant educational paradigm of the 19th and early 20th centuries was one in which students were assumed to be passive and ignorant receptacles, into which teachers can pour all of the approved knowledge that the teachers have decided the students are required to know. This model is hierarchical; the teacher is the Authority - the Knower, who has a form of cultural capital called Knowledge - and the students, who lack the fundamental skills that would allow them to exercise any agency over their own education, are expected to sit down, shut up, and let the Knower deposit Knowledge into them. Freire’s insight was that this educational model, in addition to teaching kids the actual mechanical skill of reading, also smuggles in a “hidden curriculum”: the unstated hierarchical assumption that the point of school is for Society to tell children what they are supposed to know - what information is important and what isn’t - in order to turn them into effective and productive members of the existing society.
In opposition to this model, Freire developed what he called the “generative” or “constructive” model of education. In this approach, the educator strives to minimize any sense of hierarchical relationship between herself and the students; rather than being there as an Authority, the teacher acts as a collaborator with the students. She presents them with basic concepts and resources, and then allows them the greatest possible degree of freedom in choosing which of those concepts or resources to discuss and utilize. The teacher is, in this model, merely a facilitator for the students as they exercise their own creativity and agency. In doing so, the students not only generate their own insights and absorb knowledge, but they also cultivate a sense of their own potential as Creators.
In addition - and this is centrally crucial to Freire’s model - they begin to notice things about the world. See, the teacher has pre-selected the library of works that the students have on hand to explore; if she has a bunch of, say, thinkpieces about structural oppression, or books written from the perspective of poor and marginalized people, then as the students spontaneously discover and read those works, they begin to ask questions about what they find in those materials. And that’s where the teacher comes in; she can provide some answers, or even ask other questions that inspire students to think in a particular way about the society around them. A Marxist revolutionary way, specifically. Freire is not shy about this. Neither is Lucy Calkins, the educational activist and theorist whom the author presents as the primary driver of the “whole language” model. Calkins is very vocal about the centrality of “social justice” in her pedagogy, and about her insistence on exposing children to materials about racism, structural oppression, etc. For these people, teaching your children to read is not the point. The point is to turn them into revolutionaries against the existing society. The point is to give them the tools, and then the ideological guidance, to allow them to deconstruct, criticize, and eventually dismantle the socioeconomic status quo. Again, if you read Calkins and Freire, they’re not hiding this from you.
Now, as with a lot of the larger critical theory and DEI industries, it’s never really clear how many of the ground-level employees actually have any deep understanding of, or buy-in to, the intellectual infrastructure of the work they’ve been tasked with carrying out. I find it difficult to believe that the vast majority of young women going into primary school teaching are all doctrinaire Neo-Marxists. I believe the last time I looked into it I saw that the average IQ of a public-school teacher in the United States is about 102. These are not cognitively impressive people. They’re not serious adherents of critical theory. I think that for the vast majority of them, it is indeed true that they are primarily motivated by the sorts of self-aggrandizing narratives around teaching that are presented by films like Dead Poets Society and Freedom Writers: a charismatic teacher with boundless energy and an almost gnostic ability to unlock students’ inner creativity and knowledge-generating potential becomes a sort of mentor or guru for a whole classroom of students, inspiring them to lives of greatness. This model of teaching is inherently parasocial and allows the teacher to act as a manipulator and ideological guiding light for those students, which is why it is so useful for Marxists, but it’s also an extremely emotionally-satisfying narrative for those who are going into what is otherwise a dismally underpaid and punishing career path.
In general, when you are examining the actions of progressive activists, and you are asking yourself, “Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do. The reason educators don’t seem to be doing a good job of teaching children to read is that their actual goal is something else. The reason why Black Lives Matter activism doesn’t seem to actually save any black lives - quite the opposite, in fact - is that their actual goal is something else. While the average schoolteacher is a mediocrity, in over her head and sustained only by self-serving heroic narratives about her Life’s Purpose, the people actually designing the pedagogical model she was trained on were extremely intelligent people with a strong grounding in a storied and sophisticated philosophical tradition. This is not in any sense an endorsement of these people’s methods - personally I would love to see them all in prison or worse - but they’ve got a lot more going for them than just “vibes”.
what specifically is their actual goal? Not to defend BLM, but I have no idea what you're hinting at.
Spitballing but it is generally going to go for using US racial minorities as footsoldiers for a Marxist revolution in the US. It has been pretty standard a refrain since the civil rights movement, but particularly the 1970s.
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Thanks for sharing this. This is the first time I've encountered Paolo Freire. I've only skimmed the wiki article on him and on his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I think I need to dig a little more.
Both you and the wikipedia article on him say that he's been hugely influential on the US education system. How is this impact measured? I'm reading the City Journal article on this and it mentions that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is assigned to teachers-in-training very often--but does it actually change how teachers teach?
I can imagine that some more fiery educators will have done the heavy lifting and baked in some of Freire's ideas into curricula. But going off my assumption that most Marxist teachings are very abstract (almost postmodern), then most teachers would highlight a few juicy quotes and later forget about these ideas. My other assumption comes from going through a few grades in the US system and I'm struggling to find anything that would have a noticeable taint of Marxist thought--but then, I only did a few grades, and that was over 20 years ago.
(It's too easy to find low hanging fruit of a few teachers refusing to teach math because it's oppressive. I'm looking for more subtle but broader effects of Freire's thought).
I find this interesting because it seems like nothing new. I've met before with the constructivist theory of education, which seems to have begun assembling into a coherent theory somewhere in the early 20th century, though its roots go back to the mid 19th century. It's amazing to me that someone could take this idea, which, in the right hands, could produce so much good, and then cover it in Marxist nonsense.
I think my emotion wasn't around the disconnect between their goals and actions, because it's pretty clear that whatever "good" they say they aim toward is subordinate to their real goals. Rather, it was about how openly they disdain science, reality, and human discourse as a tool for pursuing truth. While writing my post, I had a look at the Calkin's institute page and most of the messaging their is, indeed, about DEI stuff. So yeah, 100% WYSIWYG.
Anyway, I have more reading to do.
I don't have anything really substantial to add but Paolo Freire has been insanely influential. From some sources he is the the most, or at least one of the most highly cited scholars in the humanities. His influence is at least as large as Foucault in the academy, but the impact has probably been larger on society as a whole because pedagogy and education theory has a much more immediate and direct consequences on society, and his ideas are oriented towards 'praxis' and spread and filter down easily. Google Scholar has Pedagogy of the Oppressed at over 100000 citations (!!!) which as best I can tell, is the third most cited work on the site.
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I've always found it hilarious that the actual Marxist countries don't buy into these feel-good education theories. China's education system is highly regimented and college entrance is gated by a test that you get one chance to take. They study Marx and Engels as a body of knowledge to be passed from teacher to student, not as some organic discovery that takes place when the student picks up a copy of Das Kapital.
AFAIK the USSR was the same way.
Do the Cubans or the North Koreans educate their children this way?
The marxists in charge of training and hiring teachers in marxist countries aren't trying to burn their society down. The marxists in charge of training and hiring teachers in non-marxist countries are, explicitly and openly. That's the difference.
Are you saying that the leftist educators (or the philosophers who came up with the justifications behind the techniques used in education) in western countries like the US intentionally want the kids to be dumber and learn less efficiently, in order to harm the country?
No, I'm saying that they are, by their own admission, hostile to the country as such. They consider our existing social structures to be deeply unjust, and they see their job as laying the groundwork to bring down that society by inculcating revolutionary ideals in their students. That's their first priority. Everything else, including outcomes for the students themselves, is secondary to that goal. If you give them a superior method of teaching that doesn't actually advance their revolutionary ideals, they'll resist using it. If you give them a very bad way of teaching that does seem to advance the revolution, they'll happily adopt it. They're happy to teach to the best of their ability, as long as what's being taught advances their values.
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They don’t want the kids to be dumber, but they do intentionally want to avoid preparing the children to be productive participants in the existing social and economic order. By instilling in children a functional literacy in the values and prestige language of the bourgeois class, you are churning out good little cogs who can, and will, go get jobs in respectable fields. This will allow them to acculturate into the hegemonic order, and to accumulate cultural capital which will turn them into loyal members of society. This will enervate their revolutionary passion.
Like, I wish I was just reporting to you the beliefs of a wacky lunatic fringe, but I’m literally explaining the entire point of one of the most widely-taught teacher education textbooks in America. These pedagogical theorists genuinely believe that making students better at speaking middle-class “respectable” English is actually a bad thing.
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"I believe the lasts time I looked into it I saw that the average IQ of a public-school teacher in the United States is about 102. These are not cognitively impressive people"
Being above average IQ would be impressive, especially for such a low playing job. What am I missing?
edit. I am nitpicking and was impressed by your steelman of activist teachers.
It's only a poorly compensated job if you don't count pensions and 3+ months of vacation per year.
Also, they still get paid even if their kids can't read. Point taken.
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