In any human society, a foundational problem is
how to resolve conflicts of belief.
—Jonathon Rauch

It will appear that individualism and falsity are one and the same.
—Charles Sanders Peirce

This past Christmas, my mother gave me a T-shirt with a somewhat unique message on it, and when I wore it to school on one of our “dress down” days this past spring, it evoked the following response from one of my students: “Oh, Mr. Brock! That is SO you!!”

The message?

“That’s what I do:  I read & I know things.”

Well, I’ve been reading again, and from what I’ve been learning recently, I have started to wonder just how far into irrationality our society can sink and still survive.  In just this past month, a meteorologist has had to resign his broadcaster position due to death threats for educating about climate change; the governor of Texas has signed a law prohibiting mandating water breaks for people who work outdoors (during the most catastrophic heat wave in state history!); and a young woman in Arizona has created an AI “clone” of herself to sell as an on-line “girlfriend” for anyone interested.

It is enough, frankly, to leave this member of what Jonathan Rauch calls the “reality-based community” shaking my head.  What’s more, it leaves me shaking my head in a mixture of consternation and despondency because at the same time I have been reading these headlines, I have simultaneously been reading Rauch’s latest book from the Brookings Institution about the need for us to be defending the rational pursuit of objective truth, wondering if that’s even possible anymore.

Part of the challenge for me, personally, is that I know too much brain science not to know that while reasoning is one of the brain’s capacities, it is not the chief one in charge. The limbic system with its emotions and intuitions is.  Or as Rauch so eloquently phrases it, “evolution selects not for the ability to reason in a way which leads to truth, necessarily, but for the ability to reason in a way which persuades” (p. 23; original emphasis).  The bottom line is that as a social species, our brains care more about looking like we know what we are talking about than determining the veracity of what we are talking about—just recall what happened to Socrates for insisting on the truth!

Yet when the rational and the irrational do butt heads, how do we resolve the conflict successfully in favor of the rational? How do we get to at least some semblance of agreement about the objective truth of a given situation? That’s essentially the focus of the first half of Rauch’s book, and he argues that for most of human existence, we simply have not.  When conflicts of belief have arisen, humans have traditionally either created isolated enclaves and ejected the heterodox, employed authoritarianism to maintain order, or resorted to violence—something Rauch calls “creed wars”—to destroy those who harbor “wrong” ideas. 

But with the rise of liberal science, he argues, based on skepticism and fallibilism, knowledge about the world acquired a communal nature that transcended individual beliefs.  When all propositions had the potential to be wrong and potentially disproved, no one person could claim certainty about the truth, and it was these checks and balances of the scholarly community, Rauch claims, that enabled humans to start resolving conflicting beliefs about the world in favor of a rational understanding of reality—even though (as any good philosopher of science will tell you) truly 100% objective knowledge is never possible.  Thus, humanity could now grow ever closer to truth through this “evolutionary epistemology” (as Karl Popper called it) without having to resort to physical force:  you could kill the hypothesis without killing the hypothesizer.

Rauch calls those who pursue knowledge in this manner, the “reality-based community,” and he calls the epistemic structures that support it, the “Constitution of Knowledge.”  He uses this notion of a constitution as a very deliberate analogy to how the U.S. Constitution provides for the governance of our society with its separation of powers, arguing that the principles of fallibilism and empiricism prevent no one individual or institution from dictating what is or is not true.  Likewise, he suggests, just as the U.S. Constitution guides a network of people to generate laws through persuasion and compromise in a process that no one person can control, “the reality-based network [of communities] behaves like an ecosystem, producing a body of validated propositions whose composition humans can influence but not control” (p. 87).

Rauch also uses this analogy because he wants to assert strongly that just as declaring something unconstitutional in our society means it is illegal, period, then so too, “anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community” (p. 87).  Only propositions about the world which have been repeatedly put to the test of falsification using empirical means and continue to pass such testing can claim any status as objective truth.  Everything else is subjective mysticism, falsehoods, or outright lies.

Which Rauch acknowledges:

goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge:  creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions (p. 87). 

But Rauch also grasps that what can go down badly even with members of the reality-based community is that just like the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution of Knowledge bestows not just rights, but responsibilities as well, and:

as between the two, the rights are the easier to grasp and defend…of all epistemic orders, only liberal science is premised on free inquiry and intellectual pluralism.  Yet the responsibilities are heavy and tempting to shirk.  We can believe as we like privately, but in making public policy, we must privilege the reality-based community’s judgments about facts…we can question and criticize to our heart’s content, but we must also endure being questioned and criticized ourselves…accepting that we might always be wrong…[Furthermore,] if we wish to be part of the reality-based community, we behave as if truth exists and evidence matters [and we recognize that] failing to persuade means losing the argument, period.  You cannot prevail by majority vote, by being divinely inspired, by being historically oppressed, by having justice on your side, by silencing the other side, or any other way.   Those are the republican virtues of the republic of science—and they require just as much discipline and commitment as do the republican virtues of politics (pp. 112-113).

That is why Rauch recognizes that as with any constitution, “if the people or their factions seek to win by lying, breaking the law, fostering extremism and demagoguery, or wiping out the other side, then no constitution will endure, however strong it might look on paper” (p. 112).  Today, he asserts, the Constitution of Knowledge is under just such attack from both without and within, and he posits that social media, cancel culture, and what he calls “troll epistemology” are collectively chipping away at the reality-based community.  His is a call to defend against these three forces (as the book’s subtitle implies), and that is where I’m no longer sure we have the necessary social ecosystem to succeed—especially given the preponderance of the types of news items with which I started this essay.

Something I will explore in my next post.

References

Chow, D. (July 7, 2023) Backlash Brews Against Texas Law that Eliminates Mandatory Water Breaks.  NBC News.  https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/backlash-brews-texas-law-eliminates-mandatory-water-breaks-rcna92961.

Contreras, B. (June 27, 2023) Social Media Star’s AI Clone Charges a Dollar Per Minute for Chats.  The Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-06-27/influencers-ai-chat-caryn-marjorie.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Trisman, R. (June 27, 2023) A Meteorologist Got Threats for His Climate Coverage. His New Job is About Solutions.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184461263/iowa-meteorologist-harassment-climate-change-quits#:~:text=Iowa%20meteorologist%20quits%20after%20death%20threat%20over%20climate%20coverage%20Chris,tackle%20climate%20change%20head%2Don.

I expanded my educational horizons this summer and am presently teaching a population of children that are most definitely not my normal bailiwick.  A colleague and friend of mine from our Middle School division convinced me to teach a STEM course to a group of rising 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th graders in a regional program that pairs Baltimore private schools with Baltimore City public schools to prepare students for high school.  Known as the Middle Grades Partnership (or MGP), it has been serving as a bridge program since 2005 to prevent summer learning loss and help students find greater academic success in what are critical developmental years in early adolescence.  Thus, for the past three weeks (and two more to come), I have been teaching eleven, twelve, and thirteen-year-olds how to build bridges out of paper, study yeast metabolism, and write a computer program to make an animated dinosaur dance.

And it has been quite the education for me! Any inklings I ever harbored about being a middle school teacher have been banished, and my respect for those who do it full time for a living has reached the level of reverence.  People who work effectively with eleven-year-olds should be worshiped and paid seven-figure salaries.

The experience has gotten me thinking, though, about the concept at the core of this whole project of mine, “authentic engagement.”  For those not familiar with my introduction, the fundamental premise I posit is that we should understand education through an ecological rather than mechanistic lens, recognizing that classrooms are effectively ecosystems and that teachers inhabit that ecosystem as its keystone species—the one which determines the well-being of the entire thing.  Authentically engaged teachers, then, are those that generate healthy ecosystems for learning in their classrooms and to achieve authentic engagement involves three critical things: embracing the role of co-learner in all educational situations; generating appropriately intimate rapport with students; and employing a full understanding of the tension between the brain’s plasticity and its hard-wiring.

I have already explored each of these properties in detail in Part I of this project. But these past few weeks have made me realize that I have explored them almost exclusively through my lens as a high school teacher, and while my experience at MGP has made me even more convinced that we need an ecological paradigm for education and that co-learner, rapport, and neuroscience are foundational to effective teaching, I have come to realize that the three properties of authentic engagement will look different depending on the age-group with whom you are working.

Take embracing the role of co-learner.  In high school, that can mean sharing the latest in research you’ve been reading or collaborating on choreography in a dance class.  But as I have recently discovered, to an eleven-year-old, it can mean being willing to play the cryptography game you’ve just taught them along with them.  As for generating appropriately intimate rapport, I am awestruck by one of my colleagues in the program who employs what I can only describe as this gentle goofiness when teaching them math that just would never be in my capacity. And don’t even get me started on a full understanding of the brain…I thought I knew my stuff.  But watching the behavior of rising 6^th and 7^th graders has me scurrying for the research journals!

The long and the short of it, then, is that while I remain even more confirmed in my belief that authentic engagement in the classroom is essential for genuine teaching and learning, what the qualities of its three properties look like varies more than my original analysis of them might suggest.  I think I knew this intellectually—after all, elementary teachers legitimately employ well-timed hugs that would get me arrested—but now, I have a deeper existential appreciation for authentic engagement’s variability.

And an even deeper awareness of why I teach the age group that I do.  I have no regrets that I chose to stretch myself to grow as an educator this summer and am even considering staying with MGP for another year to build on what I’ve learned.  But my five weeks as a middle school teacher has most decidedly taught me what I am most definitely not, and I can’t wait to see my seniors in the Fall.

Because adolescence is a vulnerable period of brain development,
social media exposure during this period warrants additional scrutiny.
—the U.S. Surgeon General

We’re rearing a nation of passive, sedentary, and constantly distracted people.
—Shane Trotter

Anyone who knows me or has read my work knows my thoughts on digital technology—and especially social media! Unlike my students, I do not watch three TikTok videos simultaneously during every free moment I have, and unlike many in the generations in between, I do not have an Instagram or Snapchat account or a Facebook page that notifies me with constant insistent alerts.  In fact, I only possess a smartphone reluctantly because during the renovation of my kitchen, I discovered every business model in America assumed everyone was carrying their own personal computer around with them at all times, and it was no longer possible to function in our society without a ridiculous degree of aggravation and inconvenience without such a phone.  But I have no apps on it that didn’t come preloaded, and I still use actual physical maps and atlases in my travels.

I will confess to using LinkedIn occasionally to track down someone from my past with whom I wish to get in touch (as I did just the other day with a former student to see if she will be attending her hall of fame induction this fall), and I have created and managed numerous websites over the years (including this one) as a means of disseminating various types of information. However, I delete every attempt by WordPress to get me to “re-tweet” or “share” even this website, leaving it to others to decide for themselves if they want to engage with its content.  I will and do employ technology, but like maintaining a healthy food diet, I do so thoughtfully, with deliberation, and only actually as needed.

What’s more, I did not arrive at my relationship with technology willy-nilly.  Like fellow educator, Shane Trotter, I remember well the initial rollout of my school’s one-to-one laptop initiative back in the early 2000s and how it:

was driven by a vague, yet unassailable belief that technology was “the future” and, thus, that any measure that brought more technology into classroom instruction was inherently good.  According to the prevailing wisdom, new technologies were sure to unleash a cascade of new teaching superpowers.  And teachers needed to utilize these superpowers as soon as possible because “students were different now.”  They would no longer learn well from the old teaching methods like lecturing, reading, and writing.  The only way to reach the 21st-century student was to integrate a steady stream of new tools into every lesson.

And, like Trotter, I remember well the message from the administration (one of whom, in full disclosure, is a follower of this project) that we were to find ways to employ these new tools proactively in our teaching, to rethink our lessons with student access to their laptops front and center in our planning.  We received significant professional development to aid us in this process, and most of my colleagues gamely did their best (or as Trotter puts it, “that year, teachers tried everything”).

However, I was not among them.  Having been coding since high school and with two websites already designed, created, and managed by then, I was well versed in the technology now available to both my students and myself on a daily basis.  Including what it meant to have full wi-fi internet access!  Therefore, I took a more skeptical and cautionary approach—doing so precisely because I understood that while the worst I’d had to confront prior to the laptops were students who “would have had nothing better to distract them than doodling on notebook paper or passing notes between each other” (something I already knew how to combat with highly engrossing learning), I would now be competing for their attention “with all the world’s entertainment and the attention-hacking efforts of Silicon Valley’s most brilliant minds” (Trotter). 

That is, I would be competing for said attention unless I firmly delimited the usage of their devices in the teaching process.  Hence, while excited to have the nearly infinite “library” of the internet available when researching about a topic, I knew that “screens down” needed to be the norm rather than the exception when working in the classroom.

Sadly—even frighteningly—the intervening decades have demonstrated the value of my caution as the digital realm has enmeshed itself deeper and deeper into all our schools at a greater and greater cost to both individuals and society.  Again, I like Trotter’s words:

In its desire to embrace technology, our school district failed to recognize the social devolution that was taking hold of society.  The iPad Initiative came right as smartphones became virtually ubiquitous among American teens and adults…and at this crucial juncture, we decided to begin allowing students to use smartphones throughout the school day.  These students would not know how to set boundaries for how they used their phones.  They’d have no understanding of the psychological vulnerabilities that tech companies exploited—no training in how to use their phone without it using them.  Most of all, they’d have no environment where they could be free from the incessant psychic drain that had come to define their world.  Oblivious to any responsibility to help students or their families adapt better, our schools helped facilitate the community’s descent into becoming screen-addicted, constantly distracted people whose cognitive skills and attention spans were being chipped away rather than cultivated.^[1]

What’s more, in the latest news from our tech-dysfunction, people are apparently losing the ability to remain engaged in anything challenging or discomforting, even when doing so is critical to their well-being. Researchers Tracy Maylett and Tim Vandehey have demonstrated that “we’re [now] accustomed to programs that do what we call ‘reality switching’ in a very short time instantaneously and unconsciously, [and so] rather than stick things out, it’s much easier to impulsively say, ‘I don’t like this in the moment, and I’m done.’ ”  We then simply swipe on our devices to the next potential distraction, and that, they argue, is causing our brains to become “masters of swiping” rather than masters of achievement. 

And that’s because achieving goals of any kind requires practice and patience, as well as what David Rock and Emma Sarro describe as “creating space for the quiet to reach the surface.” And since significant numbers of us are no longer developing the skills of practice, patience, and quiet as we bounce from one interuption to the next, we find ourselves in a society swiping its way through our days in almost nihilistic narcissism.

Yet as Trotter writes so eloquently:

I fear we’ve been engulfed in this world for so long now that the obvious solutions will sound extreme. You cannot allow an infinite device like the smartphone in the classroom and expect students to cultivate academic capacities that require an attention span. You cannot allow smartphone use throughout the hallways and cafeterias and expect students to develop social skills. And you cannot expect students, parents, or even teachers to navigate the incessant temptations of modern technology—to be anything but distracted pawns—without clearly defined limits and an educational campaign to teach them the boundaries required for healthy use. Every school district in America has some Band-Aid initiative to shrink learning gaps and respond to the surge in mental health disorders, yet few, if any, will address this most obvious saboteur.

And when an institution as conservative as the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office is issuing a warning about the impact of the digital age on the health of our children, then you know the jury is in on what needs to be done to reign in our technological lives.  The question is:  will we have the will to carry out the necessary sentencing?

^[1]And have done so at a cost to learning I have explored elsewhere and extensively documented in many of my previous postings. 

References

Maylett, T. & Vandehey, T. (2023) Swipe: The Science Behind Why We Don’t Finish What We Start.  Herdon, VA: Amplify Publishing Group.

Rock, D. & Sarro, E. (April 16, 2023) Forget Information. Focus on This Instead.  The Baltimore Sun. https://baltimoresun.newspapers.com/search/?query=%22forget%20information%22.

Trotter, S. (April 22, 2022) Hidden in Plain Sight: Putting Tech Before Teaching. Quillette. https://quillette.com/2022/04/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-why-we-should-stop-putting-tech-before-teaching/.

U.S. Surgeon General Advisory (2023) Social Media and Youth Mental Health.  The Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf.

Early on in the pandemic, I shared some observations at the start of the 2020-2021 school year that opened with one word: “Pray.”  It was a depressing and dispiriting time as my zoom zombies and I tried to hold class, and Notes from the Trenches remains probably the darkest thing I have ever allowed myself to publish.

Yet for nearly a month now, I have had to fight the urge to open all of my writing with that exact same word.

Because the news pouring out of education just keeps getting grimmer. 

It started with a report from Atlanta where the elementary teachers there have documented that—due to the interruptions of the pandemic—74% of their third graders entered the year reading (if at all) at only a first-grade level. This leaves those teachers only the year to try and get their students caught up for the higher reading expectations of fourth grade—where the demands for independent learning start to be significantly greater—and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Children who aren’t reading fluently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to fail to finish high school, and those who don’t earn their diploma are more likely to end up in prison (with a 70% greater chance if you are a person of color).  It is a race against time, and it is a race in schools across the country, where unlike the Atlanta district, few are adding an extra 30 minutes to the school day and not all of them are using research supported phonics-based curricula to tackle the problem (Go Atlanta!).

Yet, even such intensive efforts may be for naught given what researchers at Harvard and Stanford reported discovering in the data from nearly 8,000 school districts earlier this month.  When examining previous situations similar to the interruptions of the pandemic—e.g. a single district hit heavily by an outbreak of the flu during a given year—the researchers found not only the anticipated declines in reading levels; they found that the declines stayed put.  As Stanford’s Sean Reardon put it in an NPR interview:  “what was, I think, striking and surprising and a little sobering was that when there’s a big decline in one year, those cohorts don’t seem to catch up for those three or four years that we can follow them into the future.” Therefore, he warns, “parents and public officials shouldn’t just assume that schools can make up for all that lost ground because history shows in those test scores, without a concerted effort, much of it will just stay lost.”

And one of the potential impacts of it staying lost was revealed when the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP)—sometimes referred to as “the nation’s report card”—released its latest results for 8^th graders on the history and civics tests.  The scores were the lowest since the test’s inception, with civics dropping for the first time ever, and though it makes sense given the plummet in NAEP reading scores that came out last fall—since learning both history and civics obviously depend on reading comprehension—that doesn’t make it any less fraught with alarming implications for our future as a society.  As Brown University professor of political science, public policy, and education, Jonathan Collins remarked when asked how worried he was about these results:

Well, deeply concerned – and not just because I think the understanding of the world is important, but I think there’s an additional step there, which is the understanding of the world in order to address the major problems that the world faces. So when we think about whether it’s climate change, whether it’s growing economic or racial inequality – these big, major, huge social problems that seem to be growing more and more by the day – if students aren’t getting a handle on how our political system works, then this impacts their ability to be a part of a structure that’s supposed to bring people together to solve these big problems.

Our civic institutions are already dysfunctional enough as it is right now without pouring this additional fuel of ignorance onto the flames.  Hence, I find it hard to learn of the NAEP results and not feel just a little disheartened.

Which brings me to the “salt in the wounds” provided by all this recent news.  As I shared in a previous post about the state of education today, the statistics on the teacher shortage in the U.S. show that we are risking a crisis, and apparently, governors around the country have finally awakened to this fact and are starting to call for raises in districts nation-wide.  However, for many in education, it is a situation of “too little, too late” since what is sometimes referred to as the “pay penalty” for choosing to teach when compared to other college-educated professions has only grown over the past decade, reaching a record 23.5% in 2021. 

Basically, what that means is that teachers now earn 76.5 cents for every dollar earned by other college-educated professionals, and while no one goes into teaching for the money, others in the “caring professions” (nursing, social work, etc.) don’t begin to have that big a gap.  My sister, the social worker, makes 18K more than I do and has a similar amount of leave time.  Hence, as if the current situation in education wasn’t wounding enough, now this new news. Like I said, “salt.”

I know; I know. Anyone who has read pretty much any of my other writing knows that I can’t leave it there.  I am simply constitutionally incapable of not responding to all of the pandemic’s impact on children’s learning with caring and support. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be right back in the classroom, authentically engaged, trying as always to “light candles.”

But oh, sometimes, it is damn hard not just to “curse the darkness.”

Coda

Hope.  And my kind of hope.  Hope as verb. 

While I was finishing the final edits before posting this essay, I took a break to read the paper, and there it was, a headline reading: “Kids’ reading scores soar across the South amid reforms.” 

It turns out that the perennial punching bag of educational failure and ineptitude, the state of Mississippi, has gone from having the second worst reading test scores among 4^th graders in the country to only the 21^st worse scores.  It, along with Louisiana and Alabama, have invested in training thousands of teachers in the science of reading (i.e. phonics!), and they are requiring every K-3 teacher and elementary principal and assistant principal to take 55-hours of training in how to teach children to read. The consequences have been so dramatic that some in education are referring to it as “the Mississippi Miracle,” and one can argue that that is not hyperbole given Mississippi was among the only three states to see modest gains in their reading test scores during the pandemic, rather than the learning loss seen nearly everywhere else.

It is amazing what happens when we actually invest in our children. And pay attention to the science!

References

Carrillo, S. (May 3, 2023) National Student Assessment Has Educators and Legislators Worried.  NPR All Things Considered.  https://www.npr.org/2023/05/03/1173776611/national-student-assessment-has-educators-and-legislators-worried.

Levy, M.  (May 10, 2023) Raises for Teachers Make Governors’ Agendas.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=6629bd6c-1045-4d60-ab0d-dfc40b85b777.

Lurye, S. (May 20, 2023) Kids’ Reading Scores Soar Across the South Amid Reforms.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=c6a27048-5d52-413e-93c2-ffb4ecf32ba8.

Martinez, A. & Turner, C. (May 12, 2023) How Much Learning Did Students Miss During the Pandemic? Researchers Have an Answer.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2023/05/12/1175711862/how-much-learning-did-students-miss-during-the-pandemic-researchers-have-an-answ.

Pfeiffer, S.; Jarenwattananon, P.; & Lim, M.  (May 3, 2023) 8^th-Graders’ History and Civics Scores Drop on a National Test.  NPR All Things Considered.  https://www.npr.org/2023/05/03/1173776447/8th-graders-history-and-civics-scores-drop-on-a-national-test.

Toness, B. V. (April 23, 2023) “Too Much to Learn” The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=27971d2d-1a90-49e9-8cb5-c12bfdc0fc25.

Trotter, S. (April 22, 2022) Hidden in Plain Sight: Putting Tech Before Teaching. Quillette. https://quillette.com/2022/04/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-why-we-should-stop-putting-tech-before-teaching/.

Struggles are the fertilizer for spiritual growth.
—Joyce Rupp

The work is often hidden and unglamorous, but it’s holy.
—Andy Stanton-Henry

Dear Members of the Class of 2023,

It has been quite the pilgrimage you have taken these past four years.  In spring of 2020, you were isolating at home, probably anxious about whether life would ever be normal again, and in the days and weeks since, you have dealt with zoom and hybrid classes; you have worn masks and socially distanced; you have tested weekly for COVID; and you have even lost some of life’s normal rites of passage—all of it with the ever-present reality that school could close at any given moment’s notice, disrupting life yet again.  Even now, as many routines, traditions, and habits have returned, the shadow of the pandemic lingers as each test positive forces a 5-day quarantine at home.  You are the class of the pandemic, and it has not been an easy four years.

Nor have the events of the larger world been any less challenging.  Since those first shutdowns you endured, you have witnessed an armed insurrection in our nation’s capital, the overturn of constitutional protections, Ukraine’s invasion by a despot, and far too many mass shootings of school children and police killings of people of color.  China is actually busy building new coal-fired power plants—even in the face of its own destructive climate events—and the economic turmoil coming out of COVID has generated inflation and other financial hardships not seen since the late 1970s.  It has, indeed, been one of the more tumultuous times to live through as you have matured into young adults.

Yet in that same time period, you have also observed the nearly miraculous creation of a successful vaccine in less than a year that saved billions of lives; you have seen the successful criminal prosecution of law enforcement for the murder of George Floyd; and you have witnessed the first nuclear fusion reaction to generate more energy than it consumed, laying the foundation for a truly carbon-free energy future.  A multi-national effort launched and installed a telescope a million miles from Earth for peering at the origins of the universe—an engineering marvel so complex that it had more than 300 potential points of failure threatening its final activation—and four countries (Columbia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Panama) created the Transboundary Marine Biosphere Reserve of the Tropical Eastern Pacific, the largest conservation area on the planet.

Hence, along with the bad has come the good; along with the good has come the bad, and in between, there have been thousands of sunrises and sunsets, moments of great joy and times of deep sadness.  There has been laughter and tears, days that were interminable and those you wished would never end.  There has been, as the wise author of Ecclesiastes once wrote, “a time for every purpose.”

And it is about that sense of balance and its agency that I want to write to all of you today.  We, your elders, have not always done a good job of achieving equilibrium with the world—or even within our own lives—and we now share with you (and will eventually leave with you) significant environmental and social problems that threaten to unbalance things even further.  Not least of which is the very technology I am using to write this letter.  As I have demonstrated to some of you firsthand, the device you are reading this on is simultaneously inhibiting your brain’s ability to function at full capacity—not ideal for tackling the kinds of problems we are leaving you—and if one adds in the fact that AI is now threatening our very capacity to discern what is true from what is false, it can be quite challenging to maintain any optimism about rebalancing both our lives and the larger world.

However, you will neither be the first…nor will you be the last!…to inherit the failures of those who came before you—a truth the Jewish scriptures sometimes refer to as “the sins of the fathers”—and in your own generation’s struggles with these “sins,” you will discover for yourselves what is perhaps the fundamental truth about what it means to be fully human:  that there is not and never can be enough time; so choose wisely the use of the time you have.

Granted, embracing this finitude is never easy, and it has frankly been my generation’s failure to do so collectively that has gotten our species into the current “hot mess” we are confronting.  But once you recognize and own that you cannot do it all—that each time you choose one course of action, you are by definition ruling out its alternatives…that you can never be everything you potentially could be—then you approach all of life’s choices with a better sense of balancing that of the Light and that of the Dark within you.

Because there will be both.  No one walks through life without times of alienation, and no one walks through life without times of grace.  Indeed, what my many students have taught me over the decades is that the dance of estrangement and redemption, of sin and salvation, of harm and healing…this dance is the moral and spiritual equivalent of breathing.  And just as biological breathing provides the body’s agency for action, so too does the soul’s “breathing” give agency for purpose—the power to effect change.

Which brings me to a question I have now asked my graduating seniors at the end of every year for 34 years: what will you do with yours? What will you do with your power? Will you consume simply to consume the way so much of our society continues to do? Will you invest your resources without thought to their potential footprint on the world? Will you support legislating to maintain the systemic structures of white, hetero-normative privilege? Or will you actively care for the Other? Will you deliberately fight for social and economic justice? Will you thoughtfully choose your impact on the environment?

Or, to paraphrase my favorite proverb, will you merely curse the darkness or will you light candles against it?  

Will you willingly tackle the “sins” you’ll inherit?

I will never get to see your answer.  But I have joined the caring adults in your lives who have done our best to give you the tools to walk a path that is both meaningful for you and a positive one for those around you, and it is with faith, hope, and love that we part ways, launching you into the next stage of your journey.  It won’t be an easy one; nothing that truly enriches your life ever is.  However, if the pandemic has given you nothing else, it has made you resilient beyond your years, and thus, I have the fullest confidence in your capacity to confront successfully life’s future demands.

In the meantime, to quote Dr. Seuss—a mandatory requirement of every graduation event—“Oh, the places you will go!” Congratulations and best of luck!

References

Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Gazzaley, A. & Rosen, L. (2016) The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Cambridge:  The MIT Press.

Maylett, T. & Vandehey, T. (2023) Swipe: The Science Behind Why We Don’t Finish What We Start.  Herndon, VA: Amplify Publishing.

Rupp, J. (2005) Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino.  New York: Orbis Books.

Stanton-Henry, A. (April 1, 2023) Ten Miles Around.  Friends Journal.  https://www.friendsjournal.org/ten-miles-around/.

The history of our race,
and each individual’s experience,
are sown thick with evidence
that a truth is not hard to kill
and that a lie told well is immortal.
—Mark Twain

A few weeks back, there was a story on NPR about a University of Pennsylvania business professor, Ethan Mollick, who—“for $11 dollars and 8 minutes”—had created a video of “himself” giving a lecture.  All it had taken, he explained, was an uploaded photo, a 60 second recording of his voice talking about random things, and a request to ChatGPT to generate a script in the style of his writing.  The latest AI technologies then did the rest, producing a believable video of Mollick giving a brief lecture on innovation in entrepreneurship—his area of expertise.

I’ve seen the video (it’s available on Linked-In), and it is scary how realistically it resembles the “real” Mollick.  I was unnerved enough when a deceased Peter Cushing “acted” in the Star Wars movie, Rogue One, in 2016.  But at least Lucas Studios has billions of dollars and enough computing server power to run the Pentagon.  Here was a college professor only seven years later effectively doing the same thing for the price of an elaborate Starbucks® order. 

And as the NPR story itself said, “that’s only the start.”

“Himself.” “Real.” I keep putting these words in quotes because what the story about Mollick has led me to start wondering is whether we are entering a world where truth itself no longer exists.  Where not only does the use of AI technologies confront us with the threats of propaganda and bad actors influencing elections…with the dangers of misinformation campaigns killing the unvaccinated…with the increased risks of identity theft and someone else controlling your house through the Internet of Everything…. I’m left wondering: has the advancement of AI technologies brought us to the end of “truth?”

Don’t get me wrong.  Empirical reality is not going anywhere, no matter how inconvenient its truths might be, and all the ignorance and confirmation bias in the world is not going to prevent a virus from killing, a car from crashing, hurricanes from flooding, or atmospheric carbon dioxide from warming.  There is no amount of misinformation, disinformation, or outright lying and denial that can prevent the actual world from holding us individually and collectively accountable for our actions and choices.  Climate change is real; environmental degradation is real; epidemic gun violence is real; systemic injustice is real….  There IS truth.

However, the reality of truth and our capacity to discern it are not the same thing (indeed, the entire field of epistemology exists for this very reason), and it is AI’s impact on our discernment of truth that has me concerned.  We are already a society endangered by ignorance and anti-intellectualism (as well as the rabid individualism that informs them both), and yet now, anyone at all has the power to co-opt any message and/or messenger for themselves and present it to the world as being true.  I, for example, am a respected and trusted member of my profession, and all it would take is a picture of me, a copy of my writing, and a recording of my voice—all of which there are ample supplies of on the internet—to have someone create a video unbeknownst to me for their disinformation website with the tag-line “national hall of fame science teacher explains how evolution is a hoax.”  Even scarier, a disgruntled student with access to same could now upload a video of me to social media spouting all manner and kinds of hate speech, and suddenly, I’m battling for my livelihood.

And to paraphrase the NPR piece yet again, that’s just the beginning.  Any and all manner of falsehoods will be able to be credibly presented as truths, and while those with the proper technology can identify deepfakes for now, I am not confident that this will always be so.  Moreover, we know from brain research that initial exposure to an idea, along with confirmation bias, tends to form neural pathways that are hard to dissuade and reconfigure—making misconceptions about anything difficult, if not impossible, to correct. Just ask any science teacher about the challenges of correcting naive ideas about the natural world! Therefore, even when it will be possible to identify and establish the actual truth, the fake “truth” will most likely have already done its damage.

Worse still is the fact that the number of individuals educated enough to possess the necessary expertise to navigate this post-“truth” world has been steadily declining for nearly a decade.  In some states, as little as 42% of their high-school graduates are now going on to any manner of higher education, and both college and trade-school enrollments have dropped significantly in the past few years.  Not only does this threaten to have negative economic impact; it threatens the production and discernment of truths about the actual world, with its actual consequences for our lives.  Because while I am in complete agreement with social scientist, Mike Rose, that all forms of intelligence have equal value, all intelligence still needs to be trained to its fullest capacity:  the wisdom to discern the real.  And that’s not happening right now at the same pace the world is producing foley and fools.

I want to conclude with a rather extensive quote from Martin Seligman, Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania: 

About five hundred thousand years ago, the cranial capacity of our hominid ancestors’ skulls doubled in size from 600 cubic centimeters to its present 1,200 cubic centimeters.  The fashionable explanation for all this extra brain is to enable us to make tools and weapons; you have to be really smart to deal instrumentally with the physical world.  [However,] the British theoretical psychologist Nick Humphrey has presented an alternative:  the big brain is a social problem solver, not a physical problem solver….

These are extremely complicated problems—problems that computers, which can design weapons and tools in a trice, cannot solve.  But humans can and do solve social problems, every hour of the day.  The massive pre-frontal cortex that we have is continually using its billions of connections to simulate social possibilities and then to choose the optimal course of action.  So the big brain is a relationship simulation machine, and it has been selected by evolution for exactly the function of designing and carrying out harmonious but effective human relationships (p. 22).

I share this quote for two reasons.  First, given how many animals biologists have now identified with tool-making skills and as tool users, I think Seligman (and Humphrey) are on to something about our pre-frontal cortex; we are unique among the social species.  Second, the tool-making part of our brain may have finally invented a technology that defeats the very purpose for which evolution selected our brain’s relationship part—which is highly problematic for a social species since any good therapist will tell you: truth and truth-telling are critical to effective harmonious rapport.     

It is, indeed, a brave new world.

References

Binkley, C. (March 12, 2023) Skipping Out on College.  The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=3a4b417c-e3e5-45cf-861b-151b42b0d0d3.

Bond, S. (March 23, 2023) It Takes a Few Dollars and 8 Minutes to Create a Deepfake.  And That’s Only the Start. NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1165146797/it-takes-a-few-dollars-and-8-minutes-to-create-a-deepfake-and-thats-only-the-sta.

Marcus, J.  (April 8, 2023) Community Colleges Seeing Enrollment Sink: Spurning of Schools Doesn’t Bode Well for National Economy.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?edid=9360d6a0-896f-4496-a6a2-977d2c396cf8.

Seligman, M. (2011) Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being.  New York: Simon & Schuster.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.
—Leon Kass

Three years ago this month, the entire social world shattered.  Schools emptied; hospitals filled; quarantines began.  Fear of the unknown filled the media, and simply walking past one another on the street became an exercise in social distancing.  It was a time—as the fables and fairy tales of yore might have put it—of great darkness and uncertainty, and I think few of us could have imagined the enormity of scale of the loss of life and pelf that has happened since.  To say that it has been a challenging few years would be to insult the dead and living alike, and as we emerge from this natural disaster, it is hard not to look at the consequent “rubble” and wonder if we can ever fully rebuild.

Nowhere is this truer than in education right now.  The situation and statistics I’m about to share are simply depressing to those of us who have dedicated our lives to schools and children.  But like a patient in need of medical attention, until one has the proper diagnosis, the proper treatment cannot be applied, and so I offer today’s essay to challenge all of us—educator and layperson alike—to confront the pandemic’s damage head on in order that our current educational system might successfully arise out of its own rubble.

And there is a lot of rubble.  As NYT columnist David Brooks recently wrote, our schools right now face shrinking enrollments, academic regression, increased absenteeism, exacerbated discipline problems, worsening inequality, and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  In fact, it was reading Brooks’ column that started me researching education’s current state in more detail, leading to this post.  Little in schools is working well right now, and until our society confronts this, we are in serious trouble.

Let’s start with the learning loss.  It is what keeps making all the headlines because it is the easiest to shorten into sound bites: “reading scores on national assessments down by 6% among 3^rd graders,” “losses in math twice that of reading,” “a third of a year’s worth of learning gone.”  Yet what’s lost in all that abbreviating is the full scale of what is fundamentally at stake.  A recent white-paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research has determined that between 2019 and 2022, students in this country “forfeited 40% of the [academic] achievement of the past 3 decades” and that if this loss is:

allowed to become permanent, our findings imply that the recent losses would represent a 1.6 percent decline in present value of lifetime earnings for the average K-12 student (or $19,400), totaling $900 billion for the 48 million students enrolled in public schools during the 2020-21 school year.

That’s a lot of shekels! Moreover, the portion of it coming from the greater decrease in math skills (as much as 20% here in Maryland) is more problematic than simply a total earnings loss of $900 billion.  We live in an age where our entire economies depend on scientific, technological, and engineering disciplines and where the path to higher wage jobs lies almost exclusively in these fields—all of which demand extremely well-developed skills in math and the kinds of critical reasoning which learning math nurtures.  Hence, any degree of failure to address children’s learning deficits in math has the potential to undermine a country’s entire economic future competitiveness—including our own.

But the extensive student learning loss isn’t the only very serious challenge facing education today; it is just the flashiest from a media standpoint because we have systems dedicated to tracking student progress.  Similar systems don’t really exist for the adults in the classroom with those same children, and yet without these adults, the magnitude of the educational damage the pandemic has caused will remain unchanged—especially in schools where the student populations were already struggling before the pandemic and where we are already seeing threat of a K-shaped recovery (where those with means rebound while those without sink further). The ugly truth is that even in our most well-funded schools, the quantity and quality of people seeking to enter the teaching profession is dropping precipitously.  Twenty-six percent of schools report having a shortage of teachers (which goes up to 58% for substitutes!), and 56% are seeing fewer applicants for all teaching positions.  In addition, 42% report that the candidates who do apply are weaker and less qualified than those prior to COVID (a reality I have witnessed firsthand when trying to hire in my department).

However, what is perhaps most telling of all about the teaching situation in schools are the statistics about well-being and attrition.  More than 40% of schools report an increase in staff taking sick days and requesting additional personal days, and 36% report that they are now regularly having teachers and administrators leave before the end of the school year.  Add in the Ron DeSantises of this world—along with numerous Republican-led state legislatures—passing one law after another in an effort to ban intellectual freedom of any kind, create voucher programs at the expense of publicly funding schools, and try in general to protect the privilege of a bunch of middle-aged white Americans, and is it any wonder that a once-considered-noble profession is on the ropes? No business model of any kind can survive the kind of morale problem found in today’s schools, and thus, while we already had a pre-pandemic problem with the teacher supply-chain in this country, we now risk facing an actual collapse of our entire education system.

Which some, like David Brooks, want to cheer.  They see a potential for massive reinvention of how teaching and learning take place in the United States and are upset that no one in the political realm is stepping up to lead the way.  However, while I am sympathetic (since this whole project is about how I think we need to reform and repair education in this country), I am also always leery when folks like Brooks start using the word, “revolution.”  As I once challenged one of my students—and which was apparently the one thing she remembered me teaching her as she brought it up decades later in an alumni forum—revolutions damage; they dismantle and destroy.  No one endures a revolution unscathed. Furthermore, the harm done can rival the harm restituted: as The Who cynically sang, “meet the new boss; same as the old boss.”

Therefore, though the state of education in 2023 is a grim one (and I’m not even addressing the infrastructure issues here, focusing instead solely on the human part of the equation), I do not think turning the existing rubble into ash is going to cause a phoenix-like resurrection of our schools and our children’s learning.  Instead, I think it is going to take a societal paradigm shift where adults from all ages and walks of life start to care more about our children and their future than they do their own adult wants and whims—something psychologist Dacher Keltner points out, our brains have evolved the capacity to do. 

But in today’s world of narcissistic technological habits, this capacity remains underdeveloped in critical masses of our citizenry, and that is the dilemma for the current state of education: we know what needs to be done to fix things; can we generate the will to make it happen? I wish I were more optimistic about the answer to that question, but then, as my regular readers know, I think there is always hope, and for now, that work of hope will have to be enough.  After all, there are children in my immediate direct charge, the very future in my hands; I am and remain a teacher.

References

Allen, G. (July 13, 2022) Florida Gov. DeSantis Takes Aim at What He Sees as Indoctrination in Schools. NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1110842453/florida-gov-desantis-is-doing-battle-against-woke-public-schools.

Brooks, D. (Feb. 16, 2023) America Should Be in the Middle of a Schools Revolution.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/opinion/america-schools-revolution.html.

CDC (2023) Youth Risk Behavior Survey.  https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf.

Doty, E.; et al. (2023) What Do Changes in State Test Scores Imply for Later Life Outcomes?National Bureau of Economic Research.  https://www.nber.org/papers/w30701

Ghorayshi, A. & Rabin, R.C. (Feb. 13, 2023) Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness-suicide-violence.html?searchResultPosition=1.

Keltner, D. (March 3, 2023) Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button.  Hidden Brain.  https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/happiness-2-0-the-reset-button/.

Mahnken, K. (Feb. 1, 2023) Global Learning Loss:  Top 4 Takeaways from Latest International COVID Research.  The 74.  https://www.the74million.org/article/global-learning-loss-top-4-takeaways-from-latest-international-covid-research/ 

NAIS. (Feb. 13, 2023) NAIS Snapshot.  https://www.nais.org/getmedia/e12240f3-e77-486c-b3b3-5964312eaa16/NAISsnapshotSurveyTurnover021723.pdf

Reed, L. (Jan. 27, 2023) How Students Scored on State Tests in Spring.  The Baltimore Sun, pp. 1-2.

Shortly after the completion of my on-line book portion of this project—and in response to a query from one of my very first readers—I wrote a post about AI. My reader was curious about my critique of catechism as a learning tool and whether an artificial intelligence can, in fact, actually learn. So I explored how the training methods these software programs employ are fundamentally different from the ways that brains learn knowledge and understanding, and I explained how the prescriptive, repetitive process an AI uses to master a topic or skill is very dissimilar to how the brain works and that that is why AI can’t meet the very precise definition in biology for intelligence:  namely, the capacity to solve novel problems.

My, how things appear to have changed!

Enter ChatGPT and its brethren: AIs that can write apparently unique essays and reports so that you no longer have to, and with software available to read aloud what the GPTs write, we won’t even have to concern ourselves with the potential illiteracy problem I introduced last time. The computers will take care of it all!

Or will they? As I said in Sound It Out, it’s enough to keep this educator up at night. But I also said that I think all is not quite lost (nor maybe even what it seems), and I promised to reveal why.  Here goes:

For starters, as I pointed out in my original posting about AI, these programs can mimic some highly sophisticated behaviors, but they can’t originate them.  ChatGPT can appear to be producing unique, new material, but the reality is that what looks “original” is merely a compilation of writing that already exists in the enormous database to which the software has access and which it has been trained to recognize as a “correct” response to a particular question.  In other words, it can mimic a Toni Morrison or a Taylor Swift because it has every word or lyric either ever wrote (at least so far).  But this AI cannot be Toni Morrison or Taylor Swift.  It cannot create a uniquely new, never-heard-before rendering of their voices.  Hence, while ChatGPT might compose a Tay Tay parody, it cannot produce her next exclusive outpouring of words reflecting her own individual emotions. Ms. Swift’s career is most definitely not in any immediate danger.

What is in danger are those fields of writing where genuinely novel responses are unnecessary—where the word bank and the grammar silo are already large enough.  Thus, if you are a textbook author, advertising copyist, contract lawyer, or other writer of the equivalent of instruction manuals, your day-job may be at risk.  In fact, a good friend of mine who has her own internet start-up has shared with me how excited she and her partner are by the release of ChatGPT because of how much money it will save them on authoring the on-line text they need for their business.  So it isn’t that this new AI won’t be disruptive to the act and role of writing in society; it’s just that it won’t disrupt all writing everywhere (and I’ll save the ethics of my friend’s bottom-line capitalism for another day).

The second reason I don’t think all is lost to the AIs of this world is that the drive to create seems almost hard-wired into our brains as much as the hippocampus’ hunger for new stimulus.  I have only to observe the many students in the commons space directly outside my classroom spending countless hours making Tik Tok videos to know that the urge to create is alive and well (indeed, as their teacher, I wish I could get them to see that if they studied with the same effort and investment, they’d all be future Rhodes Scholars). What all their creativity reminds me of, though, is my 10^th grade English teacher who brilliantly understood that one of the best ways to get buy-in from his students who were not intrinsically motivated academic learners was to help them see how learning to write made them more creative at the things about which they did care.  I can remember him reaching out to the kids whose passion was music, helping them to see that “the essay you just wrote will make you a better composer.”  Or the football players in the room who discovered “that when you learn to make proper patterns with the words, you can make better patterns in your plays.”  You name a population of student interest, and he knew how to hook them into writing. 

Thus, because learning to write is one of the simplest ways to learn to create—and because I’m confident that there are at least a million—if not a billion—children out there who want to be the next Pentatonix, Patrick Mahomes, or Guy Fieri—I am optimistic that ChatGPT will not be the end of high school English after all.  It will require rethinking how we teach it, how we assess it, and how we motivate those learning to do it.  But truly original writing is likely to remain the domain of the brain just as much as did the truly creative thinking it took to build ChatGPT in the first place.

Which brings me to my third reason why I do not think that this new AI is quite as demonic as first feared, and to understand this reason fully, my readers will need to take the time to listen to the very end of the final episode of Sold a Story.  Throughout this series, its primary investigator, Emily Hanford, interviews not just parents who are struggling with the reading crisis but their young children as well.  She then employs these very same children to read every single one of the final credits for the podcast, and the recording of these developing voices as they wrestle with sounding out the unfamiliar names and words—with supportive parents clearly guiding in the background—is truly joyous.  You can hear the delight in each child’s voice at the sense of power their ability to read provides them, and you can almost feel their love of the act of reading in the cadence of their tones.  If you need some optimism for the future of the written word, go listen to these kids!

However, that same optimism leads me to the cautionary part of this essay, and that is that artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT, self-parking cars, cancer screening software—and nearly every appliance in your house—are here to stay.  Ubiquitous AI is now simply part of the fabric of 21^st Century existence, and therefore, as Kevin Roose of The New York Times wisely points out, our children are going to need to learn how to live with these programs as integral parts of their lives.  He suggests that we deliberately employ ChatGPT as one of our educational tools precisely because we need students to know how to recognize fact from fiction, truth from falsehood, functional from garbage.  ChatGPT is already being employed to create both information and disinformation on-line, and our children are only going to learn how to tell the difference if they interact with the AIs that can generate both. 

That, by the way, is why we do not yet have fully autonomous self-driving cars: we have witnessed firsthand the limits of the AI responsible for them and know to proceed with caution.  With ChatGPT here to stay, we are going to need to do the same in our schools.

References

Hanford, E. (2022) Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.  Minnesota Public Radio.  https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/.

Herman, D. (Dec. 9, 2022) The End of High School English.  The Atlantic.  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/openai-chatgpt-writing-high-school-english-essay/672412/.

Klepper, D. (Jan. 28, 2023) AI-powered Tools Have Ability to Create Propaganda and Lies.  The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=d3e7db0e-e4b1-479d-9030-364b0920bd8d.

Roose, K. (Jan. 12, 2023) Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools.  Teach with It.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/technology/chatgpt-schools-teachers.html.

“What’s the use of a book,” thought Alice,
“without pictures or conversations?”
—Lewis Carroll

Ignorance, as we know, can be dangerous.  But what can be even more dangerous is not knowing what we do not know, and I recently found myself among those suffering from this condition when it comes to one of education’s most fundamental, foundational skills:  the ability to read.  Because I follow almost exclusively the science, I had thought that the battle and debate over “phonics” vs. “whole language” in elementary schools had been resolved long ago and that phonics had firmly won due to the data overwhelming supporting it.  Indeed, if you had asked me a month ago how reading is taught in the early grades in this country, I would have said “phonics” and not given it another thought.

Turns out not only would I have been wrong; I would have been badly wrong.  However, thanks to a good friend and colleague of mine who put me on to the reporting of Emily Hanford of Minnesota Public Radio, I now know not only what I did not know; I know what I should know (and so should every other educator at every level in this country), and it is scary stuff.

Our tale begins nearly 60 years ago with a teacher and educational researcher from New Zealand, Marie Clay (eventually Dame Clay for her efforts) who developed a method for teaching reading that became known as “cueing.”  It was grounded in the psychology of the day that just as all children naturally learn how to speak, developing their vocabulary without any direct instruction or intervention, so too must children naturally learn how to read, and therefore, the best way for children to learn to read was not to master how to decipher the actual individual words but to learn their meaning through the context of a story and its images. 

It was a hugely popular idea at the time, and cueing would become the educational “darling” of its day. It would do so because it was so much easier to employ in the classroom than the traditional “sound-it-out” phonics approach and also because so many children seemed to learn successfully when using this technique.  Eventually, cueing would make the leap across the Pacific to this country where it would become known as the “whole language” approach to reading, and for much of the 1980s and 1990s, the debate over “phonics” vs. “whole language” in elementary school circles was intense—in no small part because it got enmeshed with the arguments over how best to improve reading scores in the underperforming schools in our urban and rural areas, where proponents insisted that the “whole language” approach was improving the educational outcomes of poor children and children of color in particular.

Meanwhile, the scientific research about both reading and the brain began to catch up with what was going on in the classroom, and the results were unequivocal:  phonics was not only superior to cueing at teaching children how to read; cueing was, in fact, how children who struggle with learning to read actually compensate for their weakness.  Thus, teachers who were employing “whole language” were really teaching reading badly. Eventually, (as I discuss in more detail in A Brain Research Update), the science would reveal that learning to read actually involves “high-jacking” our natural facial recognition neurons in the brain and that requires the intense, direct and repetitive instruction of phonics to sound out each word as we read it—something that those of us who are successful readers do without any self-awareness that we are doing it.  Hence, put bluntly, the act of reading is not something our brains do naturally at all, and it requires significant interventive training to learn how to do so well.

Yet, as I learned in Sold a Story, all this research which I assumed was being followed has, in reality, been openly fought and denied for over two decades now by a whole host of stakeholders in our schools, and curricula based on cueing remain the dominant ones on the market for school districts to purchase and use.  It took a pandemic, with zoom school for kindergartners and first & second graders, for parents stuck at home themselves—most of whom like myself would have been trained with phonics—to see what was taking place firsthand and for a critical mass of them to begin to question what was happening—or more often failing to happen—to their children.

So how did we get into this mess? How did the scientific research about reading become so contentious and why have we allowed so many children to develop poor reading skills over the recent decades?

To address these questions, I think we need to start by acknowledging that much of the drive behind cueing and “whole language” was well-intentioned.  Marie Clay’s original research, for example, was about how to help children who found reading challenging to be more successful at it, and when she noted how so many of these children were using context to try to learn the meaning of words, it didn’t occur to her that she could be observing what the research now knows is a poor compensation mechanism for dealing with a weakness.  Instead, she saw it as a strength and made the flawed causal leap that if this is how poor readers become successful, then how much more will this method help all children learn to read.  Likewise, many elementary teachers wanted their children to love books and to make meaning from their stories as soon as possible, and “whole language” seemed to do away with the tedium of learning to read which they feared might put some kids off books while appearing to let students jump right away into what makes discovering new written materials fun and engaging.

However, lest we be too generous, I think we also must acknowledge that there have been and continues to be some powerful, vested interests at work.  “Whole language” curricula have been a $1.6 billion dollar business in this country since the early 2000s, and one of its leading proponents has made so much wealth off her program that she owns and drives a Maserati.  In addition, a phonics-based curriculum is significantly more time-demanding for teachers, and so schools confront either the need for additional educators/aids for the individuated instruction required to teach in this way, or they need to employ a more rote, drill-based pedagogy in large classrooms full of dozens of kids—neither of which is appealing in a time of budget cuts, limited resources, and the desire for more student-centered learning.  And that’s especially true given that a significant majority of children do learn to read in spite of the use of “whole language” in their training.

But that points to two other issues in this mess.  First, it suggests an implicit bias on the part of both individual teachers and schools, and that is that certain kids are just hard-wired to struggle to read; that they just don’t have what it takes to be truly successful readers.  This fixed-mindset bias has then been reinforced by the fact that the percentage of children who seem unable to master at least some degree of proficiency in reading has remained relatively low over the past few decades, and the unspoken “elephant” is that no system can be 100% successful. 

Except—and this is the second significant issue—the research shows that the same percentage of white children are just as likely as children of color or impoverished children to struggle with learning to read using “whole language.”  The difference is that many of the struggling white children have access through their privilege to tutors and other compensatory mechanisms to overcome their reading skill deficits.  Hence, how we teach reading in our schools isn’t just about securing access to education’s most essential skill; it is about securing access to an equitable education, period.

What’s more, if this almost Kuhnian battle of paradigms about how best to teach reading were not already problematic enough, the data now coming in about the impact of the pandemic on this essentail skill are positively grim.  Nearly 12 million children in this country now exhibit significant deficits in their ability to read—across the entire socio-economic spectrum—and because all the educational research shows that any reading deficits still present at grade 3 have a direct correlation with a student’s remaining educational trajectory to adulthood, we are looking at a significant subset of an entire generation being potentially unable to fulfill critical roles in our future economy and society at large.  And before my skeptics “pooh-pooh” the impact of only 12 million in a country of nearly 400 million, I remind readers of how disruptive the loss of “just” over a million dead from the pandemic has already been in the past two years on the current job market, inflation, etc.

The bottom line is that we have a reading crisis in this country with significant implications for our entire future as a society, and as an educator, it hits home at the very root of my mission.  I need to be prepared for the students who will arrive on my high school doorstep one day, and I need to spread the word about the phonics-cueing battle still taking place to enable any of my readers to become more effective advocates for better reading curricula in their elementary schools and districts.  Hence, I am grateful for the demise of my ignorance.

However, my new awareness of the reading crisis has joined yet another recently dispelled ignorance about an AI software known as GPT-3, and it has left me even more concerned about the root of all learning: basic literacy.  Many variants of this software now exist, including a publicly available free-ware version called ChatGPT, but essentially all of them have the same basic ability to generate coherent, rational—and unique!—written responses to nearly any query put to these softwares (including one GPT-3 authoring a scholarly article about itself currently awaiting peer-review for publication in a scientific journal).  I suggest reading Herman’s article in The Atlantic if you would like to see just how good a job these AIs do at generating original text, but the new reality is that meaningful authorship can now be generated by a computer—potentially leaving all of us never having to learn how to write ever again.

What, though, will it mean to teach in a world where no one has to write and where they might not even be able to read any words in the first place? It’s enough to keep this educator up at night, but I’ll tackle why I think all is not quite lost next time.

References

Barshay, J. (Dec. 12, 2022) Proof Points: Third Graders Struggling the Most to Recover in Reading After the Pandemic.  The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-third-graders-struggling-the-most-to-recover-in-reading-after-the-pandemic/.

Hanford, E. (2022) Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.  Minnesota Public Radio.  https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/.

Herman, D. (Dec. 9, 2022) The End of High School English.  The Atlantic.  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/openai-chatgpt-writing-high-school-english-essay/672412/.

Thunstrӧm, A, O. (September, 2022) AI Writes About Itself.  Scientific American.  Pp. 70-73.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.
—Andy Williams

Love people and use things. Because the opposite never works.
—Joshua Fields Millburn

We still have tree-covered slopes to deforest
and subterranean lakes of oil to tap with our gushers.
—Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens

Materialists Maximus

Let me preface what I am about to say about the annual spending orgy that remains a fundamental part of the holiday season (and the U.S. economy) by sharing that I am not a variant of the Ebenezer Scrooge prior to his visit by the ghosts (ironically no one ever talks about the post-ghost, reformed Scrooge of whom it was said “that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” But I digress).  I understand the need for celebration with family and friends and the joy of it.  I understand the psychological need to actively resist the darkness of ever shorter days.  I appreciate that there is a time to kill the proverbial fatted-calf and to feast with abandon. 

However, there is an old aphorism that parents shouldn’t worry about whether or not their children are listening to them; they should be worried that their children are watching them.  Hence, I have been busy thinking about what we are teaching our children with our choices about consumption—and not just at this time of year.

The troubling reality is that over 70% of the U.S. economy depends on consumer spending (which means it depends on people purchasing, destroying or discarding, and purchasing again), and so deeply ingrained is this habit of consumption that folks who have burned through their savings in the recent purchasing surge of this past year are now starting to put their holiday gifts onto credit cards, even as the Federal Reserve is causing the interest rates on those cards to skyrocket in its attempt to combat surging inflation in the cost of those very same gifts. Economists are predicting a mere 6-8% growth over last year’s spending and are using this fact as indicative that the U.S. economy might be heading into recession.

Yet, this entire socio-economic process is utterly unsustainable (we are a finite “blue dot” floating through space).  I is quite literally burning through the energy that is causing the climate crisis (how many of us have already forgotten Hurricane Ian?), and it is trashing and poisoning the earth’s ecosystems (something we don’t always see firsthand here in this country because we’re trashing somebody else’s environment to feed our own consumption [check out The Story of Stuff]).

So why do we do it? Why are we so busy actively contributing to our own potential demise (as a culture if not as a species) and why are we so busy teaching our children by example how to contribute through our own consumptive behaviors to the problem? Where did this whole thing come from?

The answer is the rise of a new business paradigm in the post-war era following World War Two:  planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence (otherwise known as artificial “need”).  The massive consumption of the war effort had caused the American economy to boom because as bullets, guns, etc. rolled off the assembly line, their nearly immediate physical destruction created the demand to make more of them, and the expansion of the war to more and more parts of the globe simply caused this demand to grow ever larger.  However, once the war ended, all that need abruptly went away, and corporations found themselves asking (and asking quite openly! This was not some secret conspiracy): how can we artificially keep perceived need up and cause it to grow? In other words, how can we keep consumer demand high and keep it growing ever higher? Enter planned obsolescence and artificial “need.”  Companies would simply engineer things to eventually consistently break, and advertising would create a perception of need where in fact there wasn’t any.

And it worked! Today, like fish in water, large majorities of us consume voraciously without thinking—especially during the holiday season—and you might think that our homes and domiciles would be positively bursting with stuff by now.  Yet, the average lifespan of a new item brought into our homes is 6 months, and our landfills are starting to resemble small mountain ranges.  Thus, the cycle continues.

A Danger to the Republic

Interestingly, though, what we have started to consume more and more today is no longer physical stuff; it is digital—in the form of entertainment, social media, and on-line content.  We are awash with information, misinformation, and disinformation, beamed into our homes and devices 24/7 by our “5G Networks,” and we consume it even more voraciously than we do our stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, the thinking behind the Sheldon & Arens quote at the start of this post is alive and well in corporate culture around the world, and the ecological reckoning that is coming because of it will be absolutely biblical in character.  However, as our consuming-simply-to-consume habits transition to what has been called “the attention economy,” we find these habits beginning to impact our civic life, where I fear we face an entirely different kind of reckoning.  Each new app we purchase and each new service we pay to stream lay claim to our ever-divided attention, and with an increasingly disrupted attention, many of us find ourselves feeling more and more stressed, more and more anxious, more and more fretful, and consequently, more and more open to simplistic solutions to the larger problems confronting us today. 

This is especially true for those whose digital diet consists primarily of misinformation and disinformation.  Thus, large swaths of people in this country and around the world have begun to mistrust the civic principles and structures that are the foundations of democratic society.   Conspiracy theories and authoritarianism are actively at work right now in no small part because our material consumptive behaviors have carried over into our digital consumptive behaviors—consuming without thought, consuming simply to consume—and while our republic may have survived this last election cycle, we must soberly remember that there were still tens of millions of our fellow citizens who voted for the Big Lie embracing candidates. 

Moreover, as the great educator Horace Mann reminds us:

A Republic…devoid of intelligence…will only more closely resemble an obscene giant who has waxed strong in his youth and grown wanton in his strength; whose brain has been developed only in the region of the appetites and passions and not in the organs of reason and conscience…Such a Republic, with all its noble capacities for beneficence, will rush with the speed of a whirlwind to an ignominious end; and all good men of aftertimes would weep over its downfall.

Be the Change You Seek

So what’s a citizenry to do? Well, first, become informed of the consequences of your own consumptive behaviors.  To learn more about the impact of our material consumption in this country, a good starting point is the Planet Money T-Shirt Project. For the impact of digital consumption, a good starting is my own, That Pesky Brain.

Second, educate the children in your life—lead by example.  Give to a charity in their name at this time of the year and explain to them why.  Consume less yourself and make home-made gifts that use fewer resources.  Gift a sweater and lower the thermostat in the house.  Make a “no phone” rule at dinner and talk about each other’s day.  Give children your undivided attention when they ask for it and always clearly close and set aside any digital device you might be on when they do.  Take your child with you when you vote or let them see you filling out your mail-in ballot and walk it together to the mailbox.  When age appropriate, read the constitution together, and if you yourself are of a certain age, volunteer to be an election official and take your grandchild with you if permitted. 

In short, practice in front of the young people in your life what needs preaching in a world in desperate need of healing and actively embody the words attributed to Ghandi, “be the change you wish to see in the world.”  By doing so, you teach and empower the children of this world to do the same and create the conditions for a better quality life for everyone.

After all, what could be more fitting for the “Season of Hope?”

References

Gershon, L. (April 10, 2017) The Birth of Planned Obsolescence.  JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/the-birth-of-planned-obsolescence/.

Mann, H. (1891) Life and Works of Horace Mann, Vol. 1-3.  Google Books. https://books.google.com/. 

Mirabella, L. (Nov. 26, 2022) On Black Friday, Habits Shift as Traditions Remain.  The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?edid=7ab93cd3-eb2d-43d1-884a-bfb4f1147b01, p. 1.

Sheldon, R. & Arens, E.  (1932) Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity (Getting and Spending: The Consumer’s Dilemma).  New York: Harper.