December 29, 2010

What’s Wrong With Our Schools (Part 1)

Posted in children, Education, Gifted Children tagged behaviorism, cognitive, counterproductive, mental fitness, mistakes, neuroscience, politics, psychology, social pressure at 2:28 am by Matthew

[This was to be the last of my best-of reposts, but the original was deleted by accident.  Ah well, it may be for the best that I have to rewrite the post from scratch, since so much has transpired since I first penned it.  Among other things, the pseudoscience that set me off has been increasingly vilified, the backwardness of American schools has been getting attention, and some of the people in charge of curriculum have started to agree with me.  The tone that I struck last time was of one voice shouting into the rain and expecting to get taken as a wacko.  This time, I hope to be more in sync with the new context.]

It all started when my daughter came home from kindergarten with her hands laced together backwards, pumping and twisting them rhythmically.  She happily informed her mother and me that this exercise made her brain stronger.  Had she learned this from a fellow student at recess, I would have laughed.  When I discovered she had learned it from her teacher as part of a county-wide program to improve students’ brainpower,  I had to leave the room.  I wasn’t about to dash my daughter’s excitement out of hand, but I was working on my Masters, and this program (called “Brain Gym”) didn’t resemble anything in neuroscience.

I’d be Brain Gym’s biggest fan if it actually worked, and I tried to stay objective as I slogged through criticisms.  I even went so far as to borrow a teacher’s manual from my daughter’s school so that I could evaluate the claims myself.  I looked up their cited sources to review and compare with other peer-reviewed studies.  In the end, I was forced to conclude that this program was pseudoscience, and I wrote a strongly worded but compassionate letter to the local paper, explaining that our hardworking school district employees had been conned.

When I attended a school board meeting in the wake of my letter, I asked one of the advocates of the program why she and her colleagues didn’t check with neuroscientists for a program that made neuroscience claims.  Her response was, “Well, we’re behaviorists.”  It seemed like a non-sequitur at first, but as I pondered this statement later, it occurred to me that this was a a critically important fact.

Behaviorists?  Why would behaviorists be in charge of schools?  Behaviorism was the branch of psychology founded on the principle that the mind was an impenetrable mystery, and that all you could do was study the way environment shaped behavior.  Why would such people be in charge of education–of filling minds with information? If it sounds like I’ve got a problem with behaviorism, I don’t.  I just don’t think it’s a good fit for education.  Not when there exists another branch of psychology–cognitive psychology–that studies exactly how the mind gathers, stores, and analyzes information.

This, I realized, was the grandfather of most of the problems in America’s schools.  Before, I thought that schools had hundreds, even thousands of little tiny problems.  Now I realize they have one or two large ones, and the rest are just symptoms.  Putting behaviorists in charge of an academic setting pits administrators and educators against each other, with administrators trying to shape behavior and teachers trying to educate.  With so much disagreement about the central purpose of education, is it any wonder that neither job is being done well?

When I posted this previously, it went much longer, but this time around I’d like to hand it over to anyone in the audience.  What do you see wrong with America’s schools?  Post it in the comments, and next time around I’ll relate as many as I can to this central problem.

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