In academic circles, the study of “pedagogy” has taken a fair beating. This is not a recent phenomenon. In 1929, the literary critic Irving Babbitt proclaimed that professors of pedagogy “are held in almost universal suspicion in academic circles, and are not infrequently looked upon by their colleagues as downright charlatans.”
The subsequent years have not improved their reputation—among their academic colleagues in other disciplines or anyone else.
The study of pedagogy, not to mention the practice, has suffered from a number of problems, the first of which seems to be that, as a discipline (made up of a web of educational think tanks, academic journals, teachers colleges, and professional standards boards who all purport to prepare teachers to teach), it has wasted its credibility on every progressivist fad and fashion and spent its energies on experimental ideas that have repeatedly failed—failure that has not stopped the educational establishment from implementing the same ideas again and again to no academic benefit. There is a national education reform movement almost exactly every twenty-five years in the United States, starting with the progressivist reforms of the 1920s. Each has flown under the progressivist banner, and each has not only failed to solve the problems of learning in our schools, but has, in many cases, made them worse.
Another issue is the low scholarly reputation of teachers’ colleges. On the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), for example, education majors are among the lowest performers on both the quantitative and qualitative sections of the test, saved from the absolute bottom of the verbal section of the test by the lower-scoring business majors. Students entering graduate schools of education tend to come from the bottom quartile of undergraduate achievement, and perform poorly on various measures of academic competency. Education research, too, has little to say for itself: A metastudy by two researchers from Duke and UConn in 2016 found that only 0.19% of education studies met even the most basic requirement of reliable research: that the study be replicated.
Another problem is that the study of pedagogy has been forced to bear the full weight of learning. A teacher is expected to master “methods” of teaching rather than to concentrate on the content he or she is expected to teach. Knowing how to teach math seems to be more important than knowing math. An oft-repeated progressivist bromide is that we shouldn’t concentrate on teaching students knowledge, but teach them instead how to use knowledge—the question of how a student is supposed to use something he does not have is left unaddressed.
The old idea that a teacher should have a mastery of what he or she is to teach has given way to the idea that how to teach is the important thing. The specialist in pedagogy is considered more necessary than the specialist in math when it comes to teaching math, despite the fact that the student is expected to learn math, not pedagogy.
There are other problems: lack of accountability, imperviousness to change, low expectations. But the chief problem, and the one that gives birth to the others, seems to be that many of the assumptions about students, schools, teaching, and the very nature of learning in teacher preparation are simply mistaken.
This fundamental issue has to do with the very object of teaching. Here we find a marked disagreement between progressivist and traditional educators, with extremes on both sides. Let’s start with a simple example in the form of a question.
When we say “Mark teaches Julia Latin,” is the object of Mark’s activity Julia? Or is it Latin? Which one is being taught? The progressives have a quick answer: It is Julia who is being taught. In fact, there is a common education-school slogan that asserts “We are teaching students, not subjects” to underscore the lack of concern for the subject matter being taught to the student, and their all-encompassing concern for the student.
To them, Julia is the object of teaching, not Latin.
This concern with the student over the subject is very much in line with the chief principle of progressivist pedagogy, stemming directly from John Dewey, that teaching should be “child-centered.” This is an intrinsic or psychological emphasis. The practical result is the tendency to think that teaching is the process of bringing the subject into conformity with the student rather than the student into conformity with the subject. William Heard Kilpatrick’s attempt to allow the student’s interests to play a greater role in what he or she studied (which easily transitioned to the attempt to sideline teachers) also exemplifies this impulse.
This child-centered philosophy is on full display when the new progressivist teacher takes over the classroom in Chapter 2 of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Suspicious of Scout’s evident literacy, she begins eliminating traditional subjects, only to replace them with whole-word reading instruction, projects, cooperative learning, and thematic units in a methodology her brother Jem refers to as the “Dewey decimal system.”
The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: No tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.
These new learning devices—projects, unit studies, “group dynamics” (cooperative learning), all the unwieldy pedagogical apparatus of the progressive program launched in the 1920s (made more toxic when paired with a thinly veiled disdain for actual literacy)—were designed to take the place of the former and longstanding goal of inculcating cultural knowledge in the student. And if the rhetoric of the education establishment is any indication, the downgrading of the importance of subject matter in favor of the non-academic development of the child is still the dominant attitude.
The anti-academic and anti-knowledge bias in progressivism has been its most controversial characteristic. Its greatest critic has been E. D. Hirsch, Jr., whose book Cultural Literacy landed like a bomb in 1987. In a later work, he states,
Historically … the progressive tradition has continued to attack the disciplined teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic in favor of “holistic” methods, which supposedly engage and educate the whole child. Progressives have also continued merely academic learning. Not surprisingly, disparagement of the “subject” has resulted in a diminishment of student competency in subject matters.
There is, of course, an opposite extreme. The extreme traditionalist may say that the object of education is not the student at all, but the subject: that in the sentence “Mark teaches Julia Latin,” what is being taught is not Julia at all, but Latin alone. The subject, not the student, is the object of teaching.
We see this view on full display in Charles Dickens’ novel, Hard Times, a book that could be considered one of the great commentaries on education. In various novels Dickens lampoons the education of his time, characterized by the “grinders” to whom poor unsuspecting students were sent to learn their grammar forms mechanistically and completely out of context of any actual Latin.
Hard Times opens with a scene in a classroom in which Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher, is attempting to force “facts” into the brains of his students:
“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”
Here, students are not human beings with souls that need to be formed in accordance with some ideal paradigm, but instead are “reasoning animals,” mere “vessels” to be filled with “facts.” So little do the students themselves matter to Gradgrind in the project of learning that he has assigned each of them a number by which he refers to them in class. And when he goes to ask Sissy Jupe, “Girl Number Twenty,” who has been raised with circus horses, about the nature of horses, she cannot find the words to explain what she knows. To show her what a horse is, Gradgrind turns to Bitzer, who, despite having little real knowledge of horses, gives the requisite facts about the horse, which are accepted by Gradgrind as the correct answer. Implicit in such a method is the treatment of a horse, not as a being with a nature or an essence, but merely as a mechanistic collection of facts.
“Now girl number twenty,” said Mr. Gradgrind. “You know what a horse is.”
To Gradgrind, the teacher is teaching the subject, not the student. The student is the passive recipient of the knowledge, and it is the knowledge alone, not the student, that is the important constituent in the learning process. Facts are the important thing; the student is the mere receptacle.
Is there a third alternative?
We might resolve this question by taking note of an observation about Latin grammar. In Latin, students learn that verbs like “teaching” require a double accusative construction:
Marcus Juliam linguam Latinam docet.
The accusative case, indicated by the -am ending on both Juliam and linguam Latinam, tells us that both are direct objects of the verb. In English we can say both “Mark teaches Latin to Julia,” and “Mark teaches Julia about Latin,” sidelining either the subject or the student into a prepositional phrase. Early on, however, students of Latin learn that neither would be the right construction in Latin—at least they would learn this if the teacher bothered to teach them the subject!
If we take our cue from the Latin grammar, there would be no progressivist nonsense about saying “We are teaching Julia, not Latin” (another reason Julia should take Latin). And there would be no Gradgrindian grammar either.
This is, we might say, the classical answer to the question, something that would be taken for granted in an educational thinker like the Roman Quintilian. What is being taught in the process of teaching? It is both the student and the subject. Both are the direct objects of the educational process. We are indeed teaching the student, and trying to do it as clearly as possible by adjusting our manner of presenting the material in the classroom. And yet we are also teaching subjects, each of which has its own peculiarities in regard to its teachability, which must be taken into account.
Teaching is a transitive verb: It must have an object. And what the grammar here tells us is that teaching has not one object, but two. For this reason, teaching is a constant balancing act between what we are teaching and who we are teaching. The abilities of the student must be taken into account in the teaching process, something every good teacher knows how to do, but he does this without compromising the subject.
Contrary to progressivism, the purpose of teaching is to change the student, not to change the subject. And contrary to extreme traditionalism, the purpose is not to leave the student unchanged in teaching him an unchanging subject.
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