Zhao, Chapters 5-7

In Chapters 5-7 of Zhao's book, I feel like the worst parts of China's education system are what America's would be if every bad part were turned up to 11.  Chapter 5 talks about the hitting of arbitrary targets:  Whatever the Emperor wants, the Emperor gets.  If it is decreed that a big wall will be built, then damn the expenses, the wall will be built.  If Chairman Mao wants to increase steel production, then steel production will be increased, even if it is to the detriment of every other activity in society.  If professionals (academic and otherwise) need to publish in order to get promoted, and the only thing that matters is the number of publications (because bureaucracies need numerical metrics) then fake journals will be utilized.  If k-12 schools are going to be rewarded for the number of patents filed by students (Zhao is apparently not joking) then k-12 students will file patents of zero quality, and if the system is going to reward this then the  patent office will be obliged to accept and approve those patents.

I feel much the same way about the paperwork demands of the modern American higher ed bureaucracy.  It has been decreed that reports on outcomes assessment are to be written, so those reports are written.  However, thoughtful, meaningful data collection and analysis are non-trivial activities, and the System has no ability to fund the massive efforts that would be required to produce thoughtful evaluation of anything other than the most mass-produced course delivery.  Mass production sounds good to some technocrats, but "Innovation! And! Transformation!" also sound good to them, so the system continues to tolerate the intellectual diversity that is anathema to standardized, mass-produced assessment.  As a result, the system accepts meaningless reports to show that the requisite numbers of reports were filed.*  Moreover, the only thing that The System values even more than the production of reports is ensuring that no boats are rocked, and a truly meaningful look under the hood might tell us...well, it might tell us that the phrase "Gentleman's C" refers to a problem that is timeless and universal rather than old, musty, and covered in ivy.

In chapter 7, Zhao notes that China's rulers are not and have not been oblivious to the problems of exclusive reliance on standardized testing.  The Imperial Exams were abolished a bit more than a century ago, but the competitive test prep habits inspired by those exams have not easily faded.  When the universities give weight to measures of creativity (an oxymoron if ever there was one) parents push this children to excel at those measures and bribe the evaluators.  When the universities give weight to patents (!) the children produce the requisite numbers of junk patents.  If they reward performance in artistic or athletic talent competitions, the parents prepare their children accordingly.

Some  of this is surely a consequence of 1300 years of test prep habits not fading easily.  Cultures do not change overnight, as evidenced by Marxism's utter failure to change Chinese culture. (I hasten to note that the Chinese people's refusal to replace their traditional social structures with Marxism is a very, very good thing!)  However, Chapter 6 offers another point for why these hyper-competitive academic habits have not faded easily:  In both the past and the present, the highest-status jobs in China have been and are government jobs with academic requirements, not private sector jobs.  When there are few paths to advancement, people will do anything and everything that it takes to get on one of those paths.

In the US, we most definitely do NOT have a problem of assigning low status to private sector jobs.  However, we may be seeing a narrowing and bifurcation of career paths.  In the alleged "service economy" there will be the people paid well for jobs at desks and the people paid poorly for everything else.  There are problems with the economic sustainability of this model (e.g. what, exactly, will we produce for sale to the rest of the world?) but if we leave that aside for now, and just focus on the social and educational elements, a bifurcation of opportunity will raise the stakes of elite education, and with those rising stakes we will see more intense competition, and more cutting of corners.

I want the reader to consider the hypothesis that the health of an education system relies on the economy more than the health of an economy relies on the education system.  I do not simply mean that higher GDP means more money to inject into the education system; you can inject cash into good or bad schools and get good or bad results.   Rather, I mean that a robust and sustainable economy with a breadth of desirable paths and opportunities will be conducive to a more robust and sustainable educational  system, with more intellectual breadth and a wider variety of approaches and paths for a wider variety of students.  On the other hand, an economy with bifurcated opportunities will see intense competition for the handful of pathways to the better opportunities.  Competition can be a very good thing, but intense competition for the wrong sorts of things does not lead to better learning or better innovation.

*Let me reassure you that I am, needless to say, merely reporting unfortunate tales related to me by colleagues at other, less conscientious, institutions.  My own institution is, of course, an exception, producing exemplary assessment reports of the highest caliber and most thoughtful analysis.

Chapter 13: Hofstadter unloads

Chapter 13 is the one with lots of awesome polemic.  Hofstadter clearly hates progressive education in all its forms, probably even more than I do.  He's so on fire that the book is close to spontaneous  combustion.  I will excerpt some of the more blistering quotes below, but before I get there I will offer a more substantive observation:

Most of the k-12 "reforms" that set Hofstadter on fire with rage apparently came into vogue after WWI.  There were certain fads and experiments in k-12 in the 19th century, but high school attendance was far from universal.  In the early 20th century, especially right after the Progressive Era, high school attendance became much more common place.  Once that happened, the experimentation started.  Fads, anti-intellectualism, and democratic sentiment in education spring from American cultural strains of colonial pedigree (if not older), but they did not really come into their own until a bureaucracy had to spring up to cater to the masses.  Intellectualism is, almost by definition, not scalable to mass production.  I can hold forth on the weird psychology of faculty, the incentives of the educational software vendors, and the cultural legacy of the Great Awakening until I go blue in the face, but the full energies of reformist zeal will only be unleashed against us academics when there's a call to cater to the masses.  God help us if graduate education is ever targeted for some good, hard "democratization."

Anyway, on to the blistering:

Page 335, in response to a 1918 NEA commission report on restructuring high school, Hofstadter summarizes their recommendations with:

In short, the inner structure of various disciplines was to be demoted as an educational criterion and supplanted by greater deference to the laws of learning, then presumably being discovered.

Page 340:

There is an element of moral overstrain and curious lack of humor among American educationists which will perhaps always remain a mystery to those more worldly minds that are locked out of their mental universe.  The more humdrum the task the educationists have to undertake, the nobler and more exalted their music grows.  When they see a chance to introduce a new course in family living or home economics, they begin to tune the fiddles of their idealism.  When they feel they are about to establish the school janitor's right to be treated with respect, they grow starry-eyed and increase their tempo.  And when they are trying to assure that the location of the school toilets will be so clearly marked that the dullest child can find them, they grow dizzy with exaltation and launch into wild cadenzas about democracy and self-realization.

The silly season in educational writing had now opened.  The professionalization of education put a premium upon the sober treatment of every mundane problem, and the educators began to indulge  in solemn and pathetic parodies of the pedantry of academic scholarship.  Not liking to think of themselves as mere advocates of low-grade utilities, they began to develop the art of clothing every proposal, no matter how simple, common-sense, and sound, in the raiments of the most noble social or educational objectives.

Page 345, in response to a high school curricular movement called "life adjustment" (which apparently peaked in the 1950's):

Life-adjustment educators would do anything in the name of science except encourage children to study it.

Page 349:

As W.C. Bagley once remarked: "It was inevitable that any theory which justified or rationalized the loosening of standards should be received with favor," by those who, without deliberate intent, distorted experimental findings in the interest of their mission to reorganize the high schools to accommodate the masses.

Page 353:

The life-adjustment movement would establish once and for all the idea that the slow learner is "in no sense" the inferior of the gifted, and the principle that all curricular subjects, like all children, are equal.

It should go without saying, of course, that today's educational fashions are completely different and nowhere near as silly, and they will certainly not fall out of favor with the passage of time.