At the Center of Education

All lovers of fiction can think of a literary villain who fills them with particular detestation.  Every serious reader can think of one character who, on account of their cunning or malice or outright cruelty, still makes their skin crawl, and seems to embody the worst of humanity.  For some, it might be Regan and Goneril, with their ingratitude and heartless viciousness.  For others, it might be Uriah Heep, with his cunning, obsequious malice.  For me, though, there is no villain worse than the Pout Pout Fish. 

I am not referring to the main character of the original story.  That guy was bad enough, with his smarmy, saccharine “cheerie-cheerie” face.  Why couldn’t he have said to the clam or the octopus, who repeatedly upbraided him at the beginning of the book for his melancholy aspect, “look, I am stuck here under the ocean, hidden away from the sunlight, alive for merely a season, and the time I do not spend fending off starvation I am preoccupied with avoiding sharks, barracudas, and trawler nets, so I think I am entitled to a bit of glumness, thank you very much.”  But no, he just has to put on that simpering smile, and go around planting unsolicited kisses on every organism he finds, which, even in the Marianna Trench, must qualify as some kind of felony.  All of that is more than enough reason to be suspect of that slimy little jerk.

But the figure I am thinking of is the one who has the starring role in “The Pout Pout Fish Goes to School.”  Nowhere in all the legends and fables of the world does a more loathsome, more poisonous character stain the page. Heading off to school “for the first time of all,” the Pout Pout Fish is quickly overwhelmed by his discovery that all the other marine life is far more academically advanced than he is.  They can write, they can draw shapes, they can do division. He cannot do any of that (perhaps the fins have something to do with his infelicitous penmanship - we cannot say for certain).  Frowning and telling himself, “I’m not smart, I don’t belong,” the Pout Pout Fish gives up in despair and heads for the exit.  That is when his teacher steps in, and assures him “you can do it,” because he is smart and he belongs.

When this book was given to our family as a gift, I did one quick read through, then promptly found the appropriate corner of the attic to stow it in.  I refused to let our daughter read it.  She too was due to start her first day of school in mere months.  Perhaps she was going to find it to be a grand adventure, overflowing with new toys and new friends.  Perhaps she was going to find it a big snooze, and quickly develop that same aversion to mathematical equations that continues to plague her doltish father to this day.  She might find the experience to be any number of things, including anxiety inducing.  But why, I wondered, would I want to make her think that it definitely was anxiety inducing before her foot had even crossed the threshold?  Why would I want that to be her default expectation of an experience she might in fact discover to be enthralling or blasé?  What could be more villainous than that?

In fairness to the author of “The Pout Pout Fish Goes to School,” the message of this execrable story perfectly aligns with the standard modes education and child-rearing in place these days.  The assumption that children are, by nature, nervous wrecks, trembling at every new challenge or discomfort which life throws at them, is immensely wide-spread, and conditions the ways schools tend to teach students in hundreds of ways.  The need to counsel, to console, to tend to a child’s “trauma,” now consumes tremendous energy inside the school building, often taking precedence over the duty to instruct, because so many of the adults in the building are convinced that children stand in perpetual need of having their intrinsic emotional distress tended to.

I have no doubt that these adults are by and large motivated by a desire to help children, but it is well past time for us all to acknowledge that they are doing positive, lasting harm.  It is well past time for us to admit that our habit of treating children as psychologically fragile by nature has rendered an entire generation far more unstable and far less resolute than is healthy in young people.  Various authors – most notably Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, and Abigail Shrier – have argued that our default assumption that children are crippled with anxiety tends to exacerbate the very emotional distress we are pretending to alleviate.  Tell a child before her first day of school that the experience is bound to be distressing, and she will be haunted by fears that might otherwise never have occurred to her.  Tell children throughout the duration of their upbringing that causes of anxiety abound in their world, and they will eventually find a good reason to be continually anxious.

The fact is this tendency to regard children as inherently fragile is symptomatic of a larger ill in our general approach to education, which is a failure to teach according to norms.  The common experience for children when they begin school is a mild sense of novelty or loneliness or discomfort which, thanks to the native resilience and adaptability of the human constitution, they are soon able to overcome.  So the expectation that adults ought to frame for children beginning school is that they will experience a mild sense of novelty or loneliness or discomfort which, thanks to the native resilience and adaptability of the human constitution, they will soon be able to overcome.  Will there be exceptions to this?  Of course, and they must be handled with proper sympathy and concern.  But to take such exceptional responses and frame them as the basic expectation of all children represents a complete perversion of sensible child-rearing.  The expectations of adults influence the conduct of children.  When we show students that we expect them to rely on their capacities to adapt and persevere in order to overcome the strangeness of their new environment, we encourage them to exert their capacities to adapt and persevere.  When we show them that we expect them to be crippled with anxiety by their new environment, we invite and exacerbate that sort of reaction instead.

To conceive of a norm means to have in mind some notion of what competence in a particular sphere of action looks like.  To teach according to norms means holding out a standard of competence as a general expectation for students.  When we teach according to norms, we constantly signal to our students our confidence that they are capable of achieving competence in the tasks we assign them.  When we refuse to teach to norms, we just as surely signal our doubts about whether our students can competently accomplish any of the things we are asking them to accomplish.  By relentlessly fixating on exceptional cases, we communicate to young people our assumption that they are not capable of meeting any real expectations we might frame for them.  And of course, as we see in the matter of student anxiety, eventually the exceptional case gets centered as the norm, and subtly or not so subtly shapes conduct that departs ever more radically from competence.

This dynamic is at work across whole fields of education.  Rather than framing instruction according to a norm of the way students typically learn and develop, we now take account of purported “learning differences” to such an extent that over a third of any given class might have their own individual learning plans, with the teacher expected to “differentiate” instruction to accommodate half a dozen separate needs.  Rather than setting behavioral expectations according to a norm of appropriate school citizenship, administrators now show such deference to the individual circumstances of students that schools routinely fail to discipline students appropriately, with all the obvious consequences for the learning environment.  Rather than constructing a school’s reading list based on a norm of human nature, and the shared social and aesthetic powers native to it, we now construct those reading lists to encompass the exceptional experiences that are supposed to belong to students’ unique identities, until every last ethnicity, disability, or sexual proclivity of the class is reflected on the syllabus.  Our schools have no center.  Everything that transpires there is contorted by a centrifugal pressure that pulls against sound norms, and tears apart instruction and school culture through the force of a thousand exceptions.

The obvious response to this is that our society itself is lacking any such center.  The political, cultural, and regional diversity of the country makes it impossible to develop the kinds of consensus on behavioral expectations or the contents of the literary canon necessarily underlying any viable norms.  The prioritization of exceptional cases is, on this understanding, simply an acknowledgement of that diversity, and an attempt to accommodate it within the educational system.

This is both deeply true and deeply untrue.  It is true that the consensus-generating capacity of our society is nil, and that this is reflected in the lack of educational norms now in place.  What this points to is the urgency of the movement for school choice.  I certainly agree with those who deny that school choice is any kind of panacea for the ills of our educational system.  But it is obviously the needed first step right at the moment.  What is needed is the space and freedom to develop modes of instruction centered around norms that educators and families all consent to.  If that agreement cannot be achieved at the national, or even state level, then it must be allowed to develop at whatever local level it can be achieved.

Because what is profoundly untrue is that children can be educated in the absence of any shared norms. Adults will always frame expectations for children, and those expectations will always catechize.  If we do not establish those expectations around shared conceptions of competence, then they will be determined by various modes of incompetence.  If we do not demonstrate to our students our faith in their ability to grow into self-sufficient, thoughtful, temperate young adults, then they will inevitably give themselves permission to devolve into laziness and ignorance and self-indulgence.  If we do not center instruction around the best that students are capable of, then instruction will inevitably be determined by whatever is most extreme or fringe.  Our schools need a center again; only then can we impart to children the balance they so desperately need.