Corporate Education

It's the direction we're heading, like it or not. I for one, decidedly do not, but have been surprised in one of my Spring quarter courses to find that not everybody has the same reservations I do. Indeed, there is a big push - especially in the technology world - to embrace the disruptive and innovative opportunities that a more corporate model of education offers. Our current reading for the aforementioned class, Disrupting Class, by Clayton Christensen, speaks to how technology will revolutionize education, the undying undertone being: technology will turn education corporate. Scary? Big time.

First things first, what exactly does a more corporate model of education look like? Well, for one thing, we're already moving down that track in the language that schools use. Former Chicago Superintendent and current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan did not go by "Superintendent" in his previous post. Rather, he was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of his district. It is hardly a bad things that schools are paying more and better attention to how they spend their money, and to what their results are, but it is also important to ask about what comes along with bringing business to schools.

For one thing, the emphasis we now place on test scores is a vestige of business, which, even in its most dynamic and innovative forms, is always concerned with producing certain usable products for its consumers, whose use can then be measured. It does Apple no good to produce a product if they cannot later tell how and why people are using it, so they do extensive market research, they do intensive user-feedback and bug fixing, and so on. Some business types think that education needs exactly this: we should think of curriculum content as a product, students as consumers, and thus tailor the whole educational experience to the wants and needs of individual students. In many ways, that would be an improvement, but the first difficulty here is how we do our evaluations.

Standardized testing is an effort to scientifically compare students across time, space, and culture. Moreover, it is a mechanism by which we can make policy decisions in education, electing who to fund and who to fire, which students to slap "at-risk" labels or "learning disabled" labels on, and which to call "gifted." In all, assessment is the framework upon which modern education is built, and it is almost certainly not going anywhere soon. The tricky thing is making assessment more dynamic, which would be a step towards fulfilling a more business-y model of education. How can we do that? Is there really a meaningful way to engage students beyond, on some level, their knowledge of content? It's really hard to standardize essays - because good writing is so varied - or to assess thousands of students on their knowledge of the scientific process, because those are performance-based and intensive processes. Even computers, with their amazing, disruptive capabilities cannot replace a human eye for the aesthetic component that comes along with assessing learning.

Apple measures how consumers use the iPhone quantitatively and qualitatively. They need both. In education, we do a little of each, but quantitative measures dominate. As long as content is important to education, quantitative measures will continue to dominate. Or, is that the other way around? As long as it is important to assess, content will be the purpose. Christensen rightly believes that technology is transforming education, but he still understands that transformation as being formal, and not centered around content as such. That is, he does believe that each student will be able to learn a content based on individual preference, but he still sees the purpose of education as the delivery of content. Technology makes it easier to do that, and to assess it, but is that really what we want out of our schools (or computers)?

Why does Christensen value content over, say, thought process, innovation, or critical thinking? Because he is, I believe, stuck in a businessman's world, where outcomes need to be assessable, and where all things can be understood in terms of production, consumption, and exchange. For a long time - and even still to a degree in these sad times where tests dominate the schools - K-12 education in America has been a place where students were at least partially extracted from a capitalist, survival-of-the-fittest world in favor of exposing them to myriad possibilities and thought-patterns, ranging from artistic expressions to advanced mathematics to world history. The why of all of that content was never "because Johnny needs to know who won the war of 1812," but rather because Johnny's quality of life would be higher, his citizenship more robust, and, yes, his contributions to the work-force more meaningful if he knew how to think about a wide variety of topics.

Christensen takes for granted that students, given the choice, will pursue what topics are most interesting and important to them, but that is exactly the trouble. Without the guidance of a teacher, who personally knows and personally interacts with a student, none of us might ever have found our respective callings. Computers can certainly do some of that work, but where is the teacher who encourages you to take a subject even though you don't want to, ultimately to your benefit? How many - to give a concrete example - St. John's graduates would ever take Greek or Music Theory on their own? How many, having taken those courses, regret it? I think the answer to both is almost none.

Education is not a business because students are not consumers. The vision of a public education system has always been to create intelligent, moral citizens. Public education is essential to Democratic government precisely because Democracy is non-disciplinary, non-specialized. It asks its members to be adept at weighing evidence and testimony in any and every subject. It desires citizens conversant with history, with mathematics, with science, with arts, with music, with foreign languages, and so on. More important than the content of any of those subjects, however, Democracy requires citizens who know how to think like historians, mathematicians, scientists, artists, musicians, and linguists. A business model of education is not interested in such a broad ambition as this, and yet this is the very ambition upon which public education in America was founded.

There is a telling analogy in Christensen's book, which I think captures the essence of his argument, and also my reservations. He describes the disruptive technological effect of recorded sound, and how it allowed for high-quality recordings to be distributed far more widely than a visit to a concert hall ever could (whilst leaving the possibility of attending a concert intact). By analogy, he sees education as moving in a similar direction. Great teachers can distribute - through video, or through as yet uninvented technologies - their teaching over a wider network than ever before. Sure, it's not necessarily as good as in person, but its a whole lot better than nothing.

All of that I agree with, but the problem with Christensen's analogy is that he ignores what happened to music with the invention of recorded sound. What was once an art form pursued and distributed primarily for its own sake - Beethoven and Brahms didn't write music because it made them rich - became, with wider distribution, more economized, more capitalized. That's not to say music for the sake of music doesn't exist now, but it can be really hard to tell the difference. More importantly, though, in the everyone-can-access-everything modern music world commercial viability has replaced quality. Christensen tellingly uses Rachmaninoff and Mozart as his exemplars in his analogy, and he's right to say that now more people can listen to Mozart than every could before. But do more people actually choose to? That's another question.

I've shared my thoughts about great music here, and my readers are free to disagree. In education, however, I think we'll all agree that some teaching is better than other teaching. Some classes are more instructive. Some schools do a better job of turning out critical thinkers. The problem with market forces is that there's no reason to believe that they will allow good teachers to succeed. Good online courses won't necessarily do best, rather, the most popular ones will. There's much to be said for the wisdom of the crowd, sure, but I also wonder whether the direction of a student's education ought to follow a path created by someone (or a culture, broadly) who believes that Justin Timberlake is a better musician than John Tavener, Usher better than Scott Joplin.

My biggest concern with applying business to education is the same as my biggest concern when applying business to life: what's the point? Business is built around an internal structure of meaning. Namely, money is meaning. The point is to compete, to get rich, to produce, to consume, and to iterate on that process ad infinitum (until you die or your planet can no longer support you). Nowhere, in that cycle, are you to ask, "Why?" Why breaks the whole thing apart. It is as if, finding the question, "What is the meaning of life?" too unwieldy, we have decided to build a whole structure that makes asking the question impossible. But I think we need to demand, not answers, but the freedom - and there is no other freedom - to ask "Why?"

What is the purpose of education? I demand that you answer me, Mr. Christensen, and with you all the businessmen who would reform education in the image of Toyota, Starbucks, Virgin Records, Southwest Airlines, Apple, and McDonalds. What is the purpose of education?

Nicht Diese...

Some old fashioned writing this Sunday evening (or Monday morning). A reflection.

There was a time when I kept a journal. As a high schooler, I wrote and wrote and wrote for no one but myself, trying out poetic devices, exploring thoughts on religion and love and politics, rarely, but occasionally, chronicling the day's events. In retrospect there was nothing all that peculiar about this habit of mine; after all, I was a teenager, and aspired even then to be an intellectual because of, and often in spite of, the community of peers that my private high school afforded me.

I say in spite of because there's a certain stigma attached to intellect in our competitive culture. There's nothing quite so satisfying as the smart guy who loses all the same, faced with the hard-working idiot. Mastermind has dark connotations, so too genius, in a more twisted and historical way. At the time - and maybe still today - I was caught in the paradox of intellect. Our culture honors the intellectual, but punishes and chides all the same. We value intellect, but we despise the person who recognizes their own intelligence.

Perhaps, more than anything, we despise the egotism of the self-promoter not because he is selfish - after all, there's a certain synonymity between "selfish" and "conscious" - but because he often refuses to acknowledge that, ultimately, there are always greater minds. In some sense, our fetish for specialization is a rebellion against the great minds of the great generalists throughout history, who strove to know as much as they could about as many different subjects as they could. "How dare they encroach upon my specialty!"

That's not the point, but I'm not sure what the point is. Even though I have become a writer of prose - after one time being a writer mainly of (poor) verse - I still hold a certain lesson from poetry dear: you don't have to have a "point." That's not fair to poetry, because most poems have a point in one sense or another, but there's a kind of beautiful chaos in the endeavor of poetry that prose simply cannot replicate. Even the most pointed and purposeful poetry is clothed, nonetheless, in a poetic diction, a formalism of meter and rhyme, that prevents easy unfolding. A poem may be compelling, then, but hardly in the way that a persuasive essay is.

Not all essays persuade, however. Sometimes they border on poetry. Indeed, John Dryden was one of the founders of the essay, and his Religio Laici, like the majority of his work, is in verse. Though perhaps that's poetry bordering on essay?

It is odd that we draw such a distinction, truly. Poetry comes from the Greek word meaning "to create." What difference, then, between Montaigne and Dryden, Plutarch and Sappho?

Ah, specialization is our specialty. Today we divide not just writing from poetry, but different kinds of writing and poetry from each other. The essay is a form distinct from the story, which is in turn distinct from the academic essay, the memoir, the novel, the novella, the biography, the autobiography, the treatise, the manifesto, the confession. Do we allow more experts, or fewer by such divisions? By that I mean, by splitting our brilliant writers into such camps, do we not maybe lose our brilliant writers?

That's not fair, either. A great many writers straddle such narrow definitions. Indeed, the best writers are the very cause of new terms and genres. The novel sprung into existence as a way to categorize the work of Cervantes, the essay for Montaigne. The same in music, where the Opera became a term necessary to characterize Monteverdi. The same in poetry.

Since I was a high schooler, I have learned a great deal about how little I know. I expect that, now, at a still-young 24, I have a great deal more to learn about how little I know. What is insufferable about intellectuals, it turns out, is not how much they know, but how little. Socrates was killed for it.

A turn of phrase, a turn of phrase. I have collected, in my short life of reading, a great many connections and associations - many of which are historical, and most of which are European, with occasional Hawaiian or Buddhist allusions mixed in - which allow me to express myself without expressing myself. That is another of the intellectual's tricks, and perhaps the heart of the poet's art. T.S. Eliot's Wasteland would not have gotten far without tricky, intellectual allusions. Nor would Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (the longest inside joke in history, perhaps). "Oystery Gods gaggin' Fishy Gods."

For a long time, between high school and graduate school, I stopped writing. Oh, I wrote for classes at St. John's, and I would occasionally pick up a pen ruefully in the time in between then and Stanford. Poetry, never, but occasional essays, arguments for why surfing matters - a concept that only fellow surfers will understand - or a history of the beautiful Platonic romance that closed my Freshman year of college.

Perhaps that is the object of these wanderings. The last of my poetic fervor expended itself in the poems composed for two women. The first, an illusive goddess who rekindled in me the concept of love - albeit in my hoity-toity (spelling?) way - sending me into thralls unmatched by any but my first (and less Platonic) romance. The second, my one-month-from wife, who is so much more real and wise. No goddess - for how long do such relationships last? - but instead a life. There was one poem each way, with Jericha, and that was enough. Indeed, those first poems probably say more about our relationship - even now - than anything else we could write (just as toddlers already display so many of the personality traits they will have as adults).

I suppose, for me, there is too much poetry in living for me to write poetry. I have become polemical, instead, arguing fiercely for a position on education, music, politics, or culture. Usually arguing a position untaken, or untakeable, and explaining why it should not be so neglected. A natural contrarian, I have become, who can turn "because" into "in spite of" and back again. To what end? It profits me little that I oppose so vehemently a great many things which are simply "the way it is." Why oppose, for example, specialization? It leads to such a beautiful, functional world. Why oppose citation? It leads to such easy access to knowledge. If only it were so simple.

I oppose simplicity. Or rather, I suppose simplification, which likely means I oppose myself as a writer. The vast majority of my writing - and probably all writing - is an attempt to simplify, to make expressible the inexpressible nature of being. If writing is an argument, then the most direct, simple argument wins, and the writing that best takes the complex and makes it appear simple will always be favored. I am opposed to sophistry, you might say, even though I will acknowledge that I am as good a sophist as can be found. That's perhaps a bit too self-congratulatory, for there are a great many sophists in this world better than I.

When I allow myself to write honestly - or, at least, without regard for how complicated a narrative I weave - I find that I use the word "perhaps" with astounding frequency. Perhaps. It's a versatile word, but what it does more than anything is act as a crutch. There is no better word for avoiding conclusions than perhaps. Perhaps there is no better word for avoiding conclusions than perhaps. See the difference? One is certain, the other... Perhaps.

Judicious use of "perhaps," (and "seems," and "this suggests," and "I think," and "possibly") might be a mark of intellectual rigor, laziness, or both. Judicious use of perhaps might, also, be my least poetic trait as a writer. Good writers avoid pointless, empty words like "perhaps." It means nothing. Or it means everything.

Now I'm stealing from Demetri Martin* (I run the gamut; Socrates to Important Things), which perhaps indicates that our winding road is nearing its end. What is that end? Hard to say. What the journey? Equally hard.

* To wit: 'Sort of' is such a harmless thing to say. Sort of. It's just a filler. Sort of - it doesn't really mean anything. But after certain things, sort of means everything. Like after 'I love you' or 'You're going to live.'

Nicht Diese Tone, I titled this blog, and though I addressed it in my opening post (gulp, five months and about 60 posts ago), perhaps a return to that theme is in order. The title is German, meaning "not these tones." In retrospect, why a negative? Of all the phrases from Beethoven's Ninth, why this one? I suppose it's the contrarian in me, the intellectual who doubts the value of intellectuals; the liberal who despises the term "liberal;" the musician, astrologer, and student who wants to be everything and, sometimes, just wants to be nothing and play computer for six hours. How to describe these qualities ("and this, and so much more"), how to 'fix myself in a formulated phrase'?

There was a time when poetry was written, and though it is still written, what magic is left after the placing of such lines as "All truths wait in all things," and "It is impossible to say just what I mean." Ginsberg was reduced to a string of "Holy, Holy, Holy ..." Perhaps profound in its own right. Perhaps too self-indulgent.

But we live in self-indulgent times, which I also oppose, and also embody. Maybe paradox is the real lesson. Maybe it always has been. Or rather, maybe paradox and order, chaos and structure, sway ever across some abyss of human meaning. Death, there's the real question, the ultimate contrarian, and the hardest thing for a contrarian to oppose. And yet we have a society built around death (or built around a religion built around death, to paraphrase Nietzsche). Those poems that haunt me and inspire me sit on that precipice. Prufrock, a poem afraid of death, Song of Myself, a poem of celebrating life. Of all the paradoxes of being, that may be the most poignant, and, ironically, the most taboo in our modern age.

In truth, I have little to contribute to such looming questions as "what is the meaning of life?" Ultimately, I resist the question as unsophisticated, at least as it is commonly asked. No, ask it like Eliot, for then it is complicated enough to warrant my austere notice. Or something like that... The true story is, I first recognized the terrible power of the fear of death watching, of all things, Stargate SG-1. How's that for a paradox? What can I say, after all, that is profound?

Nicht Diese, indeed.

About the Blog

Update - November 30, 2011

It has come to my attention, via site statistics, that a lot of people find and read this post.  I'm here from the future to warn you that it's not entirely accurate.  For one, I have more than 3 readers (though perhaps not much more).  Secondly, while my initial imagined audience was, perhaps, friends and family, I've come to write for a broader spectrum of readers.  Or sometimes for none at all.  Finally, I want to agree with the sentiment that the blog still has no unifying principle beyond "not these tones," but that certain topics are much more common than others.  Music, baseball, learning and education issues, politics, and astrology all make fairly frequent appearances.


With that in mind, welcome.  I've done a lot of writing over the last couple of years, as the archive will show you.  Most of it probably isn't that good, but some of it, if I may say so, is.  I hope you find something of interest.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello everyone (all, what, 3 people who might read this?),

Back as an undergraduate, I wrote emails to my friends and family as I studied at St. John's. It turned out that most of those emails tended towards the philosophical or literary, rather than the personal, and eventually I decided to stop sending them, both because they took too much time, and because I didn't think I was really writing for the right audience. With that in mind, I'm finally taking the jump into blog-space to write those very same kinds of thoughts.

I have no illusions about who this blog is for. I've been writing essays and journals for myself for a long time, and this is basically the same thing, only on the internet. Why on the internet? Because it's easier for Jericha, or James, or Joe to get to that way. It's also easier for them to ignore; while an email demands a response, a blog just kind of sits there. In general, I'm happy to have feedback - about ideas, about writing, about anything - but I'm not really expecting it. We're all busy in this crazy world, and I see no reason to add to anyone's work-load but my own.

That said, I want to clarify what the title of the blog means. "Nicht diese tone" are the first words of Beethoven's Ninth, and they basically mean, "Not these tones." It follows with, basically, "Let us sing yet more joyfully." I can't promise that I'm going to write exclusively joyful reflections here, but I can promise that I'm going to try - as I always do - to think about things differently. Nicht Diese Tone means, then, not in the way you're used to seeing (or hearing) things.

There is no unifying principle behind this blog. I may be studying Education Technology at Stanford, but I am just as likely to write about music, or literature, or politics (sorry), or marine biology, or surfing, or well, whatever. To me all of those things are, ultimately, related. Maybe not in terms of content, but in terms of process. But maybe more on that later. For now, welcome, friends and family, and I hope this serves as a way for us to keep in touch better than we have.

Aloha,
Paul