What we need instead is a rediscovery of fundamentals, an acknowledgment that the old ways work, and a realization that if we sweep away everything old and try to reimagine something better, we will have swept away everything of value.
Law & Liberty
Daniel Buck
August 1, 2024
The Great Relearning of American Schools
At the start of the pandemic, many elite institutions went test optional, only to reverse course and again require the submission of SAT or ACT scores. It’s an eye-catching list: Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, and many more. In a fit of anti-testing sentiments, they toppled a statue, but one by one they recognized their error and re-erected it.
My colleague Adam Tyner has detailed at length the importance of college entrance exams. They may be biased toward affluent students, but holistic portfolios, personal essays, involvement in after-school activities, letters of recommendation, and other alternatives to test scores are even more so. Affluent kids can afford coaching and editing for personal essays, and their well-connected parents can ensure Johnny receives a letter of recommendation from some impressive individual.
But for that kid on the other side of town, the SAT may be his only chance to prove himself. And sure enough, research finds that standardized tests are the least biased measure.
No one contests that these tests are imperfect, but elite universities have rediscovered their very real utility. They are an important data point to help admissions officers sift and sort through inflated GPAs, AI-generated personal essays, and thick academic portfolios that take time to review.
Tom Wolfe discusses a similar story—the rediscovery of old truths, this time in the twentieth century—in his famous essay “The Great Relearning.” Hippies rediscover basic hygiene after deconstructing old bourgeois norms like regular washing, and finding themselves afflicted with diseases not seen in centuries—the itch, the twitch, the rot. Architects renounce brutalism and glass monstrosities and instead embrace Art Deco and classical architecture. It turns out the glass provides no insulation while beige, cubical, utilitarian office buildings make everyone into a nihilist.
Education is undergoing a similar relearning. How anyone decided it was oppressive to measure whether students had learned course material is beyond me. Thankfully, even elite universities have recognized that standardized tests are not racist or classist. K-12 institutions would be wise to relearn likewise.
This great relearning touches on other aspects of schooling too. In the summer of 2020, in a manner resembling a Maoist show trial, school system after school system denounced traditional discipline and consequence structures, instead committing themselves to anti-racist education and restorative justice. A few years on, as misbehavior worsens, more schools are rediscovering the basic principles of human nature: if you abstain from consequences or even reward misbehavior with a heart-to-heart and a bag of chips, you get more of it.
Accordingly, districts from Las Vegas to Washington, DC are implementing stricter discipline codes to empower teachers to maintain control in their classrooms, while no-excuse discipline policies are once again receiving plaudits in the media.
The same story is soon to be told about grading. At the onset of the pandemic, perhaps understandably, many schools went pass/fail, dropped penalties for late work, and adopted more lenient grading scales. After they reopened, “equity and mastery” grading fads cemented these changes long-term, suggesting that it’s inequitable or unfair to fail students or otherwise hold them accountable for their work.
These same schools quickly discovered that low expectations only allowed students to slack off, complete the bare minimum, and still pass the class; that grades hold students accountable, incentivize work and therefore learning, and communicate important information to parents, universities, and other stakeholders.
Once again, many districts are now questioning these equity grading initiatives and re-instituting more formal gradebook procedures.
Perhaps most holistically, classical education is experiencing a renaissance. Enterprising school founders have established 264 new classical schools since 2019 alone. The media has taken notice with a host of think pieces analyzing its growth. What’s the appeal?
Since at least the 1960s, American education has fundamentally changed its telos. Student activists implored their professors to ask not “what is true?” but rather, “If we wanted to change society, how would we do it?” This theory of education that sees schools and universities as societal change agents, not institutions of academic learning, is the philosophy du jour of university education departments. Teachers are to be conspirators in cultural upheaval, not stewards of our shared knowledge and cultural inheritance.
But devoid of a great canon of literature, a body of scientific knowledge worth knowing, a compelling mythos of the American founding, or a robust understanding of Western history—even more broadly, without a commitment to objective truth or virtue—education itself becomes tinny, insubstantial, impotent. Students are left to pursue their own insular interests, reflect on their identities and navels, or pursue the latest political happening.
It doesn’t matter if teachers don’t vibe with the explicit, sequenced nature of phonics instruction. It works.
Students crave an education that challenges the mind, enlivens the heart, and stirs the soul. Accordingly, parents are fleeing insipid public schools to instead seek out something more robust in a classical, liberal arts tradition stretching back to Aristotle.
I can only hope the same relearning will begin with instruction too. American education is enamored with the latest fad or innovative instructional design. Invariably, every progressive recommendation to “reimagine” instruction amounts to cutting the teacher-role from the classroom. Denigrated is the idea that the teacher should be the “sage on the stage”—transmitting knowledge through direct explanation, demonstrating skills, or guiding practice. Teachers are often advised to limit instruction to less than 10 minutes.
Such advice is deeply misguided. Decades of research confirm that direction explanation, however easily cast off, is the best method to learn new materials. Seeking innovation in instruction is a category error. Technology may have changed but human nature remains the same. We learn best when others explain new concepts to us. In trying to innovate past explicit teaching and direct instruction, American schools lost something valuable.
Across the pond, the researchEd movement in the UK has popularized traditional pedagogy, and on this side of the Atlantic, we’re experiencing something similar (albeit on a smaller scale) with the rediscovery of phonics. It doesn’t matter if teachers don’t vibe with the explicit, sequenced nature of phonics instruction. It works. Would this realization expand to other content areas as well?
Throughout his essay, Tom Wolfe over and again references the concept of “year zero.” He observes that societies cannot deconstruct their social mores, institutions, habits, traditions, and structures, to then reconstruct something utopian on purely rational grounds. In reality, there is a great amount of wisdom in these very social mores, institutions, habits, traditions, and structures. Even something as simple as Grandma’s pie recipe has generations of trial and error built into its basic directions, far more wisdom than any one rational actor could ever contain or discover in the present.
In education, the ideologies of deconstruction and rationalism manifest in the idea that we can “reimagine” education entirely, or as one popular book puts it, reconsider every “institutional norm.” But we cannot shatter every institutional norm without repercussion, any more than we can stop washing our hands without repercussion.
Grades encourage hard work and learning. Tests both incentivize study and facilitate the retention of information in long-term memory. Discipline structures create orderly environments where students can learn, and consequences are themselves pedagogical tools that help students become responsible, polite, and self-controlled. Desks in rows, discrete subjects, handwritten notes, homework, reading great books out loud together—these norms all serve a purpose even if it’s not immediately obvious what that purpose is.
For decades, there was a general push and pull in the education world between progressives and traditionalists. The math wars stretch back at least to debates over California’s state curriculum in the 1990s. The phonics versus whole language debate began in the 1950s, and traditionalists have many times declared that phonics won. John Dewey first theorized a progressive education built on rationalist grounds in the early twentieth century, building on Jean Jacques Rousseau before him. As with old truths rediscovered, these are old debates as well.
Most recently, school systems embraced deconstructionism under pressure from anti-racist activists during Covid, imploring them to tear down old structures of discipline, instruction, testing, and curriculum. Traditionalists retreated while progressives advanced. Alas, an education system that forwent the basic truths of human nature was bound to fail, and schools are relearning old lessons.
In their renunciation of admissions tests, universities stumbled on the wisdom of the thought experiment “Chesterton’s Fence.” The purchaser of a new property, the idea goes, shouldn’t tear down a fence simply because they are unaware of its use. If they do, they may find snow drifts blocking their windows or wolves among the sheep. It is a call to respect the wisdom in existing institutions, but also a plea for intellectual humility. We may not know what’s best, so it is wise to respect those who came before.
What we need instead is a rediscovery of fundamentals, an acknowledgment that the old ways work, and a realization that if we sweep away everything old and try to reimagine something better, we will have swept away everything of value.
