Don’t Bore the Children

Posted on by

This was first published on Splice Today.
_______________

I check Matthew Yglesias’ blog semi-regularly. He’s smart and a decent writer, and he hews close to the progressive party line. I’m a progressive myself, so that works out okay, and I happily click over to his place to find out why the United States isn’t as good as Scandinavia and why the Senate should be scrapped and why health care reform was a good idea.

Unfortunately, Yglesias also sticks to the progressive wisdom on education, where, as it happens, the progressive party line is now exactly the same as the conservative party line. This makes education that holy grail of punditry for progressives — a topic on which they can appear to buck conventional wisdom without offending anyone who matters. All the edgiest wonks agree: down with teacher’s unions; up with charter schools; and when in doubt, bore the kids.

Yglesias, at least, makes no bones about his desire to bore the kids. In a post a bit back titled Provocation of the Day, Yglesias responded to an essay by Michale O’Hare. O’Hare made the modest proposal that it might be a good idea to teach kids things that are vaguely relevant to their lives and future success. Yglesias diffidently acknowledged that this sounds like it might possibly be an interesting idea…and then finished up like so:

I think the evidence suggests that one of the most important skills people learn (or don’t) in school is self-discipline rather than specific knowledge. I don’t think learning the chronology of ancient near eastern empires (Sumeria then Assyria then Babylonia then Persia then Greece then Rome) in elementary school has ever been useful to me, or even that the chronology I learned is especially accurate, but a lot of life involves semi-arbitrary tasks and it’s worth one’s while to get used to performing them.

The sand-in-your-eyes reference to “evidence” in that first sentence of the quote is especially nice. What evidence is this exactly? Well, if we are to believe the rest of the paragraph, the best evidence in the world — the evidence of Matt Yglesias’ success! Yglesias was bored by ancient near eastern chronology when he was a wee Yglesias — and look at him now! He has discipline, you young whippersnappers! So stop complaining that taking boring tests is (a) boring, and (b) totally useless for your future existence. Because it’s not totally useless! If you’re not going to walk up hill both ways to school carrying heavy packs on your back, the least you can do is to experience the transformative adversity of numbing repetition.

This logic is especially infuriating coming from a Matthew Yglesias. Yglesias is a Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a writer, but he’s best known as a blogger. He gets paid to blog. About whatever he wants, basically. Oh, sure, he needs to talk about policy and economics and so forth — but that’s because he likes blogging about policy and economics and so forth. He writes all day, every day, about the things he’s passionate about, without an editor or a publisher or anyone looking over his shoulder to nitpick. If he wants to write posts about basketball, well, hell, he can write posts about basketball. If he wants to write posts about pop culture, the fact that he is, when writing about pop culture, broadly ignorant, ceaselessly mundane, and wearisomely predictable is no obstacle, because it’s his blog. He writes what he wants. The one part of his job that requires discipline in any normal sense, the one part where he needs to pay attention to boring details, is the one that he entirely and even militantly ignores. His spelling is legendarily poor, and he generally refuses to correct errors even when they are pointed out to him in the comments.

Far from having a job in which discipline is necessary, Yglesias has one of the least disciplined jobs one could imagine. If being bored in school had any effect on him, it was not to instill in him an ability to focus on trivial, mindless tasks. Instead, it seems to have convinced him to have nothing whatsoever to do with those tasks ever. He’s not going to spell. He’s not going to write about only economics and policy. He’s not going to work at a job he doesn’t want to. Such drudgery is for those school kids who need to be trained for lives of data entry and/or stupid paperwork. Matt Yglesias? He’s going to pat those little suckers on the head and go off and write a post about the Washington Wizerdds.

Unfortunately, I doubt that Yglesias’ inspiration for bucking the system came out of his loathing school work. I strongly suspect that it came from somewhere else entirely. In particular, I suspect it came from egregiously intellectual parents who told Matthew he was special and wonderful and should follow his dreams — and then gave him the resources and connections necessary to do exactly that.

And this is the second reason that it is frustrating to see Matthew Yglesias sing the praises of rote busy work. Because Yglesias is a progressive. He believes that you can change the system, and that things will get, not perfect, but better. He thinks you can have better health care, better education, a more egalitarian society. And, as I mentioned, I’m with him there — I believe that too.

But how do you get there? I would say that one of the main things you need to get there is to have a society in which people respect their own unhappiness. You need people who, when confronted with a shitty health care plan or no pension or with bad pay or bad conditions or soul-crushing jobs with no vacation — you need people who look at those things and say, “This makes me miserable, and I shouldn’t be miserable. We should change this.”

The discipline Yglesias touts isn’t real discipline. It’s suffering for no purpose, and if it has any educational effect, it will only be to teach students that their suffering has no meaning, that they can’t affect it, and that they need to sit still and shut up. Sitting kids down for hours every day and forcing them to engage in pointless busy work without end — does that teach discipline? Doesn’t it instead instill the lesson that neither you nor your happiness matter, and that the most important virtue is neither thought nor action, but obedience?

Real discipline is the discipline Yglesias didn’t learn in school — the discipline to pursue a worthwhile goal because it’s your goal and your passion. Many of those kids have faced the kind of adversity that neither Yglesias nor I has ever faced, and which, God willing, we never will. They don’t need to be taught about unhappiness, tedium, or despair. What they need is for people to stop treating them like sociological curiosities or long-term experiments in behavioral adjustment, and to start treating them like fellow human beings. Which means, if that’s not clear, that we don’t randomly torture them, not even for the smug satisfaction of telling them that it’s for their own good.

22 thoughts on “Don’t Bore the Children”

  2. Noah, I’m going to wait a day before I respond ar length. But I disagree with you on a very basic level.

    ‘Real discipline is the discipline Yglesias didn’t learn in school — the discipline to pursue a worthwhile goal because it’s your goal and your passion.’

    What that attitude leads to, all too often, is the curse of the modern age– over-specialisation. A student is passionate about chemistry, so why should he bother with literature or philosophy? Another wants to become a writer, so why bore himself with mathematics?

    Education should be more than instruction. The overriding goal is to create well-rounded individuals; and this involves work which is often hard, boring or frustrating, in domains of no immediate apparent interest.

    I’m speaking as a former student who went to some of the academically most demanding schools, and as a teacher myself.

    More later…

  3. Oh my god, what a thrilling post. I know the Yglesias type, or at least how you characterize him, because I am one of them. I would never be able to draw comics with my lack of personal discipline without my parents’ wide and gently-cushioned safety net. If I ever forget my privilege and start spouting off as smugly as he does, I would expect someone to write a take-down as smashing as this one. You know, for my own good.

  4. Michael, Noah– as far as the child is concerned, there is nothing wrong with Privilege.

    It is a problem only to the extent that the privileged child tries to carry his/her privilege over into adult life.

    At which point, he/she will run face-first into a reality frying pan, in the best Tom & Jerry tradition.

  5. I agree; better more privileged children than less.

    And better privileged adults, for that matter. I’m against suffering in general. But I think, when formulating policy for others, it’s useful to try to understand in what ways your privileged, how that’s affected you, and why. If you don’t know who you are, you shouldn’t be proscribing anything to anyone.

  6. Well, that’s one thing that bugs me a little; your takedown of Yglesias is mostly ad hominem; you leave the ad rem to the end, and it’s impassioned but skimpy.

  7. People are implicated in what they say. Yglesias’ job, class status, and background have everything to do with where he is, why he’s there, and why he is willing to say what he does about school kids.

    The idea that who you are can be separated from what you say in these kinds of sociological discussions is very much a claim from privilege.

  8. This is a terrific article. I’m going to e-mail the link to my father, so he won’t feel so alone in his daily Facebook rants about the state of our education system.

  9. Thanks! I’ve got another couple of articles on education lying around; I’ll try to reprint them here at some point….

    Is your dad a teacher?

  10. @Richard – Absolutely not, I loved (and love) studying ancient civilizations. What I did not like was being graded on my ability to recast “facts” and spew them back at teachers.

    @Noah, I’m afraid I’m with Alex – this mostly seems to be a post describing your discomfort with Yglesias taking a position different than your own, when he otherwise validates your perspective. I don’t disagree with youy position, as it happens, but you don’t provide any evidence that it’s superior to his, either. IMHO, it’s just a slightly bitch HO.

  12. Yeah, lifelong. He’s been in arts eduction of some kind or another for almost 60 years at this point, though at nearly 80 years old himself now, he’s retired from the public school teaching he did while I was growing up. He still teaches privately via the voice/acting studio he and my mom run together (I coach there sometimes too). You can find his most recent Facebook rant (from a few days ago) shared on my FB page if you’re interested in where he stands.

  13. Noah– one of the smarter things a teacher told me in high school was that we weren,t really expected to learn much there, apart from learning how to learn. And self-discipline is one of these essential learning skills.

    I teach English and French as foreign languages to adults, which is itself a special challenge. Now, this is in the context of employee training– in other words, the ultimate clients are the employers of my pupils– and they want results.

    So it’s out with the fuzzy-wuzzy language teaching of the school system. I try to make each lesson as enjoyable as I can, but I do insist on hard work on their part. (Being motivated and adults, they go with this.)

    English is touted as an easy language, and it’s easier than many, but it has its own challenges. The spelling is a nightmare. There are over four hundred irregular verbs, more than any other known tongue has. There are over a thousand phrasal verbs (“go out”, “send for”.)

    At some point, the student has to buckle down to the boring, unpleasant job of rote learning.

    Offer to teach a teenager to drive a car. Wow! He’s delighted. But then you must point out that he has to memorise the Highway Code…boredom!

    But he’ll do it, because he wants that licence.

  14. PS — No snarky comments like “After reading your prose, Alex, I can WELL believe that you teach English as a foreign language”.

  15. Hey Alex. You’re not actually disagreeing with me, I don’t think. People do have to do boring things in order to obtain their goals. But it’s important that those goals be theirs. Even for your ESL students…they’re learning in order to get something they want, like more money or not being fired. That’s really important.

    In school, the goal often has nothing to do with the students interests, and they get no payoff other than an arbitrary grade which means little or nothing. Often the skills are useless for any purpose. They’re not learning to learn in that case; they’re learning to follow somebody else’s pointless agenda. I don’t think that builds character at all. I think it teaches rote obedience and seething resentment.

  16. But is the agenda pointless, when seen as a whole? Culture isn’t neatly divided into segments. To cultivate the whole person, you have to cover a lot of ground.

    I know whereof I speak. I went to high school at the Lycee Francais de Londres, where I followed the French curriculum while taking some classdes from the English one.

    The school prepared for two tough exams, the French Baccalaureat and the British GCE Advanced levels.

    The French ‘bac’ is like a choice of several set menus. You have to take all or nothing. Subjects were weighted according to importance to the individual student, but, yes– science majors had to sudy literature, philosophy majors had to study maths, everyone had to study a foreign language.

    By contrast, the British system was a la carte. You only took the subjects you wanted to take.Of course, this encouraged narrow specialisation.

    The result is that, even now, Brits I know may have excellent qualifications but remain stunningly ignorant in many areas. The French tend to be more well-rounded.

  17. Kids aren’t experiments. Treating them as such is evil. It may abstractly be a good idea for each child to be well-rounded…but that’s really something that needs to be up to each child. In any case, you can’t really teach someone something they don’t want to know. Students prove that every day; they just forget it or don’t learn it in the first place.

    Kids need to learn how to read, they need to learn basic arithmetic. Our schools can’t even teach those, so all the hand-waving about the need for a broad-based education ends up seeming fairly superfluous.

  18. “Kids aren’t experiments. Treating them as such is evil. It may abstractly be a good idea for each child to be well-rounded…but that’s really something that needs to be up to each child.”

    Experiment? Making a well-rounded person has been the height of educational aspiration for millenia.

Comments are closed.