Sen. Rubio, rants like yours about the uselessness of academe can be disheartening. (Same goes for you, President Obama, when you ignore the humanities and call only for more STEM education.) But if there’s anything we academics are able to do, it’s to recognize that these rants are poorly argued and lacking in evidence. Often they are the self-congratulatory blather of those whose success is predicated—in more and less obvious ways—on the existence of higher education, but who in hindsight credit that success solely to innate ability. In short, the rants are stupid, and a key part of my job is identifying and fighting the stupid wherever it is found.-Alan Levenovitz, Why I’m a Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Education
Those Pesky Asides
I was watching an older episode of Inside Man with Morgan Spurlock. He was comparing the education systems in Finland and the United States. The Finns have consistently better educational outcomes than we do, and he wanted to compare and contrast. After spending some time in Findland, Spurlock returned to the U.S. and explained that the Finnish system couldn’t translate to our country because our population is so diverse. He mentioned, as if in passing, that the U.S. has the second highest child poverty rate in the developed world.
We have the second highest child poverty rate in the developed world.
After mentioning this, Spurlock went on to investigate a charter school in New York where they have a particular style of instruction and…
Can we go back to that child poverty thing for a minute?
Taking this as the background and not as a major problem to tackle is a bit like comparing the architecture in two towns. First you go to a beautiful city with modern homes and admire what they’ve done. Then you to to the second town and say, “Of course, you can’t build the same kind of house here because the entire town is constructed over an enormous sinkhole. Now, let’s look at how they put in the windows to maximize the light in the entry way.”
Maybe we should talk about the giant sinkhole.
Yucky Framing of the Day: Don’t Force a Generation Into Debt or they Won’t Buy Stuff From Us
From Truthout today comes another example of moral arguement reduced to a market place equation. Why is it a bad idea to saddle the next generation with debt before they even get started in life? Because, if you do that, they can’t buy as much stuff and “we,” presumably, will not make as much money.
Americans with piles of student loan debt have less money to spend on anything from consumer products to homes.
And as The Washington Post points out, first-time home buyers, usually college graduates, are, or at least used to be, “the bedrock of the housing market.”
But, since millions of college graduates are drowning in debt, they can’t afford to buy a home, which is killing America’s housing recovery.
Meanwhile, according to a report from the One Wisconsin Institute, the devastating effects of student loan debt also translate into more than $6 billion in lost car sales each year.
And, the chief economist for General Motors has even said that student loan debt is one of, if not THE major reason why millennials aren’t buying cars.
Math Makes You Cute
By chance this holiday season I came about a book by actress and (apparently) math-whiz Danica McKellar best known for her role in The Wonder Years. The 2007 book “Math Doesn’t Suck” is aimed at middle school girls. The purpose of the book is to get girls interested in math and to overcome the stereotype that girls are naturally bad at it. This is a worthy goal. Only yesterday I read an article in the BPS Research Digest about how negative gender stereotypes about math impact women’s math performance. (Answer: Badly.)
…women’s maths performance suffers after they are reminded of the stereotype that men are better than women at maths.
… those students who more strongly endorsed gender stereotypes in relation to maths and the arts, subsequently showed more biased recall of their past exam performance. That is, girls who endorsed the stereotypes underestimated their past maths performance, while boys who endorsed the stereotypes tended to underestimate their past arts performance. …Girls given a more salient reminder of gender stereotypes underestimated their actual past maths exam performance while boys in this condition overestimated their maths performance.
I did not read the text of McKeller’s book itself, which may be excellent. What interested me most about McKellar’s book was how it was packaged appeal to pre-teen girls. The cover, which looks like Seventeen Magazine, tells girls they can get through middle school math “without breaking a nail.” It– for some reason I can’t fathom– asks in pink type “Do you still have a crush on him?” and promises “Horoscopes inside!” (It really does have horoscopes inside.) Of the three front cover blurbs that actually refer to math, all remind girls of negative gender stereotypes “Never be confused again,” “Are you a math-o-phobe? Take this quiz!” and “How to survive middle school math without losing your mind…”
Surviving math is setting the bar fairly low. The cover doesn’t promise to make you better than others in math or a master of math, only that you will get through it and be able, presumably, to move on to other (more gender appropriate) things when you’ve come out the other side.
The quotes on the back cover describe the book as “Clueless (the movie) meets Euclid” and say it brings “a little glamour to the teaching of mathematics.”
The endorsement that interested me the most, however, was from talk show host Leeza Gibbons who says the book is a roadmap to success for girls “no matter what career they choose.” (Again, there seems to be an underlying assumption that math is not going to be a big factor in the woman’s life after she leaves school.) What makes it such a path to success is that it “teaches the value of confidence that comes from feeling smart.”
None of the blurbs on the cover suggest that math might be useful that it might, for example, lead to a career in science, engineering, computer programming. Math matters because girls need confidence and self-esteem. Why is self-esteem important? Gibbons doesn’t say, but my intuition tells me that the underlying assumption is that it’s important for girls to have confidence because it makes them more charming, attractive and popular. In any case, building self-confidence and “showing off” are the only real world uses of math suggested in the cover endorsements.
All of this brings me back to something I have written about here before. When we talk about giving boys the tools for success we talk about what they can do. When we try to “empower” girls we tell them to think positive and feel good.
Back in September I quoted another BPS article that reported on studies that showed the benefits of praising children for their efforts rather than their inherent qualities:
“…the study revealed that parents tend to use more person praise with girls and more process praise with boys, echoing similar results in earlier research. In turn, later on, boys tended to express an incremental mindset [seeing ability as malleable and challenges as an opportunity to learn] more often than girls. This tallies with the picture painted in the developmental literature that girls more than boys attribute failure to lack of ability, especially in maths and science.”
Given that reminding girls of negative gender stereotypes about math tends to make them under-estimate their past performance, the blurbs on the front of this book seem likely to make girls less, not more, confident in their math ability. Framing success in math in “person praise” instead of “process praise” makes girls more likely to think of mathematical ability as a personal rather than learn-able trait. You either have or you don’t (and that girls usually don’t). But it’s OK, because the book cover reassures girls that they don’t have to master it in the long term– they just need to survive it while they’re in school and then they can move on to something else.
I Feel Capable, Oh So Capable, I’m a Capable, Adaptable White Knight…
Back in May, I posted an article called Unstoppable! Self-Esteem, Boy and Girl Style. In the article I took a self-esteem program aimed at young women and flipped the genders to see how the encouragement felt when aimed at boys.
At the beginning of this article, I asked you to think about what an empowerment or self-esteem program for boys might consist of. You probably imagined something like the Boy Scouts or Outward Bound. Young men test their limits, practice a sport, enjoy the outdoors, discover skills they didn’t know they had. In short, they do.
When we try to “empower” girls we tell them to think positive and feel pretty. If it is “empowerment” it is a strange use of the word “power” because it is entirely passive. The program focuses entirely personal qualities that make one attractive, not achievements and actions.
Today I was reading the BPS Research Digest and I came across a study that bolsters my subjective point of view.
Laboratory research pioneered by psychologist Carol Dweck has shown the short-term benefits of praising children for their efforts rather than their inherent traits. Doing so leads children to adopt a so-called ‘incremental mindset’ – seeing ability as malleable and challenges as an opportunity to learn. Now a new study co-authored by Dweck and led by Elizabeth Gunderson has made the first ever attempt to monitor how parents praise their young children in real-life situations, and to see how their style of praise is related to the children’s mindset five years later…The key finding was the more parents tended to praise their pre-school age children for effort (known as process praise, as in “good job”), the more likely it was that those children had a “incremental attitude” towards intelligence and morality when they were aged seven to eight. This mindset was revealed by their seeing intelligence and moral attributes as malleable. For example, such children tended to agree that people can get smarter if they try harder, and disagree with the idea that a naughty child with always be naughty…Finally, the study revealed that parents tend to use more person praise with girls and more process praise with boys, echoing similar results in earlier research. In turn, later on, boys tended to express an incremental mindset more often than girls. This tallies with the picture painted in the developmental literature that girls more than boys attribute failure to lack of ability, especially in maths and science.
Unstoppable! Self-Esteem, Boy and Girl Style
I would like you to stop for a moment an imagine a self-esteem workshop for a group of pre-teen boys. What types of activities do you think might be planned? What would the boys do? Really think about this for a moment before I go on. What comes to mind when you think of boys and self-esteem building?
Now, I want to tell you about a workshop called “Boys Unstoppable!” The workshop is put together by a company in the personal care industry. The boys arrive with their dads. They sit down at tables and find paper and magic markers.
The leader, known as a “Self-esteem Ambassador” first asks the boys to think about their dad and his appearance. The Ambassador asks each boy to write down anything he has heard his dad say about his looks. Then the boys create a second column, and they write down how those statements made them feel.
One boy, Tommy, starts to fidget in his chair. Why do they have to think so much about their feelings? It’s a nice day out. Can’t they go out and do something?
The Ambassador smiles like a salesman or a Ken doll. He introduces the next exercise. The boys are asked to think about all of the good things about themselves. Then the Ambassador hands out “confidence cards.”
The cards say “I have a beautiful________”
The Ambassador tells them to fill out as many cards as they want.
Tommy stares at the cards. “I have a beautiful face?” he thinks. Not really, he thinks, but he writes it down anyway.
The exercise is kind of hard. It’s hard to fit what he is good at into that sentence without it sounding weird.
“I have beautiful math skill.”
Tommy thinks about last week when he won the 100 yard dash. He was proud of that. “I have beautiful running skill” is awkward. So he writes “I have beautiful feet.”
That’s not right. He gives up and looks out the window.
“What’s wrong?” asks the Ambassador with a kind of cheery sympathy.
“I can’t think of anything,” Tommy says.
The Ambassador tilts his head. Tommy can tell he is thinking that the boy is a real hard case. He must have no confidence at all. It’s worse than he thought.
“Come on,” The Ambassador says, “There are lots of beautiful things about you. You have a great smile. Great eyes.”
“Yeah, but…” Tommy is thinking about how his dad taught him to change the oil on the car. He is proud that he knows how to fix stuff in a car, but that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that’s important in this exercise. He tells that to the Ambassador.
“Of course it is!” the Ambassador says. “You see, you’re talented. That will make you very attractive to girls. So write that down on the card. ‘I have beautiful repair skills.”
Tommy does as he is told, but he isn’t feeling what he thinks he is supposed to be feeling.
“You’re unstoppable!” The Ambassador croons. “You are an amazing, beautiful, talented young man.”
The attention pleases Tommy and he feels vaguely flattered for a few minutes, but he wonders if this guy has been listening to him at all. Does he know anything about him?
“Of course it’s important,” The Ambassador tells the dads, “to compliment the boys on their intelligence too, not just to tell them they are cute.”
“You are unstoppable if you just believe in yourself,” he tells the group.
Tommy is not listening. He is looking out the window wondering when they will let him actually do something.
I wrote this little scenario after reading an article on The Huffington Post about an empowerment workshop for girls called “Girls Unstoppable.” It is essentially as I have described it above except with girls. I discovered the story through my Facebook feed where one of my friends had posted it for inspiration and as a reminder of what is important. I did not feel at all inspired by what I read. My reaction, in contrast to most people apparently, was bleech.
Something about the nature of the workshop and the way it was described bothered me. I had a feeling that something underlying all that empowerment talk was not empowering at all, in fact it was the opposite. It was not until I tried to envision the same workshop given to a group of boys that I was able to put my finger on what my discomfort was.
I have been like Tommy. I may not have been in a Dove empowerment workshop, but I’ve had the same types of messages presented to me as inspiration and empowerment on talk shows, in magazines and by friends for years.
At the beginning of this article, I asked you to think about what an empowerment or self-esteem program for boys might consist of. You probably imagined something like the Boy Scouts or Outward Bound. Young men test their limits, practice a sport, enjoy the outdoors, discover skills they didn’t know they had. In short, they do.
When we try to “empower” girls we tell them to think positive and feel pretty. If it is “empowerment” it is a strange use of the word “power” because it is entirely passive. The program focuses entirely personal qualities that make one attractive, not achievements and actions.
The article features a slide show with images of the “confidence cards.” Beauty is the most frequent positive quality mentioned. Other qualities also appear, sometimes described in terms of beauty. Strength makes an appearance along with uniqueness, grace, unspecified “talent” and positive thinking which is phrased in various ways. “You are beautiful when you look at the positive things in life.”
The message is not to get angry or frustrated. But sometimes anger is warranted and is the basis for action. Being unhappy is a sign that something is wrong, and that it is time to go out and make a change.
The aspirational vision in this workshop is not to take action. It is to look on the bright side of everything, even if you have to lie to achieve that beautiful inner confidence. Indeed, we are asked to lie to ourselves, for example, by pretending not to notice which girl in the room is the prettiest by current standards. “Look how beautiful we all are!” OK.
This might be worth doing if lies worked, but they don’t. A 2009 study published in Psychological Science backs me up on this. When people get feedback that they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better. When people hear and affirmation they don’t believe, they adhere even more strongly to their original position.
The article on the workshop points out that six out of ten girls stop doing something they love because they are self-conscious about their looks. There is something wrong. It is not just a problem because it hurts their self-esteem, but because when a girl decides not to take woodshop because the protective glasses make her look ugly, we are all at risk of losing a fantastic future architect, builder or engineer. This is an issue we should take seriously.
But when our response to the problem is to “coo over how beautiful she is” (a line from the article) we do little to set her back on her natural course. The very messages we compose to soothe girls’ feelings are telling them that action is not valuable and that the only way for action to become valuable is if it can be defined in terms of feelings and looks.
Feeling good about yourself for no particular reason is not of much value. If you want to really make girls feel stronger, happier and more talented give them a challenge, give them tasks to master, goals to achieve. Let them be who they are, and celebrate what they do.
On the Value of Education: Another Argument Against the Marketization of Everything
There are certain types of value that money measures quite well and certain values that should be measured in other ways. In our political climate and our culture we have become accustomed to discussing everything in terms of its financial value at the expense of values that are harder to quantify.
If you look through the archives, you will find stories about measuring the success of books with a “best seller list” rather than some list based on quality, arguing for arts in terms of tourism dollars or the creation of non-arts jobs, and for arts education with the tortured logic that music makes you good at math, which has some marketplace value.
Robin Cangie today responds to Peter Thiel’s much discussed article on what he calls the higher education bubble. Cangie argues on her blog that we devalue education– and miss the whole point– when we treat higher learning as nothing more than an overpriced stepping stone to a higher salary, and entry into the middle class.
The very real problems that Thiel identifies aren’t symptoms of a bubble but of an institutional crisis of education; they only look like a bubble because we’ve learned to treat education as a market-driven commodity rather than a social good.
…Students pay top dollar, not for quality, but for a name brand education. For-profit universities treat students as cash cows, making unrealistic promises and even outright lies to increase enrollment…. Meanwhile, rising tuition and student debt are justified on the increasingly faith-based grounds that it all will pay off in the long run.
By commoditizing higher education, we have not only given it away to the highest bidder, or borrower, as the case may be; we have impoverished the notion of becoming educated itself, at great social and economic harm.
…I’m not disagreeing with the problems in higher education that Thiel has pointed out. But to treat all of this as a bubble, on par with housing or high technology, is to not only misunderstand the problem but also to contribute to an impoverished, commoditized view of education that values a monetary return-on-investment over intellectual cultivation, that treats education as a resource, not unlike wood or oil, to be exploited and profited from, rather than a vital ingredient of a healthy society.
And so we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to be educated? If education means churning out obedient, unthinking, indebted consumers, then we’ve done very well. But if it means anything – anything at all – more than that, we have failed massively.
Read the whole article by following the link above.
Story and Self 