Keeping society on the same page

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

From time to time my blogs elicit comments and questions from readers. Most of the time, the questions are personal and do not merit a public reply. But the other day a reader asked:

Have COIVD-19 school closures or episodic interruptions from COVID-19 restricted the common ground that schools provide for interaction between different social groups? Do you believe that school closures and interruptions arising from COVID-19 will result in an erosion of social cohesion, diminishing the school’s contribution to keeping society on the same page?

My reply:

People learn who they are, to whom they are related, and the power they have from the institutions with which they and their families are affiliated and the myths they are told. Families, of course, are the first and most influential context for such learning. Peers are influential, increasingly so as youngsters grow older.

Families interpret the world for the young, communicating the possibilities open to them and the limits on those possibilities. Families tell the young what they can and cannot do based upon their experience. Most parents encourage their children to aspire beyond the limits the parents faced and want their children to have the advantages the parents did not have. “You can be anything you set your mind on” is a common message to our children.

Families are tribal. They also draw the lines between family members and those outside the family. Tribalism, defence of the extended family, is a genetically programmed response designed for its protection. For most of human history, the tribal mechanism ensured survival in socially hostile environments. But tribalism has its downside, too. In a socially diverse society, the admonishment, “Don’t play with kids like that,” and the injunction to “Stick with your own kind” establish the basis for discrimination and racism.

Religion, media, and politics are essential parts of society, but they too are tribal. They divide us along philosophical lines. The optimist in me would like to believe that although we may differ philosophically, those differences are equivalent pathways in the pursuit of common human needs and in accordance with similar ethical principles. Increasingly hostile expressions of antipathy in recent years, and especially during COVID-19, are eroding my optimism.

I would like to think that most of us want Canada to be a more socially cohesive and egalitarian society. We want our children to have a sense of who they are as Canadians based upon shared values and want them to live in a society where the similarities among us outweigh the differences, but one in which the differences are respected.

Those aspirations cannot be realized without an institution dedicated to helping us to transcend our tribalism in order to live and work together. The only institution I know that has the promise of doing that is the public school.  You will no doubt have noticed that I used the word promise. While I think public schools do help us transcend our tribalism, they are imperfect – so the promise is not completely fulfilled.

When I think about the history of Canadian public schooling, I see improvement. The overt appeals to xenophobia that were once common (“our Anglo-Saxon heritage”) and the open denigration of Indigenous peoples – are diminished. Diminished, but not extinguished. Vestiges of privilege and discrimination are baked into the institution. Canada and its institutions are still settler-dominated.

I am cautiously optimistic that the manifestations of privilege and discrimination can be eliminated. I am not naïve, however. Eliminating them will require significant, conscious, and persistent effort. Since most children are in school at a point in their lives when tribalism is not so firmly "baked in," public education is the only institution capable of communicating the values I hope we share.

Schools address the same tension between individual rights and the needs of the collective that are present in the larger society. We cannot and should not sidestep the tensions but work to prevent one set of values from eclipsing the other.

It is too soon to assess the long-term effects of COVID-19 closures, but the effects should be assessed. There is a variety of sound tools to assess the social climate of schools and a body of knowledge that can be called upon to improve social relations among students.

Undertaking such assessments and using the data to improve the social environment of school is not a trivial undertaking. If public schools cannot help to create a socially cohesive society, who or what can?

My mother was a social justice warrior

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Education is one of the means for achieving social justice: ensuring that everyone in society is treated fairly, that the dignity and rights of all human beings are respected, and that resources are equitably distributed. That is why education is sometimes called the great equalizer.

It is not surprising that Mother’s Day prompted me to think about my mother, who has been dead for almost 25 years. She was an elementary school teacher who taught for several years when she first completed her teacher preparation in the 1920s and again from 1960 until her retirement in the late 1970s. She was well into her 70s when she retired.

Although most of my mother’s generation of elementary teachers had only one year of preparation beyond high school, my mother had two years of teacher preparation beyond her high school degree.

My mother taught grade one for almost her entire career. Her last grade one class enrolled 35 students. Many of the students lived in publicly subsidized housing because their parents were receiving income assistance. Many of the children in the area had little exposure to reading before coming to school.

My mother was proud that year-in and year-out all of the children leaving her inner-city grade one classroom were reading at grade level. I recall asking her about her teaching, she said plainly, “I’ve never met a child I couldn’t teach to read. It may have been difficult for them and for me, but all of the children in my classes began grade two reading at grade level.”

I asked her what she thought accounted for her success. She replied, “On the first day of school, I would tell the children that they were very lucky to be in school because they would learn a very powerful secret – they would learn how to read. I’d say, ‘Once you learn to read, no one can hide anything from you. Learning to read will be very hard, but I will help you. I have never met a child who couldn’t learn to read.’ Then I would read them a story that I knew they would like.”

The methods my mother used were the ones she was taught during her two years of teacher preparation in the 1920s. “I read to the children every day, often twice a day. Who doesn’t like to have someone read to them?” she asked.

“We used basal readers,” my mother explained. “You know, the readers with Dick, Jane, Spot, and all of that. But every child also had a library card. Each week, beginning in September, I would take them to the school library to select their books. In my last few years of teaching, during choosing time the children might select a cassette tape with a story that they could listen to while they followed along in the book.”

I asked her whether many of the children struggled with reading. “It varied from year to year, but there were always children who struggled. Some might not have had much opportunity to hear and handle books. Others – even the ones with books at home – struggled too. But they all learned to read at grade level by the end of the year.”

Reading – perhaps more than any other capacity – is life changing. Those who can read are more apt to succeed in school, graduate, and make a life for themselves afterward. It is a capacity that often distinguishes them from those who do not achieve success in school, often leave school early, and have diminished life chances.

The priority my mother placed on learning to read meant that she did not always address all the topics recommended for grade one students. “None of the principals I worked for ever complained that the children were short-changed.”

My mother would describe herself as an ordinary classroom teacher, but I think she was a social justice warrior for having taught all the students in her grade one class to read at grade level. If I had told her that, she would have said, “Oh, go on!”

Corporate Grooming

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Most people know, “if the service is free, you are the product.” Facebook and Instagram are two of the many applications that people use that are free. Facebook’s business model depends upon harvesting browsing history, location data, consumer behaviour, and other information from users who use its apps. Zuckerberg has been compared with J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who infamously kept records on countless individuals. In 2019, Facebook was fined £500,000 in the UK for its part in the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal where personal data was harvested from millions of Facebook users for targeting political messaging.

The US National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) recently sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter asking him to cancel plans to launch a version of Instagram designed for children under the age of 13. In their letter, the attorneys general remind Zuckerberg of Facebook’s poor record of protecting the privacy and safety of children who use its platform.

The letter from NAAG refers to a similar plea from the campaign for a commercial-free childhood (ccfc) that cites research on the impact of social media on children and youth:

A growing body of research demonstrates that excessive use of digital devices and social media is harmful to adolescents. Instagram, in particular, exploits young people’s fear of missing out and desire for peer approval to encourage children and teens to constantly check their devices and share photos with their followers. The platform’s relentless focus on appearance, self-presentation, and branding presents challenges to adolescents’ privacy and wellbeing.

The specific research to which ccfc refers shows the links between excessive screen use and a lengthy list of risks:  obesity, decreased happiness, decreased quality of sleep, depression, suicidal ideation, bullying, pressure upon Adolescent girls to “post sexualized selfies as a means of generating attention and social acceptance from their peers,” and more. Although the protection of children’s privacy has received attention from time to time from organizations like NAAG and ccfc, it has not received the attention it deserves.

Facebook’s business model is being threatened by Apple’s new operating system. The new iPhone (iOS14.5) has turned off a feature that follows users around on the internet by default. That means that apps (like Facebook) will need to seek permission from the phone’s user to use the tracking technology. Apple, of course, makes its revenue from selling people new phones and from the purchases users make from “in-app advertising”.

Spending time online has become a ‘way of life’ for most of us during the pandemic. Online learning during COVID-19 has dramatically increased the time that children and youth spend on computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Online engagement has been encouraged by schools and school boards eager to ensure the continuity of learning. School Boards have licensed the use of a variety of platforms for communicating with and instructing students (learning management systems). Students are not obligated to use the platforms provided by school boards. If they (more likely their parents) opt out, boards are obligated to make provision for alternatives. But I suspect that few parents opt out.

Most of the student data generated using online learning management systems is stored in the “cloud” (not on the school’s or board’s servers). It is not clear to me how the learning management systems use the data they store. Are the data linked to other data that they or related corporate entities hold? Are they using the data to develop other tools that they can market to schools or school boards?

In September 2020, the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) released a report titled Troubling clouds: Gaps affecting privacy protection in British Columbia’s K-12 education system.  The report was written by a friend, lawyer Matthew Levine. Levine raises important question about whether student privacy is adequately protected from breaches or from exploitation and offers recommendations for improvements.

The corporations providing online learning management applications are not philanthropies. They are not giving something away without the expectation of some return. Whether it is collecting a fee for each user, instilling a positive identification with its brand, collecting data for marketing purposes, or manipulating consumer preferences, the cynic in me thinks about it as corporate grooming of children and youth.

Mark Zuckerberg abandoning his plan to create an under-13 Instagram at the behest of the NAAG or ccfc is like expecting Midas to divest himself of his gold.  As my granddaughter quipped, under-13 Instagram is Facebook’s ‘gateway drug’ to Instagram and Facebook’s other applications. As a grandparent, I am glad to see groups like NAAG, ccfc, and the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) raising privacy issues.

Language Matters

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 The term potential refers to something that is hidden or undeveloped. The term is used in legislation and regulation from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Nova Scotia explains that the mandate of its publicly funded school system is to  “provide education programs and services for students to enable them to develop their potential and acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy society and a prosperous and sustainable economy 2018, c. 1, Sch. A, s. 2”.  British Columbia explains that “ . . . the purpose of the British Columbia school system is to enable learners to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy society and a prosperous and sustainable economy.”

The association of potential and ability was very much influenced by Alfred Binet’s and Theodore Simon’s[1] efforts to develop measures of mental measurement for the purpose of better matching instruction to the abilities (aptitudes, potential) of children:

“. . . a profound knowledge of the normal intellectual development of the child would not only be of great interest but useful in formulating a course of instruction really adapted to their aptitudes” [p. 261] . . .the instruction should always be according to the natural evolution of the child, and not precede it by a year or two. In other words the child should be taught only what he is sufficiently mature to understand; all precocious instruction is lost time, for it is not assimilated. [p. 262]

But what about students who are seen to be out of the “normal” range of development or aptitude?

Adapting instruction to cultivate the intelligence of the learner was Binet’s and Simon’s intention. But it is not difficult to see how the concept of potential can be used to restrict the education that might be provided to students whose potential, abilities, and aptitudes were perceived as “limited.” Indeed, the techniques Binet and Simon developed to measure metal abilities were perverted by others to deny education to some, stream others and, worse, to abet eugenicists bent on improving the genetic stock and eliminating “inferiors.”[2]

When applied to students, “their potential” and “their individual potential” are synonymous with “to the best of their ability.” The term is so strongly connected to schools that the Cambridge Online Dictionary uses the following example of its use in sentences: “I have children in my class of very mixed abilities (= different levels of skill or intelligence).”

There are many contemporary manifestations of categorization of students with the intention of providing educational programs adapted to their “potential.” The most notable example is students with special needs defined as: “students who have a disability of an intellectual, physical, sensory, emotional or behavioural nature, have a learning disability, or have exceptional gifts or talents . . .”

Categorization of students using the standard of “the normal intellectual development of the child” makes, by definition, deviations from that standard “abnormal” and potentially stigmatizing. Those who are categorized often internalize the label applied to them and become confirmed in the identity associated with the label. Such confirmation makes addressing the needs of that student more complicated.

Students with special needs bring additional resources to many school boards because of the additional effort and resources that are thought to be necessary for their education. Parents cognizant of the challenges their children face often seek diagnoses and labels that will qualify them for categorization and the attention that the additional resources are supposed to provide.  

The association of extra funding to categories of students with special needs creates an incentive to seek such designations. Collective agreements that place limits on the number of designated children in a class, sharpens the demarcation between “normal” students and those the system considers “abnormal.”

One only needs to look at definitions across jurisdictions to see how fluid designation and language are. Consider students who manifest externalizing behaviour and symptoms of mental illness. As Tong[3] points out

In British Columbia, the category is titled “Behavioural Needs or Mental Illness” and within this category, students can be identified in one of two ways, “Students Requiring Moderate Behaviour Support or Students with Mental Illness” or “Students Requiring Intensive Behaviour Intervention or Students with Serious Mental Illness” (BC Ministry of Education, 2011). Alberta Education also identifies two categories of students with behaviour disorders and mental illnesses using the terminology “Emotional/Behavioural Disability” and “Severe Emotional/Behavioural Disability” (Alberta Education, 2011). . . . British Columbia does not formally categorize students with mild behaviour disorders and mental illnesses whereas Alberta Education includes students identified with mild behaviour disorders and mental illnesses in the “Emotional/Behavioural Disability” category. 

One wonders whether and how much the educational programs for such students differ.

Our education system is predicated on age-related definitions of normality that make deviations from those norms stand out. It is a deficit model of schooling that begins before children enter school. Getting children “school ready” is predicated on such thinking. As I have argued before, maybe we need to rethink the assumptions behind the way we organize education and take children as they are and not as we wish them to be.

Language matters. It reflects our cultural assumptions. And when enshrined in policy and practice to which funding is linked, and in contracts, it gets baked into the system and becomes systemic. Terms like potential, ability, and aptitude have significant consequences for the way the persons to whom they are applied are treated. And the ways they are treated have consequences for them.

In British Columbia, Indigenous students are overrepresented among students categorized because of behaviour disorders and mental illnesses. The graduation rate for these Indigenous students is significantly lower than those of their peers. When one finds that some groups of students are over-represented in a category, you must ask whether some form of systemic discrimination is at work.

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[1] Binet, A. and T. Simon. The development of intelligence in children (The Binet-Simon Scale).; Kite, E. S., (Trans); Baltimore, MD, US: Williams & Wilkins Co; 1916. 337 pp.

[2] See, for example, Thompson, G. (1999), Remove from our Midst These Unfortunates: A Historical Inquiry Into the Influence of Eugenics, Educational Efficiency as well as Mental Hygiene upon the Vancouver School System and its Special Classes, 1910-1969. The University of British Columbia, Ph.D. Thesis.

[3] Tong, J. (2017) An Exploration of School Related Factors Associated with School Completion for Children and Youth with Behaviour Disorders and Mental Illness in BC. The University of British Columbia, Ph.D. Thesis.

Math is the new Latin

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduced granted if authorship is acknowledged]

When I was in grade eight, I enrolled in Latin I “because,” my mother said, “you can’t get into university without Latin.” This view was corroborated by the school guidance counsellor and the parents of all my friends. Going to university was not a matter of discussion as far as my parents were concerned.

I was not Ovid’s most avid fan or of Caesar for that matter. In fact, most of my adolescent concentration (which in retrospect strikes me as a contradiction in terms) was on Friday night. Long term planning extended to Saturday night. From my perspective, university was as distant a prospect as landing on Mars and about as likely.

So, the following summer I found myself enrolled in Latin I again, and not for the love of the language. This linguistic purgatory was necessitated by the requirement that I have two years of Latin to qualify for university. I had no idea that when my mother referred to having to take Latin for admission to university it was an indeterminate sentence. Or at least it appeared that way from the vantage point of a 14-year-old. Prayer works, apparently, because I eventually passed Latin II.

Latin is no longer required for admission to university. Its place was usurped by mathematics much like the invasion of Rome by the barbarians. In other words, mathematics has become the arbiter of those worthy of attending university. In British Columbia, for example, a student seeking undergraduate admissions to Arts is required to have taken Pre-Calculus 11 or Foundations of Mathematics 12.

Increasingly, however, mathematics’ vaunted status and utility are being questioned. Among those dubious about mathematics is G.V. Ramanathan, a professor emeritus of . . .wait for it . . . mathematics, statistics, and computer science at the University of Illinois (Chicago). To say Ramanathan is questioning mathematics is a bit of an understatement. He compares the marketing of mathematics to “the marketing of creams to whiten teeth, gels to grow hair and regimens to build a beautiful body.”

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Ramanathan asks, “How much math do we really need?” He says we should be asking ourselves that question and the next ten people we encounter – such as “your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher.” Ouch!

Ramanathan is just one of the increasing number of academics asking us to think about how much math we really need and, by extension, how much emphasis should be placed on mathematics in school. Andrew Hacker, a professor of political science at Queens College (City University of New York), was interviewed by a New York Times journalist for a 2016 titled “Who Needs Advanced Math? Not Everybody.”

Hacker comes at the issue from a slightly different direction than Ramanathan. He said:

At the very time we should be honing and sharpening quantitative reasoning skills we punch students into algebra, geometry, calculus. The Math People take over and ignore much simpler needs. Arithmetic is super essential — we quantify everything.

Notice that he distinguishes between quantitative reasoning and the topics typically addressed in school - algebra, geometry, calculus. Hacker is not advocating teaching quantitative reasoning as a means of improving critical thinking, but because everything is quantified. Besides, as Ramanathan points out, the claim that courses such as “quantitative reasoning” improve critical thinking is unsubstantiated.

Hacker’s piece in the Times is a teaser for his entertaining book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions. Hacker and mathematician at large of the Mathematical Association of America, James Tanton, debated one another at the [US] National Museum of Mathematics before an audience of mathematicians, an account of which was reported in the New Yorker.

During his presentation Tanton confessed, “I have never used the quadratic formula in my personal life. I don’t think I have ever used it in my research life. But learning the formula wasn’t the point. It was the story of quadratics. And, from that story, I know I can nut my way from most any problem to do with that subject.” He seemed to be making Hacker’s point:

Every other subject is about something. Poetry is about something. Even most modern art is about something. Math is about nothing. It sounds like ‘Seinfeld.’ Math describes much of the world but is all about itself, and it has the most fantastic conundrums. But it is not about the world.

Time in school is limited. There is much more of value to be learned than can be accommodated in that limited time. Ramanathan, Hacker, and others ask us to consider how much of that time should be devoted to mathematics. Is mathematics the new Latin?