Category: Education and Learning

It’s taken a few weeks, but I’m getting back to the book “Leveraged Learning” by Danny Iny.

In “Leveraged Learning” – Part 1, I took a look at the introduction to the topic as well as taking a couple of excursus (or excursuses, if you prefer) on different aspects of education, including a bit of history.

As we come to chapter 1, we see Iny making his argument that the education system is somehow failing. As noted, he concentrates on post-secondary education.

Iny’s first contention is that the “signal” of education has eroded over time. That is, a degree signals that the possessor has achieved a certain level of knowledge and skill, commands a certain amount of knowledge, and exhibits a baseline of mental faculties, dedication, and willingness to work. (Otherwise, the degree holder would not have successfully completed the course of study.)

According to Iny, the signal has eroded for a number of reasons, including ubiquity, disconnect from substance, and cost to value ratio.

“Ubiquity” means that college and university degrees have become so commonplace they no longer send the same signal of excellence that they once did. This argument is similar to the argument, “If everyone is special, then no one is special.” I’m not certain that either argument is entirely cogent.

In the case of education, the implication of the argument is that increased availability and access to a degree somehow invalidates the signal that a baseline of mental faculties, dedication, and willingness to work has been achieved. For certain instances, this may be the case, but there is a major assumption involved in applying the assertion across the board.

The “disconnection of signal from substance” argument seems a bit specious to me. It begins with the assumption that the purpose of education is to prepare people for business. Iny writes,

This misalignment with the needs of our graduates as individuals and economy as a whole is especially true with the degrees that you don’t specifically need for any job, but check the box of “requires an undergraduate degree,” no matter how unrelated to the task at hand. These non-vocational degree programs, like liberal arts and even business degrees in the absence of a career track headed for accounting or consulting or investment banking, simply aren’t designed to make their students valuable in the workplace. (Iny, p. 5)

Notice that one of the criteria for value is what you “need for any job”. We are also told that certain degrees have little to no value because they are “unrelated to the task at hand”. And “these non-vocational degree programs … aren’t designed to make their students valuable in the workplace.”

He is by no means the only person to hold this position. I have seen it reiterated numerous times in articles, advertisements, and other writings by entrepreneurs. Quoted in “Leveraged Learning”, Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, states, “Most of what schools teach has no value in the labor market.” (Iny, p. 6)

These writers fall into the trap of utilitarianism. In an article titled “The Utilitarian Trap“, DV observes the following:

College is an opportunity to evaluate oneself intellectually, socially, and existentially. By reducing it to a career path, we do a tremendous disservice to those who hope to transcend trade and vocation. The concepts we learn in college do not guarantee us jobs. Rather, jobs are a byproduct of much more significant intellectual development. … Essentially, we ask college to be something it was not intended to be: a job creation center.

This objection to the trap of utilitarianism should not be seen as an excuse for shoddy educational practices. A bad education is still a bad education. However, one should not blame education for human nature. Caplan goes on to say, “Students fail to learn most of what they’re taught. Adults forget most of what they learn.” One might lay a certain amount of blame on the educational process for the failure of students “to learn most of what they’re taught”. However, holding education responsible for adults’ forgetfulness is a bit misleading at best.

Another bit of disingenuous argumentation is the assertion that this “disconnection from substance” “… is at least partially responsible for the unimpressive employment rates of recent graduates. In 2011, 50 percent of college graduates younger than twenty-five were jobless or underemployed, and those who were working were more likely to be waiters, waitresses, or bartenders than engineers, physicists, chemists, or mathematicians (100,000 versus 90,000).” The role of the near-depression, longer careers of Baby Boomers, and other factors receives no mention, yet they contribute significantly to underemployment and unemployment among younger workers.

Excursus (“Rabbit Trail”) 1: The education system has become a whipping boy for economic and other ills in American society. Iny’s arguments here are reminiscent of the education reformists’ attempt to lay the blame for “low international test scores” on teachers and public schools while ignoring the impact of poverty on all areas of life. The fact is that socio-economic status is a far more accurate predictor of academic success than any other single factor. [In all fairness, we have to admit that some individuals overcome the effects of poverty, just as some individuals overcome the effects of debilitating illness or catastrophic injury. Does that mean we should not attempt to eliminate diseases such as smallpox, diabetes, coronary disease, or cancer? The arguments are analogous.] When we correct for poverty, the US does not lag behind the rest of the world. We simply find it more convenient to use education and teachers as the scapegoat rather than address the systemic and endemic ills of our society.

Back to the Book.

Iny attributes education’s alleged “disconnection from substance” to five primary factors:
1. The lecture format
2. Accreditation
3. Course design by “non-practitioners”
4. Tenure
5. Program design “by and for academics” or big businesses

Let’s address just one of these. Iny’s problem with tenure is that   it “allows academics to focus on their passion for particular topics rather than the areas that the market needs most.” (Iny, p. 5) I hope we see that Iny once again falls into the trap of utilitarianism. In addition, he seems to fault “academics” for having passions that are not his. As noted before, he is blaming education for not doing what it was never designed to do. Perhaps I should blame Iny, a successful entrepreneur, for failing to prepare his students for success in the global economy because he fails to teach them a foreign language. After all, the largest markets in the world don’t speak English as their first language.

I hope that everyone noticed I just did something similar to Iny. I highlighted his primary deficiency and said nothing about his other points. So, let me be more forthcoming than Iny.
1. The lecture format often leaves a great deal to be desired as far as retention of knowledge is concerned. It is, however, not the paradigm of instruction at the secondary level. Nor was it used overwhelmingly in my courses when I was at university. I suspect that Iny is addressing a straw man.
2. Accreditation is a signal for educational institutions, much like a degree is a signal for students. Iny probably has at least some legitimacy in decrying the constraints placed upon institutions by the accreditation process. However, we should also acknowledge that accreditation entirely voluntary for non-governmental schools. There are numerous accrediting agencies, and they are composed of the schools that they accredit. If the agency is not responsive to the needs of its clientele, that is a matter that can and should be addressed.
3. As he does in other areas, Iny makes a broad generalization for the sake of his argument. While it may be true that some courses are designed by non-practitioners, this is false for many others. I have not done the research (and neither has Iny) to determine which is in the majority. My suspicion is that course design by non-practitioners is the minority rather than the majority.
5. Program design is often dictated by non-academics. The most egregious problems that I observed in my teaching career arose from the dictates of politicians and non-academics rather than those who were closest to the instructional process. It would be better for Iny to address outside interference in education, much as many entrepreneurs decry the restrictions and requirements placed upon them by non-entrepreneurs. (Of course, we can debate the relative benefits and drawbacks of those restrictions and requirements as we consider the larger picture of the environment, society, the overall economy, etc. – but that is an entirely different discussion.)

I agree with Iny that the cost of education is increasingly exorbitant. Prior to the twentieth century, education was for the “elite”, i.e., the wealthy. A combination of factors, including massive government funding, made post-secondary education something that larger numbers of people could access. Unfortunately, that government assistance also fueled a rise in the price of education for a number of reasons. As a result, education is once again becoming too expensive for the “average person”. According to Iny,  “In the US and UK, education is now priced as a luxury.” (Iny, p. 8)

That is a significant problem if we believe that an educated citizenry is important to the working of a democracy – or democratic republic, to be more precise.

We haven’t even finished Chapter 1 in “Leveraged Learning”, but we’ll have to stop here for now.

Contra Iny, I do not believe that education is quite the disaster he paints it with his broad brush. In the remainder of his first chapter, Iny admits that higher education is still useful in a number of areas. If this work and the observations of others provide a corrective to the near idolization of education in our society, it is good. However, if it serves to demonize education, then it is bad. We’ll have to see where it goes.

Last week, I took the week off from posting.

The previous week, I posted about the California World Language Standards and registered my concern about the use and priority of the term “authentic texts” with the definition of “by native speakers for native speakers”.

The week before that, I finished my commentary on Bill VanPatten’s book While We’re on the Topic and invited people to make suggestions about what they would like for me to address.

Other than notifications that a couple of people liked my post, the only comments I have received since then have been from people offering to improve my SEO and get me more readers. I chose not to follow up on those.

During the past week, I came across a Quora question asking what people think about a “no zero” grading policy. This brought me to some work I did some time ago on the history of grades and grading. That brought me to a book that I started reading recently. It’s titled Leveraged Learningand is by Danny Iny. Danny is an online information provider, and he has done his research in preparing this book.

Since I did the initial research on the history of grades and grading, this broader view of the education system looked interesting. It is.

An ongoing debate is the state of education in the United States. The one thing that nearly everyone seems to agree on is that the current system is not designed or implemented to take us into the future. Precisely what is wrong and what the solution(s) may be are hotly debated. Even though the “education reform movement” and its opponents have not been in the news recently, the ongoing conflict is very real.

However, before we can suggest a solution, we have to understand what the problem is. This is where a bit of historical perspective can be helpful.

So, today I’ll summarize some of the information that Danny provides about the history and current state of education in the United States. Although he concentrates on post-secondary education, Danny makes comments about all of education. In this, he tends to reflect and repeat common perceptions.

What we consider “modern education” has its beginnings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when universities were established. (Bologna in 1088, Paris in 1150, Oxford in 1167; Heidelberg is a latecomer in 1386)

Excursus (aka “rabbit trail”) 1:

The course of study consisted of the Trivium (grammar, or mechanics of language; logic/dialectic, or mechanics of thought and analysis; rhetoric, or application of language in order to instruct and persuade) followed by the Quadrivium (arithmetic, or pure number; geometry, or number in space; music (harmonics and not performance), or number in time; and astronomy, or number in space and time). This looks, at first, very different from our modern curriculum, but many aspects of modern university education are developments from the medieval system. In addition, the universities themselves were based on cathedral schools and monastic schools. If this seems highly theoretical to you, you’re probably right.

Before the development of a large middle class, higher education – indeed, education in generally – was the domain of the wealthy. Poor people had neither time nor resources to pursue education. They could not afford private tutors, and children who were able to work had to help support the family, so even the cathedral and monastic schools played a limited role in educating the poor.

Back to “Leveraged Learning”:

The elite nature of education nearly ensured success for the person who managed to obtain a degree. Having a diploma from a university was nearly a guarantee of a better, more successful life. To a large degree and for over two hundred years in the United States (Harvard issued its first degree in 1813), higher education more than delivered on its promise.

Within the last few years, however, education has lost some of its luster. For one thing, ubiquity has undermined differentiation. Whereas a bachelor’s degree used to make a person stand out, now that a four-year degree has become commonplace, that no longer holds. The BA holds the same place that a high school diploma used to hold; the MA holds the BA’s old place. This is a kind of “academic inflation”. Consequently, “the majority … of recent college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed …” (Iny, p. viii) Another problem is the rising cost of education, which has by far outpaced inflation. The average debt of over $30,000 for graduates is compounded by the opportunity cost.

If the only consideration for getting a college degree is earning power, then that degree is beginning to look less useful and seem more like a liability. This, of course, is the standard position of entrepreneurs, especially online entrepreneurs: our education system has failed us. Of course, to come to this conclusion and maintain its viability, the critics have to craft their definitions carefully and ignore large amounts of mitigating information.

Excursus 2:

Now, I will not deny that there are significant problems within education, not least of which is the high cost. Another problem is the one-size-fits-all approach to elementary and secondary education. Individual teachers are encouraged to “differentiate instruction”, but the system as a whole is designed to look, feel, and operate the same wherever we may go. Federal incentives (e.g., “No Child Left Behind” and “Race To The Top”) and reform initiatives (e.g., Common Core State Standards) are intended not only to establish standards but also dictate the means for achieving them. Through PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a series of exams throughout the school career have been developed and are administered each year. (We know that what you test is what you teach.) A limited number of textbook publishers, most notably Pearson, provide not just the tests but also the textbooks for the curriculum. I see many problems with this arrangement, not least of which is that the publishing giants are setting the curriculum so that we have not just “standardized tests” but “standardized teaching”. Don’t get me started here.

The federal Department of Education’s push toward standardization, which I consider beneficial in manufacturing but not in education, stalled a bit in 2015 with the passage of “Every Student Succeeds”. Currently, 39 states are either full or partial members of one of the two assessment consortia (PARCC and SBAC), but some have repealed their membership, and others are reviewing participation. A few years ago, only a handful of states and territories were not members.

Back to the book:

Danny Iny joins other critics of education in declaring the system “broken” and therefore detrimental to us all.

He first defines “education” and “learning” primarily in financial terms: “designed experiences that are meant to act as a short-cut to achieving whatever job prospects, financial rewards, upward mobility, social contribution, and personal fulfillment we might aspire to.” (Iny, p. xii) Three of the of the five objectives in the definition are financial: job prospects, financial rewards, upward mobility. One implies financial success: social contribution. Only one is generally interpreted apart from finances: personal fulfillment – although even here finances are often perceived as the means to fund doing the things that lead to personal fulfillment.

According to Iny, the situation is so dire that “When the fringes and outliers are the only ones achieving success, they do so in spite of the system rather than because of it.” (Iny, p. xiii)

To me, Iny makes the same mistake that many people make: he blames the education for not doing something that it was not really designed to do. That, of course, takes us to the question of what the education system was intended to do. The answer to that question is complex indeed because so many different people with so many different understandings of education have been involved in shaping the education system. Maybe we’ll get there in another post.

Where Iny does get it right is in his recognition of diversity in information gathering and instructional settings. The university or college is no longer the sole provider of education, and the university degree is no longer the sole sign of competence. Our society as a whole is a bit slow in recognizing other signs of competence and excellence, but that recognition is growing. Some of the resources available include the following:

• Repackaged university courses like The Great Courses or free massive open online courses (MOOC);
• Intensive coding (and other) courses at places like General Assembly;
• Continuing or executive education programs from established educational; institutions like universities;
• Courses offered at community centers;
• For-profit colleges (of dubious credibility and standing);
• Courses from celebrity instructors;
• Corporate internal training;
• Self-study e-learning programs, apps, and software;
• Supplemental education videos on sites like YouTube and Khan Academy;
• Online video courses presented by individual experts.

I believe Iny also identifies correctly three important drivers of success: knowledge and skill; meaningful insight (analysis and creativity); balance of emotions and habits of fortitude (persistence, consistency). (Iny, p. xiii)

At the conclusion of his introduction, Iny admits that he has painted the world of education with a “fairly broad brush”. In addition, his focus is higher education, and my experience is secondary education at a public high school, so our perspectives are different. Furthermore, my experience with higher education is far different from the picture that Iny paints. This may be because my student experience was over 40 years ago, and a lot has changed in that time. It may also be because my experience has been in areas that stressed performance: music and teaching. When I graduated as a sacred music major, I was equipped to work in the field and even had a job offer, which I declined – but that is a story of its own. When I got my credential, the courses were very much geared toward being a teacher. It was not the fault of education that the career path – public school teaching – is not remunerated in a way that is commensurate with the value created. Of course, those same skills can also be used to develop instructional units as an individual expert – something I am currently working on.

So, I will be evaluating this look at the current status of education with a bit of a critical eye and from a perspective that is different from many in the online communities, especially the internet business community.