It’s a familiar and dreary tale. For twenty years, the math and reading learning outcomes of our nation’s twelfth graders have been flat. More recently, the performance gap between the wealthiest and poorest students has widened, while between Black and White students the previous gap-closing has stalled. Our math and science results on international tests are shameful. Efforts to enhance the opportunities for career and technical education (CTE) look pallid against the programs in peer countries. Civics education, at a time of intense cultural divisions and international pressure on democratic states, amounts to handwaving. All this before the pandemic knocked months off the expected learning of our children.
My new book, A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools, begins in such familiar territory. It probes the grade inflation that pumps up graduation rates while learning remains flat. It digs into the anguished debates on race and opportunity gaps, calls out our fundamental confusions about CTE, and presents the wasteland of civics instruction.
Out of despondency, resignation, or because they are convinced by their peers, many educators argue that we should stop worrying about meaningless test results and focus instead on the state of students’ mental well-being. Advocates of this shift in focus from academics to “social and emotional learning” (SEL) point to exciting new findings about cognition and human flourishing; for good measure, they integrate such findings into the education required by the “twenty-first-century economy.” We are told that teaching new skills—such as critical thinking, grit, positive mindset, and creativity—while nurturing students’ increasingly fragile emotions, is the best path forward. But my review of the research supporting this advice show that this emperor has no clothes—or so few as to be embarrassing.
Instead, we should return to the core mission of education: academic learning. The book moves forward to the underlying systemic reasons for our current academic outcomes. It lays out the fragmentation that results from the siloed worlds of teacher preparation, curricula, and assessment regimes. The extraordinarily wide variations in teacher effectiveness within our public schools—far greater than that of most other nations—is a core cause of our disparate results.
There are glimmers of hope, however. The introduction of longer and better supervised clinical placements promises more effective teachers. As undertaken in Louisiana, preparing future teachers to use specific high-quality curricula, combined with ELA assessments that are integrated into them, motivates teachers to pay closer attention to teaching quality content. Acceleration strategies that prepare students for grade-level instruction, rather than fruitlessly remediating them on years of lost learning, are now underway. Team teaching is showing promise. While very far from becoming mainstream, these initiatives are early signposts to a stronger system.
Academics is the core; the teaching of the humanities in their full hue matters; deep engagement with texts is what counts. But when we dissect our learning standards, it is clear that they largely treat seventeen-year-olds as if they were simply seven-year-olds reading longer words. I argue that the Common Core ELA standards (still de facto used in the great majority of states) rests on a model of reading which creates sophomoric and banal models of instruction for our older K–12 students. In admiration but also difference, I trace, too, the impact of E.D. Hirsch’s theories of interpretation and argue that they should be strictly restricted to use in the elementary grades.
Diagnosis is only the first task at hand; the second is to cast a vision for the future. In the final chapter, I address the elephant in the room—our widening distaste for academic learning—and start by arguing that this is profoundly wrong-headed. The answer to low levels of learning is not to avoid academics and to reach for placebos, but to make academic learning and content a matter of consequence. I argue that mastering a discipline is empowering, but only when its cognitive demands are extended so as to reach ethical questionings and aesthetic judgments. Reading to “find the main idea,” text after text, by contrast, numbs the mind and dulls the interest.
Current instructional policies for middle and high school students do more than prompt disinterest and “somnambulance”—they deprive them of the needed guidance towards schooling’s noblest goals. Why do we treat all but math, ELA, and perhaps science as third-class fields? Where is the invitation to beauty, to a considered life, to the adventure of distant worlds that enthrall?
I cannot speak for you, dear reader, but I believe that, as is the case for me, you would not want to “unlearn” and renounce the knowledge you owe to your schooling. I argue that, in the end, because most of our life is spent in the company of our own thoughts, education matters most because it provides the indispensable furnishings of our minds. If learned with attention, fascination, and rigor, such knowledge stays with us always, generating the content of a lifetime. In times of private distress, where the company of others cannot reach us, it is that content which is ours—by heart, in memory. How dare we trivialize the hard and long-earned gifts of human thought and creation?
In a text that moves from statistical effect sizes to Kant’s arguments about aesthetics, from problems of testing psychometrics to searing issues of race and learning, the scope is broad. But at its core, my book asks that we remember what is at stake and honor students and their teachers by inviting them to an educational journey worth taking. At the book’s close, I share a photograph of a little girl left alone to make her way unguided through an immaculate but empty school hallway. What will she find? What will the children of this nation find, if we do not aspire to the education of thought?
