the goal of education

To start, we have to agree on what the goal of education is. There are a number of plausible candidates, with some having the individual's interests in sight and with others having society's interests in sight:

The first is to give students the (instrumental) means to succeed in life. This kind of education typically includes teaching certain skill: e.g. reading, writing, and reasoning skills to enable the child to eventually get a job to have sufficient resources to do other things. Here, the skills are viewed instrumentally.

The second is to give students more means to enjoy life (give them access to Mill's "higher pleasures"). For example, teach them how to read so that they might enjoy reading in itself (which is, well, a cheap form of travel, just like TV is). Here, the skills are viewed as having intrinsic worth in a sense: you should read because reading itself is enjoyable, not because being able to read will help you order what you want off a dinner menu.

The third is to make them fit for society by enabling them to think critically so that they can be good citizens in a democracy. This might be for the purpose of enabling citizens to promote and protect their interests through the political process (e.g. you are an uninsured blue collar worker and so are trying to get better health coverage for blue collar workers). Or it might be for the purpose of enable citizens to promote and protect the interests of society as a whole (e.g. you are not a blue collar worker, but nevertheless think blue collar workers should have health coverage).

The fourth is to make them fit for society by indoctrinating them. This might include the idea that we ought to support arts and humanities because culture is important to... our culture (which I think is right). Or, more cynically, this might include making children used to sitting for extended periods of time when they are told to do so (so that they can, for example, stand sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day starting at 22).

Which of these you take as the goal(s) of education will determine how you think education should be done. The difference in approach is obvious, for example, if we compare liberal arts colleges with more career-oriented places of higher learning. To take an extreme example, consider St. John's College in New Mexico and some trade school. People who attend the former come out educated, but without a profession. In the case of the latter, the effect is the opposite. I think some combination of the two is probably ideal. Having a profession is important to citizenship because it gives you a sense of being socially useful and thus can also give you a sense of self-respect. Critical thinking, on the other hand, is harder to sell. Consider one civic duty: serving on a jury. If you want to be dismissed from jury duty, say that you took a forensics class or that you are working towards your phd. Citizens who can think for themselves are harder to control.

It is only once we agree on the goal(s) of education that we can tackle the two questions of how to go about education: how best to teach in the classroom (the lower-level question) and how best to organize education as an institution (the higher-level question).

conflicting goals, happiness, and tools with which to equip active citizens and idealists

Moreover, some of these goals can conflict with others. For example, giving a person the tools to think critically and thus to question institutions has a high risk of not being a win-win. It can either upset those in power or favoring the status quo or it can make that person unhappy or even break him or her. This is because the nature of institutions is to be resilient to change. This is what makes institutions stable. It is also because those in power are on the pareto frontier and thus can end up worse off as a result. The status quo rules. If the person tries to change the institutions to right an institutional wrong (e.g. an injustice or some other moral aspect of the institution), s/he can invest a lot of energy with very few results. Good citizenship is difficult to teach. It is much easier not to teach it at all. But if we take J.S. Mill's ideals seriously and try to both make people happy while at the same time making them into active citizens, fostering diversity and individualism, teaching critical thinking is not enough. With giving idealistic students the tools to question and critique institutions (e.g. be they business firms, political institutions, or schools and universities) comes the responsibility to give students the tools to make change happen, life-work balancing, and the tools to cope with and accept institutional resilience. Tools for change can, for example, can come from economics and psychology. A idealistic person needs to be equipped with coping and life-work balance tools because there is no greater weight for an idealist than realizing that he or she is part of an unjust institution. The weight is especially great if he or she feels somehow responsible for perpetuating the injustice (e.g. through a collective action or inaction problem) instead of merely feeling that he or she is a victim of the injustice.

Similarly, the tools for institutional change are needed to empower citizens. I should note here that organizations are merely one type of institution. Institutions can be formal: e.g. organizations, constitutions, rule of law including courts, laws, and those who enforce the laws and the court's rulings). But institutions can also be informal (e.g. social or moral norms, allegiance). Moreover, tools for institutional change are also marketable to employers, albeit employers seem to be conflicted about this. On the one hand, a business firm is an authoritative and hierarchical organization. On the other hand, however, business firms want smart people who can question current practices because those are the people who will think of innovation and be able to adapt to a changing market. When it comes to tools for change, leaders too, not only citizens, face the challenge of changing institutions. If you are an idealist, you will most likely want to change the institution of which you are a part (e.g. the business where you are employed or your country's domestic or foreign policies). If you are a business owner or a CEO, you are facing three types of institutions which might threaten the success of your business: the institutional structure within your own organization (e.g. the informal social norms of your employees or the social networks of your organization), your competitors, and context within which you conduct business (e.g. laws, regulations, macroeconomic market conditions). Similarly, political leaders face the same kinds of problems. Consider an example. You are the president of a Middle Eastern country and you have a problem: there is a terrorist organization in your country. You can either take the confrontational path and try to fight terrorism with force. This, however, might not be effective because resistance breeds resistence. (Perhaps in social psychology, an action does not necessarily result in an equal and opposite reaction, but it can surely breed more hatred.) So, as a creative student of economic principles, you try a different route. You pass a law that in that region of the country, single men between the ages of 18 and 25 who marry will receive a $10k subsidy and, moreover, those who are married who have a child will receive (another) $10k subsidy. As a result, terrorism activity drops to zero. Why did you think this would work? Well, you figured (or perhaps you had some intelligence) that most terrorists are energetic idealists and hence young males. Moreover, you figured that married men are much less likely to risk their lives and married men with children are even less likely to do so. So you thought of a free market incentive to turn young single males into ones married with children. In short, you used economic principles as a tool for institutional change (where the institution you were trying to change, or rather demolish, was the institution of terrorism). Had this approach failed, as someone properly equipped with tools for institutional change, you would have tried some other methods (or perhaps applied a few methods at once, depending on the cost of trying when compared to the benefit of succeeding as quickly as possible).

engaging teaching and social learning

What I find surprising is the amount of sitting and passive learning that we impose on ourselves and on our students. Think about how we learn in an institutional settings. We sit. We start sitting in grade school (perhaps on the floor, if we are lucky). Then we continue to sit at desks through high school, albeit we get summers off. In college, things get slightly better because we are often "allowed" to cut lecture and we do not sit in lecture for eight hours a day. There is, however, a serious amount of homework and reading that can be imposed on us. And, there can still be an amazing amount of sitting and passively taking in lectures (especially at big state schools where classes are large). I have nothing against good lectures and good books. However, few of us are lucky to be exposed to a large enough percentage of good lecturers. And, in any case, a lecture is a very passive method of learning. Perhaps passive learning is not the best way to foster active citizenship. Moreover, books are a rather solitary (and yet again, somewhat passive) method of taking in information. (PhD students who work on their dissertation similarly work alone, spending hours reading and writing in solitude; after all, dissertations aren't group projects, at least given our current institutional setup.) The main advantage of good books is that they give you access to the thoughts of brilliant and often thought-provoking people. But nevertheless, the social aspect of discussing ideas is lost. Socrates, for example, practiced philosophy by talking to others. This was how he thought we, as social beings, ought to discover truth (e.g. test whether our reasons for believing or valuing certain things are good ones), teach others (see the slave boy in the Meno), and indeed live one's life (i.e. the unexamined life, according to Socrates, was not worth living). Thus, I think it is unfortunate that what we have retained from Socrates in education is the "Socratic Method" in law schools, which, as far as I gather, amounts to picking on students to embarrass them in front of the class. While it's true that Socrates seems to have done a fair share of this himself (e.g. see how he talks to others in Plato's Republic), Socrates's educational insight is that learning is a social activity (often done in relaxed settings, e.g. over dinner with wine), not passive intake.

If we want to indoctrinate our students and prime them for white-collar cubicle desk jobs, then we are on the right track. We should have our students sit and listen, for ours on end. We should start indoors, then slowly move them away from windows, and then add cubicles. Giving them boring reading assignments (instead of something thought provoking) and insisting that do their work alone (or else it's plagiarism) is one way to prepare them for the solitary confinement of a corporate cubicle. All this, while at the same time firms want "team players." Consider much of computer science education in college. When we hire computer engineers, we want them to work in teams because this is how, given our limited capacities, we can best make large-scale software systems. Hence all the latest buzz with extreme and agile programming. But, in college, team work is usually called plagiarism. Moreover, when we do have classes with team projects, we do not structure the division of labor properly and leave it up to the students to figure out. It is the efficient and fair division of labor, however, that is so crucial to teach. Instead, we end up with group projects where the person who cares the most about the project or the grade ends up doing most of the work.

What is the moral of all this? I think there are three:

The first is sit and listen less, learn more. Learning is best done when it is done actively. This means not lecturing at students, but instead engaging students. How to do this well is another question (e.g. if you must lecture, short lecture sheets with blanks to fill in are good). Learning is also best done on one's feet when one's knees aren't hurting and one is bursting with energy (which for most adults without disabilities can easily be through the age of 22, 25, or even 30 and beyond). This is not only more interesting (you can go places or be outdoors), but it can also be good exercise and help prevent lecture drowsiness.

The second is that we also need to take advantage of the division of labor "in the classroom." This means group projects where the teacher thinks carefully about how to divide up the labor. (The skill of dividing up labor well is one of leadership and can of course be taught to students too, bearing in mind that it is an advanced-level skill.) The division of labor is good not only because it creates a social setting, but also because it can make its participants (i.e. students) feel useful. If I am doing the same exact work as my neighbor, then, frankly speaking, it seems like wasted effort. Why do what someone else has already done or will do anyway? Ah yes, to learn. Or, from the point of view of incentives, get a good grade. The student who copies off his neighbor is smart (well, yes, smart people are lazy; if they weren't, we wouldn't have inventions that help us do things easier and faster). The cheating student realizes the efficiency of the division of labor. (Of course sometimes redundancy is good, but I do not think this is one of those cases.) So, as educators, if we want all of our students to learn X (or acquire skillset X), then we need to figure out how to divide up the labor so that nonetheless everyone learns X. This can be done by rotation (e.g. today I do the cash register and you make the frappuccinos). Or it can be done by intelligently constructing projects and dividing them up. But it may not even be desirable to have everyone come out with the same exact skillsets developed to the exact same degree. This is not because, as Socrates (or Plato?) noted, people's talents differ (again, see Plato's Republic), but because different people (at different points in their lives) are interested in different things. It is this interest that will motivate them to learn and work hard. Thus, the job of a good educator, or any good leader, is (a) to motivate people and (b) to divide up the labor so that the natural and present talents and interests of the laborers (be they students or employees) are best matched up with their work. Motivation can be done through positive incentives (e.g. grades, feedback, promotion). It can also be done through negative incentives (e.g. threats of detention or loss of job) although I do not think this is a good way to go. Motivation can also be done by conveying why the work is important, meaningful, or interesting. And good division of labor can take advantage of our social nature (thus further preparing us for work in team environments in the real world), take advantage of our differing natural talents, take advantage of our different interests (which is a motivator), and make us feel socially useful (which is also a motivator).

The third is one I haven't mentioned so far. There are different types of learners. Some are social, some like to solve puzzles and play with gadgets, some understand numbers well or listen or read well, while some are visual learners. Multifaceted teaching (or any business or academic presentation for that matter) that can take advantage of all of these channels is best.

conclusion: productivity and ADD

I am no doctor, so take what I say here with a grain of salt -- as my uninformed hypothesis. But, I suspect that medicating kids with attention deficit disorder (ADD) is yet another way to train up kids to sit in cubicles. There are probably different causes of ADD, but one probably rather common one is hyperactivity. Moreover, while extreme in some cases (3-5% of the population?), this applies to most normal children and young adults. Kids full of energy will find it difficult to sit still and pay attention without fidgeting. Big surprise. I would have thought that's a good thing. I too can hardly sit through even the best of lectures after the first twenty minutes, even if I am familiar enough with the concepts for the lecture to be accessible for me and yet not too familiar for it to be boring. Perhaps approaching teaching from the point of active learning can help address the "ADD problem," at least insofar as it is not a symptom of not being interested in the outside world and lacking in energy, but on the contrary, as symptom of finding the world too interesting and being full of energy to explore it and to engage with it. Moreover, energy and productivity are qualities we want to foster, not rein in and break. The active citizen or the produtive employee or artist is one who is not very content with sitting still

more...

Teaching political philosophy [to be posted]
Teaching logic and critical thinking [to be posted]