Gup Shup

Related to my last post, today’s Boston Globe ran a special op-ed contribution by Kumiko Makihara called “Japan’s mania for certification.” The piece informs us that certification tests for all kinds of purposes, professional and otherwise, are popping up everywhere in Japan, with ludicrous results. Makihara writes that “even the most obscure hobbies have their own ranking systems, usually backed by related businesses.”

This is an important point. Who benefits from the existence of such certification/ranking systems? In the case of education, who benefits from passive students who simply regurgitate the material fed to them? Who benefits, eg. from students that have no real awareness of the extermination of the native population in the Americas? Who benefits from students trained to “compete” to “beat the other,” and trained to believe that such competition is “basic human nature?” Who benefits from students who swallow whole, eg. neo-liberal dogma? By setting up a rewards system whereby those who follow such dogmas “win” and those who don’t “lose,” you create a self-enforcing system that creates a “meritocracy” of like-minded dogmatists running the show. The result is that, people who assert (for example) that the suffering of the natives was “nobody’s plan” end up running places like Harvard University; people who dissent are marginalized as “radicals” and shoved aside.

Since schools are run by the state, we expect states to use them as tools for their own ends. Since the power in society rests in some kind of state-business partnership, we expect schools, to a significant extent, to satisfy the needs of this partnership. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that educational institutions are still relatively free from the influence of big corporations, and to the extent that society is democratic, students, teachers, parents, etc. hold a significant amount of say in how schools function. There is hope still in reconstructing schools as educational institutions rather than certification institutions designed to meet the needs of the powerful sectors of society.

It seems to me that there is a fundamental problem with the way our educational systems are currently designed. The problem is that they are designed to promote competition for grades, and are not designed to educate people. Popular thinking has it that the best mechanism for educating people is competition for grades. Unfortunately, this thinking flies in the face of empirical evidence, as outlined in several papers and books on the topic (see, eg. some of the books by Alfie Kohn on the subject). In fact, there are several ways in which the incentive to “get the highest grade,” both in terms of achieving high grades oneself (as an absolute measure), and in terms of getting higher grades than others (as a comparative measure), directly inhibits the education of students, resulting in a situation where the student ends up less informed than she otherwise would have or could have been. The conflict between grade competition and learning seems to me robust enough to call for a significant overhaul in the way educational systems are designed. Let me give just two personal examples to illustrate the point.

First, I have personally witnessed scenarios like the following much throughout my educational experience. Imagine there are two students, A and B, who are in the same class and have been assigned a problem set. Suppose that A doesn’t know the answer to question 3, and B doesn’t know the answer to questions 3 and 7. I have found that A will often enough not reveal hints or solutions to question 7 in order to help B. Why should that be? It is because A does not want to give B the answer “for free,” for doing so would mean that A’s comparative standing with respect to B would fall, as she would thereby be in an equivalent state with respect to the problem set (not having the answer to 3).

Now, when one steps away from the situation, this all sounds very silly. If education is meant to educate, why on earth would A not help B come to learn the solution to 7, or at least to help B understand 7 in a way that might lead her to solve the problem herself? It is only because the incentive to “beat B” exists, and so the result is that A remains not knowing the answer to 3, and B remains not knowing the answers to 3 and 7.

But imagine if the incentive to “beat B” did not exist. How might the situation differ? A might try giving hints to B to help B herself figure out how to solve it, or A might just give the answer and see if B could come to rationalize it on her own. With this information in hand, B might then “see” a solution to 3, or they might try attacking it together, potentially leading to a state where they both know the answers to each of the problems. But since the goal is not to learn the most, but to get the highest grade, whether or not you’ve learned the material, the result is a set of students who are significantly less informed than they could, in principle, otherwise have been.

Note that this disconnect between actual learning and achivement creates further incentives for non-learning, such as looking up solutions on the web or in other books, or plagiarism, etc, each resulting in the student not putting forth her own effort, and thereby not furthering her own intellectual capacities. The incentive to “win” indeed seems to halt the students’ intellectual progress to a significant degree.

Another case will be familiar to all students and teachers alike. I have noted with much despair in many assignments I’ve had to grade that, when students don’t know how to proceed, they will often just write something, anything, with the hope that having written something, they’ll get at least “partial credit,” say a 6/10 instead of a 4/10, or whatever. Now this practice seems to me utterly pointless, and rather counter-productive. What I would like to see as a teacher, instead, is something like: “At this point I am stuck. I think I could proceed along this line of reasoning, or perhaps along this line of reasoning, but each such line of reasoning seems to lead nowhere. I think I am stuck because I don’t see how to deal with such-and-such issue.” A response like this is MUCH better than just writing something to avoid whitespace, for many reasons.

First, it gives the teacher a lot more to work with. Once I see the student’s reasoning, and her own articulation of her difficulties, I can provide much more useful feedback than if the student presents me with arbitrary formulas and statements that are there merely so she can receive ”partial credit,” as if having written something in and of itself deserves more credit than having written nothing.

Second, it is a useful exercise in and of itself for the student. Articulating various alternative lines of reasoning, as well as trying to articulate the source(s) of difficulty, often times can lead to insight into the essence of the problem, and hence potentially to the correct solution. Even if no insight is gained into ways of solving the given problems, it is very useful to see where the difficulties in understanding lie, so that remedies can be properly formulated. It is easier to address a problem like, say, the student not knowing why a given lambda term should be “lambda x. lambda y. y loves x” instead of “lambda y. lambda x. y loves x” than her not knowing in a general way how to apply the lambda calculus to natural language semantics.

Third, such an exercise results in clearer thinking, in a better understanding of the nature of the issue or problem at hand. It promotes a counter-incentive to the lazy and counter-productive “write something, anything” strategy that students are driven to by the incentive to get the highest grade possible. As we all know, understanding the essence of the problem, or of some technical system, is generally more important than being able to get the right answer at the end. One would, of course, like the student to come away with the capacity for both deep understanding and the ability to crank out the right answer at the end. In the general case, deep understanding will lead to the ability to produce the right solution, though the reverse direction does not generally hold.

I believe that if educational institutions are to fulfill their goal of educating, there needs to be a fundamental restructuring of the nature of such instutitions. I haven’t worked this all out yet, but I think there is enough evidence to think that a system that rewards students who get higher grades than others is simply flawed, and is radically inefficient, in that it doesn’t produce minds that reach anywhere near there inherent capabilities. Indeed, empirical evidence shows quite clearly that competition in school prohibits proper learning, and that students do better in non-competitive environments than in competitive ones (of the sort that currently exist). To deal with this issue, educational institutions need to have as their focus the education of students rather than the certification of students. This is a complex issue that deserves greater investigation than what I can offer here. However, within the current institutional framework, I believe significant progress can be made by “rewarding” students with higher grades if they, eg. state explicitly their reasoning, and their perceived sources of difficulty, rather than returning jibberish, perhaps giving a ranking: explicit statement of reasoning and problem identification > blank page > jibberish. I don’t yet have a positive solution to the problem of getting students to refrain from helping each other with their homeworks within the current institutional framework, but I hope to have made clear that a system that creates incentives for students to behave this way calls for some drastic rearrangements.

I am perplexed by the sorry state of affairs in education, by how highly inefficient our educational institutions are in producing well-functioning, creative minds, minds that challenge orthodoxy, that are constantly “on fire.” Their effieciency rests instead in producing passive, obedient minds that want to do enough to beat the person next door. Beneficial though such a result may be for some sectors of society, this can hardly be what we want or expect from our educational system.