Gup Shup

As expected, the FCC pushed through certain rules that will help big media obtain an even tighter grip on markets, burying independent voices even further. Congress has the power to ooverride these rules. Freepress has a petition to Congress, with the goal of obtaining 100,000 signatures. To sign this petition, and for more informatin, follow the link below:

http://action.freepress.net/campaign/sbmopenletter?rk=adecLUs1uyCvE

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.

Those with a university-affiliated email address can access the New York Times’ “Times Select” offerings. Limiting access in the way they have is ridiculous, as some of their own op-ed contributors have noted. Alas, some have a way in. Simply go to http://www.nytimes.com/university to sign up.

The NY Times Business section ran a story on its front page yesterday headlined “India Finds Its Economy on the Verge of Overheating.” Apparently, the poorest of Indian children have not been made aware of what the NY Times called “the country’s climb in living standards.” Around half of all children under three are clinically underweight. Since weight is the most reliable measure of malnutrition, it seems the sizzling economy has somehow not managed to touch India’s youngest and most vulnerable. Although the economy has grown 6-8% per year the past seven years (with a projected growth of more than 9% this fiscal year), child malnutrition has remained where it was seven years ago.

Some more facts about India’s children: less than half of 1-2 year olds are fully immunized (NY Times); diarrhoea claims almost 1.5 million infants each year, about one every three minutes (Palagummi Sainath, “Everybody Loves a Good Drought”); about nineteen million children below the age of five contract acute respiratory infections (including pneumonia) every fourteen days (Sainath). Further, with the quantity of pulses and grains decreasing every year, with increased farmer suicides, with the prevalence of water-borne diseases, with the 40 percent of Indians living below the poverty line, with the low spending on health by the Indian government, with the privatization of resources that are crucial for the health and livelihood of India’s poorest, the situation looks ready to worsten. Further, the one piece of post-independence legislation that’s been passed to empower people against exploitation, namely the Right to Information Act, is under attack by the Central Information Commission. The CIC was set up to serve the RTI Act, but has been acting in violation of it by passing orders to maintain secrecy when openness is what the Act requires.*

The importance of the legislation cannot be underestimated. It has been crucial in facilitating the fight against corruption, ensuring people access to resources that are rightfully theirs. For example, it’s been used to guarantee access to food rations, which otherwise were being sold illegally on the “black market” for large profits (95% of food distribution was being sold off as such).  The RTI Act has also enabled local groups to help fight backroom water privatization schemes, which would have eliminated their control over their own water resources, with devastating consequences. Several examples of such empowerment have been carefully spelled out by Parivartan, an advocacy group devoted to spreading knowledge about the RTI Act and its potential democratization effects (see http://www.parivartan.com/).

Amartya Sen has famously observed that no democracy has ever experienced a famine. Much of this he attributes to the “fourth estate,” viz., the media. But the media only turn to such issues when they can no longer be ignored, when they cannot, in the daily course of events, remain invisible. The kind of malnutrtion that affects millions of India’s children can be safely ignored, because it’s not “in your face.” But its effects are crippling. One can avoid famine and still suffer the devastating consequences of poverty. But this slow, invisible suffering licenses the press to turn away, and to focus on matters of seemingly greater urgency, such as the growing obesity problems among India’s wealthy and elite, who somehow can’t manage to stop stuffing their faces with sweets and other fatty goodies. What merits the press’ attention is the new demand (and concomitant creation of supply) of slimming centres, “doctors” performing stomach shrinking operations, and other such “crises” facing the Indian population. P. Sainath put it perfectly: “So while thousands of Indians flocked to clinics to address the problems of excess weight, millions were hungrier than before. The first problem made the front pages, cover stories, and even prime time. The second, that of growing hunger, remained largely invisible. This despite the alarming reappearance of hunger-related deaths in some of the richest parts of the country. The irony of these contrasting situations invited no comment at all.” Even the NY Times ran a large story on 13 Sept 2006 about the rise of Type 2 diabetes among India’s elite, referring to the disease as “the rich man’s burden.” But there is no story dedicated to the findings of UNICEF’s annual “State of the World’s Children Report,” which year after year reveals the “burdens” facing millions of India’s youngest.  

And of course it continues. The NY Times just today wrote a headline story “In India, the Golden Age of Television is Now.” What is “golden” is that advertising spending on Indian TV has grown 21% per year in the decade from 1995-2005, up to $1.6B. This double digit growth is expected to continue for years, setting companies like the News Corporation, Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom into a state of ecstacy. All the while, the malnutrition, the poverty, the disease, all remain unfit to print.  

One often hears the saying that “Rising Tides Lift All Boats.” A picturesque saying, to be sure, but opening our eyes suggests it has nothing to do with the real world. Rising tides lift the boats of those that were already quite high, sinking the rest to oblivion. I leave the last word here again to P. Sainath, who describes (quite accurately) the “trickle down” theory as follows: “Take it away from the poor, give it to the rich, then watch with bated breath to see how much of it trickles down to the poor.” In the case of India’s “liberalization,” “what trickled up was money, what trickled down was malaria.”Unfortunately, we can’t count on the press to tell us that, who believe and report every fairy tale that suits those who pay their bills.

* To take action to help protect the RTI Act, you may write to:

The President of India <presidentofindia@rb.nic.in>: Request the president to order an inquiry into the conduct of the Central Information Commission under Section 14 of the Right to Information Act. Parivartan suggests that if found guilty, the CIC officers should be replaced by retired supreme court judges.

The Prime Minister and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi: Request them to urge the President to order the above mentioned inquiry (the president is the only one with the authority to take such an action): <pmosb@pmo.nic.in> and <soniagandhi@sansad.nic.in>.

Mr. Wajahat Habibullah, Chief Information Commisioner: Request him to ensure the RTI Act is observed and enforced at all times: <whabibullah@nic.in>.

Professor James L. Sherley of the Division of Biological Engineering has undergone a hunger strike to protest the denial of his tenure and the handling of a formal complaint he filed two years ago. He has charged those involved with racism and with confilcts of interest. From the evidence available, it seems that there were indeed serious issues with the grievance process. A recent letter signed by various faculty members at MIT outlines several issues with the process, including (quoting from the letter): “conflict of interest in tenure review; various sorts of unfair treatment to Professor Sherley as a junior faculty member with respect to: space allocation, space-related impediments and misinformation during recruitment and hiring, problems related to mentorship and tenure review, failure to acknowledge achievements; mishandling of complaint of racial prejudice.” The letter appeared in both the Boston Globe and the MIT Tech, and can be found here:

http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/blog/2007/02/chomsky_calls_f.html

It was signed by MIT Professors Noam Chomsky, George M. Church, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Michel DeGraff, Junot Diaz, Sally Haslanger, Jonathan Alan King, Melvin H. King, Helen Elaine Lee, Ceasar L. McDowell, James Paradis, Chi-Sang Poon, Philip J. Thompson, James H. Williams Jr., and Elizabeth Wood.

Today, there will be a discussion session on MIT’s tenure process in the Stata Center, 32-155, from 5-7pm. Those who are interested in this issue are encouraged to attend.

This past Monday both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail ran editorials dedicated to trashing Stephen Harper’s government’s approach to “dealing” with the environment. They were right to have done so. A recent poll suggests that Canadians find the environment the second most important issue facing the nation (after health care), with seventy one percent responding that the Harper government has not been “tough enough” in handling environmental concerns. Thus, as usual, Harper is way off to the right of the public and all serious scholarship.

What do I mean by “serious?” I don’t mean the kind of junk science that’s funded by concerned environmentalists such as Exxon Mobil. Rather, I mean bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who have concluded that most of the warming of the last fifty years or so is attributable to human activities, mostly due to a sharp increase in greenhouse gas emissions. I also mean the National Scientific Academies of the G8 nations, along with those of Brazil, China, and India, who have all explicitly endorsed the IPCC’s assessment reports.

Thus, when Harper recently claimed that “the science [of climate change] is still evolving,” he managed to say something that is simultaneously trivially true and highly misleading, a rare achievement. First, all sciences are still evolving — it’s the nature of the enterprise. Second, his statement conceals the fact that there is overwhelming consensus among the scientific community about the extent of global warming and the causal factors leading to it.

His mastery of English wizardry further extends to Harper’s Conservatives’ proposed “Clean Air Act,” which, if passed, would have done anything but cleaned the air. It is a good thing that the proposed legislation is no longer on the table, after having been universally criticized as wholly inadequate. Not only did the criticism prevent the serious environmental damage that would have ensued, it also allowed Canadians to save face in the international community.  Rarely has any document produced by the Canadian government been so thoroughly confused. Not only was it more or less devoid of any substantive content, particularly with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, it took a “one-size fits all” type approach to smog, greenhouse gasses, household mould, inter alia. In fact, as a proposed substitute for the Kyoto Protocol, which Canada is alone in thinking is unfeasible, it would have left Canada a far worst polluter than it already is.

Over sixty years ago, Karl Polanyi taught us that the commodification character of capitalism would result in devastation of our environment. He argued that this would necessitate social interventions in order to save ourselves from the market’s inherently destructive tendencies. However, it is equally important to note that interventions by governments can both serve to fight the destructive tendencies of the market and to enhance them. That is a choice point. A government that is accountable to the public may well, under the right conditions, protect society from the savegery of the market. On the other hand, a government accountable to only the powerful sectors of society may, if the interests of the latter diverge from those of the general public, work to proliferate the destruction. In this case, with Mr. Harper deep in the pockets of the polluters (mostly large multinationals), his government seems intent on acting to enhance the devastation that’s all around us. 

What’s the solution? Canadians are not, no matter what the Conservatives think, that much dumber than the Europeans. If the Europeans can fulfill their commitment to Kyoto, so can we. The will of the Canadian public is firmly behind Kyoto, as is the scientific community. Mr. Harper needs to have the courage and the vision to stand up to the polluters, to stop them from imposing negative externalities on the public in order to build on their record profits. The government must work to fulfill its legally binding commitments to the Kyoto Protocol immediately, and leave its “made in Canada” solutions for matters that are less urgent and less well-understood.

There has, in recent times, been a flurry of articles in the maintsream press about America’s educational woes. Students are underperforming, teachers are underperforming, and no one knows why. The analysis tends to end with fancy pie charts or some other diagrammatic representation plotting race versus “performance.” The results are unsuprising, and tend to reenforce already prevalent stereotypes. What is surprising is the simplicity of the interpretation of the “data.” As already mentioned, there is virtually no analysis or critical discussion of the results.

I would like here to raise some issues that seem to me to be pertinent to the issue of academic performance, issues which have received little to no discussion in the mainstream press. I do not claim that they are relevant. My aims are more modest. I would merely like to raise them, to suggest that they have some initial plausibility, at least as much as “race,” as factors that may lie behind the observed performance results. I will leave it to the experts to let us know what the facts are.  

First, there is no questioning the validity of the measure of “performance,” usually some form of standardized test or other whose value as a respectable yardstick of a child’s intellectual development is controversial, at best. But this controversy does not make its way into the news, and as such cannot challenge the elite worldview the papers are designed to present.

 Second, there is little to no discussion of the relevance of relative poverty/wealth to a child’s academic performance. Freedoms/deprivations of various sorts tend to be package deals: relative poverty tends to co-occur with various other unfreedoms. Obvious unfreedoms, such as lack of access to health care, quality nutrition, access to tutors, books, and the need (as opposed to the choice) to work all interfere with academic achievement. But there are other effects. For example, a poor child faces spatial restrictions in ways that a wealthier child does not (for obvious reasons). This affects, for example, liesurely activites, access to parks and other recreational facilities, access to public libraries, inter alia. The poor are closely tied to the confines of their own neighbourhoods, usually within their own homes. Such spatial restrictions make it extremely difficult to venture outward in pursuit of activities that enrich the mind and body.

This connects with a third issue, which I think is rather serious. Tied to their homes, or the homes of their friends in similar situations, the TV becomes a primary source for entertainment. Again, there is very little choice involved in this. One is not choosing between watching TV and going skating at the public rink downtown — the latter is typically not a feasible option. This makes the child more susceptible to the form of mental abuse known as “advertising,” or “marketing” directed toward children. Such ads are explicitly designed to turn children into mindless consumers, to create in children “wants” for things they neither truly want nor need. This form of child abuse actually affects children across the socioeconomic spectrum. To put some numbers to this assertion, the average American child is exposed to 40,000 commercials a year (Source: Free Press). A recent article in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity estimates that over $10B a year are spent on child/youth directed marketing. In what ways do such forms of manipulation affect the intellectual development of children?

Fourth, race is perennially a favourite issue in elite discussions of academic “performance.” But it is never asked: Given the prevalence of racial discrimination in the marketplace, common knowledge to all but the NY Times, how does the existence of such unjust practices affect one’s incentive to excel in school? If you bust your ass off only to be passed up for the next applicant, how likely are you to direct your efforts to such a dead end?

Fifth, how do poverty, parental care and educational achievement relate? If a single mother raising a child in poverty needs to work two jobs to make ends meet, how much time and energy can she spend making sure her child is doing its homework, or to help the child with its homework? She obviously can’t hire a nanny or a tutor to do that job for her. She also can’t take time off work, given the little job security left for low-wage earners in American society. This kind of strangulation chokes both parent and child, with ramifications found in daily activities, long-term planning, psychological state, and social development, among others.

Sixth, we live in what German sociologist Ulrich Beck calls a “risk society.” The poor disproportionately carry the risk for the rest of society. What’s it like to live in such a heightened state of risk? To not know whether the rent will be paid three months from now? To not be able to weather an unexpected flu, or a sprained ankle, or some other unexpected difficulty?

These are merely six issues that seem to me, prima facie, to have some relevance to the issue of academic performance. I don’t know the extent to which they are relevant, but I believe that they are at least as plausible as “race” is to be causal factors in accounting for a child’s capacity to excel in school. The pie charts that cut children up into race and academic performance indicate to me that the mainstream press is utterly incapable of transending their limited worldview. They are unable, or refuse, to ask, what’s it like to be raised poor? to be raised coloured? to be deeply in the grip of need? to be abused by the extremely wealthy?