Daria Doering

MYTHS IN EDUCATION

or “STILL TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF THINGS …”

• Myth: Constructivism is what is needed
• Reality: Constructivism is educational relativism (“every student creates his own meaning”), which is as misguided as moral relativism.  It leads to low academic standards, “group think” and poor achievement.  There are so many fallacies inherent in the philosophy of constructivism that I’ve created a chart of them.

• Myth: Skills lead to knowledge (i.e. teaching reading comprehension skills for three hours a day will lead to high achievement)
• Reality: Knowledge leads to skills, not the other way around.  Students who read a large number of books about many subjects will naturally pick up reading comprehension skills.  Teaching reading comprehension skills up to six times does lead to improvements in achievement.  But after six times, there is no more increase in achievement.  The focus needs to be on reading challenging content including history, science and classic literature; NOT “drill and kill” on reading comprehension (Hirsch 2003)

• Myth: Reading takes three hours a day to learn
• Reality: Not in schools that use effective teaching methods

• Myth: Education needs to be developmentally appropriate
• Reality: This philosophy has been used to “dumb down” the curriculum.  Research shows that the ideal time for children to learn to read is age four.

• Myth: Learning of factual knowledge is not needed, because you can always look up facts.
• Reality: Adults, let alone children, rarely look things up in reference resources.   Expert-novice studies show that it’s extremely hard for a novice to learn very much in a reasonable amount of time by looking things up.  It takes knowledge to gain knowledge.  To be motivated and able to “look it up,” a child needs to already know a lot about the general subject.  Learning works best in small increments.  Children need to be taught a broad range of information, beginning at an early age.:

• Myth: Rewards are detrimental
• Reality: Rewards are generally not harmful to motivation, and increase motivation for low-interest tasks.  On high-interest tasks, verbal rewards increase motivation, while tangible rewards decrease it.   When tangible rewards are offered for meeting a performance standard or exceeding the performance level of others, motivation is greatly increased (Cameron, et al)

• Myth: Girls are short-changed in schools
• Reality: Girls get higher grades than boys, higher class rank, more honors, are better liked by teachers, have higher self-esteem, and earn more Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees.  Females lag a little behind in math and sciences, but boys lag behind by a much wider margin in reading and writing.  More than twice the number of boys than girls are in special education classes (Kleinfield 1998)

• Myth: High self-esteem is desirable
• Reality: Violent criminals have high, not low, self-esteem.  While achievement leads to earned self-esteem, global self-esteem (general sense of pride not related to any particular skill or achievement) does not lead to achievement.  In fact attempts to raise self-esteem through unearned praise can cause an increase in violent behavior, as prideful individuals may turn nasty when they feel their ego “bubble” is threatened.  In other cultures (and in this one until recently), high self-esteem (“pride”) is held in disdain. (Baumeister, 2001)  What is needed is “self-respect,” or a general acceptance and liking of oneself; not “self-esteem.”  On a related note, the most incompetent people generally feel they are the most competent.  The reason is that the same skills needed for competence are needed to recognize it in oneself or others.  (Goode 2002)

• Myth: Standardized testing is counter beneficial
• Reality: Teachers whining about testing is an embarrassment to the profession and a testament to the failure of teaching methods.  Of course learning can and should be measured.  This attitude also demonstrates that education is a field in its infancy, still protesting accountability.

• Myth: Great teachers are born, not made
• Reality: Teaching is a set of skills that can be taught

• Myth: Teachers are professionals
• Reality: Sociologists consider teachers to be semi-professionals.  Teachers have little control over many of the conditions of their workplace, and paid as hourly employees, not on the basis of merit, which would indicate that they are not professionals.  Moreover, whether teachers should be professionals and have more control, is quite questionable.  The true professionals are instructional designers.

• Myth: Teachers are underpaid
• Reality: San Diego teachers earn an average of $65,000 for nine months of work, including benefits.  This exceeds the average for other professions, including mechanical engineers, computer programmers, college math and political science professors, chemists, registered nurses, etc. California teachers’ salaries are the eighth highest in the country.  (Dawson, 2000).

• Myth: Teacher unions care about students and want to improve education
• Reality: Like all other trade unions, teacher unions care about teachers, period.  The balance of power between teacher unions and the public interest (children, parents, school finances) is tipped to an alarming degree toward teachers.  Many people consider teacher unions to be the single biggest obstacle to the improvement of education.

• Myth: Cooperative learning benefits everyone
• Reality: 1) gifted students do not benefit from cooperative learning; 2) homogeneous ability grouping is far more beneficial for the “tool skills” of reading and math, 3) there are several pervasive pitfalls to cooperative learning, particularly some students doing all the work while other students do none.  Written contracts for cooperative learning groups and sanctions for deadbeats are needed to prevent this from happening.

• Myth: Special education is needed due to more and more learning disabilities
• Reality: The explosive growth in the special education industry is a testament to poor teaching, while the teaching profession covers itself by not even listing poor teaching as a possible cause for the need for special education.

• Myth: Gifted students should be used to tutor lower achieving students.
• Reality: This is involuntary servitude, and should be disallowed.  Gifted students should have the choice of tutoring other students, but it should not be required.

• Myth: Schools want parents to be involved
• Reality: Schools want parents to be involved on their terms, maybe.  Most schools are happy for parents to bake cookies, cut out paper shapes, get kids to do their homework, and be decent parents.  Some teachers would like parents to volunteer in the classroom, though most teachers don’t want this.  As far as parent questioning or giving input regarding school policies, this is the last thing in the world schools want (except for a very rare few).

• Myth: Homework always helps
• Reality: Our country is in a crisis of having our lives hijacked by excessive homework.  Experts recommend ten minutes per grade, per night, period.  Progressive education has created a reversed situation of “have fun at school; work at home.”  If teaching is effective, excessive homework is not needed.  Curtailing television is much more important than promoting homework.

References:

Baumeister, Roy F. “Violent Pride” Scientific American, April 2001, Vol. 284

Hirsch, E.D.  “Root Causes of the Performance Gap” Common Knowledge Newsletter Volume 16 Number 1 2003

Cameron, Judy; Banko, Katherine M., Pierce, David W  “Pervasive Negative Effects of Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation: The Myth Continues” (online) The Behavior Analyst 2001, 24, 1-44

available: http://www.abainternational.org/tbajournal/bhan-24-01-0001.pdf

Goode, Erica “Why the Ignorant are Blissful” (online) available: http://www.zenspider.com/RWD/Thoughts/Inept.html

Grossen, Bonnie “How Should We Group to Achieve Excellence With Equity?” (online) available: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/grp.htm

Hirsch, E.D. “You Can Always Look It Up … Or Can You?”  American Federation of Teachers on Core Knowledge March 2003

Kleinfeld, Judith  “The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception”  (online) available: http://www.uaf.edu/northern/schools/myth.html

Langer, Ellen “Self-Esteem vs. Self-Respect” (online) Psychology Today Nov. 1999 www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1175/6_32/56883554/print.jhtml

Shokrail, Nina H. “The Self-Esteem Fraud: Feed-Good Education Does Not Lead to Academic Success” USA Today Jan 1998

Stone, J.E. “Developmentalism: An Obscure but Pervasive Restriction on Educational Improvement” (online) Education Policy Analysis Archives (4-8) 4/21/96 http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/v4n8.html

Winebrenner, Susan Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom 2001 Free Spirit Publishing  Minneapolis

 

Daria Doering

May 14, 2003