Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

When I worked at an art and design school, one of the predictable debates centered on the wisdom of interdisciplinary approaches.  This particular school was famed for its intense studio orientation, departmentally based.  The faculty in each of the 20+ majors strongly resisted calls for interdepartmentalism.  Administrators, by contrast, were more likely to be in favor.  Academic administrators tend to be synthesis-seekers rather than taker-aparters, and financial administrators liked the cost saving potential.

In the end, the debate raged on educational grounds, as is only appropriate.  Synthesizers pointed to a world of the future in which all kinds of boundaries will be spanned, making a pure departmental approach hidebound and reactionary.  The departments argued back that the best way to equip a student to take on complexity is deep immersion in one thing, or at least one thing at a time.   Learn sculpture; the better to move on to film.

Something of this debate can be found in E.D. Hirsch‘s current article in the estimable City Journal.  Entitled “A Wealth of Words”, the article argues that the key to upward mobility lies with the prosaic mastery of vocabulary–more, and mere, words.

Hirsch has been known for some time to be an advocate for what might be called old-fashioned approaches to learning.  This article is no exception.  He argues that the U.S. made a wrong turn when it overly embraced progressive educational thinking.  This manifests itself in primary school by an over-emphasis on what he calls “how-to-ism”.

How-to-ism has failed because of its fundamental misconception of skills, which considers them analogous to automated processes, such as making a free throw in basketball. In English class, young children are now practicing soul-deadening how-to exercises like “finding the main idea” in a passage and “questioning the author.” These exercises usurp students’ mental capacity for understanding what is written by forcing them to think self-consciously about the reading process itself. The exercises also waste time that ought to be spent gaining knowledge and vocabulary. The increasingly desperate pursuit of this empty, formalistic misconception of reading explains why our schools’ intense focus on reading skills has produced students who, by grade 12, can’t read well enough to flourish at college or take a good job.

To analogize to the art school, Hirsch would likely take the department’s side.  He favors content-based instruction and what he terms domain immersion.

The advantages of content-based instruction are enormous. One is that the topic itself is interesting, so the student has a strong motivation to understand what is being said or written. But an even more important advantage is that immersion in a topic provides the student with a referential and verbal context that is gradually made familiar, which encourages correct guesses of word meanings at a much more rapid pace than would be possible in an unfamiliar context. Psychologists refer to certain skills as being “domain-specific,” so perhaps a better name for content-based language acquisition would be “domain immersion.” The idea is to immerse students in a domain long enough to make them familiar with the context—and thus able to learn words faster.

Old fashioned?  Literally speaking, perhaps.  But “old fashioned” has a perjorative connotation that may not apply here all that well.

Hirsch also advocates pushing his approach down the age continuum as far as possible, to pre-school.  He believes that at least some of the entrenched inequalities in educational outcomes (especially those that are racially-based) can be ameliorated with a renewed emphasis on vocabulary building.  He points out that the armed forces best predictor of long term job performance is the Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQC), but only after double weighting the verbal sections (essentially vocabulary) over the math sections.  The weighted AFQC also appears to make a good portion of the racial disparities go away as well.

I am persuaded in part by my own experience hosting a Chinese exchange student for four months–a high school sophomore at an elite Beijing school.  He likes the thematic aspects of his American education, and to some extent dreads a return to the deadening lectures, memorization and long hours studying back home.  But he also liked his American school–one of the best, by the way–because it was easy.  His curriculum is just further advanced.