Chapter Seven

As easy and natural as teaching through AV seemed, other teachers were simply not comfortable with it. Given the prominence of the textbook in the Grinder's world, there will be only so much time left over from student note-making to use for "illustration", so any prominence given to AV may be regarded, paradoxically, as a lazy teacher's way of avoiding lesson preparation. Its potential to avoid the busywork of extracting notes from the text is so foreign to Grinder thinking that many are unable to function with the fill-in-the-blank format, as I was to find out first with substitute teachers.

Substitute teachers, no less than interns and permanent staff, tend to resist instruction from others, no matter how qualified it may be. They were disinclined to listen to how I wished the lessons handled, and so did the damndest things with the note outlines. Some merely ran the AV program in toto past the students, leaving me to take up the notes the next day sans AV; others took the AV notes up first and were only a few minutes into the video when the bells sounded the end of class. I had to reteach so many lessons that I eventually ceased to allow illness to keep me out of the classroom, preferring to teach sick rather than waste time.

My experience with interns was parallel, and provided some insight into how colleges of education imprint young teachers on textbooks, theory notwithstanding. Without exception interns present themselves to the supervising teacher with an inquiry as to which unit of the course they will be allotted, assuming that, since progressing from Fact One to Fact 849 is part of the Divine Order in teaching, my role is to allot Facts 85 to 133 to them and retire to the staff room for coffee. Leaving interns substantially to their own resources is inevitable, since their university instructors work on the assumption that only professors are qualified to shape the neophyte, and that there is relatively little to learn from the supervisor.

The procedure is to extract a bleeding chunk and commence to grind, incorporating only the latest fad (currently group work, panel discussions or speaking assignments, where class focus can be diverted from the teacher and filled with a kind of student-generated noise which saves the teacher having to prepare additional lessons). But my approach could not be handled that way; interns could not simply ignore what had gone on before, nor what was required next as a result. Nor could they simply pick up the text and follow the material, since the themes rather than chronological sequence were what counted, and teaching had thus to turn on making connections between historical events and the real world of the student. They could have concentrated on enriching their subject background and learned how to function with AV by working with materials supplied gratis by me, but they were in the process of learning that teaching is essentially a process of shepherding the students through the acquisition of notes, and, in the absence of anything resembling scholarship, the only other source of note material available to the intern is the textbook. Hence the imprinting on textbooks is already well established before the intern graduates.

I took the view that much of what an intern had to learn from his professor he could learn from many like him; what he could learn from me in applying video to history teaching he would learn from me alone. So, it interns weren't prepared to learn from me, they would not be welcomed. Given the context set by their college mentors, the poor souls were too busy learning how to become autonomous grinders, with my role clearly limited to implementing the professor's agenda.

I was not prepared to be so passive. It wasn't that the intern, or any teacher using my system, had to use all and only my words. Making connections is an individual matter, depending on the backgrounds and talents of students and teacher, and any approach has to be adapted to the needs and interests of the particular student group. My insistence on central concepts, AV, and formal writing was intended to make a number of key concepts manageable, and to provide a measurable core of exercises and skills, but it doesn't tell anyone how to teach. A good professional should regard a structured approach as the starting point of professional freedom, not its death knell.

It should not have been a surprise, therefore, that the school's new history teachers followed a familiar pattern in seeming not to notice my existence. They never sought me out either as a fellow teacher or as the librarian, nor was I ever asked, as was once the custom, to introduce the new teachers to standard classroom-library practices. I had not expected them to flock to the library to meet the resident guru, but I had thought naively that my success with AV might have attracted at least some attention, and prompt the beginners to take a step toward exploiting the library resources I wished to promote. It is not good enough to hope that the new people will come to the library in the fullness of time, as they realize its potential (read: they will come only if the librarian is welcoming and positive, and doesn't say anything naughty to discourage them--which is as much as to say that if the grinders don't use the library it will be the librarian's fault). Appreciation of the potential of library resources presupposes an academic maturity that new teachers lack, the deficiency forming the other side of a coin of insecurity which prompts the first of many defenses against influences seeping past classroom doors.

Well, the new people knew well enough of my existence, and had some intimation of the attention that my teaching through AV had attracted, but the first concern of young teachers is to consolidate their position, not risk failure pursuing an academic ideal which is still foreign to them. It is very difficult to make up for deficiencies in scholarship unless beginners are taken by the hand and given direction, postponing autonomy until they are ready for it. Such a precedent is apt to stir such a general visceral fear of outside interference that it will be easier to deal with the youngsters where they are, and so scale down the programs to fit them, particularly if this meets the minimum requirements for student behaviour demanded by the Compact.

This tendency was aggravated within a school with a veteran staff, with many of the old hands retiring within a few years of each other--I was only three years from retirement myself. More and more, replacements were hired for multiple purposes, beginning with the coaching of sports which was so crucial in establishing in students the positive attitudes toward schooling so valued in the new progressive regime. If that were not enough, the Department of Education had introduced a new "core curriculum" which featured an entirely new (!) approach to the teaching of history. There was direction at last, but, alas, it was limited as usual to methodology. Group activity would breathe life--and fun--into a content reduced to a minimum. This new approach required the open minds of young teachers above all else, not skeptical old hands, even if these young minds were not all that full. There will be nothing lacking in a young New Age teacher that a computer and CD ROM cannot make good. Mafiosi are enamoured of young teachers, publicly for their naturally progressive dispositions, privately because they are easier to push around.

Thus it happened that the new "resource-centered" history curriculum was to be shepherded into the school by people who had never taught before, or at least had never taught high school history before, and whose History and English assignments were an afterthought designed to fill out teaching schedules in other areas. Room had to be found for the beginners, and Mafiosi instinctively perceive that the best way to insulate against unsettling change is to place change in the hands of greenhorns who are forced, in the absence of experience, to rely on the old standard procedures. And so it came to pass that, far from setting an example, I was presently moved out of the Grade Ten history course and moved on, for the time being, to Grade Eleven history. It was as if the Compact's invisible hand was at work.

I had tried vainly to hold on to at least one academic Grade Ten section, but my friend and principal seemed plainly worried about the effect of my presence on the young teachers charged with preparing the new Grade Ten course. I commented that they could just ignore me as they always had. Later, I asked an exceptionally capable colleague whether the new people felt uncomfortable with my teaching the same courses, and he was professional enough to admit, "There is something to that". Being good at what one does is no guarantee of respect for one's own preferences, still less of becoming a jock's "role model", (one of the more sterile concepts in the spurious causality of much contemporary social science). By my last year I was slotted exclusively into General Program courses, where I could embarrass nobody, and handle the students none of the young progressives wanted. I had a distinct impression that I would never again teach an academic History course if I declined early retirement.

My successors did turn to a good senior teacher, later the Academic chairman, for help in getting started, but, for whatever reason, the starting point chosen was the old textbook and the course as it had existed before I had begun the process, several years earlier, of enriching the print and non-print resources of the library to support Grade Ten. Beginners are so busy getting up the facts that they seldom have time to exploit library resources, always affirming that they will do so later as time permits. Of course, once they have got the course up they are reluctant to change what they have prepared except at a glacial pace. Eventually some move into AV resources will occur, but only within strict limits, since many teachers will not have much time left over from covering the text notes, and thus cannot deal with more than occasional AV clips of 30 minutes duration, a habit indicative of textbook addiction and the limited attention span commanded by AV confined to a purely illustrative function.

The textbook progression between Fact One and Fact 849 is generally implicit in the approach of education experts to the design of new history courses. Traditionally grinders have problems getting to specified objectives by the year's end. The Industrial Revolution, once at the terminus of Grade Ten, may suffer grievous emendations lest the class grind only as far as the end of World War II, with just cursory attention to the post-war world.

Given this problem, Departments of Education react predictably. If getting to the 1990s is the problem, it will be necessary to start grinding later, perhaps after World War I instead of the Industrial Revolution, in hopes of osmosing as far as the latest decade. When this made the eras between the Romans and World War I impossible to grind through, the reformers naturally felt obliged to hack something out of the fact sequence. There was an attempt in Saskatchewan to excise the Reformation as the bleeding chunk, presumably because it was a religious phenomenon inappropriate now in our multicultural classrooms. It proved to be a move so egregiously stupid that even the young grinders balked.

The eventual solution was to cut content across the board, partly by introducing jock texts so juvenile that Mickey Mouse would blush. (Change, for the avant-garde, means reducing content from Fact 849 to Fact 635 and concentrating more on student self-expression and choice). Now the grinders are trying to cut back on History/Social Studies as compulsory subjects, along with a reduction in compulsory English classes, in favour of the arts like music, painting and dancing. The decay in the humanities is now so pronounced that the arts crowd is beginning to circle, sensing their turn for turf creation, and knowing the visceral urge of Mafias for anything which might keep restive adolescents compliant a little longer.

The pervasive influence of the textbook thus eventually undoes reformers by isolating them where it cannot subvert them. My new colleagues had been given a list of print titles to support the new "resource-based" history course, but since these were no more than supplementary materials normally contained in manuals, they were really just an extension of the textbook. The additional books, moreover, did not come through the library, to be catalogued and assigned to a department as required. They were processed just as the textbooks were, and became a satellite collection travelling ( I supposed) between the grinders, effectively textbook alternatives to library resources. Since any assignments not based directly on the textbook were keyed to the new in-class resource material, the move away from library resources was effected without the librarian ever learning that the alternate materials had arrived in the school, or what use was intended for them.

In the end the new "resource-based" history course was disaster for the library. Rather than having recourse to what the library could offer, the new people curled up with their own conventional in-class materials. Even AV use among the newcomers was limited to films which had been in the school since 1968, and the wealth of newer library AV materials, only partly listed in Appendix C, remained of interest only to veteran teachers, whose antiquated perspectives had already marked them as yesterday's men. Meanwhile, despite careful sampling, I was unable to verify, with respect to the new teachers, that a single library book was on loan to any of their Grade Ten History or English students during my last three years as the part-time librarian, or Keeper of the Books. I could only assume that it had somehow been independently determined that character sketches and individual or group reports on in-class materials were more in tune with the new course. The young reformers were too busy making themselves inconspicuous in the privacy of their classrooms, preferring the simplicity of a linear sequence of textbook facts to the complexity of print and AV materials addressed in the first instance to literate audiences beyond classroom walls, and requiring teachers with a capacity to make significant connections between the historical record and student experience.

There is an ever-present danger that nervous professionals, in direct proportion to a lack of confidence in their capacity to meet the growing public insistence on realizing the intellectual capacities of students, will leap at anything which may curry public favour by promising to promote a whole complex of socially desirable attitudes in students.

Behaviour modification is a special case of the ambition of modern social science to diagnose social ills, and make itself indispensable to their cure, by presuming to change society by changing human nature. The study of history will show that the attempt to create ideal people and social orders has been a disaster, and we have already seen something of Social Darwinism as a characteristic expression of a technologically driven culture. But the point here is that the integrity of scientific disciplines, Evolution in that case, can be compromised by extraneous social agendas. Behaviorism is a special vice of the social sciences, because it promises social scientists and activists the status of physicians to the body politic. Since I reject this bias, I do not share the view that the classroom should be a place for politically correct social experimentation, nor need we abandon the search for intelligible patterns in history in favour of the social conditioning of individuals and groups.

My experience is that there is ample room in a history classroom for serious discussion of a whole range of important social issues, whether it be the treatment of native cultures, women, or the environment, without sacrificing an understanding of why certain cultures and social movements have prevailed, and will continue to do so. The shape of the world is the shape that western European civilization has given it, hence a high school course properly focuses on the forces which have made this civilization dominant and forced others to seek to emulate its material promise and egalitarianism even at the simultaneous risk of self-destruction in war or runaway technology. The emphasis on European history has it critics, who dub it as "Euro-centered" and instead advocate dumping European history in favour of any number of socially desirable objectives. But feelgood teaching is no substitute for scholarship, and cheats one's students, who will resent being patronized rather than educated.

The move toward personality engineering in education, as an alternative to content mastery, is in part a reaction to the legacy of textbook teaching which has sapped the very life blood of the humanities, to the point of threatening their viability as high school subjects. This is not an exaggeration. Already English and History are ceasing to be compulsory subjects. Too long have Grinders kept on grinding until they reach an ending point, or the end of the year, which ever comes first. Many teachers have fitted comfortably into this mold for their entire careers, and I have classified them as Grinders, or, if they are fairly knowledgeable and effective transmitters of content, as Gifted Grinders. Even Gifted Grinders will never entirely overcome the handicap of the textbook approach, but the escape from textbooks begins with a scholarly grasp of subject matter, not with conceiving activities designed to make inert facts edible. Freedom can come only from what is in one's head; if the only source of a teacher's material are the texts immediately in front of him, if the young teacher is forced to cram on texts by burning the midnight oil, or by reviewing the text passage for the day before the class arrives, then the text, not the teacher, will determine the parameters of classroom activity. The result will be a tedium which begs to be relieved by falling back on a variety of diversions within both classroom and school.

There seems, in any event, to be an unfortunate perception in education that subjects are made up of "content", which is identified with a large and colourless lump of facts. New teachers are now being conditioned to believe that the preferred way to instill interest in facts can be found in a technique of presentation such as group activity, one of the latest of magic wands, as if a given subject matter is fixed and neutral, technique alone being active. The realization that subjects have an internal logic which, if recognized, makes content itself more fascinating than any packaging can, is lost on new teachers whose first preoccupation is to acquire enough factual material to stay a lesson ahead of their students. By the time a young teacher has the facts all lined up, he has fallen into a sterile grinding mode that may dominate the rest of his career, notwithstanding manipulative devices like group activity.

Despairing of getting around the barrier of classroom autonomy, teachers in universities and colleges of education have tried to reform public schools from above by trying to discredit the addiction of grinders to "content", or the unimaginative pursuit of the body of facts I refer to as teaching Fact One to Fact 849. But it is howler to equate a discipline with a lifeless body of facts rather than with ordered factual patterns which allow understanding and which make prediction possible. Treating "mere facts" as unworthy of attention invites the disaster of assuming that change in education lies in the direction of manipulating facts rather than interpreting them; in the process of how facts are acquired rather than on how they are used. That is why a preoccupation with methodology has supplanted subject knowledge in teacher training. An obsession with means has replaced the proper ends of education. But communication techniques are impotent in the absence of something significant to communicate.

Few in education, so far as I can see, recognize, or care to admit, that the problem with literacy begins with what a teacher brings to the classroom inside his skull. The reputations of theorists in colleges of education are made by finding or rediscovering some panacea, technique, or gimmick which can be fitted into what teachers have always been doing without requiring unwanted changes. There are no reputations to be made, and some to be lost, by emphasizing that much of the problem in public education arises from simple breakdowns in what every literate person teaching a subject should know. The supreme irony is that the de facto function of changes, fads, or magic wands, whatever one chooses to call them, is to guarantee security for everyone precisely by substituting apparent for substantive change.

Colleges of education have a vested interest in ignoring such embarrassing shortcomings in their own graduates. Reputations in education are made by treating pedagogy as an esoteric craft properly exercised only by the initiate. The concentration on methodology is a natural complement of an approach which subtly absolves the colleges of classroom shortcomings. "We gave you the tools--finish the job!"

What is needed is a way to liberate teachers from the grinding procedure proper to textbooks alone; something, as I have sought to demonstrate, that will only be possible for minds which are able to range beyond details into the general principles which define a discipline. This is where young teachers and jocks come to grief, aggravating the native insecurity which makes them so vulnerable to the Compact, and ensuring that they are unlikely ever to be in a position to mount an concerted attack on functional illiteracy.

We have spent some time tracing the logic of teaching through audio-visual resources in history rather than treating such resources merely as a supplement to textbooks. Unless a teacher is thoroughly knowledgeable in subject matter, including the structural and theoretical components without which facts simply lie about, he will never make effective use of film or audiovisual resources except as filler or illustration, if then. Yet a structural knowledge of history should allow a teacher to make connections at will between events in medieval and modern history and contemporary events. The general principle of medieval Power and Change reappear throughout history, so that no period in history should lack significance and interest. James Burke and Jacob Bronowski are interesting because they bring a scientific approach to history in order to illuminate why things happened the way they did. Indeed, for the concepts of Power and Change, the simpler structure of earlier historical eras is better suited for purposes of illustration than the more complex world of modern technology, so that medieval history ought to be as engrossing as any other period. (There are rich opportunities to slip in discussion of issues which would be controversial in modern dress.) Only the grasp of general causal patterns allows a linear sequence of facts to become History. Unfortunately, such a grasp is exactly what the young teacher has not been given by the university's preoccupation with methodology, and Mafiosi preoccupation with student behaviour.

While young teachers entering a school system will bring along some differences in intellectual capacity and background, the fear of Blame and the urge for survival will be the same in all, and the precondition for a retreat from the original vision of comprehensive education had always been implicit in the Compact because it made the acceptance of the library's role an individual, rather than a systemic, choice. The individual will cling instinctively to anything which promises to make the classroom environment stable and livable, and experimentation, propaganda notwithstanding, offers promise only to the extent that a teacher's confidence in his powers is secure.

Bringing a long succession of insecure beginners up to speed in a new approach requires central control exercised by an enlightened leadership, and flounders because such leadership as there is centers around repeated attempts to bribe students into acceptable behaviour by repackaging the old and familiar. Even within the comprehensive school there had been a seductive tendency to overstress trade and practical courses as alternatives to the harsh challenges of reading, composition and mathematics.

This repackaging has helped create whole new subject matters in schools. The assumption that history prior to the Industrial Revolution is old, and therefore lifeless, invited the conclusion that students could be made to want to learn only by shifting to the study of things contemporary, like the study of supermarket infrastructure in Social Studies (as the substitution of Sociology for History is now referred to). It was never explained how the infrastructure of a supermarket is inherently more relevant and interesting than understanding how the Wehrmacht inflicted a significant negative casualty ratio on its opponents for 250 years. (Or why Napoleon's failure to commit his reserves at Borodino changed the course of European and Russian history). There is no reason why insights from political science and sociology cannot be woven into a historical approach, which is inherently an easier vehicle for teaching high school students. Not for nothing are so many grinders in history and composition wedded to temporal (narrative) sequences.

The gaping hollow of illiteracy at the heart of the educational enterprise has led increasingly to strained efforts to paper it over by the dogged pursuit of public relations both within the school with students and without. We have redoubled the effort to "sell" the status quo because we tacitly despair of changing it. School activities, from magazine drives to fund-raising, motivational speakers, student self-help groups, and assorted contests with other provinces and schools, notwithstanding some tangible benefits, can help to mask an emptiness within. No doubt such activities have a place, but they eventually become self-justifying, legitimizing the offices of those who organize them, and sanctioning no end of creeping interference with classroom teaching, academic standards, and the cutting of support staff such as librarians, together with any programs and intellectual extra-curricular activities (Reach for the Top--roughly the Canadian high school predecessor of TV quiz programs like Jeopardy-was an early victim) which lack a sufficient PR value.

Seducing students into acceptance of the school environment may also seem, in a behaviorist frame of mind, to require catchy subject matter and titles, group activities, new subjective grading techniques designed in part to avoid alarming parents; and de-emphasizing "traditional boring disciplines", including expository writing and history, which are elements central to literacy. Accordingly, the attempt at ending compulsory subjects begins with inventing new subject matters: the Arts, Social Studies (including ethnic studies); sex education; or concentration on social development in students in lieu of "content". It is impossible to be sure when the value of such subject matters begins to merge subtly with the need of Mafiosi to justify their existence and the compromises in the teaching environment they entail.

Sex education, for example, is just one of a variety of school add-on programs (questions have also been raised about driver education) which tends to be self-justifying despite increasing criticism of its effectiveness. There seems to be a fair amount of evidence that teen-age pregnancy rates in North America have been increasing steadily despite sex education programs, and New Jersey, long a leader in the field, has the highest rate in the U.S. The knee-jerk riposte will be that the rates would be even higher without the programs, which of course makes success unverifiable, the better to safeguard Mafias and their funding.

Still, pressure from the skeptics is still there, and the push now is to promote, interestingly enough, sexual survival through alleged alternatives such as non-coital sex. It you can't beat them, join them, as it were. A very useful article on the place of sex education in schools will be found in the October 1994 issue of Atlantic Monthly: ^"The failure of sex education" by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, pp. 55-80. Hoping non-coital sex will reduce unwanted pregnancy is rather hoping that a baseball player reaching third base will be less likely to score. I mention the topic not necessarily to take sides, but to reinforce the point that the instinct for survival in education will obscure the boundary between the value of a school program and the point at which it begins to be important to the survival of those promoting it. Utility for survival can allow some school activities to outlast their rationale.

While there is a place for some of these developments, it is absurd and self-contradictory to neglect the defining purpose of education, literacy, in their favour. The appeal of such peripheral matters lies not only in their intrinsic value, but also in the hope of buying off students and the public, and thus advance the survival ethic of the Compact. This is why such fads, as they invariably become at convention and professional development time, are invariably sold to teachers as a means to promote happier classroom environments. "Your students will have fun, they will want to learn." The appeal to the immediate self-interest of the teacher is a sure indication of a fad in the offing.

The drive to manipulate people is rooted in 20th century technology. Once we give up on content, or at least on the capacity of teachers of the humanities to handle it creatively, the only way of relieving the frustrating tedium of the textbook may seem to find some way of seducing, bribing or diddling students into enjoying what they are doing. But if what they are expected to learn is intrinsically sterile to begin with--and any subject matter can be reduced to lockstep regardless of teaching technique--the result will be a slow and long-term decline in knowledge and literacy. Texts become more juvenile, the emphasis on personal coping skills more intense precisely when there is less meaningful information to cope with. The public intuitively senses that rationality and knowledge--literacy and content--are still crucial, and shaping people, democratizing content, subjective reporting, ungraded classes or mainstreaming are all essentially manipulative in character: that is the essence of "back to the basics".

It is not suggested that there is no value in what latter--day reformers and faddists--want to do. Rather, it is a matter of regaining contact with what public education is supposed to do: enhance power over life. That is as much a matter of content as of method. In the rush to keep students quiet (more popularly known by such touchy-feely labels as teaching the whole child, learning at the learner's own pace, and teaching around activities and themes) and thus relieve pressure on the professionals, we are gutting rationality in favor of manipulation.

The Compact is education's Black Hole, swallowing reforms and regurgitating them as someone's ego trip, someone's new turf, someone's magic wand, someone's wave of the future. The de facto institutional function of educational reform is to provide distractions from the fundamental inability to come to grips with primary objectives in mathematics and science, or in the humanities, while holding out the illusion of better times to come. No matter how much merit the latest reform wave may have, it will be subverted by a Fact One to Fact 849 bias, sliding quietly into yet another bid to charm the restless natives. It is folly to suppose that the potential of computers cannot be similarly compromised. We first raise a cloud of dust, and then complain, we cannot see.

The history of reform in modern education too often lapses into a rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. Reform does not begin with marrying enlightened and capable professionals to effective public input, but in ensuring that the de facto purposes of educational organization are best served by those people rather than careerists in public relations. My career would have been wholly different had I any idea of how to manage that .

Reform is a matter of fitting new insights and procedure into what we ought to be doing, rather than into what public education is in fact doing. Education, in the sense that the public understands it, is a byproduct of educational organization, not its purpose. Anyone who thinks that parent councils, charter schools, and students can reform education better than school boards or education departments doesn't understand how the system works. Aside from the fact that such a system risks letting even more literati, censors, and assorted screwballs into the mix, no system which fails to cope with the anonymity of the classroom and the realities of the Compact will get off the ground.

Skill in imparting concepts and data requires scholarship as much as technique. In fact it is much more likely that a scholar will master technique on his own than a youngster or a jock trained in largely in techniques will master scholarship after they enter a classroom. The experts will spring to their feet at this point and regale the reader with stories of academically gifted classroom incompetents, masters of subjects they cannot impart. Just ask them how many teachers have ever been dismissed as incompetent.

A young teacher once asked me what background best serves a teacher of history. Four or five years in university after high school won't be nearly enough, I said, and no one should teach humanities who has never done anything in life but attend school: try serving four years in the French Foreign Legion, through which she could get a start on military history. She thought I was kidding.