Thursday, August 8, 2013
Julie Rugg - Buried in Books
"Booklovers would like to appear sage and superior. In reality, the mania associated with acquiring, reading, and simply messing about with books can be downright grubby." P. 7
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Pinker on Science & the Humanitites
HUMANITIES AUGUST 6, 2013
Science Is Not Your Enemy
An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians
BY STEVEN PINKER
The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists. Not only did many of them contribute to mathematics, physics, and physiology, but all of them were avid theorists in the sciences of human nature. They were cognitive neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of physical mechanisms of the nervous system. They were evolutionary psychologists, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms.” And they were social psychologists, who wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together, the selfish passions that inflame us, and the foibles of shortsightedness that frustrate our best-laid plans.
These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge? What could they have done with it?
We don’t have to fantasize about this scenario, because we are living it. We have the works of the great thinkers and their heirs, and we have scientific knowledge they could not have dreamed of. This is an extraordinary time for the understanding of the human condition. Intellectual problems from antiquity are being illuminated by insights from the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution. Powerful tools have been developed to explore them, from genetically engineered neurons that can be controlled with pinpoints of light to the mining of “big data” as a means of understanding how ideas propagate.
One would think that writers in the humanities would be delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences. But one would be wrong. Though everyone endorses science when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities has been deeply resented. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to religion; many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that there is something unseemly about scientists weighing in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and worst of all, something called “scientism.” The past couple years have seen four denunciations of scientism in this magazine alone, together with attacks in Bookforum, The Claremont Review of Books, The Huffington Post, The Nation, National Review Online, The New Atlantis, The New York Times, and Standpoint.
The eclectic politics of these publications reflects the bipartisan nature of the resentment. This passage, from a 2011 review in The Nation of three books by Sam Harris by the historian Jackson Lears, makes the standard case for the prosecution by the left:
Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the "fit" and the sterilization or elimination of the "unfit." ... Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferration of unimaginable destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of sceintific research to advanced technology.
The case from the right, captured in this 2007 speech from Leon Kass, George W. Bush’s bioethics adviser, is just as measured:
Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it "soul-less scientism"—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. ... Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West.
These are zealous prosecutors indeed. But their cases are weak. The mindset of science cannot be blamed for genocide and war and does not threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation. It is, rather, indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.
The term “scientism” is anything but clear, more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine. Sometimes it is equated with lunatic positions, such as that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.” Sometimes it is clarified with adjectives like “simplistic,” “naïve,” and “vulgar.” The definitional vacuum allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of “queer” and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend.
Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. Scientism does not mean that all current scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science. It is not an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them. And it is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.
Cordover Collection, LLCThe first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.” The commitment to intelligibility is not a matter of brute faith, but gradually validates itself as more and more of the world becomes explicable in scientific terms. The processes of life, for example, used to be attributed to a mysterious élan vital; now we know they are powered by chemical and physical reactions among complex molecules.
Demonizers of scientism often confuse intelligibility with a sin called reductionism. But to explain a complex happening in terms of deeper principles is not to discard its richness. No sane thinker would try to explain World War I in the language of physics, chemistry, and biology as opposed to the more perspicuous language of the perceptions and goals of leaders in 1914 Europe. At the same time, a curious person can legitimately ask why human minds are apt to have such perceptions and goals, including the tribalism, overconfidence, and sense of honor that fell into a deadly combination at that historical moment.
Many of our cultural institutions cultivate a philistine indifference to science.
The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and super- stitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.
In which ways, then, does science illuminate human affairs? Let me start with the most ambitious: the deepest questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives. This is the traditional territory of religion, and its defenders tend to be the most excitable critics of scientism. They are apt to endorse the partition plan proposed by Stephen Jay Gould in his worst book, Rocks of Ages, according to which the proper concerns of science and religion belong to “non-overlapping magisteria.” Science gets the empirical universe; religion gets the questions of moral meaning and value.
Unfortunately, this entente unravels as soon as you begin to examine it. The moral worldview of any scientifically literate person—one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism—requires a radical break from religious conceptions of meaning and value.
To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.
In other words, the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics. The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages. And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.
Moreover, science has contributed—directly and enormously—to the fulfillment of these values. If one were to list the proudest accomplishments of our species (setting aside the removal of obstacles we set in our own path, such as the abolition of slavery and the defeat of fascism), many would be gifts bestowed by science.
The most obvious is the exhilarating achievement of scientific knowledge itself. We can say much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life. Better still, this understanding consists not in a mere listing of facts, but in deep and elegant principles, like the insight that life depends on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates itself.
Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, exotic organisms, distant galaxies and outer planets, fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous planet Earth rising above the moon’s horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in nature.
And contrary to the widespread canard that technology has created a dystopia of deprivation and violence, every global measure of human flourishing is on the rise. The numbers show that after millennia of near-universal poverty, a steadily growing proportion of humanity is surviving the first year of life, going to school, voting in democracies, living in peace, communicating on cell phones, enjoying small luxuries, and surviving to old age. The Green Revolution in agronomy alone saved a billion people from starvation. And if you want examples of true moral greatness, go to Wikipedia and look up the entries for “smallpox” and “rinderpest” (cattle plague). The definitions are in the past tense, indicating that human ingenuity has eradicated two of the cruelest causes of suffering in the history of our kind.
Though science is beneficially embedded in our material, moral, and intellectual lives, many of our cultural institutions, including the liberal arts programs of many universities, cultivate a philistine indifference to science that shades into contempt. Students can graduate from elite colleges with a trifling exposure to science. They are commonly misinformed that scientists no longer care about truth but merely chase the fashions of shifting paradigms. A demonization campaign anachronistically impugns science for crimes that are as old as civilization, including racism, slavery, conquest, and genocide.
Just as common, and as historically illiterate, is the blaming of science for political movements with a pseudoscientific patina, particularly Social Darwinism and eugenics. Social Darwinism was the misnamed laissez-faire philosophy of Herbert Spencer. It was inspired not by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but by Spencer’s Victorian-era conception of a mysterious natural force for progress, which was best left unimpeded. Today the term is often used to smear any application of evolution to the understanding of human beings. Eugenics was the campaign, popular among leftists and progressives in the early decades of the twentieth century, for the ultimate form of social progress, improving the genetic stock of humanity. Today the term is commonly used to assail behavioral genetics, the study of the genetic contributions to individual differences.
I can testify that this recrimination is not a relic of the 1990s science wars. When Harvard reformed its general education requirement in 2006 to 2007, the preliminary task force report introduced the teaching of science without any mention of its place in human knowledge: “Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative: they have led to life-saving medicines, the internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they also have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic eavesdropping, and damage to the environment.” This strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines. (Just imagine motivating the study of classical music by noting that it both generates economic activity and inspired the Nazis.) And there was no acknowledgment that we might have good reasons to prefer science and know-how over ignorance and superstition.
At a 2011 conference, another colleague summed up what she thought was the mixed legacy of science: the eradication of smallpox on the one hand; the Tuskegee syphilis study on the other. (In that study, another bloody shirt in the standard narrative about the evils of science, public-health researchers beginning in 1932 tracked the progression of untreated, latent syphilis in a sample of impoverished African Americans.) The comparison is obtuse. It assumes that the study was the unavoidable dark side of scientific progress as opposed to a universally deplored breach, and it compares a one-time failure to prevent harm to a few dozen people with the prevention of hundreds of millions of deaths per century, in perpetuity.
A major goad for the recent denunciations of scientism has been the application of neuroscience, evolution, and genetics to human affairs. Certainly many of these applications are glib or wrong, and they are fair game for criticism: scanning the brains of voters as they look at politicians’ faces, attributing war to a gene for aggression, explaining religion as an evolutionary adaptation to bond the group. Yet it’s not unheard of for intellectuals who are innocent of science to advance ideas that are glib or wrong, and no one is calling for humanities scholars to go back to their carrels and stay out of discussions of things that matter. It is a mistake to use a few wrongheaded examples as an excuse to quarantine the sciences of human nature from our attempt to understand the human condition.
To simplify is not to be simplistic.
Take our understanding of politics. “What is government itself,” asked James Madison, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” The new sciences of the mind are reexamining the connections between politics and human nature, which were avidly discussed in Madison’s time but submerged during a long interlude in which humans were assumed to be blank slates or rational actors. Humans, we are increasingly appreciating, are moralistic actors, guided by norms and taboos about authority, tribe, and purity, and driven by conflicting inclinations toward revenge and reconciliation. These impulses ordinarily operate beneath our conscious awareness, but in some circumstances they can be turned around by reason and debate. We are starting to grasp why these moralistic impulses evolved; how they are implemented in the brain; how they differ among individuals, cultures, and sub- cultures; and which conditions turn them on and off.
The application of science to politics not only enriches our stock of ideas, but also offers the means to ascertain which of them are likely to be correct. Political debates have traditionally been deliberated through case studies, rhetoric, and what software engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion). Not surprisingly, the controversies have careened without resolution. Do democracies fight each other? What about trading partners? Do neighboring ethnic groups inevitably play out ancient hatreds in bloody conflict? Do peacekeeping forces really keep the peace? Do terrorist organizations get what they want? How about Gandhian nonviolent movements? Are post-conflict reconciliation rituals effective at preventing the renewal of conflict?
History nerds can adduce examples that support either answer, but that does not mean the questions are irresolvable. Political events are buffeted by many forces, so it’s possible that a given force is potent in general but submerged in a particular instance. With the advent of data science—the analysis of large, open-access data sets of numbers or text—signals can be extracted from the noise and debates in history and political science resolved more objectively. As best we can tell at present, the answers to the questions listed above are (on average, and all things being equal) no, no, no, yes, no, yes, and yes.
The humanities are the domain in which the intrusion of science has produced the strongest recoil. Yet it is just that domain that would seem to be most in need of an infusion of new ideas. By most accounts, the humanities are in trouble. University programs are downsizing, the next generation of scholars is un- or underemployed, morale is sinking, students are staying away in droves. No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment from the humanities, which are indispensable to a civilized democracy.
Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it’s to announce some exciting new research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it’s to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.
Those ways do deserve respect, and there can be no replacement for the varieties of close reading, thick description, and deep immersion that erudite scholars can apply to individual works. But must these be the only paths to understanding? A consilience with science offers the humanities countless possibilities for innovation in understanding. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains. They originate in our faculties of perception, thought, and emotion, and they cumulate and spread through the epidemiological dynamics by which one person affects others. Shouldn’t we be curious to understand these connections? Both sides would win. The humanities would enjoy more of the explanatory depth of the sciences, to say nothing of the kind of a progressive agenda that appeals to deans and donors. The sciences could challenge their theories with the natural experiments and ecologically valid phenomena that have been so richly characterized by humanists.
In some disciplines, this consilience is a fait accompli. Archeology has grown from a branch of art history to a high-tech science. Linguistics and the philosophy of mind shade into cognitive science and neuroscience.
Similar opportunities are there for the exploring. The visual arts could avail themselves of the explosion of knowledge in vision science, including the perception of color, shape, texture, and lighting, and the evolutionary aesthetics of faces and landscapes. Music scholars have much to discuss with the scientists who study the perception of speech and the brain’s analysis of the auditory world.
As for literary scholarship, where to begin? John Dryden wrote that a work of fiction is “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Linguistics can illuminate the resources of grammar and discourse that allow authors to manipulate a reader’s imaginary experience. Cognitive psychology can provide insight about readers’ ability to reconcile their own consciousness with those of the author and characters. Behavioral genetics can update folk theories of parental influence with discoveries about the effects of genes, peers, and chance, which have profound implications for the interpretation of biography and memoir—an endeavor that also has much to learn from the cognitive psychology of memory and the social psychology of self-presentation. Evolutionary psychologists can distinguish the obsessions that are universal from those that are exaggerated by a particular culture and can lay out the inherent conflicts and confluences of interest within families, couples, friendships, and rivalries that are the drivers of plot.
And as with politics, the advent of data science applied to books, periodicals, correspondence, and musical scores holds the promise for an expansive new “digital humanities.” The possibilities for theory and discovery are limited only by the imagination and include the origin and spread of ideas, networks of intellectual and artistic influence, the persistence of historical memory, the waxing and waning of themes in literature, and patterns of unofficial censorship and taboo.
Nonetheless, many humanities scholars have reacted to these opportunities like the protagonist of the grammar-book example of the volitional future tense: “I will drown; no one shall save me.” Noting that these analyses flatten the richness of individual works, they reach for the usual adjectives: simplistic, reductionist, naïve, vulgar, and of course, scientistic.
The complaint about simplification is misbegotten. To explain something is to subsume it under more general principles, which always entails a degree of simplification. Yet to simplify is not to be simplistic. An appreciation of the particulars of a work can co-exist with explanations at many other levels, from the personality of an author to the cultural milieu, the faculties of human nature, and the laws governing social beings. The rejection of a search for general trends and principles calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges’s fictitious empire in which “the Cartographers Guild drew a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations ... saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.”
And the critics should be careful with the adjectives. If anything is naïve and simplistic, it is the conviction that the legacy silos of academia should be fortified and that we should be forever content with current ways of making sense of the world. Surely our conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the physical universe and of our makeup as a species.
Steven Pinker is a contributing editor at The New Republic, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and the author, most recently, of The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Print and Digital
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Daniel GrossSustainabeast Content Section
Print Textbooks Still Dominate Campus Textbook Market
by Ashley Mungiguerra Aug 6, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
College students’ lives are suffused with digital media. But at many schools, e-books are just beginning to chip away at the dominance of dead-tree learning materials.
6
inShare.0 In July, Cengage Learning, one of the biggest textbook publishers on the market, voluntarily filed for bankruptcy. With almost $6 billion in debt, the private equity-backed company laid out a restructuring plan to, "introduce innovative digital and print products," and "meet our customers' evolving needs." This isn't necessarily the end of Cengage, but it does reflect the changes in the textbook industry. In an interview with the New York Times, shortly after declaring bankruptcy, Cengage said its decision will "support our long-term business strategy of transiting from traditional print models to digital educational and research materials."
Bruce Schreiner/AP
Cengage is slowly embracing digital learning methods in the wake of its financial trouble. Publishing giant McGraw-Hill is one step ahead. In a column for Forbes, McGraw-Hill Vice President of Learning Solutions Tom Malek outlined a plan for replacing textbooks with e-books. Malek says that e-books are the "presumed future of higher education," because they are cheaper, and easier to transport. Since students prefer digital to print for everything else, they’ll naturally they feel the same way about textbooks.
But the transition to e-books on campus is likely to be slower and more bumpy that many anticipate. As Malek notes, only around 3 percent of students use them. What’s more, the price of e-books isn’t necessarily dramatically lower than the price of comparable print textbooks. Meanwhile, many professors and students still prefer the analog to the digital models.
Taylor Scartozzi, a junior advertising major at the University of Texas, is sticking to print. "My favorite thing about having a printed textbook is that I can write notes directly onto the pages. When I go back to study later, the notes I make in my book help me to focus on studying."
I haven't given up on textbooks, but I rarely buy them. If I can, I get a digital version of a book on my iPad (which is often the cheaper option), or rent from sites like Amazon and Chegg.
But just because I prefer e-books doesn't mean everyone else does. I’m a sophomore at Hofstra University in New York, and most of my professors have allowed me to buy digital editions of my books. However, some of them (the same professors who prohibit note-taking on laptops) are still against technology in their classrooms. They prohibit e-books, iPads, laptops, and cell phones, and instead require students to use (and haul around) physical editions of the book.
The Kindle edition of a textbook for one of my journalism classes (which is required for every journalism major at Hofstra) costs $38.61. But renting a used copy for the semester only costs $22.50, and a brand-new version is $49.95.
While I prefer having all my books on one light device, e-books are still not the cheapest option in every case. The Kindle edition of a textbook for one of my journalism classes (which is required for every journalism major at Hofstra) costs $38.61. But renting a used copy for the semester only costs $22.50, and a brand-new version is $49.95. Another book for the same class costs $19.25 for the digital edition, while a used rental only costs $14. Such price discrepancies are one of the main reasons cost-conscious college students don’t always embrace e-books.
It’s somewhat ironic. For personal, economic, and institutional reasons, young people – who live their entire lives on smart phones, tablets, and computers – are still holding on to print textbooks. And they’re likely to do so for several more years.
But there’s a larger question on college campuses. With all the learning resources available, particularly online, do we even need to buy textbooks? The revenues of the textbook industry continue to grow, but that’s largely because of the rise in prices. Text book prices have tripled since 1986, at twice the rate of inflation. Students are still buying books, they’re just not paying full-price. With each passing year, there are more options for buying second-hand books, or renting them – on-line or in print.
Coming of age in the era of Airbnb, bike-sharing, Zipcar, and Rent-the-Runway, today’s college students are also more comfortable sharing. A study in 2012 from e-book publisher Bookboon revealed that 75 percent of students decided not to buy their required textbooks. Some 70 percent of students at the University of Oklahoma don't buy all their required books. Students said that the books were just too expensive, especially when they are only used once or twice a semester. Most students who choose not to buy either rent the books or borrow from friends.
Some schools are attempting to lower student's expenses by launching online books or using materials written by professors that cost much less. Half of my professors at Hofstra assign only one book (or none), and it’s typically not a traditional textbook- it’s often a non-fiction book that coincides with the course material. One of the textbooks for my Politics of the Middle East class last semester (required for all political science majors) cost over $100 at the university bookstore. I bought it new on Amazon for less than $20.
As deficits decline at the federal and state level, the era of austerity in the U.S. may be ending. But in the textbook, it’s still going
Daniel GrossSustainabeast Content Section
Print Textbooks Still Dominate Campus Textbook Market
by Ashley Mungiguerra Aug 6, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
College students’ lives are suffused with digital media. But at many schools, e-books are just beginning to chip away at the dominance of dead-tree learning materials.
6
inShare.0 In July, Cengage Learning, one of the biggest textbook publishers on the market, voluntarily filed for bankruptcy. With almost $6 billion in debt, the private equity-backed company laid out a restructuring plan to, "introduce innovative digital and print products," and "meet our customers' evolving needs." This isn't necessarily the end of Cengage, but it does reflect the changes in the textbook industry. In an interview with the New York Times, shortly after declaring bankruptcy, Cengage said its decision will "support our long-term business strategy of transiting from traditional print models to digital educational and research materials."
Bruce Schreiner/AP
Cengage is slowly embracing digital learning methods in the wake of its financial trouble. Publishing giant McGraw-Hill is one step ahead. In a column for Forbes, McGraw-Hill Vice President of Learning Solutions Tom Malek outlined a plan for replacing textbooks with e-books. Malek says that e-books are the "presumed future of higher education," because they are cheaper, and easier to transport. Since students prefer digital to print for everything else, they’ll naturally they feel the same way about textbooks.
But the transition to e-books on campus is likely to be slower and more bumpy that many anticipate. As Malek notes, only around 3 percent of students use them. What’s more, the price of e-books isn’t necessarily dramatically lower than the price of comparable print textbooks. Meanwhile, many professors and students still prefer the analog to the digital models.
Taylor Scartozzi, a junior advertising major at the University of Texas, is sticking to print. "My favorite thing about having a printed textbook is that I can write notes directly onto the pages. When I go back to study later, the notes I make in my book help me to focus on studying."
I haven't given up on textbooks, but I rarely buy them. If I can, I get a digital version of a book on my iPad (which is often the cheaper option), or rent from sites like Amazon and Chegg.
But just because I prefer e-books doesn't mean everyone else does. I’m a sophomore at Hofstra University in New York, and most of my professors have allowed me to buy digital editions of my books. However, some of them (the same professors who prohibit note-taking on laptops) are still against technology in their classrooms. They prohibit e-books, iPads, laptops, and cell phones, and instead require students to use (and haul around) physical editions of the book.
The Kindle edition of a textbook for one of my journalism classes (which is required for every journalism major at Hofstra) costs $38.61. But renting a used copy for the semester only costs $22.50, and a brand-new version is $49.95.
While I prefer having all my books on one light device, e-books are still not the cheapest option in every case. The Kindle edition of a textbook for one of my journalism classes (which is required for every journalism major at Hofstra) costs $38.61. But renting a used copy for the semester only costs $22.50, and a brand-new version is $49.95. Another book for the same class costs $19.25 for the digital edition, while a used rental only costs $14. Such price discrepancies are one of the main reasons cost-conscious college students don’t always embrace e-books.
It’s somewhat ironic. For personal, economic, and institutional reasons, young people – who live their entire lives on smart phones, tablets, and computers – are still holding on to print textbooks. And they’re likely to do so for several more years.
But there’s a larger question on college campuses. With all the learning resources available, particularly online, do we even need to buy textbooks? The revenues of the textbook industry continue to grow, but that’s largely because of the rise in prices. Text book prices have tripled since 1986, at twice the rate of inflation. Students are still buying books, they’re just not paying full-price. With each passing year, there are more options for buying second-hand books, or renting them – on-line or in print.
Coming of age in the era of Airbnb, bike-sharing, Zipcar, and Rent-the-Runway, today’s college students are also more comfortable sharing. A study in 2012 from e-book publisher Bookboon revealed that 75 percent of students decided not to buy their required textbooks. Some 70 percent of students at the University of Oklahoma don't buy all their required books. Students said that the books were just too expensive, especially when they are only used once or twice a semester. Most students who choose not to buy either rent the books or borrow from friends.
Some schools are attempting to lower student's expenses by launching online books or using materials written by professors that cost much less. Half of my professors at Hofstra assign only one book (or none), and it’s typically not a traditional textbook- it’s often a non-fiction book that coincides with the course material. One of the textbooks for my Politics of the Middle East class last semester (required for all political science majors) cost over $100 at the university bookstore. I bought it new on Amazon for less than $20.
As deficits decline at the federal and state level, the era of austerity in the U.S. may be ending. But in the textbook, it’s still going
Monday, August 5, 2013
Big Data in Education
Thursday, Aug 1, 2013 07:20 AM CDT
Big data could end professor lectures
Schools are embracing technology that tailors content to students' abilities, leaving teachers as roving mentors
By Seth Fletcher
1299523
more
All Share Services facebookFollowerspinterestdelicioustumblrbloggerinstapapergooglemessengerevernotediigoLiveJournalmyspacesinaAmazon Wishlisttypepadslashdotnewsvinebaiduorkutcare2allvoicesmeneamesquidooFriendFeedfarkGoogle Bookmarksxangacurrenttechnorati
Topics: Scientific American, Big Data, math, University, student loans, College, Technology News, Business News, Life News
Enlarge
This article was originally published by Scientific American.
When Arnecia Hawkins enrolled at Arizona State University last fall, she did not realize she was volunteering as a test subject in an experimental reinvention of American higher education. Yet here she was, near the end of her spring semester, learning math from a machine. In a well-appointed computer lab in Tempe, on Arizona State’s desert resort of a campus, she and a sophomore named Jessica were practicing calculating annuities. Through a software dashboard, they could click and scroll among videos, text, quizzes and practice problems at their own pace. As they worked, their answers, along with reams of data on the ways in which they arrived at those answers, were beamed to distant servers. Predictive algorithms developed by a team of data scientists compared their stats with data gathered from tens of thousands of other students, looking for clues as to what Hawkins was learning, what she was struggling with, what she should learn next and how, exactly, she should learn it.
Having a computer for an instructor was a change for Hawkins. “I’m not gonna lie—at first I was really annoyed with it,” she says. The arrangement was a switch for her professor, too. David Heckman, a mathematician, was accustomed to lecturing to the class, but he had to take on the role of a roving mentor, responding to raised hands and coaching students when they got stumped. Soon, though, both began to see some benefits. Hawkins liked the self-pacing, which allowed her to work ahead on her own time, either from her laptop or from the computer lab. For Heckman, the program allowed him to more easily track his students’ performance. He could open a dashboard that told him, in granular detail, how each student was doing—not only who was on track and who was not but who was working on any given concept. Heckman says he likes lecturing better, but he seems to be adjusting. One definite perk for instuctors: the software does most of the grading for them.
At the end of the term, Hawkins will have completed the last college math class she will probably ever have to take. She will think back on this data-driven course model—so new and controversial right now—as the “normal” college experience. “Do we even have regular math classes here?” she asks.
Big Data Takes Education
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
advertisement
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arizona State’s decision to move to computerized learning was born, at least in part, of necessity. With more than 70,000 students, Arizona State is the largest public university in the U.S. Like institutions at every level of American education, it is going through some wrenching changes. The university has lost 50 percent of its state funding over the past five years. Meanwhile enrollment is rising, with alarmingly high numbers of students showing up on campus unprepared to do college-level work. “There is a sea of people we’re trying to educate that we’ve never tried to educate before,” says Al Boggess, director of the Arizona State math department. “The politicians are saying, ‘Educate them. Remediation? Figure it out. And we want them to graduate in four years. And your funding is going down, too.’”
Two years ago Arizona State administrators went looking for a more efficient way to shepherd students through basic general-education requirements—particularly those courses, such as college math, that disproportionately cause students to drop out. A few months after hearing a pitch by Jose Ferreira, the founder and CEO of the New York City adaptive-learning start-up Knewton, Arizona State made a big move. That fall, with little debate or warning, it placed 4,700 students into computerized math courses. Last year some 50 instructors coached 7,600 Arizona State students through three entry-level math courses running on Knewton software. By the fall of 2014 ASU aims to adapt six more courses, adding another 19,000 students a year to the adaptive-learning ranks. (In May, Knewton announced a partnership with Macmillan Education, a sister company to Scientific American.)
Arizona State is one of the earliest, most aggressive adopters of data-driven, personalized learning. Yet educational institutions at all levels are pursuing similar options as a way to cope with rising enrollments, falling budgets and more stringent requirements for student achievement. Public primary and secondary schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia are rushing to implement new, higher standards in English-language arts and mathematics known as the Common Core state standards, and those schools need new instructional materials and tests to make that happen. Around half of those tests will be online and adaptive, meaning that a computer will tailor questions to each student’s ability and calculate each student’s score [see “Why We Need High-Speed Schools,” on page 69]. School systems are experimenting with a range of other adaptive programs, from math and reading lessons for elementary school students to “quizzing engines” that help high school students prepare for Advanced Placement exams. The technology is also catching on overseas. The 2015 edition of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which is given to 15-year-olds (in more than 70 nations and economies so far) every three years, will include adaptive components to evaluate hard-to-measure skills such as collaborative problem solving.
Proponents of adaptive learning say that technology has finally made it possible to deliver individualized instruction to every student at an affordable cost—to discard the factory model that has dominated Western education for the past two centuries. Critics say it is data-driven learning, not traditional learning, that threatens to turn schools into factories. They see this increasing digitization as yet another unnecessary sellout to for-profit companies that push their products on teachers and students in the name of “reform.” The supposedly advanced tasks that computers can now barely pull off—diagnosing a student’s strengths and weaknesses and adjusting materials and approaches to suit individual learners—are things human teachers have been doing well for hundreds of years. Instead of delegating these tasks to computers, opponents say, we should be spending more on training, hiring and retaining good teachers.
And while adaptive-learning companies claim to have nothing but the future of America’s children in mind, there is no denying the potential for profit. Dozens of them are rushing to get in on the burgeoning market for instructional technology, which is now a multibillion-dollar industry [see box at left]. As much as 20 percent of instructional content in K–12 schools is already delivered digitally, says Adam Newman, a founding partner of the market-analysis firm Education Growth Advisors. Although adaptive-learning software makes up only a small slice of the digital-instruction pie—around $50 million for the K–12 market—it could grow quickly. Newman says the concept of adaptivity is already very much in the water in K–12 schools. “In K–12, the focus has been on differentiating instruction for years,” he says. “Differentiating instruction, even without technology, is really a form of adaptation.”
Higher-education administrators are warming up to adaptivity, too. In a recent Inside Higher Ed/Gallup poll, 66 percent of college presidents said they found adaptive-learning and testing technologies promising. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has launched the Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program, which will issue 10 $100,000 grants to U.S. colleges and universities to develop adaptive courses that enroll at least 500 students over three semesters. “In the long term—20 years out—I would expect virtually every course to have an adaptive component of some kind,” says Peter Stokes, an expert on digital education at Northeastern University. That will be a good thing, he says—an opportunity to apply empirical study and cognitive science to education in a way that has never been done. In higher education in particular, “very, very, very few instructors have a formal education in how to teach,” he says. “We do things, and we think they work. But when you start doing scientific measurement, you realize that some of our ways of doing things have no empirical basis.”
The Science of Adaptivity
In general, “adaptive” refers to a computerized-learning interface that constantly assesses a student’s thinking habits and automatically customizes material for him or her. Not surprisingly, though, competitors argue ferociously about who can claim the title of true adaptivity. Some say that a test that does nothing more than choose your next question based on whether you get the item in front of you correct—a test that steers itself according to the logic of binary branching—does not, in 2013, count as fully adaptive. In this view, adaptivity requires the creation of a psychometric profile of each user, plus the continuous adjustment of the experience based on that person’s progress.
To make this happen, adaptive-software makers must first map the connections among every concept in a piece of learning material. Once that is done, every time a student watches a video, reads an explanation, solves a practice problem or takes a quiz, data on the student’s performance, the effectiveness of the content, and more flow to a server. Then the algorithms take over, comparing that student with thousands or even millions of others. Patterns should emerge. It could turn out that a particular student is struggling with the same concept as students who share a specific psychometric profile. The software will know what works well for that type of student and will adjust the material accordingly. With billions of data points from millions of students and given enough processing power and experience, these algorithms should be able to do all kinds of prognostication, down to telling you that you will learn exponents best between 9:42 and 10:03 a.m.
They should also be able to predict the best way to get you to remember the material you are learning. Ulrik Juul Christensen, CEO of Area9, the developer of the data-analysis software underpinning McGraw-Hill’s adaptive LearnSmart products, emphasizes his company’s use of the concept of memory decay. More than two million students currently use LearnSmart’s adaptive software to study dozens of topics, either on their own or as part of a course. Research has shown that those students (all of us, really) remember a new word or fact best when they learn it and then relearn it when they are just on the cusp of forgetting it. Area9′s instructional software uses algorithms to predict each user’s unique memory-decay curve so that it can remind a student of something learned last week at the moment it is about to slip out of his or her brain forever.
Few human instructors can claim that sort of prescience. Nevertheless, Christensen dismisses the idea that computers could ever replace teachers. “I don’t think we are so stupid that we would let computers take over teaching our kids,” he says.
Backlash
In March, Gerald J. Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y., posted a scathing retirement letter to his Facebook page that quickly became a viral sensation. “In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars,” he wrote, “our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education,” the educational-publishing giant, which has partnered with Knewton to develop products. “My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic ‘assessments’) or grade their own students’ examinations.” Conti sees big data leading not to personalized learning for all but to an educational monoculture: “STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] rules the day, and ‘data driven’ education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core.”
Conti’s letter is only one example of the backlash building against tech-oriented, testing-focused education reform. In January teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle voted to boycott the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, administered in school districts across the country to assess student performance. After tangling with their district’s superintendent and school board, the teachers continued the boycott, which soon spread to other Seattle schools. Educators in Chicago and elsewhere held protests to show solidarity. In mid-May it was announced that Seattle high schools would be allowed to opt out of MAP, as long as they replaced it with some other evaluation.
It would be easy for proponents of data-driven learning to counter these protests if they could definitely prove that their methods work better than the status quo. But they cannot do that, at least not yet. Empirical evidence about effectiveness is, as Darrell M. West, an adaptive-learning proponent and founder of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, has written, “preliminary and impressionistic.” Any accurate evaluation of adaptive-learning technology would have to isolate and account for all variables: increases or decreases in a class’s size; whether the classroom was “flipped” (meaning homework was done in class and lectures were delivered via video on the students’ own time); whether the material was delivered via video, text or game; and so on. Arizona State says 78 percent of students taking the Knewton-ized developmental math course passed, up from 56 percent before. Yet it is always possible that more students are passing not because of technology but because of a change in policy: the university now lets students retake developmental math or stretch it over two semesters without paying tuition twice.
Even if proponents of adaptive technology prove that it works wonderfully, they will still have to contend with privacy concerns. It turns out that plenty of people find pervasive psychometric-data gathering unnerving. Witness the fury that greeted inBloom earlier this year. InBloom essentially offers off-site digital storage for student data—names, addresses, phone numbers, attendance, test scores, health records—formatted in a way that enables third-party education applications to use it. When inBloom was launched in February, the company announced partnerships with school districts in nine states, and parents were outraged. Fears of a “national database” of student information spread. Critics said that school districts, through inBloom, were giving their children’s confidential data away to companies who sought to profit by proposing a solution to a problem that does not exist. Since then, all but three of those nine states have backed out.
This might all seem like overreaction, but to be fair, adaptive-education proponents already talk about a student’s data-generated profile following them throughout their educational career and even beyond. Last fall the education-reform campaign Digital Learning Now released a paper arguing for the creation of “data backpacks” for pre-K–12 students—electronic transcripts that kids would carry with them from grade to grade so that they will show up on the first day of school with “data about their learning preferences, motivations, personal accomplishments, and an expanded record of their achievement over time.” Once it comes time to apply for college or look for a job, why not use the scores stored in their data backpacks as credentials? Something similar is already happening in Japan, where it is common for managers who have studied English with the adaptive-learning software iKnow to list their iKnow scores on their resumes.
This Is Not a Test
It is far from clear whether concerned parents and scorned instructors are enough to stop the march of big data on education. “The reality is that it’s going to be done,” says Eva Baker, director of the Center for the Study of Evaluation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s not going to be a little part. It’s going to be a big part. And it’s going to be put in place partly because it’s going to be less expensive than doing professional development.”
That does not mean teachers are going away. Nor does it mean that schools will become increasingly test-obsessed. It could mean the opposite. Sufficiently advanced testing is indistinguishable from instruction. In a fully adaptive classroom, students will be continually assessed, with every keystroke and mouse click feeding a learner profile. High-stakes exams could eventually disappear, replaced by the calculus of perpetual monitoring.
Long before that happens, generational turnover could make these computerized methods of instruction and testing, so foreign now, unremarkable, as they are for Arizona State’s Hawkins and her classmates. Teachers could come around, too. Arizona State’s executive vice provost Phil Regier believes they will, at least: “I think a good majority of the instructors would say this was a good move. And by the way, in three years 80 percent of them aren’t going to know anything else.”
Big data could end professor lectures
Schools are embracing technology that tailors content to students' abilities, leaving teachers as roving mentors
By Seth Fletcher
1299523
more
All Share Services facebookFollowerspinterestdelicioustumblrbloggerinstapapergooglemessengerevernotediigoLiveJournalmyspacesinaAmazon Wishlisttypepadslashdotnewsvinebaiduorkutcare2allvoicesmeneamesquidooFriendFeedfarkGoogle Bookmarksxangacurrenttechnorati
Topics: Scientific American, Big Data, math, University, student loans, College, Technology News, Business News, Life News
Enlarge
This article was originally published by Scientific American.
When Arnecia Hawkins enrolled at Arizona State University last fall, she did not realize she was volunteering as a test subject in an experimental reinvention of American higher education. Yet here she was, near the end of her spring semester, learning math from a machine. In a well-appointed computer lab in Tempe, on Arizona State’s desert resort of a campus, she and a sophomore named Jessica were practicing calculating annuities. Through a software dashboard, they could click and scroll among videos, text, quizzes and practice problems at their own pace. As they worked, their answers, along with reams of data on the ways in which they arrived at those answers, were beamed to distant servers. Predictive algorithms developed by a team of data scientists compared their stats with data gathered from tens of thousands of other students, looking for clues as to what Hawkins was learning, what she was struggling with, what she should learn next and how, exactly, she should learn it.
Having a computer for an instructor was a change for Hawkins. “I’m not gonna lie—at first I was really annoyed with it,” she says. The arrangement was a switch for her professor, too. David Heckman, a mathematician, was accustomed to lecturing to the class, but he had to take on the role of a roving mentor, responding to raised hands and coaching students when they got stumped. Soon, though, both began to see some benefits. Hawkins liked the self-pacing, which allowed her to work ahead on her own time, either from her laptop or from the computer lab. For Heckman, the program allowed him to more easily track his students’ performance. He could open a dashboard that told him, in granular detail, how each student was doing—not only who was on track and who was not but who was working on any given concept. Heckman says he likes lecturing better, but he seems to be adjusting. One definite perk for instuctors: the software does most of the grading for them.
At the end of the term, Hawkins will have completed the last college math class she will probably ever have to take. She will think back on this data-driven course model—so new and controversial right now—as the “normal” college experience. “Do we even have regular math classes here?” she asks.
Big Data Takes Education
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
advertisement
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arizona State’s decision to move to computerized learning was born, at least in part, of necessity. With more than 70,000 students, Arizona State is the largest public university in the U.S. Like institutions at every level of American education, it is going through some wrenching changes. The university has lost 50 percent of its state funding over the past five years. Meanwhile enrollment is rising, with alarmingly high numbers of students showing up on campus unprepared to do college-level work. “There is a sea of people we’re trying to educate that we’ve never tried to educate before,” says Al Boggess, director of the Arizona State math department. “The politicians are saying, ‘Educate them. Remediation? Figure it out. And we want them to graduate in four years. And your funding is going down, too.’”
Two years ago Arizona State administrators went looking for a more efficient way to shepherd students through basic general-education requirements—particularly those courses, such as college math, that disproportionately cause students to drop out. A few months after hearing a pitch by Jose Ferreira, the founder and CEO of the New York City adaptive-learning start-up Knewton, Arizona State made a big move. That fall, with little debate or warning, it placed 4,700 students into computerized math courses. Last year some 50 instructors coached 7,600 Arizona State students through three entry-level math courses running on Knewton software. By the fall of 2014 ASU aims to adapt six more courses, adding another 19,000 students a year to the adaptive-learning ranks. (In May, Knewton announced a partnership with Macmillan Education, a sister company to Scientific American.)
Arizona State is one of the earliest, most aggressive adopters of data-driven, personalized learning. Yet educational institutions at all levels are pursuing similar options as a way to cope with rising enrollments, falling budgets and more stringent requirements for student achievement. Public primary and secondary schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia are rushing to implement new, higher standards in English-language arts and mathematics known as the Common Core state standards, and those schools need new instructional materials and tests to make that happen. Around half of those tests will be online and adaptive, meaning that a computer will tailor questions to each student’s ability and calculate each student’s score [see “Why We Need High-Speed Schools,” on page 69]. School systems are experimenting with a range of other adaptive programs, from math and reading lessons for elementary school students to “quizzing engines” that help high school students prepare for Advanced Placement exams. The technology is also catching on overseas. The 2015 edition of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which is given to 15-year-olds (in more than 70 nations and economies so far) every three years, will include adaptive components to evaluate hard-to-measure skills such as collaborative problem solving.
Proponents of adaptive learning say that technology has finally made it possible to deliver individualized instruction to every student at an affordable cost—to discard the factory model that has dominated Western education for the past two centuries. Critics say it is data-driven learning, not traditional learning, that threatens to turn schools into factories. They see this increasing digitization as yet another unnecessary sellout to for-profit companies that push their products on teachers and students in the name of “reform.” The supposedly advanced tasks that computers can now barely pull off—diagnosing a student’s strengths and weaknesses and adjusting materials and approaches to suit individual learners—are things human teachers have been doing well for hundreds of years. Instead of delegating these tasks to computers, opponents say, we should be spending more on training, hiring and retaining good teachers.
And while adaptive-learning companies claim to have nothing but the future of America’s children in mind, there is no denying the potential for profit. Dozens of them are rushing to get in on the burgeoning market for instructional technology, which is now a multibillion-dollar industry [see box at left]. As much as 20 percent of instructional content in K–12 schools is already delivered digitally, says Adam Newman, a founding partner of the market-analysis firm Education Growth Advisors. Although adaptive-learning software makes up only a small slice of the digital-instruction pie—around $50 million for the K–12 market—it could grow quickly. Newman says the concept of adaptivity is already very much in the water in K–12 schools. “In K–12, the focus has been on differentiating instruction for years,” he says. “Differentiating instruction, even without technology, is really a form of adaptation.”
Higher-education administrators are warming up to adaptivity, too. In a recent Inside Higher Ed/Gallup poll, 66 percent of college presidents said they found adaptive-learning and testing technologies promising. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has launched the Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program, which will issue 10 $100,000 grants to U.S. colleges and universities to develop adaptive courses that enroll at least 500 students over three semesters. “In the long term—20 years out—I would expect virtually every course to have an adaptive component of some kind,” says Peter Stokes, an expert on digital education at Northeastern University. That will be a good thing, he says—an opportunity to apply empirical study and cognitive science to education in a way that has never been done. In higher education in particular, “very, very, very few instructors have a formal education in how to teach,” he says. “We do things, and we think they work. But when you start doing scientific measurement, you realize that some of our ways of doing things have no empirical basis.”
The Science of Adaptivity
In general, “adaptive” refers to a computerized-learning interface that constantly assesses a student’s thinking habits and automatically customizes material for him or her. Not surprisingly, though, competitors argue ferociously about who can claim the title of true adaptivity. Some say that a test that does nothing more than choose your next question based on whether you get the item in front of you correct—a test that steers itself according to the logic of binary branching—does not, in 2013, count as fully adaptive. In this view, adaptivity requires the creation of a psychometric profile of each user, plus the continuous adjustment of the experience based on that person’s progress.
To make this happen, adaptive-software makers must first map the connections among every concept in a piece of learning material. Once that is done, every time a student watches a video, reads an explanation, solves a practice problem or takes a quiz, data on the student’s performance, the effectiveness of the content, and more flow to a server. Then the algorithms take over, comparing that student with thousands or even millions of others. Patterns should emerge. It could turn out that a particular student is struggling with the same concept as students who share a specific psychometric profile. The software will know what works well for that type of student and will adjust the material accordingly. With billions of data points from millions of students and given enough processing power and experience, these algorithms should be able to do all kinds of prognostication, down to telling you that you will learn exponents best between 9:42 and 10:03 a.m.
They should also be able to predict the best way to get you to remember the material you are learning. Ulrik Juul Christensen, CEO of Area9, the developer of the data-analysis software underpinning McGraw-Hill’s adaptive LearnSmart products, emphasizes his company’s use of the concept of memory decay. More than two million students currently use LearnSmart’s adaptive software to study dozens of topics, either on their own or as part of a course. Research has shown that those students (all of us, really) remember a new word or fact best when they learn it and then relearn it when they are just on the cusp of forgetting it. Area9′s instructional software uses algorithms to predict each user’s unique memory-decay curve so that it can remind a student of something learned last week at the moment it is about to slip out of his or her brain forever.
Few human instructors can claim that sort of prescience. Nevertheless, Christensen dismisses the idea that computers could ever replace teachers. “I don’t think we are so stupid that we would let computers take over teaching our kids,” he says.
Backlash
In March, Gerald J. Conti, a social studies teacher at Westhill High School in Syracuse, N.Y., posted a scathing retirement letter to his Facebook page that quickly became a viral sensation. “In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars,” he wrote, “our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education,” the educational-publishing giant, which has partnered with Knewton to develop products. “My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic ‘assessments’) or grade their own students’ examinations.” Conti sees big data leading not to personalized learning for all but to an educational monoculture: “STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] rules the day, and ‘data driven’ education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core.”
Conti’s letter is only one example of the backlash building against tech-oriented, testing-focused education reform. In January teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle voted to boycott the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, administered in school districts across the country to assess student performance. After tangling with their district’s superintendent and school board, the teachers continued the boycott, which soon spread to other Seattle schools. Educators in Chicago and elsewhere held protests to show solidarity. In mid-May it was announced that Seattle high schools would be allowed to opt out of MAP, as long as they replaced it with some other evaluation.
It would be easy for proponents of data-driven learning to counter these protests if they could definitely prove that their methods work better than the status quo. But they cannot do that, at least not yet. Empirical evidence about effectiveness is, as Darrell M. West, an adaptive-learning proponent and founder of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, has written, “preliminary and impressionistic.” Any accurate evaluation of adaptive-learning technology would have to isolate and account for all variables: increases or decreases in a class’s size; whether the classroom was “flipped” (meaning homework was done in class and lectures were delivered via video on the students’ own time); whether the material was delivered via video, text or game; and so on. Arizona State says 78 percent of students taking the Knewton-ized developmental math course passed, up from 56 percent before. Yet it is always possible that more students are passing not because of technology but because of a change in policy: the university now lets students retake developmental math or stretch it over two semesters without paying tuition twice.
Even if proponents of adaptive technology prove that it works wonderfully, they will still have to contend with privacy concerns. It turns out that plenty of people find pervasive psychometric-data gathering unnerving. Witness the fury that greeted inBloom earlier this year. InBloom essentially offers off-site digital storage for student data—names, addresses, phone numbers, attendance, test scores, health records—formatted in a way that enables third-party education applications to use it. When inBloom was launched in February, the company announced partnerships with school districts in nine states, and parents were outraged. Fears of a “national database” of student information spread. Critics said that school districts, through inBloom, were giving their children’s confidential data away to companies who sought to profit by proposing a solution to a problem that does not exist. Since then, all but three of those nine states have backed out.
This might all seem like overreaction, but to be fair, adaptive-education proponents already talk about a student’s data-generated profile following them throughout their educational career and even beyond. Last fall the education-reform campaign Digital Learning Now released a paper arguing for the creation of “data backpacks” for pre-K–12 students—electronic transcripts that kids would carry with them from grade to grade so that they will show up on the first day of school with “data about their learning preferences, motivations, personal accomplishments, and an expanded record of their achievement over time.” Once it comes time to apply for college or look for a job, why not use the scores stored in their data backpacks as credentials? Something similar is already happening in Japan, where it is common for managers who have studied English with the adaptive-learning software iKnow to list their iKnow scores on their resumes.
This Is Not a Test
It is far from clear whether concerned parents and scorned instructors are enough to stop the march of big data on education. “The reality is that it’s going to be done,” says Eva Baker, director of the Center for the Study of Evaluation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s not going to be a little part. It’s going to be a big part. And it’s going to be put in place partly because it’s going to be less expensive than doing professional development.”
That does not mean teachers are going away. Nor does it mean that schools will become increasingly test-obsessed. It could mean the opposite. Sufficiently advanced testing is indistinguishable from instruction. In a fully adaptive classroom, students will be continually assessed, with every keystroke and mouse click feeding a learner profile. High-stakes exams could eventually disappear, replaced by the calculus of perpetual monitoring.
Long before that happens, generational turnover could make these computerized methods of instruction and testing, so foreign now, unremarkable, as they are for Arizona State’s Hawkins and her classmates. Teachers could come around, too. Arizona State’s executive vice provost Phil Regier believes they will, at least: “I think a good majority of the instructors would say this was a good move. And by the way, in three years 80 percent of them aren’t going to know anything else.”
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Whence History?
Decline and Fall of the History Men
DANIEL JOHNSON
July/August 2013
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Victorian apostle of high culture
Are we living through the end of history? Not in the Hegelian sense that Francis Fukuyama used the phrase in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, meaning that with the triumph of liberal democracy, world history had reached its ultimate goal. As subsequent events have shown, this was a case of wishful thinking by a political scientist, not a historian.
No, I mean the end of history as the central pillar of high culture and national identity. History in this sense is not the same as historiography or historical scholarship, of which there is more than ever before. Nor is it the same as the popularisation of history, history as pure entertainment, which is also flourishing. What has become problematic is the assumption that general historical knowledge, an informed consciousness of our past, is the essential framework for Western civilisation. It is the decline of history in this sense that lies behind the heated debates about the teaching of history at school and university. The loss of such a temporal dimension has brought about a profound change in the outlook of the West: a loss of organic connection, not only with those who came before us, but with our place in the world. Clive James memorably described this phenomenon as "cultural amnesia", and Eric Voegelin adopted the theological concept of "anamnesis" to describe our attempts to preserve transcendent memories. Yet such remembrances of time past, whether they express rage against the dying of the light of history as a force in intellectual life, or acquiescence in its oblivion, are at best rearguard actions.
That an educated person could lack such historical awareness would not have occurred to the 19th-century apostles of high culture, the Mills and Arnolds, père et fils, or the brothers Humboldt and James. The 18th-century philosophes had tried to create a "philosophical" or "conjectural" history of mankind, as Anthony Pagden writes in his encyclopaedic new book The Enlightenment (OUP, £20). "The purpose of these histories was . . . not only descriptive — it was emancipatory. In providing a proper scientific understanding of the origin and evolution of the human condition, they would, it was hoped, release man from his servitude to . . . prejudice." In the 19th century, however, this emancipatory impetus was allied to the romantic cult of genius, which gave weight to what Max Weber would later call "charisma". History was the story of liberty, but also of the liberator. To be human was to be an actor on the stage of history; the human sciences were those governed by the historical method. To have a place in the history books was not only the definition of fame, but the very purpose and meaning of life.
Among the most remarkable and influential of these Victorian polymaths was Thomas Babington Macaulay. He was among the greatest essayists, poets, orators and historians of an age that excelled in all these accomplishments. Yet it is not for any of these that he most deserves to be celebrated today, according to his latest biographer, Zareer Masani. In his splendid and original Macaulay: Britain's Liberal Imperialist (Bodley Head, £20), Masani evokes a recent birthday party in Delhi for the eminent Victorian, given by the intellectuals of the Dalit community and their liberal supporters. The Dalits, the modern name for pariahs, were (and in some places still are) treated as untouchable by the higher castes. They revere Macaulay as the man who gave India the English language, British education, freedom of the press and the rule of law. English, the world's lingua franca, has enabled India's untouchables to connect with the world. It was Macaulay's famous Education Minute of 1835 that set out to create "a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." This Anglophone administrative and commercial class became known as "Macaulay's children". Macaulay's Minute, in Masani's enthusiastic words, "outlined an imperial mission more ambitious and global than any since ancient Rome".
It was the experience of India that inspired Macaulay to write his Lays of Ancient Rome, with their apotheosis of Horatius — his Roman role model for the English schoolboy. Macaulay's greatest monument is his History of England from the Reign of James II, in which he demonstrated to a vast and admiring public his guiding principle: "The history of England is emphatically the history of progress." No other intellectual pursuit could compare with history as a vehicle for inculcating the virtues of the English gentleman. Hence the teaching of British history was imperative.
Macaulay had set out his manifesto already in 1824, in his maiden speech on behalf of the Anti-Slavery Society, founded by his father, the leading abolitionist Zachary Macaulay. "[Britain's] mightiest empire," he declared, "is that of her manners, her language and her laws; her proudest victories, those which she has achieved over ignorance and ferocity; her most durable trophies, those which she has erected in the hearts of civilised and liberated nations." The relationship between Zachary's abolitionism and Tom's imperialism is the theme of another fine recent work, Catherine Hall's Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (Yale, £35.99). But it is striking that, whereas the Indian Zareer Masani is unequivocal in his approval of Macaulay's imperial mission, his British counterpart Catherine Hall is eager to apologise for his typically Victorian racism and elitism.
Victorians incorporated history into every branch of education, public life and the arts, but not everybody shared Macaulay's optimistic view of history as progress. One rival school was that of Thomas Carlyle, who replaced emancipation and enlightenment with hero-worship of the great man. His leading disciple was James Anthony Froude, whose magisterial History of England did much to establish the dynastic primacy of the Tudors in the popular imagination. His life has only just received the attention it deserves from Ciaran Brady, whose superb biography James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (OUP, £45) traces the serpentine twists and turns of Froude's life, from his abusive childhood through his abortive careers as a clergyman and a novelist, to his triumph as a historian, editor and man of letters. Only in old age did he re-enter the academic world, as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and his inaugural lecture of 1892 may be taken as a valedictory reflection on the Victorian love affair with history. Froude rejected the contemporary pieties: history was not a science, it did not move from the particular to the general, it was not a record of human progress or freedom, it was inseparable from prejudice, it had no pattern or meaning. Instead, history was a drama, an art, an attempt to understand humanity but not to explain it. Thus, in the high noon of the nation state, with the newly discovered past annexed by the triumphantly liberal present in the service of future progress, voices were raised against the hegemony of history. It was not in the Anglosphere, however, but in continental Europe, and Germany in particular, that the backlash against history began.
In 1874, the young Friedrich Nietzsche published On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. This "untimely" or "unfashionable" essay might have been directed at the propaganda of the Prussian school of historians, which presented the German Empire, newly unified by Bismarck, as inevitable. But Nietzsche's notion of the "abuse of history" had a very different target. What troubled him was the burden of living in a culture so saturated in the knowledge of the past, so paralysed by its "ironical self-consciousness", that it seemed to him to have been born "grey-haired". Around him he saw the human consequences of the explosion of historical knowledge and education since the Enlightenment. He could not stomach the liberal religion of progress, which had recently enlisted the support of Darwinian evolution: "Never has the view of history soared so high, not even in its own dreams, for now the history of humanity is merely the continuation of the history of animals and plants. Indeed, even in the depths of the ocean the historical universalist discovers the traces of himself in living slime." Nietzsche cannot contain his contempt for the overconfident complacency of his contemporaries. "Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are stark raving mad! Your [historical] knowledge does not perfect nature, but only kills your own nature. Just measure the wealth of your knowledge against the poverty of your abilities."
Nietzsche has never enjoyed the influence in Britain that he still has in America and on the Continent (cf American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen). But this root and branch critique of history led to the "revaluation of all values", the idea that individuals can and must create their own morality. His subversion of history as inimical to "life" anticipated the anti-historical reaction of modernism, which by the late 20th century had morphed into a "post-modernism" which was radically relativistic and hence even more hostile to the fixed points of history and the canonical works of high culture that went with it. Not only were certain kinds of history discredited — for example, what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history, the idea of history as progress — but history itself was marginalised, in favour of less rigorous disciplines.
Going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1975, I was fortunate enough to read history at a time when the subject had not yet been hollowed out by the elimination of facts and dates, when a grasp of the broad sweep of British and European history was taken for granted among the educated, and certainly among those who aspired to lead the country. I belonged to the last generation before the abolition of grammar schools, which still placed a premium on wide reading and the acquisition of historical knowledge for its own sake. Within a decade, that kind of education had come to be seen as a privilege of the well-to-do. David Cameron would still have enjoyed such an education at Eton; yet as prime minister he was stumped by a question about what "Magna Carta" might mean. Today, I wonder how much history even those with degrees in the subject are actually expected to have read. The reaction to Michael Gove's new history curriculum suggests that many teachers don't relish the thought of inculcating knowledge rather than "skills".
Undergraduates who went up to Oxford to read modern history in the mid-1970s found themselves examined in their first term on four historical classics: Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Macaulay's History of England, Alexis de Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Revolution and the Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen ("Reflections on World History") by Nietzsche's Swiss friend and mentor, Jacob Burckhardt. These texts suited the taste of the Regius Professor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, himself a great historian both of the 17th and 20th centuries whose works had literary as well as academic merit. He was married to the Edwardian daughter of Earl Haig, and himself enough of a Victorian to insist on academic gowns at his lectures. His chosen historians were not such sticklers for academic proprieties. Only one (Burckhardt) ever taught at a university, though he spent most of his time on tour as a connoisseur of Italian art; the only one who had been to Oxford (Gibbon) was removed from Magdalen College by his father in disgrace, having been converted to Catholicism, and sent to Lausanne for religious detox by Swiss Calvinists at the tender age of 16. As a man of letters with a large private income, Gibbon belonged to the world of private scholarship and was scathing about Oxford in his autobiography. Jeremy Jennings writes about Tocqueville elsewhere in this issue of Standpoint (page 61), but he too was a traveller, an aristocrat and a minister rather than a professor. Macaulay, by contrast, Trevor-Roper could not include among his "immortals": he mocked "that infallible, that vulgar egotism", not to mention the Victorian prudishness. "No, he won't do." In his Wartime Journals he quotes Macaulay on William III and Frederick the Great, accused of "abominations as foul as those which are buried under the waters of the Dead Sea" (i.e. homosexuality). "Had Macaulay read the classics in vain," Trevor-Roper told his friends, "that he reacts to an interesting psychological phenomenon as if he were a provincial nonconformist grocer?"
Looking back, I see Trevor-Roper as one of the last historians in the grand tradition of Gibbon and Macaulay, but perhaps also one of its gravediggers. Today his chair, Froude's chair, is occupied by Lyndal Roper, an Australian specialist on witchcraft in early modern Germany. I intend no disrespect to Professor Roper when I say that she is not exactly a household name. Not only has the Oxford school of history squandered its pre-eminence: history in general has retreated into the ivory tower, or lies rolling in the gutter.
Michael Gove, the first minister for a generation to care enough about history to wish to restore it to the privileged place in the nation's intellectual life that it once enjoyed, has encountered bitter opposition, not from philistines and barbarians, but from the historians themselves. Gove's emphasis on testing knowledge rather than "skills" in his proposed new curriculum would once have gained approval from the dons and the schools. Not, however, from their successors. Today, Michael Gove faces a hostile historical profession alone but for a few trusty defenders. Like Macaulay's Horatius, he stands defiant on the bridge:
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods?
View Full ArticleTags:Anthony PagdenEducationEdward GibbonFeaturesHistoryMacaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial BritainMacaulay: Britain’s Liberal ImperialistoxfordThe EnlightenmentThomas Babington MacaulayZachary Macaulay History of England from the Reign of James IIZareer Masani Like this article? Share, save or print using the icons below:
Douglas Johnson
July 16th, 2013
2:07 PM Manasi says British history/culture delivers the goods and so embrace its PROGRESS, whereas Nietzsche says it doesn't deliver the goods, so reject it. The backlash against history starts in Germany, but the backlash manifests itself in England through the modernist thought of writers such as Virginia Woolf and EM Forster for whom history should be rejected by a modern, triumphant relativism. The parallel to the Whig interpretation of history is the Christian heresy of triumphantism or pietism, which is another way of saying "good things happen to good people," which is also false. The corrective, I imagine, is to understand history as a VITAL record of man's fallen condition through which we are unable to save ourselves.
Douglas Johnson
July 16th, 2013
2:07 PM Manasi says British history/culture delivers the goods and so embrace its PROGRESS, whereas Nietzsche says it doesn't deliver the goods, so reject it. The backlash against history starts in Germany, but the backlash manifests itself in England through the modernist thought of writers such as Virginia Woolf and EM Forster for whom history should be rejected by a modern, triumphant relativism. The parallel to the Whig interpretation of history is the Christian heresy of triumphantism or pietism, which is another way of saying "good things happen to good people," which is also false. The corrective, I imagine, is to understand history as a VITAL record of man's fallen condition through which we are unable to save ourselves.
Floyd Alsbach
July 15th, 2013
12:07 PM If you will pardon an unpopular American perspective: The author is driving at the distinct lack of depth in current discourse, there is plenty of verbosity, great gobs of language, truck loads of glibness, but the depth of understanding that only comes with a working knowledge of history has become exceedingly rare. This cannot end well.
skeptic
July 15th, 2013
12:07 AM Michael Gove held up as some noble protector of History? I find that very hard to swallow. His systematic reduction of education in England to nothing more than a business venture with an aim to make every school 'outstanding (as if that is ever possible in real terms anyway)is risible! There are problems with education and society in the UK, but Michael Gove, the elitist psychotic chancer is not the man who will solve them. Inspired teachers can illuminate the past for the next generation, but teaching in England is so results based that it is not a 'lighting of a fire so much as a regurgitation of the facts that guarantees a school's success in unfair league tables. Gove's policies are ad hoc and divisive, as are most of the present government's short sighted visions for the future of Britain.
Malcolm McLean
July 8th, 2013
2:07 PM Traditionally history wasn't seen as a separate academic discipline. You read "a history", which might be Caesar's account of the Gallic war, or Homer's account of the siege of Troy, or Shakespeare. But if it was in your native tongue, whilst it might still be worth reading, it hardly merited the title of "study". Nowadays, instead of "reading histories", students think of themselves as "studying a period". For schoolchildren, this has a catastrophic effect. Children can't afford to buy books, they can't borrow books from the school library because the class of thirty all want the same topic at the same time, and they can't go to the poorly-stocked public library unless a parent drives the there. So their source is purely the study materials provided by the curriculum designers. Even at GCSE level, the official examining board book is sold as "the only book you'll need". In recent article in the Guardian, a teacher was patting herself on the back for writing "fictional historical sources" of a family sent to a Victorian workhouse. So the children never get to the established historians, but only read the productions of jobsworths and non-entities, or, at best, well-meaning but naive schoolmistresses.
Anonymous
July 6th, 2013
2:07 PM The past is disappearing into intellectual oblivion. In another generation it will be completely consumed into the beast of popular culture.
DBS
July 2nd, 2013
4:07 PM The premise is entirely unfounded. The writer merely confirms that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Hzle
June 29th, 2013
9:06 AM Seems to me that the overarching interpretation is still more important than the essay implies. You'll notice Msani's book is titled "Liberal Imperialist" - he's practically speaking the fashionable language of our newspapers. One of our intellectual fashions is also a reliance on badly interpreted statistics, which don't have the power to tell us what we want them to tell. And of course the very political obsessions with "patriarchy" and "cultural hegemony" that have infected everything. These, along with a post-modernist alternative to boring old scholarship mean that history is rife with quite meaningless speculation. A final political current of our time is deliberately anti-patriotic. If our sense of identity were linked in any way to our history, it would mean that our children (and new immigrants) might have to learn a thing or two about the culture they were joining. Some teachers would rather forget all that, though they have nothing to replace it with
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DANIEL JOHNSON
July/August 2013
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Victorian apostle of high culture
Are we living through the end of history? Not in the Hegelian sense that Francis Fukuyama used the phrase in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, meaning that with the triumph of liberal democracy, world history had reached its ultimate goal. As subsequent events have shown, this was a case of wishful thinking by a political scientist, not a historian.
No, I mean the end of history as the central pillar of high culture and national identity. History in this sense is not the same as historiography or historical scholarship, of which there is more than ever before. Nor is it the same as the popularisation of history, history as pure entertainment, which is also flourishing. What has become problematic is the assumption that general historical knowledge, an informed consciousness of our past, is the essential framework for Western civilisation. It is the decline of history in this sense that lies behind the heated debates about the teaching of history at school and university. The loss of such a temporal dimension has brought about a profound change in the outlook of the West: a loss of organic connection, not only with those who came before us, but with our place in the world. Clive James memorably described this phenomenon as "cultural amnesia", and Eric Voegelin adopted the theological concept of "anamnesis" to describe our attempts to preserve transcendent memories. Yet such remembrances of time past, whether they express rage against the dying of the light of history as a force in intellectual life, or acquiescence in its oblivion, are at best rearguard actions.
That an educated person could lack such historical awareness would not have occurred to the 19th-century apostles of high culture, the Mills and Arnolds, père et fils, or the brothers Humboldt and James. The 18th-century philosophes had tried to create a "philosophical" or "conjectural" history of mankind, as Anthony Pagden writes in his encyclopaedic new book The Enlightenment (OUP, £20). "The purpose of these histories was . . . not only descriptive — it was emancipatory. In providing a proper scientific understanding of the origin and evolution of the human condition, they would, it was hoped, release man from his servitude to . . . prejudice." In the 19th century, however, this emancipatory impetus was allied to the romantic cult of genius, which gave weight to what Max Weber would later call "charisma". History was the story of liberty, but also of the liberator. To be human was to be an actor on the stage of history; the human sciences were those governed by the historical method. To have a place in the history books was not only the definition of fame, but the very purpose and meaning of life.
Among the most remarkable and influential of these Victorian polymaths was Thomas Babington Macaulay. He was among the greatest essayists, poets, orators and historians of an age that excelled in all these accomplishments. Yet it is not for any of these that he most deserves to be celebrated today, according to his latest biographer, Zareer Masani. In his splendid and original Macaulay: Britain's Liberal Imperialist (Bodley Head, £20), Masani evokes a recent birthday party in Delhi for the eminent Victorian, given by the intellectuals of the Dalit community and their liberal supporters. The Dalits, the modern name for pariahs, were (and in some places still are) treated as untouchable by the higher castes. They revere Macaulay as the man who gave India the English language, British education, freedom of the press and the rule of law. English, the world's lingua franca, has enabled India's untouchables to connect with the world. It was Macaulay's famous Education Minute of 1835 that set out to create "a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." This Anglophone administrative and commercial class became known as "Macaulay's children". Macaulay's Minute, in Masani's enthusiastic words, "outlined an imperial mission more ambitious and global than any since ancient Rome".
It was the experience of India that inspired Macaulay to write his Lays of Ancient Rome, with their apotheosis of Horatius — his Roman role model for the English schoolboy. Macaulay's greatest monument is his History of England from the Reign of James II, in which he demonstrated to a vast and admiring public his guiding principle: "The history of England is emphatically the history of progress." No other intellectual pursuit could compare with history as a vehicle for inculcating the virtues of the English gentleman. Hence the teaching of British history was imperative.
Macaulay had set out his manifesto already in 1824, in his maiden speech on behalf of the Anti-Slavery Society, founded by his father, the leading abolitionist Zachary Macaulay. "[Britain's] mightiest empire," he declared, "is that of her manners, her language and her laws; her proudest victories, those which she has achieved over ignorance and ferocity; her most durable trophies, those which she has erected in the hearts of civilised and liberated nations." The relationship between Zachary's abolitionism and Tom's imperialism is the theme of another fine recent work, Catherine Hall's Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (Yale, £35.99). But it is striking that, whereas the Indian Zareer Masani is unequivocal in his approval of Macaulay's imperial mission, his British counterpart Catherine Hall is eager to apologise for his typically Victorian racism and elitism.
Victorians incorporated history into every branch of education, public life and the arts, but not everybody shared Macaulay's optimistic view of history as progress. One rival school was that of Thomas Carlyle, who replaced emancipation and enlightenment with hero-worship of the great man. His leading disciple was James Anthony Froude, whose magisterial History of England did much to establish the dynastic primacy of the Tudors in the popular imagination. His life has only just received the attention it deserves from Ciaran Brady, whose superb biography James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (OUP, £45) traces the serpentine twists and turns of Froude's life, from his abusive childhood through his abortive careers as a clergyman and a novelist, to his triumph as a historian, editor and man of letters. Only in old age did he re-enter the academic world, as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and his inaugural lecture of 1892 may be taken as a valedictory reflection on the Victorian love affair with history. Froude rejected the contemporary pieties: history was not a science, it did not move from the particular to the general, it was not a record of human progress or freedom, it was inseparable from prejudice, it had no pattern or meaning. Instead, history was a drama, an art, an attempt to understand humanity but not to explain it. Thus, in the high noon of the nation state, with the newly discovered past annexed by the triumphantly liberal present in the service of future progress, voices were raised against the hegemony of history. It was not in the Anglosphere, however, but in continental Europe, and Germany in particular, that the backlash against history began.
In 1874, the young Friedrich Nietzsche published On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. This "untimely" or "unfashionable" essay might have been directed at the propaganda of the Prussian school of historians, which presented the German Empire, newly unified by Bismarck, as inevitable. But Nietzsche's notion of the "abuse of history" had a very different target. What troubled him was the burden of living in a culture so saturated in the knowledge of the past, so paralysed by its "ironical self-consciousness", that it seemed to him to have been born "grey-haired". Around him he saw the human consequences of the explosion of historical knowledge and education since the Enlightenment. He could not stomach the liberal religion of progress, which had recently enlisted the support of Darwinian evolution: "Never has the view of history soared so high, not even in its own dreams, for now the history of humanity is merely the continuation of the history of animals and plants. Indeed, even in the depths of the ocean the historical universalist discovers the traces of himself in living slime." Nietzsche cannot contain his contempt for the overconfident complacency of his contemporaries. "Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are stark raving mad! Your [historical] knowledge does not perfect nature, but only kills your own nature. Just measure the wealth of your knowledge against the poverty of your abilities."
Nietzsche has never enjoyed the influence in Britain that he still has in America and on the Continent (cf American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen). But this root and branch critique of history led to the "revaluation of all values", the idea that individuals can and must create their own morality. His subversion of history as inimical to "life" anticipated the anti-historical reaction of modernism, which by the late 20th century had morphed into a "post-modernism" which was radically relativistic and hence even more hostile to the fixed points of history and the canonical works of high culture that went with it. Not only were certain kinds of history discredited — for example, what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history, the idea of history as progress — but history itself was marginalised, in favour of less rigorous disciplines.
Going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1975, I was fortunate enough to read history at a time when the subject had not yet been hollowed out by the elimination of facts and dates, when a grasp of the broad sweep of British and European history was taken for granted among the educated, and certainly among those who aspired to lead the country. I belonged to the last generation before the abolition of grammar schools, which still placed a premium on wide reading and the acquisition of historical knowledge for its own sake. Within a decade, that kind of education had come to be seen as a privilege of the well-to-do. David Cameron would still have enjoyed such an education at Eton; yet as prime minister he was stumped by a question about what "Magna Carta" might mean. Today, I wonder how much history even those with degrees in the subject are actually expected to have read. The reaction to Michael Gove's new history curriculum suggests that many teachers don't relish the thought of inculcating knowledge rather than "skills".
Undergraduates who went up to Oxford to read modern history in the mid-1970s found themselves examined in their first term on four historical classics: Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Macaulay's History of England, Alexis de Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Revolution and the Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen ("Reflections on World History") by Nietzsche's Swiss friend and mentor, Jacob Burckhardt. These texts suited the taste of the Regius Professor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, himself a great historian both of the 17th and 20th centuries whose works had literary as well as academic merit. He was married to the Edwardian daughter of Earl Haig, and himself enough of a Victorian to insist on academic gowns at his lectures. His chosen historians were not such sticklers for academic proprieties. Only one (Burckhardt) ever taught at a university, though he spent most of his time on tour as a connoisseur of Italian art; the only one who had been to Oxford (Gibbon) was removed from Magdalen College by his father in disgrace, having been converted to Catholicism, and sent to Lausanne for religious detox by Swiss Calvinists at the tender age of 16. As a man of letters with a large private income, Gibbon belonged to the world of private scholarship and was scathing about Oxford in his autobiography. Jeremy Jennings writes about Tocqueville elsewhere in this issue of Standpoint (page 61), but he too was a traveller, an aristocrat and a minister rather than a professor. Macaulay, by contrast, Trevor-Roper could not include among his "immortals": he mocked "that infallible, that vulgar egotism", not to mention the Victorian prudishness. "No, he won't do." In his Wartime Journals he quotes Macaulay on William III and Frederick the Great, accused of "abominations as foul as those which are buried under the waters of the Dead Sea" (i.e. homosexuality). "Had Macaulay read the classics in vain," Trevor-Roper told his friends, "that he reacts to an interesting psychological phenomenon as if he were a provincial nonconformist grocer?"
Looking back, I see Trevor-Roper as one of the last historians in the grand tradition of Gibbon and Macaulay, but perhaps also one of its gravediggers. Today his chair, Froude's chair, is occupied by Lyndal Roper, an Australian specialist on witchcraft in early modern Germany. I intend no disrespect to Professor Roper when I say that she is not exactly a household name. Not only has the Oxford school of history squandered its pre-eminence: history in general has retreated into the ivory tower, or lies rolling in the gutter.
Michael Gove, the first minister for a generation to care enough about history to wish to restore it to the privileged place in the nation's intellectual life that it once enjoyed, has encountered bitter opposition, not from philistines and barbarians, but from the historians themselves. Gove's emphasis on testing knowledge rather than "skills" in his proposed new curriculum would once have gained approval from the dons and the schools. Not, however, from their successors. Today, Michael Gove faces a hostile historical profession alone but for a few trusty defenders. Like Macaulay's Horatius, he stands defiant on the bridge:
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods?
View Full ArticleTags:Anthony PagdenEducationEdward GibbonFeaturesHistoryMacaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial BritainMacaulay: Britain’s Liberal ImperialistoxfordThe EnlightenmentThomas Babington MacaulayZachary Macaulay History of England from the Reign of James IIZareer Masani Like this article? Share, save or print using the icons below:
Douglas Johnson
July 16th, 2013
2:07 PM Manasi says British history/culture delivers the goods and so embrace its PROGRESS, whereas Nietzsche says it doesn't deliver the goods, so reject it. The backlash against history starts in Germany, but the backlash manifests itself in England through the modernist thought of writers such as Virginia Woolf and EM Forster for whom history should be rejected by a modern, triumphant relativism. The parallel to the Whig interpretation of history is the Christian heresy of triumphantism or pietism, which is another way of saying "good things happen to good people," which is also false. The corrective, I imagine, is to understand history as a VITAL record of man's fallen condition through which we are unable to save ourselves.
Douglas Johnson
July 16th, 2013
2:07 PM Manasi says British history/culture delivers the goods and so embrace its PROGRESS, whereas Nietzsche says it doesn't deliver the goods, so reject it. The backlash against history starts in Germany, but the backlash manifests itself in England through the modernist thought of writers such as Virginia Woolf and EM Forster for whom history should be rejected by a modern, triumphant relativism. The parallel to the Whig interpretation of history is the Christian heresy of triumphantism or pietism, which is another way of saying "good things happen to good people," which is also false. The corrective, I imagine, is to understand history as a VITAL record of man's fallen condition through which we are unable to save ourselves.
Floyd Alsbach
July 15th, 2013
12:07 PM If you will pardon an unpopular American perspective: The author is driving at the distinct lack of depth in current discourse, there is plenty of verbosity, great gobs of language, truck loads of glibness, but the depth of understanding that only comes with a working knowledge of history has become exceedingly rare. This cannot end well.
skeptic
July 15th, 2013
12:07 AM Michael Gove held up as some noble protector of History? I find that very hard to swallow. His systematic reduction of education in England to nothing more than a business venture with an aim to make every school 'outstanding (as if that is ever possible in real terms anyway)is risible! There are problems with education and society in the UK, but Michael Gove, the elitist psychotic chancer is not the man who will solve them. Inspired teachers can illuminate the past for the next generation, but teaching in England is so results based that it is not a 'lighting of a fire so much as a regurgitation of the facts that guarantees a school's success in unfair league tables. Gove's policies are ad hoc and divisive, as are most of the present government's short sighted visions for the future of Britain.
Malcolm McLean
July 8th, 2013
2:07 PM Traditionally history wasn't seen as a separate academic discipline. You read "a history", which might be Caesar's account of the Gallic war, or Homer's account of the siege of Troy, or Shakespeare. But if it was in your native tongue, whilst it might still be worth reading, it hardly merited the title of "study". Nowadays, instead of "reading histories", students think of themselves as "studying a period". For schoolchildren, this has a catastrophic effect. Children can't afford to buy books, they can't borrow books from the school library because the class of thirty all want the same topic at the same time, and they can't go to the poorly-stocked public library unless a parent drives the there. So their source is purely the study materials provided by the curriculum designers. Even at GCSE level, the official examining board book is sold as "the only book you'll need". In recent article in the Guardian, a teacher was patting herself on the back for writing "fictional historical sources" of a family sent to a Victorian workhouse. So the children never get to the established historians, but only read the productions of jobsworths and non-entities, or, at best, well-meaning but naive schoolmistresses.
Anonymous
July 6th, 2013
2:07 PM The past is disappearing into intellectual oblivion. In another generation it will be completely consumed into the beast of popular culture.
DBS
July 2nd, 2013
4:07 PM The premise is entirely unfounded. The writer merely confirms that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Hzle
June 29th, 2013
9:06 AM Seems to me that the overarching interpretation is still more important than the essay implies. You'll notice Msani's book is titled "Liberal Imperialist" - he's practically speaking the fashionable language of our newspapers. One of our intellectual fashions is also a reliance on badly interpreted statistics, which don't have the power to tell us what we want them to tell. And of course the very political obsessions with "patriarchy" and "cultural hegemony" that have infected everything. These, along with a post-modernist alternative to boring old scholarship mean that history is rife with quite meaningless speculation. A final political current of our time is deliberately anti-patriotic. If our sense of identity were linked in any way to our history, it would mean that our children (and new immigrants) might have to learn a thing or two about the culture they were joining. Some teachers would rather forget all that, though they have nothing to replace it with
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Saturday, August 3, 2013
The Phony Humanities Crisis?
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June 27, 2013, 2:08 pm 16 Comments
Quants Ask: What Crisis in the Humanities?
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Two recent reports on the beleaguered state of the humanities have had pundits of all stripes scrambling to explain what many see as a dismal statistic: the proportion of college students graduating with degrees in subjects like English or history has fallen to a mere 7 percent in 2010, down from 14 percent in 1966.
Is the state of the economy to blame? The obsession with the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math)? The anti-humanities rhetoric of right-wing politicians? The ideological excesses of left-wing professors?
Now one number-crunching historian has pointed the finger in an unexpected direction: women.
At the blog Sapping Attention, Ben Schmidt, a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University, notes that between 1950 and 2002, the percentage of male college students who major in the humanities nationally remained steady at roughly 7 percent. The percentage of female college students majoring in the humanities, however, fell dramatically, to 9 percent from 15 percent.
To Mr. Schmidt, this gives the lie to the idea, advanced in a recent Op-Ed column by David Brooks of the New York Times, that the humanities “committed suicide” by focusing on “class, race and gender” at the expense of eternal questions. Instead, he suggests (tongue in cheek), they may have been murdered by egalitarians who made other fields more welcoming to women.
Some women may have shifted to the sciences. But the biggest change, according to charts Mr. Schmidt made a few years ago as part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Indicators Project, may be business majors.
“Between 1970 and 1985, women jumped from 10 percent of all business degrees to 50 percent,” he wrote in an e-mail. Within the liberal arts, he added, the biggest shift was to the social sciences and what survey data nebulously referred to as “interdisciplinary liberal arts.”
Mr. Schmidt’s gender analysis is only the latest quantitative assault on the “crisis in the humanities” story that has taken hold since the release of the two reports, produced by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and by Harvard University.
In a post earlier this month, Mr. Schmidt, who is completing a fellowship at Harvard’s “Culturomics” project, which aims to study human culture quantitatively, noted that the big plunge in humanities majors in fact came in the 1970s, following an anomalous boom in the 1960s. (The past decade, contrary to popular perception, has not seen large declines.)
Nate Silver of The New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight has also weighed in. The panic over the seemingly dismal number of humanities majors, he says in a recent post, has omitted one crucial fact: far more
Americans are attending college than ever before.
The crucial statistic, he says, is not the percentage of college graduates who receive humanities degrees, but the percentage of the entire college-age population who earn such degrees.
The number of college graduates, he says, is much higher than in 1971, when there were 26.7 bachelor’s degrees granted for every hundred 21-year-olds in America. By 2011, that number had risen to 43.4, an increase of about 60 percent.
True, the distribution of degrees has shifted from English and history toward more obviously job-friendly fields like marketing, health care administration and criminal justice. “But these degrees may be going to students who would not have gone to college at all in prior generations,” he writes.
Even English — named the seventh most useless major last year by Newsweek — may not be in such bad shape, Mr. Silver says, or at least not any worse shape than before. The overall percentage of the college-age population receiving English degrees — roughly 1.1 percent of all 21-year olds in America — is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago, he notes.
Mr. Silver sees a similar pattern in many of the STEM fields, which are often presumed to thrive at the expense of the humanities. The fields that do see big increases, both in relative and absolute terms, are ones like hospital administration, criminal justice and business, which feed students into jobs that might not have required a college degree at all 20 or 30 years ago.
The real question, Mr. Silver maintains, is not how many students major in the humanities, but how much of a humanities education nonmajors receive.
“Perhaps we should at once encourage and require college students to take coursework in English – and tell them to be wary about majoring in it,” he writes.
But is an English degree really such a bad investment? At The Atlantic, Jordan Weissman cites a 2011 study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce showing that in 2010-2011, recent graduates with degrees in English and history had unemployment rates of 9.8 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively — nearly on par with graduates in computer and math fields (9.1 percent) or psychology and social work (8.8 percent), and ahead of economics majors (10.4 percent) and political science majors (11.1 percent).
“Score one for the lit nerds,” Mr. Weissman writes.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Blake Today
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
Oh, come on, Blake. Admit you're oh so early 19th Century. Nobody thinks like this anymore. You silly Romantic! We're too busy checking our smart phones, trying to keep our jobs, and worrying about the future to be playing with grains of sand and having visions of infinity in the palms of our hands. All I see in my palm is wrinkles. It's a good thing William Blake isn't alive today. We'd teach him a thing or two. (Nobody reads poetry anymore ayway so what's the point anyway?)
And a heaven in a wild flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
Oh, come on, Blake. Admit you're oh so early 19th Century. Nobody thinks like this anymore. You silly Romantic! We're too busy checking our smart phones, trying to keep our jobs, and worrying about the future to be playing with grains of sand and having visions of infinity in the palms of our hands. All I see in my palm is wrinkles. It's a good thing William Blake isn't alive today. We'd teach him a thing or two. (Nobody reads poetry anymore ayway so what's the point anyway?)
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