Why higher education should be free

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School.

By Zander Sherman

Classes have barely begun, but the most important lesson of the year may already be here: Higher education should be free. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t, and plenty of reasons why it should.

Here are a few:

1. We should be giving students knowledge, not burdening them with debt

University-aged kids are on the threshold of adulthood and all of the responsibilities that come with it. They need all the help they can get—and that doesn’t include being saddled with debt. Canadian students are $30 billion in arrears. Many will be middle-aged before they repay their loans. Others never will.

Let's get something straight. Jobs exist to make us money. To put yourself in debt in order to get one is not only backward, but crippling. How are graduates supposed to make a life, build a home, have a family? With the anxiety of having to pay back their loan, how they are even supposed to concentrate on work?

2. Knowledge is a basic human right

Like clean air and drinking water, knowledge is essential to life. We can’t get through life without it. We pine for knowledge the way we pine for love and happiness, because it’s hardwired into us, and its absence creates a biological hunger.

To deny that knowledge is a basic human right is to brand it a luxury. And if learning is a luxury, an education is available only to those who can afford it. If only those who can afford an education become educated, most people will be ignorant.

3. Higher ed. should be free because it can be

The biggest myth of higher education is that we need to pay for it. We don’t, and here’s why: Higher education is free in other parts of the world. It’s free in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Before you say that those countries pay for higher education with higher taxes, think again.

Higher education is also free in countries that have no welfare state, like Ecuador, Egypt, and Estonia. If it can be free there, it can be free here too.

4. The good would outweigh the bad

Those who say we can’t afford to have free post-secondary education argue that the cost to society (through taxation) would outweigh the benefit of having more educated labor. Not true at all. Opening university doors to anyone regardless of whether they can afford it or not would double, triple, quadruple enrollment. A better educated populace means a more dynamic economy, and a more dynamic economy means a larger benefit to society.

5. It would end the rich-poor divide

Wealth is what stands between students and the future. Not intelligence, not work ethic, not study hours or memorization skills. Wealth. Rich kids are born rich, go to rich schools, and end up with the kind of credentials that get them well-paying jobs. Poor kids are stuck in the opposite track. They’re born poor, go to poor schools, and either drop out before university or go on to study at an affordable post-secondary school … where they begin collecting debt.

Free higher education would give poor students access to those same prized credentials that lead to rich jobs, and so close the wealth gap.

6. It would also kill credentialism, for-profit universities, and private schools

A degree from Harvard or the Cambridge is worth more than a degree from, let’s say, Canada Christian College. Highbrow schools always justify astronomical tuition by saying they have a tradition of excellence. In fact, the so-called “ancient universities” began very modestly. Harvard was once a puritan stronghold. Cambridge was built in a swamp.

What the most prestigious universities have is a tradition of money. The richest universities in the world see more money in a year than some of the poorest countries in Africa. When you get a degree from these schools, you become entitled to that wealth.

Making higher education free would kill credentialism. It would also kill for-profit universities (why give your money to a diploma mill when you could go to a real school and get one for free?) and take a bite out of private schools (why send your child to an expensive prep school when the advantage falls away as soon as they get to university?).

So there you have it, six reasons why higher education should be free.

Let those who would disagree defend the status quo: a system that impoverishes students before they’re qualified to make enough money to pay off their debt; a system that encourages the rich-poor divide and the culture of credentialism; and a system that treats knowledge as a commodity, not an essential human right.

Too much time in school an economic waste

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School.

by Zander Sherman

Last week, as Alberta’s students headed back to school, some were probably wishing they’d had a longer summer holiday.

Easily overshadowed by other issues, the question of our academic calendar and its number of vacation days has long troubled educators. Those who say we should spend more time in school often suggest cutting into the summer break, when kids were once needed to help hay the fields. Because we no longer live in farming times, the tradition is irrelevant. If such reasoning is meant to sustain an argument, it might be pointed out that what we call school today was also invented during the same timeframe—and no one is arguing the irrelevance of it.

While it still eludes Alberta, all-day kindergarten has been adopted to Ontario’s educational legislation, with similar initiatives gaining momentum in other parts of the world. In the US, extended learning has become a central tenet of the charter school movement. In the UK, politicians are campaigning on a proposal that would legally force public schools to provide 45 hours of education a week for 45 weeks. Lengthening school days and cutting holidays is said to be “the perfect election promise.”

Proponents argue that their plan would create more “successful” students. To find out whether this is true, let us first agree that “educational success” is the reason we go to school. Sadly, the phrase “educational success” has come to be defined by a third party. The OECD is a global economic organization that administers PISA, the standardized test taken by all 15-year-olds. Because of the correlation between PISA results and a nation’s gross domestic product, PISA is academia’s raison d’être: If students do well on the test, it means their country is doing well financially. (This is why governments obsess over test results. They indicate a country's rank on the global stage.)

If educational success is the reason we go to school, it will be surprising to many that more time in school does not necessarily lead to it. While there is correlation between PISA outcomes and GDP, there is little correlation between PISA outcomes and the number of hours we spend in school. Consider, for instance, how Canada spends roughly the same number of hours in a classroom as the US, but as a whole does a lot better on PISA than they do. China and Japan spend about the same amount of time in school and come out at or near the top, while India also spends approximately the same number of hours in school and comes out at or near the bottom.

Clearly, instructional time does not lead to better PISA outcomes.

If more classroom hours have little to do with educational success, what does? School’s terrible secret is that students’ “success” is determined long before they enter a classroom. Wealth is the single greatest predictor of academic grades, and therefore of students’ future earning potential. This is true in many ways. Wealthy families have more resources, and can afford private tutors and expensive test prep courses. Wealthy parents have more time to spend with their children, and so engage them more. Poor families view post-secondary education as unattainable. Poor parents are often under chronic stress, which in turn affects their children.

If more time in school doesn’t equal educational success, it only makes sense that we should spend less time in it. It is a principle of economics after all that where there is no benefit to a proposal, it is wasteful to continue using it. The province of Alberta’s education budget is $7 billion per annum. Exams, snow days, and PD days notwithstanding, Albertans spend about 190 days in school. That’s about $37 million a day. For cost reasons alone, school days are precious and not to be wasted. (And that doesn’t include other reasons to avoid over-schooling such as student stress, teacher attrition rates, and the growing number of pediatricians who say that the school day begins too early in the morning—all problems that could be avoided with a shorter school year.)

To those who would shorten our summer holiday, let this be among the first lessons of the year: It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend behind a desk, merely how rich you are. There can be no denying that over-schooling is an economic waste. With that in mind, more vacation hours would solve the problem of spending too much time in school.

Should Catholic schools be publicly funded?

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School.

by Zander Sherman

Today is election day in Ontario, and as the three major political parties appeal to voters, debating the issues that have made for a competitive race, the provincial Greens have argued a contention so contentious it could have only come from a party that has nothing to lose: namely, that our public and Catholic school boards should be merged.

The reason, they say, is twofold: that having a single (bilingual) school board would save us over $1 billion annually, and that it’s unfair of the government to fund just Catholicism and no other religion or religious denomination. The first point isn’t really an argument but an observation, and the second would seem to imply that all religious schools should be publicly funded. John Tory said this 2007; it nearly ended his political career.

More fundamentally, Tory’s position represents the backward argument that two wrongs make a right. We shouldn’t single out the Catholic school board for special treatment, this line of reasoning goes, so we should specially treat every other religious school in the province. But if we shouldn’t single out the Catholic school board for special treatment, surely a more natural conclusion is that we should stop funding it with the public’s money.

The reason taxpayers fund anything is because we believe that doing so will improve the public good. We give money to hospitals because health is important to us. We fund mail service and snow plough removal and public parks for the same reason—because we believe in the social usefulness of communication and mobility and green space. When we fund public education, it’s with the understanding that doing so will lead to happiness, innovation, good governance, and all the other things that are socially beneficial. We want these things for ourselves and others, so we say yes.

But Catholic schools have a private agenda whose ideals are not socially or universally beneficial. For instance, Catholic school students are taught that homosexuality is unnatural. Homosexuality is not unnatural. Homosexuality exists in nature, and whatever exists in nature cannot be called unnatural. Here and elsewhere, Catholicism is wrong. By teaching things that are wrong, Catholic schools not only fail to meet the criteria of a public good, but are actually detrimental to it. Their students will be steeped in divisive knowledge that is rooted in scripture, not science, and faith, not reason. Rather than becoming more knowledge in the world around them, and more inspired to contribute to it, they will grow up believing that women are subservient to men, that homosexuals are more sinful than heterosexuals, and that their own religious denomination is better and purer and more righteous than any other religion or religious denomination.

These are beliefs, not facts, and those who take them in will become ignorant, not educated. 

If our hospitals made people sicker, not better, we would surely stop funding them. If our mailmen, snow-plough removal operators, and gardeners hindered our communication, made our roads impassible, and sullied our green spaces, they would be doing the opposite of what we hired them to do and we would surely stop funding them as well.

Why should Catholic schools be any different?

Jeff Johnson's Xerox Education

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School.

By Zander Sherman

Should teachers be evaluated every five years? Alberta’s education minister, Jeff Johnson, and his Task Force for Teaching Excellence think so. 

Minister Johnson’s committee, created last September, has argued that quinquennial evaluations will improve teacher quality, giving administrators scientific proof of competency and enabling them to decide which teachers should keep their jobs and which should have their certificates torn in half.

It’s fitting that Minister Johnson used to work at Xerox. His Task Force seems to believe that Alberta’s 40,000 teachers are all the same, and thus that uniform evaluations of their performance is a valid and reasonable form of assessment. This belief is wrong for the same reason that standardized tests are wrong: People are different. They learn differently.

But more significantly, evaluations every five years would denigrate the teaching profession, reducing educators to the level of factory foremen. With the constant stress of impending assessment, teachers would adhere to the mandates established by the province, teaching only the material and using only the methods that would reward them monetarily.

Minister Johnson, of all people, should know that quality deteriorates with each iteration. The more you test teachers, the worse they will become.

The report was published on May 5. Since then, we've heard from unions (predictably outraged), the Minister (predictably boilerplate), and the general public (predictably confused). What these groups have in common is their treatment of the proposal as a legitimate piece of education reform. But each of the report's 25 recommendations, as evinced in its 94 commissioned pages, are actually thinly disguised economic policy.

That’s because “excellence,” as in the quality of classroom instruction, is being defined in capitalistic terms. On page 17—the only page that defines the very word that comprises the Task Force’s name—we learn that an excellent teacher is one who impacts their students’ test scores, therefore their future earning potential. It warrants mentioning that this definition is phrased partially in parenthesis, and only after the word “excellence” or a derivation appears several dozen times.

What I get from this is that the Task Force thinks the ideal teacher is one who is best able to conform to the provincial goal of training human capital. The authors of the report have taken this position with the evident belief that it’s so uncontentious and commonly held that it barely warrants explanation. Of course a good teacher is one who can help their students get the highest marks. Of course a good student is one who earns the most money once they enter the workforce.

But doesn't a more natural and broader definition of “excellence” strike notes of originality and uniqueness? Wouldn't we intuitively describe an “excellent teacher” as someone who breaks rules and exceeds expectations rather than someone who conforms to a common goal? Isn't an excellent teacher one who inspires us to become more interested in the world around us, as opposed to one who possesses the singular ability to make us rich?

If the only point in going to school is to get a job, teachers are more like bosses than educators, and students are more like employees-in-training than lovers of wisdom, as is the tradition. Aside from the patent falseness of this scenario somehow involving “mastery” or “excellence” in teaching, it represents a stunningly narrow epistemological view that would seem to imply that knowledge has no internal worth, only external value. We can envision the oligarchical society that this would lead to, where wealth is commensurate with ignorance.

So the proposal is economic policy masquerading as education reform, but even here it fails. That’s because, in education as in economics, it takes value to give something worth. Say that capital is the point of learning, and students wouldn't have the knowledge needed to innovate the ideas and products that make the most money. “Educated labour” would be neither educated nor valuable. A proposal designed to enrich students would actually impoverish them.

It’s a perversion that we might call a Xerox education: The Ministry dictates instead of supports, teachers train instead of educate, and students arrive at the world of work only to discover that their degrees aren't worth the paper they were printed on.

Alberta teaching reform would impede innovation

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School. This post was originally found here. 

by Zander Sherman

Last week, Alberta’s Task Force for Teaching Excellence submitted its much-discussed report on the measures it thinks the province needs to take to improve teaching excellence. The most striking of these would see teachers evaluated every five years; ‘Bad’ teachers would have their certificates removed; ‘good’ teachers would be given extra pay.


The Task Force was created last September by Education Minister Jeff Johnson and follows American proposals that attempt to make teachers more accountable for their students’ success. The authors of the report, who have included the word “excellence” on each of the report’s 94 commissioned pages, never explicitly state what they mean. In one baffling sentence we are told that “Teaching excellence is achieved through a system that ensures that: For every child, in every class, there is an excellent teacher.” According to this definition, an excellent teacher is one who makes teaching excellent. It’s a nonsense statement, like describing the air as “airy.”

Only once, in parenthesis, do the authors allude to a definition. “The impact of a good teacher can be huge,” they write, before going on to tell us of an American study in which economists discovered that students assigned to good teachers, “(as measured by their impact on students’ test scores),” earned more money as adults. Finally, we know what the authors mean by good or excellent teaching.

The only trouble is that this statement technically classifies the report, and each of its recommendations, as economic policy, not education reform. Saying that a good teacher is one who can make his or her students the most money is another way of saying that the point of the teaching profession is to train future employees. And if the point of teaching is training, the point of learning is to be trained. We might then conclude that if all learning is training, the only reason to go to school is to become well-certified, not well-educated.

Aside from being a radical, if not entirely unusual interpretation of the purpose of formal education, the argument represents a reductionist position that is neither desirable nor defensible. An education is supposed to be broad. The knowledge at its core represents the accumulation of information that, once digested, leads to increased awareness, sagacity, and moral aptitude. We want to learn the things that make us better people, not just smarter or richer. That’s because knowledge itself is a public good, and part of its breadth is derived from this essential altruism. When we limit knowledge to the pursuit of capital, we’re saying that it has no intrinsic worth, only extrinsic value.

By trying to reverse-engineer success, the province of Alberta would not only rob students’ worth as educated minds, but impoverish their value as educated labour. For the same reason that it takes work to make knowledge valuable, it takes knowledge to give work worth. Education leads to creativity, creativity motivates innovation, and innovation is what produces capital. Remove “educated” from the phrase “educated labour,” and our future graduates would be both ignorant and unproductive; good at following instructions, but bad at generating the ideas that fuel the creative economy.

As for the screening of teachers, that should happen at the interview stage. Then, teachers should be left alone to do what we pay them to do.

Teach.

I'm featured in The Walrus Magazine

Illustration by Genevieve Simms

I am featured in November's issue of The Walrus Magazine. The article was written by Zander Sherman and it is titled Standard Issues: An Alberta teacher wants to liberate our schools from the educrats. 

I had the good fortune of meeting with Zander and am humbled that he chose me to be featured in this article. Zander is one hell-of-a-storyteller and I think he told my story very well. I'm particularly happy with how he was able to weave my mom into the conclusion of the article.

If you've read the article, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please consider leaving a comment. 

The end of testsandgrades

When I share with people the case against grades, and that I plan on working with my children's teachers to reduce or eliminate grading from their education, I am met with a myriad of responses. Including this:

It sounds like you are "one of those parents". You should just homeschool your children or go to a private school.

This reaction saddens me.

Has public education become so rigidly, narrow minded and singularly focused on its bureaucratic policies that it can't even start to imagine how to meet the needs of the very people it's meant to serve?

Since when did public education become about scoring well on someone else's test or coming home with As on your report card?

Who is public education for if not for the children?

Before we can understand where we want to go, it's more than likely that we will need to know where we've already been. The future of school will have a lot to do with understanding the history of school.

Let's examine three excerpts:

Zander Sherman's book The Curiosity of School: Education and the Dark Side of Enlightenment is an important read because it outlines the often unknown, and disturbing, origins of public education. He writes:

In Prussia, it was school that enabled the secret training of soldiers. In America, it was school that was seized to create an educated labor pool, thanks to the financial contributions of Carnegie and Rockefeller. In Canada, it was school that was used to convert Native Canadians into just regular ones. In Asia, India and the rest of the world, school is the gatekeeper of power, privilege and prestige. The people who control it, control the world.

In his book Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin writes about the origins of the multiple choice test:

In 1914, a professor in Kansas invented the multiple choice test. Yes, it's less than a hundred years old. 

There was an emergency on. World War I was ramping up, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants needed to be processed and educated, and factories were hungry for workers. The government had just made two years of high school mandatory, and we needed a temporary, high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots. 

In the words of Professor Kelly, "This is a test of lower order thinking skills for the lower orders." A few years later, as President of the University of Idaho, Kelly disowned the idea, pointing out that it was an inappropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned. The industrialists and the mass educators revolted and he was fired.

Thom Hartmann writes about the history of grades in his Complete Guide to ADHD:

Around the turn of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was going full-bore. Piece-work payments were becoming increasingly popular, and many schools were beginning to pay teachers based on the number of students they had, as opposed to a flat salary. 

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people. 

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn. 

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were "up to grade." It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.) 

Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed whose style of learning didn't match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.

Sometimes I like to ask: when did public education become hijacked by testsandgrades? But what if this is a misleading question? What if public education was never about helping each child construct meaning for themselves in a way that led them to lead a life of citizenship in a democracy? What if public education's purpose was to propagandize children into interchangeable, compliant workers and soldiers?

If we can't even agree why we have school, it should not surprise anyone that we can't agree on how we should do school.

Neil Postman writes in his book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School:

In tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about means, rarely about ends. Should we privatize our schools? Should we have national standards of assessment? How should we use computers? What use can we make of television? How shall we teach reading? And so on. Some of these questions are interesting and some are not. But what they have in common is that they evade the issue of what schools are for. It is as if we are a nation of technicians, consumed by our expertise in how something should be done, afraid or incapable of thinking about why.

I write this book in the hope of altering, a little bit, the definition of the "school problem" -- from means to ends. "End," of course, has at least two important meanings: "purpose" and "finish." Either meaning may apply to the future of schools, depending on whether or not there ensues a serious dialogue about purpose. By giving the book its ambiguous title, I mean to suggest that without transcendent and honorable purpose, schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better. With such a purpose, schooling becomes the central institution through which the young may find reasons for continuing to educate themselves.

Because the origins of public education and testsandgrades are mired in goals that have less to do with citizenship and critical thinking and more to do with compliance and labour, it is important that we engage those who have never been invited to reconsider their unexamined assumptions about school. The truth is that many people are reassured by signs of formal-traditional school and are disturbed by their absence, and what's worse is that these same people are often offended when they are invited to rethink their preconceptions for what school should look and feel like.

Because the end of testsandgrades tend to sabotage our long term goals for our children, it's time we bring an end to testsandgrades. In other words, because testsandgrades do not have an honourable and transcendent purpose, they need to be finished. But nothing will change until good people become active in making change. Testsandgrades are not like death and taxes -- they are not like the weather -- they are pedagogical and political ideologies that can and should be opposed.

Here is a list of all my posts on rethinking assessment and abolishing testsandgrades.

Consider checking out the Grading Moratorium.