Pedagogy

[Trivia: can you name the 9 permanent hosts of NBC’s The Tonight Show?]

I think a lot about C.S. Lewis’ brief nonfiction book The Abolition of Man, in which he criticizes an “educational” book that purports to teach children how to write but, instead, presents as “writing” advice a whole values system geared towards describing ennobling sentiments as mere subjective emotion and actual fact as the only thing worth committing to the page. Lewis skewers them: “literary criticism is difficult, and what [the authors] actually do is very much easier.”

I think about this a lot. That’s because people do it all the time.

Sometimes it amounts to people trading on genuinely difficult, expert work they’ve accomplished to mandate that people listen to them about . . . nothing they have particular expertise on. One of my favorite National Review pieces is their 2008 ode to the posthumous Economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman—i.e., the man stopped being an economist and is now just yet another opinionated loud mouth. (That was written in 2008, but it hasn’t stopped being relevant. He still has a home at the New York Times and his intellectually dishonest material still clutters the public discourse.)

But mostly educators and educational administrators do this. Most of the time, they do this in service of Left-wing values. Just to tether this to one specific example, a cover article on the American Library Association’s last winter’s issue was “Decolonizing the library.” But of course there are others.

Now, pedagogy is a technique—there is a lot of specific information about how to teach a class effectively that teachers need to learn. I’ve spent enough time around educators to hear some of them drop some of these over time. One once reflected on how, early on in his career, he reacted to students chatting by calling them out by name, a decision that dispelled a lot of good will in the classroom; he later realized that he could just position himself nearer them in the classroom and that consciousness would more than likely bring them to heel. Another time, a professor talked about how instructors need to explain concepts in different kinds of ways, to try to engage at least one kind of understanding from every student in the room: some really benefit from having something explained in the abstract from first principles, while others really click with examples or analogies, and others really need to do things themselves (to the extent possible, given the subject matter). Note that this is not the same thing as “learning styles” (auditory, visual, etc.), which, ahem, have no sound empirical evidence backing up their existence. (They’re a myth.)

All that to say—people who master this are not automatically qualified to dismiss thousands of years of sexual ethics or public morality. That is not something you are credentialed to do by either learning the technique of instructing students or something that emerges from the extent to which educators study history. If it were the latter, that would at least reduce the conversation to one of arguments—rather than the form it actually takes, which is educators exposing children to ideas and ideals that they want to inculcate in them (exercising the de facto power they have), and then, if that gets noticed, rather than seeking permission they seek to bowl objectors over on the strength of their degrees or some such.

Your mileage may vary in individual cases, but this seems to be the template for most of the national discussions, and it’s just a dumb category error. No training in instruction or educational research (if, say, they have a terminal research degree in education) makes their values magically better than yours, or anyone else’s.

~

Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Jack Lescoulie, Al “Jazzbo” Collins, Jack Paar, then after a Jeopardy!-style series of guest hosts, Johnny Carson for 30 years, Jay Leno for almost another 30, Conan O’Brien, (Jay Leno again,) Jimmy Fallon.