An Interview with Paul Zoch: Doomed to Fail

1) In "Doomed to Fail", you indicate that there seem to be some "built in defects" of American education. What are some of the most prominent?

The great defect of American education is a complex mix of many problems. As our public education system took shape early in the 20^th century, it formed its various ideals and assumptions in accordance with what pedagogical experts thought then about human behavior, the nature of young people, the nature of society and knowledge, etc.

Those assumptions and ideals govern how people in our society today see the schools and ways to improve their shortcomings. In my book, I call that complex of assumptions and ideals "the progressive paradigm," since the pedagogical experts were associated with progressive education or they reflected the thinking of the progressive era.

From early educators like G. Stanley Hall, for example, comes the idea that learning should be "fun" and emotionally fulfilling; from John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick come the ideas that students must not be expected to work hard and study diligently for subjects they have no interest in, and that teachers must teach subjects in accordance with students' interests, not what a curriculum guide says; together with the behaviorists like John B. Watson and Edward L. Thorndike they all argue that the teacher's job is to use his/her knowledge of each student's psychological make-up in order to create a lesson appropriate for eliciting the desired response.

The progressive paradigm therefore makes wide-spread educational excellence very unlikely, for the ideals of our educational thinking are hostile to educational excellence. Note, for example, that other countries do not share our country's philosophy (in fact, some of them do everything our system thinks is wrong and backwards), yet their students score much higher on standardized tests, and they manage to achieve higher standards while at the same time affording equal opportunity.

2) How have we confused education with entertainment?

I don't see that as a big issue. Rather, the big issue is who is seen as the creator of success--the teacher or the students.

Far too many people in our society see the teachers as the ones who bear the responsibility for creating excellence in education; when students fail to learn, most people blame the teachers for not teaching in the correct way for each student, and people expect teachers to solve the problems of the schools and make kids smart: "teacher accountability" is the cornerstone of education reform.

They expect teachers to change their behavior, while the students appear to have little if anything to do with becoming educated. The students seem helpless, passive, insignificant or even irrelevant in their own learning--the all-powerful teacher determines all, it seems.

Our society needs to consider the possibility that our teachers are already doing all they can, and that the students simply aren't doing their part, a great reason being that everybody expects the students to learn by virtue of what the teacher does.

Society is looking for educational excellence in the wrong place; it needs to look less at teachers and their teaching, and more at students and their efforts to understand. Students have a much greater role in their learning than the teacher does, as the learner is the only one who has the power to effect change in his (or her) brain and nervous system.

Our attitude towards student athletes and the process by which they improve their skills is more realistic than our attitudes towards students and how they learn. When athletes work out and practice, they do most of the work-- they run, sweat, exert themselves, and do many repetitions of the same play or action in order to improve their strength and skills; the coaches direct the practice, while the players work and sweat, it being assumed that improvement and success don't come easily.

If our attitudes toward athletes were the same as our attitudes toward students and their achievement in academics, the coaches would be running around on the field, throwing and catching the balls, doing the hitting or fielding drills, etc., while the athletes merely watched, without being expected to work and sweat.

Note, of course, the obvious contrast: we call the team practice sessions "work-outs," but it is utterly and absolutely inconceivable in our society to call an academic class an intellectual "work-out." According to our educational thinking, teachers must make learning fun, free of stress, and emotionally fulfilling. That's crazy.

The athletes say "No pain, no gain." That type of thinking in academics is verboten according to educational dogma.

3) Over the years, there have seem to have been a lot of fads- learning style inventories, humanistic education, values clarification- what is basically wrong with all of these fad and frivolities?

I will address only learning styles, multiple intelligences, and brain-based education, because they are the ones that affect the expectations of teachers and students today.

The problem with those approaches is that despite their superficial repudiation of stimulus-response educational psychology, they still end up making the student seem passive and helpless.

According to those approaches, the students' success depends upon the teacher's ability to divine their psychological make-up and create an appropriate lesson to capitalize on their individual strengths. Yet teachers do not have the expertise in psychology that is necessary for discerning each student's strengths, and they do not have the time and materials for individualizing the lessons.

Those approaches assume that students are incapable of striving and struggling for success, and that they are incapable of adapting to conditions not of their liking. Young people are much more capable and much more mentally tough than people give them credit for; our system needs to capitalize on those qualities by setting high standards for them and expecting them to do what is necessary to meet the standards.

4) Some blame the breakdown of the American family on the problems with education- any thoughts?

I don't see the breakdown of the American family as the culprit for education's problems; bad philosophy bears the responsibility for the low achievement.

5) Other teachers indicate that there simply are too many students with "exceptionalities, special needs, learning disabilities " being "mainstreamed" into the regular education classroom. Your thoughts on this?

I support the students' rights to be in class and to be given the opportunity, but with the provision that it is not the teacher's responsibility to accommodate the students with learning disabilities.

We will make a huge stride in improving American education if we recognize, once and for all, that the teachers simply cannot individualize lesson plans according to the psychological make-up of individual students and, that being the case, students must do the extra work to compensate for their short-comings.

Teachers do not have the time or resources to adapt their lessons to the psychological peculiarities of the students.

The teacher's time and energy need to be devoted to creating rich lessons that present the challenging material in depth to the class as a whole, and to giving students' completed work careful attention. It is unfair to the average students--easily the majority of the class--to expect the teacher to devote precious time to "adapting" lessons and tests to the needs of LD students; it is unfair to the average students that the LD students often have lower standards to meet.

For instance, I remember one student with a learning disability I had for whom I had to make accommodations on tests and quizzes. This student, because of his learning difference, was not to be expected to memorize the gender of Latin nouns or the principal parts of Latin verbs; consequently, he made Bs on tests and quizzes, while other students, who struggled to memorize the gender and principal parts, made Cs because they had to meet tougher standards.

Once a counselor suggested to me that when I tested an LD student I put the words in the Latin sentence in the word order they would be in if the sentence were in English. But then the student wouldn't be learning Latin, I commented--he wouldn't be learning Latin grammar at all, and he would not being showing any understanding of Latin grammar.

I believe that most teachers, when facing such issues, raise no objections: they are too afraid of being sued by parents, of being called to the principal's office and having to argue with the psychologist who diagnosed the learning difference, and, above all, they don't want to waste precious time and energy fighting a losing cause.

Consequently, education comes to seem like a charade--we want to believe that LD students are learning the same material that average students are learning, so we pretend that they are accomplishing something.

6) Let's face it---with students with a 60, or 70, or even an 80 I.Q.- aren't they " doomed to fail " in a curriculum that requires them to perform on grade level ?

There are certainly students in our schools who are constitutionally incapable of achieving at average levels.

7) Some have advocated lengthening the school day or even lengthening the school year--would that solve the problems we see today?

No, absolutely not. Lengthening the school day is pointless--there is only so much attention that students can pay to their teachers in a day, only so much time that they can be expected to sit and attend and listen. I believe they're at their limits already. Students don't need to spend more time being taught; they need to spend more time and energy thinking and reorganizing their minds to make sense of what they were taught. Teachers cannot be expected to work harder and longer days than they already do.

As to lengthening the school year, I doubt that it would do any good, for the simple fact that the school year is already a marathon for the dedicated teachers; they simply could not keep up the same pace for more days. Instead, simply to survive, they'd pace themselves more, and end up teaching the same amount of material but over the longer school year.

Teaching is a grueling job. At the end of the school year, teachers are completely exhausted.

The good students would pace themselves, too--they are exhausted by the end of the year. They would simply shut down, and it would be hard to blame them for doing so.

8) Nowadays, some administrators think that "technology" is the answer- just install computers, and calculators and white boards or smart boards and things will be fine- what is wrong with this type of thinking?

The problem with that type of thinking is that, true to the tenets of the progressive paradigm, it places the responsibility for the learning on anything or anyone except the students and their efforts to achieve understanding.

Computers, white boards, etc., like any tool, are only as good as how they are used, what they are being used for, and the talents of the person using the tool. Computers etc. can no more make students smart than a hammer or a saw can make a house. Only students can make themselves smart, and they do that by reorganizing their experience, that is, incorporating newly learned information into their understanding of reality, changing their behavior and ways of thinking, and broadening their understanding of the world around them.

To do that, they must read, study, think, write, memorize, imagine, conceptualize, above all, strive earnestly and devote themselves and their energies to achievement.

9) Over the past few years, the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ) has mandated a free appropriate education for students with autism, traumatic brain injury, expressive and receptive language disorders and various other exceptionalities. Is this attempt also "doomed to failure"?

See my answers for #5 and #6. My focus is on average students whose achievements, by international comparisons, are very poor, and who are not living up to their potential.

10) Family values- standards, and good old fashioned hard work- how do they figure into this equation?

The term "family values" smacks of a political agenda, so I'd prefer to use different words. My issue is human development, human potential, freedom, and empowerment. Many young people are not maximizing their potential because they believe, as many people in our society do, that their learning results primarily from what the teachers do, and that students have little responsibility or role in achievement. The students become passive, waiting for their teachers to do that which will make them smart.

They do not know that they can accomplish great things if they work hard enough; they can become doctors, lawyers, engineers, linguists, mathematicians, historians, etc., but only with hard work. People seem to see the phrase "hard work" and "studying hard" in negative terms--those are things we have to do when it is much preferable to watch TV or relax. Yet "hard work" and "studying hard" are the means by which we develop our innate potential.

They're positive things to do, not negative, for they lead to growth, increased power to determine the course and quality of one's life, and more secure freedom.

11) I have taught in both urban and rural states- and some students are more eager to be carpenters, plumbers, electricians or even fast food employees. Is mandatory, compulsory education going to work for these individuals?

Education is not just training for a job. It is preparation for life as a human being in the early 21^st century and as citizen in this country where, by definition, we the people are the government. The demands of being a human and a citizen now call for a high level of education, no matter what occupation one chooses. Considering the problems facing the world and our country, in order to be a competently functioning citizen, the individual needs to have some knowledge of the natural world, so he (or she) can understand, for example, the basics of the ongoing debate about global warming and the degradation of the environment.

The individual needs to know much more about the history of the world in order to grasp the complex issues surrounding terrorism and current events. For example, in the wake of 9/11, many Americans asked "Why do they hate us?" They seem to have expected a simple answer, as if they had never before imagined that there are people in the world who hate us and our policies.

I bet that most Americans do not even know that the Iranians are not Arabs, and do not speak Arabic. The American citizen, regardless of vocation, needs to have a sophisticated understanding of peoples and their cultures across the world so that our country can wisely pursue its interests. It would be very helpful for one to know some foreign languages not only to be able to converse with others, but also for the very important and humbling realization that people who speak different languages and live in other parts of the world look at the world in very different ways, and we need to understand them and their cultures.

Considering not only the expansion of the powers of the federal government since 9/11 but also the nature of the people who attacked us and wish to destroy us, the individual also needs to know about the Constitution and the rights, responsibilities, and benefits of being a citizen of the US. The student in an American school needs to learn to read and write English for more than just communication, he needs to develop his human faculties of reflective, critical thought and ability to participate in the great dialogue with others in the human race.

Mandatory, compulsory education has to work for all, regardless of the occupation they choose (note, also, that we as the adults in education must do all we can to insure that students acquire knowledge and skills so that they can freely choose what they wish to do and maximize their talents and abilities). The alternative is unthinkable: a country in which those who work a trade are ignorant of their country's laws, traditions, and freedoms, of the human race's development and cultures, of their own humanity and their place within the human race.

12) What question have I neglected to ask?

How about a random comment?

Japanese adults often look back nostalgically to their days in school, when they had to study so much and work very hard to meet the high expectations; one would expect them to be bitterly resentful of the hardships they had to overcome, but instead, they are proud of their accomplishments and remember fondly their struggles in school. Our students have a very negative attitude toward their time in school, probably because they accomplished so little; high school for me (I graduated in 1980) was nearly meaningless, because I learned so little. Our students might have a more positive attitude toward school if they invested more energy and more of their life in it.

Published March 21, 2007