Adam Smith (1776) described how each individual, working solely for their own self-interest can interact, in a fair marketplace, to maximize the benefits for everyone. The unintentional, “invisible hand” of the market converts selfish actions toward a greater good if the conditions are right. The key condition is the rule of law.
Without clear, enforced laws, to prevent theft and to ensure property rights, the free-market economic system breaks down. Of necessity, the laws must be fair. If they are not then they will be violated, and in general it helps to minimize the number of laws people have to keep track of. People are free to do whatever they want, as long as they follow the law.
Similarly the classroom. Students need clear rules. Rules that establish the proper way to interact with their peers, and rules that protect individual rights to property and autonomy. While we hope they subscribe to their natural altruism, and indeed encourage its development, there need to be clear laws that they all can agree on. This is why we spend a lot of time at the start of each year be developing our set of rules and classroom constitution. To gain the maximum legitimacy, students develop the rules themselves, with some guidance, and establish ways of enforcing them. In my classroom, for example, we also dedicate time twice a week for a sort of legislative/judicial session, designed to deal with issues and problems that crop up.
But the reason for setting these limits is to allow freedom: freedom to learn.
If economics ultimately boils down to the study of human behavior, and our students are ultimately human (stick with me for a second here), then economic theory ought to be able to inform the way we teach. In fact, I’d argue that constructivist approaches to education, like Montessori, work for the same reasons that free-markets outperform highly-centralized command economies: freedom (within limits) better maximizes human welfare. I think this applies both to students in aggregate (the entire student population), and to the individual student also, though you probably have to aggregate over time.
What do I mean by Economics
As a study of human behavior economics differs from psychology, sociology and the other social sciences primarily because it uses money as a metric. This gives it a lot more data to play with. The last century has clearly demonstrated the advantages of the “invisible hand” of the free-market over highly-centralized command economies in providing for the broader public good. So what lessons from the study of economics can we apply to education?
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should be treating our schools and classrooms as businesses. We’re not trying to maximize profits for a firm (via test scores or however else that might translate to education), we’re trying to maximize the welfare of our students, which I take to mean, helping them achieve their full potential.
Command-and-Control
As we’ve seen in our studies of economics, flexible, market-based approaches are much better (more efficient) at achieving goals that the command-and-control, dictatorial model. The evolution of EPA’s approach to regulating pollution is an excellent example of how a federal agency learned to employ the experience of economics to better achieve a public good.
The Cayahoga River on fire in 1952. Image from United Press International via NOAA.
In the 1960’s and 70’s, rivers catching on fire, smog, and books on the invisible consequences of pollution, like Silent Spring, inspired the environmental movement and spurred the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The EPA’s job was, and is, to enforce the laws that reduce pollution and protect environment. In the beginning, they did this by telling industry and companies what to do: the EPA mandated strict limits on the emissions from factories; and power plants were required to install the “best available technology” to reduce pollution. These approaches sound good, and are certainly necessary for pollutants that are dangerous to places close to where they are emitted, but they can be expensive, encouraging people to look for loopholes in the rules so they also become expensive to enforce.
You get the same problems with long, detailed lists of rules in the classroom. Students try to circumvent the letter of the law, rather than adhere to the spirit of the rules. “No iPods allowed,” is forced to evolve into “No Personal Electronic Devices.” Then come the questions, “What about watches?” and, “What about iPads?” so more rules need to be added to the list. By the end of the week you’re approaching a list of rules approaching the length of the tax code, and still adding more.
In the case of environmental regulation, to deal with this type of problem, the field of environmental economics emerged. Environmental economists try to figure out how to achieve the pollution reducing outcomes that everyone wants in the most economically efficient way possible. More efficiency means lower costs to society. They found that there are usually quite a number of ways to achieve the environmental objectives, using the principles of the free market, that are much more efficient than the command-and-control approach the EPA had been using.
Economists like to use mathematics. There are lots of supply and demand curves, and lots of derivatives, which tend to force some over-simplification (in much the same way that your textbook supply and demand curves are almost invariably straight lines). However, sometimes simple models can lead to a better understanding of how people in societies work.
Cap and Trade
Trees believed to have been killed by acid rain. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
In the 1980’s coal burning factories and power plants were churning out a lot of pollutants. One of these, sulphur dioxide (SO2) would react with rainwater and to create sulphuric acid, which would fall as acid rain. Acid rain was a huge problem because lots of plants and animals living in lakes, streams and forests were finding it hard to adapt to the increasing acidity of their environment. Furthermore, more acidic rainwater was damaging the paint on people’s cars and dissolving limestone statues and buildings.
So the EPA implemented a Cap and Trade program. They had a good idea of how much SO2 was being released into the atmosphere, and they know how much they wanted to reduce it by, so they started to issue companies permits to pollute.
The trick was that EPA would only give out permits equal to the total amount of SO2 emissions they wanted, and every year they would reduce the amount of permits until they reduced the pollution enough to resolve the acid rain problem.
Now all the companies that polluted SO2 had to either buy a permit or stop polluting. If they could easily reduce their pollution, a company might have extra permits that they could sell to a company that was having a harder time. In theory, some companies could even buy up permits from other companies and increase their pollution. But since the EPA was only giving out so many permits, whatever happened the total SO2 pollution was still going down.
Doing it this way let the EPA set the goals and let the market for pollution permits allocate how the actual pollution reduction got done. Since the permits could be sold, this encouraged the companies that could easiest reduce their pollution to do so, resulting in a reduction in pollution at the lowest cost.
It also meant that companies were now starting to pay for the environmental damage they were doing. Acid rain is a regional problem so it’s hard to say that your pollution from your factory in Ohio is specifically causing the acid rain here in my forest in Vermont. The atmosphere was being treated as a common dumping ground.
Cap and trade is not without its problems, however, at least in this case, it worked extremely well.
The Innate Desire to do the Dishes
Montessori believed that children have an innate desire to learn. We’ve seen how easily praise and rewards can damage that internal drive. I have, however, found it hard to identify my student’s innate desire to do the dishes. They may want a clean environment, they may have been trained since pre-kindergarten to clean up after themselves (restore their environment), but their is quite often a reluctance to doing it themselves.
Classroom jobs market.
The relationship to the pollution issue is startling to think about at first, but really the issues are the same. After struggling for quite a while to get everyone to do their classroom jobs, recognition of the parallel between my job and the EPA’s lead me to thinking about creating the Job Market Trading Board. Students can trade jobs and when they do it, but in the end, the jobs get done. I remain impressed at how well it has worked.
The basic principle is more general though: set the goals and let the students figure out the best way to accomplish them.
Fortunately, we also know from extensive research both in the U.S. and elsewhere that when we treat teens like adults, they almost immediately rise to the challenge.
— Epstein (2007): The Myth of the Teen Brainin Scientific American Mind.
Is the angst and turmoil we usually associate with adolescence just a result of the way human brains develop, or is it something learned, and depends on the society that shapes our kids? Robert Epstein argues (Epstein, 2007) it’s the latter not the former, and, despite a lot of other research to the contrary, he may have a point. He believes the main problem is that western teens are treated more as children than young-adults, and they spend most of their time socializing with other teens and not with adults.
We’ve seen that one of the major problems with most psychological studies is that they only focus on WEIRD people, typically represented by college students in the Western world, who are the easiest people for university researchers to study. Using any such subset must, necessarily, be unrepresentative of the full range of human behavior. Furthermore, since society influences brain development, even studies that focus less on behavior and more on neurological imaging are likely to be affected by the some bias.
A similar argument can be made for studies of adolescence since most studies of adolescence focus on western teens. As a result, separating behavior learned via social interaction, from the regularly progression of genetically programmed brain development is going to be difficult.
Much of Epstein’s argument is based on the book Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry (Schlegel and Barry, 1991), which compared teens in almost 200 pre-industrial societies. Epstein summarizes this and other work to indicate that in pre-industrial cultures:
about 60 percent had no word for “adolescence,”
teens spent almost all their time with adults,
teens showed almost no signs of psychopathology
antisocial behavior in young males was completely absent in more than half these cultures and extremely mild in cultures in which it did occur.
teen trouble begins to appear in other cultures soon after the intro- duction of certain Western influences, especially Western-style schooling, television programs and movies.
learn virtually everything they know from one another rather than from the people they are about to become. Isolated from adults and wrongly treated like children, it is no wonder that some teens behave, by adult standards, recklessly or irresponsibly.
Apprenticeship (image by Emile Adan via Wikimedia Commons).
Epstein’s antidote is to treat teens like adults. I agree. However, it’s essential to keep in mind what type of adults we want them to be: responsible and logical, while retaining the creativity we usually associate with childhood. This is something that typifies the ideal of Montessori education, all the way from early-childhood up.
If we’re not skilled at something then only practice and learning can remedy the situation. But, according to Kruger and Dunning (1999), human nature tends to try to blame other things, like luck, instead of our own lack of skill when things go wrong. Interestingly, we’re even resistant to thinking that our lack of skill is the problem, even when we’re given that negative feedback.
So an essential skill for the student is to learn how to take criticism constructively. Self-awareness, metacognition, and the ability to be honest with oneself are important. Let this be a warning:
“One of the ways people gain insight into their own competence is by comparing themselves with others.” “Incompetent individuals fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing the behavior of other people.”
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)
P.S. Note that “incompetent” is used here to express a level of knowledge and skill that can be improved on to become “competent”. Incompetence is not a fixed quality, unless you let it be.
P.P.S. This is another reason why it’s important that students share their work with one another and the class. The best work tends to ratchet up the standards and expectations.
The central proposition in our argument is that incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills that enable them to tell how poorly they are performing, and as a result, they come to hold inflated views of their performance and ability…. the way to make incompetent individuals realize their own incompetence is to make them competent.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)
If you don’t know what you’re doing, then it’s quite likely that you don’t know that you don’t know. Kruger and Dunning (1999) did a set of interesting studies to show this to be the case. It explains why people with the least information and knowledge about a subject may feel the most confident to opine about it.
It kind of explains why adolescents know everything. I know that I knew everything when I was 12, and ever since then I’ve been knowing less and less.
Of course there are the less typical teenagers who don’t express the same unaware overconfidence. They can be extremely competent at a particular thing (let’s call it a domain), like writing to take a purely random example, yet are extremely unconfident of their ability.
Well Kruger and Dunning (1999) have an explanation for that too. Competent people tend to think everyone else is competent too, so they tend too underestimate their ability relative to everyone else.
Teachers can easily fall into a similar trap, because we will often, quite unintentionally and unconsciously, assume students know more than they do. This is one of the reasons peer-teaching works so well. Students are more likely to know where their peers are coming from, and what they know to begin with.
The NY Times’ Errol Morris has a great interview with one of this study’s authors.
I’ll end with the most wonderful concluding remarks, which really put this whole study in perspective:
In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, method- ological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)
Progressive approaches to education focus on students taking ownership of their education. It works in education, it works in economics, and it works in politics too.
Protesters are also working with students and the army to protect the priceless antiquities at the Egyptian Museum and the books at Bibliotecha Alexindrina.
Since different student learn better in different ways, would it make sense to separate schools and classes by different learning styles? A countervailing argument, and the one upon which my Montessori middle school program (which is based on the Coe model) is predicated, is that students need to learn about different ways of learning and be able to interact with peers with different learning styles because creative endevours, especially in the future, will rely heavily on making connections between diverse fields and groups. The importance of having students interact in a diverse environment is particularly important if we can observe that students will, eventually, self-select in different fields based on their native talents, which are related to their learning styles. Students with a mathematical aptitude may tend to become engineers, more so than their peers.
So intellectual and cognitive diversity is important, yet the program also requires some uniformity. I’ve heard that, in general, students without experiences in Montessori-like environments can have a hard time adapting to the Montessori Middle School because we expect an awful lot of independence and time management that students are often not exposed to in traditional schools.
At any rate, accounting for learning-style diversity is essential, and sometimes I wonder if today, with so many more opportunities and temptations available for early specialization, if we’re not seeing further diversification in the cognitive continuum. What precisely is the point where students should begin to specialize. Matt Might model (pictured below) has specialization of education beginning at college, but it really starts earlier, at least in high school, but I wonder where the is the most appropriate initiation actually is. Historically, at least, kids were apprenticed at a very early age.
Sarah Ellison’s excellent article in Vanity Fair about the collaboration between the Guardian newspaper and Wikileaks in publication of leaked documents, has got me thinking about how teaching needs to adapt to the internet age.
The most interesting theme in Ellison’s article is the contrast between old and new media: Julian Assange’s web-based Wikileaks and the 200-year-old British newspaper, the Guardian (which, I will confess, has a wonderful football podcast).
The conflicts between the two organizations’ cultures has apparently lead to a lot of friction and miscommunication, but also resulted in a fairly effective collaboration. The Guardian has been one of the more active newspapers in exploiting the internet, but it provides the institutional integrity and journalistic tradition that seems to be able to temper some of the manic enthusiasm of Wikileaks’ zealous idealists.
It is no surprise that Wikileaks and Wikipedia share a core precept; transparent organizations work better (of course Wikipedia has put this into practice in its own organization, while Wikileaks aims to reduce the opacity of other organizations). And it should be no surprise that Wikileaks’ model has many supporters who are digital natives. What is interesting is how much the new media needs the old media, and how a forward thinking organization, like the Guardian, can adapt to, and take advantage of, the new opportunities that come from new organizations like Wikileaks.
Which takes us back to education and the internet. If we can agree with Daniel Pink and myriad others (like Ken Robinson) that traditional schooling is not effective at developing students’ creativity, and that constructivist approaches like Montessori do a much better job, then the parallel with the Guardian-Wikileaks collaboration, is that programs like Montessori are ideally placed to blossom if it can take full advantage of the new, developing, technological innovations (like Saguta Mitra‘s).
Like the Guardian, Montessori needs to embrace the new techniques the internet allows, but it is essential it is done with the same care and consideration that Maria M. applied her observations of what works in teaching. The Montessori method, has almost 100 years of tradition that needs to serve as ballast in an era when many are looking for new approaches to education, and we are trying to strike the right balance between what we know works and what we hope will.
