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[Twelve by Twelve] [loose]
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�Lubomir P r y t u l a k , Ph.D.
4165 W 1 1 t h Avenue
Vancouver, BC
V6R 2L5
(604) 228-1561
March 17,
1993
B i l l Clinton
The White House
Washington, DC
20500
0°'
Dear Mr. P r e s i d e n t :
My son was a d m i t t e d t o t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h Columbia a t
t h e age o f 11. H i s l e v e l o f achievement i s t h e r e s u l t o f a system
o f e d u c a t i o n which i f made a v a i l a b l e t o a l l would produce s i m i l a r
results i n a l l .
A d e m o n s t r a t i o n p r o j e c t c o u l d be p u t i n t o p l a c e
i m m e d i a t e l y . The enclosed a r t i c l e s i n d i c a t e how.
Sincerely
Lubomir
yours,
Prytulak
�TWELVE BY TWELVE:
Is one hundred times the work
A NON-TRIVIAL GOAL
the answer
FOR EDUCATION
to all our educational problems?
BY LUBOMIR PRYTULAK
USSIA, IN LOOKING FOR WAYS TO IMPROVE ITS
economy prior to Uie collapse of communism, turned ils
eyes enviously toward the higher standard ol" living enjoyed
by communist East Germany, by communist Poland, by
communist Czechoslovakia, by communist Hungary—and
from these tried lo extract morals by means of which it
could improve its own economy. Russia hoped, in other
words, ihal improvement lay in the direction of retaining
communism and merely fiddling with its details. What it
did not want to do was to look to truly superior economic
models in the West because to imitate these would have
necessitated a loss of power by the namenklatitra, its ruling
Please send reprint requests to: Lubomir Piytulak.
4165 W 1 Itli Avenue.
Vancouver. BC V6R 2L5
�Twelve by Twelve:
class. To justify ignoring Western models.
Russia exaggerated their defects, inflated ils
own achievements, and imposed a closed
society so that the misery of its people would
be less widely known outside Russia and so
that the wealth and freedom of the West
would be less widely known inside. Such a
sham, of course, could not be pulled off
indefinitely, and the whole structure came
crashing down.
Education today is in a similar
predicament. Il is widely recognized as being
hopelessly ineffective, and educators in
Canada and the Uniied States look with envy
at the higher academic achievement ol' such
countries as South Korea, Japan, and
Switzerland for inspiration as to how to
improve. They hope, in other words, that
improvement lies in the direction of keeping
traditional classroom instruction intact and
merely fiddling with its details.
In fact, however, Canada, the United
States, South Korea. Japan, and Switzerland
all follow the same inefficient educational
model, and the differences in student
achievement between any of these countries
is trivial. Our educators turn lo them as
models not because of their great success, but
only because their schools are so similar to
ours that imitating them would require only
small changes.
What our educators do not want to look
at is the truly superior models under their
very noses because to imitate these would
require too great a change in existing power
relations. What superior models? Why the
scores of Doogie Howsers that are all around
us—the scores of students, for instance,
gaining admission lo universities all over
North America and England who have not yet
reached their teens.
To give a single
example, Ruth Lawrence graduated first in
her mathematics class at Oxford University at
the age of fourteen. Before Oxford, she had
not attended traditional school, but had been
educated al home by her father. Ruth
Lawrence is to education what Apple
Computer is to the former Soviet Union. Just
as a successful corporation like Apple
Computer provides an alternative model of
economic activity that puts the Soviet Union
to shame, so Ruth Lawrence provides an
alternative model of education lhat puts the
traditional school to shame.
And in order not to be troubled by such
an alternative model, educators ignore or
disparage it. and in order to prevent
unflattering comparisons they impose an
information ban on the achievement of
sludenls in traditional schools, in the form of
the abolition of standardized testing. This
sham, too. will not be able to go on forever.
The strain of supporting it grows greater
every day. The overthrow of traditional
education is imminent.
The present paper outlines an alternative
model which is able to produce not the puny
gains that are promised were we lo follow the
example of other nations, but truly substantial
gains—specifically, that the vast majority of
children will be able lo complete a tough
grade 12 curriculum to a high level of
mastery while still 12 years old. This is the
goal of completing grade twelve by the age of
twelve, or more succinctly il is the goal of
twelve bx twelve.
�3
One Hundred Times the Work
The
Twelve-by-Twelve
Program
CLASSROOM OF THIRTY
students is divided into live
groups of six. Each student is
able to choose from perhaps fifty
available tasks, some on computer and some
not. His goal on each task is to earn a
"personal best." A personal best can be
earned in one of two ways: either by
completing the task at the same level of
difficulty as on the previous day bul faster, or
else by moving up to (he next level of
difficulty and completing the task no matter
how slowly. Each student's number of
personal bests is monitored throughout the
day, and whichever student currently holds
the highest, second highest, and third highest
number within his group is considered to be
the current Gold, Silver, and Bronze medalist
and is entitled to wear his respective medal.
Throughout the day. a summary of the
current medalists within each group can be
called up on any computer screen, and this
summary also displays the photographs of the
three current medal holders, and the same
information is also posted on a board and
updated periodically. Furthermore, al the end
of the school day, each group stands up in
front of a video camera for a laser-printer
photo which includes a caption specifying the
date and everybody's name and identifying
that day's final Gold, Silver, and Bronze
medal winners. The three medal winners are
given copies of the photo which they tape
into their diaries (more on the diaries below).
When posing for the photo, the students lend
to make rabbit ears with their fingers behind
the heads of others, and to screw up their
faces grotesquely, and in short to produce
priceless mementoes.
Now although the twelve-by-twelve
program described above is quickly explained
and easily understood, and although it may
seem far from revolutionary, it nevertheless
delivers several astonishin» benefits.
The Students Are Motivated
Perhaps the mosl oulslanding thing about
the twelve-by-twelve program is that ils effect
on the sludenls is electric.
They are
desperate lo win an award. They race to the
day's master summary sheet to nole Iheir
progress and to seek strategic advice on what
task will most quickly and dependably earn
them another personal best, and then they
race back lo their computers or lo whoever is
available to time them on a non-computer
task. The enthusiasm observed is one thai is
commonly seen at athletic events, but is a
little less often elicited by academic aclivity.
And here is the first of several places that
we find traditional schools failing their
students—ihey inspire them to jump and
shout al a basketball game but not at a
mathematics exercise well done. Bul if we
are to have substantial academic achievement,
with what do we hope to energize it if not
with substantial enthusiasm?
Notice, loo, ihal for many of the
techniques described on these pages, one can
find parallels and precedents, and often ones
from outside the woild of education. In
having ihe family Toyota serviced recently,
for example. I noticed that on the wall behind
ihe counter of ihe service shop were large
color photographs of ihe service manager and
the parls manager, as well as several awards,
�Twelve by Twelve:
all nicely framed and carefully arranged; and
nearby was a row of similar photographs of
maybe a do/en smiling faces, which I took to
belong lo the mechanics.
Just as such
techniques of bestowing recognition and
according status can help a corporation
achieve a profit, so too can they help a school
achieve academic excellence.
The Students Are Activated
Notice, next, that in the traditional school,
children spend most of their day in passivity.
We all hope lhat ihey are silling and listening
or sitting and watching or silling and
ihinking, bul from how liiile ihey end up
learning, a safer inference would be thai they
are mainly silling.
In the iwelve-by-twelve program
described above, however, the model of an
active teacher in front of passive sludenls is
replaced by active sludenls with a leacher
facilitating Iheir activity. Whenever a sludenl
is ready lo tackle a task at a higher level, he
will often call upon the teacher to explain
whal thai level will involve—and he will
attend to this explanation firsl because il is
brief and second because it offers practical
advice on how to gel through ihe work lhat
he is aboul to commence. The teacher's role
becomes more like thai of an athletic coach
or a music instructor—guiding what the
student does rather than lecturing. The
teacher's concern shifts from whal she is
going to tell the sludenls during a class to
what her sludenls will be able lo do at the
end of the class thai they weren't able to do
at the beginning.
The underlying assumption behind
activating the sludenl is thai he learns not by
passively silling, bul rather by actively
practicing.
The Students Are Given a Choice
The twelve-by-twelve program allows the
student a choice of whal he does, when he
does it, and for how long he does it. This is
a great deal of freedom that he does not
presently have, bul that it is important for
him lo have for the same reason that it is
important for him to have some choice as to
what he eats, when he eats, and how much he
eats. If a youngster is forced to eat fish when
he wants cheeseburger, if he is forced to eat
al four when he isn't going lo be hungry until
six, il' he has his food snatched away from
him while he is still hungry or is forced to
continue eating it after he i.s full—then his
enjoyment of his food will be spoiled. Where
nature has programmed him lo love eating,
such an unnatural regimen may predispose
him to hale il.
Now a sludenl's intellectual appetites are
governed by similar passions and ones that
are sometimes equally intense, and where
nature has programmed him lo love learning,
an unnatural regimen may predispose him to
hate it. When a student has been reading a
book that fascinates him and we tear him
away to do chemistry, we should not be
surprised if he is inattentive. When he wants
to look al an insect under a microscope and
we force him lo parse a sonnet, we should
not be surprised if he is cranky. When he
has enjoyed doing five geometry problems
and wants lo quit, bul we ask him lo do five
more, we should not be surprised if he shows
signs of feeling bloated. From ihe point of
view of the instituiion, it is unfortunate that
ihe sludenl is governed by preferences and
whims and yens, and the traditional attitude
has been lo refuse to accommodate
these—bul ihe effect of this neglect is to
contribute toward producing a classroom full
of students whose bodies go through the
�One Hundred Times the Work
motions demanded of them, but without
internal joy and with the mind wandering
elsewhere.
Now it does not follow lhat students
should be allowed to do whatever they
please—there are things that they need to
know, and the adult appreciates better whal
these things are than does the child. Also,
there are precepts that it is wise to
follow—such as that the hardest things (like
math) should be done first, and the easiest
(like art) should be left to last, but this still
leaves the student considerable leeway as lo
what is done when and for how lont!.
The Awards
Evenly
are
Distributed
The iwelve-by-lwelve program distributes
awards uniformly over all sludenls. Even
students of different ages and working at
different levels are able to compete againsi
each other, and with the older or more
advanced sludenls taking away no more than
their proportional share of the prizes. The
mechanism responsible for producing an even
dislribution of awards may be that a student
who piles up personal bests day after day
finds it harder and harder lo keep on doing so
because he reaches such high speeds thai he
is unable lo belter them, and so has lo spend
time learning whatever new material or
concepts are required lo complete the task at
the next higher level, and so he may
experience a period of earning fewer personal
besis, thus allowing others to take the prize
for awhile.
Nevertheless, the even distribution of
awards is too important lo be left in any state
of uncertainty, and so a handicapping system
is superimposed; that is. the students are first
given lo understand thai the personal-best
game is only a game and not a measure of
achievement, and that this game requires that
the more awards a student has been winning
lately, the higher will his handicap be. The
handicap lakes the form of each student
carrying a slightly different definition of the
magnitude of improvement that will qualify
as a personal best. In typing, for example, a
student who has not been winning many
awards lately might be required to only
improve last day's speed by no matter how
little, a second sludenl might have to improve
it by one full word per minute, and a third
student who has been piling up a lot of
awards for himself lately might have to
improve his former record by three words per
minute.
As three medals are awarded for every
six sludenls, on any one day half the students
in ihe class earn a medal. And even on a day
on which a sludenl wins nolhing, he still
might have held the lead for some medal one
or more limes during the day, and ihis he will
remember and lake pride in and be inspired
by. The following day, the handicaps may or
may not be adjusted slightly (which can be
taken care of by the compuler) so that
starting off the day, each sludenl has an equal
chance al each award, but of course the
highest awards will go to ihe sludenls who
put out the greatest efforts. Over lime,
students accumulate an equivalent number of
awards, everybody feels good, and all the
while past effort is being recognized and
future effort encouraged.
Advantages of Self-Pacing
As each student is allowed to work al his
own speed, ihe slow sludenl does not hold
back the fast one, and is not frustrated at his
�Twelve bv Twelve:
own inability to keep up; and the fast student
does not pressure the slow student to exceed
his capacity and is not bored by the pace of
the class. If any student misses school or
falls behind, he is not daunted by the work
that has piled up and that he musl slog
through in order to catch up—indeed, now
there is no such thing as falling behind or
needing to catch up. Such a student is able
to simply resume work where he left off, or
to retreat lo an earlier level to brush up on
rusty skills.
And so too, no matter how slow or how
fast a student's progress, he is always able to
remain in the same classroom with his peers
without inconveniencing them or being
inconvenienced by them. Al the same time,
however, should any student prefer lo study
with sludenls older or younger than himself,
nolhing prevents him from doing lhat either.
One imagines, in particular, thai an especially
mature sludenl might find that he had more in
common wiih sludenls in the class one or two
years in advance of his own.
The Failure of Failure. In a traditional
school, the difference belween the sludenl
who just barely fails and Ihe student who just
barely passes is infinitesimal. In fact, if the
student who just barely failed were given a
mere two hours of luloring on the course he
failed, his performance would exceed that of
several of the sludenls who jusi barely
passed. And so il seems crushingly unfair
lhat the lack of a few hours' work should
bring on the student's head the penalty of
having lo repeat an enlire course, or thai ihe
lack of several hours' work should bring on
his head the penalty of having to repeal an
enlire year of courses.
On the other hand, for ihe traditional
school to allow a student who has not
mastered the material to advance to a hisiher
grade is lo place him in a situation from
which he is unlikely to benefit because of his
inadequate preparation and where his demand
for easier work may slow down the rest of
the class. And so in a traditional school, both
failing the student and refusing to fail him
involve unacceptable consequences.
In the iwelve-by-twelve program this
quandary is bypassed. No student is ever
made lo endure failure, and no sludenl is ever
asked lo move on lo work for which he is
unprepared or allowed to interfere with the
progress of others.
The Joy of Speed
Usually the simplest way for a student to
earn a personal best is lo repeal a task at the
previous day's level of difficulty, but faster.
In learning lo type, for example, he sees the
sentence the quick brown fox jumped lightly
over the lazy dogs displayed on a computer
screen, and tells the computer that he wants
lo work al level 1, which means lhat he is
going to lype the first word, the. And so he
starts typing the over and over again, each
lime seeing his speed in words per minute
(wpm) on the screen, and laking pride as lhat
number grows from perhaps 5 wpm to 30
wpm. Next day, and even for several days,
he might conlinue typing only the, but
eventually, his speed is going to approach a
ceiling (which for ihis one word is 136 wpm),
and iry as he might, he will find that he can't
better his previous speed, and so he will
move on to level 2, which is to type the
quick. Because he is now typing two words,
his wpm will initially drop, but as he
continues practicing, his speed again begins
to approach a ceiling, al which poini he will
prefer to advance lo level three, typing the
quick brown. Eventually, he is typing the
�One Hundred Times the Work
enlire sentence, which is considered to be
working at level 10, as the sentence contains
10 words, and as he approaches the ceiling ol"
116.2 wpm, he will discover that his previous
personal best is going to be hard to beat and
lhat it is easier to go on lo level 11. which is
merely lo type ihe first word ol" a second
sentence. Many such sentences are available,
and the sentences become harder and harder,
as by introducing internal capitalization and
punctuation.
Children love this setup and have lo be
torn away from it. A child in lhc early
grades might approach a speed ol" one
hundred words per minute on the initial
sentence within a matter of weeks, a
significant step toward becoming a competent
typist.
Now notice how it is ihal ihe twelve-bytwelve program repeatedly encourages ihe
student lo work at high speed. This high
speed has five advantages: sludenls love
speed, Vhey get a lot done, ihey build solid
foundations, they prepare for a world which
demands speed, and they learn lo work
mentally.
Students love speed. The first advantage
of high speed is motivational—the sludenls
love il. They crave aclivily that has things
moving past them in a blur. They find ihe
experience of iheir fingers flying over ihe
computer keyboard to be a delight. Ask any
piano teacher what tempo her young sludenls
prefer for all their pieces, and she will answer
"prestissimo." In traditional school ihey
squirm and fidgel because il demands of them
that they sil slill while everything around
them moves in slow motion.
The essence of speed which makes it
pleasurable is a high rale of information
turnover, and this is true no mailer whal the
nature of that information. That is why the
thrill of running fast resembles the thrill of
playing a fast video game and both of these
resemble the thrill of solving algebra
equations rapidly. Algebra is painful only
when il is done slowly, bul once the student
is allowed to slip into high gear, it becomes
exciting. This brings to mind possible views
of education that are totally foreign to our
conventional ways of thinking—we may now
begin to contemplate the possibility, for
example, that if we allowed our adventurous
teenagers lo do algebra problems rapidly, they
wouldn't be wanting to lear around on their
motorcycles as much; if geometry could be
made as fast as Nintendo, then Nintendo
would go out of business and we would
harvest a generation of Einsteins; that if
teenagers could toss off sonnets rapidly in
their heads, ihey would find the experience
addictive.
This is a view of human nature that is
neither shared by nor capitalized upon by the
schools. In schools today, nobody is doing
anything rapidly. Typically, as soon as the
student can sweat his way loward a correct
answer on half ihe questions put to him, he is
dragged on lo another topic—no, that is too
generous, he is dragged on whether he can
answer any questions or not—and so he
rarely has the chance lo achieve the speed
that he craves. II" sludenls are permitted to
build up a level of proficiency which allows
them to work rapidly, then academic subjects
that are widely held to range from tedious to
painful become fascinating and exciting.
At high speeds, a lot gets done. An
algebra card deck containing forty cards in
which the sludenl has lo solve for X, with the
easiest and hardest cards being
- X - 3 = 1 - 2 - 2X and
3/13 X + 3 = 9 - 3/13 X is completed in
the record time of 3 minutes 57 seconds,
�8
Twelve by Twelve:
which works out to 10 cards per minute. As
each card requires several mental operations,
the mind is continuously abuzz.. Such a
speed on cards this difficult is within the
grasp of students in the very early grades—if
the student has had the benefit of a twelveby-twelve program in preschool and
kindergarten, then he will be able lo approach
it by grade one, otherwise no later than grade
three. In a traditional school, doing forty
such problems might be considered to be
several hours of work which needs to be
spread over a week, but to stretch il out that
long is to necessarily make il painful. If
instead ihe deck of forty cards is dashed off
in four minutes, then Ihe sensation will be
equivalent to firing away al space invaders in
a video game for four minutes, or playing
four minutes of ping-pong. Al high speed,
the student will be totally absorbed in
following whal is happening, ami whether it
is little monsters popping out al him that he
has to shoot, or a while ball that he has to
swat, or equations that he has lo solve doe.s
not make a great deal of difference lo his
enjoyment.
Indeed, the expression "following whal is
happening" is apt in that it captures the
absence of volitional straining—the student's
experience is one of watching something
happen in the same way thai an experienced
cyclist or an experienced skier or an
experienced pianist may watch himself
cycling or skiing or playing without any
sensation of conscious effort.
Whatever a sludenl does. then, he should
do rapidly. But to do one thing rapidly is not
enough if it is followed by a long interval of
idleness. Rather, the larger goal is lo have
Ihe student be as active as possible over the
course of the entire school day. And so ihe
teacher's goal becomes not only to fill each
minute with productive practice, but also to
fill the day with as many such minutes as
possible. And so, in the twelve by twelve
program no time is wasted. The teacher
views the mastery of the curriculum as a
serious goal and whenever he finds the
student idle, seizes the opportunity to lead
him toward lhat goal. Wailing—in traditional
schools, the mosl thoroughly practiced of all
skills—in a iwelve-by-twelve program is a
sin. If a student is obligated to wait, then he
is shown how many useful things he can find
to do while wailing. Following the same
principle, the students never merely eat lunch,
they eai lunch while laking turns reading their
latest diary entries aloud lo the others, or
getting up and pointing out the features of the
moon on a poster, or passing around samples
of wood for identification. Or, ihey don't
just sil and draw, because they can draw just
as well while listening lo Henry Fonda
reading from Grapes of Wrath or while
listening lo French in Action tapes. They
don't just hike in the woods—as they walk,
ihey identify the flora or Ihey lake turns
shouting out poetry ihal they have
memorized. An image that captures this ideal
can be found in the film An Revoir Les
Enfants—boys who have gotten off a train
and are walking through he streets of a
French village towards their residential school
do not just walk, ihey sing La Claire
Fontaine as they walk.
And so, Ihe sludenls are taught to notice
time. Each carries his own stopwatch and
puts it lo use upon the slightest provocation.
Each memorizes a dozen quotations which
aim to sensitize him to ihe value of lime,
quotations such as:
Dost llion love Life '/ Then do not squander Time:
for tliat's lhc .sniff Life is made of. (Benjamin
Franklin)
�One Hundred Times the Work
Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and
Il is the same in science—without drill,
sunset, two golden hours, each sel wiih sixty
the sludenl is eternally bogged down in lowdiamond minutes. No reward is offered, for lliey level questions. Whal does COSECANT of X
are gone forever. (Horace Mann)
mean again? Let's see, I can figure it out.
COTANGENT is the reciprocal of TANGENT,
If you spend your free lime playing bridge, you SECANT is the reciprocal of COSINE, so
will become a good bridge player; if you spend
COSECANT must be the reciprocal of SINE.
it in reading, discussing, and thinking about
Now COSINE is adjacent over hypotenuse, so
things that matter, you will become an educated
SINE
must be opposite over hypotenuse, and
person. (Sidney Smith)
so COSECANT must be hypotenuse over
opposite.
Building on rock. Still another benefit
Thai is the sort of ihinking that the
of the student's attaining speed al each level
science
student who hasn't drilled his
before advancing to the next level is that this
trigonometry has to go through.
But
lays a solid foundation on which to build. In
meanwhile,
the
mathematics
or
physics
becoming fast at his current level, the student
lecture in which the COSECANT was
learns it thoroughly. And by learning each
mentioned isn't waiting for him to sort it all
level thoroughly, the student is able to avoid
out,
and has moved way beyond that point.
the confusion and insecurity that are attendant
And so, students and scientists need to be
upon being pushed too rapidly from one topic
able lo perform basic operations reflexively
to the next. Never is he put in the position
so that their minds will be free lo attend to
of being inundated with new material for
higher-order matters. They need to be able to
which he feels himself unready or by which
glance al an equation and solve it
he becomes confused. Never is he dragged
instantaneously because the discoveries
from one precariously-mastered topic to the
waiting lo be made are not in the field of
next, his grasp of the whole aboul lo collapse.
solving
simple equations, bul rather in
Always before mounting higher does he build
something higher-order of which that
a solid foundation—a foundation so solid lhat
equation
is a minor constiluent.
his responses on it become close to
And similarly, all life demands speed.
instantaneous and he may be said to be acting
We need to be able to lype or take shorthand
reflexively with little conscious deliberation.
quickly, lo compose not one but ten business
letters an hour, to ihink of the right thing to
Life demands speed. When we learn a
say
immediately and not an hour later, to
foreign language, we do not consider it
know instantly which piano key to strike
sufficient to memorize the vocabulary and the
when we see a nole on sheet music, to know
grammar, because if that were all we did.
without pausing lo reflect what to do with the
when we tried lo speak, we would find
mainsheel and the tiller when our dinghy
ourselves groping and stumbling. We would
starts to capsize, and so on.
be unable to communicate, unable lo think
and reason. It is only when we have drilled
More can be accomplished mentally.
and practiced ihal speaking ihe language
High speeds can be achieved only if the
becomes reflexive, and lhat we are freed lo
student learns lo dispense with pencil and
attend to the important things—the content of
paper and to work mentally. The benefits of
whal is beinu said.
�10
Twelve bv Twelve:
this become obvious in an example—suppose
a question arises concerning the electron
configuration of xenon. One student locales
pencil and paper, sits down and works it out,
and only then with the electron configuration
in front of him can he address himself to
whatever the initial question was. A second
student, however, rattles it off out of his
head—something lhat a ten-year-old readily
learns lo do:
2
2
f
2
2
l
6
2
o
ls 2s 2p '3s 3p"4s 3d "4p 5s 4tr 5p".
Now let us ask which of these two
students is the more likely to be able to
follow or lo contribute to a discussion of
electron configurations? Which is more
likely while silting on a bus lo have an
insighl concerning electron configurations?
People who can do things mentally have an
immense advantage over people who can't.
How fast is fast? Mental operations are
so rapid thai the leacher finds himself asking
not only how many does Ihe sludenl perform
in an hour or how many in a minute, but how
many in one second. It is when many things
are happening each second that the sludenl
experiences pleasure and can be said to be
getting a lot done. Typing the quick brown
fox sentence peaks al 10.5 keystrokes per
second, bul this does not reflect how full a
second can gel. When we examine how
quickly a sludenl can lalk, we come up wiih
an even bigger number.
Specifically, as part of learning the
circulatory system the sludenl traces how
Toxocara canis—the common roundworm of
the dog—gels from the human alimentary
canal to the brain. The student is aware lhat.
contrary to popular belief. Toxocara canis
does invade the human body and lhat it can
settle in the brain. To net to the brain, a
favorite path is the blood stream, through a
series of one-way streets and past certain
significant signposts. The student carries a
menial image of this pathway. He replies,
"Alimentary canal, portal vein, liver, hepatic
vein, inferior vena cava, right auricle,
tricuspid valve, right ventricle, semilunar
valve, pulmonary trunk, pulmonary artery,
lung, pulmonary vein, left auricle, bicuspid
valve, left ventricle, semilunar valve, aorta,
carotid artery, brain." . The record for this
recitation, shared by several students, is
eleven seconds.
The number of
phonemes—distinct sounds—in the recitation
is 216. which makes for a rate of 19.6
phonemes per second.
Nature, in other
words, has programmed children to be able to
make aboul twenty different, controlled
sounds per second.
Bul even this is not ihe highest number
ihal one can discover. Experiments have
shown that university students asked to scan
a column of digits looking for a particular
digit—say a 9—are able lo do so accurately
at the rale of 30 digits per second. Thirty
times each second, a student is able lo decide,
"I see ihis digit, il is not a 9, I will go on to
examine Ihe next digit."
That is 30
perceptions and 30 decisions every second.
These
are
man's
natural
speeds—throughout his existence on earth, he
has needed to do things quickly, and so his
fingers have learned to fly; he has needed to
communicate quickly, and so his mouth has
learned to make a sequence of subtle but
precise changes al great speed; he has needed
lo be able to place his feel safely as he
walked and lo duck branches, and all the
while to be on the lookout for food and
danger, and si) he was empowered to take in
a vasi amount of visual information and
process it quickly. All this rapid activity is
�One Hundred Times die Work
what man is genetically programmed to
engage in for the better part of every day.
Think, now, of this staggering
incongruity—that on the one hand the human
body is this superb machine capable of ten
controlled finger movements every second
and twenty distinct mouth movements every
second and thirty separate perceptual
decisions every second, and
yet in a
traditional school this machine might be left
idle for hours at a time. For hours at a time,
the student may not be asked to make a
single finger movement or a single sound or
a single perceptual decision—may even be
discouraged from doing any of these things!
This shutting down of an activity that our
endowment intends us to exercise is why
traditional school is painful, why sludenls are
demoralized, and why ihey learn so Utile. In
the traditional school, ihe student is a milliondollar compuler which is usually left
unplugged.
And so we see thai the student has the
capacity to do a vastly greater amount of
work than he is presently doing. This is not
to be accomplished by means of a slave
driver cracking a whip over him, but rather
by the student's being released from an
enforced and painful passivity. It is not to be
accomplished by heaping on the student a
pile of things to do that are beyond his
capacity and at which he balks, but rather by
giving him the opportunity to develop facility
at tasks lhat are difficult enough lo be
interesting, but easy enough to never be
daunting. Learning will progress quickly if it
becomes like tennis or hockey—in a sense
the same thing over and over again, and yet
in another sense, always different, and always
calling forth the evolution of skill by means
of concentrated practice.
While speed is valuable in most tasks, of
course there are others where il is
11
inappropriate. To keep these tasks within the
personal-best game, we shift the criterion of
what constitutes a personal best from speed to
meeting some standard of quality. In piano,
for example, a personal best would consist
not in playing a piece faster than the previous
day, but rather in playing it to a criterion of
mastery. In art, similarly, a personal best is
given not for a faster drawing, but rather for
completing a drawing of good quality. In
reading aloud, a personal best may be
credited for every so many pages read.
A Daily Report Card
Putting a twelve-by-twelve program into
effect requires the constant monitoring of
numerical measures of performance—how
many personal bests, on whal tasks, at what
level, at what speed? For tasks that have
been computerized, it is an easy matter to
have ihe computer store all this information.
At ihe end ol' the day, the teacher can type
into the computer a summary of achievements
on non-computer tasks. The result is again
something unprecedented and vastly superior
to whal prevails in traditional schools—a
daily report card.
A single sheet of large computer paper
which the student lakes home each night for
a parent to sign. On it, a complete record of
the day's performance, and all manner of
detailed comparisons—on what tasks the
student holds the school record or how far he
is from the school record; for each task by
how much he exceeded or fell short of his
previous personal best; the total number of
tasks completed, of personal bests earned, of
questions answered; what tasks are being
neglected and should be attempted soon.
Pioviding such a detailed daily report
does not mean that parents have to find time
�12
every day lo pore over il and learn more
aboul their child's performance than ihey ever
wanted to know. The daily reporl i.s, rather,
like the instrument panel of a car. The driver
may consult his speedomeler only every few
minutes, and his fuel gauge only every few
hours, and his odometer only every few
months—and yet the information must be
provided continuously so lhat it will be
available when needed. Red lights signalling
a situation requiring immediate attention are
particularly helpful. Moreover, the chief
consumer of the information in the daily
report is not the parenl but the student—ihe
student understands the report better than the
parenl, and appreciates its nuances. He is lhc
driver in this rally, and the report is his
speedometer and odometer and fuel gauge
and road map and slop watch.
Now contrast this with whal happens in
the traditional school—there, report cards
might be issued three times a year. Week
after week, month after month might go by
with the parenl having only a dim idea of
how his child is faring, how he ranks in
comparison lo other sludenls in his class,
whal are his strengths and his weaknesses,
what he is getting done from day to day.
And
worse than ihis. sometimes
outlandish educational innovations are put
into place, and immediately il becomes
widely expected that the effect ol' these on
the children will be harmful, and yel ihe
testing lhat monitors progress and thai could
be used lo evaluate ihe innovations is
proposed at widely spaced intervals—perhaps
al the ends of grades four, eight, and twelve.
In other words, a parent placing a child in
grade one won'i have hard data on whal thai
innovation is doing to his child for four years.
This isn't just wrong—it is a travesty.
Parents and citizens in general musl raise
iheir expectations of the frequency and
Twelve bv Twelve:
precision of the information on student
progress that it is possible to obtain and that
they have a righl lo expect. They should not
be content to know after four years whether
an innovation was a success or a failure.
Indeed, they should not be content to know
after four months or after four weeks. A
daily monitoring of progress is possible, and
wiih daily monitoring, any injurious scheme
lhat is put into place on Monday will have
revealed itself in deteriorating performance by
Friday, and over the weekend can be
cancelled.
Depth is Permitted,
Encouraged
Breadth
Left to themselves, children exhibit a
tendency which is remarkably adult and yet
which clashes with the demands of the
school—ihey specialize.
Thai is, they
develop a single inierest—which in an adult
would be considered a career aspiration—and
are happy so long as they are pursuing it but
frustrated when made lo do anything else.
For example, a given adult might see
himself as an artist, and if allowed to paint or
listen to a lecture on Andy Warhol or visit an
art gallery will be happy, but if asked to do
other things will find himself muttering, "But
I will never need to know the quadratic
formula!" or "Reading the Taming of the
Shrew is keeping me Irom my work!" or
"Titration problems is not what I am good
al!"
Now ihe child is similar. At any one
time, he is seized with some passion, and left
lo himself he will prefer lo devote most of
his time to il and so to neglect the wide range
of studies thai adults feel is good for him.
What to do?
�One Hundred Times the Work
Simply require him to meet the twelveby-twelve standard in all core subjects, and
after that, let him specialize to his heart's
content. The twelve-by-twelve program is so
efficient that he can meet its requirements
early in the day, and still have considerable
time left over to pursue his personal interests.
Notice that such specialization is not
easily accommodated within the traditional
school, and notice loo that while il is
accommodated within a twelve-by-twelve
program, the student always has a gentle prod
to keep his efforts broadly based because
recognition comes mainly from accumulating
a large number of personal bests which can
only be done by working on a diversity of
tasks. Also, it will happen lhat the sludenl's
focus will switch from month lo month or
from year to year, so in the end he will
achieve breadth by specializing in a number
of areas in succession rather than by flitting
from one to another for a sel time each day.
Beyond
the Personal-Best
Game
BSOLVTE RECORDS.
The
personal-best game is the chief
mechanism whereby the students
compete against each other, and it
is the mechanism emphasized by the teacher.
By this mechanism, the student is invited lo
focus primarily on making himself heller than
he was the day before.
But there is another criterion of
accomplishment, and it is so salient that only
the sliuhiest recoeniiion need be uiven to
13
it—and that is the holding of absolute
records. The student spontaneously wants to
know what the absolute record is and who
holds it and how far he himself is from
taking it.
The equality lhat we were so easily able
to achieve with respect to personal bests is
not possible with respect lo absolute
records—inevitably, some students will end
up holding more absolute records than others.
Even more aggravating than this is the
likelihood that an absolute-record predator
will arise among the students, and that this
predator will concentrate on a task and work
at il long and hard until she has taken the
school record, and then might push the record
slill higher in an effort lo make it
unassailable for a lime by others, and may
then proceed lo do the same thing on one
task after another, accumulating her horde of
absolute records. For her, the motivational
benefits will be enormous and her learning
will proceed at a prodigious rate, but what
will her hording of absolute records do to the
morale of ihe other sludenls?
The other sludenls do have some
recourse. They can turn their attention away
from absolute records and dedicate their
efforts lo the personal-best game. But even
in ihe realm of absolute records, each student
can select one or a few tasks thai he likes,
and can seize ihe record on this one or these
lew, and can defend it from ihe absoluterecord predator, and lake pride in whatever
records he has made his own. The more
thinly the predator applies her efforts, the
easier she is to beat on any given task; and
the more she concentrates on a small number
of tasks, the less is she a predator.
Bul a stronger defense against emotional
consequences lo others of the absolute-record
predator is to give every student dejectionproofing.
�14
Dejection-Proofing the Student
We might all be on the same learning
curve.
An inlerpretalion destructive ol"
motivation and which the student must be
persuaded to abandon is that individual
differences are innate and permanent. This
may indeed sometimes be the case, but as it
is usually unprovable and unknowable, why
kill initiative by invoking it?
The more adaptive view which each
student needs to be convinced of is thai he
and anyone superior to him are riding the
same learning curve, and thai ihey are
separated only by a known amouni of
practice. All the inferior sludenl need do lo
awaken his own optimism is lo
extrapolate—looking backward, he can see
how far he has come: every day he can see
himself making progress: and so looking
ahead, he must realize that it is only a matter
of time before he himself occupies ihe higher
level that ihe superior sludenl stands on
today.
The situation can be likened lo walking
home. We do not expect—nor do we
tolerate—a student half-way home falling lo
the ground and weeping and gnashing his
leelh in despair that he is not home right that
instant. Rather, we expeci him lo calmly and
patiently keep pulling one fool in front of the
other, and expect him to remain secure in the
knowledge thai so long as he is able lo
sustain this effort for a finite time, then the
house will approach and soon he will indeed
be inside il.
The recognition of one's own inferiority,
therefore, need be no more than a recognition
of a temporary inferiority which a known
amouni of labor can make up. To be beaten
need not be humiliating or depressing—it can
be inspiring.
Twelve by Twelve:
Viewing individual differences as
reflecling different positions on the same
learning curve is not just a trick for raising
the morale of a lagging student—it is a viable
interpretation of any individual difference.
Suppose a beginning guitarist hears a
professional guitarist who plays brilliantly.
The novice is templed to view the
professional as gifted and his level of
accomplishment to be inaccessible to others.
But in adopting such a view, our novice
fails io lake inio account how many
thousands of hours of overt practice the
professional has engaged in, and on lop of
thai how many thousands of hours of covert
practice, ll is conceivable—to illustrate what
I mean by coven practice—lhat the
professional has for decades been passing
every available
moment—on public
transpoiiation, watching a movie, silling in
class, or engaged in conversation—doing
exercises lo sirengthen his fingers and
improve iheir coordination and independence
and precision of motion. And so, we find
ourselves unable to attribute his excess of
excellence to inherited superiority because we
are unable lo estimate the excess of overt and
covert practice which may have contributed
lo thai excellence.
On this topic, one constantly witnesses
incredible naively.
For example, Mike
Lapica. writing about the basketball player
Kenny Anderson in Esquire (January 1991, p.
40) says, "The things he can do off the
dribble with the pass, the ability to set a
perfect table on ihe fly and blow the roof off
the gym—you don't learn those things. You
are born with them." But on the very same
page, he also says, "There was ... a basketball
court where Kenny Anderson could begin to
dream. He would play ball there every day
after school, sometimes until 10:00 at night
when his mother would come to »et him."
�One Hundred Times the Work
Whal we gather from this example is that
even when the evidence shows an unusual
amount of practice being following by the
possession of an unusual measure of skill, we
are nevertheless irrationally drawn to the
conclusion that the skill is innate.
Now with this allilude in mind—that we
can't distinguish innate giftedness from
extensive practice—what musl we think of a
child who is diagnosed as having a learning
disability? Why we would be obligated to
wonder whether this child was not merely
suffering from a deficiency of practice. We
would be obligated to distinguish what is
observation from whal is unwarranled
speculation—what is actually observed is lhat
the child cannot do things that other children
can do, bul attributing this shortfall to some
internal deficit is almost invariably a
statement of faith not of fact. Except for ihe
rare case where some physical abnormality
can be seen in an X-ray, or some
physiological imbalance can be detected in a
blood lest, it is pure conjecture, pure circular
explanation. It is saying, in essence, "We've
never looked at his brain, but we bel there's
something wrong wiih il."
But no mailer how profound our sense of
conviction in drawing such a conclusion, the
alternative interpretation still lives—thai the
deficiency of performance may have been
caused by a deficiency of practice; lhat jusi
as our professional guitarist may have for
many years been seizing every opportunity to
practice the skill in which he is today so
accomplished, so our low-scoring child may
have for many years been seizing every
opportunity to avoid practicing the skill in
which he is today so deficient.
More
specifically, il may be ihe case thai the
child's early contacts with a subject had been
traumatic, and ever since he has avoided ii.
Reading may make him anxious, and so he
15
does not read books, and on top of that loses
a great deal of covert practice by avoiding
reading billboards and street signs and
graffiti. Arithmetic has become a signal for
failure, and so his mind goes blank not only
when handed an arithmetic problem, but also
when counting his change. He has had bad
experiences with French, and whenever given
French to translate, his mind wanders off in
another direciion, and even when his eyes
alight on the French on his cereal box, they
do not linger.
A viable proposition which educators
recklessly and irresponsibly ignore is that
mosl learning disabilities may be no more
than phobias which the traditional school has
created, that mosl inlelleciual deficits may be
no more than disinclinations which the
traditional school has engineered, that most
low IQs may be no more than a rejection of
academic activity which the traditional school
has invited.
Most supposedly defective
students may be like George Bernard Shaw:
"I cannoi learn anything thai does not interest
me. My memory is not indiscriminate: it
rejects and selects; and ils selections are not
academic." And most may be like Shaw also
in being capable of. brilliance were they
fortunaie enough to stumble on an area that
permitted ils expression.
Stir-crazy students. Hyperactivity is a
concept that invites the same speculation.
That is. once one begins lo eniertain the view
lhat traditional school is monotonous and that
it demands an unnatural and unhealthy
passivity, then when one comes across a
confronlalion between a child who craves
aclivity and variety and a school which
refuses either lo permit the activity or to
supply the variety, one is less ready to
conclude that the school is right and lhat the
child is defective.
�16
But society's sympathies are all on the
side of the school.
When the school
complains that 4% of school-age children are
afflicted with hyperactivity, society listens
without alarm. And when the school puts
down a student rebellion with amphetaminelike stimulants, usually Ritalin, socieiy does
not object. Too bad for the children lhat
among Rilalin's side effects are insomnia,
lisllessness, and temporarily-stunted growth.
"In Baltimore County, Md
nearly 6% of
all school-age children were regularly dosed
with stimulants as recently as 198S" (Time.
November 26, 1990).
In this use of psychiatry to induce
conformity to an unnatural and disintegrating
instituiion, the parallel to communism once
again forces itself
upon
us—under
communism, a common response lo dissidents
was lo slap a psychiatric label on them and
subject them lo mind-altering drugs, though
never on the vast scale employed in
traditional schools.
Team pride. Bul lei us return now to
the topic of dejection-proofing a child—we
have seen lhat he need not be depressed in
the face of superior performance because he
can see thai all that separates him from thai
same performance is a given amouni of work,
and sometimes a surprisingly small amount of
work. But he can do more than that—instead
of merely feeling less pain al another's
excellence, he is able to take pleasure in it by
virtue of being in the same class or going to
the same school.
And here we stumble across yet another
motivational device—the harnessing of team
pride. Within the twelve-by-twelve classroom
each group can become a team, and the team
members can occupy a segment of the room
and work elbow to elbow for the common
good of their colleclivity somewhat like a
Twelve bv Twelve:
gang occupying turf. Pursuing this image,
one can imagine permitting a gang's
performance relative to other gangs to
determine the expansion of contraction of the
territory within the classroom which it
controls—perhaps who supervises the
cloakroom, who has first rights to the library,
who gets the best seats for a movie. The
teacher's satisfaction lies in seeing primal
needs brought in off the street and harnessed
to the service of education.
And so one more thing that can be called
up on computer screens and that can be
posted is team standings, and at the end of
the day the members of the winning team can
each receive an annotated sel of laser photos
commemoraling the team victory. And here
too entire teams can be assigned handicaps so
lhat at the beginning of the day, each team
has an equal chance of winning. Our gain is
not only another boost lo motivation, but
some benefits thai are unique lo team
effort—that students learn lo take satisfaction
from the excellence of a teammate and also
to view a weaker team member's
performance as something lhat they have an
inierest in remedying rather than only as
something that benefits them by raising their
own slandimr.
Distant Comparisons
To recapitulate, we have seen students
comparing themselves against other students
both with respect to personal bests and with
respect to absolute records, and as members
of one team againsi other teams. What we
touch on now is comparisons to more distant
persons or events.
�One Hundred Times die Work
Comparison with out-groups. A sludenl
pariicipating in a iwelve-by-lwelve program
inevitably becomes conscious thai in
comparison to where he would have been had
he stayed in traditional school, he is far
ahead. Put another way, he becomes aware
that were he to return lo traditional school, he
would find himself at the lop of the class.
Thus, students in a twelve-by-twelve program
view themselves as a group thai has broken
away from the pack, and such that the
differences within their group are trivial in
comparison to the group's outdistancing
everybody else. This enhances pride and
serves lo diminish the significance of
different levels of achievement within the
twelve-by-twelve program.
In the future, a comparison lhat all
students will find satisfying is the comparison
with the earlier generations that attended
traditional schools. In the year 2()()(), for
example, the best student might find himself
in the 99.99th percentile and the worst
student in the 99.()()th percentile compared to
their 1993 predecessors—the sorts of numbers
that will elicit equivalent pride in all students
from the best to the worst.
Competition against adults.
The
American writer Eudora Welly recalls lhat a
favorite teacher, Miss Duling, proposed a
spelling competition belween her fourth-grade
class and Ihe Mississippi Legislature, lhat the
legislators accepted the challenge, and lhat
the children won.
Children delight in healing adults and the
beaten adults are, if anything, proud and
admiring—a win-win situation for both sides.
When Dan Quayle misspelled "potato." he
may not have been doing much for his image
as vice-president, bul he did just aboul as
much as anybody could do in a single acl to
build up the confidence of ihe class of
17
students watching him- -and indeed of all
studenis everywhere.
Motivation
Without
Competition
Public Performances
T
HE
SORTS OF PUBLIC
performances that are integral to
the study of music can be
extended to oiher disciplines.
Sludenls can display iheir mastery of
mnemonic devices by repeating back a
shopping list of eighty items ihal has been
read lo them once. They can demonstrate
their understanding of chemistry by being
handed ball-and-siick models of two or more
elements or compounds, and rearranging these
io relied ihe chemical reaction that would
occur. They can hear poetry and instantly
scan it. as by identifying it as trochaic
irimeter or anapeslic hexameter. Any skill
whatever can be turned into a public
performance.
The advantage? Pride is instilled in both
student and parenl and motivation is
heightened for future achievement.
That Dastardly
Plot—Payment
Capitalist
The teacher also puts into place a token
economy in which the student earns credits
for personal bests, for absolute records, and
�18
for learn wins. Willi ihese credits the student
purchases perhaps karate instruction, access to
art supplies, time to work on a robot kit,
movies (cinema classics late Friday
afternoon), or whatever. Students may even
use their credits to purchase the right to
engage in a school task that they value—such
as typing. In this last example we see a
wonderfully efficient motivational device—a
student being rewarded for working on one
academic task by being allowed to work on
another academic task. On top of that,
private payment can be encouraged from
parent to student contingent upon the number
of personal bests or school records or team
wins.
A token economy, then, serves lo provide
a steady income for steady labor, so that even
if a student sees little hope of qualifying for
a prize, he nevertheless continues to earn
benefits for continuing to work. Wouldn't it
be wonderful if students worked merely for
the love of learning? Yes, bul until the
Utopian day arrives when creatures walk the
earth with genes different from our own, we
might contemplate doing for children whal
we do for adults when we want them lo
work—pay them! And we mighi stop
expecting from children values lhat are more
noble than the adult "Better to sit idle than to
work for nolhinu."
Role Models
Perhaps a more powerful motivator than
any mentioned above—perhaps the mosl
powerful motivator of all—is the student
admiring someone and wanting to be like
him.
As teachers are the models that
students are exposed to most, the happiest
situation is one in which students are
surrounded
by teachers of high
Twelve bv Twelve:
accomplishmeni and exceptional courage.
Failing thai, or on top of that, visitors of
distinction should regularly address students,
perform for them, and work alongside them.
But as the demand for exceptional people
far exceeds their supply, mosl role models
will have to be presented vicariously through
literature and film. And so an integral part of
the curriculum must be the reading of
biographies and the viewing of biographical
films. By the time of graduation at the age
of twelve, every student should know how
Emile Zola came lo the rescue of the falselyconvicted Alfred Dreyfus, how Ignaz
Semmelweis's discovery of the cause of
puerperal fever drew upon himself the
hostility of the medical profession, how
Thomas Edison tested 6,000 different
vegetable growths as possible filaments for
his light bulb, or how Louis Pasteur saved the
silk induslry of France from a catastrophic
disease afflicting silkworms.
Such stories musl never come from oneparagraph summaries in history textbooks
which are capable only of killing inierest, but
rather from biographies and films which are
capable of leaving behind vivid images. As
a student is exposed lo one of these after
another, every once in a while an image will
fix itself in his mind and he will say "Now
thar is something I would like to do!" or
"Yes, thai will be me someday!"
That such attachments will occur is
certain—what is unpredictable is precisely
where they will occur. A film, for example,
that one might expect would have little
impact on a young person may nevertheless
leave behind a strong predilection, and could
conceivably decide a career. For example, a
young sludenl who saw the Japanese film
Taxing Woman aboul a female government
lax investigator announced afterward lhat he
wanted to be a "lax collector" and as he was
�One Hundred Times die Work
told that the chief requirement for such a
position would be a knowledge of accounting,
began to study accounting with the help of
accounting textbooks lhat a parent had on
hand.
The teacher does not have a choice of
whether her students will emulate models or
not, but only of helping determine which
models they will emulate. Should the teacher
fail in her duly to provide models, then the
entertainment industry will fill ihe void, and
these models will not be inventors who
relieved the drudgery of millions, or
epidemiologists who discovered Ihe causes of
diseases that killed millions, but rather rock
stars demonstrating thai one need not go to
school to be rich and film characters
demonstrating that injustices can be resolved
by wielding a hand-held cannon.
Backup in Case of Failure
Notice first that there exists a wealth of
motivational devices lhat the leacher can
employ, of which the lisl above is only a
sample. Which ones should be put into
effect?
The answer is. all of ihem
simultaneously because where several of ihe
devices might fail lo engage a student, ihere
will remain several more that might succeed.
For example, a particular sludenl might fail lo
be captivated by the personal-best awards and
might prefer to become an absolute-record
predator; another might be cool loward either
of these, bul be excited by the sense of
solidarily of working for the victory of his
group; a third might shy away from any
competition againsi fellow students, and yet
work hard to prepare himself for his next
public performance; a fourth might work
primarily to accumulate credits towards some
anticipated purchase; a fifth might only be
19
eager lo emulate some revered idol; and so
on. Redundant motivational schemes are
needed as backups in case of failure to
engage interest.
Notice second lhat while many
motivational schemes should be employed
simulianeously to generale interest in
academic subjects, schools today are
employing none. Well, close to none. At
Christmas, the school pianist and the school
violinist might perform, or every year or two
a guest of distinction might address students
in assembly hall, but throughout the year
there would be nothing like the inspirational
richness of all of the motivalional devices
outlined above being applied simultaneously.
And the result of neglecting motivation is that
instead of energy and enthusiasm, our schools
are filled with apathy and lethargy.
And notice third lhat the central
mechanism of motivation is competition. It
is the •frequent invocation of the concepts of
winning and losing, of superiority and
inferiority. This may be so even in cases that
do not involve explicit competition. The
pride that comes from a public performance
may come from an implicit recognition that
the skills displayed are out of the ordinary.
Or. the chief effect of pay may come from
the anticipation of earning things that others
prize and so being admired by others for
possessing them. Again, the motivation that
comes from emulating an idol may come
from viewing the idol as having earned
admiration by rising above others.
Educational theorists who argue that
competition is selfish and that il has
destructive consequences and that schools
musl be run without il are like Marxists who
argue that the holding of private property is
selfish and lhat il has destructive
consequences and that socieiy must be made
to function without il. In fact, a modern
�20
society cannot function without private
property and an effective school cannoi
function wilhout competition. One makes
any instituiion—whether it be a school or a
nation—work not by ignoring or suppressing
human nature and not by assuming the
presence of a type of human nature that does
not exist except in storybooks, bul rather by
accepting human nature and using it to
achieve socially-desirable goals. And an
integral part of that human nature is a love of
winning. You can talk to children all you
want about how much satisfaction is to be
found in mathematics, how important
mathematics is to science, how the world
cannoi function without malhemalics, how
useful malhemalics will be in their future
careers, and you will engage their inierest
only minimally—Ihey are bombarded with
manipulative advertising all day long, and as
far as they are concerned this is just more of
the same. But turn lhat malhemalics into a
game where they can win or lose pennies or
poker chips, where ihey can compete againsi
their friends and beal them or be beaten by
them, and suddenly their eyes brighten and
their faces light up in a smile.
And we can see that it need not be the
case lhat a school must offer a single
competition in which one sludenl wins and all
the others lose. Rather, il is easy to set up a
system which gives every student so many
ways of winning that every student does win
often and so is confident and motivated and
proud. Today's schools try lo make no
student a winner; the twelve-by-twelve school
makes every student a winner. Show me a
school thai is unaware of this principle and
lhat disparages competition and lhat fails lo
harness the sense of pride as a motivator, and
I will show you a school whose graduates
you will not wanl lo hire.
Twelve by Twelve:
Optimizing
Learning
How to Avoid Balking
RADITIONAL
SCHOOLS
traditionally make the mistake of
imposing sudden increases in the
difficulty of whal is required. For
example, the student writes nolhing from day
to day, bul then once a month is asked to
write an essay. A frequent result of such a
sudden increase in difficulty is balking—the
student stalls, and when finally driven to pick
up his pen, finds himself sitting and staring,
not knowing where lo begin or how to
proceed, daunted by the magnitude and
complexity of the task, paralyzed by writer's
block.
The proper way lo leach writing is to
have the student write something small every
single day, seven days a week. Specifically,
he is asked to keep a diary in which he
records some inieresting or amusing event of
the day, and then reads il aloud lo the other
members of his group over lunch. The
minimum length is half a page. Mondays
necessitate a longer lunch, as everybody reads
his entries from Friday, Saturday, and
Sunday.
This procedure has several benefits. It
teaches the student to write with an audience
in mind, and gives him feedback in the form
of audience reaction as lo whal others may
find interesting or amusing.
Audience
response, both positive and negative, also
provides an incentive for keeping the quality
of the writing high. And because the writing
is done daily, and because the amount written
is small, the student learns lo do il quickly
�21
One Hundred Times the Work
and wilhout suffering blockage. When later
in his academic career he is asked to write an
essay, it will seem to him no more difficult
than writing several diary entries back to
back.
The daily reading of one's diary also
constitutes an introduction to public speaking
which schools mishandle in the same way as
they do writing by requiring none for months
or years at a time, and then demanding some
performance whose rarity and brevity render
it useless for building skills, and whose
emotional impact is typically traumatic.
Incidentally, the spelling, punctuation and
grammar of diary entries should not be
checked, although any truly outrageous
solecism may be mildly commented upon.
Contemporary educators are right in wanting
to avoid inhibiting the student by demanding
too much in the way of technical correctness.
Diary writing and reading aloud are intended
as an opportunity to tell a story in ones own
way, however imperfect that may be.
Where contemporary educators are
wrong, however, is to neglect spelling and
punctuation and grammar altogether. In the
twelve-by-twelve program, even while the
teacher indulges the technical shortcomings of
the student's diary, he nevertheless includes
in the available tasks exercises lo strengthen
the student's command of technical skills, and
in this area too the sludenl moves lo a high
level of mastery at a rapid pace.
Although I have been discussing a sudden
increase in difficulty leading lo balking only
in conneclion with writing, the principle
applies to every academic subject. For
example, a math leacher gives students some
geometry to do over the Easier break. The
problems are impossibly difficult. Some
contain errors that render them unsolvable.
After the Easter break, it turns out that no
sludenl had been able lo proceed beyond
making a bare beginning. Teachers take this
sort of event lightly. Sometimes, they might
even value it for ils demonstrating how much
smarter they are than ihe students. To the
student, however, the experience can be
severely deflating. He may spend hours
struggling with the assignment, becoming
more and more exasperated, and be left with
a distaste for the subject. Far better for him
to have successfully completed during that
same time a hundred easy problems that
began to blend imperceptibly into moderately
difficult ones than lo spend the same time
stumped and fuming.
How to avoid stage fright
Similarly, to have a sludenl play piano
once a year at a recital is traumatic. What
one can do instead is whenever a student is
credited with having mastered a piece to have
his group troop into the piano room, listen to
him play the piece, and then applaud loudly.
The player has the uplifting experience of
receiving public recognition from a nonthreatening audience. As he studies the next
piece, he will be motivated lo greater effort
by the anticipation of performing il for his
group. And having gotten used to such
frequent mini-performances, he will find his
stage fright greatly diminished for any major
recital.
Sudden increases in difficulty, then, lead
to balking or lo debilitating emotion. If
something is worth doing at all, then it's
worth doing in non-onerous and nontraumatic amounts daily.
�22
Variety is the Spice of Learning
The iwelve-by-twelve program keeps
interest high by offering constant diversity.
In what place the student works, with whom
he works, the nature of whal he does—all
these are constantly changing. And so for
example a grandparent monitors reading
aloud on a couch. Sludenls declaim poetry
while hiking in the woods. They lake lurns
reading their journals to each oiher over
lunch. Sometimes they write answers in a
workbook, sometimes a group of them smell
herbs and spices around a table, sometimes a
parent times them on a math card deck,
sometimes they draw while listening to
French folk songs, sometimes they play
piano, sometimes they practice karate,
sometimes they solve chess pu/,/.les,
sometimes they do engineering drawing.
Particularly important is to relieve the
monotony of doing too many things through
the medium of paper. Thus, learning the
bones of the foot by pointing to them in a
picture is just not good enough. A beiler way
to do it is to dump the 28 bones of the foot
(this includes the two sesamoids) on a table
and have the student put them together and
name them as he goes, and lime him as he
does il (the besl time I have seen is 63
seconds). Or, ihe five lumbar vertebras can
be jumbled up behind a screen, and the young
student can reach around the screen and right
Ihem and stack them from L5 at the bottom
to L l at the top using feel alone (the best
time I have seen is 26 seconds).
Such activities serve more than one
function—the sludenls find ihe diversily
refreshing, they take pride in being able to do
things thai mosl medical students and even
most physicians can't do, and they develop an
understanding of the shape and the
Twelve bv Twelve:
articulation of bones lhat they would not have
gotten from examining pictures in a book.
Adequate Feedback
So far in our discussion about optimizing
learning, we have seen that we need lo avoid
sudden increases in difficulty and we need
variety—and lo lhat musl be added the need
for immediate feedback.
French homework offers an excellent
negative example.
One of the great
frustrations in doing French homework at a
traditional school is lhat the student often
knows that the besl translation he has- been
able to come up with is wrong, and can'l do
anything aboul it. He has to write down his
dubious answer anyway. The homework may
be due next day, bul it may also be due
several days hence; also, the answers may be
taken up the day the homework is due, but
then again the homework may be handed in
and may not be returned until several days
later. In short, there is likely lo be a delay of
from one to several days before any feedback
arrives.
And so while the student is writing his
unceriain translation, he sels up a mental
allilude of resistance toward learning it
because he fears that it is wrong and yet his
allilude of resistance cannoi screen out his
wrong sentence, and he does end up learning
it.
And worse than lhat, it commonly
happens thai the sludenl's translation is
incorrect but the warning sensation that
something is amiss is absent, and so he writes
it down happily and confidently, and may go
aboul actively memorizing il, and in so doing
leaches himself bad French.
Later—next day at the soonest—when he
does gel feedback, it is usually inadequate. If
ihe leacher presents the correct answer orally,
�One Hundred Times the Work
ihe student may be unsure ol" the spelling. If
the correct answer is written on the board, the
student still may not know whether his own
different answer is wrong or merely nonoptimal or equally good bul different, and
may be reluctant to ask. If the homework is
handed in and returned marked, then that
feedback will be so far removed from his
initial translation that he will have forgotten
whal it was that he was supposed to have
translated, and in any case, the feedback is
not followed by any demand that he redo
correctly anything lhat was wrong. Also, a
teacher correcting homework works quickly
and misses mistakes, and if a translation is
barely correct bul not ideal, may not have
time to write an explanation.
And so what we have is frightfully nonoptimal for learning. Such slow and muddled
feedback would not be tolerated outside the
world ol" academics. Imagine a video game
in which ihe player had no idea of which
space invaders he hit during ihe game, bul
was lold in a telephone call three days later.
Such a video game would be jusi aboul as
popular as French homework.
In French homework, optimal would be
first that a student never make any mistake at
all, because whenever he does make a
mistake, he is practicing an error, and the
tendency lo make that error grows a little
stronger.
To reduce the frequency of
mistakes, explanations must be clear, and
practice material must be carefully graduated
in difficully. And optimal would also be thai
feedback be immediate, and lhat when an
error has been discovered, supplementary
practice of the correct response follow
immediately.
All of this can be readily accomplished
using cards. Suppose the sludenl has lo
translate a dozen sentences from English into
French. He is siiven a dozen cards with the
23
English on one side and the French on the
other. He tries, he checks; if he's right he
lays thai card aside, but if he's wrong, he
writes out the correct translation right then,
and then places the card al the bottom of the
deck to be retesied, and so keeps working
through the deck until all cards have been
laid aside.
The benefits are several.
First,
immediate feedback. Second, an immediate
and also a slightly-delayed practice of the
correct response to wipe out the effect of
having made an incorrect response. Third,
ihe French side of the card can show
alternative permissible translations rank
ordered according lo iheir desirability, and
can also show the grammatical rules being
utilized, as well as the page number in the
text on which ihose rules are presented in
greater detail.
Fourth, wiih each new
assignment, the student accumulates an
increasingly large deck of cards that he is
responsible for. and finds this deck a
convenient way of reviewing his year's work,
either by subjecting himself to a written
translation exercise, or just translating
mentally as he flips through the cards while
sitting on ihe bus or silling on a lawn chair at
his cottage.
Ah. yes!—Bul il" ihe student has the
answers, how is the leacher to know lhat the
student is doing his work? The teacher
needn't worry—iwo reasons that the student
hales his homework now are that he has not
been motivated and lhat he lacks immediate
feedback. When both of these are supplied,
students find ihe work more enjoyable and
are more likely to do it. In any case, a
weekly quiz which tests a random sample of
the sentences assigned for translation will
give an accurate picture of the student's
progress—a picture more accurate than is
possible to get from checking homework
�24
assignmenls because these are often merely
copied from somebody else.
In its present form, though, homework is
abhorrent and should be banned. It invites
error and then presents delayed and Hawed
feedback. It often incorporates daunting
jumps in difficully and so elicits balking. It
invites copying.
It fluciuates in
volume—some weeks there being next lo
none, and other weeks there being a crushing
load. Teachers think nothing of assigning
work thai must be handed in soon—even nexi
day—without regard to whether a sludenl
might have clashing obligalions or
commitments.
In ihe iwelve-by-twelve
program, in contrast, long-range goals are sel,
but what gets done each day is up lo the
student, and sudden and depressing increases
in workload cannot occur.
Work First, Pleasure Afterwards
And there is slill another reason lo ban
traditional homework—it is that it comes at
the wrong time of day. Most adults structure
their lives so as to get their work finished
early in the day and so as lo leave their lale
afternoons and evenings free for preferred
pursuits or for recreation.
Children, in
contrast, are held in passivity during whal for
the adult world are the normal working hours,
and then are sent home to do the first heavy
work of the day. Any recreation lhat a child
engages in after school and before his
homework is spoiled by the anticipation lhat
he will have to stop soon and the anxiety of
not knowing how hard his homework will
turn out to be or whether he will succeed in
gelling it finished. The longer he delays
getting started, the more his foreboding
grows, and when he does finally start, he
sometimes realizes thai he has left himself
Twelve bv Twelve:
too lillle lime, which overwhelms him with
guilt and fear. And then, struggling through
the homework, he runs into things he either
can't do or suspects he's doing wrong, and he
writhes in torment. In his sleep, he begins to
have nightmares which will recur for the rest
of his life.
To this quandary the solution is
simple—give children what adults feel that
they themselves deserve—the right to get
one's work finished in the first part of the
day so as lo be able to face the rest of the
day with a clear conscience. In other words,
no homework!
Given lhat the student isn't going to be
asked lo do homework, his traditional
schoolday may be judged to be too shorthand
so can be lengihened. Increasing the length
of the school day in a traditional school is not
advisable—there the students are unhappy
and unproductive, and longer hours will elicit
mounting unhappiness and plummeting
productivity.
Bul in a twelve-by-twelve
program, I have found that a nine-hour day
from 8:30 lo 5:30 flows by smoothly and
happily and that when 5:30 does arrive, a
common response is surprise and the
comment thai il seems that lunch had been
finished noi long ago. Parents comment lhat
when their children used to come home from
traditional school, ihey would be lired and
dejected, whereas now thai ihey are coming
home from a twelve-by-twelve program three
hours later than usual, they were bright and
cheerful. A nine-hour day is not essential,
but if one wanted it, one could be sure that
the sludenl's happiness would not suffer, and
one might wanl il not so much lo squeeze
every last bit of academic progress out of the
students, but more lo keep ihem out of the
embrace of an increasingly corrupting world.
But to return to homework—il must be
voluntary. As all the sludenl's materials
�One Hundred Times the Work
permit individual study, he is free lo lake
them home and work at them as much or as
little as he wants. IT he never wants to do
anything at home, that's line—he gets enough
done during the day thai he doesn't have to
work at nisht.
Streaming
F STUDENTS ARE ALLOWED TO
proceed at their own pace, then some
will move ahead of others. Is this
something to be feared or avoided?
Well, first let us ask whal is the case in
the traditional classroom today? Whal we
may think we see in the traditional classroom
is uniform achievement—thai is, the students
attend the same classes, ihey carry the same
textbooks, Ihey write the same examinations,
so how different can ihey be? Bul when we
look not al appearances but at performance,
we find that the difference belween the lop
and bottom sludenls is the difference belween
night and day. The top sludenl can stand up
in front of ihe class and teach the course just
about as well as the teacher. The bottom
student is quite unable lo answer questions on
three out of four topics covered, and his
response to the fourth is muddled.
And within any given subject, this vast
difference is fixed. The rank ordering of the
students changes almost not at all from year
to year, and this is not because the students
are happy with their ranking, but rather
because the system locks ihem in and
obstructs any change. Despite the appearance
of a single stream, then, students are held in
different streams as rigidly and permanently
as if ihey were forced to go to different
schools in differeni parls of ihe city.
25
And the injustice of it all is thai this rigid
streaming is often established early in life by
chance evenls. For some inconsequential
reason a student may miss out on some
central concept—say fractions. This initial
setback may not have any great significance.
Maybe the student had been away from
school because of illness.
Maybe he
transferred from one school lo another, and
his old school hadn't yet begun the topic,
while his new school had already passed it.
Maybe exciting things had been happening to
him and he was daydreaming about them; or
maybe disturbing things were going on in his
life and he was preoccupied with ihem.
Maybe he jusi wasn't mature enough at that
moment lo grasp fractions, but would have
been a couple of months later. For whatever
reason, he misses out on fractions and either
doesn't understand them at all. or has a shaky
grasp of them and keeps gelling confused.
And whoosh! Whal was that?—That was
a fork in ihe slream. and suddenly he's in the
stupid stream for life. Now he finds his
homework baffling and fails ihe next test.
Inslanlly, he hates math, can't follow what's
being said in math class, and avoids his math
homework.
And so he becomes trapped within a
vicious circle—having missed fractions it
now becomes more probable thai he will miss
the text topic as well—say per cent—both
because per cent depends on fractions and
because he is avoiding math, and the more he
misses, the unhappier he becomes, and so on
within the circle, until soon he is turned into
a mathematical incompetent and suffers from
math phobia. And yel just before he reached
thai fork in the slream. his menial hardware
may have been as good as anyone else's and
if things had gone only a lillle differently, he
could have turned out to be a mathematical
prodigy. Everything hinges on never falling
�26
behind, never daydreaming, never gelling
sick, always having the means and the
willpower to catch up—and these are things
that not every student can count on. The
present situation in traditional schools, then,
has the characteristics of the worst kind of
streaming—a streaming that is decided early
in life on the basis of chance events, and that
is so difficult to overcome that few are ever
able to jump streams.
And now let us ask whal happens in a
Iwelve-by-lwelve program.
First, the
program is so efficient thai even ihe student
who falls behind the others slill finishes grade
12 by the age of 12. If he is slow, ii is only
in comparison to a sludenl who finishes by
the age of 11 or 10. He is still competent, he
is still qualified, he is still employable. He
can still take pride in the knowledge lhat if
judged by 1993 standards, he would be
considered a prodigy.
Second, as a sludenl is never forced
ahead before he is ready, he avoids the
frustration of being unable lo do the work
and avoids the humiliation of failing, and so
is not crippled by any fear or hostility toward
the subject. Should a day of maturity ever
arrive when he is ready to apply himself to a
neglected subject, he will find no emotional
blocks barring his way.
And third, there is no procedural or
institutional obstacle to the student's catching
up to the others and passing them. There are
no forms to fill out, no bureaucrats to
convince that he deserves a second chance,
no different classroom or different school lhat
he needs to gain admission to. All he needs
to do is turn up the heal. An extra half hour
a day on the card decks or an extra two pages
a day in his exercise book, and he will find
himself moving up through the pack from
behind. Make that an extra hour a day or an
Twelve bv Twelve:
extra four pages a day, and he will find
himself bound for glory.
The Curriculum
Skip the Twaddle
FREQUENT EXERCISE IN
grade one is to print the same
letter over and over, row after
row. or the same simple word.
Mow of course a lillle of this is necessary at
the Kindergarten level, but by grade 1
children are capable of much more, but the
moie that they gel for priming practice goes
something like this:
Miss Polly lmd a dolly who was sick, sick, sick,
And she look her lo ihe doctor quick, quick,
quick.
Now consider an alternative. The child
watches ihe Linda Ronsladt-Kevin Kline
videoiape of Pirates of Penzance several
times, and memorizes passages and songs, as
for example, the policeman's lament which
starts like ihis.
When a felon's not engaged in his employment.
Or malnring his felonious lillle plans,
His capacity for innocenl enjoyment.
Is jusi as great as any honest man '.v.
Our feelings we n7/// difficully smother
When conslahiilaiy duty's to he done.
Ah. lake one consideration wiih another,
A policeman's lot is not a happy one.
And once familiar with this song, it is what
lhc child copies for printing practice, and
later it is whal he writes from dictation or
from memory as a spelling exercise.
�One Hundred Times the Work
Notice that the tendency in the traditional
school is to isolate skills and to teach one at
a time. Thus, when it is lime to learn
printing, the child prints a lol of individual
letters, a lot of individual words, and a little
bit of twaddle. It is as if it were desirable
when learning priming to be learning
absolutely nothing else but priming. In
contrast, when a child writes out a passage
from Pirates of Penzance, he is learning to
prim, bul he is learning so much more. He is
also learning how to spell, he is building his
vocabulary, he is becoming acquainted wiih
complex grammar, he is learning something
aboul people's feelings and how ihey view
the world. And thai is not all.
He is also learning someihing about
rhythm and rhyme. And, as the sludenl has
heard the verse sung, and as he can sing il
himself, then even as he does his printing
practice, he is learning music. As many of
the songs in Pirates of Penzance involve
dancing, and all involve at leasl expressive
gestures and body movements, the sludenl is
also learning someihing about these. And
there is still one more thing.
The whole of Pirates of Penzance is
imbued with irony and humor and double
entendres and slapstick, so lhat while writing
out a passage from it, the sludenl will notice
these or will recollect ihem, and so he will be
learning about these as well.
One conclusion, then, is that isolating all
the things thai a child needs to learn, and
having him work on only one of these al a
time can be overdone and that its result is
boredom and slowed learning. Everything
that a sludenl does, therefore, should be as
rich as possible—should leach on as many
differeni levels as possible. Learning priming
is good, but learning printing, spelling,
vocabulary, grammar, psychology, poetry,
27
music, dance, and humor all al the same time
is beiler and is more fun loo.
The principle of avoiding too-elementary
material finds application to every area. In
deciding whal to teach a young child, the
teacher's first step should be lo reach for a
university-level textbook and see what there
is in that textbook that the child can
understand. In science in particular, the
twelve-by-twelve teacher does not even
consider looking al any pre-university
textbooks, because these are vague, dull, and
error-ridden.
Advancing directly to
university-level textbooks is not as hard as it
may seem.
In Chemistry, for example, one readily
starts with organic chemistry because it is
non-mathematical and lends itself lo ball-andsiick modelling. Whal can be simpler than
showing a black ball (carbon) with four white
balls (hydrogens) sticking out of it and
calling thai "methane"? Next, memorize the
series, "meihane, elhane, propane, butane,
pentane, hexane, heptane, octane, nonane, and
decane," and show thai the building of each
of these requires the addition of one more
carbon lhan the last. Next, burn each one by
adding oxygen and so as lo produce carbon
dioxide and water. At every stage, encourage
the sludenls lo handle the models and lo build
on their own. There is no obstacle to
youngsiers quickly learning to glance at a
model, name the alkane it represents, specify
how many oxygen molecules it will take to
burn it, and how many water and carbon
dioxide molecules will be produced, and then
perform the substitutions on the model lo
demonstrate how the burning is accomplished.
Willing or balancing the corresponding
equations is an easy nexl step. And then the
identification of and fundamental reactions
involving ihe alkenes, the alkynes, the
alcohols, the ethers, the esters, the aldehydes,
�28
the ketones, the amines, the aromatics, the
carboxylic acids, the phenols and so on—each
of these is just one more small step—until in
a surprisingly short time the youngsters are
well into the organic chemistry portion of a
first-year general chemistry course. This
material can be introduced in grade 1 and
completed perhaps in grade 3 or 4. There
can be no justification for keeping it from
children for a decade beyond the time that
they become ready for it.
And what is the gain? One gain is lhat
the child masters a subject more permanently
and profoundly and has more time over the
course of his lifetime to delve into more
advanced topics and into a broader range of
topics. A second gain of diving righl into
advanced material is thai il is easier to learn
than elemenlary material. There lends lo be
about pre-science as taught by elemenlary and
high school teachers someihing murky and
amorphous thai makes il both unscientific and
hard to get ones teeth into; and
correspondingly, there tends to be aboul
science as taught by scientists something
sharp and crisp and clear that makes il
exciting and that makes it easier to grasp. In
fact, I would go farther than this—I would
say thai even about first-year universily
texlbooks, ihere is sometimes someihing
vague and skimpy thai detracts from their
interest and thai poses obstacles to learning,
but which is rectified in more advanced
textbooks. In organic chemistry, for example.
I would even skip first-year textbooks and
dive with my first-graders righl into Bailey
and Bailey's delightfully lucid Organic
Chemistry.
And a third gain of diving right into
advanced material is motivational—the
student is aware thai he is learning serious
science, and ihal whal he is learning is
usually unknown lo his parents and aslounds
Twelve by Twelve:
them, and lhat the other students lhat he has
left behind in traditional schools won't be
studying anything like it for another ten
years, and from all this he gains confidence
and pride and a heightened interest in the
material.
The same in other areas. Why not some
psychology? Students in second and third
grades can do Holland and Skinner's
programmed text, The Analysis of Behavior,
one of the lexis lhat I myself assigned when
leaching introductory
psychology
at
university. The branch of psychology treated
in ihis book—operant conditioning—is
concrete and lucid and particularly interesting
lo youngsters because il covers animal
learning in enough detail to enable them to
train iheir own pets to do complex tricks in
short periods of time.
And why not law? A serious torts
casebook like Wright and Linden's The Law
of Torts has long stretches of easy reading
and brings up questions fascinaling to
children and adults alike. Am I obligated to
jump into a river to save a drowning child?
What if the river is only two feel deep so that
I would not be risking my own life? What if
the water is deep, and I am a poor swimmer,
and I jump in but fail to save the child, but
my jumping in keeps a good swimmer from
jumping in?—Can ihe mother sue me? What
if the mother had been careless in letting her
child fall into the water, and 1 break boih legs
jumping off the bridge into shallow water to
save the child?—Can I sue the mother?
These are the sorts of questions that one ends
up discussing and arguing about when
reading a torts casebook and which are as
gripping lo children as Ihey are lo adults.
And of course the study of law builds
vocabulary and slrenglhens command of
grammar, and on top of that suggests rules
for conduct.
�One Hundred Times the Work
Grammar?
Certainly, but make it
transformational grammar, please, because of
its appealing clarity. Children in third grade
can be started off on Roberts' programmed
text English Syntax, and can be occasionally
exposed to a delightful example from
Koutsoudas's
Writing Transformational
Grammars to show the application of modern
linguistic methods to languages other than
English.
For example, complete
reduplication, as in Indonesian
pluraliz.ation—kursi (chair) and knrsikursi
(chairs)—is amusing to all, as is partial
reduplication, as in Tagalog futuri/ation—bili
(buy) and bibili (will buy).
Similarly, in one area after another, very
young children will reap great rewards from
being given access to materials that would
normally be withheld from them for a decade
or more.
Reading
The entire debate over whether to leach
reading phonetically or by word recognition
is inane—obviously the teacher musl use
both. The two are not exclusive. The child
musl know his alphabet and be able to sound
words out, but as this occasionally gives
incorrect results, he musl also practice word
recognition.
But no mailer whal method is emphasized
in getting a child to lake his first steps in
reading, thai child's later reading competence
will be decided primarily by a single
factor—how many hours that child spends
reading aloud under supervision. A child
reading by himself is good too. of course, bul
in the early stages not nearly as good—the
young child will mispronounce words, will
lose his place and skip words or lines, will
see nolhing wrong wiih skipping passages
29
lhat seem difficult or uninleresling, will find
some words or passages incomprehensible,
will give up before he gets to the good parts.
When reading aloud under supervision,
however, all these imperfections can be
corrected. It is reading aloud lhat is needed
in reading instruction, and so in the twelveby-twelve program, every child reads aloud
for half an hour every day to an adult who
looks over the child's shoulder and corrects
and explains and discusses.
Other
opportunities to read aloud are seized as they
arise—for example, children will sometimes
lake turns reading aloud to others during art.
More reading aloud is encouraged at home.
The rcsull is children who read basic English
fluently al the end of Kindergarten and who
begin adult novels, plays, and poetry in first
grade.
A wonderful way to introduce literature
that might otherwise be loo difficult is to
listen to recordings of il while doing
someihing with one's hands, like art.
Listening while working with one's hands
readily develops into a habit so lhat at home
when the child plays with his toys, we find
him first inserting into the ghetto blaster on
Ihe floor beside him a tape of Tartaffe, or
Mark Lane reading from his testimony to the
Warren Commission, or Bob Newharl doing
his classic Abe Lincoln monologue. In the
case of a play whose recording is complete,
the child ends up memorizing so much of it
as he plays and replays it that reading the
play becomes superfluous; in the case of a
recording of excerpts from (not condensations
of) a book, (he child's inierest is whetted, he
learns ihe names of ihe main characters and
becomes acquainted with the main themes,
and from ihere finds reading the entire book
a natural next step. Film versions of books,
in contrast, are almost invariably inferior to
�30
the book, and are capable of killing interest in
the besl of books.
The Joy of Rote
Rote memorization or perceptual
awakening?
After the diaries have been
read over lunch, the teacher passes around a
small block of ebony and one of balsa, two
woods that are about as differeni as woods
can be—ebony being black and heavy and
balsa being light in color and weight. Other
distinctive wood samples are added: perhaps
zebrawood because of its bold stripes, and
mahogany because of its reddish color. The
children take turns naming the pile of lour
wood samples.
Every day, two or more samples are
added, and soon an entire box of 54 has been
mastered, something that initially seemed
impossible because so many of the samples
appear to be indistinguishable—there are. for
example, six varieties of pine (white,
ponderosa, long-leaf, sugar, loblolly, and
parana).
Wood identification can be pursued as a
group activity over lunch, or individually with
each student winning personal bests in the
standard way—by naming the samples in his
pile faster than before, or else adding one
more to his pile and naming the whole pile
correctly no matter how slowly. The record
for the entire set of 54 blocks settles at an
asymptotically low time of one minute, which
is obviously the asymptotically high speed of
54 identifications per minute.
Now learning to name in this way does
go against current practice and is disparaged
as "rote learning" or "rote memorization."
Call it whatever nasty name you will, it has
a place in education because it brings with it
three benefits.
Twelve bv Twelve:
The firsr benefit of learning to name is
motivational—the students like doing it and
they have something else lo be proud of,
another intellectual skill that they can take
pleasure in and display. And a motivational
effect in another sense—having learned the
name of something, there comes a surge of
pleasure when one sees that thing in real life.
In a world of high drop-out rates, no
motivalional gain is to be scoffed at.
The second benefil of learning to name is
thai il brings with it perceptual awakening.
One does not see until one has been forced to
discriminate, and learning lo name forces one
lo discriminate. To a youngster, wood is just
wood, and for all he knows, has no other
name lhan "wood" and for all he cares may
all come from a single kind of tree. But
learning to name 54 varieties of wood forces
him to look more closely and notice for the
first lime differences in color and grain and
hardness and density, and sometimes very
minute differences in all these things—and
lhat changes his life. From that point on, he
will always be looking at a floor and saying
"red oak" (not to be confused wiih the darker
white oak), or at a ceiling and saying
"Western red cedar" (not lo be confused wiih
Eastern red cedar), or at a piece of furniture
and saying "padouk" (not lo be confused with
the highly similar nana and mahogany).
And a third benefil of learning to name is
that il permits communication. One hears or
reads aboul a hickory slick, or ash skiis, or
rosewood furniture, or ebony skin, and now
these qualifiers have a precise meaning where
before they conveyed "wood," if that.
But wood is only one of the many things
in our environment that can be identified, and
in learning lo identify any of these other
things, one always reaps the same benefits:
the sludenls enjoy the work, they love to
show iheir knowledge off, they are
�One Hundred Times the Work
perceptually awakened, and they are able lo
understand and communicate beiler lhan
before. Where before ihey would have seen
only a tree, now they exclaim "Douglas fir!"
Where before they would have seen only a
bunch of stars, now ihey exclaim,
"Cassiopeia!" Where before they would have
seen only Arnold Schwarzenegger, now they
exclaim, "Pecloralis major!" Where before
they were being served only someihing
strange-smelling, now they exclaim,
"Marjoram!" Where before ihey would have
seen only a face on a dust jacket, now they
exclaim, "Pablo Picasso!" Where before they
would have heard only an unfamiliar accent,
now they exclaim, "Devonshire!" Where
before they would have seen only a dog, now
they exclaim, "Rottweiler!" Where before
they would have seen only a mushroom, now
they exclaim, "Destroying angel!" This is a
greal deal of fun and a great deal of
perceptual awakening thai the student is not
to be deprived of.
Whatever the twelve-by-twelve student
learns is always thorough and impressive.
When he learns dogs, for example, he learns
every last dog in the American Kennel Club's
Official Dog Book, and has ihe piclures taped
to cards so lhat he can be limed. When he
learns muscles, he points out 131 of them on
a good muscular model. When he learns
British dialects, he learns all 32 on the BBC
LP English With a Dialect. When he learns
faces, he learns all the faces in a book of
portraits of famous people.
Rote memorization or internalization of
language and wisdom? There is another
activity lhat the traditional leacher blackens
with the label "rote," and thai is the
memorization of quotations, of poetry, of
songs, of word definitions.
31
Brushing the disparaging label aside, we
nole that this sort of memorization may be
one of the most important things lhat a
student can do to develop his language skills
and his intellect. In the twelve-by-twelve
program, the student spends half an hour each
day reciting by memory from his current
memorization deck to a leacher or a parent or
grandparent or to some other student. When
he has recited a card perfectly on twenty
differeni days, ihe card is date-stamped and
retired and replaced by a new card, but dug
out every two or three years and recycled into
the current memorization deck for another
single run through as a refresher to make sure
lhat the card has been permanently
internalized. When a card contains something
long, the sludenl starts by merely reading it
aloud, bul without earning a check mark
toward his twenty. An observation that never
ceases to amaze me is that if a child reads
someihing once a day for many days, then he
ends up knowing ii by heart, even though it
may be long and complicated, and even in the
absence of instructions to memorize it, and
also in the absence of any apparent effort or
strain or sign of rehearsal.
And so what is ihe benefil of this
memorization? The focus here is no longer
perceptual awakening. Rather, if the teacher
has been able lo provide selections that
contain beautiful English and significant
ideas, then the result of memorizing these
selections is the internalization of the
language and the ideas.
Vocabulary is
expanded,
complex and innovative
grammatical constructions are internalized
and made available for use in the student's
own speech and writing. And stored in his
memory will be words of wisdom and
inspiration, and maybe these will enter his
mind at odd moments throughout the day, and
drown oul the advertising jingles and other
�32
inanities that may otherwise dominate his
consciousness.
To be able to appreciate the utility ol"
memorizing quotations, let us consider a
handful. Here is a quotation that gives a
succinct defense of the study ol" history:
In the meantime, let u.s study tilings which are no
more, ll is necessary to know ihem, if only for
the purpose of avoiding them. The counterfeits of
the past assume false names, and gladly call
themselves the future. (Victor Hugo)
Or, perhaps the student might be given a
quotation that merely offers a glimpse at
some paradox of human nature:
And again and again he came upon this
incomprehensible mendacity. Each time il was
like a riddle to Olav. He had told lies himself,
hard and cold enough lo split rocks—he had not
forgotten that—bul then-he had known whv he
lied; he had lied because he was forced lo it. lim
Eirik lied and lied, and his father could never
espy anything that looked like a plausible
reason—he did not lie for gain and he seldom
lied for concealment. (Sigrid Undsel)
Perhaps a warning against seeking an easy
way:
My child, you are entering, through indolence, on
one of the most laborious of lives. Ah! You
declare yourself an idler! prepare lo toil. You do
not wish to be a working man, you will be a
slave. To do nolhing is your object. Well, not a
week, not a day, not an hour shall vou have free
from oppression. The hardest of all. work is
thieving. (Victor Hugo)
Perhaps a caution againsi strife:
No man who is resolved lo make Ihe mosl of
himself can spare lime for personal conleniion.
Still less can he afford lo lake ihe conset/uences.
Twelve bv
Twelve:
including the vitiation of his temper and the loss
... of self-control. Yield larger things to which
you show no more lhan equal rights; and yield
lesser ones though clearly your own. Better give
your path lo a dog than be bitten by him in
contesting for the right. Even killing the dog
would not cure the bite. (Abraham Lincoln)
Perhaps a surprising preference for simple
intellectual pleasures above worldly success:
// anybody would make me the greatest king that
ever lived, with palaces, and gardens, and fine
dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful
cloihes. and hundreds of sen-ants, on condition
Ihal I would not read books, I would not be a
king. (Thomas B. Macaulay)
Perhaps a call for vigilance againsi tyranny:
They came for the Communists and I didn 7 speak
up because I wasn'/ a Communist. They came for
ihe Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't
a Jew. They came for ihe trade unionists and I
didn't speak up because. I wasn't a trade unionist.
They came for ihe Catholics and I didn 7 speak up
because I was a Proleslanl. Tliey came for me
and there was no one left to speak. (Martin
Neimoeller)
To memorize the above sample of
quotations might take an hour or two spread
over many days. I copied them out here so
as to permit the reader lo ask himself Ihis
question—what i.s there lhat the child can
learn in an hour or iwo thai could possibly
stand him in better stead? Whal could
possibly be better for him than being given
an inner voice lhat can be called forth from
time, lo lime to offer inspiration and guidance
and protection, and thai can remind him of
the elegant and moving ways in which
laiiiiuaue can he used?
�33
One Hundred Times the Work .
There are a couple of hundred such
quotations lhat no twelve-year-old should be
wilhout, and also a score of poems and
another score of songs. Committing these to
memory is an indispensable part of the
twelve-by-twelve program.
Creativity Coming Out of Our
Ears
With its emphasis on ihe repetition of a
skill to the point where il becomes reflexive,
might not the twelve-by-lwelve graduate be
suspected
of being mechanical and
uncreative?
If creativity is ihe asking of questions,
and if it is the demanding of deeper
explanations, and if il is the probing beneath
the surface and not being satisfied with
superficial accounts, and if il is seeing
parallels, then the iwelve-by-lwelve sludenls
have this in spades. In fact, they are so
creative, that the teacher's role becomes one
of suppressing creativity. There is so much
creativity that it can fill the day and interfere
with anything gelling done. Nothing is more
commonplace than for the student to say, " I
wonder whal would happen if...?" to which
the teacher is forced lo reply. " I don't know.
I'm not a chemist. There might only be a
few people in the world who can answer lhat
question, and I am not one of them. Let's
get on with the job at hand. Lei's answer the
questions that the book puis lo us, because lo
these questions there are answers." Or. more
succinctly, "Save it for your PhD "
The teacher has no choice bul lo do this.
Always there are goals that musl be met.
hurdles thai must be jumped. The leacher
keeps these in mind and wants his students to
perform well. If the sludenl fails, he will be
1
judged as incompetent and no one is going to
be impressed with the teacher's defense that
"He may have failed, but he asked a lot of
questions which I couldn't answer."
This is not lo say lhat the student's
curiosity and creativity will be entirely
suppressed—he will still have a great deal
left over. He will still ask enough questions
and nole enough parallels for a thousand
Ph.D. theses. It is just that a child is capable
of asking more questions than any teacher
can answer, bul what he needs more than
asking unanswerable questions is to master
the fundamentals of a subject first so that he
can ask belter questions and so that he has it
within his power to find the answer to some
of ihem as well.
If children in traditional schools are not
presently demonstrating a comparable degree
of inquisiliveness, this may a result of being
kept in a slate of enforced passivity. In a
twelve-by-twelve program where students are
motivated and active, creativity is so
overabundant thai some of it has to be thrown
overboard lo keep the school from sinking.
Practicability
The Obstacle of Cost
T
O PUT THE TWELVE-BY-
iwelve program into effect, a lot
has to be added
to a
classroom—compuler terminals, a
video camera and a laser printer, teaching
aids like bones and muscular models and
wood blocks, areas in which a sludenl can be
limed or can read aloud, and mainly several
additional teachers—and so we immediately
�34
see ihal either we're going lo have to move
our class of thirty inio a bigger room, or else
we're going to have to have fewer than thirty
per room. How can the cost of all of this be
contained?
While computers do cost money, they
save labor, and thus may pay their own
way—for example, computers can relieve
teachers of the labor of making up
examinations, as recommended in Towards an
Open Curriculum: The 333-Qiiestion Course
(Prytulak, 1992). The additional manpower
that is needed may come primarily from
family volunteers, particularly parents and
grandparents. Also, once the educational
bureaucracy has begun to break apart,
inefficiencies that have been protected may
prove to be reversible and will save
money—for example. perhaps some
administrators will venture back into the
classroom and perhaps teachers will bring
their working hours into line with those of
other professionals.
But there is another consideration which
permits us to foresee that future costs might
not rise or might even fall below current
levels. And that is that a lesser reliance on
the lecture method reduces the need for
students to all be present in one classroom at
the same lime. This would permit students to
do some of their work at home, and so might
reduce the pressure on leaching manpower
and on classroom space. Older sludenls, in
particular, might be ones who had the
maturily to work on their own outside the
school, and whose need for teachers might be
restricted to the occasional use of a phone-in
or a drop-in consultation to ask a question
where the wrillen materials fell short of being
perfectly clear.
Of course any initial pilot project will be
especially costly because it will be
developing materials that do not presently
Twelve by Twelve:
exist, bul thai can later be passed on at small
cost lo other schools making the change to a
twelve-by-lwelve program.
One has lo keep in mind, also, that
present-day resistance to increases in
educational spending occur in a context in
which whatever money is already being spent
is largely wasted and in which increased
spending offers no guarantee of enhanced
performance. If it were ihe case, however,
lhat achievement could be doubled, the
benefits to society would be so great that
even a substantial increase in spending would
be justified, and any modest increase would
be welcomed as an unparalleled investment.
And finally there arises the issue of
whether some of ihe funds currently allocated
to ihe advancement of national prestige,
national influence, or national security could
not help realize these same goals belter by
being
diverted
to e f f e c t i v e
education—perhaps we are entering or have
already entered an era in which the ultimate
victory in international competition will go
not to the nation thai has amassed the most
nuclear warheads or that has the most men
under arms, but rather to the nation that has
amassed the mosl patents.
The Obstacle of The Teacher
Ian (I have changed all names) was a boy
in firsl grade in a Vancouver-area school
several years ago who caught my attention
when I observed that he was far ahead of the
rest of the class in his malhemalics
workbook. I wondered how he had been able
to do ihis, particularly as another
student—Marko—had not similarly shot
ahead even though he had a reputation for
beinu advanced in mathematics.
�One Hundred Times die Work
Eventually, the riddle was solved—Ian
was sometimes picked up after school not al
2:30 when all the other children went home,
but at 3:00. During this half-hour several
days a week, Ian would, apparently of his
own accord, work through his mathematics
workbook and so get ahead. In order not lo
get left behind by Ian, Marko began to bring
his mathematics workbook home so lhat he
could catch up to Ian. Progress through the
workbook became brisk. At the pace they
were setting, Ian and Marko would finish ihe
entire workbook, a year's work, in a couple
of months.
But the race did not last. New rules were
brought into effect. Now there was no longer
a minimum number of pages that had lo be
done each day, but rather a fixed number lhat
was noi to be exceeded. If the sludenl
finished ihe required number of pages, he was
not allowed to go on. If lhat left him with
time on his hands, he had to find something
else lo do. If his parents picked him up half
an hour after ihe bell, he was noi to imagine
that he was going to be allowed to spend his
lime working through the curriculum.
Soon Ian and Marko, who by the end of
the year could have finished off not only that
workbook, bul the one after thai, and the one
after that as well, were dutifully plodding
along at the prescribed pace. The race was
cancelled. Equality had been restored. Five
years later, 1 heard that Ian was doing badly
in school.
Things have deteriorated loo far in our
schools for us lo indulge in the luxury of
beating around the bush and mincing words.
The stark reality is thai leachers hold students
back. They have two reasons. The first is
thai the accelerated progress of some sludenls
would be demoralizing lo the others. The
other sludenls would wanl the pace-breakers
held back, as would their parents. This is the
35
same sentiment ihal one finds among people
who have grown up under communism: "In
the Pskov region, workers on a collective
farm were so resentful of the success of a
private grazer that they decided to
'confiscate' 140 calves and all his equipment"
(Time, December 30, 1991). But the topic of
unequal progress and slreaming has already
been discussed above, and I hope has been
satisfactorily resolved in favor of the
conclusion thai all the benefit is on the side
of allowing students to proceed at their own
pace however unequal thai may prove to be.
The second reason ihal teachers hold
students back is thai the sludenl's capacity for
learning is so vast lhat if unrestrained would
find him beginning university-level material
in firsl grade. The problem here is that firstgrade teachers are not ready to leach
universily-level material, nor to answer
question concerning it, nor even to learn it
themselves. In fact, if materials equally
unfamiliar to all were taught to both first
grade sludenls and firsi-grade teachers, the
students would learn it faster.
So here's one big obstacle, and in fact the
only serious one. lo educational reform—the
leachers don't want it. The leachers are the
nomenklatura of education, holding back
reform. Children learn so rapidly that their
leachers are forced to suppress that learning
so that they—the teachers—are noi left
behind or so that they don't have to work
long hours struggling to keep up. If reform
means twice as much work for the teachers,
then how can we expect them lo welcome it?
A reform that ihey are more predisposed to
welcome is one that lakes ihe students off
their hands for another segment of time each
day—a reform like television in the
classroom. Those interested in effective
education, however, must oppose the
introduction of television into the classroom
�36
because it violates the first principle of
education—that the student be kept active.
Although activity is the student's preference,
if passivity is enforced, it becomes addictive,
and once a passive mood is induced, the
student will cling to it and will view aclivily
with repugnance.
The worst imaginable
sequencing of events is lo first induce a state
of passivity by watching some television, and
after that asking that some work be done—to
this the certain outcome will be hostility and
resistance.
The Obstacle of The Educational
Expert
Turning to the educational expert for help
in remedying the traditional school is usually
like turning to an employee of the Ministry of
Propaganda in a Communist country for help
in remedying the country's economic plight.
The only answer thai such a person is capable
of giving is Ihal Ihe system is fundamentally
sound, but needs to be tinkered with.
If communism doesn't work, it's because
we haven't got enough of it—we slill have
too much inequality, loo much private
property, too many attacks from the press, loo
much opposition from the capitalists. And
mainly, it's the people! If only ihey would
behave according to theory, then how
perfectly would the theory be confirmed. If
only ihey would dedicate themselves to the
uplifting of ihe nation, then how high would
the nation be uplifted. If only they worked
selflessly toward the enrichment of all. then
how rich would ihey all become. If only ihey
didn't slack and malinger and steal and
sabotage and black marketeer, then whal a
Utopia we would all share. And so the
Communist theoreticians tell us, ihere is
Twelve by Twelve:
nolhing wrong with Communism, there is
only something wrong with the people. And
if there were a single identifying feature of
such theorists, what would il be?—Why that
they have never made a business turn a profit.
And so, too, with our educational experts.
They theorize, bul their theories have never
gotten a twelve-year-old into university.
Anything wrong with school, according to
them? Sure, they say—we don't have enough
of il: we have 180 days of school a year
while ihe Japanese have 243 days. Anything
else wrong?—Sure, the students are defective.
If they would only pay attention and do their
homework, then whal a wonderful educational
system we would have! Anything else?—Oh,
yes. a lot of things.
Well?—Well, here's an example from the
pages of The New Yorker (August 12, 1991).
Described is an innovation which will solve
"a whole handful of problems."
The
innovation is "idealistic," it could have "big
consequences."
"We showed it lo the
leachers and the principals, and they were all
crazy aboul it."
What is this
innovation?—Why. lo change ihe shape of
ihe classroom. Take the standard rectangle
and shift its lop. Anything else?—Well, of
course: ihe blackboards will no longer be
slate, ihey will be porcelain, which is less
brittle lhan slaie. Anything else?—Sure:
"blackboards" will
now be called
"chalkboards." Anything else?—Well, no,
actually, there isn't anything else: "the focus
of ihe schoolroom is still the blackboard. A
teacher up ihere with a piece of slate and a
lump of chalk." There you have it—this
idealistic innovation aboul which leachers and
principals are crazy and which is expected to
solve a whole handful of problems consists of
keeping ihe traditional classroom intact while
tinkerinsz with ils details.
�One Hundred Times the Work
The Obstacle of The Student
There are iwo major obstacles lo
switching from communism to a democratic
market economy.
The first is that the
nomenklatura resists giving up power. The
second is that while youlh embraces the new
ways, age resists. Under communism, the
older people have become lazy. All their
lives they have been saying, "As long as ihey
pretend to pay us, we'll pretend lo work."
Under communism, ihey weren'l rich and
they weren't happy, bul al least they got their
daily bread without having to leave the
cocoon of their passivity.
In education, the nomenklatura have their
counterparts in the teachers and educational
theorists, while Ihe workers have their
counterparts in the sludenls. The youngest
students will jump at the twelve-by-twelve
program, and so will ihe majority of older
students—but among the latter will be some
who resist. Some of the older sludenls will
have grown addicted lo iheir passivity. All
their lives they have been saying "As long as
they pretend to teach us, we'll pretend to
learn." In the traditional school, ihey weren'l
learning much, and they weren'l happy, but at
leasl they were being passed from year to
year wilhout having to leave the cocoon of
their passivity.
37
One Hundred
limes the Work
THE IDEA OF DOING ONE
hundred times the work initially
conjures up images of students
slaving lale into the night when
ihey should be sleeping; of students ruining
iheir eyes over their books when they should
be out playing; of students being handed
ninety-nine more problems to do when they
have grown restless from solving one. But
we see now thai the twelve-by-twelve
program is not like thai al all. In fact, the
twelve-by-lwelve program abolishes
homework and leaves the student's afterschool hours free for recreation. While the
educator is free to view the program as
extracting one hundred times the work, the
student experiences it as being allowed to
have one hundred times ihe fun. Rather than,
viewing ihe traditional school as natural and
the twelve-by-lwelve program as imposing
one hundred limes the work, we are free to
view the twelve-by-twelve program as natural
and the traditional school as inhibiting ninetynine percent of the spontaneous activity.
And. of course, ihis is the crux. With
one hundred limes the work—particularly if
il is work on advanced and enriched
material—how can one fail lo achieve twice
the rale of progress and a higher level of
mastery and a broadening of the curriculum
all al ihe same lime? The trick lies in
making all thai work fun and squeezing it
into a narrow lime frame so that it does not
crowd out other areas of the student's life.
�38
Similar-Sounding
Programs May
Be Very Different
LBERTA'S
"PROGRAM
continuity" experiment which has
just Tailed, and British Columbia's
"Year 2()()()" experiment and
Ontario's "destreaming" experiment which
have barely begun but are nevertheless just
aboul lo Tail, resemble ihe iwelve-by-lwelve
program in paying homage lo the importance
of accommodating individual differences and
building self-esteem, but ihe similarity ends
there and the differences loom large.
First, these provincial experiments not
only fail to stress achievement, they openly
portray individualized learning as providing
emotional gains at the expense of
achievement. The twelve-by-twelve program,
in contrast, employs individualized learning
as a tool to raise achievement.
Second, the provincial experiments reduce
monitoring and accountability, whereas the
twelve-by-lwelve program raises them lo a
new high in both frequency and precision.
With detailed daily assessment of student
progress, the benefits of the twelve-by-twelve
program can be appreciated in a matter of
days.
Third, lo allow students to proceed al
their own pace in ihe absence of steps to
enhance their motivation is simply to allow
them to grind to a halt. The twelve-bytwelve program, in contrast, places
motivational enhancement al the center of a
teacher's concerns, and proposes concrete
measures capable of achieving il.
Twelve by Twelve:
And fourth, for a teacher to allow
individual progress in her class of thirty
sludenls, she must be provided with three
things—learning materials geared to
independent study, computers and appropriate
software, and manpower in the form of either
family volunteers or other teachers. Without
all of these, individualized progress is
unrealizable.
To imagine that a program that merely
pays lip service to vague ideals of
individualized learning and self-fulfillment
bul that is put into place in the absence of
these four essential ingredients is lo invite
certain disaster.
Driver Training
From Hell
E HAVE GROWN USED
to traditional
academic
education and so lake it for
granted lhat when we
discover an alternative model which produces
markedly superior results, we are surprised.
Such a surprising alternative model is Ruth
Lawrence already mentioned above
who—saved by her father from being
zombified in traditional school—was able to
stand firsl in her graduating class in
mathematics al Oxford Universily al the age
of 14.
But strangely enough, sometimes our
experience can be exactly the opposite—in
certain cases the education we are familiar
with is already maximally efficient, and we
so take this efficient education for granted
lhat we cannoi begin lo conceive of how it
could be bungled by anyone.
�One Hundred Times the Work
I have in mind driver training. A typical
Canadian or American experience might go
like this. The student opens his yellow pages
and selects one of perhaps forty driving
schools listed there, and informs the school al
what limes and on whal days he wants his
•lessons.
The instructor arrives al ihe
student's door with the car. If the student
should be dissatisfied with his instructor, he
can ask for another, or he can switch to
another driving school, which makes it
probable that his instructor will indeed be
friendly and helpful. Other things lhat help
lo make the instructor friendly and helpful are
that he does not have tenure and thai anybody
who wants to qualify for his job does not
have to spend several years at drivingteacher's college.
Furthermore, the student decides when he
is ready lo tackle each new stage—if. for
example, he feels unready to go out on the
highway, no one will force him to: or. if he
feels thai the instructor has kept him too long
at parking, he may simply say that he does
not wish to practice parking any more. As
the functions of instructor and tester are
separated, the student may decide to take his
lest before his instructor thinks he is ready, or
can opt for continued instruclion even though
his instructor deems it unnecessary. When
the student takes either the written or the
driving tests, he is told the results
immediately, and any shortcomings are
explained on the spot.
The student might prefer to study the
theory for the wrillen test on his own. and so
will not be forced to sil through and pay for
lectures ihal he either doesn't need or doesn't
understand, and so all his lesson lime can be
spent on what he feels he does need—actual
driving experience.
As a result of all of the above, learning to
drive is often not jusi pleasant, bul
39
exhilaraling. The enlire course might be
completed in a do/.en lessons, stretched out
over two weeks if the student wants, or
concentrated into a few days if he is in a
hurry. All of this is at reasonable cost and
requires no subsidy by the slate. At the same
lime, if the sludenl prefers to be instructed by
a friend or member of his family, then that is
his prerogative.
This description of a typical learning to
drive experience strikes us as natural to the
point of inevitability. How else could it
possibly be done? Jan Wong describes a way
in The Globe and Mail, of April 5, 1991.
In China, a driver's licence may only be
obtained by laking a driving course, with the
standard course lasting six months and the
crash course which excludes auto mechanics
lasting two months. Classes are all-day, six
days a week. Thus, anyone who is employed
musl obtain a leave of absence from work to
get his driver's licence. One policeman
volunteered for night duly so lhat he could
lake lessons on the sly. The cost is the
equivalent of ten months pay for the average
worker.
A typical day finds the student rising at 6
a.m. to catch a special bus for the hour-long
ride lo ihe school sel out in the country.
Upon arriving al lhc school, the student may
wash the car. make lea for the instructor, then
stand idly by chatting and watching other
sludenls practice maneuvers. The instructor
holds considerable power over his students:
when annoyed he will put the car in neutral
and order ihe student to push; when it rains
he will cancel classes; when he wants to take
a favorite female student for a joy ride to the
local hot-springs bath, he will send the rest of
ihe class home.
Either four or eight students share a
car—when four, then while one student
drives, the other three sit in the back; when
�40
eight, then students split into morning and
afternoon shifts. One sludenl who wanted to
learn to drive a car was assigned lo a iwotonne truck.
The six-month curriculum goes like this.
To get in, an entrance examination. The first
month, memorize regulations and start the
engine. The second and third months, study
the engine and pass a mechanic's exam. The
fourth month, study parking, pass the parking
test, and begin street driving.
Of the eight sludenls followed in the
newspaper report, seven failed the course and
went back for two weeks of remedial lessons.
Five passed on a second test. The last two
passed on a ihird test. Any that had failed
this third test would have been obligated lo
retake the enlire six-month course.
And Ihe results of such thorough training?
In 1991, nearly 5(),()()() people died in traffic
accidents across China. Even though the U.S.
has over 100 times the passenger vehicles and
over 14 limes the commercial vehicles, il had
43,500 traffic accident deaths in the same
year.
Yes, that is what education can come lo.
Thai is whal driver's educalion has come lo
in China, and thai is whal academic education
has come to everywhere that it is under state
control.
If we were lo recommend to the above
driving instructor that China should adopt the
Western system, we can be sure thai he
would not agree—he could not help noticing
thai the status and power of a driving
instructor in China was considerably higher
than in the West, and this would prompt him
to resist. He might start by saying thai he
didn't really believe us aboul learning to
drive in twelve hours—weren'l we
exaggerating just a lillle? Or if it really was
true, then ihe driving students going through
our schools musl be prodigies and as his own
Twelve bv Twelve:
students could never hope lo duplicate such
feats, ihey should not be demoralized by
hearing aboul them.
And in any case, he was a professional
who had devoted years of study lo the
mastery of driving, and was he to be exposed
to unemployment by any number of young
people who would be getting licences under
the Western system and challenging him for
his job?
And what too of all those students who
had gone before and sacrificed six months of
iheir lives and ten months' wages—would it
be right to cheapen ihe value of iheir licences
by suddenly handing ihe same licences out to
people who had only a few hours of
instruction, or even to people who had no
official instruclion at all and who merely
came in off the street asking to be tested?
And he might go on lo explain lo us that
to do something in twelve hours lhat
rightfully takes six months—or at least a
minimum of two months—is unnatural. It is
forcing a skill lo emerge prematurely when it
must, like a flower, be awaited patiently until
il emerges in its own lime. Early ripe, early
rot. you know. And he might wonder what
was
the
use
of such
hurry,
anyway—shouldn't one lake time to smell the
flowers?
And perhaps this hothousing
experiment thai we had initialed in the West
was unhealthy or even dangerous. Wasn't the
pressuie of squeezing so much learning into
such a short time going to come back to
haunt us? Didn't we all end up paying for it
later with a high alcoholism rate or a high
suicide rate? Perhaps all that frantic rushing
was ihe reason for ihe moral degeneracy and
high crime rales of ihe West? Had we not
struck a devil's bargain, selling our souls in
exchange for instant success when we could
have kept our souls and let the same
�One Hundred Times the Work
achievement come to us of itself in the
fullness of time?
These are the sorts of things that the
driving instructor might say to us upon
hearing our recommendation that driving
instruction in China be made more efficient.
Teachers Fire
the Coach
and Take Over
Basketball
MAGINE that the educational theorists
who have given us our present
methods of teaching academic subjects
have taken over physical educalion and
lave applied iheir favorite methods to the
teaching of basketball.
First of all, it was discovered that when
students were asked questions concerning the
significance of basketball and ihe rationale
underlying basketball, they usually couldn't
think of anything to say, and so il was
decided lhat any lime on the court should be
buttressed by lectures on basketball theory in
a ratio of 1 to 2. such that for every half hour
on the court, the students attended a one-hour
lecture on basketball theory.
After thai, basketball games were
discovered to have negative emoiional impact
on the losing learns, and so games were
banned, and on-courl basketball was reduced
to individual sludenls throwing balls at a
hoop. The chief benefit of this innovation
was lhat it encouraged students to study
basketball for the love of basketball itself.
41
and not because il offered a means for
humiliating fellow students.
As some students were embarrassed at
how poorly ihey threw the ball, each
sludenl's righl to privacy was protected by
requiring him lo practice and to be tested
individually, behind closed doors, and by not
divulging his score to others.
Whenever a student threw a ball—just as
the ball left his fingertips—the lights would
go out and the room would be plunged into
darkness. The student would be informed
which of his throws had landed in the basket
some ihree days later, after his instructor had
had a chance lo review an infrared videotape
of his performance. This was found to be
necessary because students too often cared
only about whether or not their ball fell
through ihe hoop, and so evaluated iheir own
performance immaturely and without
sufficient attention to important points of
slyle. After a final examination conducted in
the same way. the results had to be subjected
to six weeks of analysis before being released
to the student.
As il was discovered thai students also
became demoralized al comparisons showing
lhat their basketball skills were inferior to
those of sludenls al oiher schools or in other
countries who had adopted different methods
of instruclion, any testing that was
numerically precise was banned, and student
evaluation was limited lo verbal descriptions
thai were calculated lo be uplifting, such as
"trying hard," "showing improvement," "a
pleasure to have in the class," or "has learned
lo select shots appropriate to his skill level."
Particularly disruptive lo basketball
educalion were parents who refused to take
down garage-mounted basketball hoops as
had been recommended by leachers, and
whose children had strongly deviant
basketball-iossiiiii scores. In a tactful effort
�42
Twelve bv Twelve:
to inform such parents of the impropriety of
their conduct, they were said to be
"hothousing" their children. In cases where
deviant scores were not attributable to any
known driveway basketball, the students were
dubbed "prodigies." Whatever the reason for
a student having deviant scores, il was felt
appropriate to keep the numbers of such
students small by questioning their sanity and
by inciting fellow sludenls lo bully them by
means of sometimes veiled and sometimes
explicit signals of disapproval from leachers
and from parents of normal children.
The observation thai sludenls were largely
apathetic toward basketball, and that
basketball studies had a high dropout rale,
was attributed to lhc students' distraction by
such activities as reading books, watching
movies, and playing street hockey in front of
their houses.
An Offer We
Can't Refuse
HE
TWELVE-BY-TWELVE
program outlined above is not
secret and cannot be patented. Ils
essential characteristics are being
independently discovered and rediscovered
every year by hundreds of people the world
over. Anyone is free lo adopt it. It will not
be long before some nation begins to apply il
on a large scale.
And whal if we lag behind? If we are
not competitive with Japan and Germany
today, then how competitive will we be if
they adopt the twelve-by-lwelve program and
we do not? What chance will we have if half
of our 17-year-olds continue lo be unable lo
turn 9 parls out of 100 into a percent, while
all of their 5-year-olds can? We have a
choice, but it's not much of one—we can
either adopt the twelve-by-lwelve program
now, or walch our slide loward third-world
status accelerate.
We do not want to be the last to
recognize the fundamental trulhs concerning
education. That children are impressionable.
They soak up knowledge like sponges. If
during the magic years when they are so
absorbent we fill their minds not with great
literature and universily-level science, but
with cartoons, nursery rhymes, and snail'space courses, we handicap them for life. We
deny them the world-class accomplishments
which they yearn to give to the world, and
which the world yearns to receive from them.
As Chinese women used lo bind Iheir feet so
lhat they would not grow leaving themselves
permanently crippled, so we bind the minds
of our children so that they cannot learn,
leaving them permanently mediocre. It is not
a question of whether we should begin an
intellectual force-feed ing of our children, it is
a question of whether we should stop their
inlelleciual starvation. Il is not a question of
whether we should coerce them to learn; it is
a question of whether we should continue
coercing them to avoid learning. It is not
that we should tear them away from fun so
that ihey should work; it is lhat we should let
Ihem in on the secret that work is more fun
than fun. Il is not lhat we should turn them
into workaholics; il is that we should save
them from being turned into slolhaholics.
Today, the chief freedom that the
traditional school offers children is the
freedom lo remain passive. Tomorrow, the
chief freedom that an effective school will
offer ils children is the freedom to exercise
the gift that is uniquely theirs—learning.
�The Rules of the Game:
Three Varieties
Of OK-cheating in Education
Lubomir Prytulak, Ph.D.
January 1993
A First Variety of OK-cheating:
Intercepting
The Recycled Examination
The Stacie-Steve-Stone Saga
A second-year mathematics student at
the University of British Columbia
(UBC)—Steve—was tutoring a grade 12
student—Stacie—in
mathematics.
Everything looked auspicious for Stacie's
Christmas test, which was only on a single
chapter. Stacie had worked through the
chapter once at school and then twice
more with Steve, and could do everything
in it without hesitation. On the test,
however, she got 15/50.
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please write or telephone:
Everyone—Stacie, her parents, Steve,
and myself—was interested in knowing
what had gone wrong, and wanted to see
this test. Was Stacie just making slips,
and so needed to be more meticulous and
to double-check her work? Was there
some central concept in that chapter that
she confused during the test? Perhaps
the test included material that the
teacher—Mr. Stone—had given orally and
that was not in the book at all, and it was
neglecting this supplementary material that
had gotten Stacie her low mark. In any
case, as she could do all the problems in
the chapter, it was obvious that what she
needed to learn to do next was this
examination that she had failed. If she
worked through that examination once
during the Christmas holidays and then
again in the spring, she should be in better
shape when this topic was retested on the
final examination.
Lubomir Prytulak
4165 W 11th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V6R 2L5
(604)228-1561
�Unfortunately, however, we all found
ourselves unable to answer any of these
questions and Stacie found herself unable
to do any of this remedial work because
the examination was not in her
possession—the students wrote their
answers on the question sheet itself and so
had to hand it in upon completing the
examination. After the examinations were
graded, Mr. Stone allowed the students to
see them for about ten minutes in class,
but then collected them all again. From
this brief viewing, Stacie derived no benefit
whatever—there were so many things she
had gotten wrong that she was intimidated
to start asking about any of them, and if
she wasn't going to be able to take away
both questions and answers with her for
study, she wouldn't have benefitted much
from seeing the correct solutions flashed
before her anyway.
Confiscating examinations hurts the
student. Stacie is placed in a frustrating
predicament—she is told that she is not
performing well, and yet the means of
doing better are denied her. What is she
to do? Working through the textbook
chapter yet again is obviously not going to
help her—she can already do all the
questions in that chapter. Going to Mr.
Stone is not an option: he is impatient and
peremptory—he is in fact what the students
call a "screamer." Indications are that
Stacie is going to need many hours of help,
and this amount of help she can only get
from Steve with whom she feels at ease
and who is willing to give her as much time
as she needs—but as she doesn't have the
examination, she can't do this.
Confiscating examinations helps the
teacher. Given that confiscating students'
examinations is clearly bad for the student,
why is it done? There are two reasons,
and both of these benefit the teacher and
hurt the student. One is that the teacher is
unsure of the accuracy and the quality of
his contribution to the examination—the
questions, what he considers to be the
correct answers, and the grades that he
has assigned—and is afraid to open these
up to public scrutiny.
Maybe some
questions are poorly worded or confusing
or even meaningless, maybe the teacher's
solutions contain errors, maybe he was
generous in awarding part marks to Betty
but niggardly to Peter. If students are
allowed to keep their examinations, they
might end up comparing them and showing
them to parents or others who might be
well-versed in the subject, and then such
flaws and errors and injustices are more
likely to be brought to light to the
embarrassment of the teacher. Maybe his
rule is, "What they can't see, they can't
criticize."
I recollect an elementary-school
principal describing to me a teacher's
devastation upon receiving a multi-page
critique of a French test from an irate
parent. It is almost inevitable that among
all the parents of the students in a class,
there will be at least one who knows what
the teacher teaches better than does the
teacher herself, and it is particularly the
surveillance of such a parent which every
teacher dreads.
But perhaps the teacher's more
important
reason for keeping
his
examinations secret is that he wants to
reuse the questions on subsequent
examinations. Now if his first reason was
bad, this second one is terrible. It is a
confession, first of all, that the course is
really quite easy, that there are only a
small number of questions that can be
asked on an examination, and that if
�OK-cheating
students are shown these questions, then
their marks will be unacceptably high. In
other words, keep them ignorant by limiting
the materials available to them for study.
In still other words, keep their marks down
by practicing examination by ambush,
where the questions that the students are
asked are ones that they had no way to
prepare for.
Now contrast this to the usual practice
in first-year mathematics, physics, and
chemistry courses at the University of
British Columbia. In these courses, old
examinations are typically on sale with
complete solutions, and students recognize
that working through these is the best way
to prepare for upcoming examinations.
Some UBC professors go to the trouble of
photocopying old examinations along with
their own optimal solutions, and handing
these out to students free of charge. Now
the question must surely arise, why this
difference? Why is it that in grade 12,
optimal educational practice dictates that
the students be denied access to old
examinations, and that their own
examinations be confiscated, whereas
when they find themselves at UBC the
following academic year, the predominant
rule seems to be the opposite—let the
students keep their examinations and
provide them with a set from previous
years as well? Can it be the case that
what is best for the student changes from
the last day of grade 12 to the first day of
university, an interval of two months? Or
might it be that one of these alternatives is
optimal, and the opposite practice deviates
considerably from what is optimal?
Teachers might offer a third reason for
restricting access to examinations, but this
reason is not credible—that if they return
the examinations, then students will change
their answers and then appeal their grades.
To this, I have four observations. First, the
students already have an opportunity to
change their answers during the time that
they are allowed to inspect their
examinations in class after they are
marked, particularly as this is when correct
answers are discussed, and still more
particularly in those cases where the
examinations are handed out at the
beginning of the class and not returned
until the end. Thus, being allowed to keep
their examinations forever would increase
the opportunity for changing answers only
slightly. Second, if preventing answer
alteration were the teacher's motive, then
teachers could offer to return photocopies
of examinations to any students who paid
the cost of photocopying, but they do not.
Third, if preventing answer alteration were
the motive, then the teachers could have
the students write their answers on
something other than the question sheet,
and could let the students keep the
question sheet, which they tend not to do.
Fourth, if preventing answer alteration were
the motive, then teachers would not object
to anyone copying down examination
questions, which I have seen them do, as
detailed further below.
Intercepting the recycled examination.
But let us turn now to the most serious of
all the d e f e c t s
of
recycling
examinations—which is that it invites
cheating. Yes, although a teacher may
claim that confiscating examinations
prevents cheating, the truth is exactly the
opposite—it sets up a system that makes
cheating possible and that encourages
cheating. Consider, for example, how
easily a student would be able to help a
younger relative or friend who was going to
�take the course a year or two later—during
an examination, the student could copy the
examination questions onto a separate
sheet of paper, and take that sheet out with
him after the examination. When the
examinations are briefly handed back for
the student's inspection during class, our
student is provided with a second
opportunity to do some copying.
Better than copying is to steal a
question sheet outright.
The testing
situation is not one of high security. As the
examinations are being passed around, it is
not inconceivable that under cover of some
bustle or confusion, or distraction on the
part of the teacher, or the teacher stepping
out of the room for a moment, or students
coming late or leaving early, a student will
be able to filch a spare copy of the
examination and smuggle it out of the
room. If the answers are not to be written
on the question sheet itself, then keeping
track of all the question sheets and making
sure that they are all returned becomes
even harder.
And then there is the
possibility of copies being appropriated as
they are being duplicated before an
examination, or as they are being stored in
the teacher's desk in the years following an
examination. To imagine that with so many
possibilities of a leak that students do not
end up with copies of an examination is to
greatly underestimate their resourcefulness
and ingenuity, as well as the intensity of
their motivation.
In fact, Stacie discovers from fellow
students after the Christmas test that one
student did indeed have a copy of an
examination from a couple of years ago,
and that old examination turned out to be
identical to the Christmas test that her
class had just written. That is, Stacie
learns of this one student and no other, but
it occurs to me that that student could
easily have shared this old examination
with his friends, or that if he had been able
to get a copy of that old examination, then
others might have been able to do the
same thing independently of him, and so in
my mind it was less a question of "Were
there others?" than of "How many others
were there?" What if a third of the class
had had a copy of this old examination?
What if three-quarters of the class had had
a copy? This would explain Stacie's poor
performance, or it would at least help to
explain it—that she did badly because she
did the naively correct thing (which was to
study from the book) and because she was
unaware that it was possible to go the
extra mile (which would have been to
obtain copies of old examinations). Maybe
this examination that Stacie failed asked
such hard questions that only students who
had had advance exposure would be able
to answer them.
And so we arrive at conclusions
concerning the chief motive and the chief
effect of denying students access to past
examinations. The chief motive is laziness
on the part of the teacher—he has
questions he likes to ask and doesn't want
to have to make up new ones. The chief
effect is that copies of these questions fall
into the hands of some of the students, and
these students enjoy an unfair advantage.
The Recycled Examination
Ubiquitous Phenomenon
is
a
Secret examinations in high-school
physics. Stacie's story above is of interest
to us not as an aberrant occurrence, but
because it is typical of what happens in
schools and universities every day. For
example, on a smaller time scale,
examination recycling is practiced when
�OK-cheating
most of a class takes the examination on a
given day, but a few stragglers with
legitimate excuses are permitted to take it
later. Similarly, a teacher or a professor
may teach two sections of the same
course, and give the same or a highly
similar examination to both sections, with
information flowing from the section which
meets earlier in the day to the section that
meets later.
During the year that my own son spent
in a Vancouver-area high school, I was
repeatedly frustrated at not being able to
see the examinations he had written.
Sometimes, he was allowed a quick look at
them in class; sometimes, he never saw
them again. On one occasion,'he studied
for a physics test by doing all the examples
in the body of a chapter twice and all the
review problems at the end of the chapter
five times. It's true! With that much
preparation, he expected to write a perfect
paper. His mark, however, was 17.5/30. I
made an appointment with his teacher to
inspect his examination. Unfortunately, a
quick look revealed nothing—one has to
work through the problems to discover their
hidden traps and to fathom what went
wrong, and this would have taken an hour
or two, which was more than the few
minutes of cursory scanning that the
teacher had obviously bargained for. I
began to copy down one of the questions
for eventual dissection at home, and the
teacher objected. I stopped copying. She
relented and said I could copy the
question. But having been apprised by her
objection that copying was not allowed, and
that my copying this question amounted to
being granted an exceptional privilege, I
declined.
This inspection of the
examination, therefore, ended
with
absolutely no benefit to either myself or my
son.
Serial testing in high-school French.
In this same high school, a French teacher
several times gave oral tests in which the
students were called up one at a time to
his desk at the front of the class where the
the testing was carried on in low voices.
The fault that interests us here is that
recycled questions benefitted the later
students, both by students reporting to
others the questions which they had been
asked, and by students sitting near the
front being able to eavesdrop. One notes
incidentally, that during all such testing, the
remainder of the class remained largely
idle, and that by not choosing students by
lottery, the teacher had arrogated the
power to punish or reward by calling
students either early or late.
A recycled examination in UBC
engineering. Over these past Christmas
holidays, I discussed my thoughts
concerning cheating on recycled
examinations with a third-year engineering
student at UBC, and she informed me that
she was presently taking a course in which
the professor confiscates examinations and
recycles them, and in which the Christmas
examination that she had just written was
identical to an old examination that was on
file in a student club to which she belongs.
We see in this example as well as in
several others below, that the recycled
examination and the interception that it
invites, though more prevalent in high
school, does nevertheless infiltrate the
university.
A recycled examination in a baradmission course. A few days after that,
�I discussed my views with a lawyer, and
she recollected that on a real estate baradmission examination that she took, her
study group had prepared answers to a few
old examinations which were kept on file at
the law firm at which she was articling.
The examination that she was about to
take was open-book, meaning that she was
allowed to bring with her into the
examination hall whatever materials she
wanted, and of course among the materials
that she did bring in were all those old
examinations and the answers that her
group had prepared. It turned out that the
examination being given that day was
identical to one of the old ones that her
group had prepared answers to, and so it
was only a matter of copying out the
prepared answers for all the members of
her group to get high marks.
A recycled examination may not even
be secret.
And sometimes the student
doesn't even have to go to the trouble of
trusting to someone else's memory, or
receiving a possibly illicit copy of an old
examination—some professors at UBC give
almost identical examinations year after
year, and some of these examinations end
up being filed in Brock Hall, where they are
available for inspection or photocopy. On
one such reliable series of Biology final
examinations that I looked at, I estimate
that a student who was given a set of
optimal answers to one such old
examination could memorize them in a few
hours and then write a near-perfect final
without ever having purchased the textbook
and without ever having learned in which
room the lectures were held.
Mystery labs at UBC. Science labs at
UBC are plagued with a similar
phenomenon.
The instructions in the
laboratory manual for most labs are
maddeningly muddled, and for some labs
are downright unintelligible. For example,
a student of my acquaintance was stumped
by a chemistry lab and came to me for
assistance.
Even though my own
chemistry was at that time well above that
of an average first-year science student, I
found myself as flummoxed as he was, and
incited him to express our common
frustration on the pages of his lab report
and suggested things he could write. In
the absence of some external support of
the sort that I was giving, a student is
unlikely to complain because he will
assume that his lack of understanding is
his own fault and not that of the course
instructors.
From that lab report, I excerpt the four
quotations that appear below this
paragraph. This quoted section starts with
an equation that the student had stumbled
across by chance in a part of the textbook
that had not been assigned, but which
seemed to be the equation he was
expected to infer from his observations:
2
2+
5S0 -+2Mn0 +6l-r^5SOf-+2Mn +3H 0
3
4
2
If this is the correct answer, then I don't see
how we are expected to infer it from our
observations.
Furthermore,
anyone who has
access to another student's earlier lab reports
would be able to get the right answer,
conferring
upon him an unfair advantage.
I hope that the
same is not true for the remaining nine tests below,
though I fear that it might be—that without access
to an already-marked
lab report, it might be
impossible to arrive at the correct equation.
Therefore, I see no theoretical
rationale
for
expecting different results in acidic and basic
solutions, nor can I find such a rationale, either in
the textbook or the lab manual.
Has this been
explained to us? Again, someone without access
to previous lab reports is likely to be at a loss while
�OK-cheating
someone who does, will gather up some easy
marks.
It seems to me that this lab has not been properly
introduced and explained, and that anybody who
gets it right could only have done so by having
unauthorized materials that are not available to
everybody.
From this ambiguous information, it does not seem
possible to arrive at an equation.
Now you might imagine that such
complaints would constitute an opportunity
and an invitation for the course instructors
to show this student the error of his ways
and to explain to him how this lab was
indeed intelligible, and to point out to him
the logical path which could have led him
to the required equations. That's what you
might imagine. In fact, however, the lab
report came back containing no answers or
explanations whatever—what it did contain
was the highly informative "CUT ALL THIS
B—SHIT OUT IN THE FUTURE" angrily
scrawled above one of his complaints. The
teaching assistant's delicacy in sparing this
student the B word was much appreciated.
How was this comment highly
informative? Why it conveyed the very
useful information that complaints such as
the ones quoted above were misplaced and
unwelcome, and it suggested that what
was expected of the student was that he
copy a set of answers from somebody's old
lab report so that the teaching assistant
would be able to compare those copied
answers to the key supplied him by the lab
instructor, but that neither the student nor
the teaching assistant was supposed to
assume that the lab made sense and
neither was supposed to try to understand
it, and anyone who dishonorably refused to
play by the rules of this game was
justifiably exasperating to someone who
honorably bound himself to observe those
rules.
So even though we are now talking not
about examinations but about laboratory
reports, the principle is the same—the
instructors don't change their questions (in
the case of examinations) or their directions
(in the case of labs) year after year, which
constitutes an invitation to cheat. This
invitation the student either accepts and
finds himself prospering or never
receives—or in some rare cases receives
and declines—and finds himself suffering.
The chief way in which labs differ from
examinations is that they tend to be
identical from year to year over the course
of many years and that this is recognized
by all, and previous-years' lab reports are
widely available, so that reliance on these
is ubiquitous. For example, in a physics
lab that I participated in recently at UBC,
when the question arose as to what to do
next, my lab partner whipped out
someone's old lab workbook to look up the
answer.
I. was horrified because the
possession of anyone else's workbook
within a physics lab was prohibited, and I
made her immediately put it away. To her,
however, consulting someone's old lab
workbook had seemed so natural that she
saw no need to do it covertly. In some
courses, students will acknowledge that an
entire series of labs is unintelligible, and
that copying from old lab workbooks is the
only conceivable way of completing the
labs, and the professor will openly
acknowledge an awareness that this is
what students are doing, and as a
consequence will award only a small
proportion of the grades for lab
reports—say 10%—and as these labs are
not worth many marks, and as the content
of the labs will never be examined in tests,
�some students do not hand in laboratory
reports at all, but as attendance is
mandatory, the students do come in and
make a show of going through the
procedure.
The Miller Analogies Test.
When
many members of my graduating class at
the University of Toronto were applying to
graduate schools, along with the obligatory
Graduate Record Examination, most of us
also took the Miller Analogies Test (MAT).
The MAT was taken individually by
appointment, and over the space of many
weeks, as each student emerged from the
test, he was able to remember a number of
the test items and pass these along to his
classmates, and so the later a student took
the test, the more test items he had
already heard in advance, and so the
higher his score tended to be. At one
point, however, the test administrator
switched from one form of the MAT to
another, and the score of the next student
to take the test plummeted.
The Stanford-Binet IQ test.
A
Stanford-Binet intelligence test, that I
recollect taking when I was about ten, I
found myself in turn administering to
children when I was a graduate student in
experimental psychology at Stanford some
fifteen years later. I had never forgotten
several of the items from that early test that
I took—the "what's wrong with this picture"
item showing the sun, a man, and the
man's shadow pointing toward the sun; and
the picture of a pioneer taking aim with his
rifle at a distant Indian when a nearby
Indian was about to brain him with his
tomahawk. And then there was the folding
of a piece of paper an increasing number
of times, and each time cutting off a corner,
and predicting how many holes there would
be in the paper when it was unfolded. I
expect that my being given access to the
Stanford-Binet as a graduate student must
have been accompanied by some
understanding—perhaps even a legal
obligation—to not divulge its contents, but
my recollection of the above three items is
from my first exposure to the StanfordBinet some forty years ago, at which time
I doubt that I took any oath of silence, or
that if I had taken any such oath at that
tender age, that it would be binding on me
today.
The Stanford-Binet deserves a special
place in the annals of recycled
examinations because it is not just another
recycled examination, it is the mother of all
recycled
examinations—the
same
questions asked who knows how many
millions of children all over the continent,
all over the world, decade after
decade—calling out, "Come to me all you
well-born children, and receive from my
bosom the high-IQ number that you
deserve by virtue of your parents
remembering me."
And so what we see above is that the
entire testing industry rests on a fallacy.
The Miller Analogies Test and the StanfordBinet IQ test and the majority of all
intelligence, aptitude, and achievement
tests all recycle their questions and all
naively trust that the cycle will not be
intercepted by resourceful students or
enterprising parents. Some private schools
use recycled aptitude and achievement
tests to evaluate students for admission.
To this dilemma, there is only one
solution—not to follow the present policy of
restricting access to the questions that will
be asked, but rather to move to the
opposite extreme and to give everybody
unlimited and equal access to a large
number, of questions, a sample of which
�OK-cheating
will be asked, which can be accomplished
by relying on a "computer-based open
curriculum" as recommended in Toward an
open curriculum: the 333-question course
(Prytulak, 1992).
What is OK-cheating?
Notice that none of the activities that
we have been discussing above constitutes
real cheating. Real cheating is exchanging
information with another student during an
examination, it is consulting an
unauthorized crib sheet during an
examination, it is breaking into an office
and stealing an examination before it is
given, it is having somebody else write an
examination in your stead—these sorts of
things are clearly prohibited and carry
serious penalties. But the instances that
we have been discussing above are not at
all like that. The Christmas test that Stacie
took did not contain a warning that
possessing it beyond the duration of the
examination was an offense and carried
penalties. Or, the student in Stacie's class
who was discovered to have the old
examination was not breaking any law or
rule or regulation.
Mr. Stone never
announced to the class before the
Christmas test that possession of old
examinations
was prohibited and
constituted cheating, and there are two
reasons why he did not make any such
announcement and why teachers in general
never make any such announcement. The
first reason is that old examinations are
widely recognized as providing the student
with excellent practice material, and so a
teacher feels a lack of any moral
foundation for such a ban. The second
reason is that to announce a prohibition
against the possession of old examinations
is to alert students that these old
examinations are about to be recycled, and
so is to produce a stampede among
students to obtain them, and so is to elicit
vociferous cries of protest from students
who fail to obtain them.
And so too the law firm that kept
copies of old bar admission examinations
on file was not violating any prohibition.
And similarly, although at UBC there may
be the occasional rule about bringing old
lab workbooks into labs, there is no rule
about possessing them or consulting them
at any other time. And the parent who
reminisces about the items from an IQ test
that he took thirty or forty years ago may
do so without fear of penalty. Notice too
that the physics teacher that I spoke to did
not offer to let my son copy from another
student during an examination or any of the
other things that constitute real
cheating—but she was about to let me
copy that one question off the examination.
You see—it is forbidden and yet it is
permitted; it's wrong and yet go ahead; and
so it's not really cheating, it's just OKcheating.
OK-cheating, then, is the offering or
the accepting of an advantage for
reasons other than
meritorious
performance, and where the offering or
accepting of such an advantage is not
explicitly forbidden, is rarely punished,
is made easy enough that it is widely
resorted to and yet made difficult
enough that it is not available to all.
�10
A Second Variety of OK-cheating:
Manipulating the Mark
A Gentler, Kinder Sort of Athletic
Competition is Conceivable
Imagine in the 100-meter dash, that the
order of finish was Abel first, Baker second,
and Charlie third. This order, however,
was tentative—the official results wouldn't
be known for two weeks. The Race
Committee had to take other things into
account.
In the first place, Abel had submitted a
doctor's note that he had had a cold all
week and that on the very evening of the
race he had been running a fever. Baker,
in turn, submitted a notarized statement
affirming that he knew that he could run
faster than he had, but during the race had
felt as if some invisible hand was holding
him back. Charlie, finally, came from a
broken home, had a wife and two children
to support, and could lose his athletic
scholarship if he didn't place well in this
race.
In addition to Abel, Baker, and Charlie,
there was Don who had known in advance
that his sister's wedding would fall on the
day of the race, and who had been allowed
to run it two days earlier, and there was
Ed, whose alarm had failed to go off on the
morning of the race, and who therefore was
allowed to be timed on the same track the
following day.
As a result of all these additional
considerations, the race committee
upgraded the results of Abel, Baker, and
Charlie—one second was taken off Abel's
time, one and a half seconds off Baker's
time, and three seconds off Charlie's time.
The corrected times gave the race to
Charlie, and at the same time credited him
with a new world record. Don and Ed did
not file supplementary material and so their
times were not improved. One issue that
occupied the Race Committee for almost
half an hour arose from Ed's uncorrected
time being better than Charlie's corrected
time. The race committee, however, noted
that although Ed's doping test had come up
negative, rumors persisted that he was on
steroids, and on account of this rumor, and
also on account of Ed being notoriously
disrespectful toward race officials, the
committee worsened his time by two
seconds.
Now of course nothing could be more
preposterous and nothing could be more
destructive of athletic excellence than this
scenario. All of an athlete's effort should
go into bettering his performance and none
into excusing it or into pleading need. If
fate is unkind to him for a particular race,
then this will show up as a single poor
performances in an otherwise excellent
career. If fate is unkind to him for most or
all of his performances, then perhaps he is
in the habit of provoking fate and does not
deserve much credit—that is the view that
prevails in athletics today and that results
in athletic excellence.
A Gentler, Kinder Sort of Academic
Competition Already Exists
The view that prevails in academics,
however, is precisely that of our imaginary
race committee. During the eleven years
that I was on the faculty of the University of
Western Ontario, an observation which
never ceased to amaze me was that the
vast majority of the students who lined up
at my door were not coming to discuss the
�OK-cheating
course material, but rather for some sort of
special consideration. They wanted to be
allowed to take a test early because they
had committed themselves to a skiing
excursion over the Christmas holidays.
They had missed the test and wanted to
retake it at a later time. They had been
feeling unwell and wanted their score on
the recent test raised or discarded. They
deserved a good mark because they really
knew the work, but had found themselves
unable to express this knowledge on the
examination. The grades they were getting
in my course were going to keep them out
of medical school. They had to support
families by working night shifts as hospital
orderlies.
What I couldn't figure out was why the
students kept coming to me in such
numbers when I was so unresponsive to
their requests. I suspected that it was
because they were encouraged by their
success with other professors. I wondered
whether some students didn't visit one
professor after another, pleading that that
professor's mark alone was going to keep
them out of medical school—if half of the
professors gave such a student anything,
this might constitute a significant
improvement in his transcript. In fact, one
student did come to me saying frankly that
he needed higher grades to get into
medical school, and did I want to "get the
ball rolling," to which I gave my usual reply
that he could have any marks that he
wished, but he would have to get them by
working and not by begging.
But it was only when I later returned to
school to take undergraduate courses at
the University of British Columbia that I
received full confirmation of my suspicion
that there existed within the university a
wholesale adjustment of marks—at UBC, I
11
was surprised to discover that several
professors openly admitted to raising or
lowering grades as they saw fit.
Sometimes this amounted to giving a
bonus for exceptional performance on a
final exam—a bonus, however, whose
occasion and whose magnitude were
determined intuitively and not according to
any explicit formula.
One lecturer in
computer science boasted that he awarded
final grades employing a process of
"adjudication"—a process based on
intuition which he did not feel obligated to
explain or justify—and who at the end of
the course refused my request to account
for how my scores on tests and labs and
the final examination had been used to
compute my final grade.
This same
lecturer publicly boasted that he never gave
100's in his course, revealing in still
another way that he viewed marks as
flowing at his discretion rather than being
determined by the student's performance.
A mathematics professor described how he
had adjusted a student's final grade
downward on account of the pattern of high
marks on term tests (on which invigilation
is weak and real cheating is epidemic) as
contrasted with a low mark on the final
examination (on which invigilation is strong
and real cheating is rare). I have heard a
chemistry professor affirm his right to
adjust grades based on extraneous
considerations as well as to refuse to
disclose to students how component scores
were combined to obtain a final grade.
My recent experiences as a student,
then, allowed me to see that my own
former practice of letting student
performance alone determine grades, and
my holding this process sacred and
refusing to intervene in it, was out of whack
with the times. The Zeitgeist is, rather, to
�12
manipulate grades in order to overcome
fate, to respond to need, to express
admiration or affection or disapproval ... or
even fear—in today's climate of political
correctness, one may hear a professor
expressing fear that if he awards a low
grade to a minority student, he could be
accused of racism.
Out of sync with the times as I see
now that my views may have been, I
continue to cling to them. Marks are
sacred. Marks are always earned by a
student, and never dispensed by the
teacher. It is up to the student whether he
gets a 100, not up to the teacher whether
he gives it.
Marks must reflect
performance, whether that performance
was attended by good luck or bad, and
must never reflect a teacher's estimate of
what performance would have been had
fate smiled more evenly. When marks are
manipulated, they become less reliable
indicators of merit and become distrusted.
It is as corrupting to change a student's
mark and present it as the actual grade
achieved as it is to change a runner's time
and present it as the actual time achieved.
In this regard, The University of
Toronto Conservatory offers a model worth
emulating—in
British Columbia, for
example, the many students who follow the
national standard set by the Toronto
Conservatory and who take Toronto
Conservatory examinations are not only not
graded by their own teachers, but are not
even graded by teachers from British
Columbia; all grading is conducted by
musicians from outside the province, which
in the case of British Columbia usually
means musicians from Alberta.
The
sentiment motivating such precautions
would if emulated sweep fresh air through
our schools and universities—the sentiment
which separates the functions of teacher
and evaluator, and to whatever degree
possible which allocates the job of grading
to the teacher across the hall, or to one in
another school, and yes sometimes even to
one from another province.
And again, mark manipulation is
cheating because it is the awarding of
grades on the basis of considerations other
than quality of performance, and it is OKcheating because rather than being
forbidden, it is openly practiced by
experienced and respected professors.
That Bastard, Cott, and the Question of
Privacy
When I was in Grade 7, a girl asked
before class to copy my science
assignment that we were all to hand in at
the beginning of that class. I gave it to her
and she hurriedly copied it. When the
assignment was handed back next day, I
was disappointed in my low mark—perhaps
a C—and astonished, furthermore, when
the science teacher—that
bastard
Cott—began to read out to the class what
he considered to be a model answer. Yes,
it was the assignment of the girl who had
copied from me, and as he read, I could
follow my own assignment and see that it
was word for word the same. I raised my
hand and bluntly said that the girl had
copied from me and that I had only gotten
a C. Mr. (I am willing to suspend hostilities
for the remainder of this article) Cott
mumbled something that I don't recollect,
and I did no more than sit down in a rage
of indignation, which almost forty years
later I am happy to say is beginning to
abate.
I don't think that it was the
handwriting—I can see from samples of my
work that I had good handwriting at the
�OK-cheating
time, and given that the girl was copying
hurriedly, I doubt that hers could have been
appreciably better. In any case, if Mr. Cott
had read the assignments, he would have
noticed that the one that struck him as
being clearly superior bore a strange
resemblance to one of the ones that struck
him as being decidedly mediocre. And in
any case, if there was any justification for
awarding me the lower mark, then he had
not only the opportunity but the obligation
to place the two assignments side by side
and demonstrate to me in what way mine
was inferior—something that he neglected
to do.
This is another instance of the
manipulated mark—that is, a mark given on
the basis not of merit but of some sort of
prejudice or favoritism—and supports the
view expressed above that one of the
reasons teachers do not like to hand things
back for keeps is that they don't want the
marks they assigned criticized or
challenged.
But the example does
introduce a new issue—that of privacy. If
Mr. Cott had not happened to read that
model answer out loud to the class, I would
never have become aware of the injustice
that he had done me, and I might have
taken my low mark as a piece of evidence
that I was not good at science or not good
at school.
And so the principle is
suggested that one can't be sure of
equitable marking if the process of marking
is private and if the marks that other
students get and the performance which
elicits those marks is private as well.
Privacy and the English essay.
Where this is a real problem is on English
essays. It is a well-known fact among
experimental psychologists concerned
especially with the topic of testing, that the
13
grading of essays is scandalously
subjective and unreliable. To give one
example, French (1962) working at the
Educational Testing Service had highly
competent
people from
different
professions (writers and editors; teachers of
English, social science, and natural
science; lawyers; and business executives)
grade the same set of essays by placing
each essay into one of nine piles in order
of merit, which of course is equivalent to
assigning one of nine different grades to
each essay. French found that out of 300
essays, 101 were placed into all nine of the
piles. That is, every one of 101 essays
received from some judge or other the
highest grade, the second highest grade,
and third highest grade, and so on right
down to the lowest grade. Also, no essay
was placed in fewer than five piles. In
other words, in estimating the quality of
essays, there is vast disagreement, and so
the mark a student gets on an essay
depends on who reads it.
Now it has happened that I have seen
a situation at UBC in which I thought an
essay was superb and deserving of an A,
but which was given a C, with the student
not understanding how he could have been
awarded such a low mark. The suspicion
was that his deficiency lay not at all in
clarity of writing or force of argument, but
only in having deviated from political
correctness and in having impugned the
literary merit of a novel of which the course
instructor thought highly. A student may
have such a suspicion, but there's not
much he can do to verify it. Of course the
instructor would deny it, and such a
suggestion coming from a student would
only alienate the instructor further.
Let us imagine a parallel situation—let
us imagine that Olympic gymnasts perform
�14
in private, and have their performance
videotaped, but that no competitor is
allowed to view the performance of any
other competitor. An American gymnast,
let us say, turns in what he feels is the
performance of his career and is expecting
10's, but finds that he's being given 7's and
8's.
Russian gymnasts, however, are
getting 10's all over the place. What the
sentiments of the American competitor
would be is obvious, and it is obvious as
well why in gymnastics such a system
would never even be contemplated, let
alone tolerated.
But education takes place in a totally
different sphere of values. The student
whose essay received the C above is
disappointed in his mark, and yet doesn't
know what it is that he has to do to extract
a higher mark from his instructor. What
he wants to see is just what kind of essays
this instructor is handing out A's for. What
makes them so great? Is it that their
language is simpler and less formal, or the
opposite? Is it that they go out of their way
to praise the readings assigned in the
course? Is it that they are sprinkled with
puns and witticisms? Could it be that they
show off a familiarity with English literature
generally by means of allusions and
comparisons? Might it really be a question
of political correctness, so that if the
student only makes his essay politically
correct, then he will get an A despite an
awkward style and childish arguments?
There is only one way to answer questions
like these—and that is to read the A
essays and see for oneself, but this is
usually impossible. And so the student is
trapped within a situation that is common in
education—he wants to improve but finds
that the most direct path to improvement is
blocked.
On the question of privacy, my own
preference would be to allow any student
to obtain a photocopy of the essay or
examination or lab report of any other
student. My rationale is the same as it was
in the case of gymnastics—that the
students are in competition, the stakes are
high, they learn from watching each other's
performance, and publicly reviewable
performances keep the system honest. But
if not such full accessibility, then perhaps a
compromise where everybody has access
to the assignments graded in the top ten
percent of the class—in this way, the
assignments inspected by others would be
the good ones worth emulating and their
authors would be flattered by the
inspection, and mockery of poor
performances would not be facilitated.
A Third Variety of OK-cheating:
The Collaborative Effort
The Scholarship Essay. As part of
being evaluated for a scholarship at a
prestigious Vancouver private school, the
applicant has to submit an essay that he
has written at home. Now let us imagine
just how ten-year-old Reginald might come
to write this essay. Perhaps Reginald is
left to himself for the space of several
hours, and when he emerges from his
room, he holds out a stack of papers and
says that he's finished. Are you sure?
Yes!
Do you think there are any
improvements you could make? No! Did
you check the spelling? Yes!
So, what happens now? Does this
essay get submitted to the school in its
present form? Not likely! The father
�OK-cheating
knows very well that however bright his
Reginald might be, he's only ten years old,
and therefore capable of the grossest
errors of spelling, of grammar, of
punctuation, of reasoning, of taste. The
essay as it stands is certain to be gravely
defective. If submitted in its present form,
Reginald will not only fail to win a
scholarship, he might not even get
admitted to this private school at all. How
is it possible for Reginald's father to avoid
at least scanning the essay for some
catastrophic blunder?—And if he sees
some blunder, is it conceivable that he will
bite his lip and say nothing and let his son
hand it in uncorrected?
Our best bet is that the essay that will
eventually be handed in is going to be a
collaborative effort. If Reginald's father
could be sure that all the other contestants
were not going to get any help with their
essays and were going to hand them in
errors and all, then maybe he would be
content to let his Reginald do the same,
but what reason has he to trust in the
integrity of all these other families? Has he
been impressed with the high moral tone of
the average man of late? What if all the
other contestants get help, but he sends in
his Reginald's essay unedited?—Will there
be a consolation prize for integrity, or is his
Reginald simply going to be the laughing
stock of the scholarship committee, and
even of the admissions committee?
Such speculations, then, lead us to the
conclusion that an essay written at home,
or for that matter anything at all that is
done without monitoring, might readily turn
into a collaborative effort, particularly if a lot
is riding on it. If there is any possibility that
an assignment will turn out to be a
collaborative effort, then we must recognize
that it invites OK-cheating of the
15
collaborative-effort variety. "Collaborative
effort" should be taken to stand for "Taking
personal credit for a collaborative effort."
Like the other varieties of OK-cheating, it is
not clearly prohibited. For Reginald to
discuss some of his ideas with his father
can't be objected to. And if it's all right for
a word-processing program to spell-check
an essay, then surely it's all right for a
parent to do the same thing. Doesn't every
writer get editorial advice which he
customarily fails to acknowledge? It's all a
question of degree—it's only when the
contributions of others become excessive
that claiming sole responsibility for the
product becomes wrong, but whether such
a point has been reached is not readily
verifiable.
And so this scholarship essay at this
exclusive private school is not a measure
of individual merit, but rather an instrument
for the perpetuation of class differences. It
is a means of funnelling an advantage in
the direction not of the more accomplished
student but in the direction of the student
who happens to have the more
accomplished parents, or the more
ambitious or unscrupulous parents.
Science projects and talent hunts.
How many other student activities share
this characteristic?
Science projects
certainly do. Is anyone unaware of the
vast amounts of time that parents regularly
give toward their offspring's science
project? Any sort of project, for that
matter—one sees on display in the foyer of
an elementary school a model attributed to
a student of a sailing vessel, perhaps, or a
Roman catapult, and it is instantly evident
from the complexity of the model and from
the quality of the workmanship that it is
beyond the capacity of a child that age.
�16
Science talent hunts based on student
projects are similarly fatuous—it is
conceivable that in some cases the student
may have played an insignificant role and
in the end had only to memorize the
project's rationale as it was explained to
him, and had only to memorize stock
answers to probable questions that might
be asked by judges or spectators. To
imagine that tomorrow's Nobel Prize
winners can be discovered by student
projects is ingenuous in the extreme,
unless it should be the case that Nobel
Prize winners tend to come from families
capable of mounting unusual collaborative
efforts.
Architectural drawing in grade one.
When my own son was in first grade, he
came home with the assignment of drawing
a plan of our house. Of course the task
was far beyond his capabilities. He had
never before done anything of the sort, and
the assignment had not been preceded by
simpler assignments which could have built
the requisite skills. And so, of course, I did
it for him, resentful at being conscripted
into this role, and asking of him only that
which he was capable of giving—which
was to hold one end of the measuring tape
and to answer questions about what was
being done, and finally to transcribe the
final product in his own hand.
Working in triplets at Skyline
Elementary. Or take the unique program
instituted in the Skyline Elementary School
in Ferndale, Washington—children are
allocated to groups of three, and whenever
they are asked to do anything, they
collaborate in formulating a single answer.
This working in triplets might have a
superficial appeal—that is, it might appear
that the children will all struggle to
complete whatever task is assigned them,
and that in coming up with their consensual
product, they will learn cooperation as well.
Anyone who has taught children,
however, will immediately see the fatal
flaw. What will in fact usually happen
within each triplet is that one of the children
will immediately see how any given task is
to be done and will proceed to do it. The
other two will watch passively, left behind
by the rapidity of the first. The amount
learned from passively watching somebody
else do something of even moderate
complexity is close to zero. The social skill
learned by the active member of the trio
will be dominance, and the social skill
learned by the other two will be passivity
combined with the pretence of contributing
to, or at least following, the dominant
member's efforts. Few things could be as
destructive to intellectual development as
learning again and again over the course of
many years that whenever anything needs
to be done, one can simply wait for
somebody smarter to step in and do it; and
few things could be as destructive to the
development of character as learning to
take credit for the labor of another. The
chief effect of forcing children into triplets,
then, could be years of passivity and
duplicity for two out of every three of them.
And so why is it being done? The gain
must be that so long as all three children in
a triplet are credited with what in fact is the
answer of the fastest, then the average
performance of all three will indeed seem
to improve.
A similar sleight-of-hand
inflation of grades could be achieved on
paper by simply taking a class list, drawing
a circle around every three names, then
crossing out the two lowest marks within
each circle and replacing them with the
highest mark. Yes, such a procedure will
raise the class average, but the higher
�OK-cheating
marks will not stand up if the time ever
arrives, as it surely must, when the children
are called upon to perform individually.
Lab partners.
The practice of
requiring lab partners in science labs brings
with it exactly the same defect. Yes it is
possible for the members of each
partnership to contribute equally, but it is
also commonplace for one member to be
competent and responsible and the other to
be incompetent and dependent—and yet
the report that the two hand in, and the
mark they receive for the lab, will be highly
similar if not identical.
Portfolios.
In the calls for national
testing programs in both Canada and the
U.S. one sometimes finds expressed a
need to get away from conventional tests
to something better, and among the
recommendations are things like that
students should be evaluated on portfolios
which display a body of their work
completed over a period of time. In such a
call, however, we recognize the danger that
collaboration may enter in to raise apparent
achievement without doing anything for true
achievement.
Copying homework. In mathematics
and science courses that I took recently at
UBC, copying of assignments in class on
the day that they were due was everywhere
evident, and I made a point of handing
mine in upon arriving in the lecture hall so
as to be unable to lend it to students who
might ask. This copying was done overtly,
and as students finished copying, they
might brazenly walk up to the table on
which the assignments had been heaped
and add theirs to the pile even while the
lecture was in progress, which openness
17
we may take as an indication that this is
the sort of permissible cheating that we are
calling OK-cheating, and that it may be
categorized as taking personal credit for a
collaborative effort where the contribution
of the dependent party is reduced to that of
copying.
Even real cheating can be OK
Sometimes school authorities become
so lenient that even real cheating becomes
OK. A couple of illustrations can be found
in the biographical movie, Nasty Girl, which
shows a teacher in Germany providing
favorite students with a copy of an
examination that was to be given the
following day, and also consulting a list of
parental donations to the school in order to
help determine a student's final grade.
Similarly, when I was a graduate
student at Stanford, Stanford's honor
system required that examinations not be
invigilated, but teaching assistants like
myself who were often present in order to
hand out or collect examinations or to
answer questions, could see that cheating
was wholesale and far beyond anything
that would be observed at a university with
the conventional strict monitoring during
final examinations.
Later when I taught at the University of
Western Ontario, I saw bills posted
advertising essay-writing services, and
these were neither torn down by the
faculty, nor investigated, nor even
commented upon.
I recollect, too, that a fine arts course
at the University of Toronto was heavily
attended by students from the honor
�18
psychology program, and that during the
final examination, these psychology
students sat side by side instead of
spreading out which the size of the lecture
theater permitted them to do, and that they
scanned each other's work openly. After
the examination had begun, some students
changed seats so as to sit beside each
other. I was sitting in the uppermost row of
the theater and I recollect the professor
standing just behind me, and was
conscious that the two of us were gazing
down upon a display of mass cheating, and
that I expected fire and brimstone to issue
from his forehead, but that I was amazed
to discover that he did nothing. The
reason, I pieced together later, sprang from
an understanding between the departments
of fine arts and of psychology that the
psychology students were taking the fine
arts course as a lark, and that the
psychology department, much bigger and
more powerful than fine arts, would not
tolerate the transcripts of its students being
sullied by failing grades on non-serious
courses, and that should any such thing
happen, the psychology department had it
within its power to retaliate by increasing
the failure rate among the fine arts
students who regularly took psychology
courses, and so with this explicit and
intimidating understanding in place, the fine
arts instructor felt that it would be impolitic
of him to confront psychology students or
to involve them in a scandal.
The Up Side of OK-cheating
OK-cheating, and to a lesser extent
even real cheating, is not just an
occasional aberration and is not
destabilizing to the system, but is rather an
integral and routine component of the
system, and serves to shore it up and to
keep it from collapse. OK-cheating is so
pervasive and so tolerated because it has
a little something for everybody.
First, students love OK-cheating. For
those at the bottom, it provides a safetyvalve—when the pressure becomes too
great, the student needn't break down and
he needn't explode and he needn't fail—all
such reactions are distasteful and
disruptive. Better he should OK-cheat. For
students in the middle, OK-cheating
reduces the work load. For students at the
top, OK-cheating provides that extra edge
they need to get into a prestige university,
as well as to stay in once they arrive.
Second, parents love OK-cheating. A
parent ambitious for his offspring need not
stand helplessly by as they accumulate
disappointing grades—he can offer an OKcheating hand and watch those grades rise.
Third, teachers love OK-cheating. By
recycling questions and examinations they
cut down their work load. By assigning
marks at will, they empower themselves to
reward students they like for having chosen
to make themselves likeable and to punish
students they dislike for having chosen to
make themselves odious. They can throw
together an unintelligible lab or course, and
point to all the OK-cheaters breezing
through with 90's as evidence that the lab
or course is fine, and therefore that there
�OK-cheating
must be something wrong with the students
who are failing and complaining. Notice
that if every student OK-cheated, then the
marks would be unacceptably high, and so
what the teacher needs is a few OKcheaters to validate his course as being
intelligible, but not so many as to invalidate
it as being a give-away, and so he opposes
OK-cheating, but not so effectively as to
eradicate it completely.
And fourth, OK-cheating strengthens
groups and institutions. A science club or
a fraternity can keep old examinations—licit
and illicit—on file for its members and can
coach them on OK-cheating methods, and
so that club or fraternity will be owed a
debt of gratitude and will be strengthened.
A dominant class can bequeath power to
its descendants by teaching them the
techniques of OK-cheating and by OKcheating along with them. The publishers
of an aptitude test can win the support of
well-connected parents by turning a blind
eye to the leakage of the contents of the
test to the children of those parents. A law
firm can increase its power by feeding old
bar-admission examinations to its own
articling students. Were any tightly-knit
group to discover the power of OK-cheating
and employ it methodically, it would find
itself with one leg up to dominating
academics.
Where there's cheating, there must be
a cheater, and it is natural to assume that
it is the student who does the cheating and
the teacher or the parent who opposes it,
but we can see from the many instances
discussed above that this far from the
case. In fact, students, parents, teachers,
and groups and institutions all take an
active hand and all receive some benefit.
19
If Only
There Weren't a Down Side
But OK-cheating is not all good. The
student who OK-cheats learns less, while
the student who does not is demoralized
by the difficulty of assignments and
examinations. And so education reformers
looking for ways to increase learning and
heighten motivation have at least this one
improvement that is straightforward and
that can be accomplished without
increased cost—get rid of cheating, both
real cheating and OK-cheating.
Getting rid of OK-cheating brings
many benefits. Teachers will no longer
have OK-cheaters available to validate
lousy courses and lousy labs, and so the
quality of courses and labs will improve.
Academic recognition will go to merit not
to cunning. Duplicity will be less often
called upon and integrity will be
strengthened.
A student ' wishing to
evaluate his inadequacies, or wishing to
improve his performance by working on
maximally-relevant materials, will not be
frustrated by having his own examinations
confiscated and old examinations kept
from him.
The corpses of broken careers that
litter our educational institutions will be
fewer.
What will no longer happen,
particularly, is the appearance on campus
of a student bright with promise, but who
is immediately overwhelmed by the
difficulty of the work and either fails or
drops out or is forced to switch to
something easier; and who never
discovers the reason for his defeat—that
he was unschooled in the techniques of
�20
OK-cheating, that he failed to network with
the street-smart students who could have
shown him how to tame overwhelming
courses, and that he trusted to honest
study to get him through those impossible
labs and assignments and examinations,
never suspecting that these were, in large
part or in small, measures of artifice and
guile.
What Must We Do?
We need a student bill of rights that
will serve to acquaint students and parents
with what they are entitled to expect and
that will serve to inform teachers of what
they have a duty to provide. This bill must
guarantee student rights in at least the
following three areas.
First, the student has the right to be
protected from OK-cheating of the
intercepted recycled-examination variety.
Specifically, the student has the right to
access all old examinations along with
complete solutions, and the right to be
given after each examination not only the
examination questions but also the correct
answers to these questions, and the right
to obtain photocopies of his own answers
deliverable no later than the day following
the examination.
Second, the student has the right to
be protected from OK-cheating of the
manipulated mark variety. Specifically, the
student has the right to know that his
marks have not been manipulated, and
that other students have not gained an
advantage over him by having their marks
manipulated, and to have public disclosure
even before a course begins of how marks
will be calculated and what objective
formula will be used to combine
component marks into a final mark. A
student has the right to purchase
photocopies
of
other
students'
assignments, essays, lab reports, and
examinations when these have received
high marks. A student has the right on all
tests and examinations to be protected
from bias and prejudice by having his
identity concealed and by a rotation of
markers.
Third, the student has the right to be
protected from OK-cheating of the
collaborative effort variety. Specifically,
the student has the right to be protected
from the corrupting effect of having to
seek collaborative support on assignments
for which he will take personal credit, and
the right to be protected from the lowering
of his own class standing when others are
able to receive more collaborative support
than himself, and must be protected from
the demoralizing effect of being unable to
complete a task that requires collaborative
support when he is unaware that
collaborative support is necessary or when
he is unable to find any.
The biggest single step which cures
many of the ills discussed above is to
adopt a computer-based open curriculum,
as described in Toward an Open
Curriculum: The 333-Question Course
(Prytulak, 1992).n
�Toward an Open Curriculum:
The 333'Question Course
Lubomir Prytulak, Ph.D.
December 1992
Back to School
Understanding the lecture. In all
the mathematics and science courses that
I ever took in high school, or as an
undergraduate at the University of
Toronto, or as a graduate student at
Stanford, I usually had no idea of what the
teacher or professor was talking about. At
the time, I did not blame my lack of
comprehension on the educational
system—I blamed it on my own lack of
preparation. But recently I have been reexposed to mathematics and science
courses at the University of British
Columbia
(UBC)
under
different
circumstances and with a different attitude.
Now I was mature, disciplined, and
motivated.
Now I not only did my
homework, but I did it several times, and
did more than was assigned. Now I read
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ahead and often knew the material well
enough that I could have delivered the
day's lecture myself. Now I was getting
high marks. And so now what did I find?
Several things.
In the first place, when I had
learned a topic beforehand, then yes, I
could follow the lecture—usually—but only
with a great deal of straining. Also, now
that I was reading ahead, I could see how
often
the
material
must
be
incomprehensible to anyone who was
hearing it for the first time—the instructor
might fail to stress some critical point, or
he might word something poorly, or he
might be unaware of some simplification
that was possible or some mnemonic that
made the whole easy to remember. Or,
when as the lecture progressed and each
new point depended on the ones that had
gone before, the instructor's assumption
that the student was able to remember all
those earlier points seemed unjustified.
Lubomir Prytulak
4165 W 11th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V6R 2L5
(604)228-1561
�Professors make mistakes. And I
noticed something else: professors made
mistakes. Even the most competent ones
made one or two per lecture; in other
cases, a dozen mistakes per lecture might
not be unusual. Mistakes were inevitable
because mathematics and science
lectures often involved the continuous
writing of proofs or else the solution of
complex problems, so that over the course
of an hour the lecturer might cover several
blackboards with densely-packed symbols
over and over again. So the fact that
there were mistakes was not significant,
but what happened afterward was. What
often happened was that I would pause
and look around, and see all the other
students contentedly continuing to copy
from the blackboard, mistake and all. And
often the mistake was far from
trivial—rather, it was so gross that anyone
who was following the lecture must have
immediately been struck by it. Seeing that
nobody else was going to say anything, I
would then point out the error, and the
instructor would acknowledge and correct
it, and then all the other students would
docilely revise their notes, and then a
while later the same thing would happen
all over again.
As this failure of students to catch
errors repeated itself, I began at first to
entertain, and later to be entirely
convinced of the truth of, the zombie
hypothesis—that in a typical mathematics
or science lecture, from zero to five
percent of the students are following what
is being said. These are the non-zombies.
You can guess the rest.
Regression to zombiism. There is
something else that happened that has a
bearing on the zombie hypothesis—and
that is that sometimes I would not have
read ahead and mastered the upcoming
material. Perhaps I had not had time,
perhaps the professor was not following
any predictable path through the textbook,
perhaps it was a lecture course and there
was no textbook. In all such cases, I
usually had no idea of what the professor
was talking about. I had joined the ranks
of the zombies—no, I had rejoined the
ranks of the zombies, for a zombie is what
I had been throughout my youth. And so
now again among the zombies, I sat and
copied without understanding. Now I was
catching no errors, and when some nonzombie did catch an error, it seemed like
a miracle to me that he was able to do it,
and my having copied down the error
without objection stood as a just
accusation of my total lack of
comprehension. I was still getting high
marks, but I was learning everything after
each incomprehensible lecture, and
nothing during and nothing before.
Teachers are aware that students
are unaware.
Are course instructors
aware that almost
nobody—and
sometimes absolutely nobody—is following
them? Well, their behavior suggests that
they are aware, for they studiously avoid
any action which might provoke a
confirmation of the zombie hypothesis.
For example, I never saw a UBC instructor
in mathematics or science address a
question to a random student.
An
instructor might ask a rhetorical question,
but this he would immediately answer
himself. More rarely, he would put a
question to the entire class, and here he
might be saved by one of the few nonzombies providing an answer; or if no
answer was forthcoming, the instructor
�Open Curriculum
would provide it himself, an outcome
which was nondiagnostic in that it was
possible to ascribe the students' silence
not to universal catatonia, but rather to a
shyness which the instructor tactfully
chooses not to encroach upon. More
rarely still, the instructor might put a
question to some obvious, card-carrying
non-zombie. In one three-month halfcourse that I took, for example, the
instructor asked exactly one question, and
this he addressed to me. But what no
instructor ever did was address a question
to a random student—and the reason was
that he knew that most of the time he
would get no answer and the zombie
hypothesis would be confirmed.
Let
sleeping zombies lie is a rule that avoids
much unpleasantness.
The zombie hypothesis is easy to
verify. But the zombie hypothesis is not
something any lecturer should believe on
the
basis
of
someone
else's
observations—he has it within his power to
put it to an empirical test at his very next
lecture. All he needs to do is to ask every
once in a while, "Would all the people who
understand everything I have said so far
please raise their hands?" Better than
that, he can intentionally introduce several
subtle and yet fatal errors into every
lecture, and a line or two later, pick the
name of a student out of a hat and ask
him whether he sees anything wrong.
Yes, the name-out-of-a-hat is a little
cumbersome, but if you don't institute
some measure to guarantee randomness,
of course the instructor will pick some
helpful non-zombie. Or, the instructor can
erase the last few lines of a solution or
proof, and ask a random student to come
up to the board and reconstruct what has
been erased. The best thing that he can
do is to deliver a lecture on an
unannounced topic and then give an
unannounced quiz on the material covered
in that lecture—there is no surer way to
elicit mass failure and howls of protest.
Even an announced quiz at the end of a
lecture covering that day's material is not
to be thought of. Such things are never
done and for good reason—the lecture hall
is not where learning takes place, and
disaster threatens anyone who assumes
the opposite.
Bogus verification.
Although
genuine
verifications
of
student
comprehension are available but unused,
bogus checks are commonplace—a
lecturer might say something like, "Any
questions so far?" and take the ensuing
silence as indicative of
perfect
understanding, not troubling himself with
the possibility that it may also be indicative
of a perfect lack of understanding. I
recollect a case in which an instructor
invited anyone in the class to request from
him a repetition of the last portion of the
lecture, saying "If even one student says
he didn't understand it and wants to hear
it again, I will repeat it." Nobody raised his
hand. I hadn't understood him, and I
didn't raise my hand. I didn't want him to
repeat anything.
He had been
incomprehensible when he had presented
the material the first time, and he would
have been just as incomprehensible the
second time.
The material was too
complex to be grasped by means of
passive viewing—I needed to work
through it by myself. If this instructor had
not been shamming, he could have begun
to get a rough idea of the level of student
comprehension by employing any of the
�checks outlined above, but as this might
have proved embarrassing, he preferred
his bogus check which gave such
complimentary results.
The students misbehave.
But if
the zombie hypothesis is true, then what
are all those students doing there? Well,
in the first place, they're not all there. Full
attendance is not the rule, it is the
exception. So rare is full attendance or
anything close to it that it is simpler to
explain it rather than the opposite. Full
attendance usually means one of four
things: a test is being given; it's a lecture
course without a textbook; it's a small
class and attendance contributes toward
final grades; or it's not a mathematics or
science course, and so comprehension
may be possible. In a typical first-year
mathematics or science lecture, however,
attendance is likely to be closer to half of
enrolment than to total enrolment. Then
on top of that, of the students who are in
attendance, large numbers of them are not
paying attention: some chat with their
neighbors throughout the lecture, some
read newspapers or work on unrelated
material, some come for a few minutes
and then walk out, some doodle and gaze
around without taking notes, some sleep.
So then what is going on? If the
amount of learning that takes place in a
lecture is really close to zero, then why
are any students coming at all, and why
do others come and then behave so
inappropriately?
Curriculum Definition
From the point of view of the
student, the chief role of the lecture is to
provide curriculum definition. That is,
when the course begins, the student does
not know what is examinable. She usually
has a textbook, but it may be some 800 to
1,200 pages long and may contain
anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 problems.
And yet in a typical half-course, she might
only have to read a quarter that number of
pages and might only have to solve onetwentieth that number of problems, and
she has to come to class to find out which
pages and which problems these are.
She also comes to class to learn the dates
of tests and what these tests will cover, to
get homework assignments, and to obtain
other procedural information—all of which
I include under the heading of curriculum
definition.
Obviously this curriculum-definition
information could all be made available on
the first day of class, but it is not—it is
released in dribbles over the duration of
the course. Oh yes, there is sometimes a
course outline indicating what pages are to
be read, but this outline is skimpy and
unreliable. It is skimpy chiefly in that while
it may indicate what pages should be
read, it will not indicate what problems are
to be solved. And it is unreliable—for
example, in physics, I learned the
Wheatstone Bridge, Young's modulus,
shearing and compression, and Hall's
method of distinguishing p-type from ntype semiconductors because these topics
were on pages assigned in the course
outline. None of these topics, however,
turned out to be on the course. So, if the
student wants to avoid doing unnecessary
work, the advisable thing to do is to come
to class and listen for curriculum-definition
�Open Curriculum
information—the inadvisable thing to do is
to follow the course outline.
On top of that, some of the course
will turn out not to be in the textbook at
all—every instructor offers new material
orally and by writing it on the board and
distributing it on handouts, and of this
material, too, only a fraction might turn out
to be examinable, and it is up to the
student to discover what fraction.
And students have to stay on their
toes at all times, because the curriculum is
constantly being shifted on them. For
example, the students are given a
handout, it is discussed, they invest time
learning it—but then later they are told that
they don't have to know it. They are given
problems for homework, they complete
them and hand them in—and they are
then informed that two of the problems
won't be graded because they involve
concepts that are not required for the
course.
They copy down proofs of
theorems in class, later find out that they
needn't have bothered because these
proofs are in the book—and as test after
test fails to ask for any proof, they
eventually glean that proofs are not
examinable.
Here is a representative experience.
In a computer
science
course,
supplementary texts were recommended
and stocked at the bookstore, in which I
found on page 16 of one text, page 17 of
another, and page 35 of a third, a
description of the cond expression. The
latter text described cond as "Scheme's
most general and powerful tool for making
choices. In fact, once you have read this
section, you don't ever have to use if
again, since any if expression can easily
be rewritten in cond form" (Eisenberg &
Abelson, Programming in Scheme, 1988,
p. 35).
And so on one of my lab
assignments, I did use this general and
powerful cond instead of the more
awkward if. But the instructor had not
lectured on cond, and the marking key
that he had provided the teaching
assistant who was grading the labs used
the more elementary and more awkward
if. This teaching assistant had had no
previous exposure to the Scheme
language, and so he did not recognize the
cond in my lab report, and the teaching
assistant complained to the course
instructor about the unfairness to him of
not being able to simply compare each
student's lab against the marking key. As
a result, the course instructor announced
to the class that the use of any
expressions not covered in lectures would
be penalized.
In other words, course instructors
are in a continuous process of defining
and redefining the curriculum as they go,
of recommending material that they will
penalize the student for using, of
presenting material that they have no
intention of ever testing, and of skimming
cursorily over material that they intend to
test in depth. The student is obligated to
keep a vigilant eye on the instructors as
they struggle to make up their minds, and
as they release hints and clues and
revisions
and
even
conscious
disinformation. One of the hardest tasks
put before the student is to construct a
picture
of t h e
examinable
curriculum—somewhat like an archeologist
trying to piece together a vase from the
shards brought to her one or two every
other day, and where some shards will
never be found, and where some that are
brought to her will not be from her vase.
Students who acquire skills in curriculum
�inference will find that such skills help
them as much as hard work in their
struggle to earn a degree.
A second look at the lecture hall.
Now let's get back to the students in a
typical mathematics or science lecture
hall—why do they act the way they do?
Here is my guess. As curriculum-definition
announcements tend to be made at the
beginning of the class, that is why some of
them come for the first few minutes and
then leave. This was most evident in a
case that was described to me in which an
instructor started each class by projecting
on a screen a summary of the last day's
lecture, and where students could be seen
copying down the summary and then
leaving before the current day's lecture
began. When homework is due, students
who have not done it come to class to
copy it from someone else. I made a
point of handing mine in upon arriving in
the lecture hall so that I would not be
pestered by requests to borrow it. After a
student has copied someone else's
homework, he has several options, the
most brazen that I saw being to walk up to
the front of the class in the middle of the
lecture, plop his paper down on the pile
already on the table, and walk out of the
lecture hall. As for the students who don't
come at all—they have trusty friends from
whom they can get the curriculum
information, or with whom they share the
burden of coming to a fifty-minute class in
order to extract five minutes' worth of
curriculum
information.
The
somnambulists sleep during the portion of
the lecture that is incomprehensible
anyway, but were awake during the critical
first few minutes, and at the end of the
lecture they will be in a position to have
some fellow-student inform them of any
curriculum-relevant announcements they
may have missed while asleep. The
chatters, the newspaper readers, the
doodlers, and the crossword-puzzle
solvers have given up trying to follow the
lecture, and find that even while chatting
or whatever, they can still pay enough
attention to catch any curriculum-definition
information that may be tossed their way.
In a no-textbook lecture course where
students are forced to take notes, they find
that conversation does not interfere
appreciably with the mindless transcription
of meaningless symbols, and so they
enliven their copying with chatting. And so
maybe that's who the zombies are and
that's what they're doing in the classroom.
Now I don't mean the word
"zombie" derogatorily.
Fundamentally,
there is nothing wrong with these students.
Outside the lecture hall, they are overall a
decent, considerate, attentive, and
responsible lot. But in the lecture hall,
they sense the game in which they are
being forced to play the pawns, and they
participate on their own terms—grudgingly,
perfunctorily, rudely. But their negligence
and irresponsibility are superficial and
situation specific—if one looks not at their
classroom
behavior
but
at their
accomplishments, then one gets a very
different impression, for where society
credits them with mastering a year's work
in a year's time and only with the help of
their teachers, they in fact accomplish
most of their learning in a small number of
cramming sessions and largely on their
own.
Under more optimal learning
conditions,
students
with
such
demonstrable powers could accomplish
miracles.
I started out calling them
"zombies" because they had no idea of
�Open Curriculum
what the lecture was about—but this it
turns out is no sin, for it is almost
impossible for anyone to know what the
lecture is about. If students are guilty of
any sin for which they deserve the label
"zombie" in a derogatory sense, it is the
sin of failing to grasp that they are being
victimized and that their victimization is
escapable, and of failing to demand their
own emancipation.
The Open Curriculum
Now on the one hand, the
confirmation of the zombie hypothesis is
very bad news—it tells us that
mathematics and science students have
the bulk of their lecture time wasted. But
on the other hand, it is very good news
because the situation is easily remedied
by adopting an open curriculum, and the
remedy brings with it several astonishing
benefits. The remedy, furthermore, is not
totally unprecedented—it is merely an
extension of something that is being done
in the occasional course with great
success.
The student needs a core
curriculum.
Imagine, now, that for a
calculus half-course lasting three months,
the student purchases at the book store a
booklet containing 333 core problems, and
is told that being able to solve these 333
problems constitutes the course. (The
number 333 for a half-course is arbitrary
and the optimal number will vary—for
some courses, a much smaller number will
be appropriate; in an excellent integration
half-course that I took, a number close to
500 worked well.) On any examination,
the student will be asked to solve some
sample of these 333 core problems, and
of course the problems on that
examination will be altered by changing
the coefficients and the variable names, so
that for example where within a core
problem there is a 2X + 3 which yields a
final correct answer of 31, the transformed
problem might contain in that same place
a 5Y - 9 which yields a final correct
answer of 14. Such changes will make it
unprofitable to simply memorize the
correct answers to the 333 core problems,
and will make it impossible to be reminded
of the nature of the required solution by
seeing a particular pattern of numbers and
letters in a question.
The student needs solutions to the
core curriculum. Now it is important that
every problem also come accompanied by
a complete and optimal solution, or with
several alternative solutions where more
than one is possible. Without complete
solutions, the student will often get stuck
and find herself unable to continue—and
in such a case, what is she to do? Why
she is to wait until the professor's office
hours, which may be several days
removed, and then she is to stand in line
cooling her heels, and eventually she is to
scribble down something that the
professor says and take it away with her
to her own desk where she can begin to
think about it—that's what she is to do.
Mind you, she might have a hundred more
such problems waiting to be done after the
one that stumped her, and so this getting
into line to obtain each piece of
information may strike her as cumbersome
and inconsiderate of her time—but that's
�what her instructor deems best for her,
and that's what she's stuck with. And
that's not even the worst case. A worse
case is an instructor who refuses to
announce office hours. A worse case is
an instructor who refuses to announce
office hours and who does not answer his
door when a student knocks, pretending
he's not in, cowering silently in his unlit
office waiting for the student to go away,
holding his breath, playing Run Silent, Run
Deep as the depth charges of those
repeated knocks probe for his presence,
and surfacing only when a graduate
student knocks and whispers at the door,
"Vance! It's me!" That is worse, and that
does happen at UBC. But surely any of
this sort of inconvenience and delay in
obtaining information is insufferable.
Surely students must be given complete
solutions so that when they get stuck they
can unstick themselves without delay.
The student needs lecture notes.
And there is a third thing that the students
must be given—lecture notes. Not just
any lecture notes, but a really good set—a
superb set. Such lecture notes would
differ from a textbook in that they would be
both necessary and sufficient, which a
textbook is not. (Students would still have
mammoth textbooks recommended to
which they could turn for greater depth on
topics that they found interesting, but there
would be no virtue in confusing or
misleading them as to exactly what depth
was examinable.) Copying these lecture
notes off a blackboard day by day is not
an acceptable alternative to being handed
the whole batch of them at the beginning
of the course.
There can be no
justification for making students come to
class to copy things that they aren't going
to understand at the time of copying, and
when the resulting notes are sure to be
defective—defective because as the
lecturer is writing on the board, he is
bound to make a mistake or two (which
may or may not be caught by someone);
and then as the student is copying off the
board, she is bound to make a mistake or
two more; or defective because the
student may happen to have terrible
handwriting; or because she may be too
rushed to get it all down; or may be sitting
at the back and mistake some small or
faint writing on the board; or may have her
view obstructed by a projector or the body
of the lecturer; or may be unable to hear
clearly what the instructor is saying
because of the hubbub in the room; or
may be late coming to class or may have
to miss a class; and so on, and so on. A
case came to my attention in which the
instructor was at the leftmost of three
boards, and a student sitting toward the
right in the front row couldn't see what the
instructor was writing, and so was forced
to copy from the notes of the student to
his left, but that student was copying from
the notes of the student to his left, and
that student was copying from the notes of
the student to his left. And on top of all
that, any notes copied in class that are
intended to cover an entire course are
likely to be defective because the amount
of material in an optimal set of lecture
notes will probably exceed what the
student has time to write down during the
available lectures.
The student needs computerization.
So we start with a student who has been
given her 333 questions, complete
solutions, and superb lecture notes, and
this is what I mean by an "open
�Open Curriculum
curriculum," and already it is a vast
improvement which by itself will guarantee
that such a course will be popular and that
the students in such a course will turn in
sterling performances. But that is not
all—here is the really good part. Imagine
that these 333 questions are put on
computer, and then a program is written
which selects questions for a final
examination—a program that picks one
question from the first section, two
questions from the second section, and so
on.
Imagine, furthermore, that the
computer introduces random changes both
in the coefficients within each problem and
into the variable names, as discussed
above, and so is able to print out sample
examinations—as many as the student
wants—and also solutions to each sample
examination.
The real examinations
administered
by the
university,
furthermore, are printed out by the same
program, so that the students' sample
examinations are indistinguishable from
the real ones. At the same time, students
who are not ready for the final examination
but who want to test themselves on what
they have learned so far can ask for tests
on individual topics, or on several topics at
one time. And imagine, finally, that this
program is put on diskette and sold in the
bookstore for some nominal sum. What
would be the result?
Benefits of an Open Curriculum
First of all, the students would have
an unprecedented level of curriculum
definition. They would have the 333 core
questions, and they would be told the
rules by which the computer selected
questions for a final examination, and the
rules by which the computer altered the
questions, and they would have access to
an unlimited supply of sample
examinations.
Now this resembles what already
happens. Today, it is commonplace for
students to purchase past years'
examinations with solutions. But doing it
on computer as part of an open curriculum
would be better for two reasons. One
reason is that as things are now, the
curriculum shifts from year to year, so that
previous examinations cover different
material. The second reason is that the
solutions presently being provided tend to
be prepared by students and are errorridden. Forever etched in my memory
was the pain on the face of a fellow
student when I informed her—as she was
about to enter a final-examination
hall—that several of the previousexamination solutions that she had
purchased from mathematics students and
had studied and trusted were wrong. The
computer-generated sampleexaminations,
in contrast, would remove both of these
shortcomings—every sample examination
would be highly similar to the upcoming
examination, and the accompanying
solutions would be error-free.
No more examination by ambush.
And as a result, forever abolished from the
face of the earth would be examination by
ambush—the examination to which the
student goes not knowing what to expect,
or the examination to which the student
goes with reasonable expectations but
which asks such bizarre questions that it
seems to be from some other course. A
computer-based open curriculum would
also prevent the frequent miscalculation on
the part of the test-setters of the difficulty
�10
of an examination, and so would prevent
the ludicrous outcome of seventy percent
of a class being failed, which reflects not
at all on the students, but only on the
immaturity and inexperience of their
teachers. Indeed, under a computerized
open-curriculum system, failure might
become a rare phenomenon, as students
would now be able to pre-evaluate
themselves as often as they wished and
according to the same criterion that the
university would be using to evaluate
them, and so if their own pre-evaluations
told them they were going to fail, then they
might be convinced that they needed to do
more work before examination day.
No more cheating. A computerbased open curriculum brings other
unlooked-for benefits. Today, cheating is
a serious problem. On term tests in
particular, in a large crowded classroom,
the students sit elbow to elbow, with their
neighbors' examinations almost as easy to
scan as their own. But with computergenerated examinations, cheating can be
prevented by having the computer
generate a different examination, or a
different
variation
of the
same
examination, for each student. Having
many alternative versions of an
examination within one classroom would
slow grading, but only trivially—each paper
would have its own code number, and
punching that code number into the
computer would produce a printout of that
paper's solutions, and that printout could
be stapled to the students' answers. The
markers would then consult the attached
printout when marking, and the students
could later use the same attached printout
to review their performance.
Still on the topic of cheating—at the
University of Western Ontario where I
used to teach, my secretary was
propositioned by a cleaning lady to steal
examination papers for money. My office
seemed under constant assault by
students trying my door when they thought
I wasn't in, usually at night. A student was
once left alone in my secretary's office
when she stepped out for a moment, and
he immediately opened a side door
between her office and my own, and
stepped into my office, but was unable to
account for why he had done so. A coed
invited me to help her study at her place
on the evening before one of my
examinations. Thus, a professor's having
curriculum-definition information that is
denied to students makes him the object
of theft and of corruption. A computerbased open curriculum circumvents all
such perils by equating teacher and
student on their knowledge of any
upcoming examination.
No more unfair advantages. And
there are other things that would be
prevented that may not qualify as outright
cheating, but that constitute the granting of
unfair advantages. As things are done
today, one professor may give away more
of an upcoming examination to his class
than another, or a given professor may
happen to drop more hints to a few of his
students than he does to others.
Teaching assistants may know things
about a professor's examination policies
and preferences, or they may have seen
the final examination, or may have helped
in its preparation, and so be in a position
to pass along pertinent information to
favorite students. Some professors give
s'umiHaT — s o m e t i m e s
aJmost
�Open Curriculum
identical—examinations from year to year,
and students who learn .this and discover
that these examinations are on file and
available for inspection and photocopy can
benefit enormously.
Some professors
attempt to keep all their past examinations
from students and refuse to put them on
file, but as these examinations have
passed through hundreds of hands, a few
students are able to obtain copies, and
these few benefit greatly. With a secret
curriculum, a teacher must hold back and
measure how much in clear conscience he
can tell any particular student about an
upcoming examination. With a computerbased open curriculum, he is not only
permitted to tell everything he can, but
also obligated. He is thus transformed
from an antagonist of the student to an
ally.
No more errors. The preparation
of a final examination is often more hectic
than it should be, so that sometimes a
question turns out to be devastingly hard,
or unsolvable, or entirely meaningless.
Or, sometimes after a final examination
has been graded and the grades officially
released, it is discovered that the solution
that the graders had assumed was correct
and that they were looking for on
examinations was in fact incorrect, so that
some students who had wrong answers
were given credit and all students who had
the right answer were not given credit, and
since re-marking that question on
thousands of examinations and then
revising all the grades would be costly and
embarrassing, the error is hushed up.
Problems such as these the computerized
open curriculum would also sweep away.
11
No more simultaneous testing.
The extra labor of devising make-up
examinations for students who excusably
missed an examination is now replaced by
the touch of a button. In fact, there need
no longer be any such thing as a missed
examination because there would no
longer be any reason to herd students into
large halls so that they could write their
examinations simultaneously.
If a
particular student felt that she had
mastered a three-month course in one
month, she could just walk over to a
testing center, and if they were booked for
the day, she would reserve a time on the
next day or the day after, but if there was
an empty desk available right then, then
the attendants could just punch a few
buttons, and out would come her
examination questions which she could
answer on the spot. Graders would be
continuously available, and as the optimal
solutions could at any time be printed out,
the examination could be graded within
minutes after being completed. When the
student walked out of the examination hall,
she could be clutching in her hand not
only her question paper, but also a
photocopy of her own answers, a copy of
the correct solutions, and her grade.
Perhaps this is a little optimistic—perhaps
she might typically have to wait a day or
two for her grade—but it certainly wouldn't
be anything like the unconscionable six
weeks that it takes now.
No more unverified grades. And
no more wondering if the graders were
competent enough to understand an
unconventional solution, or whether a
certain question really had a correct
solution at all, or whether there had been
a mistake in adding up her grade—now it
�12
would all be open and above-board. Now
she would be able to review her
examination while the course was still
fresh in her mind, and while it was still
possible for her to understand the reasons
for her errors or the nature of the correct
solutions.
In the present system, in
contrast, by the time she gets her marks
six weeks later, she has forgotten how to
do most of the problems, and so that even
if she went to the trouble of petitioning to
view her own examination answers, she
would only be allowed to view them briefly
and what she saw she wouldn't
comprehend because it would have been
so long since she had studied the
material, and she wouldn't be allowed to
photocopy her own answers, and wouldn't
be given the correct solutions along with
the marking scheme, so that she would
find it impossible either to understand the
course material better from inspecting her
paper or to verify whether she had gotten
all the marks that she deserved. A
computer-based open
curriculum
eliminates all such difficulties and permits
a final examination to become not only a
means for evaluating the student, but also
a learning experience for the student.
No more timetable dilemmas. And
no more examination time-table conflicts
where a student has two of her
examinations scheduled at the same time,
or examination pile-ups where several
tough examinations have to be written
within a short space of time, or
examination spread-outs where some
simple examination has to be written
weeks after all the others and, say, delays
her departure for home or for a job in a
distant city. And similar things can be said
about course scheduling—as things now
stand, students must sometimes select
only one of two courses that they would
like to take because the lectures for these
two courses have been scheduled for the
same times, or for overlapping times (but
this would be less of a problem if an open
curriculum
released
students
from
attending lectures), and students are often
prevented from registering in a course
because of limitations on the capacity of
the lecture hall in which it is taught (but
this ceiling could be lifted if it turned out
that few students wanted to come).
Less wasted faculty time.
The
open curriculum would save a vast amount
of faculty time. Right now all over North
America, thousands of faculty members
are all busy trying to figure out which
pages to ask the students to read, which
problems to assign, what questions to ask
on examinations, what might be the
correct answers to these questions, and
so on. And the question must arise as to
why these thousands should all be
duplicating each other's efforts, when it
needs to be done only once on the
computer, and from then on it can be
improved and refined, but with a far
smaller investment of time, and with an
increasingly superb product with each
revision.
No more rejection of qualified
students. In those lectures whose chief
benefit to the student is curriculum
definition, an open curriculum will lead to
a drop in attendance. If any students
should remain who value the lectures
either as the primary conduit of course
material or as an adjunct to their private
study of an open curriculum, then they can
continue to attend lectures—but these
�Open Curriculum
students will constitute a minority. Such a
drop in attendance can be viewed as still
another benefit of a computer-based open
curriculum. It will benefit, among others,
students like the 3,300 qualified students
who were denied admission to UBC last
fall.
These students were denied
admission because there was no room for
them in the lecture halls, but if they could
have found seats in these lecture halls,
then in many cases they would not have
understood what was being said in them
anyway, so in fact there was no need to
deny them admission. Far better to have
admitted them and to have given them
adequate curriculum-definition material so
that they did not need to come to these
lecture halls in the first place. And far
better to have pocketed their fees too. No
news should be met with greater joy by
cash-strapped universities than that
student morale can be boosted and
student learning can be facilitated while
cutting costs at the same time. From a
financial point of view, the recipe of the
open curriculum is irresistible. Of course
some of the savings would have to be
passed along to the students.
Lower tuition fees. And here is
suggested an argument that students
currently protesting fee hikes should be
using—that most of their tuition goes for
things that fail to benefit them—indeed
that injure them; specifically, lecture halls
in which they do not enjoy being confined
and lecturers whom they do not
understand. Their time is wasted, their
morale sapped, and to defray the expense
of this they are handed an everyincreasing bill.
13
Answering
unprecedented
questions. To the objection that the open
curriculum would teach students how to
answer the core questions, but that what
the university should be teaching them is
how to answer new questions, several
replies come to mind. First, when one
becomes aware of how little the average
student actually learns, and that in firstyear calculus, something like a quarter to
a third of all the students fail, the idea that
the secret-curriculum system teaches the
creative solution of
unprecedented
problems does not seem credible.
Second, whatever questions are asked on
an examination must inevitably be drawn
from some pool, and so the only issue
remaining is whether the student is to be
allowed to see this pool or not. If he can
see it, he knows what to study; if he can't,
he doesn't. Third, the best way to learn
how to solve unprecedented problems
may be to acquire experience in solving a
diverse selection of set problems—and so
students coming out of an open-curriculum
course may be able to outperform
students coming out of a secret-curriculum
course on any examination, whether it
includes unprecedented problems or not.
Fourth, one wonders whether there are
any truly unprecedented questions being
asked on examinations right now, or
whether these are merely variations on
questions that have been studied. Fifth, if
truly unprecedented questions are being
asked, can this be justified? Surely, an
examination legitimately tests what a
course has taught, and not what some
rare genius among the students may be
able to answer. Sixth, that rare genius
may be merely a student who loves his
subject and has had broader exposure to
it, so that the question which for most
�14
students seems unprecedented, for him
falls within a familiar pool, and so if that
question had been included in the core of
an open curriculum, prior exposure would
have been equalized for all students. And
seventh, if difficult and unfamiliar
questions are indeed being asked, then
one may enquire how many students are
answering them correctly. If the purpose
of any question is to distinguish the more
able students from the less able, then a
question that no student answers correctly
is a totally wasted question, and a
question that almost no student answers
correctly is an almost totally wasted
question.
A look back at the secret-curriculum
system. For the secret-curriculum system
that is presently in place, it is difficult to
muster any sympathy. It is a system in
which the student learns what a course
requires of him only by spending many
weary hours picking the information out of
a stream of unintelligible verbiage. It is a
system which pretends that course content
is transmitted from teacher to pupil, but
where often the pupil understands only the
curriculum information that defines for him
what he will eventually have to cram on
his own. It is a system which places
obstacles in the path of learning and then
blames the student when he doesn't learn.
It is a system by which the faculty
establishes a monopoly on curriculumdefinition information, and dispenses this
information to students as a reward for
attending lectures and thus for bestowing
an air of legitimacy on the lecture method.
The abolition of lectures?
Advocating an open curriculum is not at all
advocating the abolition of lectures, it is
only advocating the removal of one reason
for attending lectures—the bad reason of
curriculum definition. Upon the removal of
this reason, attendance will indeed drop in
lectures dealing with topics that because
of their complexity are not amenable to
being taught by the lecture method, and in
some cases that attendance will approach
zero. In consequence, the role of the
faculty in certain disciplines will change.
As things are done now, mathematics and
science students put the faculty to greatest
use before examinations when the
students have begun their cramming, and
when for the first time they have learned
enough to be able to ask questions—that
is when the lines start to form outside the
professors' offices. If the result of an open
curriculum and the self-pacing that
computerization permits is that students
engage in a more even and sustained
effort, and if the result is also that they
take their examinations in a staggered
fashion, the chief effect on the faculty
might be that students begin appearing at
the professors' doors in a less
overwhelming but steadier stream
throughout the year, and that in certain
disciplines, voluntary
individual
consultations might replace lectures as the
primary mode of
faculty-student
interaction.
The student gains. From the point
of view of the student, the benefits of a
computer-based open curriculum are so
numerous and so weighty as to make the
option irresistible. The student's time is no
longer wasted travelling to and from, and
sitting in, a class where she learns
nothing. She is relieved of the guilt and
demoralization that result from being made
to feel stupid many hours each week
�Open Curriculum
listening to incomprehensible lectures.
She gains the security of knowing exactly
what it is that she is responsible for
learning, and she does not spend time
learning things that are not examinable
while neglecting to learn other things that
are examinable. She is able at every
stage to pre-evaluate herself so that she
always knows where she stands. She is
freed of the fear of examination by
ambush. Following every problem that
she works out and every examination that
she takes, she has immediate and errorfree feedback. She is not plagued by
errors in her notes and in exercise
problems and examination questions. She
is not corrupted by seeking unfair
advantages nor does she have her class
standing lowered by other students who
succeed in gaining unfair advantages.
She is able to pick up where she left off
following some interruption in her studies,
and able to complete courses early.
Because she no longer pays for lecture
halls and lecturers which do not benefit
her, her tuition fees drop. Because the
university's costs fall too, it is able to
provide her with finer libraries and betterequipped laboratories. By the elimination
of scheduling conflicts, she has a wider
selection of courses, and by scheduling
her own examinations, she avoids
examination timetable clashes and
inconveniences. Perhaps most important
of all, she is relieved of the burden of
every day having to pretend that the king
is wearing clothes.*
is
�The Role of Textbook Confiscation
in
British Columbia High Schools
Lubomir Prytulak, Ph.D.
December 1992
Memories of private ownership.
It is easy to imagine that every
improvement
to education
must
necessarily cost money, but this is not
always the case—sometimes what
educators are spending money on is
actually harmful, and if they merely
stopped, both the students and the
taxpayers would be better off.
I came across such an instance
when I discovered that the province of
British Columbia went to the trouble of
purchasing high school textbooks, and
then of loaning these out to students
during the academic year. This surprised
me because what I had gotten used to
when I was in high school in Ontario many
years ago was buying my own textbooks.
During the year that my own son spent in
a Vancouver-area high school, I noted the
effects of state ownership of books and
quickly came to the conclusion that private
ownership offers many advantages.
In Ontario, one of the high points of
the year was going off to a big downtown
bookstore to buy my textbooks for the
coming school year. There was a thrill in
getting these brand-new books, slick and
shiny, with their delicious new-book smell
and in taking them home and in glorying in
one's ownership of them.
;
For reprints of this article,
•: or to be put on a mailing list
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please write or telephone:
The c o n t r a s t
with
state
ownership.
What happens here in
British Columbia is that a student is given
books with school identification stamped
and inked all over them, and while some
of the books may be new, many are used,
and some have gone through several
hands and are ratty. Sometimes the
books are marked up. Sometimes they
contain graffiti.
One mother looked
through the textbooks that her daughter
brought home on the first day of school
and discovered obscene drawings that she
scribbled over with a ball-point pen so that
her daughter wouldn't see them. So
already
we h a v e
something
undesirable—not only is the student
denied the pleasure of owning new books,
but upon touching some of the books
given her, she may understandably be
seized with a desire to wash her hands,
and may have constantly thrust upon her
the reminder that the subject she is trying
to study has been viewed by the previous
users of the book with contempt.
And previous users may leave
behind booby traps too. At one place in a
French book, the print was white on a
black background, and a parent noticed
that a former owner had inked out a
terminal 'e.' If the parent hadn't noticed
Lubomir Prytulak
4165 W 11th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V6R 2L5
(604)228-1561
�this and corrected it, her daughter may
have fallen into this little trap.
One's own library. But let's move
on to a weightier consideration—that the
student must return the books to the
school at the end of the academic year,
which means that he is unable to build up
a library of the books that he has been
studying from all his life. But, building
one's own library is an excellent way to
encourage a love of learning. Merely the
possession of a bookshelf with books in a
student's room will predispose him to view
himself as a student and perhaps even a
scholar. By scanning his old books, he
can see and take pride in the progress he
has made.
Spontaneous study.
Also, he
might want to consult books to remind
himself of something that he has learned.
For example, during his summer holidays,
a student was watching fireworks from a
distance. He noticed that the flash of an
explosion and the sound were separated
by about ten seconds. He recollected that
in physics he had studied things about the
speed of sound that would have permitted
him to estimate how far away these
fireworks were, but he didn't remember
quite how it was done. If he had had his
physics book, he could have looked it up,
and he could have made his computation,
and then he could have told everybody
what he had found—but this healthy
learning experience was denied him
because the school had repossessed its
book from him last spring and presently
had it sitting in a warehouse.
The same happens in every area.
Say a student finds himself during the
summer surrounded with the chirping of
crickets and just outside the kitchen
window he sees an outdoor thermometer,
and this reminds him that his biology book
presented a formula by means of which
one can use the number of cricket chirps
per minute to calculate air temperature. If
he had his biology textbook, he could look
up the formula and could put it to an
empirical test, but it never really was his
textbook in the first place, and he does not
have it now, and he will not get to verify
the cricket-chirping formula. Or, he comes
across hockey on a French channel and
hears some expression that he can't
remember the meaning of but that he
thinks was discussed in his French book in
a chapter that dealt with hockey, but he
can't look it up because he doesn't have
that French book. He hears a passage
from Romeo and Juliet on the radio, and
recognizes it and likes it, and would look it
up and read it if he still had his copy, but,
no, it too has been confiscated. Such
examples can be multiplied endlessly.
The school seems to imagine that
children will be happy to answer artificial
questions pushed at them during the
school year, but that beyond that, they
never have questions of their own; that
they read when directed, but never
otherwise, and certainly would never be
tempted to reread anything that they had
read before. One day in French, a book
called Les OVNI was handed out and read
from briefly, but then immediately collected
again. Les OVNI is French for The UFOs,
and this was a topic that interested a
grade 11 student, Ben. Ben asked if he
could borrow the book, and was allowed
to. He brought the book home, and spent
a couple of hours reading it, and greatly
enjoyed it—mostly on account of the
laughable credulity of its authors—and at
the next class returned it. Note that to be
allowed to take this book home
necessitated a special request, and was
greeted with suspicion, and the request
�Textbook
Confiscation
was granted with an admonition
concerning the importance of returning the
book. A student's wanting to read further
in a book was for the educational
bureaucracy not a cause for joy, but for
anxiety. Note also that in the years since,
if Ben had had that book, then he would
undoubtedly have looked at it more than
once, and would undoubtedly have shown
it to his friends, but these opportunities
were denied him and that copy of Les
OVNI is also sitting in some warehouse
instead of on his shelf where it could be
doing some good.
Owning textbooks permits easy
review.
And a library of ones
schoolbooks isn't just useful for answering
spontaneous questions or satisfying
flashes of curiosity—it is also useful for the
later academic work that a student might
do. Many school subjects are cumulative,
and what one learns in any given year
builds on what one learned the year
before, and so at some point in his
education, that student may be expected
to know something that he once learned
but has forgotten—logarithms, say, or
trigonometry—and he may recollect that
he has studied these, and if he could only
see his old textbook, he would recognize
the diagrams, and the notation would be
familiar to him, and so his review of this
material would be facilitated, but he
doesn't and he can't.
In my own case, I have used and
reused my grade 13 algebra book more
times than I can count and in many
situations—for example, when one takes
the many probability and statistics courses
that are required in experimental
psychology, a knowledge of permutations
and combinations is assumed, and my old
grade 13 text is where I would always go
for a review. The same when I started to
teach probability and statistics in
university—any refreshing that I needed
on fundamentals, I got from my trusty
grade 13 text. Over the years, I have
worked through the annuities and bond
values chapter several times—without a
knowledge of this chapter, one is an
illiterate in the world of money. I have
used the logarithms and indices chapter in
helping my son with his coursework. It is
the most thumbed-through textbook that I
own. I always know where it is. I may
continue to use it for the rest of my life. It
would not have had the same usefulness
had I not also kept the Coles notes
solutions that were then available for
purchase—another
thing that
is
unavailable today, and that restricts a
student's ability to profit from a textbook
and that increases his dependence on the
educational bureaucracy. Had this grade
13 algebra book been confiscated by the
state as textbooks are today in British
Columbia, I would have been deprived of
a useful tool.
Owning textbooks permits easy
preview. Private ownership of textbooks
can be helpful not only after a course has
finished, but before it ever begins. For
example, a student may have August free,
and being interested in chemistry, would
like to start working through the chemistry
book assigned in a course that will begin
in September. Or, the student may have
a tough year coming up, and may want to
get a head start on a particularly difficult
subject so as to relieve the strain once
school starts. With the present restriction
on private ownership of textbooks, neither
of these options is available.
You can write in your own
textbook. Then, too, their arises the
issue of the optimal use of a book. When
I study from a book that I own, I write in it.
�Some lines or passages seem to stand out
in importance, and these I underline. Or,
I find mistakes, and I correct them.
Unfamiliar terms I gloss. Sometimes, I
have a question, and I write that in the
margin. Perhaps I see a parallel between
two statements on different pages, and I
note that. Sometimes, I disagree and
write down why. Occasionally, I know a
detail or an elaboration that is not in the
book, and I add that. At the end of a
chapter, I might summarize the main
points. I may hear a joke or pun that is
related to the material, and I write that in.
I might complain about the book being
repetitive or unclear.
Sometimes a
formula can be expressed in a simpler or
more memorable way, and I write that in.
If I am studying the book for a course,
then I will want to indicate sections that
are to be skipped and sections that are to
be studied with particular care. When I
am solving problems, I can put a small "1"
opposite each problem I get right, and a
small "0" opposite each problem I get
wrong, so that later I will be able to tell
which problems I did, how many times I
did each one, and how hard they were for
me. All such writing I enter in fine lettering
in light pencil so that I can revise or erase
it and so that it doesn't impair the legibility
of the original text.
And what do I have when I am
finished? Why I have a book which for me
is corrected and clarified and enriched—a
book that shows that I have read actively
and thought about what I have read, and
that upon rereading reminds me of the
things I have thought. For the student,
then, a textbook should not be something
that he absorbs passively, but rather
something that he carries on an active
dialogue with, and his notations should be
a record of that dialogue. When I see that
the textbook a student owns and has been
using is spotless, I imagine that he
couldn't have reflected much on what he
was reading, and couldn't have enjoyed it
much either. And so, in order to be able
to write in their books, students must own
them.
Private ownership
facilitates
tutoring. Then, too, textbooks may be
useful to people other than students. For
example, a grade 12 girl—let us call her
Arlene—wanted
help with
her
trigonometry, and asked Tom, a
mathematics student at UBC, to tutor her.
Tom agreed to help her if she would first
buy for him a copy of her textbook, so that
he would be able to review what it was
that she was having trouble with before
they got together. Arlene did succeed in
buying a copy of the Mathematics 12 book
from her school, but it took phone calls
from her mother to accomplish this, and
she was given to know that this sort of
thing was highly irregular. She was made
to feel like she was stealing state secrets.
But why? Is the school in the
business of disseminating information, or
of restricting it? Is grade 12 mathematics
confidential? Is it susceptible to abuse or
overdose? Is there a danger that some
unprincipled and unauthorized person will
master grade 12 mathematics, and with
this knowledge join Saddam Hussein's
effort to build the bomb? Must a teacher
approve the possession of a textbook in
the same way that a physician must
approve the possession of a hypodermic
syringe? What is going on? The teachers
have a goodly supply of these books, and
they know the replacement cost that they
must charge when a student loses a book
and wants another—so why aren't they
happy to sell these books to students or to
anybody else who wants them at the
�Textbook
Confiscation
replacement cost?
The student can't just go out and
buy these books elsewhere—a mother
who was considering home education tried
to order some dozen schoolbooks through
a book store, but found that of the dozen,
only one ever arrived. She concluded that
textbook publishers like to sell in bulk to
schools but cannot be bothered with
individual orders.
Non-students might want to
study. And let us not forget that one
should not have to be a formal student in
order to be allowed to study.
If
schoolbooks were stocked in book stores
and were for sale to all, any number of
people might be tempted to either brush
up rusty skills or to pick up the thread of
abandoned studies. It is not easy to think
of a justification for allowing schools to
establish a monopoly on educational
materials and to restrict their distribution.
A better textbook might come
along. Consider also, with the state
owning truckloads of a particular textbook,
what happens if a new and better book
comes along. What usually happens is
nothing, because it would be frightfully
expensive to switch. The truckloads of the
old book would all have to be thrown
away, and truckloads of the new book
purchased. In other words, the present
system locks books in and gives teachers
less flexibility in switching to superior
books.
Teach respect for property. Yet
another reason for permitting private book
ownership is that it encourages respect for
property. When something is not your
own, it's hard to build up any enthusiasm
for protecting it.
I noticed that the
backpacks that students all seem to use
abrade the covers of books rapidly, but
that students were not doing what I and
my classmates did in those days of private
ownership, which is to put covers on the
books to protect them. Why bother when
it's not yours? Why bother when it isn't
going to be kept in your own library, or
when you aren't going to have to resell it?
State ownership encourages in the student
an attitude of neglect which can turn a
brand new book into mush over the course
of one school year.
Save the school money.
And
then, obviously, the schools are chronically
short of money and manpower, and so
why do they deplete their resources
buying books and assigning teachers to
keep track of them and trucking them
around the city and storing them in
warehouses?
Are we helping the poor? But if
we can find so many reasons favoring the
private ownership of books, then there
must be some countervailing and
overriding motive which has led to the
buildup of this vast book bureaucracy.
What might that motive be? An obvious
motive readily springs to mind—it is that
by providing books, education is made
more affordable, and so students will not
be kept out of school on account of
poverty.
But when we examine this
motive more closely, it does not ring true.
In the first place, all the textbooks that a
high school student needs in a year cost
about as much as a family's going out to
a good restaurant for dinner. In the
second place, when books are owned
privately, a secondhand market springs
up, so that anyone who is under financial
constraint can buy the books secondhand
(with the advantage over state ownership
that he can look them over first and buy
ones that have not been defaced), and
then at the end of the year, if there are
books he doesn't want to keep, he can
�resell them (with the advantage over state
ownership that he can keep books he likes
or might need)—which two measures bring
book costs down to truly trivial levels. But
if there are people too poor to afford even
this, then special provision can be made
for them: a textbook allowance can be
added to welfare payments made to
families with school children; or publishers
can be invited to donate some free books
for the needy; or students who don't want
to keep their books could donate them to
a book bank. In other words, the problem
of the poor not being able to afford books
is so trivial, and it can be solved at such a
small cost in so many ways, that one has
to reject the notion that a vast bureaucracy
has sprung up on its account.
In any case, if the purpose of state
ownership of books is to equalize income,
then why books? Students also need
shoes—so why not provide them with free
shoes? Or, free breakfasts and lunches,
or free school supplies? In any of these
cases, the student would be relieved of
one financial burden, and could use the
money saved to buy books, and so be
blessed with all the advantages of book
ownership outlined above—and yet it is
books that teachers choose to supply and
not any of these other things.
Or are we just
imposing
classroom homogeneity? No, we really
have to look elsewhere for the solution to
the riddle of state ownership of books.
The answer that occurs to me is that
teachers restrict access to textbooks
because they want to retain control of the
learning process—they are uncomfortable
at the idea of learning taking place
independently of the school, and at the
vision of people following their curriculum
who aren't even registered in school, or at
students being guided by other than
unionized teachers; and they wish to
prevent the many uncomfortable things
that start to happen in the classroom when
learning is pursued independently—some
students end up knowing far more than
others, some students end up having
already learned things that the teacher is
about to teach them, and some students
end up even knowing things that the
teacher himself doesn't know. From the
teacher's point of view, the ideal class is
one that progresses at the prescribed
pace, and one in which all students come
to class needing to know exactly what the
teacher is going to teach that day. When
state-owned textbooks are handed out on
loan in September, there is little chance of
this lock-step being broken—the students
are going to be kept so busy during the
year going to class and getting their
homework done that they will have neither
the time nor the inclination to move ahead
on their own.
It is the desire to maintain
classroom homogeneity, then, that may be
the hidden motive behind the state
ownership of books. This alone can
explain why teachers aren't content to
provide books on loan, but go beyond that
to discourage private ownership. This
alone explains why teachers feel a need to
offer free books to students, but no
comparable need to offer free shoes. The
essential thing to notice is that state
intervention does not consist of offering
free books to the poor, but consists rather
of denying private ownership of books to
rich and poor alike. And so we come back
to our starting point—to switch from state
to private ownership of books is to
encourage the student in his pursuit of
knowledge, and to cut costs as well.^
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Health Care Task Force Records
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
White House Health Care Task Force
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/10443060" target="_blank">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
Description
An account of the resource
<p>This collection contains records on President Clinton’s efforts to overhaul the health care system in the United States. In 1993 he appointed First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to be the head of the Health Care Task Force (HCTF). She traveled across the country holding hearings, conferred with Senators and Representatives, and sought advice from sources outside the government in an attempt to repair the health care system in the United States. However, the administration’s health care plan, introduced to Congress as the Health Security Act, failed to pass in 1994.</p>
<p>Due to the vast amount of records from the Health Care Task Force the collection has been divided into segments. Segments will be made available as they are digitized.</p>
<p><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0885-F+Segment+1"><strong>Segment One</strong></a><br /> This collection consists of Ira Magaziner’s Health Care Task Force files including: correspondence, reports, news clippings, press releases, and publications. Ira Magaziner a Senior Advisor to President Clinton for Policy Development was heavily involved in health care reform. Magaziner assisted the Task Force by coordinating health care policy development through numerous working groups. Magaziner and the First Lady were the President’s primary advisors on health care. The Health Care Task Force eventually produced the administration’s health care plan, introduced to Congress as the Health Security Act. This bill failed to pass in 1994.<br /> Contains 1065 files from 109 boxes.</p>
<p><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0885-F+Segment+2"><strong>Segment Two</strong></a><br /> This segment consists of records describing the efforts of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to get health care reform through Congress. This collection consists of correspondence, newspaper and magazine articles, memos, papers, and reports. A significant feature of the records are letters from constituents describing their feelings about health care reform and disastrous financial situations they found themselves in as the result of inadequate or inappropriate health insurance coverage. The collection also contains records created by Robert Boorstin, Roger Goldblatt, Steven Edelstein, Christine Heenan, Lynn Margherio, Simone Rueschemeyer, Meeghan Prunty, Marjorie Tarmey, and others.<br /> Contains 697 files from 47 boxes.</p>
<p><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0885-F+Segment+3"><strong>Segment Three</strong></a><br /> The majority of the records in this collection consist of reports, polls, and surveys concerning nearly all aspects of health care; many letters from the public, medical professionals and organizations, and legislators to the Task Force concerning its mission; as well as the telephone message logs of the Task Force.<br /> Contains 592 files from 44 boxes.</p>
<p><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0885-F+Segment+4"><strong>Segment Four</strong></a><br /> This collection consists of records describing the efforts of the Clinton Administration to pass the Health Security Act, which would have reformed the health care system of the United States. This collection contains memoranda, correspondence, handwritten notes, reports, charts, graphs, bills, drafts, booklets, pamphlets, lists, press releases, schedules, newspaper articles, and faxes. The collection contains lists of experts from the field of medicine willing to testify to the viability of the Health Security Act. Much of the remaining material duplicates records from the previous segments.<br /> Contains 590 files from 52 boxes.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0885-F+Segment+5">Segment Five</a></strong><br /> This collection of the Health Care Task Force records consists of materials from the files of Robert Boorstin, Alice Dunscomb, Richard Veloz and Walter Zelman. The files contain memoranda, correspondence, handwritten notes, reports, charts, graphs, bills, drafts, booklets, pamphlets, lists, press releases, schedules, statements, surveys, newspaper articles, and faxes. Much of the material in this segment duplicates records from the previous segments.<br /> Contains 435 files from 47 boxes.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0885-F+Segment+6">Segment Six</a></strong><br /> This collection consists of the files of the Health Care Task Force, focusing on material from Jack Lew and Lynn Margherio. Lew’s records reflect a preoccupation with figures, statistics, and calculations of all sorts. Graphs and charts abound on the effect reform of the health care system would have on the federal budget. Margherio, a Senior Policy Analyst on the Domestic Policy Council, has documents such as: memoranda, notes, summaries, and articles on individuals (largely doctors) deemed to be experts on the Health Security Act of 1993 qualified to travel across the country and speak to groups in glowing terms about the groundbreaking initiative put forward by President Clinton in his first year in the White House. <br /> Contains 804 files from 40 boxes.</p>
Publisher
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
Identifier
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2006-0885-F
Text
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Paper
Dublin Core
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Title
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[Twelve by Twelve] [Loose]
Creator
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Task Force on National Health Care
White House Health Care Task Force
Marjorie Tarmey
Identifier
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2006-0885-F Segment 2
Is Part Of
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Box 41
<a href="http://clintonlibrary.gov/assets/Documents/Finding-Aids/2006/2006-0885-F-2.pdf" target="_blank">Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/12092971" target="_blank">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
Provenance
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Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
Format
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Adobe Acrobat Document
Medium
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Preservation-Reproduction-Reference
Date Created
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2/6/2015
Source
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42-t-12092971-20060885F-Seg2-041-011-2015
12092971