The New Education

The New Education by Cathy Davidson explores disruptive changes to higher education as the world transitions from a world where people learn to become workforce ready to one where people learn to become world ready. She really had me on her side until the moment she didn’t. Davidson spends the first half of her book explaining why current higher education is the way it is and then highlights cases of untraditional teaching methods.

She details how compulsory education was introduced to aid in the societal transition brought by industrialization where former farmers needed to learn how to be factory workers. Education created complacency which was needed for the values of the time. Charles Eliot was a Harvard President that wrote the first version of The New Education in 1869 that called for reform inspired by German’s diverse approach to learning and the French’s prescribed/standardized approach. This contributed to significant changes and brought the modern higher education model into the picture.

Davidson is a big fan of community colleges’ approach to learning which is to make education accessible. Community colleges are open and want to nourish students while universities are seen as exclusive and cut-throat. In a university, there is a fixed mindset and when a student fails it is because the learner is flawed. At a community college, it is believed that everyone has a capacity for growth and sometimes all it takes is a nontraditional approach. She highlighted CUNY’s ASAP program that was a program established to increase communication between students and faculty/staff to identify problems and better help students succeed. The program had success in increasing graduation rates by directly addressing students needs with simple things like train fair that turned out to be very important to students.

The last main point Davidson made that I agreed with was that technology is not always superior to the current ways of teaching. Pedagogy is.

When it came to looking in the real world and who was adopting a ‘New Education’ philosophy the results were very mixed. She attributes a hackathon to being the key reason for students’ success because they were allowed to take what they learned in the classroom and apply it in the real world.  What she doesn’t acknowledge is that many students in this class didn’t enter a hackathon and only one group won. It also doesn’t give credit to all the information the students used in this competition that came from traditional means of teaching or what the students were doing outside of class already. These kinds of events are not a reliably reproducible practice.  That’s the main problem with most of her examples. Success can range from sky high to intangible.

Davidson taught an online course where she structured an online community that she makes sound unreal. When picking her teaching assistants, she tells a story about how she gave them 90 seconds to use their devices to figure out who invented the printing press. This is when she lost me. She says that the students all created a google doc to work together and discovered that actually the technology for the printing press existed before Gutenberg made his version. The fact that she mentions the students sharing a google doc leads me to believe that her claims are at least exaggerated. Why and how would students create a share a google doc with a 90 second deadline? There was also no mention of a follow up discussion on why Gutenberg received credit for the printing press and why he is still an important figure when it comes to making information accessible through books. She mentioned the importance of iteration when talking about the ASAP program but the way she described her class made it seem like it was designed perfectly the first time and had no problems. I think this creates unrealistic expectations for the teacher who wants to break the mold. “Cathy didn’t have any problems.” Although her class was a smashing success, the platform it was on lost traction and support. This result is a reoccurring theme for her examples of the New Education where things allegedly work but don't catch on.

She talks about Arizona State’s approach to student-centered learning and how it gives them opportunities “that go beyond the usual unpaid-intern-at-the-copy-machine” role. This line makes me think that Davidson is out of touch with the real world. I have been led to believe that unpaid internships don’t exist anymore. If they do, better than a copy machine role is the lowest bar possible. It’s also mentioned that ASU is the first to recruit their own graduates which sounds like they are eating their own waste. She vaguely states that these students go on to have good jobs without explicitly stating any salary or hiring metrics or comparing results to any other higher education institutions.

Davidson recounts her trip to the hospital where, while on the brink of death, she can’t help but feel sorry for the medical attendants and their large tuition debt. This paragraph in particular made me cringe:

“The bustling, efficient team of eight or ten physicians, residents, interns, and nurses who surrounded me in surgery looked like my CUNY students. They were young, from different countries, international by birth or first-generation Americans.”

Why? They look like her students as in they are people? How does she know that they were all international by birth or first-generation. Did she ask? Why??? It came off to me tone deaf. She goes on to explain that it’s a shame that education costs so much money and students are expected to complete a major and be responsible for the cost. She doesn’t acknowledge how removing those barriers will overflood higher institutions and the quality of learning would decrease significantly as a shortage of professors would require more inexperienced people to be brought on, because universities have already shown they refuse to hire full-time professors, and students would sign up for something they have no commitment to. I'm not saying that I completely disagree and think education should cost a million dollars. I think it should it be available, accessible, and discoverable to everyone. I think she could have mentioned some of the problems with destroying these barriers and then provided counter-counterarguments for some of these problems. Make it universities’ jobs to make sure students sign up for the right major.

Professor Coward was a math professor who taught for three years and was so good he was fired. By the time I got to this point in the book I was taking everything said with a cup of salt. Because he was so successful, Berkely fired this professor is what I was told. This is where the theme of something that is allegedly very good just goes away for no valid apparent reason. Davidson also writes Professor Coward as some kind of stoic martyr and that made me feel like she was trying to use emotion to make up for a lack of facts. Maybe Berkely just hates good teachers, I don’t know. This chapter also talked about formative feedback alone being the best type of feedback over summative or summative + formative which I think is a useful finding assuming there is significant qualitative and quantitative research that backs it up which it sounded like there was.  

Professor Mike Wesch is a Kansas State professor who taught a 200-person course in a retirement community. The class was tasked with building a video game about end-of-life decisions and did so while living among people at the end of their lives. Wesch wrote a 12-page note to his students at the end of the semester letting everyone know what they did good and how they could improve. I don’t believe that Davidson was advising other professors to duplicate this which is good. There was no acknowledgement if financial aid was given to the students who wanted to take the class and couldn’t afford to live in this retirement community, if any elderly found themselves unable to find a place to live because it was full of college students, or if any of the elderly people found themselves annoyed by the presence of partying young adults. The point was that the lack of standardization in the class let students do something they wouldn’t normally get to experience in their education. I just don’t see how 200 people were able to meaningfully contribute to a project that could realistically be completed by less than a tenth of that class size. There are profitable game studios with so many fewer employees. This isn't acknowledged. There are also no base understandings that all students got which highlights the problem with this extremely individualized approach to teaching. Davidson has a problem with standardization and grade distribution which seems to stem from the origins of those maths. Just because something was made with bad intentions doesn’t illegitimize it no matter how strongly you disagree with how it originated. Regardless of what Davidson claims, I do not think using SAT scores is similar to measuring people’s skulls.

The last example covered was Georgetown which I don’t think is worth going into detail about. They have a building where they brainstorm new education ideas. This seems like common sense. Additionally, there are tips for students going to college, instructors, and people in charge of higher education at the end. The ones towards students might be helpful but I could also see them doing harm if everyone were to follow them.

The problem with this book and The Breakdown of Higher Education is that while they do have valid concerns and logic behind their claims, they are making an emotionally biased argument. Ellis at least acknowledges his bias in his book. I believe that education should be based on results and not feelings. Arguments need to be made against proposed solutions, and those arguments need valid counterarguments. Why is it so difficult for these professors writing these books to write out their cases like they themselves would teach a student to do in school? Another thing I’ve noticed is that the things that get highlighted are when big institutions use significant resources to create some big program that yields results. When I think about education reform, I ask myself how can a teacher change their classroom? What can Ms. Soandso in rural Alabama do with the tools that are already available or easily available to her? The changes that are easier to implement are more likely to spread on and encourage change from the bottom up. When things are changed from the top down the people making those changes are out of touch with what is happening and there’s negative sentiment among the people it affects because it isn’t properly tailored to them and they can see that. (I think this is a good idea for a blog post.)