Author: Brock Schnurr
Brock Schnurr is an Owen Sound, Ontario-born author, essayist and educator currently based in Singapore, and a regular contributor to C2C Journal.
When something goes badly wrong in education, it is tempting to blame teachers. Concerned parents and critics may imagine classrooms full of ideological activists imposing fashionable but destructive theories on unsuspecting children.
But this is too simple. Most teachers and professors are not ideological warriors. They are busy professionals trying to do their jobs while dealing with unruly and/or de-streamed students, parents, administrators, grading, extracurricular duties and disruptive technology.
The more penetrating question is how bad ideas become established in Canadian education to begin with. My previous column used the example of trigger warnings as a case study of how one such bad idea arose, the many things wrong with it, and the absence of science behind it. Now it’s time to delve into how and why such preposterous ideas can gain acceptance and become nested.
A large part of the overall answer is widespread conformism. There are two kinds. One is strategic conformism, typically described as “going along to get along”. People conform because the costs of contrariness can range from discomfort to exclusion, punishment, and even death.
The other kind, non-strategic conformism, is not motivated by fear. Rather, it is an essential part of our social lives. None of us can become experts on everything; there needs to be a division of intellectual labour, which means we all need to defer to the judgment of others. Non-strategic conformism happens constantly: we do what others do, we believe what they believe, we trust, we defer.
This is ordinarily sensible. If I need specialized medical treatment, I defer to my oncologist or cardiologist. If I need my brand-new EV repaired, I defer to the automotive technician. And if I am a teacher confronted with a claim about how children best learn, I am naturally inclined to trust someone with an advanced degree, a university position and years of specialized research experience.
The problem arises when the supposed expert is wrong—and refuses to admit it.
Consider the typical teacher, beset with demands on all sides, as I described. Those professional-development days must come as a relief. And while they may be given presentations by one or more experts, our teacher is not given much opportunity to reflect or prepare probing questions. Does anyone seriously believe they have the time, energy, or motivation to read the fundamental research, identify its flaws, wade into a controversy and then challenge the keynote presentation?
This is where the charlatan appears—and this is the opening they exploit.
A charlatan is not simply someone who is mistaken. The charlatan believes they are right and superior to anyone who might disagree. Yet, paradoxically, the charlatan quickly dismisses empirical evidence when it undermines their pet theory. Often, they know the research they’ve conducted or rely upon is unfit for purpose. That doesn’t stop them. Because what matters most to them is contributing to a grand narrative.
Canadian education provides plenty of examples.
Consider “learning styles.” Its adherents claim students learn differently according to distinct styles and that education should accommodate them all. Yet there never was strong evidence to support the claim. People express preferences for learning in certain ways, but the evidence is unambiguous (see here and here): there are no educational gains from indulging those preferences.
Or consider the long-running dispute over how children should learn to read. The evidence overwhelmingly favours phonics (see here and here), yet deeply flawed “whole-language” instruction has been used in Canadian schools for decades.
Then there is the “multiple intelligences” notion, which proposes that human beings possess several independent forms of intelligence rather than a single general ability. So slipshod that it should not even be acknowledged as a “theory”, it has no empirical support for its grandiose claims and is incompatible with well-established findings about the brain.
Because conformism appears to be the default mode in Canadian education, a small number of charlatans can do a great deal of harm. It takes time and effort, skill and motivation—and perhaps an unusual degree of risk tolerance—to criticize a fashionable idea or a study that sounds progressive. So most teachers trust and defer, while those with suspicions go along to get along.
This pattern is compounded by wokeism. Traditional education is presented as oppressive and unjust. When students underperform or lack interest, this is evidence of some yet-to-be-unmasked oppression. New pedagogical practices are then presented as cures. Bad ideas become difficult to criticize because criticism is portrayed as opposition to equality, inclusion or justice.
Concerned parents and others need to look beyond teachers, however, and focus on the field itself, particularly the faculties of education that train teachers and produce research on teaching. A recent series of papers in Nature tested the credibility of research in the social sciences. The discipline with the worst performance—by far—was education.
Something is terribly wrong when the experts who purport to tell preschool teachers and university professors alike how to teach produce the least credible research in the social sciences. Canadian teachers should be enabled to ask a simple question without fear of ridicule or reprisal: “Show me the evidence.”
The original, full-length essay upon which this column was based, by Renaud-Philippe Garner, was recently published in C2C Journal.