Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms Book

I found Frank Smith's name in an endnote in an Alfie Kohn book and decided to check him out. In this book, Smith rails against what he calls "the nonsense industry"' programmatic instruction that is lockstep and focused on discrete, isolated skills. As he was describing the ideal language classroom, I was thinking, "Hmm, this sure sounds a lot like whole language." Sure enough, he's one of the big names associated with the whole language movement. I briefly considered tossing the book aside, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. As is the case with most movements in education, there isn't anything inherently bad about the whole language philosophy. It turned bad when it was adopted in entirety by school systems and enforced to the exclusion of phonics. Whenever the education "experts" think they have the next big thing, instead of integrating the best aspects with what's already working, they overcorrect and make a mess of things.

Two myths, Smith writes, had a hold on education when the book was written (and still have a hold today, I'd argue): First, the myth of quality-controlled education: Instruction will succeed if it is delivered to students of all ages in the same systematic way that part of industrial products are assembled, with constant monitoring all along the line. Second, the myth of the omniscient outsider: People outside the classroom can make better instructional decisions than teachers who actually know and see students. He gives a brief history of the transfer of control from teachers to external authorities, which ramped up in the panic after Sputnik in 1957. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 mandated educational research, so agencies and institutions sprang up all over and began taking advantage of federal funds. The act also attempted to redress socioeconomic inequality through the public schools, which gave rise to constant evaluation of students. Constant evaluation, he points out, is also key for state governments as they direct and defend the expenditure of taxes for public education.

I don't agree with everything Smith says; for example, I'm not a fan of heterogeneous grouping. I do like his metaphor that learning must be like being "part of a club." The four criteria of a successful "learning club" are no grades, no coercion, no restriction (e.g., in terms of grouping and timetables), and no status (in other words, the teacher acts as a mentor, collaborator, and fellow learner). Good teachers, he says, are interested in what they teach and enjoy working with learners.

Pithy quotations:

"'Accountability' is the standard term for the belief that teachers will teach better if they are constantly and publicly confronted with the consequences of their teaching, in the form of numerical test results. I am not against accountability. I think society has a right to expect teachers to promote student learning to the utmost, just as society demands that physicians do everything possible to advance and maintain the health of patients. But society does not tell physicians how to practice medicine. Teachers are given responsibility without autonomy. . . Ironically, the procedures that are supposed to ensure that teachers teach effectively prevent them from doing so" (150).

"Teachers are--or should be--the experts. They should not expect others to be better qualified and more authoritative in changing the teaching world for them" (246).