[Header Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash]

Throughout my public school teaching career as a high school English teacher from 1984 until 2002, I always centered in my classes a love for popular music. In fact, my poetry unit was grounded in songs by R.E.M. (and a wonderful part of that is that my students drew me into their music in the late 80s and early 90s).

In the 1980s, however, students were well aware that my favorite music then included Dire Straits and Pink Floyd (among others).

Some where in that first decade, I had a student turn in a brief essay that praised lavishly the music of Pink Floyd—except that the student referred to Pink Floyd throughout as an individual performer, not a group.

The essay was equal parts very authoritative misinformation and somewhat impressive sentences that expressed absolutely nothing. This was many decades before ChatGPT; however, this essay was a harbinger of the sort of nonsense AI produces under the guise of human expression.

While this was an extreme example, many if not most students I have taught over the past 40 years are victims of two problems with both thinking and expression (writing)—the grand overstatement as a first sentence in an essay and the Dunning-Kruger Effect (“a lack of self-awareness [that] prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills”).

The impact of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is pervasive and complex:

The Dunning-Kruger effect effect occurs when a person’s lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, and underestimate their relative abilities as well.

Why can we not perceive our own abilities?

To the latter point, I have seen in sports many examples of excellent athletes who struggle and even fail as coaches because they misread the simplicity of performing as an athlete. But the primary way this effect impacts students is the danger of expounding on a topic with which someone has little or no experience or expertise (see below for a parallel problem, epistemic trespassing).

Journalists, politicians, pundits, and public intellectuals often reinforce these behaviors, a naive arrogance, and students have seen far more evidence of inexpert bombastic pontification than valid and credible expressions of claims and explanations.

As well, a central cultural phenomenon in the US is a disproportionate trust in entrepreneurs and outside-the-box thinkers to the exclusion of people with a depth and breadth of experience and expertise; for example, the billionaire effect on a field such as Bill Gates performing as an expert on education.

Young people (more often than not, young men) routinely are compelled by and drawn to mainstream discourse that is overwhelmingly corrupted by the Dunning-Kruger Effect; Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Christopher Rufo, and others are among the punditry who excels in almost exclusively holding forth with authority and certainty on topics with which they are provably wrong.

Podcasts, interviews, and written expression grounded in the Dunning-Kruger Effect are representations of the power of rhetoric and purposeful expression to supersede credibility and even facts. And there is a symbiotic relationship in that phenomenon because, for example, neither Rogan nor his audience have enough knowledge in the topics to know what they don’t know so Rogan’s bravado and certainty are compelling despite the lack of facts or even evidence.

Further, the political norms in the US allow politicians and political candidates (especially in formal debates) to gain power and influence through how they express and carry themselves even as they distort evidence and even outright lie. During the Trump/Clinton debates, Trump was declared a winner in one event even as most people acknowledged his responses were overwhelmingly false claims.

Here, I think, is an important distinction between the popular and scholarly world (and not to suggest one is somehow superior to the other, but substantially different and different in ways that could benefit humans broadly).

When a person, especially a young person, who hasn’t been formally educated—such as graduate school—in gaining and navigating knowledge (or “Knowledge”) has a “new” thought on a topic, that person often feels that the newness is universal, not just new to them. It is easy, as well, in a burst of excitement with a new idea to believe you now have something wonderful and new to share with others.

In the scholarly world, when a scholar has a new idea to them, the first thought is assuming other people with expertise have explored that idea thoroughly, and the rush of excitement, then, is to find out what knowledge there is on the topic, often as preparation for sharing their exploration of the ideas with others but grounded in an intense examination of other people’s authority on the topic; in academia, there is a culture of standing on the shoulders of giants, the exact opposite of popular trust in out-side-the-box thinkers and billionaire pundits.

I must stress here that even as this approach to knowledge is a norm of academia, scholars are too often victims of both the Dunning-Kruger Effect and epistemic trespassing; however, typically within the scholarly world, those failures are challenged and even shunned.

I have begun calling that norm “academic humility,” and I directly teach that in my first-year writing as part of expectations for student thinking and writing.

A great deal of instruction with first-year students is grounded in unlearning habits about writing and thinking instilled in K-12 schooling. A major concern I address is traditional essay elements, specifically the assertive introduction with a thesis statement.

Directly and indirectly, students are often encouraged to make blunt claims in essay writing, starting with the direct thesis. That expression comes after students are encouraged to draft and have approved an introduction and thesis sentence before they can draft their essays.

Also, students are taught to write conclusions that restate their introductions.

These traditional approaches foster static and narrow thinking and expression (especially writing an entire essay simply to restate what the beginning of the essay has already asserted).

Therefore, as we interrogate and then re-imagine essay writing, I emphasize the value in discovery drafting and raising questions to be considered in an essay instead of the thesis-sentence-as-proclamation.

Academic humility in thinking and writing allows for nuance and, ironically, for working toward ideas and expressions that do in fact bring something new to the conversation.

If we are careful when consuming media, public, and political discourse, we often notice a great deal of dogmatic expression grounded in ideology and not careful consideration or evidence.

Without academic humility we are left victims to not knowing what we don’t know.

Education rightly approached fosters in students ways to navigate the world with the sort of humility that can and will lead to a tentative authority that benefits not only them but all of us.

See Also

Epistemic Trespassing: From Ruby Payne to the “Science of Reading”

Epistemic Trespassing in Real Time: Peter Navarro, Economist

As I wrote about recently, the “science of reading” movement fits into a 40-plus year cycle of neoliberal (conservative) education reform.

However, using terms such as “neoliberal” or “conservative” means very little to most people since these are broad (and often shifting) terms about ideologies or beliefs.

Education reform since the early 1980s has been almost entirely conservative in the following ways:

• The structure of reform has been entirely accountability, which has often been punitive (school report cards and grades that have led to school takeovers, value-added evaluation of teachers that resulted in ranking and firing teachers, exit exams that kept students from graduating, grade retention, etc.).
• Reform has used standardized testing to justify reform and to monitor reform outcomes despite well-known concerns about inequity in such testing.
• Reform has been entirely in-school only, depending on and perpetuating education guru marketing such as that by Hattie (although his research and ideologies [can’t do anything about poverty] have been refuted).
• The rhetoric around reform has depended on a false crisis/miracle dynamic without either being verified by evidence; reform has primarily been perpetuated by political rhetoric and media stories.
• Reform has surrendered public institutions (schools) to the marketplace, choosing indirect reform over directly reforming how schools works or addressing any social inequity that is reflected in school data.
• Reform is grounded in rugged individualism myths—students and teachers just need to work harder (and they will do so only if held accountable), downplaying or ignoring systemic forces.
• Reform is often trapped in over-sold programs and one-size-fits all approaches that seem more efficient.
• Reform reaches for technology at the expense of teacher autonomy and authority as well as individual student needs.

Progressive education has never really been practiced in the US, and the US has certainly never implemented progressive education reform.

Considering what progressive education reform would entail may help clarify how our current cycle of education reform is essentially conservative. Progressive education reform would include the following:

• Acknowledging that out-of-school factors (systemic forces) have the greatest impact on measurable student achievement, progressive education reform would reject either/or thinking and advance social reform and in-school reform grounded in equity, and not accountability.
• Progressive education reform would reduce or eliminate the role of standardized testing in driving what reforms are needed and how well reforms work. Evidence for effective teaching and student learning would be much more broadly and deeply defined.
• Collaboration, community, and transparency would replace punitive accountability.
• Aspirational and idealistic outcome goals would be replaced by patience and realistic expectations for human behavior.
• Progressive education reform would center individual student needs and teacher autonomy over market and political interests.
• Progressive education reform would reject one-size-fits all solutions, crisis rhetoric, and competitive models that pit stakeholders against each others’ interests.
• Progressive education reform would be critically skeptical of fads and pre-packaged programs.
• Progressive education reform would put individual freedom and democracy above market/career goals.

I believe progressive (and especially critically progressive) education reform has great promise for serving the needs of students and society much better than our schools have done historically or currently.

I also recognize that we lack the political or public will to set aside our grounding of neoliberal/conservative ideologies.

Ironically, too often people are not well educated enough to step back and challenge their beliefs even as all the evidence around them shows those beliefs are not working.

I suspect that even though we find ourselves in a very deep neoliberal education reform hole, we are going to just keep digging.

After 18 years teaching high school English, I transitioned to higher education in 2002. For well over a decade, I have been teaching first-year writing to incoming college students, who in many ways struggle with the contrast between what it means to be a high-achieving high school student and a successful college students. [1]

One of the first discussions I have with those first-year students is about student behaviors, ways in which students are expected to behave that are unlike behaviors outside of the classroom.

We often discuss hand raising, asking permission to go to the restroom (or being denied access to the restroom), bell systems for being late and class dismissal, and taking tests (and the focus on not cheating).

The discussion is designed in part for students to interrogate the norms of being a student and schooling, but also to begin to consider how college norms are different.

I start here advocating for students to stop behaving as students since many of those behaviors center the authority of the teacher/professor and erase the humanity and autonomy of those students.

My university has recently committed to an expanded advising program that guides students purposefully through their first two years. Since I enjoy working with first-year students, I just volunteered for the program and attended training last week.

One of the sessions addressed the community norms that the program seeks to foster in students, norms of classroom behaviors that should be applied across all of their courses.

Although we didn’t spend much time on this, what stood out to me was the tension between “community” and “norms”—terms that are too me positive, the former, and negative, the latter [2].

Additionally, I am certain that our current political climate around education—anti-CRT legislation, curriculum bans, and book censorship—that suggests teachers and schools (especially higher education) are indoctrinating and grooming children and young people would result in some people finding these norms “woke indoctrination.”

Ironically, these goals are designed to encourage a more free and considerate exploration of ideas; in short, this is about the importance and power of community:

But teachers like McLaughlin and a growing group of parents are starting to realize that for our children to be healthy, happy and successful, we need to teach them a more profound lesson: interdependence — that is, how to rely on others and how to be a person whom others can rely on, too.

What McLaughlin knows and what research suggests is that lasting self-worth cannot come from approval based solely on external rewards, such as trophies, college acceptance letters and fancy job offers. Rather, an understanding of one’s inherent value comes from knowing one’s place in a community — from the sense that others value you and that you add value to others. Researchers call this feeling “mattering”: Only by building interdependence can kids gain social proof that they do indeed matter.

Forget independence. Teach your kids this instead.

I have two vivid and humbling experiences from college. The first in Mr. Pruitt’s class as a first-year student and the second in Dr. Predmore’s class, likely when I was a junior.

As an eager students who had a great deal of success engaging in classroom discussions in high school English (Mr. Harrill’s classes), I found myself excitedly speaking up in Mr. Pruitt’s class until I suddenly realized I was embarrassing myself.

That day I recognized I had much left to learn and not speaking up, listening with new ears, was often a better option.

Just a couple years later, after I had declared as a secondary English education major, I had grown some as a student, but I entered class one day for Dr. Predmore’s Southern literature course and once again found myself embarrassed at my lack of knowledge (but I had learned not to speak up too quickly by then).

I was then evolving in my quest for academic/intellectual humility.

Much of my grounding as a teacher for forty years has rested on those experiences and how to foster high engagement, intellectual humility, and intellectual curiosity in students. I also recognize that a great deal of the norms of schooling are counter to human dignity and deeply engaging with knowledge in critical ways.

There is also another layer to the paradox of community norms in the classroom; along with the tension between education and indoctrination is how teachers/professors and students can navigate academic freedom in a space that has a diversity of beliefs and experiences.

Academic freedom is incredibly important in an education system dedicated to fostering democracy and individual freedom; however, “freedom” is not license, and neither teachers/professors nor students are “free” to simply say anything.

Further, learning is often uncomfortable (student discomfort having been politicized, even weaponized, by conservative recently), but while intellectual discomfort may be expected or even necessary, no one should feel emotionally or physically threatened or unsafe.

Few people have a genuinely good grip, though, on where that line is, and often, the teacher/professor is left to determine that threashhold.

Currently, issues around safe spaces, trigger warnings, and other mechanisms designed to encourage respectful and open discussions are also under attack (and some of the debate around this is certainly warranted).

In the real world, students and teachers/professors will make mistakes, but I remain convinced that formal education must seek to balance academic freedom, free speech, and seeking ways not to further marginalize or dehumanize anyone—recognizing fully that some topics and comments are necessarily inappropriate for class discussions.

Free speech and academic freedom, however, fall back under the problem of norms.

If you spend just a few minutes on social media, you soon learn that billionaires, politicians, and the so-called average citizen all have very weak or even distorted understanding about free speech and academic freedom.

Simply put, what we can say and should be allowed to say on Twitter/X simply is not the same as a classroom, and technically, free speech is grounded in the role of government to monitor or control speech (made even more complicated by the recent over-reach by states such as Florida).

The paradox of community norms in the classroom then becomes that a classroom setting is the ideal place to identify norms and then interrogate that if those norms are ultimately fair and healthy.

Community matters, but share values are not without problems—unless we are willing to continually revisit and revise those shared values in the context of avoiding either/or thinking in which we reduce “value” to either supporting the individual or the community.

As John Dewey and other progressives have argued, we simply do not have to choose one or the other since in a democracy, community and the individual are sacred.

So I return to the problem I have with “community norms.”

Often “norms” are fixed and work in ways to control or police human behavior; community is. a thing in progress, an evolution that is made stronger by its constant state of possible flux.

Norms, you see, are the seeds of indoctrination, and while I fully reject the current conservative histrionics around indoctrination, I am a critical educators who also fully rejects indoctrination.

The best classroom, one where human dignity and humanity are honored in the pursuit of democracy and individual freedom, is a community, and the best community is a thing in progress, stable enough to support us and malleable enough to serve us better as we grow together.

[1] What Do College Professors Want from Incoming High School Graduates?

[2] See:

On Normal, ADHD, and Dyslexia: Neither Pathologizing, Nor Rendering Invisible

Normality in Sayaka Murata

A Vision of Being Human: “Am I normal?”