[Header Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash]
Writing about the fundamental flaw in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Andrew Solomon opens with a claim that helps explain why five-decades of intensive education reform has always failed: “There is nothing more alluring in polarized times than straightforward solutions to complicated questions.”
Haidt is an academic and scholar who is having success with public work. His status as scholar should elicit trust in his work—notably more so than public work by journalists (such as Malcolm Gladwell) or pundits (such as a tiresome list of Op-Ed writers at the New York Times).
Yet, as Solomon explains, Haidt’s popular book is, in fact,
a compendium of important and profound insights about contemporary childhood embedded in such wishful lucidity. His twinned basic propositions – that children should have less supervision and more free play, and that they should have less access to social media and some other parts of the internet – have a strong basis. It is likely that his sweeping simplifications will help to move forward much-needed social change; it is unfortunate that the impetus for that change is often grandiose and misleading statements, an endless succession of graphs and footnotes notwithstanding. The word sometimes seems not to be in his vocabulary; the key associated with the question mark seems not to work on his computer. He never lapses into the rhetoric of uncertainty that would serve truth. Nowhere does he refer to the incomprehensibility of social decay. Never does he express uncertainty that it is possible to know the causes of something as complex as the fluctuations in youth mental health, so his remarks allow for almost no contemplation of the exceptions to his propositions.
Since I entered higher education, I have been dedicating most of my work to public scholarship and public commentary (such as this blog); when I publish traditional scholarship, I advocate for those pieces to be open-access.
I have always felt that too much of academic scholarship and research is siloed behind paywalls and almost exclusively discussed at exclusionary professional organization’s conferences.
What good is knowledge when it sits behind a wall between academics/scholars/scientists and the general public?
My introduction to public scholars included reading Joseph Campbell and Howard Zinn when I was quite young and only beginning as an educator, writer, and scholar.
I was drawn to their work well before I discovered that academia mostly frowns on public scholars. Even in 2024, much of my work is casually waved off as “just a blog,” and there really is no mechanism in my university for receiving the sort of proportional credit my public work deserves.
Most of my traditional scholarship is read (maybe) by 10s of people. In 2023, my blog had 139, 000 visitors and 220,000 views. Some of my public work has directly impacted grade retention reform.
However, as Solomon details about Haidt’s thesis, too often what is popular is mostly “straightforward solutions to complicated questions.”
And that leads to what most of my public work necessarily confronts: A century of media, public, and political misrepresentations and misunderstandings about teaching and learning resulting in a fruitless series of education reform cycles.
As Solomon admits, Haidt’s book is grounded in a valid concern about contemporary childhood. But from there, Haidt over-relies on extreme claims not grounded in the evidence (the same sort of mistake found among journalists).
The essential problem here is one that Howard Gardner has examined. Leaders, such as politicians, are most effective when they use black-and-white rhetoric.
In other words, the paradox of public messaging is that what works to compel the public is counter to what works for addressing complex problems.
For several years now, the US has experienced that exact same dynamic in terms of media and political claims about reading instruction that has resulted in reading legislation destined to do more harm than good (except sow the seeds for yet another reading crisis in a few years, which is occurring in England after major reading reform in 2006).
Although grounded in the journalism and podcast of Emily Hanford, the mainstream media remains trapped in “sweeping simplifications” and “grandiose and misleading statements” about reading instruction, reading achievement, and national tests data (NAEP) as represented by Julian Roberts-Grmela’s “Many kids can’t read, even in high school. Is the solution teaching reading in every class?”:
Poor reading skills are a nationwide issue. On the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, nearly 70 percent of eighth graders scored below “proficient” and, of those, 30 percent scored “below basic.”
“In a typical classroom that’s about 25 kids, that means about 17 are still struggling to comprehend text at the most foundational level,” said [Natalie] Wexler.
This article again misrepresents NAEP data and allows another journalist make a false overstatement not grounded in fact.
Even if we accept NAEP data as 100% valid, “proficient” is well above grade level, and “basic” represents what Wexler calls “foundational,” grade level reading.
That means in a class of 25, we might have 7-8 students, not 17, struggling to read at grade level.
In other words, the paradox of public messaging is that what works to compel the public is counter to what works for addressing complex problems.
The truth here, however, doesn’t fulfill the crisis rhetoric journalists have committed to despite the evidence otherwise. The truth doesn’t help fuel the reform cycles that feed the education marketplace (such as the US tossing out millions of dollars of reading programs to buy new and different reading programs without any valid evidence that the reading problem is grounded in those reading programs).
So if we return to Solomon’s excellent and nuanced look at Haidt’s work we can better understand that most of education reform is also prompted by valid concerns about student learning (especially reading and math as so-called foundational learning); however, we must also then acknowledge that the claims about the problems and the solutions being offered are yet more “sweeping simplifications” and “grandiose and misleading statements.”
In our free market, regretfully, there is often little money or popularity in nuance, either in detailing problems or providing solutions.
Roberts-Grmela and Wexler are certainly perpetuating extreme over-simplifications about reading that—as Sold a Story has proven—are very compelling for the public.
Like Haidt’s book, however, most of the claims and most of the solutions are fundamentally grounded in misinformation and misunderstanding.
Journalists today, ironically, seem incapable of reading with comprehension themselves, or are simply blinded by the popularity of their misinformation.
In any case, like all of education reform across the past five decades, the current reading reform movement will fail, again, because it is another round of “straightforward solutions to complicated questions.”
