In Defense of Men (but not Man)

“Psychologists must tell us: why are boys and young men not as focused on education or performance [other than on the football field]? Are they more easily distracted? If that is so what remedial measures should we put in place in primary or pre-schools to correct this?...The question for determination at the end of the day is not so much where are the men—but why are the men becoming dropouts in society.” [Dana Seetahal, Express, Oct 02, 2010]

I want to respond to two recent provocations, one alluded to above and the second the theme of a panel at this year’s National Parents & Teachers Association conference, High Performing Boys: Finding the Formula. My defense of men is not intended as a condemnation of women. Nor am I attempting or seeking to defend or excuse indefensible behavior by any person. This defense is a focused critique and invitation to a fuller more participatory dialogue on education. My intent is to attempt to interrupt some of our unexamined beliefs and habits of thinking that underlie the powerful, diffuse and debilitating, national narratives about Caribbean male (under) performance.
Let me begin with one that is implied in the excerpt and the NPTA panel theme, namely that there exists ‘a formula’ or ‘remedy’ for what has come to be constructed and accepted as a crisis and somehow naturalized deficiency in young men and boy’s upbringing. That Seetahal seems to be advocating a ‘correctional’ stance beginning in pre-school is understandable given that the 20th century has contributed to the almost complete medicalisation, psychologisation, and carceralisation of mental, physical, and everyday life in ‘Schooled’ societies. Unstated but nevertheless implied in the seemingly neutral call for ‘remedial’ measures to the ‘boy problem’ is the unquestioned validity of privileging ‘focus’ over ‘distraction’ as if physical and mental ‘tinkering’ and ‘messing-around’ had little or no value or relation to innovation, creativity, performance, and human well-being and the belief that dropping out of school to pursue ‘a distraction’ is the worst thing that a person could do. Perhaps many students would benefit from adults taking their ‘distractions’ more seriously as opportunities from which to begin learning rather than starting with a desire to see them disciplined and cured of it?
Many students are distracted in school because in most instances the game of school is just not one that they find very interesting or relevant, they soon figure out that it has few real winners, winning does not make or guarantee happiness or satisfaction, and the game has been set up to find and reward a few, or those with the right ‘connections’ or ‘capitals.’ If one is seeking enlightenment, development or intellectual stimulation, or merely entertainment, one will not find it very frequently in the majority of schools. If you’re seeking power, prestige, and social promotion that comes from following orders and certification then succeeding in school is a better, though not necessarily the most successful strategy.

Alternative educational sites like the football field are also valuable spaces to learn about the fundamentals of high performance. More school is probably not the answer to the problems of schooling and we ought to be constructing a new mindset: a vision for education ‘After-School’ (and I don’t mean ‘extra’-lessons which is sometimes More-School just not in School).

Seetahal’s premise that “boys and young men are not focused on education or performance” is flawed. It begins in the wrong place neglecting to interrogate a more fundamental possibility that what many students are actively resisting is the strictures of schooling, meaningless certification and a meager anesthetizing curriculum – education and performance are not necessarily best served by schools as currently enacted in this historical moment. From my observations in several schools during my time as a teacher and lecturer at UWI, boys in schools of all types from Cedros to Port-of-Spain seemed less willing to ‘go along’, to ‘play nice’ or tolerate the farce that was and is being passed off as ‘teaching’ than their female counterparts. Many students are not prepared to tolerate a precarious educational existence of ‘doing without understanding.’ For them doing and earning are the first movers of learning. This of course is upsetting to the entrenched narrative of the ascendant, educationally progressive and active female – that gets ahead by activity and effort but unacknowledged as a cost is a degree of passivity, acceptance, playing along and playing well with others. The institutionalized consumptive party line that “you can have it all” – fashion, family, financial independence, freedom to fete and…is a dangerous and damaging lie. Only a few women and men can have it all and that usually comes from huge personal sacrifices or seeking dangerous or illegal shortcuts in other areas.

Let me turn now to the 2010 NPTA panel theme, “High Performing Boys: Finding the Formula”. At first I was amused then I became annoyed and finally concerned enough to write about it. It is however the likely difficulty that the members of the NPTA and others have in recognizing that their theme is problematic and the dangers of not addressing these respectfully that is my concern. Indeed they perceive a serious issue and are desirous of talking about it. Professionally I have a responsibility to take their concerns seriously but at the same time to honour the pedagogical moment and work to trouble too simple understandings of the issue. Personally, I have a stake in not allowing the no-more-or-less fairer sex to continue to dominate and dictate the pace, content and direction of a suffocating discourse on the past, present and future education of men and masculinity at home and regionally as if there were a deficit of competent and able men capable of responding.

If I were invited to address this theme my goal would be to argue that the valuing and pursuit of high performance as an educational end for boys and girls in T&T, in and of itself is problematic, perhaps dangerous and part of the very problem that we are seeking to address and perhaps needs to be rethought. Because my hosts requested a ‘formula’ I would provide them with one drawn from the research on high performance/performers across many fields including education. The ‘formula’ simply stated is that high performance is dependent upon (but not determined by – this is an important distinction) deliberate practice, a growth mindset, competent, knowledgeable, effective, resourceful and mindful teachers providing useful and timely feedback, supportive social and personal environments and dogged persistence over a significant period of time. I would also point out the fact that while the literature on high performance describes a particular ethic or attitude towards improvement and growth in a deliberately chosen field, it is exceedingly difficult to achieve high performance in a discipline in which one has not made a commitment to improvement or mastery, and this literature says very little about individual or personal ethics – something that we might also find to be a valuable characteristic in high performing men and women who work their ways up corporate and political ladders.

Having hopefully satisfied my hosts’ desire for a formula, perhaps a lingering legacy of the obsessions of an older educational system, I would turn to the costs and rewards of high performance. Some of the costs of high performance, apart from the obvious ones of time and money include reduced creativity, depression, damage to personal relationships, damage to self, unsustainability, cheating, and illegal or unethical behavior. There are many routes to high performance, not all of them honest, safe or socially sanctioned. Indeed it is the promised rewards of high performance, money, power, prestige, status, comfort, personal satisfaction, and various freedoms that are sometimes part of the motivation to become a high performer. Rarely is ‘utility to others’ a motive. Indeed, in many fields, but not all, to actually become a high performer one has to consciously and deliberately make the decision that it's not first and foremost about helping people, but it’s about personal improvement – ultimately it's a selfish or individualistic pursuit though one that can sometimes also be socially useful.

Part 2
Having begun to trouble the audience a bit I would move to discuss some examples of high performers to illustrate some of these ideas. I’d talk about high-performing celebrity boys and men like Tiger Woods, Dwight Yorke, Russell Latapy, Brian Lara, Lawrence Duprey and VS Naipaul – all exemplars of high performing boys/men and all very, very human. This move would be to emphasize that high performance as an end in itself is neither a guarantee nor predictor of success in other areas of life outside of the domain(s) of high performance and to unlock the door to the question of whether or not high performance is really the main or only thing to which we should be aspiring. My own answer to this is that high performance must seen as being part of a larger, more coherent, sustainable and healthy educational outcome for all students. [I would leave my discussion of exactly what I see this as being for the Q&A session to follow.]

I'd talk about the young man at a good school in the US who committed suicide because he had his sexual orientation ‘outed’ online by a thoughtless series of actions by another young man. I'd talk about boys I see drinking copious amounts of red bull and other stimulants or using steroids in the pursuit of high performance and make the connection explicit that high performance is an addictive behavior and one which, without control and appropriate supervision can be destructive. I'd re-emphasise the HIGH in high performance both the positive and negative dimensions and discuss all the people, including some of those likely in the audience who have come to achieve happiness, peace of mind, and financial security - not by pursuing high performance as an end but by finding and nurturing their passions, positive addictions, and finding the right people, places or opportunities to help them do so.
Next I would raise the issue that in order to become a high performer one must be able to work very closely in a community with other high performers and receive useful, constructive and timely feedback leading to the problem of finding, creating or sustaining such communities locally. A large part of the very definition and central to any value to being a high performer is the premise of there being few or very few who are at that standard. In the case of our two small islands, we simply do not have the carrying capacity, markets or communities to support and reward large numbers of high performing people across every sphere of endeavor. Thus pursuing high performance as an educational end might seem to be setting up the inevitable but understandable conflict with other educational concerns namely national development and the perennial concern with ‘brain drain’ which perhaps is a narrow and misplaced patriotism.

Depending on the mood and composition of the audience I might take a risk towards other more germane understandings of ‘male performance’. Talk of male performance and education seldom goes in the direction of the literal. I would wonder out loud, “How many teachers/principals take time to talk with boys about their sexual futures and how to manage relationships and their developing erotic selves responsibly and maturely without moralizing or imposing a heteronormative and monogamous ideology?” I would probably see certain audience members likely becoming visibly uncomfortable. Male performance cannot be restricted only to academic matters – men have bodies too that matter a great deal to them. Perhaps that is part of why they are on the football field?

IF I were talking to an audience of men I'd also say, hey, let the women continue to pursue this obsession with high performance, in the meantime let us men start to take better care of ourselves so that we will be prepared to take care of our spouses, partners, children and wards, when they break down from this dangerously obsessive, anxiety inducing and ultimately wasteful pursuit of high performance at any cost. If it’s one positive thing 'bro' culture might teach it’s the importance and necessity of certain kinds of social networks for men's survival and sanity. I would recommend to them taking a cue from the disability rights and other recent movements for social justice that a reinvigorated men’s movement ought to proclaim loudly, unapologetically and proudly, “nothing about us without us.” Men cannot continue to be silent as women talk about and disparage us publicly, through media and through research – it does none of us any good. But we men also have to get involved. We also have to listen very closely and hear what women are saying – clearly women want to help though they need to be reminded at times, and become mindful, that well-intentioned and oppressive maternalism can have as disastrous consequences as well-intentioned and oppressive paternalism. Patriarchy and privilege are not naturalized or encoded in the male body or communities but are one form of expression of a particularly pervasive and damaging ideology – what Caribbean philosopher and writer Sylvia Wynter has called Man.

“Man” Wynter writes “is not the human, although it represents itself as if it were. It is a specific, local-cultural conception of the human…Its “Other” is therefore not woman…Rather because Man conceives of itself through its Origin narrative…of Evolution…its “Other” and “Others” are necessarily those categories of human who are projected…as having been bio-evolutionary dysselected – i.e…[all] who are negatively marked as defective humans within the terms of Man’s self-conception and its related understanding of what it is to be human.” It is perhaps ironic (and ultimately tragic) that the memythic ideology of Man has been turned, in the present moment upon the members of the entire class from whom it emerged and who sustained it for centuries while benefiting most directly. It is men everywhere and of every hue who are now suspect and being constructed as the new (educationally) evolutionarily dys-selected class. A ‘distracted’ or ‘disobedient’ boy is broken and a danger, a societal dagger, that needs to be quickly re-sheathed through a formula. I suspect that the ideology of Man has found new millennial hosts – though I would stress that these are not solely female or feminised bodies. Most frightening is the possibility that it might verily turn against life-itself if indeed it is not already doing so.

I’d end by re-stating the formula and reminding them that the pursuit of high performance as an educational end comes with no guarantees about other valuable educational outcomes and requires a price which for some might already be too high.

If I were more entrepreneurial and less concerned about the truth and consequences of my speaking or writing I’d market a programme called “The formula” for academic success. It’s what the target demographic of the NPTA appear to want and is primed to buy. The parent market is largely uncertain, fearful, yet desirous of success for their children and simultaneously trusting and mistrusting of experts and soothsayers – in short they are excellent consumers prone to suasion by the latest fad and lapped up rhetoric. Educators, including myself, have much responsibility and blame to shoulder here – we have not always treated or trusted parents and interested others as competent and intellectual equals. Nor have we always taken the time or care, as I am seeking to do here, to articulate clearly where and how we come to see certain forms of thinking and consequent actions as being too limited or too narrow or incompatible with other commitments to social justice that we might hope to make.

Our semi-literate and barely functional news-media, another group whose under-performance and less than critical literacies educators have yet to answer for, catering to the lowest common reader also does more than its fair share as well to keep conversations within certain tolerable and comprehensible limits. Caribbean educational discourses and especially ones concerning male marginalization or performance suffer simultaneously from a poverty and abundance of words, ideas, and concepts… without connection – the true crises are ones of meaning and of our own making (double entendre intended). In seeking to answer if and why men might be dropping out of society, it might be fruitful to characterize the ways in which the society that they are supposed to be dropping out from has constructed and constrained the range of their performative identities and possible identifications.

We need to look closely and critically at the way our Caribbean media and culture have commodified and corralled male, female and other performative embodiments through its limiting representations of masculinity and femininity and by reinforcing certain unproductive (but economically profitable) habits of thinking (being and doing) and our gender theorists have contributed much there already. There are fewer ways in TT to do male/female that are capable of being scribed outside of received scripts. For example, Seetahal’s suggestion that “…the number of eligible men is dwindling. Soon they will become an endangered specie at the tertiary level, in the professions and in the job market” restates as implied fact rather than open question, a trope introduced into the discourse by Keisha Lindsay’s 1997/2002 paper with the similarly sounding title “Is the Caribbean Male an Endangered Species.” Even the headline, “Where are the Men?” has been uttered before, for example in Carl Wint’s Gleaner article of 1989 which went under the banner, “Where have all the Men gone?” and which has popped up from time to time. Having found a meme to mine, it is not (often) in (most) media’s interest to explore other, perhaps more productive sites of and for the construction of alternative meanings and educational ‘realities’. Seldom called upon are much more nuanced and generative formulations such as the question posed (and answered) by educators Jerome DeLisle, Peter Smith and Vena Jules in their 2005 paper, “Which males or females are most at risk and on what?” which recognizes that factors influencing performance and success affect males and females differentially across the entire educational spectrum. Well intentioned slogans while making for good headlines often do very little to unsettle dominant cultural educational mythologies and at worst naturalize these to the detriment of those who do not fit within the ‘normal’ bounds.

The situation we are witnessing and the difficulties men are having has a long history. One part of it stems from outdated but entrenched and reinforced conceptions of ‘masculine virtue.’ Moral and political philosopher Alasdair Macintyre in Dependent Rational Animals: Why human beings need the virtues (1999) draws attention to the fact that the relationship between our (human) biological constitution, our vulnerability and consequent dependency on others, has been neglected as an object of study. This inattention, he suggests, arose out of interpretations of Aristotle’s conceptions of rationality, experience and masculine virtue. Aristotelian rationality, has been interpreted as something that distinguishes us from other animals while his account of the value of experience excludes that of those most likely to experience vulnerability, affliction and dependence, viz. women, slaves, servants, laborers and manufacturers – Man’s dys-selected. Together, they sever and obscure our familial relationships with our animal natures, from which emerges our capacity to be wounded, i.e. our vulnerability. Macintyre alludes to Aristotle’s elevation of an outward practice of a perception of ‘invulnerability’ that emerges from his (Aristotle’s) description of masculine virtue as one which does not burden others in times of need, sadness or loss, but seeks a detached rational independence. Aristotle’s virtuous man does not reveal how, where or when he is vulnerable. Indeed, he denies the existence of his vulnerable self as dependence on others is seen as a sign of weakness. It is this question of masculine virtue and how it needs to be re-defined, enacted and embodied in a Caribbean context not only for boys/men, but for all human beings that is part of the missing thread in visible public anxieties so far.

Reading within and across the genres of this generalized albeit gendered socio-cultural anxiety about (male) performance I see at work a cultural unconscious working through the implications of the sacrifices, losses, transitions, and traumas of the ‘progress’ made in the name of ‘development’ over the last Quincentenary and especially the last century by women and others together with the insecurities and uncertainties of individual, human and global survival in this one. It is perhaps a necessary work of mourning. The last 30 years have seen a celebration of the ‘diversity of women’s different ways of knowing.’ These were necessary and important critiques of those ways of knowing, doing and being that up until that time were posited as being ‘human universals’ but which for centuries had served as mask, proxy, and inappropriate standard for classifying and justifying the exploitation and exclusion of any abject ‘othered’ or ‘bio-evolutionarily dysseleted’ human beings (mainly indigenous populations, women, and others that deviated from the dominant European male ableist norms) but which turned out to represent mainly the values, concerns and ways of knowing of primarily white, European, college educated, often socially privileged heterosexual men. Since that time however I have found great difficulty in locating or recognizing sustained cultural narratives that do not take this pathological intellectual tradition as the de facto crystallized starting point for imagining some assumed homogeneity among the as diverse fraternity and faculties of men.

I am very concerned as a scholar, (and in this case as a man also), when any social group is consistently constructed, identified and repeatedly represented as being ‘deficient’, ‘defective’, ‘derelict’, ‘deviant’ or at a ‘disadvantage’ primarily or solely by members who (must) locate themselves outside of that group and who happen to be enjoying privileged or elevated status in the dominant cultural mythological narratives of the moment. I am also concerned when a member of a group tries to appropriate a discourse as if seeking to represent the entire spectrum of interests, concerns and values of a group. That is to say, I am cognizant and thus need to explicitly state that my opinion presented here in no way is meant to speak for all or even the majority of ‘men’ in T&T or elsewhere for that matter. Though I do hope that some parts resonate with them.

I wonder, are men finding ways outside of the formal education and certification systems to live productively, sustainably, well and mindfully in Trinidad and Tobago at present? If they are then how are they doing this and who are these men? I can think of a few and don’t think they will be found in what are traditionally perceived to be the highest echelons or with hands on the levers of power, but they are more than likely above average performers, known and highly respected in their sub-fields and more importantly productive citizens. These are the questions I am interested in both as a Caribbean man and as an education researcher. To answer questions about high performing boys, if we still wanted to I’d go talk to the families of high performing boys who seem to have managed to be academically successful and leading successful adult lives. Several families come immediately to mind from my time teaching.

To answer Dana Seetahal’s question directly, I checked Facebook to see “Where my boys at?” The short answer is scattered all over the world including Trinidad and Tobago doing what they have to do – working, hustling, living, loving, learning and liming – to survive. Not all have gone on to pursue higher education. The majority appear (and some are) wise and happy and appear to be ‘living a sustainable reality’ rather than mindlessly chasing after ‘the dream’ of having it all. Some are indeed struggling to realize a place in the world, to leave stifling occupations and to find happiness, contentment and meaning at home or abroad. They (and I) would not, and this is critical, characterize themselves as high performers, but perhaps as disciplined, hard-working, entrepreneurial, and mindful workers and caring citizens. But then again, my social network is probably not very typical for Trinidad and Tobago and Facebook is probably not a class-neutral platform.
Indeed, we ought to be concerned about why some students, especially boys are not doing as well in school. But we ought not pathologize them but also ask whether or not there isn’t something terribly wrong with our plantation educational system, its premises and commitments. I’m going to leave this now and invite other men (and women) to continue this complicated converstion.

Secret Criteria and the Medal

Offered in response to this article in the Guardian.

The recent concerns expressed about the criteria for being awarded the President’s Medal and that of CXC’s Dennis Irvine Award provide further justification of the need for more transparent selection processes everywhere in education and in political life, as well as the need for a more critical, reflective and informed public. I mean to take nothing away from the remarkable performance under trying circumstances by Nicholas Sammy, especially when so few men are being held up as academic role models, but quite simply the two awards are from two different organizations with differing philosophies and stakeholders and designed for entirely different purposes each with its own selection criteria. In both cases it is likely that the award is based on a sum and not an average score.

In the case of the President’s Medal it is likely a total score based on performance in eight (8) Units, including Caribbean Studies and Communication Studies, over two consecutive years, i.e. three (3) Unit1 and three (3) Unit2. This makes the Medal open to ALL students from T&T completing the minimum requirements for a full CAPE certificate in the required time period. Where a student does additional Units one would hope that their best six Units in three subjects (in addition to the Communication and Caribbean Studies) would be considered. By pursuing additional Units he likely did not maximise his scores on those Units that would eventually be considered in awarding the Medal. This will likely be the eventual explanation for the government’s “failure to award” Nicholas the Medal. Simple economics (not one of the Units he studied).

Now on to CXC’s Dennis Irvine Award. CXC, as I have argued before, is a for-profit business. It is in their interest to promote their testing products and to elect, brand, and promote admirable spokespersons such as Mr. Sammy, who have used their product in excess to success as exemplifying, ‘The Most Outstanding CAPE Candidate Overall.’ Here the award is not based on pursuing and succeeding in a minimum number of Units but rather the maximum utilization and ‘enjoyment’ of their product/brand – this year 14 Units. A similar award is made at CSEC Level and the winner likely also has something like 12-16 distinctions at CSEC.

The President’s Medal and CXC’s Awards are based on two different standards and criteria and serve two different purposes and constituencies. Despite the media`s mamaguay it is no real mystery as to why one could be awarded one and not the other. One reason we and Nicholas have heard relatively little of CXC’s Award is that the payoff in the short-term for individuals is negligible as compared to that of the Medal which, encouraged by uncritical journalistic practices, has achieved its own mythic status in our academic culture. The annual return on investment for CXC though is increased and unquestioned brand loyalty from regional governments and perhaps more students across the Caribbean being encouraged (by parents, teachers, competitiveness and media attention) to pursue more Units. ‘Ka-ching’!

The sense of outrage and injustice, both real and media manufactured, done to Mr. Sammy and Mr. Jaikaransingh, the Principal of Presentation College, San Fernando, soon to be branded ‘CXC School of the Year’, speaks to an as yet unsatisfied desire in our society for increased transparency, accountability and oversight in managing selection processes at ALL levels and in ALL spheres where valuable social goods involving the public purse are at stake such as the award of (secret) scholarships, contracts, or privileged entry into secondary schools. The promise of ‘New Politics’ demands nothing less. Indeed, while we are hurt by this perceived injustice done to a single ‘son-of-the-soil’ we are not so moved, and there is nary a peep from any Principal of any prestige school, when he/she legally disenfranchises a significant number of other people’s children, our sons and daughters, who have legitimately and legally earned places at mainly tax-payer financed schools under the anachronism that continues to be allowed by the Concordat. Our government assisted schools too perhaps have ‘secret’ criteria for admissions that go beyond simply ‘belonging’ to the right religious denominations.
Imagine what would happen if in addition to the names of students and the schools passed for the newspapers published students’ scores on SEA. The whole of Trinidad and Tobago would be in an uproar when they saw the same questionable selective principles operating as students with lower percentages were admitted to a prestige school ahead of other students with higher scores. There is an obvious reason this is not done – it would upset the way things are. Questions must also be raised and answers sought to the `uncertainties` surrounding selection criteria as to how individual students are admitted into 6th form and how some transfers are effected when others are denied. If some Principals of prestige schools are feeling a little uncomfortable, then I’ve done my job.

As a friend of mine related to me, we cannot only demand the truth and selection criteria when it is favourable to us. That we see no problem with agitating for transparency in one situation but keeping a studied silence in another analogous situation is telling. We cannot have one set of standards for some and another set for others if the game and its outcomes are to be claimed to be fair and just for all. We cannot demand full disclosure only for those powerfully placed and their agents. We must ask after that which continues to take place behind closed doors with and without our continued legal blessings and who benefits and who is disadvantaged and how. We are all complicit in the annual injustices meted out by successive and successful educational establishments. If our selection processes do not pass ethical scrutiny they must be abandoned and rethought. The door has been unlocked for students who have superior marks and who are not selected for the school of their choice to likewise demand a public justification from the Principals of Prestige Schools as to why they ‘failed to be awarded’ a place.

In closing I offer some final, more personal, messages. To Nicholas, Naipaul’s description is apt, “the world is what it is” and by and large it is not fair. If an injustice has been done to you I hope it will come to light and be corrected. Congratulations and I hope you commit yourself to fighting with the same spirit against those more common injustices inflicted upon and which manifest themselves day-to-day and year-to-year upon those who have not been as privileged as you and I. To the Principals of the Prestige schools I ask that they with one voice and in a singular act of altruism end the continued violence and injustice done to the nation’s children via the 20% selection mechanism. Note this does not mean abandoning the Concordat only this unjust element. To the Ministry of Education, don’t get played by the media or the Prestige schools. Don’t pander to public pressure and rush in to redress this perceived injustice without serious consideration and deliberation. Please do it right and make it fair the first time!

A Bad Romance: Hope and Heroism, not Heroes.

I want to respectfully disagree with my former colleague Dr. Maharaj-Sharma on the need for more ‘heroes’ in our school system. There are already sufficient numbers out there doing what heroes do – doing what needs doing with the resources and abilities that they have – generously, altruistically, silently and without recognition. I believe we need to shift the conversation to considering the qualities of heroism or expressions of heroic virtue. My personal position as a scholar is that the hero is an inappropriate archetype and metaphor upon which to found a renewed millennial project for Caribbean Education and Society. It is too close in my opinion to the religious call, one expressed by Fr. Harvey quite recently, on a need for martyrs. I prefer to found my philosophy of education on and in our history, art, and science; our models of resistance, hope and resilience which I find in our maroon heritage and an associated kumbla consciousness with its gesture towards intervulnerability. But I can appreciate the need, especially from those who experienced the tail end of British Colonialism, to begin with the Romantic mythologies of the hero.

Indeed this ground has been well trod by Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Education (London) David Halpin who has argued for the recovery of a Romantic conception of education (see Romanticism and Education: Love, Heroism and Imagination in Pedagogy and Heroism and Pedagogy). By ‘Romantic’ he refers specifically to some of the central elements (as he sees it) of the British literary-historical tradition known as Romanticism. He suggests that recognizing and supporting these conceptions in education might play a role in helping us to recover a sense of hope as educators. While acknowledging the diverse interests of the Romantic period and the ongoing debates within literary criticism he defines the Romantic Vision as “a tradition said to embody a recognizable aesthetic sensibility that centrally attaches great importance to the power of the imagination and the need for spontaneity in thought and action” (p.2). It is to these aesthetic sensibilities: an ideal of love, the heroic, the power of the imagination, and commitment to a rebellious and critical stance that I now turn.

Love for Halpin in the works of the Romantic poets is an overarching and unifying theme. He distinguishes between the different forms of love in their works, namely Eros, “denoting a form of passionate desire of a possessive and sexual nature…that seeks to consume sexually what it passionately desires, in other contexts, like for instance in Plato’s dialogue the Symposium, it provides the initial impetus for an erotically mediated pursuit of the truth – one in which selfish desires are ‘educated’ and ultimately won over in favour of the Good,” and Agape, the self-transcendent form “of caring for the Other that entails a selfless and public-spirited unsparing generosity”. It is this latter form, Agape, that Halpin suggests needs to (re)permeate/reanimate educational discourses and which I believe is the focus of Dr. Maharaj-Sharma’s article though she does not use the term.
Halpin makes a strong case that teachers must be able to find ways to love like this, both for their own well-being and that of their students. He also draws attention to the real difficulty of sustaining such a pedagogical practice and thus the need for “commitment, intimacy and passion” of which passion is seen as the innervating medium that supports others. He cautions against an excess and unalloyed passion (eros). Instead he argues for a passionate teaching that, “places the greatest emphasis, not on charisma, but on a form of earnestness about teaching …[associated with] “enthusiasm, caring commitment and hope . . .; with fairness and understanding . . .; with being close rather than distant; with having a good sense of playfulness; with encouraging students to learn in different ways; with relating learning to experience; with encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning; . . .; [and] with being knowledgeable about their subject; with creating learning environments that engage students and stimulate in them an excitement to learn”. Such teachers have “a genuine concern for the Truth” [ . . . .] ”which they know is “a passionate business.”
In his description and rationale for a ‘heroic conception’ of teaching he focuses on the element of “daring to struggle for some form of inner authenticity as the basis for personal imaginative freedom” that he sees as another common theme in Romanticism. He draws extensively on the work of Curriculum theorist Kieran Egan who recommends identifying with the transcendent and admirable qualities of the hero. The rationale for this is given as “by associating with whomever or whatever in the world seems to best transcend (the threats posed by external reality and personal circumstances), we too feel some security against them as well, some confidence that we might transcend them also”. This heroizing is meant to be of benefit to teachers as well and leads Halpin to equate heroic teaching of the nature he describes as a vocation. He writes, “such vocationalism requires courage, entailing a willingness by teachers to take risks, sometimes at some cost to themselves… it remains the virtue of heroes. It is also a necessary virtue in teaching. The courageous teacher-hero, on this interpretation, is someone who seeks bravely and disinterestedly to serve the needs of others; who takes moral duty and personal authenticity seriously; and who eschews cowardice in the pursuit of the common good.”

After love and heroism Halpin next focuses on the role and power of imagination in Romanticism and for education. Here he draws extensively on Romantic critic, journalist and essayist William Hazlitt. He draws on Hazlitt’s thesis that, “the human mind is simultaneously ‘sympathetically disinterested’ and ‘autonomously creative’. It is ‘sympathetically disinterested’ in the controversial sense that people, according to Hazlitt, are not inherently selfishly motivated, but rather are as sympathetically interested in the welfare of others as in their own happiness; it is ‘autonomously creative’ in the sense that it is the imaginative master and not - as the empiricists would have us believe - the mechanistic slave of sense impressions”. Indeed, much of the work in positive psychology, the science of human goodness, is lending strong empirical support to Hazlitt’s thesis. For Hazlittit it is the imagination that empowers us to imagine and work towards creating a better future. As I and others have argued repeatedly, the real crisis in education in T&T, aside from incompetency and fixed-mindsetedness, is both a lack of imaginative vision of how it could be otherwise and the socio-cultural inertia that often prevents us from following through on what we know should be done.

Finally Halpin looks to rebellion as a virtue of the Romantic which compels him to a critical stance as a ‘public’ or ‘professional’ intellectual. Here he draws on postcolonial and cultural theorist Edward Said as one embodying the Romantic virtues of rebellion, social critic and public intellectual. Said describes the intellectual as, “…a person who is “set apart, someone who is able to speak the truth to power, a crusty, eloquent, fantastically courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized and pointedly taken to task…an opponent of consensus and orthodoxy”, acting as “a kind of public memory; to recall what is forgotten or ignored; to connect and contextualise and to generalize from what appear to be the fixed truths…”. Prof. Kenny, smelter activists Vine and Kublalsingh, educator Raymond Hackett and journalist Kevin Baldeosingh meet these criteria as has Lloyd Best and others in the past. Indeed we have a rich tradition of this in the Caribbean but unfortunately we work very hard to discipline our rebellious and unorthodox teachers in primary, secondary and tertiary schools. Let me also be clear that this particular enactment of heroic virtue is difficult and dangerous resulting in exile, ostracism, loneliness, impoverishment and despair – it is not something to be entered into lightly. Heroism is a risky business.

While preparing this response I had occasion to chat with a friend associated with the now grieving and guilt-racked Naparima Girls’ High School community. We discussed the general lack of courage among students, teachers, staff and parents in failing to say what needed to be said to each other and indeed in not being able to listen to one another. As she said to me, “many people don’t speak up because they are afraid, afraid of subtle victimization.” I wonder whether some will manage to find their heroic voices in the new academic year as they work through this trauma?

A Romantic conception of education (teaching and learning) which acknowledges rebellion and criticism as virtues is perhaps a more open and desirable one than that which currently prevails. Such a view helps teachers to appropriate and value the agency that they always already have though which may be at times diminished by forms of pedagogical and institutional control. It is a perspective that adds to the discourses on teacher empowerment and critical pedagogy.

Halpin’s arguments and examples elaborate Maharaj-Sharma’s musings and calls us then to consider what we have lost and to consider what is likely to be gained by adopting a Romantic conception of education in which love, imagination, heroism, rebellion and criticism are all valued. He offers that “Romance is a necessary condition for being hopeful in education” (p.15) and that we may need “…somewhat against the grain of events, and maybe in order to challenge them - to restore to critical consciousness some of the ideals, values and beliefs of the Romantic Period, many of which in any event interpenetrate unconsciously our thinking today about education, but not in ways that sufficiently influence for the better our actions within it.” As educator Ivan Illich has argued, organizations, systems and institutions have futures, but only people hope. Hope, it appears, is a scarce resource in education at present, scarce but not yet exhausted.

While I have taken pains to be sensitive to the Romantic values and palpable despair that underlies Maharaj-Sharma’s and other teachers’ desires for heroes, the desire to be saved, note how it fits right in with an patriarchal infantilizing damsel-in-distress trope – the damsel being the feminized profession of school teaching – I want to re-iterate that for me the British and European hero motif and narrative perhaps is not the most appropriate one for our situation as it continues to limit and locate the locus of action in a mercenary individual (who does not necessarily live happily-ever-after) independent of the actions of a community that is itself transformed and self-transforming. Indeed, the hero brand today is too easily co-opted into a marketable fetishizable commodity and transformed by the cult of celebrity and narcissism. It is quite likely that we will never come to know of most heroic actions – those that result from the multitude of everyday people doing what they know to be good and right with love, imagination and courage. We do need heroic actions, the virtues associated with heroism (love, imagination, care, courage) available to all of us. As I said earlier, I find my models among the maroons.

Earl McKenzie, in Philosophy in the West Indian novel has recently thrown out a challenge for Caribbean philosophers to articulate our own aims for education. I too want to end with a focused challenge to Dr. Maharaj-Sharma and the staff at UWI and UTT – will you provide the necessary emotional, legal, and financial supports for the type of heroic teachers and teaching you are advocating? If not, then why should anyone choose the path of the hero which comes too closely to resemble that of the martyr? Have you chosen it and followed through on it for yourselves?

A design for sex-segregation research in T&T: A thought experiment

While I have many criticisms and concerns with the decision to pursue sex-segregation research in education in Trinidad and Tobago, especially in the top-down manner with which it is being imposed on schools, (I have outlined these elsewhere here and here)), I want to offer for discussion a research design that I consider to be potentially viable if one wished to pursue this line of action (i.e. cognizant of the limitations to the claims that can be made, the ‘ill-definedness’ of the variables/constructs themselves, the complexity and ethical difficulty of research with vulnerable social agents, and the difficulty of generalizability to other schools and of providing a sound basis upon which policy could be founded). I invite reasoned discussion and feedback on any aspect of the design from interested parties in the media and via email. As a scientist, one has to think through and actively construct a design that is fit to the research question, i.e. one that can potentially provide evidence to support or refute the claim. Research designs or experimental protocols do not magically materialize and aren’t simply thrown together from a tool-kit of parts. Ethically, one also has to consider potential harms and iatrogenic effects, again cognizant that one cannot know all possible benefits or potential harms before-hand. One of the frequently ignored or unspoken possible harmful effects of most intervention research in education is reduction in learning/performance, i.e. lower achievement is a possibility.

While I don’t believe that we can PROVE that sex-segregation ALONE improves performance – there are too many exogenous variables that influence the latter – I am assuming that very possibility, (mathematicians can do this: assume a converse or contradictory proposition), and ask, as a scientist, how could/would I go about showing that it did or did not? I am also assuming that researchers are not going to actually analyze blood, hormone and chromosomes to determine children’s sex. Such a protocol, while informative would be invasive and expensive on a large scale. They will rely on visible characteristics, socio-cultural conventions and the assignment given by parents as authorized by medical authorities at birth as a proxy or ‘good-enough’ indicator for biological sex. I am also assuming no questions will be asked about sexual identity, i.e. feeling like a man in a woman’s body etc., and heterosexuality will be assumed as these are not considered ‘relevant’ to the question by authorities in Trinidad and Tobago at this time. Sex will be assumed by looking at visible characteristics. Male and female would have to be defined as mutually exclusive categories in all regards relevant to the experiment. Whether this is a valid assumption for researchers or sound basis for policy is another matter. What will matter to policy-makers is not what sex students are in any objective way but what researchers and society say that they are for the purpose of the intervention.

To even have a chance at proving that sex-segregation alone improved performance nothing else would have to be changed, i.e. we’d have to keep the curriculum the same, the teacher, the assessment, there could be no sex-differentiated instruction etc. The design could be easily modified to test claims of the relationship between “sex-segregation + sex-differentiated instruction on performance.” But one could not determine if it were the segregation or the instruction and we would not have previously ruled out that it was segregation alone that was responsible. If baseline data was collected we’d have to know under what conditions and try to collect the experimental data under similar conditions. Given the networked nature of societies, and especially in a small place like Trinidad, interventions, observation and analysis would have to be on short time-frames initially to limit communication among individuals involved. While scientists may speculate, conjecture or theorize, they must not ‘overclaim’, i.e. their conclusions must be warranted from the evidence available. I do believe that small, very narrow claims are sustainable if the observations are about very small time frames initially where there is little possibility of individuals’ history affecting the observations and little time for outside influences to confound. We might for example be able to support/refute claims of the form, “based upon these definitions and assumptions about sex and educational outcomes, sex-segregation leads to greater/lesser/no change in outcome on this measure of this variable (retention/attention/performance etc) we deem important, of this idea/concept x from discipline y, under these learning conditions z for the period of time t.” Specificity is everything.

Here’s the first part of my design. Begin with a class of close to equal numbers of Males and Females matched as best as possible on other variables like real-age, developmental age, SES, etc. Then separate M/Fs for a single short period of Math, English, Chemistry, or whatever. Instruction is to be a constant, delivered by the same teacher, same lesson, same jokes etc. (In variations of this design I have a strategy for separating students that hopefully would not clue them in right away that they were being separated by sex, but it relies on a little deliberate deception.) The content and structure of the lesson would have to be well-designed prior to implementation via extensive consultation between researchers, subject matter specialists, and teachers taking into account what is known about teaching that concept in general and in our educational context in particular. I would recommend the concepts/skills chosen be something with which all students, boys and girls, have fairly equal difficulty and perhaps little, ideally no prior experience with in the curriculum at their age-level (but which is part of the curriculum). In this way the knowledge/skills that are being assessed are new and more importantly have little consequence for students in the long term, i.e. they are not part of a consequential exam. Examples abound in mathematics but in order not to confound the design if pursued I won’t reveal that aspect to the public just yet. Specifically, avoid concepts/tasks that are known to favour one sex over another like spatial rotation tasks or some verbally complex reasoning tasks. Ideally I’d want to see lessons drawn from all of the disciplines from Art to English, French to P.E. and Social Studies to Zoology as we are interested in sex differences across the curriculum, not just in Mathematics, Science, and English, though we might choose to begin there. The lessons and topics chosen should span a wide range of educational levels, from first-year (infants) to Form One to first-year of University. Again all lessons would need to be well designed, pedagogically and disciplinary sound and scripted before being used in an actual classroom.

The next part of my design is about delivery. In thinking about how to have students in experimental and control classes receive the same lesson from the same teacher at the same time given the resources available one approach is to use a standardized video lesson or virtual tutor. This could then be used at all schools on both islands with little cost beyond the initial production of the video and resources for showing, thus allowing for wider application to a broader sample, for example in single sex-schools. It would add a level of similarity and redundancy to the instruction at a reasonable cost and massive potential gain in knowledge. The video content should be short, 10-15 minutes. This considers that students will be aware that they don’t have the physical presence of a teacher and the authority represented present in the normal ways as well as the limitations of working memory and human attention. We could then make sound claims about our outcome measure(s) under these fairly fixed conditions thus avoiding the complications of different tutors and feedback at this early stage of the design. These important elements of instruction should be incorporated over time in other designs but not in the beginning. Different video lessons (within the same discipline) should involve teachers/tutors/actors that differ by gender, race, dress, accent etc. If well-designed these could be used for other research studies providing a larger return-on-investment.

If a class is separated the physical space and psychological space is changed. To compensate classes should be merged so that the total numbers remain the same else we are also testing possible effect of class size on the outcome phenomenon of interest. One group should not be sex-segregated but be kept intact and shown the same video. Another kept intact and not shown the video at all and yet another sex-segregated but not shown the same video (they should be shown a video of someone teaching something). That the content of the lessons are not regular curriculum topics at that level means that performance/non-performance on the measure(s) are not academically consequential for students’ lives in the short term. We wouldn’t want students to feel that they were being ranked/scored or valued in a way that could influence their future in this experiment. They get enough of that already.
We don’t necessarily have to show these videos in school settings, though it is likely to be more practical and economical to do so. In fact, we probably could make stronger claims by not doing so initially. Though we would lose the richness and complexity of the school classroom we would gain significantly by having a controlled environment in the beginning stages. Boys and girls could register or be randomly selected (by lottery for example), and volunteer to be part of this research and come to identical centres, located in different parts of either island, either after-school or on weekends, where they would be assigned to the various groups. I like this as it allows students to be simply boys and girls and not representatives of one school or another with all that social baggage. In fact groups could be constituted of students of relatively similar backgrounds from different types of schools if we thought this would yield interesting and relevant data. This would also reduce the influence of peer and cohort dynamics as everyone in a group might be relative strangers to each other. The issue here is whether or not some of the students we would like to be part of the research would actually be part of it, but the same applies in that the students we might be concerned about might not be in school on the day the research takes place. This is a serious problem, a significant sampling error and one for which I have not thought of a solution as yet that does not involve steps that I am not comfortable taking as a researcher. Incentives for participation in the research may be necessary.

The third part is about data-collection and analysis. The actions of students in the different groups as they engaged in the lesson should be recorded. Their talk, questions, movements, notes, doodles during and after the lesson and of course the assessment, form the initial data-set. I’m leaning more strongly now to fixed laboratory styled research settings to capture this data in the initial stages as described above and not existing schools. I am again assuming we’re not after physiological data such as cortisol, adrenaline or glucose levels (indicators of stress) or eye-movement (indicator of focus of attention) – at least not on a large scale. In the pre-stages of the video-lesson design eye-tracking studies might be important with a few students of different sexes to observe what they focus on before taking it to a classroom or experimental setting. One would look at actions during the same time across various groups, for example, in the first minute, or at fixed critical points in the lesson. Keeping the time restricted in this way allows for some strong claims to be made and backed-up.
Analysis of the classroom data should be supplemented with focus group or individual interviews about the lesson, learning, the sex-segregation dimension, performance, etc. As you can see this is a difficult and data rich design. We’re talking, at the minimum, many hours of video, thousands of pages of transcripts - terabytes of data - to be analyzed. A strong set of appropriate analytic resources from a wide range of fields should be brought to bear on the data including but not restricted to tools, concepts and methods drawn from fields as disparate as cognitive science, linguistics, gender studies, cultural studies, mathematics etc. Nobody said that research was fast, easy (or cheap).

A good research design is like a good story – well thought out, plausible plot and potentially satisfying to the consumer. More than this though the design I have offered above, while still in rough form, I think, offers many opportunities for new knowledge generation and innovation in education – one of the goals of this new government. Importantly the design is adaptable, transferable, and scalable. From these perspectives I believe such a project would be valuable. When I started writing this piece the design was meant to be implemented in schools. After receiving some feedback from more experienced peers, I am more convinced that it should first be pursued (or perhaps simultaneously pursued) via research laboratories, a network of knowledge-centres, set up across both islands in various communities where not only education but health or other inter and trans disciplinary knowledge projects could be pursued using the equipment there. This might be a better way to invest in innovation and capacity building for some types of research involving humans. I envision facilities that researchers from different disciplines or interested groups could book/rent with recording equipment already set up to capture voice, video, etc. [We’ll have to deal with crime and security but we have to do that anyway.] These could probably be added to or formed from already existing infrastructure eg. in community centre/health centres. Through such an initiative I see the possibility for involving more and more people in participating in the processes of knowledge creation through research and study in their own communities. Independent groups and entrepreneurs can likely begin to pursue this strategy without government subsidization but I would wish that they did so as social businesses instead of profit-making-businesses, i.e. not for any more individual profit than one’s initial investment. In my thinking here I am heavily indebted to the ideas of Dr. Mary King, Muhammad Yunis and the late Lloyd Best’s call for more research, auto-research in particular.

In recent months I have found the local educational conversations on sex-segregation to be superficial, stale, or stalled and not moving forward in a productive or meaningful way for the national community. Few have offered anything significant or meaningful from which the population could even begin to have a reasoned conversation. My hope with this piece is that by providing something substantial, albeit provisional, concerned and interested individuals will challenge, advise, direct and shape (or reject) this research design in a way that might be useful to us all through civil discourse. My goal in crowd-sourcing is both to get more people to engage in some aspects of scientific design thinking and to actually think deeply and rigorously about what would have to be done, and how that could happen, and ultimately why we want to do this and how to improve this research so that we get value for money and the answers we seek. I know that this is the right thing to do. It is an invitation that I sincerely hope is taken up.

In closing, I wish to remind readers of my earlier concerns about the definitions used and values underlying all research endeavors and this one in particular. These are not simple problems of epistemology and ontology that can be overlooked or left to philosophers but are often important determinants of the findings themselves. I have ignored them only to be able to begin to speak to those who are not familiar with those discourses. One learns a great deal from thinking, reading, observation and experiment, but it matters a great deal with what tools and which theoretical frameworks one chooses to use and how one chooses to wield them. Not all frameworks or designs (or writers) however are mindful of their capacity for harm, respectful of the dignity of the diversity of all (human) research participants or honors the integrity of self-determining beings. Such considerations though must be among the very first in any research programme.

The Reader Bytes Back

“The ethics of criticism requires pointing out the faults in a colleague's thinking.” (Jeffrey R. Di Lio, 2010)

In the digital era one of the tasks facing teachers of the art of persuasive writing is the responsible use of source material. There are many dimensions to responsible use. One of these is appropriate attribution of sources, the breach of which, in an argumentative setting by one seeking to perform as a scholar or intellectual, public, or otherwise, is plagiarism, a species of academic dishonesty. This is a lesson Fr. Henry Charles, President Richards and T&T will likely not forget any time soon. A more difficult skill for many argumentative writers, one exacerbated by the hyper-geometric increase in available and accessible information is responsible use of source material. Irresponsible use of sources, in the context of persuasive writing or scholarly work, takes many forms ranging from the professed naïveté of students who print out Wikipedia articles or web-pages, place them in folders and try to pass them off as ‘research’ papers, to more subtle scholarly improprieties such as that employed by Kevin Baldeosingh in his article Laptops dance with danger (11/06/10).

Baldeosingh’s arguments are typically presented as an intertextual mashup – a sampling of exemplary excerpts from various commentaries made in public fora which are eviscerated with sardonic commentary while buttressing his own position by appealing to ‘expert’ testimony drawn from one or more of his stable of scientists du jour. His style is, usually, a hybrid genre blending acerbic satire and critique and last Friday’s is no exception. Now satire, when it is done well, can be an effective means of critique, persuasion and entertainment, and there have been occasions when he has achieved this harmony to great effect. Last week’s piece however is neither effective nor well done and bad satire is neither an excuse for, nor can it serve as a rhetorical sanctuary from professional irresponsibility as a writer and journalist.

The article represents an example of irresponsible use of source material as Baldeosingh excises and presents segments of text from the letters of Drs. Sharma and Kalicharan as metonymies for positions they do not advocate. Severed from the contexts of their original utterance, Baldeosingh’s injudicious juxtapositions facilitate the construction of these individuals’ contributions to the national conversation on education as simplistic, spurious and suspicious. In short, he misrepresents their arguments through selective quotation in order to generate (false) ‘evidence’ of the antagonistic position he wishes to critique. He invents his opponents.

Consider the way Baldeosingh very early on elevates the emotional ante by descriptively framing the contributions as “dire warnings” and “passionate denunciations.” Are they really? As a scholar when one suspects that what one is reading is untrustworthy or that claims are exaggerated, or worse unfounded, it is incumbent to check for oneself, and indeed a laptop and internet connection makes this easier than ever. I mean no offense to Dr. Sharma, but in her writing she is rarely what I would call a ‘passionate denunciator’ of any kind. She is typically measured, and restrained. This is what aroused my suspicions and led me back to the sources – the three public commentaries.

I noticed - and readers are advised to check this for themselves - that Sharma offered neither dire warnings nor passionate denunciations. Rather, she attempted to raise critical “issues that need to be considered to honour this commitment” from her perspective as an educator who works with teachers across Trinidad and Tobago. She does not isolate the potential benefits from the possible iatrogenic effects and the practical difficulties likely to be encountered in implementing this election promise that voters forget is not yet educational policy. She wisely situates the decision within the culture and climate of schools in T&T where violence, indiscipline, bullying, theft, infrastructural, human and knowledge resource deficiencies, and a lack of training and supervision are commonplace. In short she does not over-simplify the matter but attempts to present and retain some of the complexity of the situation. Likewise, reading Kalicharan’s letter for myself I take it as a public intellectual’s wondering and questioning of the rationale behind this decision to give laptops away. His central point, like Sharma’s, is that laptops alone are not going to be a panacea for some of the challenges facing education in Trinidad and Tobago. Baldeosingh eschews these central points completely in his attempts to paint these educators as alarmists though it is he who lays the foundation for a media-sustained panic discourse through his interpretation and public presentation of their concerns as “dire warnings” and “passionate denunciations.”

There is some evidence of Baldeosingh’s success in at least one case that I could find and which serves as an example of why I consider this particular piece of writing irresponsible. Consider, Trinizagada, a cotecicotelatnt blogger’s response to this article, “After reading the article (Baldeosingh’s) in the Trinidad Express I was lost for words. Now the laptop program of the People's Partnership is going to create morons? What in heavens name are these so called educated people thinking?” S/he goes on to describe details about a laptop programme in the US. To be fair, many in T&T do not read satire well. We respond to picong, brutish humiliation and humbling of authorities and experts when they can be shown to be talking/doing nonsense, and we are fortunate to have an unnatural abundance so as not to have to invent such opportunities, but that is not the case here and is certainly not my intent with this critique.

By irresponsibly misrepresenting and misreporting the central concerns raised by Sharma and Kalicharan, Baldeosingh has influenced this blogger’s, and perhaps some of the general public’s, opinion in a way that undermines their credibility as educators. This is likely not libelous as the piece is sufficiently satirical for this argument to function as a valid defense. In an academic setting however the student would be counseled to return to the sources, read them more carefully, attend to what they are actually saying and responsibly re-present their positions before critiquing them. Indeed, I note that of the three writers (Sharma, Kalicharan, Furlonge), the only person who actually constructs a link between laptops, reduced intelligence and moral questionability (morons, thieves, perverts, politicians, priests, pundits) is Baldeosingh himself. He manages however to successfully obscure this fact by creating and transferring a set of false associations with these ideas and those of the letter-writers. That deception finds any home in Baldeosingh’s argumentative algorithm calls into question his corpus of work as a reliable writer and commentator as well as his ethics. There are other examples in Baldeosingh’s piece, but taking a cue from many good math texts, and a proven strategy for prompting ‘active learning’, “the remainder of the proof is left as an exercise for the interested reader.”

Perhaps of greater concern is the way Baldeosingh deliberately uses misdirection and scientific language to fashion an identity as a knowledge-broker. Globally, there is great concern about the public’s lack of critical understanding of the science, and scientific thinking necessary for enacting democratic citizenship and in helping societies to govern themselves. News media are tasked, perhaps unfairly, with an important educative role in this project. Baldeosingh’s work this week, atypically, works against such goals. In presenting the evidence for his own case Baldeosingh also oversimplifies and misrepresents his sources. Citing psychologist Richard Nesbitt and journalist Steven Johnson he argues for the importance of play in learning and the contributions of popular culture, video-games in particular via Nesbitt, to increasing IQ scores. Baldeosingh neglects however the importance of context to learning and the limits of such learning, viz. the difficulty of transfer. Fortunately, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, (someone who also apparently doesn’t teach) provides the missing nuance. In a New York Times Op-ed piece which appeared on the same day as Baldeosingh’s article, he notes that, “If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else…Accomplished people…immerse themselves in their fields.” Despite many of my former students’ protestations, playing FIFA’s video games will only make you a better video-game player, but it won’t get you to a World Cup or improve your skills significantly on the field without significant physical, emotional and mental effort. I don’t think Farmville is going to help us solve our food problems.

Pinker also makes the important educational point that mere access to technology is not going to suddenly usher in some democratic educational utopia. I have made similar arguments in my scholarly publication Harnessing the Complexity of Children’s Consumer Culture, in particular I believe that while popular culture is a powerful pedagogue, there are some things it does not teach very well and indeed is inimical to the development of some important human and democratic values. Pinker likewise argues that good and responsible intellectual habits “of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning” have never been easy to develop, rather, “they must be acquired in special institutions…and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.” Imagining what those institutions might be like, understanding why they have found difficulty flourishing locally and then working together to actively construct ones that will work for us to achieve the goals of good, responsible habits of mind and being are what we ought to be debating. These are but a few of the tasks which the privileged people who “can’t teach” should be doing and doing well. It is partly what I have tried to do here.

Finally, Baldeosingh notes rhetorically, “when the lower orders begin to get smarter, they aren’t as easy to fool, which leads to all kinds of dangerous trends…do we really want a society where students challenge teachers…?” The same resources that destabilize the authority of the professor and the priests and their claim to being the final, irrefutable source and arbiters of knowledge can also be applied to other knowledge producing agents including media practitioners and cultural workers but we must be care full. As I continue to advocate we must learn to read and write different types of texts more carefully and critically than we have been doing. We must also teach these skills and be prepared for the painful occasions when they will be applied to our own works.

If democracy and skepticism, digital and otherwise, are to flourish in T&T it will not likely be without effort, struggle, and the courage to take on powerful gatekeepers, including journalists, when they act irresponsibly without also acting irresponsibly ourselves. If we can learn that responsible critique and debate do not necessarily have to humiliate, brutalise, or belittle others to be effective, educative or entertaining, and that compassion is not an estranged kin of argument, then perhaps we might create conditions for fecund conversations. If we can demonstrate that we are a society where thoughtful readers can challenge established writers to be first ‘better’, i.e. more conscientious, in their craft, and secondly, better human beings, then perhaps we might truly create new, more fit models of dialogue for our civilization…

Gift of a Growth-Mindset

"The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit." (Mark Twain)

I’m always somewhat taken aback, slightly hurt even, when people praise or express admiration for my intelligence rather than the effort, persistence and dogged determination I’ve put into being prepared, or, divorce my accomplishment from the sacrifices and contributions made by individuals and the opportunities afforded to me by participation in different learning networks. My response is usually an uncomfortable silence and a ‘thank you’ muttered de sotto voce. I have a confession to make. I’m not really that smart. Indeed, as we appear to be moving full-steam-ahead towards another highly contested and questionable educational innovation, viz. sex-segregation, whose outcome is likely to be an increase in the gender gap favouring girls, I want to share some research that suggests why this might not be the best approach and to offer an alternative to educational professionals that is likely to make more of a difference in the immediate and long term – the Theory of Mindsets.

Carol S. Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, in Mindset: The new psychology of success defines two types of mindsets that everyone utilizes to different degrees in different domains of life. When operating within a fixed-mindset the individual believes that some human quality like intelligence, (or some other ability), is static, pre-given or fixed at birth and that individuals possess a certain limited/fixed capacity. Growth-mindset individuals on the other hand believe that human qualities are not static, but learned and can be increased through purposeful effort. From this slight distinction a whole host of differences and associated psychological dispositions develop.

An immediate corollary is that individuals operating in a fixed mindset (FM) have as their goal proving themselves on tasks of fixed difficulty, thereby validating their sense of self through performance while for individuals operating in a growth mindset (GM), the goal, indeed the hallmark, is learning through stretching and perseverance. FM individuals view challenges as a threat to be avoided while GM individuals take these as opportunities to learn, develop and become deeply engaged. In the FM obstacles trigger a response to quit or resign while for GM obstacles trigger persistence and an occasion for exerting more effort. Indeed, effort is a key difference, for FM, effort is seen as embarrassing or fruitless – a demonstration or proof that one is not able to do something while for GM purposeful effort is simply the way one learns, gets better and ultimately the only way one can expect to develop competence or expertise in something that one does not yet know how to do. Dweck states, “it’s startling to see the degree to which people with the fixed mindset do not believe in effort.”

For FM individuals, correction is ignored as not being useful or relevant and blame is assigned to outside sources or forces while GM individuals listen carefully to what can be improved, and pay attention for useable information. For FM individuals other people’s successes are seen as threats which can detract from one’s need to demonstrate superiority while for GM other’s successes are inspirational and again provide opportunities to learn and grow. Dweck’s research has consistenly shown that FM people plateau early, sometimes as early as Grade 6-7 (10-11 years) while GM people experience consistent growth and plateaus do not persist for very long.
With respect to education, FM learners take smart to be “a perfect performance” or “100%” while GM learners view accomplishment as an indicator of progress and expanding capabilities and might make statements like “I got 60% which is great cause I got 52% last time and I’ve been working really hard.” FM students greet lack of success by attempting to avoid such occasions while GM students view it as a necessary reality check, an opportunity for important and constructive feedback and persist with changes to their previous behavior/strategies. FM learners tend to remain at a consistent level of performance, if they start high they end high and vice-versa. GM learners almost all end up higher no matter where they begin. Finally, FM learners tend not to assess their ability accurately, lie about their grades/accomplishment and effort, blame others for their failure and may cheat to maintain a level of performance and achievement they believe should come ‘naturally’ without requisite effort. If this sounds like some politicians, well, I leave you to form your own opinion. GM learners on the other hand tend be more honest about grades, their self-assessments are more accurate and they assume responsibility for their achievements or lack thereof.

A caution and a clarification. The Theory of Mindsets seeks to provide an explanation at individual, inter-individual, and socio-cultural levels of the complex relationship among individual effort, failure, persistence, motivation and societal messages, in achievement, or rather, life-long learning. It does not ignore the contributions made by biology, but suggests that it is not as critical a factor as one’s belief in (and actual) effort, persistence and challenge seeking that influences learning for the majority of individuals in a population. Indeed while there may in time prove to be a biological basis for different mindsets, and perhaps even other types of mindsets, at present, the importance of the theory is in sensitizing educational consciousness to the important role that certain types of beliefs play in achievement and success across different spheres of endeavor. While I present the mindsets dichotomously this is a simplification and I invite interested readers to check the entire book and Carol Dweck’s website for themselves where she engages with the more subtle nuances of the theory.

So how are these mindsets created and can they be changed? What can teachers and parents do and what are the wider implications of these mindsets for our society? I’ll discuss that in the second and third parts of this article.

(Part 2)
Very early in Form 4 Mr. Mercier, our English teacher graded an essay of mine as a D (fail). Looking over that piece I suspect he was being a little generous – somewhat gently telling me that the quality of work was not quite up to his standard and that I could improve with effort if I worked at it. Over the course of form four, through lots of independent extra reading, time in Carnegie library, writing practice, and without going for extra lessons my English mark crept up slowly through a C a B and eventually a low A. More importantly, I knew for myself that the quality of my writing was improving. I had learnt to assess my own work. In form 5 I finally earned an A from Mr. Mercier, it was for a short story on a hurricane and its aftermath which I had spent weeks researching and pleasurably writing and rewriting in a state of flow the weekend before submission. Several months later I would learn that I had won the “Best Short Story” prize from CXC in the 1993 examination, however it is the D and the A from Mr. Mercier on those essay which I hold more dearly as the indicators of my determination to get better at writing.

Teachers and parents play a crucial role in creating (and sustaining) fixed or growth mindsets. They are also essential in changing mindsets. According to Dweck’s research the way praise and labels are used and what is emphasized, are important. In her studies on praise she found that almost all students who were praised for their ability were pushed almost immediately into the fixed-mindset, becoming more risk-averse to challenge, failure and sources of potentially disconfirming information about their ‘brightness.’ In contrast 90% of students who were praised for their effort, i.e. for doing what is needed to succeed, took up new more challenging tasks from which they could learn. The take-away message here is if you want to create fixed mindsets in children praise their ability/intelligence or talent, say things like, “Kevin you’re so smart/dumb/bright/stupid/fast/slow.” But if you want to create a growth-mindset person, praise the effort with statements like, “Kevin, that was a great report, I can tell you did a lot of research and put in a lot of hard work, it shows, there are a couple of places you might like to go to develop your thinking on this further…”. Dweck says, “praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance” and advises, “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort and keep on learning.” She offers suggestions for after-school conversations involving every member of the family answering questions like, “What did you learn today?”, “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?”

Labels and stereotypes also work to affect mindsets. Dweck’s research suggests that a great way to create FM learners is to use limiting labels such as “What type of learning mode are you? Are you a visual learner?” Rather fewer labels should be used and when necessary ones that are as expansive as possible such as, “I see you’re really good at picking up visual information from the environment…how else might you learn?” These different approaches send different messages. When teachers use limiting labels the message is “you have fixed traits and I’m judging them” while the other message is “I see you as a developing person and I’m interested in your growth.” Indeed this is one way the FM undermines achievement – by turning every opportunity to learn into a test and need to ‘prove’ oneself as ‘good/smart/bright/able’ and turning teachers into judges (sometimes jury and executioner as well) instead of allies in learning.

Finally teachers (and administrators) whose pedagogy is conducive to producing FM learners tend to focus on knowledge as product in their classroom, i.e. something pre-given and fixed, right or wrong. Growth-mindset teachers however make a subtle shift of focus to knowing as way of being – helping learners to connect disparate bits of knowledge into robust knowledge networks by emphasizing processes of coming to know. While both FM and GM teachers (and parents) may set high standards, GM teachers are honest with students about where they are, teach children how to reach them, help them to develop the tools and skills to succeed and actively enact the belief that all students can reach them. They see these as their responsibilities and they cultivate an atmosphere of mutual trust and intervulnerability where it is safe to learn from failure, including their own. Growth mindset teachers love, and live, to learn. This is critical. FM teachers (and administrators) on the other hand create an atmosphere of judging, mistrust, and fear of failure. They see themselves as “finished products” whose sole responsibility is to “impart their knowledge” and assess the correspondence between what they know and what their students have come to know. They believe that tests measure intelligence, now and forever and since ability is fixed, there’s no point in expending effort behind someone who doesn’t have the ability.

Teachers themselves have to be in the growth-mindset. The best teachers I have met in the Dip Ed and B.Ed were not necessarily the ones with the highest certificates, teaching at the best schools with the best students, but rather the ones whose emphasis in the programme, and in their classrooms was learning from and with their students – developing (as) growth mindset learners. These have been far too few though as many aspects of our education system and national culture, including teacher preparation, reinforce the fixed-mindset. The good news however, is that because mindsets are beliefs, we can choose to believe, and then do otherwise. We can change our minds. Dweck’s research demonstrates that a person can be shifted from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset over the course of 20 minutes, perhaps even over three short articles, simply by shifting focus and emphasis, drawing attention to the mindsets and being attentive to language. Conversely, a person can be shifted out of growth to fixed mode by emphasizing the wrong things, the wrong utterance, praising individual ability rather than effort etc. One wonders what happens when this happens day in day out, year in year out via our educational policies and systems? We need to ask ourselves in our classrooms and homes who/what do we want (our students) to be? I want my children to be surrounded by GM teachers at home and in school and in their community.

Finally, while I’ve used the term FM and GM teachers or learners I don’t mean to label some people as inherently possessing a fixed-mindset or growth-mindset. All of us are capable of being on either side in some domain and it is our mindset in the domain of interest that influences our actions. For example, when it comes to learning about changing and improving education, especially mathematics, I think I’m a growth mindset person. When it comes to football, I’m more a fixed mindset person, though adopting a more growth mindset position it is likely that I haven’t gotten anywhere with football because I haven’t ever put in much effort there – so who knows what I might accomplish if I spent more time and energy learning to play football? A growth mindset is infective. Dweck says it well, “with the right mindset and the right teaching people are capable of a lot more than we think.” The choice of where to expend our efforts though is still ours.

Part 3- Wider implications
When I began submitting articles as a new staff member to the UWI School of Education column, I was told, that my ideas, interesting as they were, were not presented in a style that was appropriate to the medium (Newspaper) and appealing to its audience. I could have approached this with a fixed mindset that I already knew how to write, the editors couldn’t appreciate what I was trying to say, or that I wasn’t any good at that type of writing and stick to writing in and for the Academy. Instead I approached it as a challenge – to learn how to write for different audiences. I talked with people, like Pat, whose growth-mindset and effort over a long time made her demonstrably more competent at it than I; like Lynda, who understood about the nature of the medium; and my wife Shalini who could help me with my grammar, clarity, and expression. I did that not because I like writing – indeed writing remains for me the least pleasurable aspect of intellectual work – but because I believed I had, and have, a responsibility to help others to grow and learn from my learning also. It also provides yet another occasion from which I learn.

So, why bring these ideas to the attention of educators? It is not an attempt to demonstrate superior intelligence nor is it my staking out a little space in the academic agora of educational reform ideas in Trinidad & Tobago, rather it is to say, “I’ve had opportunities as part of my Phd. thus far to engage with some really interesting ideas and people from whom I have learnt and from whom I think educators in TT could also learn and which pose some interesting challenges for rethinking education that goes beyond simply separating boys from girls but speaks to the whole fixed-mindset system of education in Trinidad and Tobago. Where and when does the fixed mindset enter into the educational consciousness of our population? How does it happen? Does our obsession with SEA, CXC and now Phds. have anything to do with it? Perhaps our tiered educational system? And what about the media attention given to the top 100 and scholarship winners? By looking at these might we find something more to learn that what we already know? Might we learn something about what we value and what we teach our children to value?

In Dweck’s research fixed-mindset learners, of all achievement levels, by as early as Grade 5 (9-10 years or about Std. 4) had come to believe that tests measured not only how smart they were at present but how smart they’d be in the future when they grew up! They defined themselves by the test. Consequently, for FM learners, not only was it important to succeed now, but such success had to be flawless and flawless in the right way – perfect and fast. I’ve heard similar sentiments from a high-achieving student in my research, where a transition from pencil to pen between Primary and Secondary school was blamed for her performance on a test as she could no longer erase and her mistakes remained as an indictment rather than a testament to her learning.

“Speed and perfection are the enemy of difficult learning” Dweck argues, providing a strong critique against timed-testing used for dubious if not dangerous sorting purposes. For FM learners, success is proof of their ability, and for high achieving FM students, this is often the route to being seen as special, better, superior and ultimately entitled to rewards without effort or (in)actions without consequences. I recognize, sadly, such a mindset among those posted on a Facebook group by students of a school which has produced two of our Prime Ministers, who mindlessly brag about abuse, fraud, cheating, laziness, lack of effort, greed and their insensitive, ignorant and uncritical individualism.

Fixed-mindset educational cultures, Dweck notes, have transformed failure from an action (I failed) to an identity (I am a failure) and continually reinforce this idea. Failing at anything becomes the great Fear and since one’s abilities are fixed, there’s no way out – why even bother trying. Growth-mindset cultures on the other hand don’t send the message that failure or success defines one’s identity – but that intelligence can be developed with effort and appropriate, knowledgeable guidance. I don’t know that this is the message we’ve been sending to boys and men over the last few months (and indeed years). Indeed we’ve got fixed-mindset and growth-mindset learners across all of our school types, gender categories, races, religions etc. and we ought to be as concerned with the ill-effects of high achieving FM learners who rise to positions of authority and (ir)responsibility as we are with low-achieving FM learners. A question we ought to be asking is “Do we produce too many fixed mindset learners and what are they doing to our society?”
What I find useful about the Theory of Mindsets is how it productively re-situates the locus of the problem of achievement from within individual gendered and racialised bodies constructed as deficient, defective or deviant in some way to a broader network of capillary relations which can be affected by a certain degree of mindfulness on every individual’s part. I also think Dweck’s ideas have implications for our culture as a whole especially leadership at the highest levels. Indeed I find a certain resonance with ideas of Wilson Harris in his descriptions of the Block Mentality and the Literate imagination, the different types of consciousness described by Fanon and Freire, Bob Marley’s endless invitation to “Emancipate ourselves from mental slavery” and the questions and pleas of Dr. Morgan Job and Lloyd Best, especially his obsession with understanding “how a culture could escape itself.” A short answer, perhaps, is that it must do more than change its leaders – it must also change its mindset.

While its been said that politics has a morality of its own, in our history thus far, such a morality seems to be have been more aligned with fixed mindsets than growth mindsets. I invite those offering themselves up for election, especially those new to national politics, to bring their growth mindsets to the parliament, serving, representing and ultimately learning from the population. For those going to the polls I suggest an alternative to choosing between person or party – vote for the candidate with the growth mindset! One way to assess that is not to look only at their history of success, but look especially at their history of recovery from failure and setback. Look at whether or not they assign blame or take responsibility. This silly season let’s give ourselves and the next generation the gift of growth mindset leaders. Primary teachers and Principals, when exam results come out in the next month or so, praise the effort not the ability. Be honest about what SEA is and does. Let’s work to break the cycle of fixed-mindset-edness among our students. When the new academic year rolls around next September it is my hope that teachers, in all schools facing the same issues and concerns that they faced this year might begin to face them with, and offer their students, something hopeful – the generative germ of a growth-mindset. Finally, maybe if we could stop pretending that we already know it all, maybe, just maybe, we might as Sprang used to say, “lun sumting.”

Experiments and Education

I want to make a few critical points in response to columnist Kevin Baldeosingh’s Express article, Experimental Sex Education of Friday April 9th. But first I want to point interested parties to Visible Learning by John Hattie, which is a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses representing over 50,000 studies related to student achievement. Of the 138 factors that he lists as key influences on student learning, gender ranks 122nd in terms of effect size (d=0.12) while variables relating to what teachers actually do in their classrooms make up more than half of the top twenty (d= 0.61-1.44). In this piece though I want to explain why it is extremely difficult to run a true experimental design in education and even more so in the educational climate of administration/governance/policy by vaps as occurs frequently in T&T.

The medical ‘gold-standard’ of controlled randomly assigned double-blind experiments is inappropriate for education. Neither teachers nor students are randomly assigned to secondary schools in T&T nor is it feasible to do so at present. Even among the entrants to ‘prestige’ schools, the legacy mechanism of selecting the 20% confounds the assumption of a randomly selected ‘statistically similar’ population in terms of achievement.

Secondly, in a densely networked place such as T&T or a small community where everybody talks, any group that was receiving a ‘placebo’ treatment would likely figure this out quickly. Also, as is already the case with the media attention given to the potential decision to pilot a shift from co-ed to single-sex schools, if you knew that you were part of a study there is a strong likelihood that some actions/behaviors relevant to one’s learning would be altered and could be attributed to the fact of being aware that one was being studied. His suggestion to convert a single-sex government school to a co-ed one is prone to this critique.

So we cannot have randomly assigned nor double-blind, perhaps even single-blind experimental designs in education. Now what about controls? There is no way to ‘control’ or perhaps even list all of the variables that might affect learning during a study Hattie’s 138 culled from the quantitative literature is a good start. In T&T the phenomenon of extra-lessons as well as (lack of) homework assistance/supervision at home would confound any attempt at ‘proving’ that a perhaps not well understood construct like gender and the decision to separate ‘girls’ from ‘boys’ ‘results’ in greater achievement. The warrant to support the claim would simply be too weak.

Now on to the ethical concerns of conducting ‘experiments’ on ‘other people’s children’ in a field as politically and emotionally charged as education. The most important one, in my opinion, being the way it robs children and teachers of any human agency and reduces the diversity and variability of human beings into the limited pigeon-holes of researcher determined categories. In the first case, experimental design assumes a correspondence between changes in the manipulated variable(s) (independent) and the observed/measured (dependent) variable(s) and since all other variables are kept constant (controlled) cause and effect can be established and one of several outcomes can be predicted. Experimental design also depends critically upon on an assumption that the thing(s) being experimented on do not, cannot (or should not) act intentionally to alter the quality of the variables being investigated or that such actions can be ignored and requires that agents’ histories have no bearing upon the experiment’s outcomes.

Experimental design depends on ignorant, passive and essentially ahistorical agents. Learners do not meet these criteria. They are not inert bits of matter buffeted about solely by external forces despite dominant discourses that continue to talk about increasing the numbers of some type of students in the pipeline or the misleading misnomer brain drain for what is a more complex phenomenon. Nor are learners eternal captives of prior conditioning, but rather they are engaged in continuously construing and re-construing their experiences, testing new knowledge for ‘fit’ with prior experiences, expectations, future goals, desires, aversions, and personal beliefs and altering their actions and their environments. Prior experience or history plays a significant role, but does not determine the complete landscape of future learning. What is learnt in any moment is unpredictable. To treat any learner, group of learners or learning system in this instrumental fashion raises profoundly disturbing ethical concerns.

Experiments are especially good at generating waste in their pursuit of determining cause and effect. Many failed experiments often precede the one that ‘works’ and being a part of a failed experiment in a consequential area such as education is not what parents, teachers or students have signed up for. In other areas, medicine for example, risks, including death, are discussed with participants. Which researcher in our system would dare say that potential risks include lower achievement and failure to complete the mandated curriculum even if the quality of what is learnt is improved? We talk only of potential benefits.

What systems, legislation and oversight are in place to seek and protect students, teachers and parents’ rights from researchers desire to know whether acting as proxies validating government’s policies or academic entrepreneurs? I do know that in T&T some schools have developed their own in-house guidelines and policies for participation in research, though at times I feel this is being used to protect reputations (read prestige) from unfavourable or less than flattering findings and limits reporting of classroom based research by teachers – another factor which robs policy makers of valuable data. Whether such policies are ‘legal’, however, remains to be tested in the future.

While ethical research policies, like other educational policies could be imposed from above without widespread stake-holder consultation, a more dialogical approach coupled with the simultaneous development of the requisite institutional, infrastructural, legislative, and enforcement capabilities would likely create a better climate for the conduct and reporting of useful education research in T&T.

Finally, a brief comment on Mr. Baldeosingh’s ‘poke’ at the UWI School of Education Express column that “99 per cent of the pedagogy in those articles was not based on any scientific research.” I don’t dispute this claim because as I have outlined above, it is next to impossible to do true experimental research in education, and I think this is how he might have been defining ‘scientific’. I also don’t dispute the claim because, as a former contributor to that weekly column, I know that many of the articles weren’t about pedagogy – education isn’t only about teaching or method after all – but there was an invisible pedagogy at work in the occasional reminders to write in a style appropriate to the format of a newspaper and the general “readership of the Express” which I was told required a less academic, less theory or research heavy focus, and a more – albeit no less difficult to learn and master – clear, concise, and convincing journalistic style.

Now, while I don’t want to, because I would prefer Kevin to spend his time on more important things, like unearthing corruption and mocking Ministerial malfeasance, but I’m calling his bluff on the invented, arbitrary, and likely hyperbolic statistic. A simple apology to my former colleagues will suffice.