Teaching and Learning Catastrophes

Like so many of us, I often depend on outside sources to tell me what’s going on in the world today and I was appalled at an article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago.

How about “three quarters of graduating high school seniors ‘lack basic proficiency in writing’ and a majority of students, even the ones who graduate from high school and then decide to go to college, do not even place into college-level math.” Something is really wrong here. Is it Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in our world?

The author of the piece, “Teaching Teaches New Tricks,” Dominic Green, was reviewing two new books, “The Student” by Michael S. Roth and “Brave New World” by Salman Khan.

Education today is in an “academic apocalypse,” he summarized through his essay, which begins with “the U. S. has the world’s best universities and, it sometimes seems, the world’s worst students.”

And before we go too much further as we explore the impact of DEI in higher education, let me add right up front that DEI is also destroying the work ethic in private industry and business, and it is having a major impact in the American military, and, to state the obvious, as a contributing factor in the dissembling and ideological pollution in American government.

Let’s return to Green’s article. He’s not shy in his descriptions. Universities are “clotted with identify-based tokenism, political extremism, bureaucratic incompetence, intellectual imposture and students who can’t spell.” And he really dumps on the Ivy League where “antisemitism” is rampant, and “University presidents pander to the mobs.” It is an ugly picture of education. What to do? Indeed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is then suggested as a solution to getting students “engaged” through machines that instruct and interact with them digitally. Everything in the world of education is available digitally. We just need to hook up the students to this new electronic organization of all the knowledge in the world.

Mr. Khan’s book directs us to Khan Academy where all this is already taking place. It’s not very impressive as a substitute for teaching in the old-fashioned way, dependent as Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Poor Richard’s Almanack on two words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY.

Ben Franklin as a Young Man

At the end, Green kind of throws up his arms. We “don’t need more social workers, gender students and Marxist literary theorists. We need plumbers, nurses, and soldiers: people who are trained to do the jobs that AI cannot yet do. Socrates’ father was right. Stonemasonry is a job for life.”

What we really need is a restoration of what we used to call the “work ethic.” In our country no one is born with privileges. You may come from a well-to-do family, from a family of lawyers and physicians, a family of carpenters, home builders, gardeners, computer programmers, journalists, ranchers (like my wife Louise’s family) bankers or professional secretaries, just thinking out loud here of the hundreds and thousands of jobs in our world.

I was a professional teacher most of my working career. My dad was a chemist who started managing miners in the desert-like north of Chile bringing nitrates out of the earth. My sister worked for a while as a secretary in New York City. My mom was a stay-at-home mother. You all have people who work in your families, in one form or another.

Let me suggest that the work ethic is formed in three institutions: the family, education, and the Church, and by the Church I mean the Christian church. Forget AI. It’s just another instrument in our cultural equipment.

What does the Church say about work? Wow, it runs through the Bible like a bright thread on how to live. I got one hundred Bible verses about work when I searched “work in the Bible!” Let’s look at just one of them for the time being.

“Whatever you do,” in Colossians 3:23-24, it says “work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord…it is the Lord you are serving.” Or work is part of our Christian life.

With work comes wealth and prosperity. What about the vast gulfs between the super wealthy and the poor? Let me point you to an essay originally published in 1889 as The Gospel of Wealth by a guy named Andrew Carnegie. Look him up in Wikipedia if the name does not ring a bell.

Returning to our theme of teaching and learning catastrophes. Work and teaching are personal activities, not to be simply assigned to AI or learned on your favorite browser or online college or university.

We need to restore the natural and spiritual motivation to work which not only feeds and takes care of us in so many ways, but also inspires us to be more, to learn more, to put the God-given ethic to live and prosper in God’s way to work. He will reward and build you up, no matter what you do.

Read a chapter of Scripture each day. Go to gateway.com and subscribe to a daily reading, daily audio, whatever. You WILL hear from God each day. Promise. And each lesson is one I needed to hear across the spectrum of the human experience, even occasionally related to work.

Now, back to work for me!