Mighton, I

Stamping out Ignorance; A Review of:
"The End of Ignorance, Multiplying our Human Potential,
by John Mighton, Alfred A. Knopf, Toronto, 2007

By John Taylor; 2007 Aug 26-27

On Thursday the kids led me on a wild goose chase. They begged and cajoled me to take them to the Cayuga Library to get a book they wanted -- they did not tell me what it was until they had it in their hot little hands. It turned out to be a book-length collection of Garfield comics (or two) that they have not read yet. Garfield and Captain Underpants are the only books that Tomaso will read on his own. When we got to the Cayuga Library it turned out that they were thinking of the Caledonia Library instead, so I drove them there. It was such a refreshing change for them to be dragging me out on an excursion rather than the other way around that I happily indulged them. Anything to get them away, albeit briefly, from the Almighty Screen.

In the New Arrivals section of the Cayuga Library was a book called "The End of Ignorance." I read the dust jacket and was intrigued, but resisted temptation and left it on the shelf. Then in the Caledonia Library I came across the same book in their new book section and could resist no longer. I had no choice but take it out. This turned out to be such an extraordinary book that I broke all the rules. Since I started my active lifestyle last year the only books I read cover-to-cover are audio books, which I listen to as I exercise, lift weights or practice hitting the ping pong ball. Printed books I squeeze in when I can, usually taking years to finish, or, most often, never finish at all. And I never read new books, I wait for material to mellow out before I touch them.

The End of Ignorance was an exception to these and many other rules.

I read it in two days. I laughed out loud, I cried, and then very often I would do a double take: you are reading a book about mathematics, why that of all things? This is a dry subject, theory of education, why is it having such a profound emotional impact? Sure, I was suffering from the weather, the tail end of a hurricane, I am told, but it was more than that. I was in tears because I was looking back on the twelve years plus of mathematics torture sessions disguised as educational classes that I took all through public school. Time utterly wasted. I was recalling my passionate love for science snuffed out and permanently blocked by, it turns out, grossly incompetent math teaching.

Silvie, like so many of us, has persistent problems keeping up in math class, and I recall dunning her teacher in every parent teacher encounter through the years, "Why do you put kids through this?" "What do you hope to accomplish by trying to force mathematics into them?" "What good does it do?" A century ago teachers used Latin as a form of discipline, not useful knowledge in itself but a rigorous way to sort out the sheep from the goats. At least with a little Latin kids could quote some pithy Latin saws, like Tempus Fugit, or Carpe Diem. What do they have to show for thirteen years of mathematics? I cannot do much more than count, and most other adults are not much better.

At one point I even loaned Silvie's teacher my copy of the Icon Books visual introduction to mathematics, which shows how the content of math as taught is nothing better than thinly-veiled Western propaganda. Most of what is portrayed as the product of European inventiveness was originally discovered in China, India and Islamic lands hundreds and even thousands of years ago. But I never had much luck persuading him that math should not be taught. The fact that he was failing was not an argument that he should not try.

Studying math does not even help to learn mathematics. That is what the following anecdote, told by our local musician, Ron Speer, implies.

He talks about a highly concentrated, advanced math class at graduate level where every year they let in half musicians with no special training in mathematics, and the other half are highly advanced mathematics students. Every year the musicians beat out the mathematicians. To me that says one thing. Forget about math in public school, teach them music in the early years. At least music is enjoyable (actually music was more torture for me than math, but I am an exception, I think). With a music background later on at higher levels kids will be better prepared for math than if they had beat their heads against the wall trying to do the impossible, learn math as a child.

The End of Ignorance persuaded me that maybe mathematics should be taught to children after all. Why? Because this mathematician, John Mighton, proves that mathematics _can_ be taught to young children. And what is more, it can do them good to know it.

He uses a teaching method that I have only seen used once successfully in all my days, and that was not a math class but a Baha'i children's class that Silvie attended several years ago. It was taught by Debra Fuller, a Native believer whom we also have to thank for the graphical improvements of Baha'i Canada that began around the same time. In Debra's final class they had a picnic that featured a brief demonstration lesson. The kids were so avid to answer her quiz about the Dawnbreakers that they were literally chasing her across a grassy field. She should perhaps have limited that exuberance since the shy Silvie was left out, sitting on a picnic table. But it got through to her too, even though she was in a younger class and only was taught by Debra once or twice; for years afterwards Silvie was still citing details about the life and adventures of Mullah Hussein that slipped past me long before.

As they are right now, school is obsessed with pointing out differences in ability among students, and that deflates things quicker than a needle in a balloon. We have no idea how the brain works or what basis these perceived differences in thinking may have in reality. Here is the paragraph from the book that the publishers chose to reproduce on the back of the dust jacket:

"There will always be differences in ability and motivation among children, but those differences would probably not have much bearing on long-term success if schools were not so intent on making differences matter. Because children's levels of confidence will largely determine what they learn, teachers can easily create artificial differences among them by singling out some as superior and others as inferior. I've learned to not judge students too hastily; I've seen many slower students outpace faster students as soon as they were given a little extra encouragement or help."

In other words: ours is a supposedly egalitarian society but the old social stratification has been replaced by a new elitism, one based on sham meritocracy. Ability in schools is sorted not by anything in the children themselves but by how they do when either not taught or taught incompetently. Students who for one reason or another get by without a teacher are branded "gifted," while those who need teaching are humiliated and left behind. It is the old blame-the-victim syndrome; the sins of a corrupt education are visited upon innocent children. Meanwhile substantive discoveries about how children's brains work and how they respond when learning are ignored. At the beginning of the book, Mighton writes,

"If we are ever to nurture the full potential of children, we must develop a model of education based on a deeper understanding of the brain. In the natural sciences our understanding of complex systems such as the brain has recently undergone a paradigm shift. Scientists now recognize that complex systems show emergent behaviour: new and unexpected properties of a system can emerge out of nowhere from a series of small changes. For example, if a chemist adds a reagent to a chemical solution one drop at a time, nothing may appear to be happening until, with the addition of just one more drop, the whole solution spontaneously changes colour. I have seen this behaviour in hundreds of students: they can appear to be at the limits of their ability, and then, with a single drop of knowledge, they leap to a new level of understanding." (End of Ignorance, p. 10)

He devotes a full chapter to this research, much of which is based on studies of chess masters. Chess happens to be among the easiest and most reliably measured skills. The research found that, properly taught, anybody can learn to be a chess master. The Hungarian father of the Poldit twins proved it. At the time, female chess masters were all but unknown, and he decided to teach his twin daughters how to play; because he knew how to teach, they succeeded, becoming top players (they also learned Esperanto, a key to language learning that is not unlike mathematics is to science). The trick is to ignore everything that educational theory says: either let them play and hope they will discover the rules for themselves, or try to pound details into their head by rote. What really works is to get them running fast with easy challenges, then offer a "plot twist," a challenge that, in Mighton's frequent terms, "raises the bar." Using this method, reinforced by strong chess machines, recently a fourteen year old became a chess grandmaster, the youngest to attain such a height in history.

But instead of exiting rewards from the get-go, we offer humiliation in front of their peers, the worst thing that can happen to a young person. That proves right away that math is impossible and they are dumb, and then we congratulate ourselves on our superiority. As Mighton points out, people who fail to learn to read are ashamed and hide their illiteracy, but failure in math teaching is so ubiquitous that most people are actually proud of their incompetence. We (I say we because I am one of them) freely admit to all who will listen that we can barely count. Teachers abuse rather than teach, in spite of the fact that, as Mighton says, they all believe that, at least in theory, they should be offering some kind of incentive to learn math.

"I have never met an educator who would agree that students who lack confidence in their intellectual abilities are likely to do well at school. I find it surprising, therefore, that no program of mathematics used in our public schools has ever taken proper account of the role of confidence in learning. If students are more apt to do well in a subject when they believe that they are capable of doing well, it seems obvious that any math program that aims to harness the potential of every student must start with an exercise that will build the confidence of every student." (End of Ignorance, 104)

Once Mighton has a confident student, he knows what to do then. For one thing, as a mathematician who went back to school to study math as an adult himself, he is one of the few people in the world fully qualified to show how to get ahead in math study. Most teachers are not qualified, let us face it. As he points out, in one school they gave a question from the grade six mathematics examination to every teacher in an elementary school, and not one of them got it right. (Strangely, the suits at school board have never consented to undergo such a trial by fire.) He also points out another surprising thing, if you want to learn what children respond to, do not ask an educator, go to children's television shows. The makers of Sesame Street were told by the boffins, never mix fantasy and reality, it will twist their minds. They found out right away that children love that and learn much quicker when the Muppets talk to real people. So much for theory. Anyway, this fellow is also qualified because he actually pays attention to what works. And what does not work is elitist bias.

"Based on my observations of thousands of students, I am now convinced that new intellectual abilities can emerge in any student from a series of small advances, and that mathematics, rather than being the most difficult subject, is one in which a teacher can most easily add, rigorously and effectively, the drops of knowledge that can transform a student. New discoveries in cognition and genetics suggest that the brain is much more plastic than scientists had previously imagined, and that with rigorous training, new neural connections and mental capacities can be developed even in older children and adults." (End of Ignorance, p. 10)

In other words, learning cures as well as enlightens. When teachers fail to teach, they offer a do it yourself diagnosis of ADHD, and rush the parents off to a shrink for a pill. Instead, what is being found is that learning a skill is a far better way to rewire the brain than any pill. It actually changes the way the neurons program themselves. He goes into classes full of these victims slash students, and suddenly there is no problem with "behavior" or attention deficits, suddenly they are all avid to learn math, of all things.

What enthralled me about what this guy does is that he does just that. He in effect acts like God, according to our Baha'i conception of "going to the need." The Manifestation of God takes the toughest nut to crack in the world, and shows how to crack it. Jesus came to the Jews, Muhammad to the Beduin, and Baha'u'llah brought Baha'i to its cradle, Persia, and then He sent His world Order to its Administrative Cradle, America. Same way, Mighton goes to the toughest classes, the inmates of no-opportunity opportunity classes, to inner city schools full of problem kids in Toronto and London, England, and demonstrates that his teaching can grab even the worst math reprobates imaginable. He challenges the autocratic suits with their absolute power over teachers to try doing the same thing with their failed curricula. They would not dare! Of course he puts this idea in more diplomatic terms, since he has to work with these suits. Here is how he phrases it:

"Boards must assume that teachers will be able to tell when their classes improve, will be motivated to improve their teaching, and will have good judgment about the success of their work, if they are offered alternatives that make sense to them and that they can become excited about. Rather than trying to improve schools and by forcing the same text or program on every teacher, boards must trust that teachers who are given a range of resources to test, and who can communicate with their peers about their successes and failures, will become better teachers."

Instead of improving our teaching methods, we have corruption, bafflegab, pride and money grubbing.

"We must move away from a system that values theoretical expertise more than practical expertise. There are teachers who clearly can teach well and who are recognized as good teachers by their colleagues and their students. Find out what these teachers do and allow them to train other teachers. If an educator can't step into either the most difficult inner-city classroom or the most affluent, privileged school and get all of the children engaged, and if they can't give other teachers effective strategies for doing this, then they should not have the power to dictate to teachers."

This is revolutionary! Let teachers work with what works. Then pick out the most effective teachers, and let them teach the next generation of teachers. History offers many proofs that this can work. For example, that is how the American air force won out over the Japanese, flying the superior Zero fighter, in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. The Japanese pilots fought, died and were replaced. American pilots who gained experience and proved the most successful dogfighters were not left in the fiery skies to fight until they were killed. They were pulled from combat and made into instructors to train the next wave of novice pilots. By scientifically pooling their best talent for teaching rather than dying they learned how to defeat an opponent in much faster, more maneuverable fighters. That should be happening in the teaching profession.

The biggest problems to overcome in education, as in every other area of life, are provincialism and corruption. Provincialism because everything Mighton does, including teaching fractions at grade one and two level rather than seven or eight, is already being done successfully in Far Eastern countries such as Taiwan and Hong Kong (not to mention the Czech Republic, number one in the world in math and science). But here in North America the almighty dollar speaks louder than success in far off places that we can ignore.

I have often written about Richard Feynman's run in with wealthy text book manufacturers on this blog, in his amusing "You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Mighton refers to this too, and reports that things have not changed since Feynman's day. These corporations have a stranglehold on both educational research and school boards. Their over-centralized power structures assure that the board decides everything, even if it means purchasing twenty thousand dollars worth of textbooks, which are then left on the shelf because they are unusable (as really happened in Ontario at least once). Learning materials are selected for corporate benefit, not that of students. The folly begins in faulty, uncontrolled research done often not by experimentally trained scientists but by academics adept only at manipulating the jargon and ideas of science.

"There is one danger in relying too much on research that most people are unaware of. In the pharmaceutical industry, checks and balances have been established to ensure that research isn't unduly influenced by companies that will gain or lose money based on the research results. In fact, many people think that controls in the pharmaceutical industry aren't strong enough. But the controls in education are virtually nonexistent. Many educators employed by faculties of education or by school boards and ministries receive funding from textbook companies for their research, or they derive income from those companies as authors and consultants." (End of Ignorance, 228)

Rather than rely on evidence or science, these influential educational researchers take the cheap shortcut of hiding thought and detail under a soft, snowy blanket of buzzwords. Here is the mealy-mouthed conclusion of one paper: "To summarize, the data suggests that teaching and learning can be related through the kinds of instructional tasks provided and the nature of the classroom discourse." A mathematician examining this supposedly exemplary educational research commented,

"If I didn't miss something, what that says is that teaching and learning can be related to what goes on in the classroom." Well, I certainly hope so. As Horatio said to Hamlet, "There needs no  ghost, my lord, come from the grave, to tell us this." (End of Ignorance, 218)

Of course, behind this corruption is stinking complacency on our part. Parents simply do not care enough to protest. My daughter's teacher was unmoved by my protests about math because other parents passively accept the situation. We think: "I screwed up in math as a kid, so let my kids do the same. Failure will toughen them up." Mighton puts this more politely, as always,

"... as a society, we could simply refuse to settle for programs that do not nurture the potential of all children in every subject. If we were to take these measures immediately, I believe we would see striking improvements in our schools within a matter of years, and in our society within a decade. Since adults can relearn subjects by tutoring or teaching them to children, we could also establish an adult education program that would support the public school system so we could see the benefits from our investment even more quickly. If we were to invest properly in early childhood education, the results would be even more dramatic. (267)

Mighton does not elaborate on this "adult education as tutoring" proposal, but it is intriguing. Instead of taking night classes, parents and adult learners could be tutoring kids, helping out with the classroom work that Mighton's methods require. This would re-educate adults in the most important basics of math very cheaply, and at the same time do good for the next generation. I am so inspired by his teaching that I am seriously considering doing just this, tutoring math, using Mighton's JUMP method, starting with my own kids. Plus, it is very exiting to think that this can be applied to every area of learning, not just math. I am avid to try.

Mighton also has some interesting political insights, essentially saying that what we consider political issues are usually really educational failures in disguise. Whatever the Ancient Athenians thought were issues of the day were really stuff and nonsense, what really would have helped would have been to eliminate slavery and sexism. He speculates on what might result if ever we did learn to teach children efficiently.

"It is hard to say exactly how a society that educated children according to their potential would look. I can imagine there would be less government and fewer regulations, but I can also imagine that there would be more. It is very difficult to speculate about this issue, because a society that educated children according to their potential would produce adults who would be almost unimaginably different from ours. (pp. 267-268)

I have barely scratched the surface of this book. For one thing, for anybody who has read the advice to teachers that Abdu'l-Baha gives, Mighton's methods sound eerily familiar. I would like to examine this intersection with the Master's teaching in more detail in a future blog entry when I have some experience tutoring my own kids, and hopefully others, with his method. His website is jumpmath.org. Let his credo in the following be our last word for today:

"Children have fundamental psychological needs that are far more important than the content of any particular lesson. Children want success: they want to be able to show off to a caring adult, to feel that they are not stupid or inferior to other children, to reach higher levels in an activity (as in a video game), to succeed in front of their peers, to see patterns and play with subtle variations on a theme, to solve puzzles, and to think the same thoughts and experience the same excitement over an idea as other children. Because we have never completely taken into account the things that are deeply important to children -- in the planning of lessons, in the development of textbooks and programs, in the way we assess students' work -- we have never been able to nurture their intelligence effectively. We need to give children the opportunity to train the way experts do and to practise and solidify their knowledge effortlessly, with joy and excitement." (Mighton, 184)