Immeasurable Outcomes And The Humanity Of Education
At Forbes.com, I take a look at Gayle Greene’s new book.
The subheading of Gayle Greene’s new book Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm may leave readers with the impression that this is a very niche work; instead, they’ll fine a spirited work in defense of a heartfelt humanist approach to teaching and learning. Rather than a guide for teaching Shakespeare, Greene looks at questions about the larger purpose of education itself and how the answers to those questions play out in the day to day life in the classroom.
“The impetus for this book was anger,” Greene opens, “but that turned to something sadder as I saw how much ground the liberal arts have lost, what a beating we’ve taken.” Greene has spent more than fifty years teaching, much of it at Scripps College, a women’s liberal arts college that is part of the Claremont College consortium in California, and she makes a case for the liberal arts in a world that increasing devalues them.
In a phone interview, she expressed concern over the “crisis of humanities” being fed by high-stakes standardized testing in K-12 schools. Students have become trained to follow algorithms and rubrics “that spell it all out for them,” leading to “blighted imaginations.” Education, she said, “is about human development, not workforce preparation,” and this book argues for the human touch in education rather than ”decontextualized math and reading skills devoid of any purpose other than passing the test.”
Teaching and learning are things done with people, by people, for people, dependent on the trust and goodwill, presence, participation, responsiveness of human beings.
Definitely going to add this book to my list! Anything that moves beyond the very simple phenomena that we are able to measure and quantify is a step in the right direction to me. I'm currently reading From What Is to What If by Rob Hopkins, and much of the book is centered around imagination and the killing of imagination by these ideas of "one right answer" and the arrogant notion that only the things we can quantify matter. There's a whole chapter on education where they explore several possible alternatives to the test-heavy system that has spread around the world. It so far has left me feeling like there are solutions and there is hope, both by learning from the past and looking forward to a better future.