The Problem With the Pedagogy Gurus

In 1903 George Bernard Shaw wrote Man and Superman, a comedy of manners featuring the character Jack Tanner — political firebrand, descendent of Don Juan, and author of The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion. Shaw produced his character’s revolutionary writings as an appendix to the published play, which closes with Maxims for Revolutionists, a series of sardonic yet lifeless epigrams, pitched somewhere between Nietzsche and Wilde, on a variety of subjects including imperialism, marriage, idolatry, and the proper way to beat a child. Just one epigram has survived in popular culture, plucked from its pamphlet and attributed now more often to Shaw than to his character: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

Understandably, teachers and professors can rarely take the joke. (A quick Google search for the phrase calls up page after page of humorless rebuttal.) And of course Tanner’s apothegm, taken straight, is simply untrue. Teaching is a worthy calling, and good instruction a difficult skill to master.

The expression comes nevertheless to mind when confronting the prolific work of the pedagogy gurus of contemporary academe — the self-styled learning experts whose hectoring books and advice columns have become a familiar feature of higher ed today, leading professors down the righteous paths charted by the most up-to-date education theory. Just what knowledge do these would-be teachers of teaching possess?

One recent work of scripture comes from Joshua R. Eyler, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a clinical assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Mississippi, who aims to reveal the damage visited on students by our attachment to grades. In Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It, Eyler purports to set the record straight on assessment and evaluation: Grades are not merely unhelpful or counterproductive, but dangerous to our students and to the enterprise of pedagogy.

Failing Our Future might be taken for a deeply humane book, and Eyler does write with compassion about students’ anxious relationship with evaluation. These students, he rightly observes, have been trained by our current system to see grades as the goal rather than the byproduct of education. Insofar as Failing Our Future attempts to tackle this problem — the misvaluing of grades — one might be grateful for Eyler’s clarion. But the book simply cannot maintain that focus. Its eye slips almost immediately from the difficult problem of how we came to be in this position, to the far more exciting and saleable idea that grades are somehow inherently vicious (Eyler calls them “problematic,” à la mode). To feed this argument, Eyler serves a sampler platter of pieties from the dismal kitchens of contemporary pedagogy discourse.

Between the covers of Failing Our Future, readers will encounter a world of strange bathos. Potted histories make short work of common sense, dubious psychological studies of motivation are wielded with absolute confidence, and urgent moral declaration attaches to even the most neutral material. Failing Our Future ought to be read not so much as an argument (reader, you already know whether you agree), but as a symptom. Just why does so much professional talk about teaching sound like this today? What peculiar institutional circumstances have produced it? “Be ready,” writes Eyler in his introduction, “it’s not for the faint of heart.”

After some throat-clearing clichés about grades as “scarlet letters” and a brief history of grading in American education, Eyler offers a series of chapters covering the “frightening laundry list of effects” grades have on our students. The argument of Failing Our Future has three central planks: Grades do not offer an objective representation of student excellence (or the absence thereof). Grades “significantly impede the learning process” by stymieing motivation and punishing failure, which is itself essential to learning. Grades harm children physically, emotionally, and psychologically, exacerbating the mental-health crisis among young people today. To replace this pernicious practice, Eyler points readers toward a different set of revolutionist handbooks: those of the grading-reform movement, which he supplements with “research informed” advice for talking to your children and students about their academic work.

Failing our Future can at times be cleareyed about how institutional structures have distorted the experience of evaluation. Take, for instance, Eyler’s discussion of “grading portals,” an artifact of No Child Left Behind. These online grading systems allow students and parents to monitor grades at any point during the semester. Constant updates, constant access. They are now ubiquitous in primary and secondary education. College educators have similar systems, though of course only the students and not their parents can use them. (My own institution wants us to keep students up to date on their grades via Canvas’s grading tool.) The putative goal, as with mandated midterm grade reports and similar kinds of accountability, is to catch students in danger of failing.

Eyler argues that constant access to grading portals “creates a condition where children and teenagers cannot escape scrutiny and are constantly confronted with the pressure to do better.” This seems correct. These systems have in common with other algorithmic terrors of our screen-addled age the tendency to let the world inside the portal override the world in front of you, to give the virtual an outsized and damaging importance in our lives. My own students sometimes express frustration when grades are not instantly available, which feels at times like a customer complaint and at times like a withdrawal symptom.

Eyler describes the portals, with a touch of melodrama, as “an academic version of Big Brother.” This kind of thinking slips easily from reasonable skepticism to full-blown Foucauldian paranoia. Here’s Eyler on the use of grades as a “technology of surveillance” — that is, as a measure of attendance or participation:

This passage works through the magic of its lexicon, a parody of literary criticism circa 1988. Children aren’t “well behaved”; they’re “docile.” Attending class is a form of “compliance.” This is the same fevered pseudo-logic that induces grown-up professors to accuse each other of “cop shit” on X anytime someone admits to tracking participation or disallowing cellphones in class.

What other standard practices fall into this moral gravity well? Grading curves, for one. Taking a class average on an exam and then distributing grades above and below turns out, on Eyler’s account, to have distressing connections to race science:

We do not call them “bell curves” because of the notorious book; the phrase has been used to visualize the normal distribution for a very long time. There are real problems with curves in grading — including a failure to respect variation in performance across different groups of students and a tendency to pit students against one another — but the fact that an infamous book borrowed the bell curve for its central metaphor doesn’t implicate grade-curving professors in biological determinism. The problem with Eyler’s argument is not that curving grades is some untouchable practice (far from it), but that his moral suit against that practice is so unhinged.

One of the more persistent commonplaces among the pedagogy set is that grade inflation is a myth. Back in 2002, in these pages, Alfie Kohn objected, “The burden rests with critics to demonstrate that those higher grades are undeserved, and one can cite any number of alternative explanations. Maybe students are turning in better assignments. Maybe instructors used to be too stingy with their marks and have become more reasonable.” Sure — I mean, maybe! None of these writers deny that grades have in fact risen. Their anger involves a semantic objection: Grades may be higher, but they are not inflated. Here’s Eyler’s version of this aging canard:

There is already clear evidence that grades have risen across institutions of higher education, compressing averages into the A and B ranges, but inflation deniers like Eyler prefer evasion to counterargument on the subject of grade inflation — an especially distressing failure at a moment when students are demonstrably less prepared for college than in the past. Average GPAs did not rise, as Kohn suggests, just because Dr. Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes one day. Any honest professor in the United States can talk readily about a variety of forces driving grade inflation: schools’ focus on retention and graduation rates, the rise of the student as consumer, the distorting effects of teaching evaluations, and even the recursive force of higher averages themselves.

One of the book’s lowest points arrives with a discussion of the mental-health crisis among young people today. Eyler begins with statistics on depression and suicide among teens and college students, and then notes that young people list academic stress as a major concern. Therefore, he concludes, grades are driving young people to depression and suicide. Eyler claims that he is “not brazen enough to suggest that grades play a primary role here,” but he suggests exactly that in a blog post on Inside Higher Ed, incorporated into this same chapter: “Rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicidal ideation have spiked dramatically, and academic stress tied to grades is a leading cause of this escalation.” Nothing in the chapter contravenes this position except Eyler’s one-sentence caveat. Meanwhile, one awaits his smoking gun.

At one point, Eyler points to diagnostic surveys generated by the Healthy Minds Network, the responses to which apparently show high levels of depression among college students. (Are these in fact informative surveys? Can surveys, even “diagnostic” ones, offer meaningful statistics for mental health apart from clinical assessment?) Eyler explains virtuously that “using these kinds of health assessments reinforces the medicalized lens through which society tends to view mental illness,” and then he uses the data anyway, calling it “robust and revealing.” This melodramatic description is a stylistic tic throughout the book; shortly after sharing this “robust and revealing” report, Eyler calls the “silence” about the link between grades and mental health “both troubling and thunderous.” The emergency is in the adjectives.

Throughout the book, Eyler attempts to prosecute a case against grades by eliciting panic about potential harms. The word “harm” appears, as it has in popular discourse for the past decade or so, to plant a finger on the scale of urgency. What’s finally most dispiriting is that, in the end, Eyler almost grasps the problem, such as it is: not grades, per se, but students’ relation to grades (and perhaps professors’ as well). That grades are not scarlet letters, that they are not judgments of worth or character, that their permanence is illusory — all this is surely something that many students could stand to learn. But when the solutions finally arrive in the back half of the book, they amount to some bland rehearsal of parenting techniques (e.g., make sure teenagers get enough sleep; praise your kids for their efforts, not for the grade itself) and a buffet-style survey of alternative grading methods from the entrepreneurs and mystics of the grading-reform movement.

If you treat writing like Eyler’s merely as advice from down the hall, so to speak, you may indeed find worthwhile tips and strategies in the many books, essays, blogs, and opinion columns produced by these reformers. A colleague I trust, for instance, swears by Linda B. Nilson’s Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time. Whatever one thinks of their solutions, many reformers are alert to the challenges facing college students today — deficits in attention, struggles with basic college-level skills, and a transactional relationship to education, among other issues. One might find in the pages of these books any number of useful tools for dealing with contemporary classroom challenges.

Yet the pedagogy gurus offer more than just tools and advice. Though they frame their arguments as objective, “research informed” claims about how we learn and therefore how we ought to teach, what they offer is an ideological program — one from which other professors ought to dissent. That ideology appears first as style, a mélange of branded language borrowed from pop psychology, therapy speak, progressive mantras, and corporate jargon. Adopt a “growth mindset.” Pursue “excellence and innovation.” Cultivate “radical hope.” Rediscover “authentic learning.” Glib and implicitly condescending — did you know your teaching was inauthentic? — this idiom is as contentless as a motivational poster.

Consider “authentic learning.” I was disturbed to discover that this phrase names an actual subfield of pedagogy theory. It generally refers to learning through experience, as with immersion-based language instruction, though there is, of course, no agreed-on definition. How could there be? Authentic learning, like authentic selfhood, is not so much a definite object as a fable of discontent. Its value lies in the easy denigration of alternatives to its practitioners’ own methods — alternatives cast implicitly as retrograde, ineffective, and reactionary. (The preferred term among the gurus is “traditional education.”) Who doesn’t want “authenticity” or “innovation”? This style of talk derives not from scholarly discourse but from the self-mystified chatter of the consultant class.

Descending from gaseous abstraction to the practicalities of reform barely improves the picture. Rubrics, learning outcomes, grading contracts, alternate grading systems — these are some of the radical solutions on offer. According to Eyler, such tools promise to decouple learning from evaluation, to make standards transparent and thereby relieve student anxiety. Students simply consult the rubric and meet the specified standards. Our students, though, are already well-trained — too well-trained — in this model of education, and we can see the damage this has wrought. In a recent story in The Chronicle, Ethan Hutt, an associate professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, expresses frustration at how students now respond to writing assignments: “Hutt would like to give an assignment that goes like this: Pick a topic, write an essay, and say something interesting. But he finds he can’t — not even with his doctoral students.” Conditioned by grids and rubrics, they are unable “to engage in writing in a different way, as means of developing ideas and sharpening their thinking.”

The goal of the reformers, as Eyler writes in vague utopian tones, is “a world where children have the freedom to learn without judgment, to explore without fear, and to seek without consequence,” but their faddish lists of standards and fussy contracts produce something quite different. The adoption of rubrics and standards-based grading in primary and secondary schools has destroyed students’ independence and given them the impression that learning is nothing more than a list of skills, demonstrated and then checked off. (No wonder AI is so appealing to students: Its logic of inputs and outputs seems hardly different from the education many have received so far.) While the reformers imagine their aim as something like insurgency — “Why not dream of revolution?” Eyler asks in his epilogue — what they offer instead is deadening bureaucratic proceduralism.

This program emerges, in part, from the psychological framework on which writers like Eyler typically depend. By tethering his argument to studies from psychology, Eyler gives his reforms a veneer of objectivity. If this is indeed how human beings are motivated, become curious, absorb and retain information, or acquire new skills, then any teaching which disregards Eyler’s lessons must be less “effective.” Yet psychology is its own complicated discipline with its own contested methods and concepts, susceptible to revision and even embarrassing blunder, and the artless appropriation of these studies for other disciplines can go badly awry. A recent exposé on business psychology in The Atlantic offers one cautionary tale, while the most notorious example in education is probably the thoroughly debunked yet tenacious notion of “learning styles.”

Through its reliance on psychology, pedagogy discourse in Eyler’s mode abstracts the practice of teaching away from the idiosyncrasies of individual disciplines and toward a general picture of something called Learning. From the perspective of Learning, it would be naïve to imagine that professors of mathematics or literature understand the transmission of their own disciplines, might know best how to teach differential equations or Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Other professors may be experts in literature or mathematics, sociology or art history, but they are emphatically not experts in Learning. That knowledge belongs to the pedagogy specialists themselves.

Who are these lamas of higher learning? Some are current or former administrators and teachers, rightly frustrated with American education today. Others are professors in various disciplines. Susan D. Blum, for instance, editor of the landmark Ungrading anthology, is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Some are independent “educational consultants”: Starr Sackstein, author of Hacking Education, is chief operating officer at Mastery Portfolio, an “ed-tech start-up,” and Joe Feldman, author of Grading for Equity, is chief executive of Crescendo Education Group. That teachers and professors — particularly at education colleges — worry earnestly over the practice of teaching, study its conditions, and propose solutions is entirely appropriate. When the consultants show up, though, you may be facing a bona fide racket.

A notable number of gurus are employed at colleges, albeit outside of normal academic units. They reside instead with institutes devoted to helping professors improve their teaching. Eyler is the director of the Center of Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. Other institutions possess such aspirational monikers as the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation or the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. Most are simply called “Center for Teaching Excellence.” Their job is to offer teaching support: resources and workshops to help professors with lesson plans, assignments, syllabi, and classroom engagement.

These resources can be genuinely valuable for struggling faculty, though it’s worth asking what the presence of such centers says about higher education today. One answer is that they reflect a general crisis of faith in the university as such. The ever-present language of innovation — how can we be always improving, restless as sharks — implies that we have never quite known how to teach, never been adequate to the task.

This is perhaps the most distressing feature of Eyler’s book and of the discourse and institutions that produced it. While reformers like Eyler often pitch themselves as progressive activists, they are, in their way, as skeptical of higher education as its right-wing critics. Reformers’ attacks on “traditional education” are particularly dismaying in the context of our current crises. Colleges, once one of America’s greatest public institutions, are in dire straits, facing drastic funding cuts and attacks on academic freedom. American trust in higher ed has plummeted across the political spectrum. AI is wreaking havoc on the composition of, well, everything — from college essays to computer code. At the time of writing, the current political administration plans to shutter or cripple the Department of Education. Meanwhile, in the pages of Failing Our Future, Joshua R. Eyler demands an assault on “the mirage of rigor and the inertia of the status quo.”

In Failing Our Future, rigor is always an illusion or a con job — which brings us finally back to grading. The problem may simply be what one asks of grades in the first place. The scene of judgment represented by grading is an unavoidable (and valuable) part of teaching, and the attempt by Eyler et al. to rationalize and rubricate that judgment so thoroughly that it effectively disappears is doomed to fail. Indeed, the fact that grades involve some measure of subjective judgment does not make them arbitrary or worthless. They are merely products of evaluation made in a specific context — that is, the particular classroom of a particular teacher. (Most students, I’d wager, already understand that some A’s are worth more than others and that this isn’t a national crisis.) Failure to recognize this — by faculty or students, by administrators, reformers, or employers — is not the fault of grades. One may even maintain the value of traditional grades while agreeing with Eyler that they do not offer an immutable, objective standard for excellence. Then again, neither does this book. I’d give it a D.