2.4 - Attention

Hi. I seem to be looking at a brain. This is actually-- this funny, multicolored brain-- was actually an award that I and my HASTAC co-founder, David Dale Goldberg, won in 2012; and we're very honored. It was as "Educators of the Year" from the World Technology Network. But this funny, flashing, multicolored brain is kind of comical. In fact, I'm going to shut off my brain. There we go. But it's a good entrée into what I want to talk about next, which is the idea of attention, and especially the philosopher and psychologist William James; he's sometimes called the founder of the field of modern psychology. He was a Harvard professor, and in a very famous book called Principles of Psychology that he wrote in 1890, he whines in chapter 11 that he's the first person in English to write about attention. And he's particularly concerned about a certain kind of focused, linear attention to task that and what happens when you no longer have that attention. He says he's very concerned about what-- and this is a direct quote-- "what the French call distraction". Now that's interesting. Most of us don't think that 1890 is the first time anyone in English is thinking about attention, and is concerned about what the French call distraction. But indeed, he gave us some scientific basis for the idea of attention, and especially the idea of how we stay focused on a task.

Why that's important is because much of 20th century education has been focused on how we stay on task. And much of the current fear about the modern age and technology is that we're no longer focusing on the tasks-- our brains look kind of like this little piece of plexiglass here-- they're constantly being distracted by a world of changing colors, too much going on, multitasking, all of that. So we're increasingly going to be looking at that idea of what multitasking is; what "Do It Yourself" is; what different ways of dividing attention are with the right tools, the right partners and the right methods.

We've talked already about collaboration by difference, a method where you look for people with diverse skills; diverse backgrounds; diverse religions; regions; races; ages; genders; and expertise in order to find the most, collaborative, complex community, and answer to communities, that you can find. This is almost the opposite of the method of attention that we see prescribed in William James, and even more so the opposite of a form of attention that became concretized by a management theorist, Frederick Winslow Taylor-- who, in fact, read James' work. Even more so, Taylor was the Mark Zuckerberg; Bill Gates; Steve Jobs, of the 1890s, in that he was on his way to Harvard, didn't make it, decided "No, no, no, factories were the future." That factory we saw that was closed down-- the White Factory that I wrote a book about a few years ago-- is the kind of thing that he was interested in, back in the 1890s. And in fact, he did not go to Harvard, much to the shock of his mainline Philadelphia, very wealthy, prestigious family. The scion of their family; their son; their brilliant son was not going to go to Harvard Law, but instead was going to go into a pig iron factory and take ideas of attention and apply them to the workforce.

Taylor invented something called scientific labor management. One of his books is The Adjustment of Wages to Efficiency, which was published in 1896-- another one, Principles of Scientific Labor Management, published in 1911-- and they're both about how to make humans as machine-like as possible. The word Taylorism is synonymous with assembly lines, similar to Henry Ford: how do you keep people on the assembly line doing the same task at the same time? Exactly what we talked about with compulsory public education-- keeping little kids in line, on time, doing one task, discretely separating one subject from another, getting the right answers, doing what their teacher tells them to do-- this was the model of the assembly line and scientific labor for Taylor, as well. In fact, he was kind of obsessed with the idea that somebody, at 8:00 in the morning, when they've just had a full belly; big breakfast; they get to work, that they're somehow pushing that pig iron in the wheelbarrow faster than they do at 8:00 at night or even 5:00 at night when they're hungry and they've been working for 10 hours. He thought that was bad. He thought that, in fact, they needed to reward the worker who worked at the same high pace all day long-- he called them soldiers and they got special merit pay-- versus the person who actually might have the same quantitative productivity at the end, but who was working at variable speeds, who wasn't working like clockwork, like a machine; he called those malingerers. And if, in fact, your productivity level fell, as well as your schedule became erratic, he would have said the only thing to do with you is to get rid of you; to fire you.

I'm very interested in how James's ideas of focused attention and Taylor's idea of scientific labor management translated into what I call the industrial educational complex, basically from the years 1875 to 1925. I like to call this scientific learning management. I actually thought it was pretty clever when I came up with the idea that Taylor's scientific labor management became scientific learning management. And then, last year, when I was on book tour for Now You See It, I went to Dartmouth College, and found out that Dartmouth College-- which of course is the home of the Tucks School of Business, the first graduate level business program in America-- who was their first professor? Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor was the first distinguished professor at the first graduate school of business in the country. And what did he do? He took his theory of scientific labor management, designed for the working classes for manual labor, and translated it to goals and guidelines for higher education; scientific learning management. I admit, I have not done that research; I have not gone into the Taylor archives; I don't know even if they exist at Dartmouth. I heard this from a business professor at Dartmouth when I was there. So maybe, if some of you out there are researchers, you can do that as a research project for this class. I know many, many people would love to know more about, Fredrick Winslow Taylor's actual influence on scientific learning management of the early 20th century and that continues to the present.

Here are some things that happened between 1875 and 1925 that I consider to be part of the corpus of scientific learning management-- and we'll put a slide up, so you can see the whole list:
-Kindergarten
-Mandatory public secondary schooling
-Land grant universities
-Research universities
-The U.S. Office of Education
-Majors and minors in college
-Dividing colleges into divisions
-Giving certification for college work in professional schools
-The invention of graduate schools
-The invention of collegiate law schools; law schools based at universities
-Nursing schools
-Graduate schools of education-- again, based at universities
-Collegiate business schools
-Degree requirements-- this becomes very, very important in the first decades of the 20th century: what things do you have to know; do; what classes do you have to take in order to get a degree?
-Grades-- A-B-C-D grades
-Statistics
-Standard deviation
-Spreadsheets
-Blueprints
-In the business world, return on equity-- ROE, as it's called
-Punch clocks
-IQ tests
-Multiple choice tests
-Learning disabilities-- the idea that you would have, actually, a disability; not just a different way of learning, but a disability
-Rapid response, item response college entrance exams, or SAT exams
-School rankings
-Tenure

Those are just some of the apparatus of scientific learning management that happens between basically a 50-year period between 1875 and 1925. And it's all extremely important to the apparatus that we now have and that now governs our educational system. And that it's the polemic of this course: that we argue is no longer serving the world we live in.

I want to talk about three things from that long list. I want to talk about statistics, I want to talk about multiple choice exams, and I'm going to talk about grading.

Statistics is the one that's most bothersome to me. Francis Galton, who was a cousin of Darwin's, was a person who invented the idea of deviation from a mean and standard deviation; the two bedrocks of modern statistics. Galton was also a famous eugenicist. By that, I mean he believed that you biologically control human reproduction and populations in order to make superior human beings. He was British and he actually made a proposal to the British government that they give money to aristocrats for having children, so that it contributes to a better gene pool, and that they sterilize the working classes and prevent the working classes from reproducing. There's an incredibly racist assumption based on that: that the aristocrat actually has better genes, and they got to their superior position not because they inherited it, but because their genes are better and that those genes need to be reinforced through payments so that they reproduce as much as possible. Versus the corresponding idea that poor people had poor genes. It wasn't lack of luck; it wasn't subjugation; it wasn't colonization; it wasn't imperialism; it wasn't slavery; it wasn't a class structure; it was their bad genes that prevented them from rising to a higher economic level, and therefore they should be sterilized.

Very, very interesting, he invented the idea of deviation from a mean, and standard deviation, so we have a scientific measure for proving the inferiority of the working classes and superiority of the upper classes. It's an extremely tautological, circular argument, because education level and wealth were some of the criteria that he would use by which to measure who were or weren't superior or inferior people. But every time I see statistics, I think about that origin. It's not that every statistician believes in something is heinous as that, but that origin back in an idea that humans can actually be measured on single item measurements of their worth-- biological worth-- as human beings. And it shows up again and again in the ways we grade, test and measure. A huge topic for next week's lessons on how we measure.

Even before we get there, I want to talk about two things, two parts of the apparatus of scientific learning management that are very important. And, kind of funny, they have interesting histories. One is grades and one is multiple choice tests. The first university in America-- it's a college-- to adopt grading as a standard is Mount Holyoke College. Before that, everybody wrote, not grades, but long expository explanations of how somebody did responses to somebody's work. But Mount Holyoke decided it was going to be modern. And, in 1897, it adopted an A-B-C-D grading system. There was no E; it was too confusing for excellent. So it's A, B, C, D, and F. And that meant all of those comments that teachers wrote on papers; all of the different complexity of work that a student might produce in a term; would be reduced to one scientific standardized grade: either A, B, C, D, or F for failure.

Interestingly, the second major U.S. institution to adopt the grading system was the American Meat Packers Association. And, since I'm an archivist, I actually did go back and look at some of the correspondence from the early 20th century when the American meat packers adopt grading. And it's fascinating to find out people are outraged; meat packers do not think something as complex as sirloin and chop can be reduced to a simple A-B-C-D grade. What's ironic about that is, from the very beginning, for the American meat packers-- even if there's an A attached-- you can look at that A and you can find out all the written comments that the inspector-- the meat inspector-- gave that led up to that A grade. So they've never had a simple reduction to an A-B-C-D grade. Meanwhile, A-B-C-D grading spread like wildfire throughout the educational system, and very soon became the standard way, with a very few exceptions now-- the standard way to evaluate grammar school; secondary; and even college-level, college work. Peculiar, very peculiar. I think if Galileo had been told that, in the 20th century, people would reduce all the complexity of thinking to an A-B-C-D grade, he'd be sure the lemmings had just gone off the cliff. And if he had realized that in our interactive; "Do It Yourself"; modding; mix up; hugely overloaded information age we were still relying on grades, he would really be convinced that the lemmings had won.

The second one is multiple choice testing; this history is almost as interesting. In the next lesson, I'm going to be talking about "No Child Left Behind", the 2002 national policy which makes standardized end-of-grade testing the policy for all education-- publicly funded state education in the United States. And multiple choice testings are what? Get you into college; get you into graduate school; get you into law school; get you into medical school are part of college rankings, how high are the grades, the grade point averages on standardized tests. I personally think it's an extremely impoverished way of measuring knowledge, and keeping knowledge, again, discrete as we saw it in the classrooms; the math from 8:00 to 9:00, geography from 9:00 to 10:00.

So my editor-- when I was writing Now You See It-- said stop complaining so much about standardized testing and multiple choice testing, and tell us a little bit about that history. And, to my astonishment, it turns out one person-- one guy-- Frederick J. Kelly, actually invented the standardized test, and the reason he did is fascinating, and I think illustrative, and another armament in our activist history that will help us change the future. In 1914, as a doctoral dissertation student at Kansas State University-- now Kansas State Teachers University, now Emporia State-- Kelly wrote a dissertation called, Teachers' Marks: Their Variability and Standardization; again, 1914. 1914 was a very important year.
1) The U.S. had just passed new laws requiring students to stay, basically, in secondary school-- at least until their junior year, or until they turned 16. There was no system to cope with this sudden influx of students into high schools.
2) Immigrants were coming into America in numbers never seen before. So the urban situation, especially, was explosive and way overcrowded, with way too many students relative to the amount of school space that was available.
3) The First World War was beginning. And already, although the U.S. didn't really enter until 1917, already farm crops and machinery were being sent abroad for the military operations on the Western Front in World War I. By 1917, it wasn't just farm produce and machinery, but actual humans that were going over. And it was at that point that Kelly's method became standardized like wildfire throughout education. Why? Because he came up with a method where anybody could grade a test. Tests were all, A-B-C-D item response tests, and anyone could grade them. You just put a template over, and you marked what was right and wrong.

Let me read you something from Frederick Kelly's 1914 dissertation. This is a quote from Kelly:
"Draw a line around the word cow. No other answer is right. Even if a line is drawn under the word cow, the exercise is wrong, and nothing counts.
Stop at once when time is called. Do not open the papers until told so that all may begin at the same time."

Again, remember what we talked about with timeliness: open on time, you have to do it exactly, you have to fill it in. If you are in school now, or have a child in school now, this is not so different from the end-of-grade testing today. Do we really want to reduce all learning to an A-B-C-D test? Do we really want to say you're smart if you manage to draw a line around the word cow as opposed to a line under the word cow? Is that really our metric for what intelligence is? If you're a parent now and your kid comes home and cries because they got this test wrong-- let's say they were asked, "Which of these animals is a cow". "Circle which of these animals is a farm animal: A - cow, B - rhinoceros, C - dinosaur, D - dog."

Let's say your kid circles dog, because you live on a farm and you have a dog on your farm, and, in fact, your dog works the farm and is a farm animal. By Kelley's test and by most testing, that's a wrong answer. So testing, standardized testing isn't just teaching you the right answer; it's teaching you how to think like right answer testing. We've talked about that as "teaching to the test", "learning to the test", "learning how to guess the answer the test wants", has very, very, very little to do with how we live our life outside of school. And, in fact, that kid comes home crying because he circled dog instead of cow as a farm animal. And if you're a good parent, you'd say, "Let's Google it-- see what Google tells us about farm animals." If you Google farm animals, the first site that comes up on Google is a site called "Farm Kids". It's made by educators-- ironically, in Kansas-- and it's a marvelous, delightful site that tells you all kinds of things about farm animals, including about dogs and cows. But most parents look at it, see it's a safe site, see it's by educators, and turn away.

I actually played with farm animals as a child. Otherwise, if I weren't doing this research, I would not have stayed on for 15 or 20 minutes. But if you do, something curious happens. The site starts getting slower and slower and suddenly you get a pop-up that says, "Little boys and girls, please go ask mommy or daddy to download Internet Explorer". "That's why your system isn't working well; this system works best with Internet Explorer and it doesn't work with Apple products". Mind you, Apple products have plenty of walls around around their own apps and products, too. They approve and disapprove whatever, have to approve any app that gets used on an Apple product as well. But the point of that is we live in this world of abundance, but we're not telling our kids about the 12,900,000 hits that come under "Farm Kids", nor are we telling them that in the number one hit-- the hit that Google rates number one-- that's a paid site; it's a commercial site. It's number one, not because it's the best site, but because Microsoft manages it to be the number one site on the web. And we haven't taught our kids those digital literacies, either how you sort information from 12 million possible answers, nor to be cautious-- extremely cautious about the kind of answers they're getting. Instead, sadly, the United States and worldwide, we're still circling A-B-C-D tests; we're still telling kids, in effect, to do what Frederick Kelly said in 1914: "Draw a line around the word cow, no other answer is right. Even if a line is drawn under the word cow, the exercise is wrong."

That's it. That's today's lesson. Thanks to all of you. We'll be back next time to talk more about how we measure. Thank you.