Are mathematics teachers to blame for Donald Trump?
Dave Kung's bizarre thesis
I have been teaching mathematics for many years now, from Grade 6 all the way through to Grade 12, although the majority of that has been with older students. I cannot be sure how representative my experience is, but it has certainly held constant across different student ages, different schools, different continents and different subjects such as physics, chemistry and even latterly, economics.
There are two enduring features I want to emphasise. Firstly, teaching is hard and so we all make mistakes in the process. Students look for these and will point them out, with varying degrees of glee or politeness that depends on the teacher’s relationship with the class. Secondly, showing a student how to do something is not enough. If they don’t feel they understand why the process works, they will become frustrated. I have found myself explaining the same concept forwards, backwards, grasping for an analogy and grasping for another one. To be fair, as I have moved to more interactive explicit teaching that includes a constant source of feedback from mini whiteboards, there has been less of this. I put that down to teaching the concept better in the first instance and intervening early as misconceptions form.
What does this prove? I think it shows that at least in the cultures where I have taught, students don’t simply accept whatever the teacher says. When they don’t understand what a teacher is doing or why, they or their parents will complain, or they will label the teacher as ‘bad’ and this reputation will spread. In a school with a structured and clear approach to managing student behaviour, relationships will be respectful, but students will not treat the teacher as infallible and will question many aspects of what they are asked to do. As teachers, we become well versed in explaining our rationale.
I have never taught in America and so maybe it’s different there. I find this hard to believe because my prejudice is that Americans are even more individualistic than Britons or Australians. Regardless, it is difficult for me to imagine the picture painted by Dave Kung of a mathematics lesson in a U.S. classroom:
“In too many cases, [students] are just like rally goers, listening to a sage on the stage and believing what they’re being told. Rather than following along and using logic to connect ideas, they are simply falling in line, believing what they’re being told and mimicking it dutifully when asked. The logical coherence and beautiful connections have been replaced by the algorithmic pushing of symbols around on the page, hoping to get kudos in class, the green checkmark when they hit ‘submit answer,’ and an A. They are stressed out, in a time crunch, and just working within the system to please the classroom authority who controls their future.”
Who are the ‘rally goers’ Kung is referring to? Well, he took Kamala Harris’s advice to attend a Trump rally and saw, ‘a large group of people unquestioningly believing what someone on the stage was telling them.’
And just like that, mathematics teaching is implicated as a cause of the moral, cultural and political disaster that any nice American sees in Donald Trump.
Hold on a second.
It is tempting to dismiss this as just another example of the left in the U.S. looking for anything other than the obvious cause of Trump’s election win—the fact that the Democratic prospectus was deeply unappealing to large numbers of voters, including growing numbers from identity groups that the Democrats believe really owe them their vote. This is blindingly obvious to me 14,000 km away in Australia. Miserable, censorious, sackcloth-and-ashes identity politics is not appealing to anyone with a sense of agency or aspiration.
And how lacking in self-awareness is it to assume that those with whom you have political differences are the ones unquestioningly believing what someone on the stage is telling them, while you, a nice person, are somehow possessed of superior critical thinking powers?
There’s been a lot of unquestioning belief in recent years. Much has also been unquestionable, at least without risking a ban from social media or worse. There was the unquestioning belief that masks did not protect against COVID until that changed and they did and then we all had to wear them and we couldn’t question that. There was the unquestioning belief that COVID did not emerge in a lab until that changed and maybe it did. There was the unquestioning belief that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a figment of Russian disinformation until that changed and it was not and was actually Hunter Biden’s laptop. And there was the unquestioning belief that concerns about Joe Biden’s mental faculties were a misinformation campaign by the right wing media until that placed him in a hopeless, undignified and cruel situation where the entire world could see that it was not.
It’s not just the bad guys who fail to ask the right questions. If, as Kung states, authoritarianism is a ‘strict obedience to authority’ then all sides of politics have been guilty of that.
What has any of this to do with the teaching of mathematics? Absolutely nothing.
Yet, Kung thinks lecturing in the mathematics classroom is causing the kind of submission to authority that leads to Trump. We are teaching students to ‘believe what authorities tell them.’ Although not the main cause of a growing acceptance of authoritarian leaders, ‘it’s worth examining.’
No. It’s not. It is just the latest sad excuse for pushing teaching methods that have been shown, time and again, to be ineffective. If our aim is to ensure students grow into adulthood with the capacity to critically analyse the pronouncements of demagogues, we should seek to teach mathematics the most effective way possible so they learn it thoroughly. If that means ‘more didactic’ methods, so be it. Ideological preference is a poor alternative to empirical reality.
Critically, I am not making the case for lecturing—the bogeyman Kung offers up. A one-way monologue is not an effective means of teaching mathematics. Even the default, more interactive approach I previously used is less effective than what I do now, which is based on my improved understanding of educational psychology. But of course, it is easier to dismiss lecturing than it is to dismiss interactive explicit teaching and so we have to endure these recycled arguments.
And yet I wonder if Kung’s overreach is a source of hope. His argument connecting didactic mathematics teaching to the rise of Donald Trump is so absurd, so hyperbolic, so bizarre and so pathetic that it may just make a few readers stop. And think.
In an ideal universe, one would subject every claim to searching and open-minded analysis to determine its truth. In the real world, life is short and there is only so much time to think about things. And so one develops certain heuristics or shortcuts to reduce wasted time. One such: anybody who uses the term “sage on a stage” as a pejorative is an idiot who can be safely ignored.
This is a fantastic post! Thank you for writing it. Of course, the point of Kung's article, in my opinion, is to try to make people feel like they're authoritarian dictators if they lecture or use explicit instruction. In other words, we're supposed to feel like we're bad people.
I want to mention one other thing from his article because the meta-analysis by Freeman et al. that he mentions has been sent to me several times, as some sort of evidence that direct instruction doesn't work. As you point out, Kung presents a bogeyman - lecturing in its most extreme form. And the Freeman et al. paper actually defines lecturing to be the most extreme one-way teaching possible.
Freeman et al. define traditional lecturing in this way: “continuous exposition by the teacher. Under this definition, student activity was assumed to be limited to taking notes and/or asking occasional and unprompted questions of the instructor.”
On the other hand, Freeman et al. define active learning in this way: “Active learning engages students in the process of learning through activities and/or discussion in class, as opposed to passively listening. It emphasizes higher-order thinking and often involves groupwork”
The point of the meta-analysis was to examine articles in which traditional lecturing and active learning (according to their definitions above) were studied to try to determine which was more effective.
Their meta-analysis separated out papers in this way: “Note that criterion i) yielded papers representing a wide array of active learning activities, including vaguely defined “cooperative group activities in class,” in-class worksheets, clickers, problem-based learning (PBL), and studio classrooms, with intensities ranging from 10% to 100% of class time (SI Materials and Methods). Thus, this study’s intent was to evaluate the average effect of any active learning type and intensity contrasted with traditional lecturing.”
Therefore, the Freeman et al. paper does not actually present evidence against the effectiveness of direct instruction or explicit instruction (or lecturing at the university level), even though many people use it that way, because most good teachers who use explicit instruction would fall into the active learning category, by their definition. Even at the university level, the type of traditional lecturing Freeman et al. describe (which has NO interaction between students and prof) is rare.