I don’t take sucker bets.

Seriously, it’s more about uncovering the flaws in his arguments for the rest of the audience in this debate. I’m quite sure Alex won’t see them.

———————————————————
OT: To the webmaster, Google is flagging this site as malicious due to 3rd party calls to malicious sites. You might want to check your third party content to make sure.

Why do you insist on sticking words in my mouth? The following are things that you attribute to me that I’ve never said, or even flat out contradicted in a previous comment:

What you are saying is that practice should indeed be counted as learning and then defining it in such a way so as to make it look like that it is the act of learning the skill itself.

Conceptual understanding, which is the heart of learning, can’t be perfected through mere practice as you endorse it.

The practice you endorse(ie. learning multiplication tables and then filling out a worksheet full of them) is a waste of time.

All you are saying is that you think its okay to restate your own opinion but its not okay when I restate mine.

For someone who claims to be an “expert” on educational theory as you claim

You and the other posters who have respnded to my postings have a chronic inability to consider my points.

Those are your words, Alex, and they are all false.

You said:

In fact, I have read and considered your statements. That’s why I’m responding with the detailed citiques that I do!

You have done a lot of critiquing, some of it captured above, but it was rarely, if ever, of my statements. Only once over the space of several comments have your critiques responded to something I actually said. To get that out of you, I had to direct a derisive, if true, comment in your direction.

The rest of the time, you critique straw men. You sketch up a crude caricature of me based on what you think I am and what you think I’m saying, let that caricature speak in your head, and respond to it by restating your opinion.

You say:

All you are saying is that you think its okay to restate your own opinion but its not okay when I restate mine. That’s a double standard and intellectually unacceptable.

I have only had to restate myself so often in this debate only because you hadn’t, until your last comment, actually critiqued anything I actually said. You attempted to drag me into defending a patently false caricature of who I am and what I’ve said. I refused, and still refuse, to play that game.

When I respond to something you said, I always quote you or restate it. I want to make sure I’m according you the same intellectual standard I am asking of you. That’s no double standard, and you’ll be hard pressed to convince anyone else here that it’s “intellectually unacceptable”.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m responding with my own critiques of those views and I think you don’t like that because you’re not used to being challenged by someone of a different opinion on the issue since this organization and website is basically filled with people who already share your views.

That is awfully presumptuous, Alex. I will gladly be challenged on the views I express and engage in a vigorous debate about them, as soon as you actually challenge them in any meaningful way. So far, you’ve spent most of your words here arguing with a crude crayon drawing of me you ginned up in your own mind.

Now to the one thing you said that actually responded to a point of mine:

In regards to your comment about music, I spent about five years with that recorder and I didn’t learn “superficially” as you say that I did. I performed in numerous Christmas and Easter concerts with that recorder and I also sang and played the drums, which recquired intense practice for that type of activity.

Rather than rebut my comment, you confirmed it for me. How? I’ll get to that in a moment.

You earlier accused me of claiming to be an education expert. I never claimed to be. I am a professional musician. My insights on practice, both physical and intellectual, come from firsthand implementation of the insights passed to me by my teachers who were also professional musicians, as well as discovering what worked along the way. Part of working up to that level is achieving a high-level of self awareness of all the automatic physical and intellectual processes going on in yourself and being able to influence them on the fly.

I have to be connected to every second of a rehearsal or performance on a physical, mental, and emotional level to breathe life into the music, make it rise above being just notes on a page to some that lives and that moves the audience. The insights I share here are not the product of reading textbooks or studies, but are the product of using them, of living them. I have learned to walk in with a trumpet, or just my voice, and never make the same mistake twice. I’ve learned, through continual practice and reflection, to figure out why I made a mistake and to correct that before I encounter the same thing again.

When I say you don’t understand music deeply enough to comment on it, I’m saying you don’t understand the depth of the mental processes going on to make that possible. It takes many layers of mental skills from the most elementary to the profoundly complex to give a professional-level musical performance, all of which have to be automatic to allow the musician’s mind to comprehend the music at the with the needed depth.

If comprehending the music weren’t enough, I also have to have an awareness of every sound being produced around me and have the mental ability to adapt to what I hear. Again, this is automatic. The only physical aspect of it is the bones of the ear transmitting the sound energy captured by the eardrum. Everything else, the deciphering of the sound, connecting it to another simultaneous mental process and using it to adjust that mental process, is a mental skill.

You ask:

What about the person who practices that sheet all wrong?

The person who practiced the sheet all wrong has gotten one step closer to doing it all wrong automatically. Practice is not a technique used in isolation. To be of value, it must be preceded by conceptual understand. The person practicing a skill must understand the skill before it is practiced, for the point of practice is to bring the skill to the point of being automatic.

In the above few paragraphs I mentioned things I now do automatically to make music. I know I do them because, when I started doing them, they were not automatic. Each skill I use started out as something I learned and had to do with conscious effort. I continued to do it consciously, continually checking my results against the concept. With that practice, I eventually stopped having to think about it, and soon began being able to leverage the skill to do something more advanced, that then became automatic.

I also know that I continue to do them because I can consciously focus on one of them and modify it if needed. Going back to the scale example from my first comment, say I looked at the scale and keyed off of the notes G-flat, D-flat, and F and played a D-flat major scale where it was really a G-flat major scale. I would have played a C instead of a C-flat. My ear would hear it and, if it stood out as a mistake, I’d ask myself why I missed the flat.

Then I’d remember back to how I looked at the scale and trace the misidentification to a glitch in my process. Then I would think to my theory training and remember that I forgot to look for the tritone in the scale. I saw three notes and pieced them together instead of looking for the tritone first and keying off of that instead. If I had, I would have identified the scale by the written tritone of F to C-flat, and would have seen that interval pointing to G-flat, at which point I could run through the rest of the process I’d learned for identifying a scale.

Except, consciously, all I’d do is look at the scale again and see the interval I should have spotted before, remind myself to look for the tritone, and keep moving. That entire last paragraph is a cluster of unconscious processes.

Applying your math worksheet metaphor to my philosophy, you asked about the person who understands after the first problem. Each person doing the worksheet should always understand after the first problem because they understood before the first problem.

The disagreement between us is not whether conceptual understanding comes from practice. It does not, as I have stated clearly in each comment so far. The disagreement is whether people are capable of learning mental skills to automaticity just as they are with physical skills. I believe that they are, for the reasons laid out above. You believe otherwise.

In fact, in each of your comments, you view understanding a concept as an end unto itself. Understanding is only the beginning. After understanding comes conscious use of that concept, after which comes refinement and more conscious use. After that comes unconscious use, when that concept is so integrated into one’s mind that it can be drawn upon at any time. Only at this point has that concept transcended the vagaries of memory and recall to become available to a person whenever she needs it. That’s the power of practice.

Keep in mind, Ben, that merely uttering Hirsch’s name without a series of foul imprecations means that you are, ipso facto, a “conservative,” regardless of anything else that you may believe.

1. Don’t make 3rd graders spend too much time learning the mechanics of reading, or doing multiplication tables.
2. ??????
3. Liberals win!!!! Universal health care!!!!!

“Your invocation that I make frequent grammantical errors(when I make complete sentences)is itself silly. ”

1. “Invocation” isn’t the right word. Maybe you were thinking of “accusation.”
2. It’s not spelled “grammaNtical.”
3. You left out spaces on either side of the parentheses.

So you managed three pretty basic errors in just one sentence. I could keep going, but I don’t have all day.

I don’t get it. It’s just a bizarre and completely specious accusation of bad faith. And you don’t see Hirsch making up wild theories suggesting that Kohn and you and other progressives are all conspiring to keep children stupid and illiterate so that they will lobby for more government welfare. There’s no need for such silly imputations of bad faith. We all agree, I think, that children should be educated. We simply differ on the means by which to get there.

But Alex’s side (perhaps because it is insecure about the state of the evidence) is constantly hurling these accusations that the only reason Hirsch wants kids to learn to read is because of some conservative conspiracy to “maintain the status quo,” whatever the heck that means.

It’s as if they think Hirsch secretly wants the following sequence of events to occur:

1. Teach kids to read, and to do math fluently, and to learn lots of ideas about the world.
2. ?????
3. Political conservatism will win!!!!!

But of course, there is NOTHING in step 2. There’s just no logical connection to be made between what Hirsch argues for, and the supposed future success of political conservatism.