A Treat, not a Treatment

Harold Pixley, one of my high school band directors, used to have a saying that summed up his programming philosophy; 

Give the audience a treat, not a treatment.

His thinking was that the music should not be some kind of unpleasant medicine--good for you, but unenjoyable, a painful cure for what ails you.

Some education discussions remind me of Pix's words. There's this continuing thread, this notion that the Youngs all suffer from a variety of maladies, all distinguished by what the children lack--knowledge, understanding, skills, etc--and it is the job of schools to give children a treatment to fix them.

Education Treatment fans assume that the correct treatment will fix the deficiency in all students, so their focus is on the deficiency itself and the treatment to fix it, not the students. If students find the treatment joyless and unpleasant, well, that doesn't matter. In fact, some folks are pretty sure that the unpleasantness is a sign that this is the Correct Treatment, and conversely that if a child is enjoying themselves in school, they are really receiving treatment for their deficiencies.

Education treatment fans dismiss the premise that a teacher needs to know or know about the students. The right treatment will always work. And because they focus on the deficiency, education treatment fans often display an absurd lack of understanding about human children or the education thereof.

Take Jordan Adams, the Hillsdale product who has launched himself as a one-man anti-woke consulting firm. He appears to be hilariously bad at his job (teach 6 year olds American history) and not too sneaky about his far right christianist agenda, but the only thing separating him from far more successful educonsultants is that he appears to have underestimated the number of districts just waiting to hire him and help him fail upwards. 

Adams comes from the treatment school-- if we just apply the correct anti-woke treatment to students, they will turn out the way we want them to. 

He's certainly not alone. State legislatures often take this policy approach: "Young people don't know enough about widgets, so let's pass a law that requires schools to apply one Widget Knowledge Treatment to students every year." Center stage at the Reading Wars is regularly occupied by someone (these days it's the SOR folks) declaiming, "If we just apply a treatment of This Proven Reading Poultice, all students will be cured of not being readers."

Nor is it confined to folks on the right. The worst of the DEI or SEL programs come with the premise that if we just take this program out of the box and aim it at the students, they will become more empathetic and accepting and loaded with soft skills. 

Nor is it confined to education amateurs (though that's certainly where the majority come from). Every school building has at least--at least--one teacher who's sure that if they're making their students miserable, like children being force fed hay soaked in castor oil, then they are doing their job.

Can you go too far in the other direction and create a classroom that is focused primarily on making everyone warm and fuzzy and happy? Sure. But for the moment, I'm focusing on what it looks like in the more common cases where we go too far the other way.

The related premise of the treatment school of education is that children are pre-humans, being prepper for their Real Life, which hasn't actually started yet. Therefore, the daily concerns of things like joy and accomplishment and building relationships and figuring out how to be your best human self in the world--none of those things should matter. 

Apply treatment. Measure result. Apply more treatment.

Educational treatments are done to students, not with them. For them in the sense "this is for your own good, so suck it up."

End result: too many students who come to school anticipating only the "extra" class that is their treat, like band or chorus or their sport, because that's the one where they feel as if they're living their lives. 

Another bad side effect: if we think that those students just need The Right Treatment, that opens the door for all sorts of snake oil salesmen who would love to sell us the next miracle cure for the deficiencies that our treatment is supposed to target.

Again, I don't mean that every class should be sunshine and lollipops and a happy land of Do As You Please; that extreme is ultimately not a treat, either. Learning to read and enjoy the world that reading unlocks is a treat. Building your brain muscles with skills and knowledge--that's a treat, too. People like treats. 

Yes, some students will be hard to convince that learning to understand how gerund phrases function is a treat; that's just one reason that the teacher needs to understand why it is (pro tip: "because it's on the test" is a treatment answer). And the wind in policy circles has been blowing steadily in the direction of treatment, that education is something we do to students to make them be the way we want them to be, some day, when they maybe become real persons. 

As my children and grandchildren move through school, the most fundamental thing I want for them are teachers and a school system that treats them like real, live human beings. Get that right, and everything else will follow.