Why Verbal SAT Scores became Un-ratcheted
America’s reading ratchet slipped badly several decades ago—in the 1960s and 70s—as indicated by a two-decade decline of scores on the verbal SAT. The causes of the slide lay in the decline of shared knowledge in elementary and middle school classrooms during the 1950s and 60s. Detailed research has contradicted the excuse that the SAT scores fell only because a larger and more diverse group of students started taking the test. “Despite these compositional changes,” psychometrician Dan Koretz concluded in 1992, “the real decline in college admissions test scores during the 1960s and 1970s was considerable.” And subsequent data from both the SAT and the National Assessment of Educational Progress confirms that our reading scores have yet to recover.
During the two decades before the slump in SAT scores, the SAT-takers-to-be were experiencing changes in the furniture, the seating arrangements, and the curriculum of their elementary schools. Whole-class instruction changed to individual and small-group instruction. Sage-on-the-stage teaching changed to guide-on-the-side teaching. The reading texts changed from anthologies that were discussed by the whole class to child-selected “leveled” booklets from the classroom library. We thus individualized a skill that is inherently social. Literacy is based upon shared background knowledge between writer and reader. That technical truth was not widely known in our classrooms of the 1940s and 1950s. In any case, it was ignored.
It was replaced by two spurious ideas: (1) that the readability of a text for a student can be determined apart from our knowing anything about the student’s background knowledge; and (2) that the text-relevant knowledge of the student could be estimated by her score on a general reading test. Both assumptions are incorrect. They were adopted ad hoc to foster a child-centered individualized approach to the choice of reading from classroom libraries.
The culprit in the shift from communal school readings in shared anthologies to individual readings from classroom libraries was child-centered Romanticism. Historians of the nineteenth century’s Romantic movement can readily explain why. After our Enlightenment founding, some of our top thinkers, like Emerson and John Dewey, urged us to follow nature in our schooling. Nature, they believed, would benevolently oversee the child’s natural physical and mental “development.” The gradual effect of this all-conquering Romanticism on American educational thought has been profound. Dewey once conceded that the early nineteenth-century Romantic philosopher, Georg Hegel, had left “a permanent deposit” in his mind.
Hegel saw human history as a narrative of ongoing progress, a theodicy, despite the existence of evil. Such confidence explains why the child-centered approach came to be known as “progressive education.” Under divine guidance, the child’s instincts and preferences in choosing books of personal interest from the classroom library would naturally and securely advance the child’s reading ability. This faith in the individual’s ability to progress by means of natural, child-centered education is evident in Dewey’s closing comment in a 1940s Time magazine newsreel called “The March of Time” (a confident Hegelian title). Dewey ended the episode as follows: “The world is moving at a tremendous rate, no one knows where. We must prepare our children not for the world of the past, not for our world, but for their world.”
Implicitly, God and His agent Nature oversaw that forward march. Such confident Romanticism viewed human cognitive “development” as analogous to the growth of a plant. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote a long autobiographical poem titled The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind. He meant it when he said “growth”; an early line reads, “Fair seedtime had my soul.” Our current use of the terms “development” and “growth” to describe early education are remnants of the confident Romanticism that began taking over our educational thinking in the early 20th century. The English essayist and poet T. E. Hulme called Romanticism “spilt religion.” That’s why it’s so hard to combat.
Current evolutionary psychologists use a different noun than “development,” and they want you to notice it. They use “ontogeny.” It simply means “the life-course of an individual.” Evolutionary psychologists stress that the communal shared knowledge conveyed by our schools has been invented by us. They use the noun “culture,” not “nature.” Indeed, they stress that our cultural artifacts and practices may be hostile to the natural world. One evolutionist, Harvard’s Joseph Henrich, describes the consequences of our ancestors’ activities this way:
The disappearance of many megafaunal species eerily coincides with the arrival of humans on different continents and large islands. For example, before we showed up in Australia around 60,000 years ago, the continent was home to a menagerie of large animals, including two-ton wombats, immense meat-eating lizards, and leopard-sized marsupial lions. These, along with 55 other megafaunal species, went extinct in the wake of our arrival, resulting in the loss of 88% of Australia’s big vertebrates.
Such observations are antidotes to the Romantic assumption that the natural educational “development” of the child is overseen by divine forces. Evolutionists stress the diversity of children worldwide. They conceive of human education as a cultural process. They regard the shared knowledge and shared print language of schooling as human-made ratchets designed to preserve social and cognitive gains and to devise new improvements of them.
In holding that view, today’s evolutionists are in tune with educational leaders of our early republic like Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster, who followed the lead of our founding philosopher, the Englishman John Locke. While Locke’s political theories guided Thomas Jefferson in writing our Declaration of Independence, his educational theory proposed that a human baby’s mind starts not as a seedling poised to “develop” but as a “blank slate” ready to be written upon. That’s largely right, as Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke explains in her authoritative new book What Babies Know. She shows that the baby’s inborn “core knowledge” is vague and abstract—a characteristic that enables a society’s caregivers to write upon the child’s “slate” pretty much whatever shared knowledge the society’s elders have devised.
Current evolutionary and cognitive science, then, is more classic than Romantic. It regards human culture and education as human-made accommodations to local exigencies rather than as an inherent natural unfolding. Local conditions are varied; hence, human cultures are varied. Our social inventiveness, supported by our ratcheted social knowledge, enables human schools to help foster human flourishing across the globe—not through natural development but through highly varied cultural inventiveness.
