Educational luxury beliefs

License Creative Commons

Paco Benítez

“Vain men proclaim themselves the heirs of a fashionable licentiousness, of which they do not in their hearts approve, and of which they are perhaps not really guilty. They wish to be praised for what they themselves do not consider praiseworthy, and are ashamed of their old-fashioned virtues, which they sometimes practice in secret and for which deep down they have a certain degree of real veneration.” (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759).

The concept of “luxury beliefs” has been defined and popularized by the American writer and political commentator Rob K. Henderson in the last part of his book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, recently published in February 2024. Previously, Henderson had already introduced the concept in a 2019 article published in the New York Post. This term refers to ideas and opinions that the socioeconomic elite (usually wealthy white people) forge in order to increase their social status, but damaging the interests of the lower classes. In other words, the person who has and spreads these ideas does not suffer the consequences, but others do. The reason why the elites have luxury beliefs is because the upper classes used to signal their social status by purchasing expensive material goods, but since these goods are now available to an increasingly wider social stratum, the wealthy classes have resorted to different symbolic statuses to mark their superior position. For this reason, luxury beliefs have replaced luxury goods as a marker of social status. In short, it is a criticism of the current moral exhibitionism that is publicly displayed, especially on social networks, and that our students often aptly call “posturing.”

Some examples of these luxury beliefs are the proposal to defund the police, people using terms like “heteronormative” or “cisgender,” or the owners of big tech companies not letting their children use the products they themselves create. In any case, what is interesting about the term is the fact that these luxury beliefs harm the lower classes. Henderson himself explains this in the case of defunding the police (a movement that even has a website), a movement that began to gain a lot of fame in 2020 and 2021 in the US among the cultural elites of the US, after the shameful murder of African-American citizen George Floyd by police officers on May 25, 2020. Data in the US indicate that the poorest citizens are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery and to be victims of an armed robbery, twenty times more likely to be victims of sexual abuse, and are also the main victims of homicides and all types of violent crimes. Therefore, reducing police surveillance goes against their interests and is a harmful idea for them (but not for those who have spread this idea from their communities with private security and security cameras).

The truth is that the term itself and the ideas described by Henderson have provoked a heated controversy, and in the US there is a strong and passionate debate on the subject between those who accuse him, on the one hand, of having an intention against the rights of minorities that undermines progressive ideas, and, on the other, those who praise and celebrate the usefulness of the concept and the debate it proposes. In short, it is one more chapter in the current cultural wars that exist in the discourse of Western countries and that do so much damage to their social fabric due to the ideological polarization they entail. I leave it to the reader to consult the sources of the debate and draw his own conclusions.

Be that as it may, the truth is that when I read and understood this concept of “luxury beliefs”, I could not help but remember a passage from the book Escuela o barbarie. Entre el neoliberalismo salvaje y el delirio de la izquierda (Fernández, Liria et al., 2023: 148) when it says that “the parliamentary left, with all its differences, is late to the exercise of self-criticism to defend, above all, knowledge; and to claim the intellectual function of the teacher and the student, against psychologizing and technocratic positions that are so uncritically assumed because they “sound good” and that are based on a conceptual framework that is completely ideological and loaded with neuromyths”.

It sounds very good, it sounds very modern to repeat all the mantras of the old “new education”, that the student must be at the center of the learning process and teaching must be based on their interests and their learning style, that project-based learning must be the methodology par excellence to promote active learning and “learning by doing”, that students must be seated in groups by default, that direct instruction must be reduced and flipped classroom and discovery learning must be promoted more, that gamification and activities that students like must be introduced in order to avoid boredom in class, that the use of textbooks must be eliminated or homework must be prohibited, that attention must be shifted from knowledge to skills (when numerous serious studies are showing that reading comprehension is directly linked to prior knowledge and the cultural background of the reader, just like other general skills such as critical thinking, creativity or problem solving, and that therefore the transfer between different fields of knowledge does not exist) to rant about the memory when all we learn is with it (Baddeley, et al., 2020). But all this is nothing more than an attitude of condescension that sinks the poor into their poverty and inequality forever, since what this leads to is an education that harms learning, especially that of students from more humble socioeconomic backgrounds (I refer the reader to click on the hyperlinks above this paragraph and to consult the bibliography at the end of the article to find rigorous studies that show this).

But the question is not about demonizing any methodology or learning strategy, since depending on the objectives, the group of students, the moment of the learning process, or even the mood of the students (which is very different on a Monday first thing or on a Friday last thing), the teacher can use, thanks to the authority given by his experience and above all being a specialist in his subject, the method he considers most appropriate. But what is necessary is to recognize that there are methods that work better than others regardless of the teacher’s tastes (Muijs & Reynolds, 2017), as well as to denounce the pressures and methodological impositions by the educational administration of which there is no solid evidence that they improve learning (it is worth remembering the mandatory teaching by areas in 1st year of ESO and the mandatory offer of the interdisciplinary project subject in the Valencian community, measures that fortunately were annulled by the TSJCV), and that others are denigrated of which there is ample evidence that they work simply because they are considered traditional. As Héctor Ruiz Martín (2023: 326) says: “The history of education is full of good intentions; but, as we all know, good intentions are not enough. It is essential to channel these good intentions through actions that have sufficient foundation to maximize the probability of achieving what we intend. Therefore, being critical of the ideas that challenge us, especially when they sound very good, is essential.”

This is why all these educational mantras described above can be considered as “luxury educational beliefs”, since they usually come from people who will not suffer their consequences because they have cultural and economic resources to compensate for them (extracurricular classes, tutoring teachers, enrolling their children in demanding private and subsidized schools, high level of intrafamilial knowledge), but which leaves a large social mass abandoned that will be cannon fodder for future precarious jobs. “How well he preaches who lives well”, said Cervantes in the mouth of the great Sancho Panza. And this fact cries out to heaven when the great majority of our politicians, many of them responsible for our educational laws that reinforce the mantras mentioned above, do not take their own children to public schools. It is in these cases when the quote from Adam Smith in the epigraph of this article comes into full forcé: when these elites adopt beliefs with the ultimate goal of gaining social approval. Because they often practice a series of habits and virtues in private that they are not willing to acknowledge, perhaps because they are somehow ashamed of them, but in private they are respectful of these beliefs; deep down they think they are admirable, but they are reluctant to speak publicly about them.

The most reprehensible thing in this process is how harmful all these ideas are for our students, who should receive an education based as much as possible on scientific evidence that enhances learning, and not the other way around. Because luxury beliefs move at the pace of fashion, and therefore expire very quickly, and new ones will be adopted and will be preached by our ruling class and social elite; but the damage, in this case to the learning of our students, will already be done. Salustiano Martín González (2008) explains it perfectly: “…good charitable bourgeois wanted to spare the children of the lower classes the suffering of school effort, of discipline, of intellectual work, of the struggle for the construction of a will at the service of their interests. For this reason, the directiveness became the horrible beast of the educational relationship and monumental nonsense was written about it […]; in short, instructing in a strong sense and educating for intellectual emancipation were actions removed from the classrooms”.

It is very curious, or at least disconcerting, that those of us who demand an education that is based on a strong formation in knowledge and not on an institution that fundamentally takes charge of keeping them entertained and happy, in order to help form citizens with a strong, well-founded critical spirit, are branded as reactionaries and other funny epithets. But these are the times we have to live in. In the meantime, we must remain aloof from the noise, from the empty and fallacious criticism, and continue to fight for a school that pursues social equity. Because there are human enterprises that require the adoption of a conservative attitude, or should anyone be shocked that we take measures to preserve the health of our planet by fighting against climate change? Well, the school is also one of those enterprises that must be conservative in order to ensure that knowledge and skills reach all types of students (and not just a few, as when traditionally knowledge was reserved for social and political elites).

Instead of accepting defeat in advance by approving educational laws that operate on the basis of social inequality and entrench it, education must reveal itself and, after a logical diagnosis of these inequalities, try to tear them down with the most useful tool to achieve the social elevator that leads to true and lasting social equity: knowledge. Only in this way can we achieve a complete empowerment of individuals in the three spheres that will most affect their vital development: the civic sphere (with critical capacity that allows them to be an agent of political change), the economic sphere (to access a working world in optimal conditions) and the personal sphere (with autonomy in the strict etymological sense of the term of imposing their own rules to know how to govern themselves). And it is precisely in these three vital dimensions that the current global context reveals to us that we are not doing things right; this is attested by the current rise of populism and extreme social polarization, the impoverishment of the labor market and the alarming data on mental illness.

Bibliography:

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Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M.W. & Anderson, M.C. (2020). Memory (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.

Carpenter, S.K., Witherby, A.E. & Tauber, S.K. (2020). On Students’ (Mis)judgments of Learning and Teaching Effectiveness. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(2), 137-151.

Crato, N., (2024). Apología del libro de texto. Cómo escribir, elegir y utilizar un buen manual. Narcea, Política Educativa.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, e.J., Nathan, M.J. and Willingham, D.T. (2013). Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14 (1), 4-58.

Fernández Liria, C., García Fernández, O. y Galindo Ferrández, E. (2023). Escuela o barbarie. Entre el neoliberalismo salvaje y el delirio de la izquierda. Nueva edición actualizada y aumentada. Akal.

García Fernández, O. y Galindo Ferrández, E. (2024). Aprendizaje basado en proyectos. Un aprendizaje basura para el proletariado. Akal.

Henderson, R. (2024). Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Gallery Books.

Martín González, S. (2008). La lucha de clases en la educación. La comprensividad como estrategia. El Viejo Topo, 86-93.

Muijs, D. & Reynolds, D. (2017). Effective Teaching: Evidence and Practice. Sage

OECD (2013), PISA 2012 Results: Excellence through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed (Volume II), PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris.

Ruiz Martín, H. (2023). Edumitos. Ideas sobre el aprendizaje sin respaldo científico.  International Science Teaching Foundation.

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Smith, A. (1759). Teoría de los sentimientos morales. Alianza, 2013.

Tirado Ramos, M. A. (2024). Dime cómo lees y te diré cómo aprendes: ¿Qué nos aporta la investigación a la enseñanza de la lectura?. Supervisión 21, 71(71). https://doi.org/10.52149/Sp21/71.8

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Watkins, C. (1997). Project Follow Through: A Case Study of Contingencies Influencing Instructional Practices of the Educational Establishment. Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.

Willingham, D.T. (2003). Students Remember What They Think About. American Educator, 27(2), 37-41.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons