I've taken to studying and writing about the works of the world's most prolific and popular social-science journalist, Malcolm Gladwell, because I'm trying to figure out why the phrase "There's a study …," which used to come out of my own mouth at every party, has now started to disturb me even when I hear it on my favorite news channel. But I want to keep stressing that I have nothing against Gladwell, who's a skillful writer and, as a proponent of social engineering, stands out only because of his diligence and enthusiasm.

Last time ["The Age Demanded an Image," July/August 2013], my leading example was Gladwell on dog training, but I care a lot more about the education of young people—and this is something I actually know about, if a number of years as a teaching assistant, instructor, and lecturer count, along with the authorship of several books used mainly in the classroom. But in fact, my own education, which I can remember from the age of four, tells me the most.

Adults expected and caused me to learn. On the awkward height of "grown-up chairs" at the kitchen table, and under the repeated threat from my grandmother (a retired rural schoolteacher) of not getting "big, fat As," my little sister and I drew our first word, LOOK. Once my letters were straight and round and legible, I was relieved to see "A" on my first "report card." Gretchen got one too. Later, while drilling the two of us in reading from a giant primer propped upright on the floor, Grandma didn't need to be so explicit. Her disgust was enough to bring me back on track. (Gretchen, the perpetual "Little Angel," had her "eyes front" and never goofed off the whole time.) A teacher's or parent's mere imagined contempt kept me studying through a Harvard doctoral program in classics and a Johns Hopkins MA in the Writing Seminars.

It doesn't seem fantastical now. After all, Susanna Wesley's dreaded judgment was her main instrument in teaching her nine surviving children (including one who was perhaps born intellectually disabled) through Latin and Greek. She allowed a single day for learning the alphabet and was impressed only with her eldest son Samuel's intelligence. Somehow, John and Charles got over it. As a Latin teacher myself, I wasn't nearly as tough as Susanna must have been. I recast explanations, shared exciting stories from ancient literature to encourage boring rudimentary work, revealed tricks for memorizing that I secretly believed should be obvious. But beyond that, I knew, my "interventions" would have been like crippling a healthy nine-year-old by wheeling him around in a stroller, then peddling his parents a bigger and fancier stroller year by year thereafter, before finally throwing him away as hopeless—not my fault: look at all I did for him!

This kind of thing is what education as a lucrative industry, as opposed to an individual moral responsibility, ceaselessly invents—so ceaselessly, so routinely that it's hard to notice it going on until someone like Gladwell takes you behind the scenes. A critical chapter in his 2002 book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is entitled "The Stickiness Factor: Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, and the Education Virus."

Up front, "stickiness" is a marketing concept (Gladwell's formal training is in advertising), a word for the critical quality that creates a sales craze. A sticky new product, merely thrown against the public, will adhere on its own, with no further effort from its backers, the metaphor seems to assert. Gladwell also uses the word "virus" in the sense of "viral video," something that spreads independently through internal drivers; it starts small and obscure but sneaks in and then proliferates like an epidemic disease or a computer worm.

Sort of depressing, as language for passing on knowledge. The chapter's opening depresses me even more:

In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Gantz Cooney set out to start an epidemic. Her target was three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the "virus" she wanted to spread was literacy.

The medium is very much the message here, with an expert "hook" intended to draw a jaded audience into the not exactly jolting topic of pre-primary education: a media functionary's heinous conspiracy against the very young is both titillating and morally hard to dismiss. Then comes the feel-good twist: she is actually scheming to take more-general social ills off our hands: "But what she wanted to do, in essence, was create a learning epidemic to counter the prevailing epidemics of poverty and illiteracy."

Only because I lived overseas for many years and made a fool of myself trying to act on the notion do I notice when Americans suggest that a hot idea can make poverty vanish, so that it won't worry us ever again. The biblical decree is a lot more realistic and difficult: "For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good" (Mark 14:7). That is, the poor are normally right here, in our faces, reminding us of the choice between doing something for them and using all our money and energy for ourselves—two separate things. We can finesse them out of sight, which helps us trick ourselves into believing that whatever we happen to want will do them good too, but that's not normal; it's just weird. Still, we get used to it; this is a big, powerful country, with a habit of saying what's what.

I'm not a teacher anymore, so I have no vested interest in writing that I think automation takes education apart, especially for low-income children, most of whom can't counter automation with the help of educated, undistracted instructors within their families. Education is essentially an exchange of attention, a pact: the pupil pays attention to the subject matter (however unpromising-looking), and the teacher pays attention to the pupil (ditto). Both parties need to work, visibly and audibly—how else could they trust each other and put in the necessary sustained effort, instead of just going through the motions?

Mature, independent learning—from books, projects, software, and so on—is this relationship internalized, as childhood moral teachings are. The crown of both kinds of education, as the pedants tell us, is self-control and self-determination, the ability to turn attention away from whatever is most enticing here and now.

The Sesame Street revolution, though well-intentioned, deprives poor children of real education through a highly automated short-cut. Starting in the late Sixties, the TV program drew on the format of Saturday morning cartoons, commercials, and variety-show songs and sketches; during the design phase, psychologists conducted tests of small children's natural patterns of attention and gave advice on special ways to manipulate these en masse.

According to one test, although children in a room full of attractive toys paid attention to the screen only 47 percent of the time, as opposed to 87 percent of the time for children in a toy-free room, memories of the show's lessons were the same in both groups. Children were apparently "watching strategically"; they were then tested to find out what they particularly wanted to watch and listen to: not cavorting animals, it turned out, and not puns; nothing over four minutes long, no contentious discussion, and not complete separation of fantasy and reality—this last choice, in fact, was against the advice of the developmental psychologists, who thought the mix "misleading."

When measures of attention to the whole screen proved too crude—perhaps the children were watching only the puppets or other characters and not letters or numbers—the show's developers used eye movement photography to chart glances within the screen, and vetted and redesigned the show accordingly. It is hardly surprising that the show tests—according to the same kind of people who designed it, anyway—as successful: it is a captivation machine whose invention Gladwell narrates. Children have to recall a lot of what they see and hear through it.

But a slower, plainer, more-explicit spin-off of Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, he goes on to report, gets children even more deeply involved in the content, and yields impressive differences on cognitive tests administered later. There is evidence that Sesame Street can be too abstract, sophisticated, and adult, forfeiting attention. But assuredly the research goes on and on, and children's programing with the ultimate stickiness must be on the way, and at that point we'll have no illiteracy—

But wait a minute. Why, in spite of all of this help and all of its offshoots, a click of the remote away in all of the American households with TV, and then as a regular resource in schools (I remember my primary school teachers, in the early Seventies, pulling out a TV on a large, wheeled stand for various "language arts" lessons), have American children on average skated straight down the international achievement graph, even though the U.S. nearly leads in public-education spending?

Here's part of what I think happened. Asked to pay attention to entertainment, we all did. My mother placed me in front of Sesame Street, and I loved it; I think it didn't count toward my one-hour-a-day TV limit, which means I would have watched a lot of it. But I felt no duty to remember any or all of the fun I was having, let along synthesize and apply what I remembered.

In my life, I was allowed to have fun because I had been good already, or because other children were having fun, or just because it was customary to let children have fun sometimes—I didn't owe anything in return for it. Had I been disadvantaged, so that Sesame Street had the power to mix up fun with the work of learning in my mind, it would have been curtains for my education sooner than otherwise among the poor. There is nothing fun about algebra or the pluperfect tense. My homework would have insulted me. Had instructors (at great strain) pushed the fun forward, the price would have been the far the more important lesson about attentiveness. And no one would have indulged me in competitive higher education. I would have been crushed and discarded, which is what I saw happen to a university classmate from a ghetto who had never studied without artificial motivation.

What such motivation leaves behind just isn't enough. When I was a teenager, visiting cousins (also teenagers) found that I still had a toy Cookie Monster, and we had a fit of nostalgia. "C is for COOKIE, that's good enough for me! / COOKIE, COOKIE, COOKIE starts with C!" sang the puppet on Ruth's hand, and we all joined in, and laughed until I hobbled to the bathroom. Once in a Mennonite Fellowship, during an organized discussion about the value of TV, I and someone roughly my age simultaneously remembered the Interjection song from Grammar Rock, and we were both able to perform the chorus and one verse nearly word-for-word; it's an extremely catchy song, trailing off into the Hallelujah Chorus—as my mother informed me, passing through the living room on a Saturday morning forty years ago.

But I recalled these songs the way I recalled ordinary pop scraps: because I wanted to, because I happened to like them the most. If I had depended for grammar on TV, interjection would be the only grammatical concept I know. Mnemonic tunes for the English alphabet, and for the Hebrew alphabet and grammar much later, weren't so swell, but they worked comprehensively and lastingly because teachers I viewed with respect (tinged with fear) marched me through them—which reminded me to apply myself to other things as well. I'm pretty slack by nature; I need reminding.

I think about this difference often as I read and hear about the latest automated educational "solutions": laptops for every first-grader, math lessons as computer games, online courses, grading software even for writing tests—none of it, curiously, visible at the élite private schools I visit to talk about translating Vergil's Aeneid.

The students there use computers, of course; the teacher proudly keeps one student after class to demonstrate her original music for the opening of the Aeneid: she composed and stored and now plays the music on a computer, because that's the easiest way to do it. But she got here the hard way, the only way I can imagine: she was taught her instruments and her languages face to face and hand to hand. To the children of the poor, we are going to grant this or deny it; through technology, we may try to fudge the choice, but it won't go away.

—This essay is the second installment in a three-part series.

Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Wesleyan University, where she has been translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible is forthcoming from Knopf in 2014.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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