Good grades or bad grades, for example, are only a sign of success or failure if you trust the process that generates them. The fact is that parents, by and large, trust this process. We can begin to understand why parents, for one group, do not think of the school as a factory. This factory image does not seem to jibe with the considerations that actually underlie schooling practice. The common complaint that students are insufficiently interested in their studies identifies an important factor, motivation, as beyond the control of the classroom teacher.
Lecture is the most common teaching technique.
When students fail to learn, we seldom look to see if the lecture technique can be replaced by something else. Rather, we look to SES, culture, race, and parenting to account for the failure. The quote from Langer at the beginning of this essay indicates that people tend to treat chance events as controllable. But it might work just as well the other way. Events controllable only in ways forbidden by tradition or ethics may be treated as chance events.