What are We Learning?

This is my ninth year teaching since I graduated from a prestigious Master’s program in the Pacific Northwest.  This is my tenth year teaching if you also include the year I spent teaching undergraduates as a graduate assistant in that same program.  This is my thirteenth year if you also include the three years I spent working closely with high school students, in schools and outside of schools, tutoring low-income, first-generation, inner-city  youth as part of a federally funded trio of programs called Upward Bound.  I have taught in three countries, have taught at private and public schools, have taught in rich and poor areas, in cities and in rural areas, have taught students of color in the US, students in the majority populations in the US, and have taught students from other countries, namely China, Bahrain, and Turkey.  That’s enough appeal to ethos; sufficed to say, experience with education is not lacking in my life.  What have I learned after all of my experiences? A lot.

Mostly, this: our system is broken. We suck at this. We are doing it wrong.  On the one hand, the United States is doing it so very much better than the places in which I have been fortunate enough to visit, those locations I’ve been blessed enough to teach within, or in which I have friends who teach.  In terms of respecting students as individuals, in terms of trying to be rigorous and keeping standards high, in terms of respecting teachers as professionals to be honored, and in terms of attempting to modernize curriculum to match an advancing world, we are doing better than many others.  I’m an idealist, though, and doing better than others is just not good enough. I see too much that we are doing so badly that it truly ruins people’s lives. It saddens me to the point that I’m not sure how much longer I can take part in the system.

I’m a teacher because I learned just enough in school and from my parents to barely make it out of a decrepit mindset and worldview that would like us all to believe that we are less capable than we are, that we should embrace dependence, that we should have allegiance to authority no matter where it comes from or what its values, and that our natural responses and patterns are not to be trusted, that instead we should conform to a rigid way of experiencing life and knowledge in order to succeed and be accepted.

It’s disgusting. I want no part of it or I want to change it – and maybe those things equal out to the same end.

I thought I could become a teacher and just kick ass, empower children, enlighten young minds, and generally be a supportive, caring force in a sometimes careless world.  I wasn’t totally wrong, but I was disappointed.

The times I was lucky enough to end up in a school with amazing administration and pretty badass colleagues, I was able to do the most.  Even then, I was battling the unnatural constructs that are endemic in the education system such as

• having 30 kids in a classroom who are all at different places with their needs, interests, and abilities,
• being constricted to 50 minute chunks of time, before and after which the students are immersed in something completely different
• being forced to assign grades, no matter how arbitrary that practice actually is and no matter how much research we do that shows that grades don’t actually measure a student’s ability to think and succeed
• being expected to create curriculum from scratch for up to five different classes for every day, every week, every month of the school year while also grading every assignment, communicating the results to parents, and tailoring the curriculum to any and every student of different needs in a class

I don’t even think that begins to cover it, but it’s a pretty good start for our conversation.

What stands out most from the list, though, and what I think is most important is the idea of tailoring curriculum or modifying it for students of different needs. It is a fantastic response to recognizing that students are different. Where it fails and falls short in our current system is that no teacher can do all of this. No teacher can.  Some of us can do most of it very, very well. None of us can do all of it very well. It is just too much work for one person and, to do it all with excellence, as we should achieve in educating our young, we would need to work at least 12 hours every day. That is unrealistic and unfair.

Where the same idea falls short, even within a system that somehow found a way to reduce the workload of a teacher to allow for accomplishing all of these tasks for every single student, every single day, is that every student has special needs, in the end.

Every student is different. Every student understands a different amount of a given body of knowledge.  Every student has slightly different ways in which they learn best. Every student has days where their emotional state is such that they can not learn effectively. Every student needs a curriculum that is tailored completely to their own experiences and place in life.  Furthermore, every student needs an open time-table in which to accomplish learning. We just do not learn best when “subjects” are treated as separate and distinct from one another and, to make it worse, we are forced to consider each in discreet chunks of arbitrary amounts of time each day.

But how would a teacher even begin to make a curriculum that suits each child’s needs, picks up exactly where that child should begin and ends right where that child needs to stop?  They wouldn’t.  They couldn’t.  Anyone who tried to do that would fail.  I can’t know my students, no matter how close we get, better than they know themselves.  They are their own best teachers, or at least they should learn to be.  The skills that help a person be intelligent and successful in life do not involve diagramming sentences and graphing functions with asymptotes. Not necessarily.  The skills that help a person succeed and be thoughtful with an intrepid mind are these:

• knowing how to best learn about a given topic
• knowing how to read and consume information about a given topic
• knowing how to communicate about a given topic
• knowing how to reflect on the meta-cognitive aspects of all of the above
• knowing how to interact with all types of people in all types of settings
• knowing how to be emotionally cognizant and responsible

If I had a child and they understood all of that, I would consider myself an incredibly accomplished parent.  In school, when we vaguely try to sort of address the general subtext of these ideas, we say that we want to teach “Critical Thinking” skills. When we say that, we usually mean we want to use higher taxonomy levels of Bloom’s pyramid:

I don’t disagree with this pyramid, it is a great mental construct with which to try to improve a scraggly curriculum in today’s educational world.  It is still not good enough,  however, to alone address the ills of our institution.

So, what would be better? There is a fabulous TEDx talk given by a young man out of California.  What struck me the most about this boy is that he speaks better than many college students and strikes to the heart of learning profoundly, and he does so completely independently of anyone else. No one is making him do this and no one told him what to do or how to do it.  He did it because he has a genuine curiosity and passion and that can stem only from a true love of learning. This depth is touching, for most of us, and that is probably because it is so rare in children of his age.  However, he is not a genius.  His depth and skill do not have to seem as rare as they do. He is not alone in his abilities.

Most kids can and should be as skilled and genuine as he is, but they are not given the opportunity. They are forced to sit unnaturally still in rows of desks in classrooms that can be stifling with teachers who can sometimes be destructive in their criticism and lack of support and in situations in which their minds may or may not be actually ready to deal with. Or, worse, they sit in these environments, needing so very much more stimulus and input than they are getting. Both are equally as destructive.

These children are then taught that their every action, even something as personal as deciding when to toilet, should be decided by this arbitrary adult figure that someone else has chosen for them to be ruled by.  We train them into obedience, dullness, and despair in the worst situation, where they learn to distrust themselves and think they are stupid and incapable and, even in the best situations, we merely string them along, feeding them bits of information and teaching them how to conform.

Well, after watching Logan, ask yourself if you like what he has become more than you like what an average person of the age of 13 has become.

I love what Logan has become.  I also love that Logan’s Hackschooling relies on very simple spheres of importance that could improve anyone’s life and, if mastered, guarantee a successful experience:

1. Exercise
2. Diet & Nutrition
3. Relationships
4. Time in Nature
5. Contribution & Service
6. Recreation
7. Relaxing & Stress Management
8. Religious & Spiritual

I know that number 8 will raise some eyebrows and set atheists afire with rage, but before we explode let’s just imagine that number 8 could just as easily read “philosophical exploration”.  Does that work? I think that should work just as well.

Imagine the societal transformation that might occur if more people than not were educated to think instead of to parrot, to act instead of to passively receive, to search instead of to blindly accept.  Imagine if people were taught to connect with their environment instead of being taught to abstractly respect the environment by throwing their Coke cans into the bin marked ‘aluminum’.  Imagine if people were encouraged to explore health instead of randomly assigned PE periods in which they are constricted to certain sports or experiences that may or may not suit them. Most hopeful, for me, is when I imagine the world we might live in if people were encouraged to explore relationships and philosophy, as I truly believe this would lead to greater emotional health.  With levels of chronic stress, the nation’s poor children are often doomed to a lifetime of ill-health and failure.  With a little bit of emotional support, who knows what kind of damage we could be averting and, on a nation-wide scale, what kinds of radical changes it could engender.

A radically different approach to education is scientifically warranted and dreadfully needed. We are destroying people and we are sick as a society in a large part because of the ills of the current paradigm.  I would like to see a day when Hackschooling is the only model, where communities educate their young as an ongoing and self-initiated process rather than a forced and unnatural, regulated and mandated experience.

The details are hard to come by, the actual employment of this as a societally embraced model is a tricky thing to navigate.  But that route is a necessary one for us to go down.

What do you think?