A Better Question for Education

Everyone wants their children to receive the best education possible. Unfortunately, most of us are beginning our definitions of that “best” with the wrong question.

 

Our American culture has wired itself to think about education through the question, “What?” “What are you learning?” “What should you be learning?” “What do you need to know for the tests?” “What is your major going to be?” Though not irrelevant questions, when given the excessively inordinate attention our families and schools tend to give them, they are devastating to the success of our young learners.

 

When we have an educational model overly focused on what kids should learn, we cripple their natural drive to want to learn, pervert their reasons why to learn, and fail to help them discover how best to learn.

 

Human-beings come into this world with an incredible desire and capacity for learning. Our minds are probably the greatest wonder in the natural world. The human ability to observe, deduce, invent, and inspire is unrivaled. With the advent of computers and robotics, our ability to remember and calculate are not. What you know is thus increasingly more irrelevant in our modern world. No matter what you know, Google knows more. What Google doesn’t know is how to learn.

 

Parents and educators feeling the pressure to get kids the right information at the right time tend to wound the natural curiosity of children by force-feeding them facts they don’t yet desire, aren’t yet ready for, or worse—will only need for the test. Children are being taught younger and younger that learning is for performance on tests or other gimmicks adults use to see “what” they know. With this as the driving reason for their education, young brains begin to be rewired after the model of robots and computers, rather than human-beings. They file away the bits of information needed for the job they are being told to do. In the process, they slowly lose the natural curiosity which formerly drove them to less measurable, but more person-developing learning. Even when, for some students, this process leads to high test performance, it rarely translates to real life. Thus the brain in its beautiful efficiency swiftly trashes much of the learned information as irrelevant and excess.

 

I am not suggesting “what” we learn is of no significance.

I am saying what I learn in the healthiest education environment is driven by who I am as a learner, the reasons why my learning is important to me, and with the help of adults concerned first and foremost with helping me learn how to think, problem-solve, persevere, and triumph in my quest for knowledge.

 

This is learner-centric education. The world of what naturally becomes teacher-centric education. When what that teacher knows and I don’t yet know is the crux of the educational question, then everyone’s attention must be turned toward the “right” answer knowing teacher, including that of the teacher.

 

We find ourselves obsessed with what, focused on teachers over students, and bound by our own measuring tools because of the immense challenge of creating a system to educate millions. As Henry Adams wrote in his autobiographical, The Education of Henry Adams, “No man can instruct more than half a dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.” To emphasize learners over teachers, and understand individuals at the depth necessary to guide and mentor his or her learning journey is costly in time and energy. Time and energy in a massive and finite education system are precious and not abundant enough to reach the sheer numbers of students. We thus fall back on standards we can measure for all students, standards which inevitably, due to the size and complexity of our systems, turn into little more than the programming instructions required for the latest automaton: “This is what they need to know in order to perform at capacity.”

 

The solution in the long term will be systemic revolution, but in the short term it takes only the corrected focus of parents and educators. Most parents have abdicated their role as educator, but it is they who have the capacity to reach an audience of Henry Adams’ half dozen. If all parents took seriously their role to inspire and protect their child as curious learner, and at least in their own home demoted what in its level of importance, the national change would be nothing short of revolution. Even classroom educators, all of whom are doing their best, can double down with the encouragement to focus their energies on who and how using their own human creativity to explore new ways of exploring what the system says they must.

 

The future of our children and grandchildren, our nation and world require us to reprioritize the questions with which we explore education.

It is time the question what be not forgotten or retired, but intentionally and boldly demoted.