Prologue: Getting Educated
I find myself beginning kindergarten at about the same time that I began to understand what it was. In fact, the year is already over. Perhaps I’ll be better prepared my second year, I thought, as it ends and I begin my third. I learn about a system of grading that isn’t exactly perfect but it’s good enough, and will probably show that I'm making progress, as indeed it has. Did I learn anything last year? I can't remember. What matters is: did I pass the test? This I wonder on my way home from high school.
High school is full of tests, the sort that determine which colleges I’m allowed to attend, and I send out applications to go to one. Whereupon I begin my first year at a university, exploring life away from home for the first time, taking more tests in bigger classrooms and at a faster pace. I struggle with some subjects but discover a talent for writing. I can’t remember the last time I slept well, and I’m not so sure anymore, as I scramble to keep up with the growing workload, what I want to do after college. The reason I am here, if it still exists, is fading from my memory.
I need good grades, I thought, as I apply for work that isn't exactly fulfilling but I need a job because now I have bills to pay. Were my grades good enough? It doesn't matter. What matters now is: Do I have job experience? Well, I was told from an early age that the purpose of education was to help me learn about the world and become a critical thinker, but now it seems it’s to cultivate a skilled workforce.
It seems that the goals established for education have changed dramatically whenever there has been major social or economic change, yet the system for achieving these goals has stayed the same. And I think this has caused chaos.
For-Profit Schools
Having spent 17 years in education, I am sure that I am prejudiced, and I hope that I am very prejudiced. But it is the considered belief of this writer that no matter what global problem you are dreading, education will produce the finest solutions, or just say solutions, although, the more educated you are, the finer the solution; but it was initiated, designed and implemented to meet the needs of industry, and by businesses that stand to profit by it.
I believe that all the people who stand to profit from education, and by doing so defer a student’s education because of money, should be robbed on the first day school starts by the students who couldn’t afford to attend that school, just as they are being robbed of their futures.
Education isn’t something that should be bought. It should be a right, as essential to our well-being as clean water. Solving problems is at the heart of our prosperity, and this arises out of the creativity that we should be encouraging in our schools. But the education system we have today was founded on academic ability, not creativity or critical thinking, and this has come to define our view of intelligence.
A Moment at Home
I'm at home now, with my family. It’s quiet. I have some time to reflect, at least for a moment. My sister walks into my room and starts, as she often does, to deliver to me her thoughts in the order in which they manifest in her head. I, too, was 7 years old once, and I remember that sweet disposition, that righteousness that allowed me to speak my mind to anyone without any sense of apprehension. Just pure curiosity and the constant battle against boredom: that would be my agenda for a typical summer day.
She walks in and asks, "Hey, watcha doing?" I’m sitting down at my computer, writing, and, even standing next to me, she barely comes up to my shoulder. Her voice squeaks like a sped up record. I enjoy her company and I stop writing for a moment, sensing the boredom in her tone. She asks if I’ve seen that Spongebob episode where he and his friends make a movie, I say that I haven’t (yet), so she proceeds to give me an unabridged summary of the episode, scene by scene, laughing again at all the punch lines.
She shows me a picture of a dress she drew and says she wants to wear it when she gets married. I show her how to fold it into a paper airplane. She asks what college was like, what my favorite childhood memory was, what’s a funny joke, and if we can go swimming later in the pool. The questions don’t end if I don’t stop them but sometimes I like to see where her thoughts take her. I ask for her opinion on her own questions, and you can watch the thought in her eyes as she searches for an answer.
There’s a pause as she looks at the paper airplane. She casually brings up the question of what happens to us when we die. Not an easy question to tackle with conviction, I must say, even for the brightest of scientists or the most brilliant of philosophers, and not because it’s a question of intelligence, but because, inherently, it’s a question of faith. Since no one can absolutely, truly, prove to me what happens to the energy that holds my consciousness together when it leaves my body, I conclude that as a matter of fact, I don’t know. And that’s what I tell her.
But I also tell her what I do know: that it’s more important to focus on living than on dying, because you don’t want to mope through your existence and only do one of those things. Death isn’t something we should worry about, because as long as we’re alive, it won’t be here, and when it does come, we won’t be here. Well, seemingly satisfied with this answer, she agrees and hops off to continue watching Spongebob.
She had left the room but the question still lingered. I wondered why would a 7-year-old ask me this?
The Fear of Being Wrong
She asked me this question because she has an interest in knowledge, naturally, and so do I — actually, I find that everyone has an interest in knowledge. I think it’s important. Let's say you're at a party, you meet someone nice and strike up a conversation, asking harmless questions like where they’re from and what they do. Maybe you dig a little deeper, and you learn about the kind of music they like or movies or books and the conversation ignites because people love talking about things that reveal meaningful connections to one another.
On the other hand you can ask someone about his or her political views and effectively drive the conversation into a wall, and not because they don’t have an opinion on the matter, but because there are certain topics that have become a sort of taboo in conversation, namely, religion, money, and politics. This is because as we get older we’re endlessly reminded that our ideas should be kept to ourselves for fear of being wrong, whether formally or factually.
The source of this belief is our system of education, as it ruthlessly conditions us to fear being wrong by routine penalty. I think this is a problem. Especially since religion, money and politics are the forces that control our world today. They create the laws that imprison us. They create the sins that condemn us. They are grounds for war. They define our values. And since these topics are founded on logic, a line of reasoning can be used to determine their truth or falsehood. In other words, your opinion can be wrong.
But when we tell someone about the music or writing we love we’re talking about an opinion founded on emotion. There is no right or wrong, only empathy or lack of empathy on account of the person we’re speaking with. And this is a good thing; it helps us understand one another. But our fear of being wrong has halted our creativity, and this is the problem. It has created a culture in which we dismiss our private brilliance and instead worship works of genius that harbor our own rejected ideas. And so, in shame, we are reduced to quoting our own opinion from another, over and over again.
Wrong is Good
My sister still hasn’t learned the concept that wrong is bad. Far from it, she appreciates my feedback on her drawings and her magic tricks and her acrobatics. I show her what she’s doing wrong and what could be improved, but I don’t grade her work. So she knows that the goal isn’t to be good enough to pass my judgment, it’s to get better.
There is a sinister aspect of grading that is exposed when you withhold it. What grades really do is cover up a failure to teach. A bad instructor can spend an entire semester reciting a monologue at a breakneck pace, leaving nothing memorable in the minds of their class, curve out the scores on a cumulative test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. The students who were unable to memorize enough information to pass the test are held back, the students in the right half of the curve get to move on, and the process repeats itself until a certain percentage of students drop out.
When a student fails a class, they must choose to either retake the class or accept that the major is not for them. The problem is that mistakes are recorded as grades, so students are often sucked into a downward spiral as they struggle to retake the same classes in an attempt to fix their previous grades, because with a low grade point average you may not even be given the chance to enter a new major.
Even if they want to stay within the major and know that this is what they want to do, they’re only given a couple of tries before the grades catch up with them, whether due to curved tests or poor teaching. Maybe the teaching is fine and the tests aren’t curved, but some students just don’t learn at the same pace as others and need two or three tries to get it right, but that doesn't work either because after enough mistakes have been recorded, they're not allowed to try anymore.
The Paradox of Education
There’s a weird paradox in education that often goes unnoticed and it’s this: schools praise perfection, yet they punish error.
If you have ever tried to get better at something, you would know that practice makes perfect, and practice is a process of trial and error. I don’t know how schools expect their students to learn if they continue to punish error.
This culture of perfectionism is preventing our ability to learn from our mistakes. We’re being conditioned from an early age to measure our success through the eyes of others. We are encouraged to gain respect and maintain an image of professionalism, so now managing the way others view us has become a full-time job.
People have become so fixated on not failing that they lose site of what the goal of education really is. We are so concerned with achieving the goal rather than considering the process, and the goal is to succeed. We become so enamored with success that we avoid failure at any cost, and the more success we achieve, the more failure becomes unthinkable.
I’m reminded of successful people in history who have committed horrible acts of desperation all for the sake of avoiding personal failure. One comes to mind, the story of the ex-Wall Street banker, millionaire Michael Marin, who burned down his $3.5M mansion because he couldn’t keep up with the $17,000 payments. After being convicted of arson, he collapsed dead onto the courtroom floor, having ingested a cyanide pill just moments before. Perhaps he couldn’t live with the fact that he would have to spend nearly 16 years in prison. Or perhaps he wouldn’t have burned his house down if he weren’t so concerned with avoiding failure.
A Broken System
Of course, not all failure should go without consequence. Repeatedly failing to show up to work on time would get you fired. And a poor leader in a company would not be tolerated for too long. But the mistakes you make at work have repercussions for other people, not just yourself, so it’s only fair that the damage is cut short, whether after three strikes or after one. After all, you are being paid to do your job well.
But when it comes to learning, error is a vital part of the process. The school isn’t paying its students to do well on their tests. The students are paying the school to teach them well. If all the students in a class were to fail, would we blame the students or the teacher? Maybe the previous teacher, whose task it was to prepare their class for this one, should be at fault for curving the test scores and giving the false impression that their students were ready to move on.
The truth is that neither of them are the real source of the problem. The education system itself is broken, and it’s long overdue for a transformation.
Our Most Valuable Resource
Human ingenuity is our most valuable resource against the problems we face, so we need a system that promotes it.
If we want to restore creativity in education we need to accept and expect error in the learning process. Instead of using a system of grades that encourages competition between classmates, students should focus on building a portfolio that serves as a convincing demonstration of employable skills.
Even without a letter grade system, a student’s performance could and should still be recorded. This information could be used to aid teachers in building a curriculum that best suits each student. Maybe one student is a visual learner and the other is more of a kinesthetic learner. Maybe some students are ready to move on to more advanced subjects quicker than others.
But how can lesson styles be different for different students in the same classroom? Instead of assigning problem solving for home, and lectures for the classroom, the two should be switched. Lessons could be watched or read at home at a leisurely pace, and class time would be used to work through problems together.
By doing “homework” in class, teachers could provide immediate feedback to questions and students would be encouraged to collaborate on finding solutions. With a system like this there would be no reason to fear being wrong on an exam, because now the students would know that an error would only mean that they need help in that area of study. Once they have learned the subject matter, they would be ready to continue.
A New Understanding of Human Intelligence
How we learn is only half as important as what we learn. As it stands today, the purpose of school is to prepare you for college, and college is supposed to prepare you for an intellectual career. I think this is a mistake. If we want to preserve human ingenuity we need to adopt a new understanding of intelligence, one in which we recognize the full richness of human ability.
Physicians and engineers are just as important to a community as farmers and teachers, yet they’re not regarded as equals, especially in salary. We have to recognize that society depends on a diversity of talent, not just academic intelligence. Different people have different aptitudes and our education system needs to cultivate that. So if a student wants to work in agriculture or construction, there should be a way for them to learn about that in school.
The knowledge they gain in this setting has the added benefit of being put into context with other subjects. Students in any field of study would benefit from actual business and management classes. These classes can account for real-world problems like disease, famine, inequality, and unsustainable practices, so students can think about ways to design them into the bottom line of a business or nation. And as issues change, education must rise to the occasion.
The Irony of Public Education
The irony of public education is that it’s trying to prepare people for the future by using ideas from the past.
It’s important to understand the origins of the system we have today. It was conceived to meet the demands of the Industrial Revolution, and it was designed around the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, which viewed intelligence as a capacity for deductive reasoning and knowledge of the classical studies from the ancient Mediterranean world, especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
Industrialization called for a skilled workforce, so the subjects that were the most useful for work were ranked above the rest, and that’s why science and language are considered more important than humanities and the arts. This is what we have come to think of as academic ability. This system assumes that there are two types of people in the world: academics and non-academics; smart people and the rest of us. Consequently, many talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not because they didn’t do well in school. The truth is that their schools didn’t appreciate what they had to offer.
Education shouldn’t just be about learning how to be a good worker. There is so much more to life than that. Often, I meet people who have no clue what they want to do after college. They go through this entire system and do everything right, yet they feel there is something missing. I meet all kinds of people who are good at things they don’t really care for. Instead of enjoying what they do, they simply endure it and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. They have found something that they want to devote their lives to because it isn’t what they do, it’s who they are. And I find that this is true of very few people.
There have been many reasons for this throughout history and in different societies, but I think the main one today is education, because education dissociates very many people from their natural talents, based on the notion that their talents are not useful for the economy.
We grew up with the story that if we worked hard and went to college, we would be successful, but that isn’t necessarily true anymore. I don’t mean that a college degree is worthless, but it’s not a guarantee of success like it used to be because its value has depreciated, spurring many people to extend their education with grad school, continuing their story of success.
A Successful Life
What is success anyway, and why is it the goal? The most important lesson that education has taught me is that a successful person isn’t necessarily a happy person. This must be why so many people don’t know what to do with their lives, even after two decades of learning.
Education needs to recognize that people need more than just prosperity. People need feelings, relationships, motivation, identity, and community.
When my sister asked me what it means to be dead, I wondered why she even brought it up. She could have just as easily asked me what it means to be alive. But I realized she already knows what that means. And as we get older, many of us forget: Life is about following your passion. The problem is not that we aim too high and fail. I think we aim too low and succeed.
