2. The hole in the heart of education
2. The hole in the heart of education
an attempt to diagnose something quite big, in just four questions-and-answers
1. What’s the matter with schools?
Schools: the original culture war! When you ask a big question, expect to be swarmed by fighty answers:
Not enough funding!
Ideological teachers colleges!
Administrators who don’t know to teach!
Helicopter parents!
The trouble with a complex problem is that many diagnoses can be simultaneously true. (I suspect that all of these at least touch on a piece of the One True Answer. The trouble is, probably their opposites would, too.)
But there’s something lurking under all of these that doesn’t come into adult conversations about schooling. It sounds too simple for Smart People to comment on. It doesn’t get retweeted by flattering any specific political camp. It looks so fundamental that wonky-reformer-types can’t imagine it being changed.
This diagnosis is too obvious to command the attention of serious folks.
This is a diagnosis more commonly made in pop culture than academic research.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true:
the matter with schooling is that schooling doesn’t matter.
For most students, most of the time, what they’re learning in school feels meaningless. The interest and excitement they feel in the rest of their lives isn’t there. They don’t care about what they’re learning.
Imaginary interlocutor: Actually, Brandon, I had a great experience with school! It was fun fun fun every danged minute!
Every once in a great while I’ll meet a person who flatly disagrees with this diagnosis — who claims to have had a perfectly golden experience of schooling. I’ll address that critique (and more!) in a follow-up post.
2. Why don’t schools matter?
Again, a lot of answers could be given here — and in this substack, I’ll be trying to paint a fuller picture of the history of schooling, and the curriculum. Look forward to hot takes on some of the giants who’ve shaped how we think about school — John Dewey, Jean Piaget, William Torrey Harris, Maria Montessori, and Mizz Frizzle.
For the moment, I’ll stay as big picture as possible. Here comes! Schools don’t matter because
people assume brains are built to think.
I.I.: Obviously brains are for thinking! (What do you think you’re thinking with right now — your spleen?)
Yes — thinking is a brain thing.1 But it’s not why brains exist in the first place. And believing that brains are for thinking (and noting that we humans win the prize in the Great Biggest-Brain-to-Body-Ratio Race)2 has led many educational luminaries to assume that kids are primarily intellectual creatures — that something like modern, rational thinking comes naturally to us.
Ho boy it doesn’t.
I.I.: Why do brains exist in the first place, then?
Evolutionarily, the nervous system came first: brains are swellings of it. And to understand why we have nervous systems in the first place, it helps to look at what our ancestors could do before there were nervous systems.
I.I.: Which was…?
You can learn quite a lot about humans from watching bacteria.
These single-celled critters have no brains or nervous systems, and yet they behave surprisingly like people. (I owe this insight to the psychologist Antonio Damasio, in his book The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures.)
They act as if they’re observing their environment, looking for dangers and resources. They interact with each other and sometimes act as if they had a basic human morality — some act as if they’re attempting to cheat each other, some punish cheaters, and others observe what’s happening and just go on with their lives. When you get an infection, it’s because bacteriums have banded together in a literal battle formation.
Which is all to say: we don’t enter the world as intelligences who go about making abstract sense of things. We inherit from our distant ancestors our most unconscious, automatic, and powerful drives — goals like thirst, hunger, attachment, lust, fellowship, joy, fear, anger, compassion — and we develop abstract intelligence to help us achieve those goals better. Our nervous system is forever scorekeeping how we’re doing at meeting those goals.
We feel that scorekeeping as feelings. Feelings report on life and death issues.
To put the problem a different way:
schooling doesn’t matter, because educational thinkers ignore feeling.
The task is to make what students learn in school matter to them. And for that, we need to help students feel the content.
3. Are you saying that…
The critique I’m leveling at schools is a nuanced one — it sounds like a few other critiques people make.
I.I.: Are you saying that the content of the curriculum isn’t useful? That we should, say, replace history and calculus and British literature with, I don’t know, practical stuff like health class, financial literacy, and how to survive the zombie apocalypse?
Nope.
There’s a long tradition in educational reform that says we should fill the curriculum with only useful knowledge and skills. This approach sounds sensible, sage, wise… and ends up dissolving away everything that matters in education. The push to be “useful”, paradoxically, has a track record of making schooling feel more meaningless.
We shouldn’t ignore the “usefulness” of the curriculum, but we should recognize that what’s actually been (and felt) most useful for many of us has been some of the “academic” knowledge that would have been the first to the chopping block, had the reformers’ revolution been allowed to go ahead.
I.I.: Are you saying that students are complaining that what they’re learning isn’t useful?
Nope.
A desperate fear in every new teacher is the moment a student (inevitably) asks: “But when am I going to use this?”
The funny thing about that question is that it’s almost never literally what the student means.
No one enjoying a game of soccer asks when they’re going to use what they’re learning. No one watching a good movie asks when they’re going to use what they’re learning.
When my wife was in an advanced Spanish class in high school, one of her classmates raised his hand and asked “when am I going to use this?” My wife remembers the teacher at a loss for words — it’s a language, you use languages to talk to people.
“When am I going to use this” sounds like it’s about utility; in reality, it’s code for “this doesn’t feel important”. That is — it doesn’t matter.
I.I.: Are you saying that schools should help kids find their passion?
Nope.
I used to work at a school that tried to do just that! I’ll write more about that experience by and by; suffice to say right now that as a result of working there, I’ve become very skeptical of the notion that most people have an innate, specific passion — and that assuming that they do can be quite destructive to their learning.
I.I.: But some kids do have innate, specific passions…
You’re entirely right — kids are diverse. I’ll address this in my follow-up post.
(Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming.)
4. How on Earth could we make something matter?
I’m not sure we can? In any case, this is the wrong question to ask. Much better are two other questions:
Question #1
To who (or what) has this thing-we-want-kids-to-learn already mattered — who’s already “felt” this content, emotionally?
Here’s where we should remember what we’ve learned from a few hundred years of modern science —
the night is dark, and full of terrors.
The world we’ve fallen into is dangerous, populated by predators ranging from huge to microscopic, ruled by impersonal forces that mock our pretensions to being the captains of our fate. And yet out of that have sprung up persons, able to navigate chaos and experience awe, able to engage in jaw-dropping instances of compassion and love — and, to be sure, wickedness.
Everything we want kids to learn is part of that story. It all comes from experiences of despair and hope, stupidity and wisdom, weakness and strength. It all comes from meaningful lived realities.
Every piece of content in the K–12 curriculum already has mattered, to someone or something.
It’s already been felt.
Question #2
How can we spark some aspect of that feeling in kids?
Worksheets and high-stakes testing, of course.
Just kidding! Here’s where the work of Kieran Egan becomes cold water in a hot desert. His work was to stand far back from the details of the human story, and glimpse the tools that cultures used to pass themselves down, and help their humans survive.
I.I.: And those tools would be…
The short version is a (very) partial list:
stories
metaphors
jokes
riddles
gossip
ideals
worldviews
skepticism
The fuller version — and where they come from, and how they fit together, and how we can use them to reboot schooling — is what we’ll be exploring in this substack.
I.I.: Are you saying that we don’t need worksheets and high-stakes tests?
Great question… wait for the follow-up! (I’m saying that a lot, aren’t I? Lucky me!)
In sum…
There’s a hole at the heart of schooling: kids don’t generally feel that what they’re learning matters.
To most people, this is intuitively true — but when we have “serious conversations about education” we tend to ignore it because it seems unsolvable. (If it could be fixed, surely someone would have done it by now!)
But few people have tried to fix this, because most education reformers have shared an assumption: that humans are natural-born thinkers, and that getting kids to thinking deeply is relatively easy.
This ignores 99.997% of our evolutionary history. What comes first is the reality of threats and resources, of danger and hope, of life and death. We evolved feelings long before we evolved abstract thinking — and even abstract thinking is powered by feelings.
Educational reformers have focused on brains, and missed the bigger story of why brains exist in the first place.
Our brains evolved to identify what matters. The work of teaching is to help students experience the far-flung things in the world as meaningful. And there’s a method to do this, one pioneered by Kieran Egan. First, ask when the thing-we-want-to-teach has mattered before, then ask what tools — stories, metaphors, etc. — could be useful for sparking those feelings of “mattering” to kids, now.
Until we can start guiding kids to rich feelings about what they’re learning, all our other efforts to improve schooling aren’t likely to amount to much. And once we start, then all the other efforts can go even further: because the truth is that just about anybody can learn just about anything once they feel it matters.
They’ll focus on it in class. They’ll obsess over it at home. They’ll dream about it at night.
Accomplishing this ranks as one of the more pressing problems in the world.
Apologies to the embodied & extended cognition people reading this. We’ll talk about your ideas by and by.
Apologies, also, to all the treeshrews reading this. We’ll probably… uh, we’ll probably never bring you up again.