Education and Learning
I have started and deleted a number of posts about education. It’s a topic that’s been weighing on my mind a lot, but I haven’t managed to write a post that says what I want to say without it spiraling into a myriad of different topics associated with education.
The posts becoming muddled suggest to me that they need to be broken into multiple posts by topics. I’m not sure how many posts I’ll make, but at the very least I hope to cover: The Value of Learning, Education for Education’s Sake, How to Improve Education, and Technology in Education.
I figured I would start with what might be the most difficult post to write, but also I think the most important: The Value of Learning and how sometimes when we hear “education” we assume “learning” but that’s not always what the speaker means.
This might sound confusing as by definition education includes learning, but I think often in usage they’re not the same thing at all. Education should imply learning. Education should encourage life-long learning. Education should provide the skills for life-long learning. But more often than not when people say “education” what they mean is job training. And when administrators and politicians say “education” what they really mean is graduation rates. Or when MAGA politicians say “education” they really mean some fanciful FOX news fear factory of students being conditioned into becoming trans-socialist Mexicans or something, but that’s a topic for another post. The point is that the word education is often not being used to mean what it should be.
Learning is the acquisition of skills, analyzing and understanding content.. Learning skills and content is something one can achieve through education. Learning the skills involved to go on learning is often best acquired through education. To this day when I research topics for stories or want to learn something that is new to me, I utilize skills that I acquired in college. I often start by searching for syllabi in introductory courses. I see what readings the professor is assigning as well as looking for videos or other available sources that the professor, a trained professional in the topic, has chosen for instructing their students. Any books or readings that I find, I look into the author’s bias. As I learned in my upper-division history classes, this includes researching the author for their background, intellectual milieu, and their association with their subject. Researching and being trained to identify bias, are but two of the skills I learned in college that I would not have acquired had the professor and administrators been entirely focussed on job training or just merely moving everyone along for graduation statistics.
Before we can address what is wrong with education, before it can really be fixed with better funding, we need to make the case for the importance of learning and identify why it is often swept under the rug in favor of political or short-sighted economic expediency.
The discrepancy between education and learning has always existed. Many students have always wanted the grade or the with less concern about learning. There probably has always been the administrator who has felt that the purpose of a school or a university is to graduate as many people as possible with very little care if those graduates learn anything along the way. But this has become more prevalent; a larger percentage of the public, administrators, students, and even some instructors seem to feel that what’s important is the degree and not the knowledge and skills that degree is meant to represent.
Carl Sagan once talked about how he’d go to kindergarten classrooms and the students were curious, whereas by twelfth grade all of the curiosity had vanished: Video. Some of this I think results from an underfunded educational system and many of the problems I’ll address in a later post, but a lot of it I think also comes from our society undervaluing learning.
There’s a tendency to see learning as only important when it’s part of job training. For some reason our society cannot seem to justify the benefits of learning unless it has a cash payout at the end of it. But there are many good reasons to want to learn things even when they don’t result in income. Being informed on a topic before making a decision about it is generally better than the reverse. It is beneficial to human cognition to learn and to go on learning. Yes job training is important, but usually people tend to learn much of that on the job and they have much of their lives to utilize job training. We are usually given much less opportunity to learn in different fields, and we should make the most of those opportunities and do our all to create more space for learning even once out of school.
Another part of the problem is that learning is seen as uncool. This attitude is continued by countless characters in movie and television. Colleges on television are almost always small private schools, even though the vast majority of people who attend college go to large state campuses. Then there’s the portrayal of the professors. The Rooster is a very funny show, but nearly all the professors spend very little time working, most are more obsessed with themselves than helping their students, and there seem to be no rules at the college. I’m not saying these things aren’t sometimes the case with professors, but in my experience, professors are working all the time, are generally dedicated to helping their students, and are under strict rules about what they can do in their classes.
So how do we reverse this trend? How do we create interest in life-long learning?
The good news is there are signs of hope in entertainment. Ted Lasso I think did something very helpful. Many of the characters are seen reading. Coach Beard in particular is always reading from a book and imparting what he has learned to help edify those around him as well. The show even comes close to stating its theme point blank: it’s not about the wins and losses, it’s about helping people become the best version of themselves. Or in one scene in particular: it’s not about being perfect it’s about constantly working to be better and helping those around you try to be better as well.
One thing that is out of teachers’ hands that needs to change is people need to start reading at home again, especially if they have children. Reading to young children is a good start. Children seeing the adults that they love and respect reading is even better. Another thing that can help is practice life-long learning: in addition to books, attend lectures, watch webinars, listen to podcasts, take notes as you do these things and let your kids see you doing this. Even better if one can, take a community college class. Let your children see you study. Let them see your interest in learning. This will prepare them not only to do well in school but to actually learn in school instead of merely getting grades and diplomas.
Even back in Sagan’s day, before cell phones and streamers and when people read more, there was still that problem of people getting the curiosity beaten out of them by the school system. How do we fix that?
Part of the problem I think is the desired results of education. Often what administrators in K-12 are hoping to achieve is higher test scores. At colleges and universities, administrators are looking to have higher graduation rates and ideally in less time. For graduate schools and professional colleges, they’re most interested in being able to claim that they can get people jobs in their field. Ideally all of that would be fine. The problem is in reality: focusing on K-12 test scores leads to students learning to take a test (not great for learning in general or fostering a desire to be curious and go on learning). Colleges focussing on graduation rates means decreasing standards particularly when students coming out of K-12 lacking the skills they should have because the focus of instruction has been on how to take a standardized test. Those same schools want the students to graduate sooner which means taking fewer classes out of their major and having less variety in their education, both things aren’t going to be helpful for fostering a love of learning.
I have suggestions for primary schools to help foster a desire for learning. First, uphold standards. I suspect No Child Left Behind made this a lot worse, but if a student cannot do the fundamentals of a class, they shouldn’t go onto the next class. Ideally they’d be encouraged to master subjects before moving on. I realize class size and grim realities are there, and I think fixing these is vitally important but also a different post. I’m focussing on the intent of learning instead of the incorrect usage of the term education here. Reading comprehension and writing need to be prioritized over multiple choice tests. In math we need less focus on getting the answer and more focus on why things work. On a walk I overheard a classroom doing subtraction problems together and the class would say in unison things like “8 5 3, or 12 7 5.” They’d removed both the subtraction operator and the acknowledgment of the equality from this, and all I could think was you’re not doing these kids any favors here. No wonder students quickly learn to hate math if all they’re doing is something a calculator does with no thought as to why something is. Allow students to have epiphanies about math. It is very interesting if you allow people to study it and not to be focused entirely on spitting out an answer. I think also we need science classes to include lectures and material about the more interesting aspects of the universe. I’m not saying that primary school students need to be shown the wonder of quantum mechanics, but I remember watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos when I was in elementary school, and it fostered a sense of wonder and interest in me that somehow survived the years since.
The arts should also be included in primary education, even if students aren’t particularly good at doing them. Students should be encouraged to draw and for it to be fun and creative. They should be encouraged to play instruments whether or not they’ll ever play with an orchestra. Art is good for human development, but also doing something one isn’t good at, failing and trying again and doing better, is a vital lesson that our students aren’t getting the chance to experience. Allowing students to fail at something and doing it again having learned from a mistake is something that is missing in our education system in general.
Sports I think are also healthy and need to be encouraged for non athletes as well. There’s a natural tendency for kids and even adults who should know better to focus too much on winning. Not every child who plays sports is going to be great at it. Most never will be great at it. But that causes them to get discouraged and give up and there are often no options for them. In addition to helping promote physical health, sports, especially team sports, can encourage social development, players learn tactics and stratagems as well as the rules. In short I think all that bitching people did about participation trophies was greatly harmful. I don’t know if those trophies are helpful, but kids and adults should be encouraged to play more even if they are bad at it.
Colleges need to reexamine their curriculum as well. We need more general education instead of less. Students should be encouraged to learn things wildly out of their major. They’ll have all their lives for job training and redoing those same skills over and over, how much time will they get for 18th century poetry, or other random classes outside of their normal worldview? There’s a story about Steve Jobs taking a calligraphy class and taking that knowledge to create fonts. I am certain that the people who insist that education should be about job training would hastily cut calligraphy classes, but, no calligraphy classes, no fonts. Steve Jobs dropped out of college without a degree, but he clearly learned while he was there. He didn’t require the degree, but he made use of his learning and continued to seek knowledge after leaving.
As for grad schools, obviously at that level of education variety is not the issue. Of course people will be focussed on learning in their field by that point. I think the key for grad schools is to ensure that people are still learning, and that some of that learning should be in how to teach, even if the student has no plans to become an instructor. We need the most educated to impart their knowledge and hopefully their love of life-long learning on the students they’ll meet in and out of the classroom.
Hopefully when people desire to learn, feel it’s important for students to learn, and people want to go on learning, we can reverse the trend and education will be more focused on learning and the meaning of those words will come to mean something much closer to one another instead of continuing to be further and further apart.
