In the education wars, data is our ammunition. And according to a growing majority of Americans, that data says we’re missing the target.
Education is failing.
Elementary. Middle. High school. College. Graduate school. It doesn’t matter the level; if it receives public dollars, too many of us feel that education in the country has simply failed.
I’ve written a lot over the past 20 years about what the data says on public education and success, as well as how people perceive public education. And in that time, I haven’t been particularly successful in convincing people that public education not only is successful, but that it’s doing quite well.
I’ve failed because I’ve fought that war on the turf of those who insist on using test data to convince people that public education doesn’t work.
It’s time we move away from data, and to exploring an approach to learning that can move the needle in improving public education. Asking a simpler, open-ended question.
Are we teaching people to love learning?
Why Do I Need to Know This?
You won’t find much about this in the research.
For example, Google “How many Americans say they love learning,” and you’ll get not studies examining that question, but the following:
A study by Pew on lifelong learning, reports about that Pew study’s findings, a Gallup poll on how Americans feel about the quality of education, and a study on Americans’ confidence in higher education hitting historic lows.
This shouldn’t surprise. How does one measure if Americans love learning?
The answer is, there probably isn’t a good way to do that.
But I’ve come to believe that focusing our public discussion on cultivating a love of learning may be our best hope for energizing and freeing public education to become what we all want it to become. Why?
The clue is in an age-old student question: “Why do I need to know this?”
I’ve tried all sorts of creative answers, but the most honest one is this.
“I don’t know why you need to know this.”
Partly I answer it this way because I teach the humanities. Unlike the hard sciences – where it’s easy to draw a straight line between what you’re learning and your future career – I can’t show such a line.
One can point to studies that show a person with a college degree earns more over their lifetime than a person who doesn’t, but that isn’t particularly helpful. Compare the average lifetime earning of a history major to a business major, and you’ll see what I mean.
But this is how we’ve come to understand education. It’s only as valuable as the income it produces for us in the future.
Return for a moment to the list of results from the search results to the Google search of the question “How many Americans say they love learning.” Most of the top-level results focus on the percentage of Americans who consider themselves lifelong learners.
Life-long learning, however, isn’t necessarily – or even likely – learning for the sake of learning. From the Pew Study’s report on life-long learning:
Most Americans feel they are lifelong learners, whether that means gathering knowledge for “do it yourself” projects, reading up on a personal interest or improving their job skills.
We may value learning throughout our lives, but it’s too often learning tied to a pragmatic end. A do-it-yourself project, increasing one’s understanding about an interest, or improving one’s job skills.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach to learning. And it works great for people once they’re out of school.
But it doesn’t answer the student’s question: “Why do I need to learn this?”
Saying “I don’t know the answer to that question,” ironically does.
Opening the future
The only education I’ve regretted over the first 61 years of my life is the education that I walked away from.
- Knowing how cars work – I know how to drive, why do I need to know how a car works? Because I couldn’t know at age 15 and 16 when my father was trying to teach me these skills that in my 50s I would become an automotive reporter who needed that information to do my job.
- Learning Arabic – When I wanted to learn Arabic in graduate school in the late 80s and the early 90s, I was told not to waste my time. “What good will it do you? A European history student?” Little did I know that a decade later I’d be a reporter writing about terrorism.
I could offer many other examples, but the case is made.
We don’t know what we may need to know. And this is especially true of young students. We cannot possibly predict the information they’re going to need in the world that they’re growing into.
And for that reason, it’s critical we get them to pursue learning for its own sake. Not for any outcome that may come their way.
For when students embrace learning for learning’s own sake, they’re able to reach higher and touch a higher ceiling of opportunity.
But for 25 years, our obsession with narrow outcomes has crippled students, instead of stretching them so they can reach for higher ceilings.
Take a slew of SOLs, and I know you can pass basic math today based on some narrow questions? Great – here’s millions in funds to keep churning kids through SOL programs.
Spend millions so you can have the ceiling raised on your opportunities, when we may never known if it worked? Time to cut educational funding.
Short term success on standardized tests is a high price to pay when we realize that students come out of that system with their love for learning crushed. And the ceilings on their futures lowered as a result.
The only way to strengthen education it is to take our eyes off the practical, and place them squarely on the impractical. All that knowledge that no one can know if it will do them any good in the future.
That knowledge which challenges us to explore and learn for the simple joy of learning. And reach for the highest ceilings.
