September 1, 2023
by Martin Davis
FOUNDER AND EDITOR
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.
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-Martin Davis, Editor
I’m reminded of the profound statement that originated with Sir Winston Churchill: “To each their comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”
It is vital to learn and complete the preparation to fulfill your dreams.
Learning starts at home and IS a social/economic issue. Children who come from poor homes usually do worse than children from upper middle-class homes. You only need to look at Virginia cities’ test scores vs many of the state’s rich counties in Northern Virginia. Compare Fredericksburg to Spotsylvania and Stafford. Yes, you hate test scores, but they do measure how localities are doing relative to their neighbors.
Until we learn how to make parents better parents who love learning and pass that on to their children, nothing will change. We will continue to blame teachers, who are not only expected to teach our kids, but to raise them as well. Maybe it’s time we focused more on parents and what they don’t bring to the table.
You are a pragmatist, as am I. The bottom line is that of course we should strive to help our students love learning. I don’t know a teacher who doesn’t want that. I also understand your point about parents. However, we can’t throw kids out because their parents stink. There are some terrible, absent, and abusive parents, but their children deserve a chance. More common than the terrible parents are those who simply don’t have the resources, skills, or time to nurture a love of learning in their children. They’re trying to put food on the table. Their children deserve a chance too. When the family can’t provide the chance, it’s on the schools. That’s the reality.
Even when we nurture a love of learning there has to be assessment. Teachers must have the means to measure teaching and learning and, to be brutally honest, testing is the most efficient way to do that. The problem is not the assessment, unless it is excessive as it has become. The problem is how the assessment is handled. The idea for testing is that it should be to assess learning and to inform instruction based on how students are doing per the test results. Are tests infallible? Of course not. But they are useful tools when used appropriately.
Back in 2002 when No Child Left Behind came into the picture we teachers were told, “Gotcha!” We’re going to test these kids and if they aren’t passing the tests we’re going to punish those teachers and those schools. Rather than using tests to inform instruction, the federal government systematically punished schools where students didn’t perform well on tests. Those teachers were branded as failures and so were those students. At the time, over 20 years ago, the teachers in the trenches warned that this punitive and unforgiving testing was not going to end well. And it has not. The schools and kids in poor areas were failures and the schools and kids in affluent areas were doing great! I often thought there was a perfect way to test that belief. Switch teachers. Send the teachers from the affluent schools to the poor schools and vice versa. If, indeed, test scores are dependent on quality teachers alone there would be a decided change in test scores. My idea was never put into place because those in power knew, just as teachers knew, that teaching and learning is hard, messy work and punitive testing is not going to change that.
So what’s the answer? Don’t we wish there were a simple answer and there is not. We do need to to fund public education, instill a trust in our educators, and (this one my turn some heads) take the cell phones out of the kids’ hands during the school day. And that’s for starters.
Looking at the way things are going in Spotsylvania (and elsewhere across this country) I don’t see it happening unless there is an immediate change in leadership and, even then, so much damage has happened in such a short time that it will be a hard uphill climb to recover.
We in Spotsylvania have leadership on our school board and in our central office that is destroying our schools as fast as we can say “Charter Schools.” For Spotsylvania, there is one chance to even start the recovery and that is at the polls in this fall’s election. It is that crucial. Even if the election flips the board’s majority and the stars align, there’s still a lot of work ahead. Changing the anti-public school, fake parental rights mentality is not going to be easy. I’m hoping for the best with this election but, to circle back, I’m a pragmatist. . Can we fix it? We can try. If we don’t make a change, we’re in big trouble.