A Subtractive Education

Brent, as always a passionate and compelling argument about staying away from the extremes of scholastic overdrive. Character IS important when trying to influence a young person’s development. I am convinced that there are characteristics of success that conventional schools may not address enough.

However, I also think (after having taught at a couple of schools both in the US and abroad) that many schools don’t emphasize content and knowledge _enough_. I heard an adult last night tell me that she could never really learn anything that she couldn’t see directly apply to her own life. This made me think to myself: But how can we know what will become important? How can we KNOW what will be applicable?

Here’s my argument for why knowledge is at least as important as character and soul.

Knowledge is inherently good. Knowing where countries are in the world and a little about their history would certainly have helped George Bush, for example, be a better president. When he was in high school and college could he have predicted that he would have a use for knowing where Sudan was? Probably not. Would statistics have interested him or countless others in high school? Probably not. But they sure could have helped him in the White House!

Being an educated person means having a lot of information in you. This is a good thing for many reasons: because it allows you to compare and form connections which help you analyze your own life, because you can build on this knowledge in your own areas of passion, but mostly because you GET what everyone else who is educated is talking about! That is to say: when people talk about the lessons of World War II, you can have an opinion and a discussion with others. When the TV spouts off false or misleading information, you are able to recall facts and philosophy and history which allow you to be skeptical, and yes…when you go to college you are far better prepared. Why is that important? Because to develop good skills (critical thinking, moral responsibility, environmental awareness, etc.) and to have an impact on the world, you need to go to college and be successful.

So do I think our schools should teach essential traits, oh yes! But to the exclusion of content, oh no! I think you need to make a compromise given the school that you’re at and where they are.

At my current school I feel that both areas could improve but especially knowledge. At another school the traits might need emphasizing. But too much emphasis on the essential traits means highly skilled students with nothing in their heads to work with.

My two cents

Miss you guys!

-Eric

Content, we always seems to come back to content. Let me respond to your comment and see if I can help clarify some of my thoughts. First off, HS teachers focus too much on content. For many HS teachers, the content itself is more important than the students. Ask an elementary teacher what they teach and they will reply; “I teach 6 year olds” or “I teach 2nd graders.” They will refer directly to the students they are teaching not the content. However, ask a HS teacher what they teach and they will reply, “I teach Math” or “I teach Science.” This choice of words reveals an unfortunate bias. For many secondary teachers the focus is on the stuff to be taught and the work of the teacher and not on what is best for kids and helping them learn. This can be seen in almost any school where, as Ernest Boyer former president of the Carnegie Foundation, pointed out, “Secondary schools are places where children go to watch adults work.” Walk down most hallways and you will see teachers standing in front of the class talking. This talk sounds depressingly the same from school to school and in many cases from classroom to classroom- the teacher summarizes and simplifies the material, provides a few examples or stories, and ends up presenting the class with neat little packages that leaves scant, if any, room for questions or interpretation. This “talking head” style of instruction which focuses on the stuff to be taught acts as if children were empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge from the “educated” adult standing in front of them.

What I am advocating is the following; that schools stop focusing on the content, which actually decreases the rigor of a program, but use the content as means for building the skills students need to be successful in the world. With this approach, the educational experience is built around developing skills not amassing facts. Teachers become generalists and use their discipline to help students build these skills. In doing so the content because more rigorous not less. However, to use this approach would also mean to look at our curriculum and begin dramatically pairing down what we teach. Harvard has conducted some interesting brain research on how children learn and it has yielded surprising insights. Children come to us not as blank slates but as human beings with ideas, thoughts, insights and understandings of how the world already works. These students will hold on to these ideas religiously even if the teacher tells them they are wrong. Of course the good students will be able to regurgitate back what the teacher “taught” them for a test but will automatically revert back to their preconceived understanding of the world shortly thereafter. Giving up on one’s preconceived ideas is painful because it means giving up something. This can be seen with teachers that continue to be stuck in the antiquated “talking head” model of instruction even though all of the current research is screaming for change.

What would a subtractive style of education look like? First off, teachers wouldn’t act as if there was a “one size fits all” curriculum for every child. The content would become relevant when the student needed it. For example, if a student is conducting research on water pollution, they may realize they need to understand the chemical properties of oxygen atoms. Now they have a context in which to learn the periodic table. Another student may need to learn about titrations to finish their research on the chemical composition of Pepsi. While another student may have to research about the constitutional and legal history of the Second Amendment in order to defend their position on the rights of hunters to own guns. This type of learning builds life-long learning skills.

These life-long learning skills are what I would like to end with. You made the statement in your entry that being an educated person means having a lot of information “in you.” I would argue that being an educated person means begin curious enough about the world around you to want to, and know how to, go and find the information you need. If you hear a group of friends discussing the lessons learned in WWII, you may not be able to comment on the facts from WWII, but you will be able to discuss causes and effects of wars because you understand the larger context of why many or most wars happen. When you go home that night you would immediately go to the internet and begin reading about WWII. Maybe you would even order a book or two on WWII for your next conversation. Or, being at a party and hearing a group of individuals talk about “The Great Gatsby” and then going home and reading it because you realize this is one classic you would like to read or maybe even reread. We need to quit treating students as if they are going to stop leaning after HS and that it is our job to hurry up and fill them with all of this important stuff. We need to have a massive paradigm shift in our thinking and realize that we must train these students to continue learning and wanting to learn for the rest of their lives. Do we need to shove “classic” novels down their throats in HS? No! We do need to teach them what defines a classic and expose them to a few. Do we need to teach students about 2000 years of mathematics in only a few years! No! However we do need to teach students about the essence of math so they will continue to learn it for the rest of their lives. Nobody will ever agree on what content is essential for students to know. What we can agree on are what skills are necessary for these students to lead healthy, happy and well-educated lives.

When I think back to my HS experience, I don’t remember any of the content. Most everything I have learned has come post HS. Think about the phrase which is used by teachers in so many schools, “I never learned this stuff until I had to teach it.” Why is this? Simple, it’s not until we teach it that all of that stuff finally becomes relevant and therefore we are ready to learn it. Let’s stop treating students as empty vessels and help them to see the relevancy of the content they are learning. Let’s also help them to realize that it is OK to slow down and really learn this stuff, for they have a lifetime to continue reading, doing math problems and learning about the latest advancements in science.

Author’s note: Much of the information above was taken from the book “Time to Learn” by George Wood 

The entire debate, from Rousseau to the present, seems to assume that education is one and only one thing in the world . It’s like a group of powerful painters who have only one canvas on which to paint and argue endlessly about how, what, who to paint. I don’t share the monoontic assumption of one canvas. I think there are many canvases, many painters, and many subjects. Perhaps one way to think about it is that no one can get the rewards for mainstream achievement without doing the things that are valued and rewarded in the mainstream. No one is going to get the rewards for being a best-selling writer of action novels in the popular culture by writing esoteric poetry backwards on the surfaces of their toenails, even though that may be exactly and the only thing they want to do. Similarly, no one is going to stop educational institutions from producing millions of young people who will take over for the millions of older people who die, retire or leave their jobs for other jobs. And most of those millions of young people don’t need any more than they are now getting in schools to be the replacement products for human civilization. All educational reformers seem to want to ignore the stabilizing function of educational institutions and turn all of education into a theoretical free-for-all that has no clear relationship to maintaining the basic qualities and quantities of human life. This type of divergence has killed most of the living experiments as communes and most of the educational experiments as free schools during the last few centuries. Isn’t there something for educators to learn from this history of failed attempts at change?

Did you ever teach in Damascus Syria?

Remembering my high school education… now that is an event in history! But yes I do remember much from my high school but only in three subjects. Two, band and orchestra were a personal love of mine since an early age and today still is. What I learned strengthened my foundation for future experiences in the US Army Band. And then in my own teaching of music and expanding the instruments I have learned to play. The third were my Science classes but I must not thank my high school teachers but rather a junior high teacher who through the technique of discovery and inquiry fostered a desire for me to learn as much as I could about all sciences. All three were due to having personal experieces in each, not just sitting and listening to someone talk.

I was very frustrated upon entering university and finding the sciences separated into Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Astronomy, and not integrated. Frustrated I changed to Speech Education that included Reader’s Theater, Drama and other active learning experiences.

After teaching a few years I found out about an upper graduate program that involved teaching the higher sciences through inquiry. Although it was still segregated it was much better and with my elementary experience it was easy to find integrated ways to present that information to my students.

I liked the comment above about students presenting multiple canvases to be painted upon and that is the beauty of our world – we are all part of one big web but each part is an individual contributing to a beautiful painting!

Hsinchu International School’s secondary program will be on the right path in preparing our students for THEIR future world!