A Subtractive Education
A colleague of mine recently gave me an article that struck a cord in me. I have been reading and thinking about education for some time now and the more I do the more a feeling of discontent grows inside. The way schools currently treat children seems out of harmony with how the natural world works and how people inherently learn. This industrial, one size fits all, model of education in many cases does more harm to children than helps. School becomes a place to endure not enjoy. Students count credits, waiting to be granted the permission to leave this massive sorting machine. Why do schools continue to do what they do? Why do we continue to subject students to years of content driven madness? When you step back and look at the situation you really begin to see how artificial the entire educational process has become. Let’s take a look at high schools. Students spend 5000 hours in classes over four years learning stuff. Teachers continue to pile on and outfit these students with the information that we believe is necessary to lead successful and happy lives. However, is this really the case? How many of you would bet your next paycheck on the results of retaking your HS finals? How many of you can use a trig. identity to solve a problem? Not many but most of us continue to lead successful and happy lives regardless of the fact that we can’t remember this content. Over the years I have had countless parents comment that by 8th grade they could no longer help with their children’s homework because the content was too difficult. However, most of these parents were successful and doing extremely well in life. We can argue that our students need this information for success in college and for passing such standardized exams such as the SAT, AP and IB. However, is this really true? Should all of our decisions be based on what our students need for success in college? Many courses in college are poorly taught and would not be classified as “good teaching,” however it continues to drive what we do in high school and even lower. I believe that what schools should be focusing on is a list of characteristics or skills that we want our graduates to have. When Mustafa takes over his family business, will he transform it to become more environmentally aware? When Roberta becomes a doctor, how do we want her to treat the patients? When Fatu becomes President of Sierra Leone, what values and attitudes do we want her to rule her country by? When Alex becomes our next door neighbor, what type of neighbor do we want? Do we really care if any of the above students can remember a trig. identity? Is that what is really important? I would argue a definitive No! Then why do we continue to treat education and students as empty vessels that need to be filled with information that we believe will make them successful in the future. John Dewey sums up it when he said:
“What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win the ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul; loses his appreciation of things worthwhile, of values to which these things are relative if he loses the desire to apply what he has learned.”
How many of us have sold our souls to this artificial method of education? How many of us will be bold enough to stand up and demand change for the sake of the students we claim to teach? Carl Sagan, in his book Cosmos, has a chapter titled, “One voice in the Cosmic fugue” which describes how each of the individual and unique parts of this Cosmos join to make the harmony of life. It is my hope that when educators begin to treat children and themselves as voices in this cosmic fugue, each playing a part to create this beautiful harmony then we can all begin making school the experience children deserve.
A Subtractive Education. This article discusses some of these ideas and musings.
