I love school.
I am the student that school is built for. If I could be in school for my whole life, I would be. Even when I have a job and do proper adult things, I’ll always consider my real occupation to be “student.” And for most of my life, I thought other people saw things the same way, too.
But if there’s one thing I’ve discovered in high school, it’s how different and diverse other people are. I’ve become much more familiar with what it’s like to be not me - an experience which, as it turns out, belongs to the overwhelming majority of people. And the more I see of these non-me lives, and the more I understand about the people who live them, the more certain I have become of a simple truth:
Schools are failing us.
Here’s why.
The Three Principles of Learning
To figure out where our schools are going wrong, let’s start with what a good school should do.
International education advisor Sir Ken Robinson has an excellent way of thinking about this. In his TED Talk “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley,” Robinson outlines three principles of human life that are essential for a school to recognize. I’d like to use two.
“The first principle is this, that all human beings are naturally different and diverse,” says Robinson. “The second principle… is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often.”
Robinson has a third principle, but I’m going to replace it with my own. The third principle of learning, which I think is the most important of all, is this:
At a fundamental level, everyone loves and is capable of learning.
We will explore these principles further as we examine modern education, and they will help us to understand exactly where and why our schools are failing us.
So let’s go exploring.
The Difference Principle
The diversity and difference of human beings is fundamental to our society and our species. It is the basis of the concept of identity. Every person has a unique interests, skills, goals, fears, and ways of seeing and thinking about the world — it is what defines us as individuals, and what makes interacting with other people interesting and valuable. It is such a basic truth that it would be somewhat redundant to further explain.
Importantly to our discussion, this inherent idiosyncrasy also applies to the way and speed at which people learn. As Dr. Tae says in his TEDx Talk “Can Skateboarding Save Our Schools?”, this means that “nobody knows ahead of time how long it takes anyone to learn anything.”
Which makes sense! If every person is a completely unique mix of skills, abilities, personality traits, and experiences, it seems irrational to claim to be able to predict with any degree of accuracy how long it will take someone to learn something. Everyone needs different amounts of practice, and everyone needs different amounts of explanation and feedback and time to consolidate information in their mind.
Yet this runs counter to every experience I’ve had in formal education — it contradicts the basic structure of our schools. We fit our teaching and learning into specified, predefined, uniform periods of time, and then test everyone on the content at the same time. And here’s the real issue — then everyone moves on at the same time — regardless of each person’s individual success with the previous unit.
Because all individuals learn at different speeds, when that unit test rolls around, not everyone will have fully mastered all the content. Their test results will clearly indicate that. Yet despite tests — whose explicit purpose is to identify students’ abilities and lack thereof — showing that some students clearly have significant gaps in their understanding, the entire class moves on together to the next unit.
I think you see the problem.
As Khan Academy founder Sal Khan says in his TED Talk “Let’s teach for mastery — not test scores,” this is ridiculous. How can we expect students who have, as a natural and logical consequence of the principle of difference, demonstrated a lack of mastery in one topic to move on to the next — especially in classes like mathematics or science, where each topic of study builds on the previous one? Khan has a particularly vivid way of highlighting the absurdity here.
“Imagine if we did other things in our life that way,” says Khan. “Say, home-building. So we bring in the contractor and say, ‘We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation. Do what you can.’ So they do what they can. Maybe it rains. Maybe some of the supplies don’t show up.”
“And two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around, says, ‘OK, the concrete is still wet right over there, that part’s not quite up to code… I’ll give it an 80 percent.’ You say, “Great! That’s a C. Let’s build the first floor.”
Clearly, this is an insane way to build a house. Khan agrees. If you keep building your house this way, he says, with subsequent floors being “passed” and moved along on set timelines that do not adjust for obvious shortcomings in structural integrity, your house will crumble. And whose fault will it be? Not the inspector, or the contractor, or the materials, says Khan. The fault is with the process.
Let’s extend Khan’s metaphor a little further. Imagine that you are building a house, and you are given a house syllabus. The syllabus says exactly what steps will be taken to build the house, and how much time will be given to each step. And not only do you have to abide by this syllabus, so does every other house in your city, all at once. Sure, there will be inspectors, and they will rate your house-building, but that rating won’t affect whether or not you move on. If you get a bad score, you get a bad score. I guess you did a bad job.
All the houses in the city are trembling.
This analogy makes it crystal clear what the problem is.
When we build our houses, what is the point of the inspector if their discovery of critical weaknesses has no bearing on how and when the project continues? How can we expect every house to be built successfully on an identical timeline, when we have no way of knowing (or much less accounting for) in advance the countless factors that might affect construction — from the quality of land under each building site, to random deficiencies in the materials each site uses to build their house, to weather patterns that might impede construction?
When we teach our students, what is the point of a test if the gaps in understanding it identifies don’t give a student pause before moving on to more advanced, cumulative concepts? How can we expect every student to successfully learn everything in the same amount of time, when we have no way of knowing how comfortable each student is with the material to start with, what learning style each student has, or what mental blocks in understanding they might encounter?
What we are doing is basically ensuring that not everyone succeeds. As Dr. Tae says in his talk, it took him 58 tries to learn a certain skateboarding trick. If he was artificially constrained to 50 tries, he wouldn’t have learned it.
I said earlier that the principle of difference contradicts the structure of our schools, but it’s much more accurate to say that the structure of our schools violates the principle of difference.
After all, if either of these is an antecedent truth, it is the principle of difference. Every field of study - from literature, to genetics, to psychology, to statistics - tells us that all individuals are unique. We know from firsthand experience that this is true.
By contrast, the way we structure our schools is completely arbitrary - it is something that we choose, something we make up, with the stated goal of best educating our youth. So education should adapt to individuals, rather than forcing individuals to conform to education.
The Curiosity Principle
Curiosity is almost as fundamental to human nature as idiosyncrasy. The drive to understand is one of the essential characteristics of human beings, and is the force that has initiated and driven every intellectual pursuit in the history of humanity: science is a quest to understand the natural world, philosophy to understand existence and knowledge itself, history to understand the past, mathematics to understand numbers and patterns.
It is a logical extension, then, to say that our schools, which are supposed to cultivate the next generation of minds to engage in these pursuits, should not only recognize but capitalize on the significance and power of curiosity.
Given how ingrained both curiosity and diversity are in basic human nature, it’s unsurprising to realize that the principle of curiosity is closely related to the principle of difference. Different things spark the curiosity of different individuals. Thus, in order to get students to learn, schools need to expose them to a diverse range of stimuli and opportunities for engagement, wonder, and exploration.
When this does not happen (as has historically been the case with our schools), the consequences can be severe.
The quintessential example of an educational system that does not promote students’ individual interests is immortalized in J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger shares the (loosely autobiographical) story of Holden Caulfield, an angsty sixteen-year-old who struggles to find meaning, purpose, and connection after getting kicked out of his fourth school in a row.
In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger shows through Holden the result (alienation and disengagement) of a school system that does not offer students opportunities to let their own interests and curiosity drive their learning. When Holden’s sister asks him to name one thing he likes, he can’t. The closest Holden gets to expressing a personal interest in something is when he talks about his Oral Expression class - ironically, the one thing he likes is the thing that is actually suppressed by the school rules.
“Each boy in class has to get up in class and make a speech… And if the boy digresses at all, you’re supposed to yell ‘Digression!’ at him as fast as you can. It just about drove me crazy,” says Holden. “That digression business got on my nerves. I don’t know. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all.”
Not only has Holden not been allowed to pursue what he thinks is “more interesting,” he has been convinced that having personal interests is “the trouble with” him. The result: Holden doesn’t feel at all compelled to engage with his education, and after getting expelled from his fourth school wanders around New York City on his own for several days trying to figure out what to do with his life.
This is frustrating because it’s obvious that Holden would be more interested in his education, and would have a much more fulfilling and engaging experience in school, if only he was encouraged to discover and pursue his interest. Salinger makes this clear by bringing up how one of the reasons that Holden likes Mr. Antolini, a teacher from one of his schools, is because Antolini read all of the stories that Holden’s brother (whose passion is story writing) wrote.
These systemic educational failures that Salinger highlights in The Catcher in the Rye are by no means confined to the world of fiction. In her book Polite Lies, Japanese-American author Kyoko Mori describes a Japanese education system that is toxic, inflexible, and arbitrary, and which stifles individualism and creativity.
“The problem with the Japanese system, ultimately, is that individual freedom - to question the teacher, to disagree - is sacrificed for the supposed convenience and protection of the whole group,” writes Mori. “In school and elsewhere, people are rewarded for obeying the rules diligently, never for taking a chance and being different, or for asking good questions.”
This inflexible system, Mori says, bleeds into Japanese society as a whole - where housewives are given few to no “chances to learn something new or feel useful,” and are forced to prioritize conformity and household duties over personal fulfillment, and where men and women alike are given no chances to explore their interests and try out new or different things.
“Life in Japan is like an unending stint at a school where you have to keep taking tests - giving your answers under pressure without help or guidance, knowing that you will get no second chance if you make a mistake,” writes Mori. “Japanese people have to make many of the big decisions of their lives - whom to marry, what company to join - without detailed information, since it is rude to ask direct questions.”
“They have no choice but to trust authority and do their best, just as they were supposed to do in school. If their job or marriage turns out to be a disappointment, they will be given the same vague exhortations they heard from their teachers: keep trying, work hard, pay attention.”
Clearly, Japanese education and society violate both the principle of difference and the principle of curiosity - members are expected to conform, not stand out, and to be motivated by arbitrary communal duty, not personal interest. The result is a society of burnt-out, stressed-out students and unhappy adults who have no choice but to keep moving in a society that ostracizes dissidents.
Yet another example of the importance of fostering curiosity in students, and the damaging effects of not doing so, is highlighted by Spokane author Sherman Alexie in his essay “Superman and Me.” Alexie describes how, rather than being encouraged for his passion for reading, he was ostracized by his classmates in the Spokane reservation and regarded as an “oddity” by his school.
In addition, Alexie describes how “in all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught to write poetry, short stories or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories or novels. Writing was something beyond Indians.”
Rather than take advantage of Alexie’s natural curiosity, which per the principle of curiosity is an invaluable resource in helping students learn, the system denied him the opportunity to develop his passion and kept from him even the knowledge that it was possible for him to do so.
This is the antithesis of good education.
Fortunately, we’ve come a long way since the systems that The Catcher in the Rye, Polite Lies, and Superman and Me (which were published in 1945, 1999 and 1998, and drew on the authors’ childhood experiences from decades before) describe. But these lingering influences - those of a rigid, uniform educational system born out of the Industrial Revolution and designed to produce standardized students like products of a machine - still persist.
An example is exemplary reading, a term coined by teacher and author Daniel Coffeen in his book Reading the Way of Things. Exemplary reading, as I’ve written in a previous post, confines students’ experience of a book to predefined standards of what is important and what is valuable in the text, and prevents students from directly discovering their own meaning and significance through unfiltered experience.
It is these vestigial attitudes and practices, entrenched in our educational paradigms, that continue to make it difficult for students’ learning to be driven by their own curiosity rather than the arbitrary decree of school authorities. After all, if a teenager doesn’t want to do something, there is no better way to make them want to do it less than to just tell them to do it.
This is a second dimension to how schools are failing students. Schools don’t just fail students when students don’t master content; schools also fail students when they don’t allow students to motivate themselves and learn for their own sake. When schools force students to learn, rather than facilitating self-driven learning by sparking curiosity, they are depriving students of enjoyment and fulfillment even if those students achieve the same ‘outcomes’ on standardized tests.
The Principle of Universal Potential
The last principle of learning is the most important and the most powerful. It informs the first two principles, and is informed by them. It unifies everything we’ve discussed, and it reveals why this issue is so urgent.
The last principle of learning: everyone loves and is capable of learning.
The reason that recognizing difference and sparking curiosity is so important is because it allows us to realize the full potential of every student to learn.
And we know that every student loves learning and can learn because the only reason they aren’t doing so are our broken systems - per the first and second principles of learning.
Thankfully, the first and second principles not only demonstrate how our schools fail, but they also guide us to how we can fix them - and in the process, they prove to us that every student can indeed learn.
We saw in our discussion of the first principle of learning (the difference principle) that one of the reasons students don’t learn is because they are given predefined, uniform timelines to do so that don’t necessarily line up with the amount of time they personally need in order to learn. As a result, they are herded along through the curriculum, and they accrue compounding, unaddressed gaps in mastery as they move on to subsequent units without addressing what they didn’t understand in the first one.
Eventually, those gaps become significant enough that students will hit a block in understanding, years down the road from when they first missed something, and they’ll think they just aren’t meant for calculus or chemistry or physics.
Sal Khan has a simple, scientific way of breaking down and fixing this problem.
In this current situation, says Khan, what we have is this:
fixed learning time (artificially constrained)
→ variable outcome (some students learn, some students don’t)
What we should have, he says, is this:
variable learning time (flexible, individualized)
→ fixed outcome (everyone learns)
This is mind-blowing. What it implies is that if every student is given the appropriate time that they need to learn, we can ensure that learning is a fixed outcome. Or, to call back to the analogy we made earlier, if we let every construction project stop, fix the problems the inspector finds, and make sure the foundation is 100% stable before building the next floor, the house will get built. Every house will get built. And we know this, because this is exactly what we do in the real world.
In this world, Dr. Tae is not given only 50 tries to learn his skateboard trick - he is given as many tries as he needs until he learns it. Which, inevitably, he will.
And what we know is that this kind of individualized learning, which has long been called impractical or logistically infeasible by its detractors, is in fact viable in our modern day and age. As Khan explains, on-demand video, adaptive exercises, and other advances in technology have made personalized education extremely possible. Ken Robinson cites real-life evidence of their efficacy:
“I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of - they're called alternative education programs,” says Robinson. “These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common features. They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are called ‘alternative education.’ And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative.”
That is how we apply the difference principle. But there’s more.
In exploring the curiosity principle, we saw how Holden’s inability to connect and engage with his classes led to him feeling alienated and rejecting school altogether. This is because he clearly does not have what Ken Robinson brings up in his TED Talk:
“Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading,” says Robinson. “The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts.”
Or this:
“I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, ‘What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?’ And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, ‘Well, we don't have one. Why would you drop out? If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them.’”
Clearly, with a system of education that (a) does not place excess emphasis on students conforming to certain standards of what subjects are valuable, (b) provides students with broad opportunities to learn and explore different fields, and (c) supports students who feel disconnected from the curriculum, complete engagement is possible. Even Mr. Antolini, who lives in the same time as Holden, believes this:
“You’re a student - whether the idea appeals to you or not. You’re in love with knowledge,” Antolini tells Holden. “And I think you’ll find, once you get past all the [Mr. Vinsons and their Oral Composition classes], you’re going to start getting closer and closer - that is, if you want to, if you look for it and wait for it - to the kind of information that will be very dear to your heart.”
Let’s take a second and understand just how significant this is. What we are saying here is that no one is unable to learn - that with the right system, everyone can not only learn, but be self-motivated to learn and to enjoy the process of learning. Sal Khan has a powerful way of putting this.
“If we were to go 400 years into the past to Western Europe, which even then was one of the more literate parts of the planet, you would see that about 15% of the population knew how to read,” says Khan. “And I suspect that if you asked someone who did know how to read, say, a member of the clergy, ‘What percentage of the population do you think is even capable of reading?’ They might say, ‘Well, with a great education system, maybe 20 or 30 percent.’”
But today, says Khan we know that estimate to be completely inaccurate - we know that close to 100% of the population can read, and that the only reason that so many people couldn’t read for so long was because they didn’t have access to the appropriate kind of education that would enable them to do so.
Here is the kicker. What if, Khan asks, we apply this scenario to today? What if we expand this paradigm-busting expansion of our conception of human potential to calculus, or organic chemistry, or cancer research? What if everyone is capable of learning and contributing in these fields, we just haven’t had the right system to allow this to happen?
To me, this realization is both exhilarating and disturbing because it means that our current ideas of what is possible and our current systems of helping people learn are imposing an artificial limit on human achievement. We are the engineers of a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, an enormous global opportunity cost of human potential to contribute to society.
Every Holden Caulfield, every student who thinks that school isn’t for them or that they aren’t meant to learn or capable of learning, is a victim of this tragedy. This is the Tragedy of Caulfield. This is the Tragedy of Caulfields.
So how do we fix it?
Well, of course, there are all the specific solutions that we’ve discussed earlier in this section. But to capture the scope and magnitude of this crisis, we need something bigger. We need a paradigm shift.
Here it is: it is not possible for students to fail in school.
That is, it’s not possible for students to fail in the traditional sense of the word - to not achieve necessary outcomes. There is no such thing as students not learning anymore. Not in the new world we’re building.
But failure is still a part of our model - but instead of its current place, shunned off to the side in a place where students think that not ‘getting it right’ the first time reflects a personal inadequacy, now we are writing it into our model of education. We are treating it like what it is - a normal, natural and valuable experience.
“‘Failure is always an option’… is an awesome way to think about the scientific method,” Adam Savage of Mythbusters explains in an interview with The Atlantic. “To think that an experiment could ‘fail’ is ludicrous. Every experiment tells you something, even if it’s just don’t do that experiment the same way again.”
Failure should be an expected step in the process of learning, and should be incorporated as an opportunity to learn and grow. When we do this, we take away from failure the power to poison our education systems and our students’ lives. Instead, we co-opt it as a tool to empower our students to achieve the goal of universal learning.
This is the world we want to live in.
This post was originally published on Medium.com.
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