What is education? (Effective vs. Ineffective Learning)

The Five Pillars of Modern Education

Everyone acknowledges that our modern system of education is riddled with problems: inequality, inflexibility, under-achievement, huge amounts of money and effort continuously resulting in sub-par test scores.  Many different suggestions have been made and many fingers pointed at possible suspects: it's the teachers! it's the parents! it's the curriculum! it's the funding! lack of teacher training! lack of teacher accountability! it's our inherently racist/sexist/socialist/capitalist society, etc., etc.  There may be truth in some of these ideas or accusations, but before we blindly embark on another sweeping(ly expensive and meddlesome) education reform, I'd just like to ask: what is education, anyway?  And what is it really for?

There are many different education methodologies used all over the world.  I have direct experience with those in the US (as a native student), France (exchange student), and Korea (teacher).  Though all three places are markedly different, I would still say they have more in common that not.  Specifically, schooling seems to focus on these things:

1) the memorization of a HUGE number of facts, more than anyone could ever possibly remember or put to use.
2) a linear progression through a curriculum that includes all core subjects all the time, which are none-the-less kept constantly separate and distinct from one another. 
3) a rigid schedule and highly supervised series of classes, where all students must do essentially the same things at the same time. 
4) the seeming necessity of spending a lot of time on homework, studying, or both. 
5) an extremely high value put on the results of tests and quizzes, especially standardized tests, which are then used to determine a child's future opportunities.

Now, I understand that these five fundamental pillars of public education are in place for logical reasons.  Some of it has to do with resource limitations, or the need to objectively measure progress and success.   But what I find interesting is the underlying assumption in all schooling systems that children cannot be left to their own resources--that, if you allow them to budget their own time and do what they want, they will do nothing but waste their time.  There is usually very little room for individualization and self-directed exploration in our schools.  

You might say, "Well, of course!  No child wants to study!  If we didn't make them do it, then most of them never would."  In a sense, that might be true, but I think that we often confuse studying with learning.  Our schools are purportedly places where children learn--but let's be honest, how much do any of us remember, out of all the things we had to study in K-12?  If you really think about all that stuff you had to memorize?   I'm just going to go out on a limb for moment, and bet that most people remember less than 10% of everything they had to learn in K-12, no matter how smart they are.  If we don't remember most of what we've learned, we can't really say that we've  learned it at all, can we?  I think that our education system needs to make sure that students learn, not more, but more effectively.


The Keys to Effective Learning

In order for learning to be effective, I think you need three things: 

1) a student needs to remember what they learned,
2) be able to make meaningful connections between that knowledge and other things they know, and 
3) be able to apply it in their own lives.   

It serves no purpose whatsoever to memorize stuff for a test and then forget it the next day, or week, or month.  Personally, I can say that this is mostly what I did in school, especially in subjects like math, science, and history, which require a high degree of memorization, and which I had little time or interest to explore outside the classroom.  

However, I did retain a good deal of what I learned in French and English.  Why?  Part of it was simple interest.  These were my favorite subjects.  (Ironically, they were also the subjects in which my grades were the most inconsistent).  But it was also because of how I learned the information in those subjects.  I've always had a gift for making connections between words and finding patterns in language.  I did this constantly in French and English.  When studying vocab, I entertained myself by finding similarities between related words, and when I was outside of school, I often challenged myself to try and identify objects around me in French.  Every time I happened across something written in French, I tried to figure out what it meant.  For me, language is an exciting puzzle, a secret code to decipher.  It's the closest thing on earth to having a super power: to understand conversations that other people around you cannot, to be able to read what can only be meaningless scribbles to the uninitiated.  I won't lie, speaking a foreign language gives me a heady sense of power and privilege--of being privy to an entire secret world, a culture, millions of people who would otherwise be rendered inaccessible behind a language barrier.  

I understand, of course, that most people do not feel this way about languages.  They don't have the court intrigue/X-men super-hero fantasy at the back of their minds that makes language learning so exciting for me.  What I learned from this though, is how to learn.  As I said, it's not just the interest, nor is it just about having a "gift" that makes one adept at learning.  Learning to see patterns and make connections is something that can be taught and applied to all subjects.  

In other words, everyone can learn how to learn.  

But it goes beyond that.  Beyond the patterns and connections, you have to use what you have learned and integrate it into your life somehow.  That's how I've retained my French over the years--I use it whenever I get the chance--and everything that I remember from English class is from the stories and essays that had a deeper meaning for me.  There were always things in literature that I identified with, that I could appreciate in the context of my own life.  That was real learning.  I was learning about life.  

Ironically, this is also what made English and French classes the most painful for me.  There were valuable things that I could extract from reading Alexander Pope, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson--but I extracted these things mostly in spite of, and not because of, all the assignments and tests that came with them.  When I read Hamlet, the teacher required us to write notes and "responses" to every single scene.  And with the deadline looming, I found myself rushing through it, focused more on what the hell I could write that the teacher would find interesting, rather than having the leisure to dwell on what I found interesting.  I could have been learning from it--but I wasn't.  There wasn't time, and the more "important" thing was to come up with some bullshit response to give the teacher for the sake of my grades.   

The Value of Self-Education

How is it, that we spend so much of our lives in school, and yet school leaves no time for real learning?  I honestly think that real learning only happens when someone is ready for it, and when they have the freedom to go about it in their own way.  Sure, there are good things to be said for having the guidance of a teacher, but mostly, I think it's so much more gratifying, exciting, and truly educational to discover things for yourself.  It is the most meaningful and effective way to learn. 

You might argue that this is nice in theory, but you can't possibly expect people to "discover" everything on their own.  As I mentioned earlier, people all have different interests, and I myself was mostly interested in the artistic or language-related subjects in school.   But let me tell you something interesting.  When I finally finished my "education," (a.k.a. got out of college), something changed.  I suddenly had the freedom to learn about whatever caught my fancy at the time.  And I found that what caught my fancy first was history.   

I had always liked history, and I had been developing a growing interest in politics, but it had never really been at the forefront of my academic endeavors.  I had taken history classes, sure, but I never read a history book in its entirety until after I graduated from college.  That book was Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers.  During my senior year, my high school government teacher had recommended it to the class.  I always thought it sounded interesting, so much so that even 5 years later I still remembered it, but I never had the time or the energy to read it while I was in school.  

I can safely say that I effectively learned more about the first 20 years of U.S. history (post-1776) from that book than I ever did in school.  It's because I was genuinely interested in what I was reading, I didn't have a test or a paper looming in the back of my mind, no deadlines to rush me through it.  I could take my time, think about it the way I wanted, dawdle over the more interesting parts, and make connections between that book and other things that I knew--not only about American history, but about leadership, the shaping of all history, how views of history change through the kaleidoscope of time, and the way our perception of history today sets the stage for everything we do.  Joseph Ellis has a wonderful way of making history real.  Here were no facts or figures to memorize--only people to meet and stories to tell.  Fascinating people--Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison....  People I had studied numerous times before, and yet never really known as fellow human beings.  This is what history is really about.  

I will say it again, and again, and again: literature is about real life; history is about real life; science and math are about real life.   All learning is about life, about understanding ourselves as human beings, about understanding the world around us. 

Likewise, my post-college education wasn't limited to history.  In the past, science had been a far cry from my favorite subject.  I usually thought of it as merely tolerable.  And yet recently, I've been getting interested in that too.  Do you know how many great science videos there are on youtube?  Smarter Every Day and SciSchow are my current favorites.   And honestly, when I was a child, I was really interested in science.  Maybe not biology, or chemistry, or physics, specifically--I was interested in dinosaurs!  No, scratch that.  I was obsessed with dinosaurs.  

I have been told that it started at the age of 3 when my dad brought home a VHS copy of The Land Before Time.  (So, really, it was all his fault :-P).  From then until the age of 9 or 10, I read everything about dinosaurs that I could get my hands on.  I watched every movie, psyched myself out over every trip to the museum to see fossils, and religiously attended the annual exhibition of robotic dinosaurs that appeared in the local mall every winter.  Although dino-obsession may not be the most conventional way of learning science, I did learn a lot about biology, geology, and natural history during those years.  I could name more dinos off the top of my head than there are States in the Union; I could tell you all about evolution, continental drift, the different extinction theories, about the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods and which dinosaurs lived in which period; how fossils were dug up, and how the different layers of rock told you about which era the fossils were from.  I am pretty sure that my years of dino-mania laid the groundwork for me to do well in science class later on. 

Now, you could argue that I am an exception.  How many kids get that totally obsessed with something?  Actually, I think most kids get really obsessed with things.  It just depends on what and when.  How many kids are avid readers like I was?  Maybe not a lot, but whatever a child is interested in, whether it involves books or not, obviously it gives them some kind of mental and emotional stimulation.  Obviously, it is doing something for their little, growing brains.  

And what about adults?  What about after all those years of schooling?  How many people are going to start reading history books, listening to Great Courses' lectures from the library, or make a hobby out of reading the news, like I did?  Or how many people do you know who simply get out of college, get a job, and spend most of the rest of their lives working, drinking, raising kids, and watching TV?  Sadly, a lot of the latter, I think.  But I also believe that it's because this is how people have been conditioned.  In a weird way, this is what society expects.  As Astra Taylor points out in her talk on "Unschooling," our current society needs most people to be drones: people who will work at mindless jobs, produce conveniences, accessories, data, and various other smorgasbord en masse, and ask no questions. 

But people are naturally curious animals!  As Michio Kaku says, "All children are born scientists."  As children, we want to know everything!  We're overflowing with creativity, and we're so full of a desire to learn, but by the time we finish umpteen years of schooling, that natural curiosity seems to be burned out in most people.  

If you give people the time and freedom to explore, I think you'd be surprised at how many things they'd be interested in.  And if they don't learn about everything--if they're not all perfect Renaissance men and women--who cares?  It's not like our current system is producing Renaissance men and women, though if you looked at the curriculum you would certainly think that was the goal.  

There is one more compelling example I must mention.  There's a co-teacher that I had in Korea.  His name is Yi Jae-ik, and I had the pleasure of working with him for one semester.  He follows a teaching philosophy of giving no orders, no punishments, and no rewards.  He believes in letting students learn in their own way, at their own pace.  He believes in the teacher's responsibility to listen to the students--that their needs and wishes are never foolish, or selfish, or trivial.  The most impressive thing that I saw, was that students who previously had given up on English--who knew almost nothing, who had no motivation and no interest--suddenly started to make an effort.  He made English accessible to them, and allowed them to study things that were at their level (i.e. making their own vocab cards of any words they pleased, using Rosetta stone, allowing them to ask any questions they wanted), and encouraged them in all things.  The kids might have been learning at a much slower pace than the actual curriculum, but they were learning deeply, effectively, in other words, TRULY learning English, some of them for the first time in their lives.  They may never do well on a standardized test, but they will remember what they learned in Yi Jae-ik's class for a long, long time--that is something indeed.  

Sources of inspiration for this post:

 Astra Taylor on "Unschooling" - an extremely interesting approach to education (skip the first 2 minutes; the talk itself only lasts until about minute 47--after that it's a discussion with the audience)

Michio Kaku - All kids are born geniuses 

Ken Robinson - How to escape education's death valley

Ken Robinson - How schools kill creativity

“Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.”
~Louis L'Amour 

"Everyone is born a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its life believing it is stupid."
~attributed to Albert Einstein (though I don't believe there's a reputable source for this--but it's a good quote anyways)

"I simply wasn't ready to read.  And it was painful trying to learn.  Painful.  It was like trying to force a penny through a hole that's too small."  
~My friend, Catherine, on her early years in school.  She learned to read later--when she was ready.  She is now one of the most avid readers and one of the most curious minds that I am blessed to know. 

Yi Jae-ik, who showed me that children really do learn more when you give them freedom.