Letter from America #2: Education
Curiosity: A state in which you want to learn more about something.
Learn: To gain knowledge or skills.
Question: Is curiosity a prerequisite for learning?
Looked at one way, these are fundamental to the nature of education.
Currently, this is not the case. Education is considered valid only if it is quantifiable. Now, who would want to quantify education and determine a student’s value by measurement? One obvious answer is, following the money trail, the people who profit from the tools which we are told enable the standardization of student learning. You might ask, “What is the virtue of standardizing student test performance?” It has the same benefit as assembly lines in factories where quality can be identified by perfect sameness and rapid production. There’s no place in the assembly plant producing automobiles for variation. Likewise, there is no place in our Ritalin-rich classrooms for deviation. Isn’t comparing students to automobiles a bit of a stretch? Yet, that is precisely the view of many educational policy makers. They believe, and I do not doubt their sincerity, that if we can only refine the curriculum, the texts, and the methods of our schools, what they consider an American school system at risk would regain its health and in the process help America become a leader in world affairs beyond the current drive for military might.
A friend and I were discussing her ten-year-old son’s uneven performance in school. I knew him to be intelligent and inquisitive. Her inclination was toward the use of commonplace medications like Ritalin and its generic form methylphenidate. This would allow him to focus and please his teachers and most likely raise his test scores and, presumably, lead him toward College entry. Tricky territory. Her child, their future. I voiced some concern safely in the abstract with my notion that new ideas and creativity don’t rise from focusing on the narrow range of subject matter the school presents. I continued recklessly with some thoughts that were alien, irrelevant, and downright abstract to her but completely commonplace to my way of thinking. For example, that great ideas are formed not out of, but in spite of, what is taught and new ideas don’t arise from following the K-12 curriculum meant to produce model graduates who’ve demonstrated proficiency in approved subject matter. Did my friend accept my arguments? No, of course not, because she viewed the success of her son in the school system as an indicator of his success in future endeavors. And for this I had no response. The idea of conforming to the quantifiable requirements of the school system has become ingrained in the most caring and intelligent parents.
Despite the lingering attitude by now traditional parents, the current dysfunctional educational scheme is failing. Oddly, teachers are, in effect, outsiders who can evaluate the public perspective. And, being one of these un-ingrained, retired teachers, some comparisons come to mind. Take the popular definition of insanity, repeating the same actions and expecting different results. Despite the yearly drone of many-colored sameness, educational leadership still yearns for some minor but spectacular original student thought. Will twelve years in the pressure cooker of the school system emphasizing the goal of achieving high grades yield such a result? Not likely. We might take a cue from the way evolution works, not from perfectly replication DNA structure but rather from genetic mistakes leading to new life forms. Then there are computers that, by most definitions, can never think as humans do. Why not? Because we are a blessed, illogical race of screw-ups. After a sublime series of trials which yield unsatisfactory results, we will venture into the ridiculous, the absurd, and we will discover, if we’re lucky, the miraculous. Machines don’t function this way, and are not meant to. And despite the often for-profit proclamations of policy makers, anything that could be construed as original thought in the mind of a young person does not arise from machine-like activity.
Learning by itself requires healthy discipline and expands our mental toolkit. What we study in school shows us worlds of information, beautiful in their complexity, a vast laboratory ready for experimentation, what Einstein might have called thought experiments. But, rather than allowing young people the freedom of thought to pursue ideas, they are evaluated by state standards. The element of curiosity has no place there because 1) curiosity can’t be quantified and 2) it can’t even be taught in the first place.
Curiosity, then wanting to learn more about something, is handled in the school system by simply offering a more advanced form of what was already been covered. That, in turn, is tested and the cycle continues until graduation where the student and his family are presented with the option of lifelong student debt to pay for an often unattainable, mundane career. More insanity.
