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If our schools are peopled with students who wish to work, then we can optimize our schedules to get the most from their effort. But there are still changes that we must make in our schools if we wish to convert that work to learning. Unfortunately we use our class time as a chance to cram students’ minds with useless facts, instead of teaching them how to understand and use knowledge.
It is still a common misunderstanding that knowing a ream of facts generates intelligence. We believe that if we could only force a student to memorize enough facts then somehow understanding would magically appear to fill in the space that surrounds them. We believe this while ignoring the fact that in our own lives nothing works that way. Facts follow understanding, they are a side effect. When one understands a subject well enough the facts are easily remembered, because they make sense. But they are not a necessary component of understanding. Professional scientists, historians or scholars do not feel any need to memorize their subject areas. They realize that there are such things as reference works where they can find specific information when needed. Eventually through repeated use of the knowledge much of it is memorized, but only through constant contact. We should not expect this memorization from students who only have a short term exposure to the subject, and most of whom will never find a need for it.
The purpose of a public education is to provide a common understanding of our culture to our students. The purpose is not to make every student a professional in every subject area. So there is no need for our classes to be so obsessed with facts. What is asked of them is to help each student understand the subject: its purposes and procedures.
Our troubles are that we are attempting to make each student a professional, but in our misunderstanding we don’t even accomplish that. We burden our students with facts, but give them no real examples of what professionals do with those facts. We ask them to put in the work of a professional, but through our isolated subject areas, and teaching methods we prevent them from discovering the joys or frustrations of actually doing work in those subjects.
Our educational environment is a very artificial one, nothing like the world of knowledge outside of it. Never will a student see math, history, science or reading existing alone, separate from other skills and fields of study. Mathematics is a useless realm of knowledge except when used to solve problems, usually in the field of science. Historians must use reading and language skills to learn anything from historical documents, or must use science to learn from artifacts. Scientists spend just as much time writing papers as they do experimenting. Separation of these subjects is a fiction created by our school system. All that exists in our culture is human knowledge, and our various ways of understanding it. The danger of teaching our students otherwise is that they will go into these fields with this idea of division, and will stifle any true understanding that could take place there.
In trying to separate knowledge from its practical applications we hide from our students the ways in which knowledge is used. We teach students math without first showing them the problems that we require math to solve. We teach them science before they observe, question and experiment. We teach them vocabulary before they read great books. What we have forgotten is that scientists, engineers, historians, authors and inventor don’t sit around reading textbooks, or doing exercises. Those adults learn by doing and by satisfying their curiousity, and so do students.
I understand what our schools have done. They have decided that our students need a background in these subject areas, so that they will be able to join any career they like after school. So they have asked professionals what it is that people have learned in their field. And then they compiled this information into textbooks and gave them to the students. They have never stopped to ask whether those professionals got their information from a textbook.
So our students use these textbooks, and are being taught the history of science, the history of writing, the history of history. Yet we don’t teach them how people arrived at all this knowledge, or how they can arrive at more. They don’t learn how to learn, discover or create. In effect they don’t learn how knowledge is used. Students graduate from high school knowing how to do algebra, but not how to apply it, or why humans felt the need to create algebra in the first place. They witness no examples of knowledge in action. I have had students who did not believe me that anyone used algebra, who in their isolated and non-experiental classes had never learned how algebra is vital to science. They had never been asked to solve problems, and so they had never hit that wall and discovered that they needed to use algebra. In a world where knowledge is so foreign to our students it’s no wonder that those students when grown older never see the need to change our schools.
Students should learn their subjects by doing. Not so that they will know how to do it, but to gain an understanding of how our world works. It’s not important for students to memorize scientific facts, but it is important for them to understand the scientific process. And the way to learn that is not to read about what someone learned from it, but to experience it. They should learn what science is, so that they can understand the scientific culture they live in. Students need not memorize history, but they should understand how history affects us by wrestling with the same questions that historians do, and trying to find the answers. Students should learn about great books by trying to write their own. And students shouldn’t be taught math until they find a reason to use it.
Facts and skills are the lowest on the educational totem pole. What people need to learn is curiousity and understanding. When a scientist becomes curious about a subject they use their understanding of the field to research it. And when they come to a problem they cannot solve, they learn the skills needed to solve it, or enlist the help of others. Our school system is trying to cram all the facts and skills a person could need into the student’s head before they even enter the field. We’ve missed the fact that things are easy to learn when they make sense and are needed.
Adults learn when they need to learn, and when they want to learn. And despite our practices, students learn the same way. Knowledge and understanding cannot be implanted in our students. Our job is to provide them with a place to learn, and give them the need for knowledge. Let them do the rest.