What is school for?

Seth Godin wonders if we are even asking this. It’s one of those questions that most of us think we have an answer for, but when called upon to articulate our thoughts, we’re at a loss for specifics. This includes me; I have long had feelings of discontent regarding our nation’s educational system, but have never really arranged them into a coherent whole. This is the start of my attempt at that.

An easy launching point is discussing how our standard model of schooling is outdated and failing. Not to say there aren’t great teachers at work, or dedicated administrators trying hard to improve kids’ lives, but the system in which they work is just a wreck, and it makes it nearly impossible for them to achieve real results. And by real results, I don’t mean the functionalist, standardized test-oriented stuff. That approach is representative of the old model, one based in the Industrial Age, when public schools were meant to teach kids to read and write, and to sit in rows and follow instructions, so that they became living versions of interchangeable parts, able to be plugged into the economy as needed.

The Industrial Age is long past, and the worlds of today and tomorrow seem to require a very different skill set—one that includes creativity, adaptability, and “soft” skills—that schools are not providing because their very foundations are antithetical to this kind of training. As long as schools are about compliance and standardization, they will fail to produce the kinds of workers that the modern economy will need to function, but more importantly, they will fail to produce the kinds of citizens that our republic needs to survive, and the kinds of human beings that our world needs to thrive.

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I find several things very wrong with a typical school. First, there is no emphasis on creative thinking, the focus instead being on learning a pre-established curriculum that is predicated on rote memorization and aversion to failure. Why memorize things anymore? We live in a world where information is at our fingertips, and as Godin notes, “Anything worth memorizing is worth looking up.” Shouldn’t we spend more time teaching kids how to find information on their own, and how to properly vet it? Then there is the stigma against wrong answers: students are taught that being wrong is the worst possible outcome. But innovation can only flourish in a place where it is safe to fail, to be wrong and to learn lessons from your failure, and to try again. As Sir Ken Robinson says, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original,” and unfortunately schools are educating people out of their creativity. Our schools stigmatize mistakes to such an extent that students, instead of following their curiosity and genuinely engaging in a topic, will merely ask “will this be on the test?” This type of approach kills motivation. As Dana Suskind (drawing on the work of Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth) notes in her book Thirty Million Words, encouragement is far more effective and lasting with kids when it focuses on their tenacity, their “grit”—a determination to overcome obstacles by not giving up. Telling kids that they succeed or fail based on their first try at a subject creates a fixed mindset: they are either smart or stupid. But “process-based” praise creates kids who can tolerate failure by realizing that it is not due to their inherent qualities, but is instead something that can be solved by increasing their effort or simply trying different techniques. The result is a growth mindset that will last into adulthood, creating grown-ups who will be adaptable, self-confident, and won’t quit when faced with tough challenges.

Secondly, schools adhere to a constricting concept of intelligence that leaves behind so many young people who have much to contribute to the world. Schools emphasize a form of academic achievement which Robinson describes as progressing—from kindergarten through high school—as follows: waist up, then neck up, and finally to the left side of the brain. There is a narrow definition of intelligence that is dependent solely on academic success, and if your grades and test scores are not up to snuff, then you are not intelligent. But there are so many forms of intelligence (see Howard Gardner’s work on this), among them social (interpersonal) and emotional (intrapersonal). Kids receive no training in these hugely important areas, and so while they may end up succeeding academically, there is no guarantee that they will be well-rounded human beings who communicate well with others, are masters of their emotions, and recognize their own particular intellectual assets. Additionally, the excision of music, art, and dance from curricula robs students of a chance to develop any sort of musical, visual, or kinesthetic intelligence; however, these intelligences, often denigrated as a form of “play,” are crucial for helping develop creativity and generating new ways of seeing the world.

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Ultimately, there are still many who view schooling as a form of job training. They argue that the primary objective of school is to prepare kids for getting a job. Aside from the fact that I find this approach dehumanizing and restrictive, I would also argue that even if it were a worthy goal, the way in which we are going about it is fruitless. Robinson notes that we really don’t know what our future economy will look like, even in ten years. It is impossible to know exactly what jobs there will be in the coming decades, as more and more become automated or are better executed by AI. Given such uncertainty, is it not more prudent to educate kids in such a way that they will have the creativity, adaptability, and variety of intelligence to succeed in whatever scenario we find ourselves?

So, having aired some grievances against schooling as it is currently formulated, what would I suggest as a superior model? I have some ideas on this, and I will dedicate four future posts to outlining certain areas that I think schools should be for. Briefly stated, they are critical thinking, creativity, citizenship, and character. Some might claim that school does teach these things, but I’ll argue that the guises in which they currently manifest are far from useful, or even detrimental. Stay tuned!