There’s nothing like pointing to a page

All three of my children attend public school. I feel very meh… leaning yikes about it, but we don’t have the thousands of dollars needed to move them into private schools. There are some affordable private schools near us, but they usually require a side of tithe which I don’t have interest in, personally. I also don’t love the idea of them only interacting with kids whose families can afford private educations. A lot can be learned in a diverse environment. So, we send our kids on buses to schools in our neighborhood. Whenever I ask, they say they are happy at school with their friends.

From where I sit, it seems as though the goal of education morphed from acquiring practical life knowledge to winning best score. It’s shocking how quickly my children can calculate the percentage points they’ll lose (usually to the hundredth decimal) if they opt out of a homework assignment. But when I ask what subject they are learning about, they can’t put it into words, and I don’t think that’s because they aren’t paying attention. From the outside their learning process seems so intangible and disjointed. The requirements of the wider school system are practically worthless in terms of a forming cohesive worldview, which is still the goal, is it not?

In my seventh-grader’s world history class, a typical assignment is to read a four-paragraph article detailing the entire Ming Dynasty and then answer five multiple choice questions for a grade out of 10. This is likely the only time she’ll encounter any questions on the subject so there is no incentive to commit anything to long-term memory. The points have been earned. My kid is given link after link to read (who are we kidding—scan for key words) in order to answer a few questions on her device. This particular teacher is not a favorite, she seems more low effort than most, but I don’t blame her. If I had the ability to copy and paste a few links and call it a day, I’d be tempted too. The trouble is the subject of history really requires some framing and relatable context, especially the first time you are introduced to the concept as more than just the reason for a holiday (as it is commonly presented in the elementary grades). The job of a good teacher is to talk to these preteens in a way they understand and then connect their daily lives to the lives of those who lived before. That’s how history sticks.

The kind of “it can’t happen here” thinking that we are dealing with now is an issue with nationalism and exceptionalism, a natural result to teaching history without context. When we teach history as though we aren’t also a part of it, we feel like we can’t affect it either. We’re just here to learn the facts of what happened to some other people. Teaching history as if we understand it with perfect accuracy is disingenuous. We only know the sides of the story as they have been passed down. I don’t think it’s ever possible to understand a historical event without living it. History might serve us better taught as patterns that all of humanity are susceptible to; the rise and fall of empires and the early warning signs, the quirks of human nature that lead to us to act against our own interest, or easily avoided mistakes that cost lives or progress. How would we start to think differently about ourselves if instead of names and dates, we worked to memorize our social patterns? I’m not suggesting the names and dates aren’t worthy of study, but are they most important? Surely, remembering the example set by Napoleon is more important than the man’s birthday. Do students even need to remember anything in a world where they can figure it out in the time it takes them to ask Siri?  At least when you write your answers on a paper test you have a few meaningful interactions with the material, first when you answer the questions and again when you receive your graded paper back, hopefully with notes from your qualified teacher who spent time and effort making the material relevant to you.

But as of now, none of this matters. Our school system has invested in a chromebook for every student and universal software for assignments and grades. The lessons must fit the tools, not the other way around. We’ve lost sight of the goal. We’ve attempted to solve a deep, long-term problem with a shallow, short-term solution. We needed the job to be more appealing to qualified professionals, and we’ve made it less so. We’ve turned education into an elaborately scored system of busywork for teacher and student. There seems to be an enormous chasm between the people studying the science of how we learn and the people deciding how teachers can teach.