Hello, clients, students and readers!

A quick note before we get started: I’ve decided to skip the fieldnotes section in today’s post. Okay - let’s begin.

Part I: Words from My Students

They have a lot to say.

“In today’s world, schools constantly criticize you and your work with letters and numbers, which doesn’t accurately reflect a true level of expertise that any given student may have. This creates a problem, where students who have talent in school start struggling when they lose self-respect and confidence in their work. The cause of this is the grading system that is used in most schools. When you get a bad grade on an assignment, you are given a score, an assessment of yourself. Just one of these bad grades, while ultimately not having much consequence, can make students lose much of their self-respect. This connects to the reading by Joan Didion…She says that the loss of self-respect causes you to focus on your failures and hinders your ability to see where you succeed. This is what happens to many students who start to have declining grades in school. While they may be smart, their confidence in themselves declines due to one small assessment, which causes a lack of effort, leading to more bad grades, and the cycle continues.”

- Another anonymous high schooler

Part II: A Reflection

Let’s get deep.

Today, I’d like to continue the conversation we began in my previous post. What did my student mean when he said, “If you give a child a strict schedule for his formative years and then abandon him to the world, he becomes prey to people offering structure and order”? 

This comment brings to mind my concern that most American schools condition students to live, and think, reactively – that is, to be passive receivers of information and tasks, rather than active seekers after knowledge and generators of questions.

Let me explain. For the past few weeks, I’ve been using excerpts from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers as teaching material for my high school students. At one point, the book discusses the childhood of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, focusing especially on the advantages he gained from attending a progressive school that instilled in its students a sense of healthy entitlement re: their own educations. The following revelation in particular has been shocking and thrilling my students all month: “When his math teacher realized he [Oppenheimer] was bored, she sent him off to do independent work”(pg. 108-109).

This scene lies so far outside the realm of most young peoples’ educational experience that it seems almost unbelievable to them. Usually, students who alert teachers to the fact that they’re bored (purposefully or not) incur immediate blame and censure – even at the university level. That’s because very few teachers currently have the ability (the prerogative, the training, the resources) to empower their students to learn in different ways or at different paces. They work with strict, inflexible schedules; large, mismatched classes; and uniform goals.

On the flip side, very few students today have any idea how to engage productively with opportunities to structure their own educational experience – probably because they’re discouraged from doing so at every turn, from the moment they enter school to the moment they leave it. When did you last hear of a teacher inviting students to speak up when they’re bored, or when a lesson isn’t engaging them? Our standard educational model does not encourage learners to honor their own desire to learn. In fact, it trains them to suppress this desire when it goes unfulfilled, in order to avoid disrupting the flow of the lesson.

In this way, students learn to cope with their boredom rather than addressing its causes. They learn to do the bare minimum required to ensure that their lack of engagement (and progress) goes unnoticed. And, worst of all, they learn that the true goal of educational institutions is not learning but the acquisition of a nearly endless capacity to zone out while appearing attentive, to complete meaningless tasks as quickly as possible, and to stop caring about what they want or how they feel. Intellectual alienation becomes the norm.

But picture a school in which teachers could respond to boredom by empowering students to take an individual approach to any given subject. Picture a school in which students could be trusted to work independently on something challenging and enriching. How could this be accomplished? The students would have to be coached from a young age on how to pursue (and enjoy) learning sans monitored instruction, and their teachers would have to be given the freedom, training and resources to prioritize intellectual growth over classroom management. Imagine the possibilities…

And keep on imagining them, because that’s all I have to say for now. Next week, I’ll continue to work towards an answer to the question I asked at the very top of this reflection. I’ll start by exploring some evidence for my concerns about passive learning as an educational norm, focusing specifically on the decline of divergent thinking scores among students in the United States. If there’s anything you think I should know before I start writing, feel free to send me a message. I’d love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

Warmly,

Your tutor