Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (73 page)

Give me a motivated block builder with a jumbled box of LEGOs over a memorizing drone any day. If we can’t (or won’t, or don’t want to) win the race to the bottom, perhaps we could seriously invest in the race to the top.

Every year, more than a million kids are at exactly the right age to radically advance their understanding of leadership and human nature. They’re ready to dive deep into service projects, into understanding how others tick and, most of all, into taking responsibility.

And so, of course, the system teaches our best and brightest how to complete the square to solve a quadratic equation.

In case you missed it, it involves adding (b/a)[squared] to both sides of the equation and then solving from there.

It’s almost entirely abstract, it is certainly of zero practical use, and it’s insanely frustrating. The question worth asking is: Why bother?

One reason is that quadratic equations are the gateway to calculus, which is the gateway to higher math.

Another reason is that many of the elements of Newtonian mechanics involve similar sorts of analysis.

Both reasons are based on the notion that a civilized society learns as much as it can, and advancing math and science (and thus engineering) requires a wide base of students who are educated in this subject so that a few can go on to get advanced degrees.

Less discussed is the cost of this dark alley of abstract math. In order to find the time for it, we neglect probability, spreadsheets, cash flow analysis, and just about anything that will increase a student’s comfort and familiarity with the math that’s actually done outside of academia.

Also ignored is the benefit of learning how to actually figure things out. Because we’re in such a hurry to drill and practice the techniques on the SAT or Regents exam, we believe we don’t have time to have students spend a week to independently
invent
the method of completing the square. They don’t invent it, they memorize it.

Obedience again.

Precisely at the moment when we ought to be organizing school around serious invention (or reinvention and discovery), we wholeheartedly embrace memorization and obedience instead. Because it’s easier to measure, easier to control, and easier to sell to parents.

The puzzles of math and physics are among the most perfect in the world. They are golden opportunities to start young adults down the path of lifelong learning. The act of actually figuring something out, of taking responsibility for finding an answer and then proving that you are
right
—this is at the heart of what it means to be educated in a technical society.

But we don’t do that any longer. There’s no time and there’s no support. Parents don’t ask their kids, “what did you figure out today?” They don’t wonder about which frustrating problem is no longer frustrating. No, parents have been sold on the notion that a two-digit number on a progress report is the goal—if it begins with a “9.”

Here’s the nub of my argument: the only good reason to teach trig and calculus in high school is to encourage kids to become engineers and scientists. That’s it.

The way we teach it actually
decreases
the number of kids who choose to become engineers and scientists. It’s a screen, the hard course schools set up to weed out the less intent. In other words, we’re using the very tool that creates engineers to dissuade them from learning the material that would help them become engineers.

Advanced high school math is not a sufficient end in and of itself. If that’s the last class you take in math, you’ve learned mostly nothing useful. On the other hand, if your appetite is whetted and you have a door to advanced work opened, if you go on to design bridges and to create computer chips, then every minute you spent was totally worthwhile. And so the question:

Is the memorization and drill and practice of advanced math the best way to sell kids on becoming scientists and engineers?

If not, then let’s fix it.

(Have you ever met a math whiz or an engineer who explained that the reason she went on to do this vital work was that the math textbook in eleventh grade ignited a spark?)

Every once in a while, between third grade and the end of high school, a teacher offers the class a chance to do something interesting, new, off topic, exciting, risky, and even thrilling.

I’d venture it’s about 2% of the hours the student is actually in school. The rest of the time is reserved for absorbing the curriculum, for learning what’s on the test.

Just wondering: What would happen to our culture if students spent 40% of their time pursuing interesting discoveries and exciting growth opportunities, and only 60% of the day absorbing facts that used to be important to know?

Let’s assume for a moment that college sports serve an educational function, not just one of amusing alumni.

Who learns the most? I’m arguing that the quarterback and the coach take away the most lessons, because they’re making significant decisions and have the biggest opportunities for intellectual (as opposed to physical) failure in each game.

A running back might learn from a fumble (hold on tighter), but the person calling the plays and managing the team and organizing the defense probably gains a greater life lesson.

So let’s de-professionalize. Have a student (or a rotating cast of students) be the coach. And let students be the high school recruiters. And let students be the managers of as many elements of the stadium, the press box, and the concessions as possible.

And let’s have the director of the college musical be a student as well.

And the person in charge of logistics for homecoming.

Just about all of these jobs can be done by students. What would that lead to?

Well, first we’d have to get truly serious about giving these students the background and support to do these jobs well. Interesting to note that kids in college plays have taken ten years or more of drama classes, but the student director probably has no mentor, no rigor, and no background in doing his job. We’ve rarely taught students how to do anything that involves plotting a new course.

Would you be interested in hiring the kid who coached the team that won the Rose Bowl? How about working for someone who had handled logistics for 500 employees at a 50,000-seat stadium? Or having your accounting done by someone who learned the craft tracking a million dollars’ worth of ticket sales?

Is there a better way to learn than by doing?

Ten years ago, I was speaking to newspaper executives about the digital future. They were blithely ignorant of how Craigslist would wipe out the vast majority of their profits. They were disdainful of digital delivery. They were in love with the magic of paper.

In just ten years, it all changed. No interested observer is sanguine about the future of the newspaper, and the way news is delivered has fundamentally changed—after a hundred years of stability, the core business model of the newspaper is gone.

College is in that very same spot today.

Schools are facing the giant crash of education loans and the inability of the typical student to justify a full-fare education. It will be just a few years after most courses are available digitally—maybe not from the school itself, but calculus is calculus. At that point, either schools will be labels, brand names that connote something to a hiring manager, or they will be tribal organizers, institutions that create teams, connections, and guilds. Just as being part of the
Harvard Crimson
or
Lampoon
is a connection you will carry around for life, some schools will deliver this on a larger scale.

I guess it’s fair to say that the business of higher education is going to change as much in the next decade as newspapers did in the prior one.

Cathy Davidson teaches at Duke and her courses almost always have a waiting list. Interesting to note that in the first week, about 25% of the students in the class drop out. Why? Because the course doesn’t match the industrial paradigm, can’t guarantee them an easy path to law school, and represents a threat to established modes of thinking.

Bravo.

In her words, “Sometimes the line outside my office was as long as those at a crowded bakery on a Saturday morning, winding down the hall. Students wanted to squeeze every ounce of interaction from me because they believed—really believed—that what they were learning in my classes could make a difference in their life.”

The astonishing thing about this quote is that only one professor in a hundred could truly claim this sort of impact.

Davidson doesn’t use term papers in her class—instead, she has created a series of blog assignments as well as a rotating cast of student leaders who interact with each and every post. Her students write more, write more often, and write better than the ones down the hall in the traditional churn-it-out writing class.

She is teaching her students how to learn, not how to be perfect.

Just about everything that happens in school after second grade involves rearranging symbols. We push students to quickly take the real world, boil it down into symbols, and then, for months and years after that, analyze and manipulate those symbols. We parse sentences, turning words into parts of speech. We refine mathematical equations into symbols, and become familiar with the periodic table.

The goal is to live in the symbolic world, and to get better and better at polishing and manipulating those symbols. That’s what academics do.

I love stuff like this. The manipulation of ever-increasing levels of abstraction is high-octane fuel for the brain; it pushes us to be smarter (in one sense).

But at another level, it’s a sort of intellectual onanism. For a few math students, it’s a stepping stone on the way to big, new insights. For everyone else, it’s a distraction from truly practical conversations about whether to buy or lease a car, or how to balance the federal budget.

The reason we make fun of advanced research papers with titles like “Historic Injustice and the Non-Identity Problem: The Limitations of the Subsequent-Wrong Solution and Toward a New Solution” is that the academics are focusing all their attention on symbol manipulation—and since we, the readers, have no clue how the symbols relate to the real world, we’re lost.

Symbol manipulation is a critical skill, no doubt. But without the ability (and interest) in turning the real world into symbols (and then back again), we fail. Pushing students into the manipulation of symbols without teaching (and motivating) them to move into and out of this world is a waste.

It doesn’t matter if you’re able to do high-level math or analyze memes over time. If you’re unable or unwilling to build bridges between the real world and those symbols, you can’t make an impact on the world.

Back to the original list of what our society and our organizations need: we rarely stumble because we’re unable to do a good job of solving the problem once we figure out what it is. We are struggling because
there’s a shortage of people willing to take on difficult problems and decode them with patience and verve.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

—Isaac Asimov

School is not merely vocational. It used to be, a long time ago, but then, in addition to work training creeping up, the Academy crept down. It became important to our culture for even the street sweeper to know what a star was, to have a basic understanding of the free market, and to recognize Beethoven when he heard it.

In the rush to get a return on our investment, sometimes we forget that having knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a cornerstone of what it means to be part of our culture.

The shift now is this: school used to be a one-shot deal, your own, best chance to be exposed to what happened when and why. School was the place where the books lived and where the experts were accessible.

A citizen who seeks the truth has far more opportunity to find it than ever before. But that takes skill and discernment and desire. Memorizing a catechism isn’t the point, because there’s too much to memorize and it changes anyway. No, the goal has to be creating a desire (even better, a need) to know what’s true, and giving people the tools to help them discern that truth from the fiction that so many would market to us.

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who sought and found out how to serve.

—Albert Schweitzer