I originally posted this on my old website in November 2002.
This is the final draft of my fourth essay for Writing 121, a college composition class I took at Rainier High School during my Senior year in 2000. The citing tags refer to an essay written by Richard Rodriguez, which was included in the textbook for the course, the title of which I have long forgotten. This paper makes some interesting points about the current state of American public education, and suggests why we are falling behind the rest of the world and what we might do to catch up.
Education: What's the point?
By Robert West
“Education? What's the point? Why, to learn stuff, of course. After all, isn’t that why people go to school: to learn how to read and write and do arithmetic. Isn’t that the point?”
To most people, that would be the answer to the title question. It seems so obvious, too. The point of education is to learn stuff. It’s a simple answer, and it makes perfect sense. Too bad it’s completely wrong.
“But the point of education is to learn stuff.” Many of those people would continue to argue that the point of education is to learn things, but I say no, no, no, no, no. The point of education is not to learn things. Well, at least not entirely.
Gaining knowledge is a part of education. Acquiring skills is another part. These are necessary for education; they must be achieved for education to be successful. In that way, they are points of education. However, gaining knowledge and acquiring skills are not the main points of education, or at least they shouldn’t be.
People naturally gain knowledge and skills through life experience. Formal education, The System, attempts to teach students the knowledge and skills that would be most beneficial for them to have. It attempts to be efficient in order to teach the students as much as possible. Much of what is taught in schools could be learned by individuals later in life. Schools just try to speed up the process. After all, we can’t just walk into a convenience store and pick up a can of Knowledge Soda with lunch, nor can we send $29.95 plus $4.95 shipping and handling to a mail order house in Cleveland for some audio CDs we could listen to at night and have the entire encyclopedia in our brain after one night. Learning doesn’t just happen. It takes time, effort, ambition.
So, what happens after we’ve learned how to find the volume of a box and memorized the presidents of the United States in order? Do we just file the information away in our minds until someone hands us a box and says, “Find the volume,” or someone asks us who the 23rd president of the United States was? Or is there more to it than that?
Despite what some people may say, I believe there is more to it. I believe that the point of education should be to teach students how to use the information and skills they acquire. I’m not saying that schools should stop teaching students skills and information. I’m just saying that they should change their emphasis.
An example will illustrate what is wrong with The System. Consider children being taught about a hot stove. A teacher gathers the children around a stove. The teacher says, "This is a stove. The stove is hot, so you shouldn't touch it." The teacher then questions the students, "Why shouldn't you touch the stove?" "Because it's hot," the students reply in unison. The teacher then points out a pot of boiling water on one of the burners. "This pot of water is on the stove, so you shouldn't touch it," the teacher says, and then asks, "Why shouldn't you touch the pot of water?" "Because it's on the stove," the students reply. The lesson continues on in this way, with the teacher presenting the students with information about what things are hot and then asking them to repeat it.
The problem with this is that it fails to make the students think about how this information applies to them. The children learn that they shouldn't touch the stove because it is hot, and that they shouldn't touch the pot of water because it is on the stove, but they may not make the connection that the pot of water may be hot, nor would they necessarily make the connection that if they touch the stove or the pot, they may get burned. The students are not expected to actually think about what the information means and are not given the skills to do so. They fail to understand what is meant by the stove being hot, why the things on the stove are hot, or what may happen if they touch them.
A solution would be to let the students find out from experience that the stove is hot. Let them feel the heat radiating from it. Let them see a pot of water boil over the burner. Let them feel the heat of the steam. Even allow them to help boil the water. Show them that if the stove is not on, the water won’t get hot. Allow the students to make the connections between steam and heat. The students would be told what was going on by the teacher, and at the same time they would be seeing the steam, feeling the heat, boiling the water themselves, learning the way they learn best.
This brings me to another point. No matter how much the Department of Education would like them to be, students are not mindless automatons. Students are individuals, and they learn in different ways. Some learn better by seeing something done. Others can learn just fine by being told something. Still others learn best by experience. Students learn at different speeds as well. Some students learn things quickly. Other students learn at a slower pace. The System tries to teach as many students as possible while wasting as little time as possible. The System establishes a set amount of time to teach certain things, a time it considers adequate to teach most of the students whatever is being taught. The students that learn the material move on. Those that don’t are separated from the rest of the class for as long as it takes for them to learn it. While their peers continue to bigger and better things, they are permanently set back. Meanwhile, the students that understand the material quickly are forced to wait for the rest of the class, holding them back from their full potential. As a result, the students who learn faster end up being bored out of their minds, while the slower students end up being left behind, learning nothing.
There is a better way to teach students, which I call Optimal Learning. I can’t explain it myself, so I’ll use a real life example. UCLA psychologist Jim Stigler videotaped a Japanese schoolteacher teaching her fifth grade class. At the beginning of the video, she quickly bows to the class and says, "Today we will be studying triangles." She points out to the 44 children that they have already learned to find the area of a rectangle, and, after handing out a variety of different paper triangles, asks them to consider "the best way to find the area of a triangle." The children spend 14 1/2 minutes discussing the problem with each other and manipulating the triangles with scissors and paste. In the end, nine children take turns at the blackboard demonstrating how they reached their solutions. 52 minutes after she bowed to the students at the beginning of the lesson, the teacher had shown every student how every solution was related to the same formula: The area equals the base times the height, divided by two. This way of teaching helps all the students to learn as the students who grasp the concept immediately have time to consider it and work with it, while the slower students get the advantage of having the same concept demonstrated in different ways, so they can understand it too. All of the students were able to learn in the way that was best for them, whether it was by seeing, hearing, or doing.
The students that are most in danger in The System are not the ones that The System doesn’t teach well enough, they are the ones The System teaches too well: the overachievers. These are the students that will do anything to please the teacher. These students become the teacher’s favorites, and they are what The System calls perfect students. They always do as they are told, always finish all their work ahead of time, and always accept the praise they receive as payment in full for their extra effort. But, in their attempts to be what the teacher wants, they end up giving up something even more important . . . Themselves.
Richard Rodriguez, the son of Mexican immigrants in California, gave up his culture in order to get an education. Rodriguez felt ashamed of his parents and their lack of education. As a result, he looked up to his teachers instead. His teachers were his only role models during his early schooling. His desire at the time focused on reading and becoming like his teachers. About his teachers, he said, “Any book they told me to read, I read—then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed.” (4th-571) He was so obsessed with being like his teachers that he gave up trying to be himself. In the end, he realized that he was without a position or point of view. While writing his dissertation to earn his PhD, he realized that he “knew too much (and not enough) to be able to write anything but sentences that were overly cautious, timid, strained brittle under the heavy weight of footnotes and qualifications. I seemed unable to dare a passionate statement. I felt drawn by professionalism to the edge of sterility, capable of no more than pedantic, lifeless, unassailable prose.” (4th-584) If Rodriguez had maintained his culture while pursuing his education, he would have the point of view that resulted from his culture. Instead, his imitation of his teachers left him without a culture of his own. Rodriguez abandoned his culture trying to be what the system wanted him to be, instead of simply trying to be himself. Eventually, he found that he had been harmed by that. He had become so focused on being what The System wanted him to be, that he had ended up without a mind of his own.
Instead of trying to make students into what it wants them to be, The System must abandon its policy of “We are the Department of Education. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” and encourage students to be themselves. It must help students look at themselves and their way of life so they don’t abandon it. One way to do this is in the form of a class taught at Stanford University called Cultures, Ideas, Values. The class focused on North and South America and the cultures that have come together in those places. With students from many different backgrounds and cultures, the class became what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “contact zone,” a place where people from two or more cultures come together, explaining their culture in order to make the others understand it, at the same time gaining understanding of the other cultures. This class teaches the students cultural knowledge, not only of other cultures, but also of their own, and helps them to understand who they are.
Optimal Learning understands that students are different and seeks to promote those differences. In order to do that, a class such as Cultures, Ideas, Values must be added to the curriculum of every education level. This class utilizes a system of discussion developed by Paulo Freire called “problem-posing” education, in which there is no one single teacher. Instead, there is an entire class of “teacher-students,” discussing things in order to understand them better. In this case, the students and teacher would be engaged in discussion about each other’s cultures, providing the students with enough knowledge about themselves to give them their own perspective. With this knowledge and perspective, students could then be given things to learn. They would learn in the same manner as the Japanese students, with students given the opportunity to learn the way they learn best, and with the students who learn faster demonstrating to the slower students how they learned the information. Once all the students had learned the information, they could discuss the uses for the information in Freire’s “problem-posing” system, discovering how the information applies to them and seeing how it would apply to others.
The students involved in Optimal Learning would no longer simply have information. They would know how they could use the information in their lives and would be able to see how it relates to their culture. They would also see how the information relates to other people and cultures. The students would be very knowledgeable about their own culture, and would also know about other cultures. They would be able to take criticism and would become more tolerant toward ideas that are in conflict with their own beliefs, thanks to the experience of being faced with those conflicts in the “contact zone” of the classroom. They would still have their own perspective, but they would be able to see other perspectives as well. In general, the students would be better individuals with skills to understand other people’s beliefs and to use their knowledge in their lives.
Education is not just the acquisition of knowledge. Education involves being able to use one’s knowledge. The students resulting from Optimal Learning would be able to do just that. Allowing students to discover for themselves who they are would allow them to become better people in society, with the ability to see how things will affect them. At the same time, letting them experience other cultures would give them the skills needed to understand ideas from other perspectives that they might not agree with. In short, they would be more tolerant of others and better suited to solving problems they encounter. If society could be made up of these kinds of people, many of the world’s problems would probably be solved. Such a society would take a long time to attain, but it would bring many advantages along with it. Perhaps, it is a worthwhile goal.
© Robert D. West: 2000, 2003.
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