Inferential commentary abounds. Talk radio. Op ed pieces in the press. Blogs. Chat in the store check-out line. The President. The economy. Taxes. A quarterback who threw three interceptions. The climate. These are background noises to my ears. In almost all instances, I hear lay people who feel compelled to air their thought of the moment. It is all noise, except when the words “school” or “public education” are uttered. Then, my ears perk up faster than a cat hearing the tab of a Fancy Feast can being pulled back. Ffffft! I listen and pay attention and fume. I can abide lay opinions about many things, but not education.
Starting backwards with the solution to my fuming, I am resolved that we attempt to teach too much to children and we do not teach our too much successfully. We need to teach less well.
First, in order to teach less well, we need to identify the less that is important to be learned. This really is not that difficult. Take the great body of information in each subject area, identify only enduring concepts, skills and empirical processes that are essential for thinking like an expert-to-be in the subject area, and teach until all children have learned these. The real list of what is essential is not very big once all of the “oh, and did you knows…” are set aside. The barrier to doing this is that colleagues in our discipline may not want to reduce their “too much”. If they don’t, how will our reduction be perceived? Strange that the world was flat until a man they thought sailed over the edge came back.
We are abused by game shows that infer that the learning of trivia is the result of K-12 education. The facility to know that the Volga is a river that empties into an inland sea, the Caspian, is learned and remembered by studies that exceed the academic standards of our public schools. Books of facts are just that and, as books, the facts they contain can be referenced on demand when an educated person who knows how to use references needs to know a fact.
Second, take your time to explain clearly and until all children can explain their learning to others. Take your time to grow each child’s confidence in what they have learned and shed their inhibitions about inquiring into what they should learn next. Take your time, because there is no race against the clock or the table of contents. Children who know important things and how to think importantly can learn all the rest on their own.
These are not new thoughts. I began talking with colleagues about reducing the quantity of teaching in order to increase the quality of learning in the 80s. And, in the 90s and 00s. Talk about changing long ingrained habits did not lead to immediate change back then and leads to little change now. My colleagues are creatures of how they were taught by their teachers in grade school and how they were taught how to teach in their undergraduate and graduate programs, and their habits over time are reinforced by their faculty-mates. The common belief is that the body of knowledge we learned must be taught to children and that body just keeps getting bigger and bigger so we have to teach it faster and faster. How wrong! There is not enough time and even if there were, our efficiency at covering so much would be overwhelmed by our ineffectiveness at teaching any of it.
S0, when I feel admonished by lay critics of public education who criticize with the “…isn’t it awful that children don’t know…” or “… I was surprise that my sophomore can’t…”, I fume silently and consider that these adults are products of the way we should no longer teach. How could they know better? But, in a world with an ever growing universe of information and a need for generations of better educated adults, can we afford to teach children as we taught their parents? Not if I can help it.