Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

To Create the “New Normal” of Education, Start With the “Old Normal” of Learning

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As educators, parents, and students have scrambled over the past couple of months to figure out how to move school online quickly and at scale, I can’t help but be reminded of a pivotal scene in the movie Apollo 13. After having to abandon their trip to the moon due to an explosion, the three astronauts suddenly find themselves struggling for oxygen in their emergency home in a lunar module designed to support only two people. Faced with quickly rising carbon dioxide levels, engineers in Houston dealing with this totally unexpected crisis suddenly have to design a makeshift air filter using only materials that the astronauts can access and assemble in space. As the mission commander says, “I suggest you gentleman figure out how to put a square peg in a round hole…rapidly.”

That’s in essence is what schools around the world have been trying to do these past weeks thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, the very rapid transition from school buildings and classrooms to Zoom rooms and Google Docs over a period of just days has posed what may be the most complex problem-solving moment ever in education. As UC Berkeley historian Elena Conis said in a recent article in The Atlantic, “There is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.”

Thirty days or so in, the outcomes are mixed. Some schools where students have laptops and bandwidth have weathered the shift fairly well. Others where many students have little or no technology or access have been forced to close up shop for the rest of the year citing the unfairness of being able to meet some but not all of their students’ needs. Some have tried to totally replicate school online, complete with time schedules and having students wear their school uniforms to virtual “class.” Others have taken a more student-centered approach, relaxing curriculum standards and even eliminating grading. For most, school is “open” online, but it’s a far cry from the school that was open down the block.

Transformation?

To hear traditional and social media tell it, the “transformation” of schools is now finally, definitely, without a doubt, unquestionably, most certainly on the horizon. The crisis, experts say, will lay waste to much of “school” as we know it. Education will become more equitable, more “blended” with technology, more responsive to the needs of children facing an increasingly complex, uncertain future. With millions of parents gaining a new appreciation for the work of educators, teachers will be paid more, and they’ll gain more agency over what is taught and how. We’ll have an improved “new normal” when schools eventually do reopen in communities around the world.

Color me skeptical.

I don’t doubt that some things will change, but I wonder how much of that change will be truly “transformative.” Our collective, shared experience of school has deep roots. Change of any type feels especially risky when it has to do with our children. And as much as the Coronavirus has created a profound disruption to the system, I’m unconvinced that it will fundamentally shift the deep-seated power relationships among administrators, teachers, parents, students, policy makers, and curriculum and technology vendors in ways that will allow for a significant alteration to the fundamental day to day story of school.

If we are truly serious about real change in education, our conversations have to go much deeper than a focus on new technologies or tweaked teaching practices. If we sincerely want to create a better, “new normal” for kids in schools once this crisis is over, one that truly transforms the experience in ways that are urgently required to help them navigate what lies ahead, we need to start by embracing the “old normal” of learning first.

The irony is that schools were not built for learning. Research shows that very little of what kids “learn” in a curricular sense is remembered for the long term, nor is it relevant to or applicable in their daily lives. It’s an unpleasant truth that makes us uncomfortable. But it is a truth. Just look at the many recent blog posts and Tweets from semi-embarrassed parents-turned-teachers lamenting how little they actually remember from high school that they can help their kids with. Learning in school simply isn’t like learning in real life.

A Learning Moment

Take the current crisis as an example. Aside from being a moment of huge disruption for all of us, this may be the most profound moment of deep professional learning that any of us have ever experienced regardless if we’re in health care, business, politics, service, or any other industry you can name. Educators in particular are literally learning their way through the crisis, day to day, hour to hour, and the conditions required for powerful learning are obviously present: a deep engagement in meaningful, real-world problem solving that is driven by questions, is intensely collaborative, is challenging in productive ways, and isn’t constrained by a linear, dated “curriculum” that dictates what comes next. No one is doing this for a grade; we’re doing this for a goal, namely to try to serve our students as best we can under exceedingly difficult circumstances.

Those conditions and others like them are and always have been how all humans learn best. And all humans know it. Learning is as natural as breathing when there is a real purpose behind it and when we have the freedom to learn on our own terms, when we’re not confined and coerced by external systems and traditions. Yet, we humans seem to forget that when it comes to the experience our kids have in school. In school, we seem to think learning happens only when it’s age-grouped and graded, or when it’s chunked into time blocks and subjects and meets some predetermined outcomes. Students have “learned” it seems only when they have consumed a mandated bucket of information or content and been tested to make sure they consumed it adequately.

In other words, in schools, we seem to think learning happens when it doesn’t look like real life. Common sense and personal experience tells us otherwise.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that kids shouldn’t be in community schools, in classrooms with caring, supportive adults who can push them to create and connect and change the world in powerful ways that they might not realize on their own. And I’m also not saying that there aren’t important things for students to learn in school. No question, the future will require people who are expert communicators, who have a global lens through which to live their lives, who are expert “crap detectors,” and, most importantly, who are agile, motivated, powerful learners who have the skills, literacies, and dispositions to find and solve real problems with others on an ongoing basis. It will demand people who can learn just in time, not just in case. In that regard, schools have a huge role to play in the developing mastery in all of our children and communities no matter what the post-pandemic world looks like.

Difficult Choices

But as we have been making difficult choices in these weeks about schools and education as we transition online, we’ve been reminded of those things that we value most: relationships, community, the curiosity of kids, and the power of real learning. And we’ve been surfacing other things that are simply not as important. Grades have been suspended in many schools. College entrance exams have been cancelled or modified. Many states aren’t giving standardized tests. Schools are cutting curriculum and pulling back on homework. At a moment when we have record numbers of students feeling stressed, anxious, and depressed, those choices suggest a real opportunity to ask some difficult questions about what we truly want schools to be in the future. As in which of those things remain important, and which will we choose to put on our “To (Un)Do Lists”?

In moving schools online in the face of this crisis, most seem to have learned how to put that metaphoric square peg in a round hole. That’s not a bad thing, but as with the astronauts, it’s just life support, a way to survive this momentary disaster. But the discussions we have and the decisions we make when the dust finally settles from the Coronavirus disruption will determine whether or not our schools and our students will just survive this moment or whether they will actually thrive in the future. For the best chance at the latter, those discussions and decisions need to be held through the lens of how powerful learning actually happens in each of us in the real world, not how we have long tried to force learning to happen in this thing we call school.

The Parent Opportunity

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Right now, we have millions of parents shouldered up to their children trying to help them do school. I’m reading a fair share of both funny and sad accounts of parents who are trying to navigate this new role of surrogate teacher or coach in terms of setting schedules or giving feedback or making the technology work or just getting “coverage”. Frustration levels are high, and my sense is that most parents can’t wait for this to be over and will be happy to send their kids back to school. Not all, but most.

For progressive educators who are looking to this “crisis” as a way to make real change happen in schools, the opportunity right now is not to change practice but to change minds. Now is not the time to figure out what parts of the school experience are truly broken and what we need to create as an alternative. As an old friend reminded me recently, now is about “getting thru,” about making sure that we survive the disruption not just in a curriculum outcomes sense but in a health and wellness sense as well. People are grieving. Forced change like this is stressful to the max. We need to minimize the upset, not create more.

That said, I think all of us would be remiss if we didn’t use this moment to begin to build a different conversation around learning. Again, all these millions of parents in close proximity to their kids, observing “learning” right in front of them. It’s a moment that will be relatively (I hope) short-lived, yet it’s also a moment where we if we seize it, allows us to reflect deeply as school communities about the central commitment that we share for our kids, that they become powerful learners in the world. It’s a moment where we can begin to change the larger story of school.

Getting Meta

In other words, now is the time to get meta with parents, students, and teachers about learning. And we can do it in the service of learning about learning. Whether through survey or live Zoom discussions or email or whatever else, right now is when we need to be asking these questions and engaging in these conversations:

  • When is your child most engaged with their online school experience? Why? What drives that engagement?
  • When is your child bored or disengaged? Why?
  • When do your children feel joy in learning? What circumstances lead to that?
  • What are you learning about your children during this experience? How does that learning happen?
  • How are your children’s learning skills improving during this time? What’s changing about them as learners?

I’m sure there are others, and we can vary them for the audience, but you get the idea. We can collect and share these answers at the appropriate time as a way of sparking a larger conversation about what learning really is, what aspects of school really aren’t working, and how we can bring more joy and love of learning to “real” school moving forward. And it would be a spark built on our personal, collective experience as qualitative researchers asking relevant, important questions about our kids.

Let me say it again: we need to do this work now. I really believe this is the real opportunity of this crisis for those who have been itching to reimagine school. Real change has to start with a community-wide, shared understanding of what learning actually is, how it happens, and what constrains it. This moment, when so many families are huddled inside together trying to make sense of school, we can be creating a powerful conversation about learning that will serve us all when we’re done “getting thru.”

More on Stories, More on “Goods”

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I’ve been thinking more about story since writing this recent post, and I’ve come across some more reading and thinking that I’m trying to make sense of. (If you haven’t read that post, this one will make much more sense if you do.) So in the spirit of blogging my way to greater understanding…

Next week marks the release here in the US of a new Will Storr book titled The Science of Storytelling, and from the reviews that I’ve come across so far, I’m intrigued enough to have queued up the download on my Kindle when it comes out. One of the most interesting reviews of the book comes from Big Think, where I was struck by this particular description of Storr’s thesis:

In his latest book, “The Science of Storytelling,” journalist and novelist Will Storr opens with a simple yet disconcerting message: “Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it.” This is why we’re all hallucinating. We’re not living reality as much as constructing one based on personal history and environment. Over 7 billion human animals walking around, telling ourselves stories about ourselves, using them as emotional shields to guard against the ravages of an indifferent universe. That’s how powerful stories are.

I think the reason that “Humans might be…” part strikes me so much is that it’s unpleasant truth-telling, which is pretty obviously the phase that I’m in when it comes to life and particularly education. And because it again goes back to that Harari quote from my previous post about almost everything being a fiction. It’s all narrative. And we create the narratives and fictions we need to find some in the moment meaning to our existences, even though one outcome to all of this could very well be that we’re all just dust in the end. (Which, while somewhat depressing is also somewhat freeing.)

Our Stories

Anyway, it’s good to be reminded that we are always telling stories about ourselves, and that our stories really are the way that we make sense of life. Without story, it would be a pretty bleak existence. Thing is, we choose the stories we tell about ourselves and one another and our institutions. If you’re a Bernie supporter, you’ve chosen a much different story from all those Trump supporters out there, and vice versa. And that’s because the story you’ve chosen resonates more closely with your own personal framing. But neither is necessarily “right,” although it feels like we need one or the other to be. In the case of schools, if you think an education is something you “get,” then you tell the traditional story of school. If you think an education is something you “learn,” then your story is vastly different. And honestly, I’m not sure there’s more space in-between those two than there is between Bernie and Donald.

Good stories require that a character (or an institution) changes. At some point, according to Big Think’s review, “the protagonist faces an ultimate challenge which forces them to confront life-altering change.” And I can’t help but think about schools as I read that. I think schools are on the brink of an existential challenge, one that goes to the heart of “Why School?” It doesn’t get more foundational than “Why do schools exist?” yet I don’t think many educators are asking that question. And I don’t think we can effectively craft a new story until we’ve done that. If you go back to my previous post again, I talk about David Labaree’s distinction between two narratives of schooling, that of being a “public good” whose role is to help children become good citizens and problem solvers and humans, and that of being a “private good” whose role is to create or maintain status and access to a greater degree of personal success rather than societal improvement.

That in and of itself is great conversation to be having in schools right now. Not just in the sense of articulating as a community which story you want the school experience to be about but also owning which story you are actually living. (So much discomfort there.)

Ambiguity Sucks

Storr also writes about how we can’t live with stories that are incomplete. Our brains require us to fill in the gaps because we just hate ambiguity (especially true when dealing with stories that revolve around our young.) And, importantly, he says that we want to be in control of the story, even though, again, control is just a fiction as well. Our fatal flaw as individuals and institutions is that we don’t understand that we really aren’t in control of much of anything, and not acting with that understanding. I mean, do schools act as if they understand that they really aren’t in control of what kids are learning?

It’s interesting, and there’s more that I’ll try to sort out in later posts, perhaps after I’ve actually read the book itself.

But I want to briefly capture one other molecule-shifting idea that I found this morning after tracking down more information on a mention Storr made of “eudaimonic happiness” in his TedX Talk on “The Science of Storytelling.” Defined, a eudaimonic life is “to be had whenever we are in pursuit of fulfilling our potential,” which leads us to finding “more meaning and purpose in life.” It’s based on the Aristotelian view that we are innately driven to pursue our potential, to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

But here’s a bit of an extended snip from a Psychology Today article that focuses on “eudaimonic happiness” with some added emphasis:

But to realize our potential, we need what Aristotle called “real goods.” By real goods, he meant those things necessary for the development of our potential, such as shelter, clothing, food, and friends, but also arts, music, literature, and culture. In the modern world, there are certain things that we need to be able to do in the pursuit of fulfilling our individual potential, and, in this sense, real goods are defined by their necessity to us as individuals.

The obvious example is that we need money, and so it becomes a real good. But there is also what Aristotle referred to as the “golden mean,” which is the right amount of the good: too little and we are in deficit of what we need to pursue our potential, as in times of famine when people’s potential is literally thwarted; too much and what was a real good becomes an “apparent good”—something we don’t need.

Apparent goods are the things we simply don’t need. They may give us pleasure, but we don’t actually need them. The important thing is not to confuse them with real goods, which can lead us to think we do need them.

Modern-day positive psychologists are now taking these ideas based on ancient Greek philosophy very seriously in their quest to understand what seems most important for a good life.

The eudaimonic view is a different way of thinking about happiness than the view we are bombarded with in our daily lives by advertisements that seek to define modern life and sell us apparent goods as if they were real goods. Seen this way, modern life makes it hard to find happiness because we end up striving for, and investing our energies in the quest for, apparent goods. In short, we seek pleasure and joy at the expense of meaning and purpose.

Is anyone else seeing the connection here to what David Labaree has been writing about? The tension between public/real goods as the most important needs and aspirations in our work and private/apparent goods as the things that we don’t really need but which our stories tell us we do? Anyone?

Honestly, I’m still trying to think this through. But there is some resonance there. At the core, what is actually necessary for us to develop our potentials? To engage in true “eudaimonic happiness”? And how do schools support those “real goods”? Or do schools cater to the “apparent goods” which may provide “pleasure and joy (and status) at the expense of meaning and purpose?”

One More Thing…

In the current edition of the Atlantic, the inimitable George Packer has a piece titled The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions. And yes, it’s pretty scary. And yes, you probably are already in that story tent if it does feel scary.

But in the midst of all of the stories of how much has and is changing under Trump’s regime, I couldn’t help but stop cold on this line that was describing one reason why so few people saw these changes coming:

But the adults’ greatest miscalculation was to overestimate themselves—particularly in believing that other Americans saw them as selfless public servants, their stature derived from a high-minded commitment to the good of the nation.

I can’t help but wonder the extent to which the “private good” drivers that we have in our schools today is a huge reason for this miscalculation. The “good of the nation” intentions that schools were first formed around have been “re-formed” by the consumer’s desire for “good for self” outcomes. So why should we be shocked when so many don’t see a “high-minded commitment to the good of the nation” as something to be admired and respected? That’s not been our emphasis. That’s not what we’ve been living in schools.

Whew.

Thoughts?

On Power and Climate Change

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At some point in the last couple of months, someone recommended that I read Seth Kreisberg’s 1992 book Transforming Power: Domination, Empowerment, and Education.

To whomever that person is, sincere thanks. It’s an amazing read. And it’s connecting really deeply with my recent thinking about the tension between schools as a public and private good and the greatest aspirations we have for students as they experience school.

Real fast here, I just want to riff a bit off one paragraph in particular from the last chapter which was written by editors after Kreisberg died suddenly at the age of 33 before finishing the final manuscript of the book.

A Challenging Future

It’s difficult not to be concerned with how our kids in school today are going to cope with and thrive in their futures with the effects of climate change bearing down on them. It’s equally difficult to look at the future with a sense of hope, not just for the world but for the ability of schools to actually make that the focus of our work.

Kreisberg’s book tells many stories of teachers and students who were involved in a group called Educators for Social Responsibility which was founded in 1982 to address the concerns of both students and teachers about the possibility of nuclear war. It grew to be a “national grassroots organization of teachers and other educators who believed that schools can help students develop the values, insight, skills and commitment to address contemporary problems and to shape a more peaceful and just world” (92). In other words, it was a group dedicated to pursuing the “public good” potential of schools (as opposed to the “private good” that I wrote about in my last post.)

So, here’s a snip from the book that talks about the work of those educators under the threat of nuclear war. But I’ve taken the liberty to replace “nuclear war” with “climate change” because the sentiment holds. And it’s pretty powerful.

“The omnipresence of climate change is sufficient to make anyone feel helpless, overwhelmed, and speechless. The problem seems huge, above and beyond us. Young people in our society have lived their whole lives under the threat of climate change, and many of them believe that the effects of climate change will only worsen. The problem makes them and us feel small, nearly invisible. In addressing the threat of climate change, these educators found themselves addressing the issues of power in our society, in their daily lives, and in education. They saw that there was a relationship between addressing the problem and how they acted toward one another. Further, they saw that education could play a role in addressing the threat of climate change and changing relationships; but for students and teachers to do so, they both had to become empowered and emerge from the invisibility and silence into which they were relegated. The struggle against the threat of climate change was not separated from the struggle against the social conditions that disempower people. In struggling against the threat of climate change, they transformed themselves, others, and the pedagogies they brought to their classrooms” (214). [Emphasis mine.]

While daunting, I read that last line as hopeful. The idea that we can “transform” ourselves and our practice around the urgency of a collective and existential challenge is a hopeful frame. But only, only if we choose that path.

Climate, Democracy, and Power

I worry, however, that we are failing to understand the significance of this moment. I worry that we will wait to begin to address both the intellectual and emotional aspects of climate change until some curriculum writer or policy wonk decides it’s appropriate. And I worry that when we do begin to embrace this challenge in schools that we will do so with a disregard to the larger context of how power relationships in our society really hold the key to whether or not we’re going to solve it.

As Kreisberg’s editors write, schools don’t take democracy seriously, and that has much to do with power. Democratic communities are places where “people enter into critical inquiry characterized by mutual support, cooperative decision making, and synergistic learning”. Yet schools are places “characterized by human isolation, competition for scarce resources, and relationships of dominance and submission” (215). Harsh words, but true nonetheless.

Fact is, unless you are a technological determinist who believes that some app will save the day, we will only solve this crisis if we dive into it headlong in schools and choose to make it the primary context for our work. Not just the context of climate, but equally the contexts of democracy and power as well.

Thoughts?

School as Fiction

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I’ve been expending a lot of bandwidth lately reading and thinking about the meta story of school, not just the history of the system and of pedagogy, but, more specifically, the motivations behind the story we’re currently living and how they effect the potential for deep and powerful learning that we all say we want for kids.  That means diving into some new (to me) edu-historians and thinkers and trying to connect what I’m learning to others who have been tweaking my thinking for a long time. Frankly, it’s a lot to make sense of, but I think it may be time to try. Feedback welcomed.

Let me start with Yuval Noah Harari, who has been stuck in my craw for the last few years after I read his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. The other day, a lengthy, fascinating piece about Harari popped up in the New Yorker, and one idea in particular jumped out at me. The author of the article is talking here about Harari’s most famous book, Sapiens:

In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations. Harari uses “fiction” where another might say “social construct.” Harari further proposes that fictions require believers, and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists.

If you recognize schools as “social constructs” which, of course, they are, that’s a provocative idea, no? Schools don’t exist in nature. We’ve constructed them to meet some type of societal need, primarily to collectively educate our young. We see them as a public good, aimed at perpetuating democracy (at least in the US) and creating a more just and livable world. (More on the purpose of schools later.)

The idea of schools as “fictions” is bracing at first. But if you flip the idea over a few times, less so. The narrative of schooling runs deep, but it is simply that: a narrative. A story. One that depends on our “communal belief” in it to wield the power it does. (And no one doubts the power of the school narrative, right?)

In-Between Stories

Importantly, Harari’s work highlights another idea that is relevant here, and that is that in this moment, almost everything is in-between stories. Think about media, business, politics and even the ways we meet and fall in love. Less and less seems to be abiding by old rules and norms. In 21 Lessons, he writes that we are particularly stressed because of this:

“We are still in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one.”

I think it’s fair to say that many are losing faith in the traditional story of school, primarily because it doesn’t serve all kids equitably and it’s increasingly out of step with how the modern world operates. But while there are some indications as to what the new story might look like, (more child/learner centered, focused more on skills and dispositions than content, etc.,) we’re nowhere near any “communal belief” in it. It’s not clear enough, yet, that there is a new story to fully “embrace.”

Still, the new story that is emerging feels much more in tune with the natural, biological rhythms of learning, which, by the way, are not a “fiction.” This is the point that Carol Black has so eloquently made in her amazing essay A Thousand Rivers (which I’ve glossed many times.) If you want the punch in the gut quote from that, here it is:

“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World.”

Our current fiction about schools attempts to take the very natural process of learning that is a part of all of us and make it happen in the very unnatural setting of the classroom where few of the conditions that all of us know are needed for learning to occur actually exist. It’s our greatest unpleasant truth that schools are not really built for learning. And if you read the rest of Black’s essay, you’ll get the gist of just how harmful that current fiction can be to the well-being of kids.

The Function of Schools

I think this whole idea of “fiction” resonates with me more deeply today due to my recent introduction to the work of David Labaree, a recently retired professor from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. I can’t remember how I found it, but a few months ago I came across his essay from the Journal of Curriculum Studies published in 2012 titled “School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage.” Let’s just say that it’s been rocking my thinking about schools ever since.

In a nutshell, Labaree’s thesis is this: we may say that we want great schools because they are a public good, because (as I said above) they serve the purpose of preparing children to live in a democracy and to hopefully improve society. But what we truly value in schools in the private good they offer in terms of promoting privilege and the current meritocracy, and in the assumed role of providing access to “a better life.” Here are his words from the top of the essay:

The US is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium of education. Society wants schools to express the highest ideals as a society and the greatest aspirations as individuals, but only as long as they remain ineffective in actually realizing them, since one does not really want to acknowledge the way these two aims are at odds with each other. Schools are asked to promote equality while preserving privilege, so perpetuating a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning. The focus is on making the system inclusive at one level and exclusive at the next, in order to make sure that it meets demands for both access and advantage. As a result the system continues to lure one to pursue the dream of fixing society by reforming schools, while continually frustrating one’s ability to meet these goals. Also, a simple cure cannot be found for this syndrome because no remedy will be accepted that would mean giving up one of the aims for education in favour of another. [Emhasis mine.]

Yes. That.

Seriously, the whole piece is important because it paints with an historical eye to explain school reform movements and why almost all of them have failed. It makes a compelling case that the true reform of the original system was the one that was driven by the consumers of education, not the creators and purveyors of it. While we say that schools and education are the most effective way to attain our highest aspirations and ideals as a society, schools are also the primary way that we accomplish our greatest individual ambitions and “stave off our worst fears.” And that last part, in fact, has become the primary motivation behind the story in schools that we’re currently living.

In short, we choose to build our narrative of schooling around the “private good” of schools and education in order to maintain access to social standing and individual opportunity, rather than as a “public good” which emphasizes citizenship and civic mindedness at its core. And that is a challenging, “unpleasant truth” as well.

The Consequences of our Fiction

That narrative has many deleterious effects, as I was reminded last week in Johannesburg when I reconnected with David Gleason, the author of At What Cost? Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools. A school psychologist, David is researching why it is that our students are now reporting record levels of stress, anxiety, and depression and what schools can do to alleviate it. Educators at “prestigious” schools that David has interviewed are very forthcoming about how their schools contribute to those issues. They freely cite things like putting too much emphasis on college, assigning too much homework, rewarding “achievement” over all else, and not honoring the normal mental and physical development of adolescents, among other things. (In other words, they’re acting in service of the “private good” over the “public good.”) But when he asks those same educators what would happen if they stopped doing those things that they know contribute to the problem, they respond by saying they would then be seen as lacking rigor and excellence, that they would lose their reputations as elite schools and their enrollments along with it, and more.

This “bind” that David discusses so powerfully in his book is the same “bind” that Labaree sees as well, this idea that we are trying to balance two things that are in opposition to one another, and that right now, we are deferring to the consumer’s need for credentialing over students’ well being or society’s noblest aspirations. It’s the same tension that Black feels between the natural needs of children and the unnatural needs of schooling.

Which all ties into a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times titled This Is How Scandinavia Got Great: The power of educating the whole person. Brooks argues that the reason Scandinavia got it right is because they dedicated themselves in the late 19th Century to educating the whole child, that it was more about lifelong learning. That it was more about connection to community and home. It wasn’t about status. Money quote:

“If you have a thin educational system that does not help students see the webs of significance between people, does not even help students see how they see, you’re going to wind up with a society in which people can’t see through each other’s lenses.”

When we choose (or allow ourselves) to be motivated by pragmatism and individualism over idealism and collectivism, we run the risk of ignoring what’s best for our kids and for our society and world.

What We’ve Lost

I’d argue we’ve lost a great deal because of the system as it’s currently constructed and the motives that drive it. And this idea that schools are meant to serve the individual over the collective is at the root of many of our ills. This is what we get when we focus on grades. On being right. On knowledge and not learning. On delivery instead of discovery. We get kids who see others as competitors, not collaborators or cooperators. We don’t want to work with them as much as work to overcome them.

The fiction of schools says we can teach kids things that they don’t internally care about. That we can measure long term learning with numbers and letters. That following the rules is the way to success, at least at the game we call school. The fiction also says that we know what you need to know. It says that you as a child should just acquiesce to our choices. That acceptance of this fiction is the path to an education and, ultimately, personal success.

And yet, we all know this just isn’t true. The vast majority of what we measure in schools, those things that count, literally, are most often quickly forgotten, never again used, and a barrier to the conditions that great learning requires. Our emphasis on “outcomes” and grades creates real emotional stress that is absent when we are learning the things that matter to us. I mean, what kind of emotional stress and anxiety do you feel when you are learning something that you find deeply and powerfully important and useful?

Our greatest challenge as educators is to write a new story of “school” that more effectively serves our students and our society given the moment in which we live and whatever future we can glean. Acknowledging that that too will be a “fiction” may actually make the work easier. But more than anything, understanding and acknowledging the motives of the current story will make that work more urgent, more relevant, and hopefully, more powerful.