Yesterday, I wrote about the jobs I’ve had, and how I learned skills outside of my schooling that carried me through the decades of rapid change. It seems a lot more impressive than it is. I was also a short-order cook and waited tables while I was in college. Matthew Tabor brings up some issues in his thoughtful comment, that I must admit tugged at me as I was writing that post. He says,
It sounds as if you were equipped with the tools to teach yourself those skills – what makes you think that you weren’t?
You give an impressive list of things that your 1950’s/60’s school couldn’t have known about but which you’ve mastered – coding, self-publishing, etc. Then you lament that the schools didn’t give you the skills.
If the school didn’t play a role giving you the transferable skills you used to get through a broad array of jobs and professional endeavors in the future, who did?
I’m going to try to comment on this, but it’s important to state that this is my own experience and my own impressions of my own experience. It is true that my schooling equipped me with essential skills to be a lifelong learner. My teachers taught me to read, to think with numbers, and to write a coherent paragraph (on a good day). It also built a context for my life, so that I had a sense of where and when I was living, because I came to know something about the science and history of my existence.
What I question is, “Did that education instill in me a learning lifestyle? (The more I use that term, the more I like it.) I remember, standing in line to receive my high school diploma, several classmates behind me saying, “I’m never going to read another book!” I wasn’t surprised. But if any student today, graduates with that attitude toward reading, then there is something very wrong with the schools, teachers, and curriculum that served them.
I remember, in the early days of personal computers, when we thought that the best thing we could do with them was teach children to program. I didn’t do that. I was much more interested in writing instructional software that helped kids learn to think, make inferences, spell the states. But I remember teachers and trainers saying, “These kids (and teachers) can’t learn to program. They can’t think.”
I remember wondering why I was able to learn programming so easily, and most people weren’t. We thought then that it was aptitude. But I kept thinking about my father’s woodworking shop in the basement of my childhood home. He had a pile of scrap lumber in the basement, which I had permission to use. I could also use most of his tools. When I wanted a toy, I went to that pile of variously shaped pieces of wood, found the shapes that could be nailed together to make that toy, and went about it. Seymour Papert tells a similar story in Mindstorms — about gears. I envied the kids, whose fathers could afford to buy them plastic toys. But I was learning to take stray shapes, and ultimately pieces of information and put them together to make something new — I was learning to teach myself.
I do not think I was very good at being taught. I remember ignoring my math teachers, and then reasoning through how to work the problems when I got home. I think it’s my particular form of A.D.D. that I can’t sequence things well. My mind is VERY random. I was lousy at working repetitive long division problems. I was lousy at memorizing rules of grammar. But when I took Geometry, and had to reason through axioms and assemble them logically in a way that solved a problem, I found that I was actually good at math. I was good at learning how to solve a problem, at teaching myself how to solve that problem. Classmates who had always made As in math, were pulling their hair out. They were good at being taught a process, not so much at inventing a process.
I’m not saying that my schooling was worthless, nor that there aren’t things that need to be taught. Absolutely not. I’m just saying that education’s job, in the 1950s and ’60s, was to prepare students for a future that was static and predictable.
I believe that we no longer live in those times. I believe that we need schools where students teach themselves. We must assure that they become literate, but that it is a literacy to learn — learning literacy. We should assure that they are gaining a common context for themselves, who they are, what they are, where they are, when they are, and that they appreciate the ways that their environment impacts them and how they impact their environment — and that they learn these things through their developing learning literacies.
Added 2 Hours Later: I would have to say that nothing taught me how to learn more than being a teacher.
Sorry for the personal tour…
I could not agree with you more about giving students opportunities and challenges to play in intellectual scrap lumber to learn the self-directed, cyclical process of learning and questioning and learning some more. You could probably poll the lifelong learners you respect most and find that they had similar experiences questioning and experimenting, even if they did have the nice plastic toys. They were around adults who modeled and encouraged them to ask WHY at every turn. No need to apologize for a personal tour. Learning is personal.
While you were programming instructional software, you were likely enjoying the learning experiences you were depriving kids of.
The people who made Math Blaster learned a lot more than any kid who ever played it.
If kids “teach themselves” (a proposition worth debating at length) does that mean that you should not have been trying to make instructional software? Isn’t that just you teaching them via the machine?
It’s a fair point, Gary. But this was way before Math Blaster and way before I’d heard of Logo. If you looked up instructional software, you got titles like “This Day in History” and “Biorythms.”
That David and others seem not to recognize that the role of the autodidact has been discussed at length before troubles me.
I am sincerely confused about whether articles/discussion like this one come from a profound ignorance of 2,500 years of thought or an unwillingness to regard any of it as valid. I am not suggesting that we do everything the way Socrates did – that would be ridiculous. I am, however, questioning the value of reinventing wheel after wheel without providing any sort of worthwhile explanation.
We get transferable skills from many different spheres: schools, jobs, relationships, etc. Sometimes we learn what to do, sometimes we learn what not to do. Sometimes, as in the case of sports drills, we work hard on certain elements that never even show up in a game but benefit our performance as a whole.
And none of this is remotely new or noteworthy. Most of the views I’ve read in this article and its discussion seem to advocate a need for a new, relevant education. I might be convinced if I saw familiarity with the literally millions of examples spread over centuries of exactly the type of education many of you think has never happened.
Just because too few teachers are doing it doesn’t mean that a) it doesn’t exist; b) we need to burn the schools and start again; or c) it’s a novel thought when we bring it up.
We are not ignorant, Matthew. We’re teachers. It has just occurred to me that it’s you and others who do not see the situation, as classroom teachers in the United States do. You are looking at a broader perspective, one that is immensely valuable to us, but not one that gives you any right to insult us.
Education, in the United States, is in a very bad place. We became convinced that schools were not doing their jobs. So the government decided to hold those schools and teacher accountable, and the easiest and cheapest way to do that was to test the heck out of the kids. Teachers were also told that they could use only scientifically proven techniques, and to teach the standards set down by their state departments of education — standards that could be tested with bubble sheets.
So what I and others have been hearing for years is, “This is nice, and I agree with you, but will this improve test scores?” I know of schools where they simply stopped teaching social studies and science, so that they could concentrate on what was being tested, reading and math. I know states that are suffering under devastating teacher shortages, because teacher morale is disastrously low.
Now to be fair, there are many schools and teachers who fought through these constraints, and I acknowledge that because of this legislation, there are kids who are learning to read, who weren’t before. But education in this country is currently so far away from 2500 years of conversation, from Socrates, and Piaget, Dewey, and Papert, that speaking from that perspective would be meaningless. At this point, I believe that the best avenue to affect change, to rescue U.S. education, is to appeal to people’s common sense, the common sense of their personal experiences.
but that’s just my 2¢ Worth!
David,
I don’t have much time, but I’d like to address a few points in your reply.
That you regard being a teacher as sound, self-evident proof that one has authority demonstrates well the haughtiness I was referring to. It is simply absurd to think that teachers, or any other profession, noble or otherwise, can divorce themselves from proper self-reflection or are immune to valid analysis from the outside.
Also, to suggest that I see the situation differently than a classroom teacher because I am not a day-in-day-out public school teacher is ridiculous. In short, public education is is not a members-only club. Many of us have valid teaching experience even if we aren’t “in the trenches” this week. And it’s important to note the logical folly you’d commit if you assigned my arguments more value if I did start teaching at a public school next week.
Charging one with ignorance is not an insult and, in this case, it is an honest assessment of what I’ve read. I am simply not convinced that many of the participators in this thread are familiar with some of these points and you haven’t demonstrated otherwise. It pains me that such honesty is taken personally; these issues aren’t about you, me, or any other individual – we’d both agree that, first and foremost, it is about kids and making our schools better. That’s a cause far more important than my personal feelings and, I’d hope, yours.
Matthew, Reprimand, at least partly deserved. I’d actually decided to remove that comment while riding my bicycle this morning, and then go bogged down in things and forgot all about it. I’d realized that it had been written with to much haste, and without concern for your closing thought — it is about the kids.
— dave —
David, At my last job interview(I got the job), a group of us started talking about the “odd” jobs we had done in the past. I thought my stint as a lay midwifery advocate on the South Carolina Board of Health was out there until the librarian for the Chemistry library talked about working on a shrimp boat. She is also in a serious rock band. The consensus was that every experience had added some spice and interest to our lives.
This is excellent stuff. You should post some of your links on studentup.com ! love your blog!
David,
When were you developing instructional software? (I’m trying to contextualize the era we’re discussing).
MathBlaster and Logo are not important to the point I was making. I was pointing out the contradiction between believing that kids should “team themselves” and the adult desire to teach them (even if by developing content).
I take your point about the apparent contradiction. To answer your question, I was developing software on Radio Shack Model III computers (TRS-80) from 1981 to 1983.
A good example of one of my programs was Trucker Geography. It displayed a map of the United States, outlining the states (not a trivial task on a TRS-80). It randomly placed the student into one state and then gave them a job, to deliver coal to California, for instance. The student then consulted an Almanac, that sat beside of each computer. They used the almanac to learn what states produced coal, then drove to the closest state by correctly typing the names of each state that they would drive too. When they reached West Virginia, they would then start typing the names of the states they would drive through to reach California. Their earnings depended on how quickly they finished the job.
The point was not to teach the students. It was to create and experience within which they were teaching themselves.