stimulant

When most teachers walk into a classroom, they’ve already put in hours of work preparing for the next forty minutes. What they say, what they do, what materials are made available, how they organize students — to some extent, all the teacher’s moves have been orchestrated ahead of time. For many teachers, careful orchestration is necessary: the only way to squeeze in a burgeoning curriculum is micromanaging class time. Most schools even require the advance submission of a lesson plan, in some form.

When people talk about good teachers, they usually mean that a particular teacher is effective. Even people excited about educational reform and those critical of traditional education conflate being a good teacher with effectively transmitting information and skills.

I won’t try to define, “a good teacher.” Instead, let’s examine teachers’ interactions with students. We ask teachers to excise their personal life and opinions from the classroom. Touching is prohibited. There is no room for informal conversation or off-topic discussion. The classroom is regulated into an artificial, bloodless place.

Teachers strategize constantly to keep students’ attention, to evoke a desire to work, to foster willing — even eager — obedience. We have made the teacher into a behavioral engineer. Unfortunately, the line between behavioral engineering and “pedagogy” is not as clear as connotation would suggest. We measure teachers via students’ performance on tests which at best [attempt to] measure the retention of knowledge. What else do we expect?

We have defined education in such a way that coercion is intrinsic. To compensate for tihs, teachers call on a variety of tools. “Great” teachers master the art of drama, crafting a stage persona to engage students. Hours are spent “sugarcoating” a subject to make its study palatable, as with naturally noxious but unfortunately necessary medicine.

As teachers, when we walk into a classroom, we try to hide all the preparation and microengineering that goes into the lesson. “Effective” preparation is invisible: the activity will run smoothly, students will enjoy it, and they’ll learn something, to boot! What’s wrong with that?

Basic to our efforts is a duplicity that is compatible with the best of intentions. When I teach, there is an unresolved tension: do I work to effectively teach knowledge, or do I aim to create the type of environment I wish were available for students? There is a hidden battle between the implicit purpose and explicit aims of education. In differentiating aims and purpose, I mean to separate what many people refer to as “deliverables” (verifiable, explicit goals) from the long term reason for our efforts, the underlying motivation bringing us to articulate these “aims.”

When I teach, I could set out to transmit skills and information as effectively, pleasantly, and engagingly as possible. Or, I could create an honest and empowering environment. These are incompatible insofar as they occur within a coercive institution, no matter how pleasant and well-mannered the coercion is.

Education is a myopic institution oblivious to its own disability. Unaware of its own systemic design flaws (though not its real-world failures), educators — and in turn, the public — inadvertently hyperfocus on the explicit aims of education.¹ I fundamentally disagree not only with the methods employed to satisfy our current, explicit, educational aims, but the underlying trend they comprise.

Generally, solutions that address issues closest to a problem tempt people most strongly. The proximate cause is more prominent than the underlying cause when people see a problem. This human instinct is disastrous qua social reform, where the infrastructures involved are so large as to preclude looking at only proximate causes. In most large systems, the network of causality is dense and subtle, and it is foolish to mistake symptoms for causes. This problem is well understood in medicine. There is a clear difference between symptomatic and curative treatment. Both doctors and patients distinguish between the two; furthermore, everyone is aware of the potential for interacting symptoms, treatments, and disseases.

Unfortunately, most people fail to bring the same subtlety to a consideration of schooling (or most other social institutions). Certainly, teachers will gladly cite home, neighborhood, or cultural factors as causes of in-school problems. And this is even true! These problems are also outside of the control of educational institutions. While I would never suggest expanding schools’ jurisdiction, I do think that this handicap should inform our strategies. But, these are not the most salient factors. At best, we should acknowledge that our current policies interact poorly with problems of this type. The cultural factors fingered as problematic deal in terms like empowerment, happiness, safety, and respect. Our institutions should foster these in students, rather than looking to solve society’s ills directly.

For instance, misbehavior in the classroom is often seen as a result of boredom. And it’s true: boredom is a proximate cause which, if removed, can suppress the symptom of misbehavior. Some teachers see disrespect as a proximate cause of classroom trouble, and strive to enforce obedience. With obedience in hand, they declare the problem solved. But it isn’t. School is still a fundamentally coercive institution that does harm to students’ autonomy, intellect, and spirit.

Despite MIT students’ mastery of the educational system, they often have a perverse relationship to their own learning. Without a schedule and teacher in hand, they find themselves incapable of learning academic content. Worse, they have no idea of what they would like to learn. Setting their compass by the prudence or popularity of a given choice, natural curiosity disappears. Yet these students love class: they are among the best schoolgoers I know. Assignments excite them, questions incite further investigation, tests prompt all-night study sessions. Overachievers have mastered the art of teacher-pleasing to the point that this feedback is a basic value. Doing well — notably, as defined by others — is fundamental to their self-worth. Countless conversations with students have highlighted grades and tests as both stressful scourges and necessary metrics to give students a sense of their own progress. “Tests let me know if I’ve really learned a subject,” many will say.

Step back for a moment and reconsider that statement: school has created an environment in which its best and brightest have difficulty understanding how well they know something without one-dimensional and ultimately shallow feedback about their mastery. This is the result of solving a systemic problem incrementally, improving the local situation by moving up the gradient of academic performance. Obedient, motivated, hard-working, attentive, and “gifted” students are not enough: this is what our academic trials cull.

This trend toward disempowerment and dependency is the closest thing to a purpose our educational system has. Words like “purpose” and “mission” bring along the assumption of intent. While I would never suggest that teachers wake up in the morning and rejoice in another opportunity to disempower the next generation, I would suggest that they set other goals that end up equivalent (e.g. “preparing students for the job market,” or “teaching students to follow directions,” etc.). Within a coercive institution, it is still possible to create compelling, creative classes. And this is dangerous.

Seymour Papert first introduced me to this problem in his book, Mindstorms:

Knowledge is a collection of facts about the world and procedures for how to solve problems. Facts are statements like “The earth is tilted on its axis by 23.45 degrees” and procedures are step-by-step instructions like how to do multidigit addition by carrying to the next column. The goal of schooling is to get these facts and procedures into the student’s head. People are considered to be educated when they possess a large collection of these facts and procedures. Teachers know these facts and procedures, and their job is to transmit them to students. Simpler facts and procedures should be learned first, followed by progressively more complex facts and procedures. The definitions of “simplicity” and “complexity” and the proper sequencing of material were determined either by teachers, by textbook authors, or by asking expert adults like mathematicians, scientists, or historians — not by studying how children actually learn.

Today’s educators have allegedly renounced this knowledge- and skill-centric philosophy, trading it in for a “constructivist teaching philosophy.” What’s ironic about the transition is that constructivism is an epistemological theory concerning learning, not teaching. Papert clarifies the distinction by coining the term “instructionism:”

What I was going to talk about if I had been [at the site of an intended speech], is about how technology can change the way that children learn mathematics. I said how children can learn mathematics differently, not so much how we can teach mathematics differently. This is an important distinction. All my work is focused on helping children learn, not on just teaching. Now I’ve coined a phrase for this: Constructionism and Instructionism are names for two approaches to educational innovation. Instructionism is the theory that says, “To get better education, we must improve instruction. […] ” Well, teaching is important, but learning is much more important. And Constructionism means “Giving children good things to do so that they can learn by doing much better than they could before.”

People see learning not as a skill, but as a process determined primarily by a combination of talent intrinsic to the learner and difficulty intrinsic to the topic. This misconception offloads responsibility for learning from learner to teacher. Unfortunately, the reality is that the difference between teaching and learning is the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching that same man how to fish. Empowerment and satisfaction differ fundamentally. Worse, the teacher ends up fighting a losing battle, holding the teacher accountable for something over which they ultimately have no a priori control.

This confusion is central to the friction created by inflexible curricula. Educators’ contortions aim to finagle attention and effort from students, procuring motivation where there is none. To torture our analogy a bit, this is something like starving the man to whom we give a fish for the purpose of teaching them the specifics of gutting and cooking seafood.

The fundamental duplicity into which all teachers buy unwittingly grows from the fact that we are dealing with a captive population, unable to choose their intellectual course and constrained by legal, social, and economic pressures. No matter how personable or hard-working we are, we cannot erase that fact. But we can mitigate it. It is in doing so that our duplicity takes root.

We try to trick students into learning. We are not honest about our motives, we are not transparent in our expectations, and we draw inconsistently on the capital provided by the students’ captivity. And it is here that my dilemma arises: providing freedom and providing an effective learning environment are different — though thankfully compatible — goals when pursued within current educational institutions.

During every afterschool program I run sans school supervision, I make it clear that not only do I not expect students to participate if uninterested, but I am eager to cover for them if they would like to leave school or otherwise skip class. I try to create a haven for the type of real freedom and autonomy to which I believe everyone has a right. These efforts are often at odds with attempts to create the focused atmosphere of energy that characterizes effective learning environments in schools, often resulting in a range of engagement. Instead of having a class in which three-quarters are excited and entirely engaged, only one third of the group entirely engaged, one half is interested and partially engaged, and the remainder are engaged with something entirely unrelated to my efforts.

I am uncomfortable with this compromise. I know I could easily improve how effective and engaging my teaching is in the narrow context of “education;” furthermore, I know that in doing so, it is likely that students’ experiences with me will contribute significantly not only to their long term academic success, but to their long term intellectual (and academic) acuity and creativity. But for me, their attention is poison fruit, tainted by the methods providing it. And until that tension is resolved, every attempt to “teach better” will be an effort in well-intentioned duplicity.

1. This is one reason testing such an easy cause — or, addiction — to pick up. [↩]