Students Don't "Work"--They Learn
By Alfie
Kohn
September is a new beginning, a time for fresh starts.
Consider, then, a resolution that you and your colleagues might make for this
school year: From now on, we will stop referring to what students do in school
as "work."
Importing the nomenclature of the workplace is
something most of us do without thinking - which is in itself a good reason to
reflect on the practice. Every time we talk about "homework" or
"seat work" or "work habits," every time we describe the
improvement in, or assessment of, a student's "work" in class, every
time we urge children to "get to work" or even refer to
"classroom management," we are using a metaphor with profound
implications for the nature of schooling. In effect, we are equating what children
do to figure things out with what adults do in offices and factories to earn
money.
To be sure, there are parallels between workplaces and
classrooms. In both settings, collaboration turns out to be more effective than
pitting people against each other in a race to be No. 1. In both places, it
makes sense to have people participate in making decisions about what they are
doing rather than simply trying to control them. In both places, problems are
more likely to be solved by rethinking the value of the tasks than by using
artificial inducements to try to "motivate" people to do those tasks.
Even the most enlightened businesses, however, are
still quite different from what schools are about - or ought to be about.
Managers may commit themselves to continuous improvement and try to make their
employees' jobs more fulfilling, but the bottom line is that they are still
focused on - well, on the bottom line. The emphasis is on results, on turning
out a product, on quantifying improvement on a fixed series of measures such as
sales volume or return on investment.
The extent to which this mentality has taken hold in
discussions about education is the extent to which our schools are in trouble.
In the course of learning, students frequently produce
things, such as essays and art projects and lab write-ups, whose quality can be
assessed. But these artifacts are just so many byproducts of the act of making
meaning. The process of learning is more important than the products that
result. To use the language of "work"- or, worse, to adopt a business-style
approach to school reform - is to reverse those priorities.
In a learning environment, teachers want to help
students engage with what they are doing to promote deeper understanding.
Students' interests may therefore help shape the curriculum, and a growing
facility with words and numbers derives from the process of finding answers to
their own questions. Skillful educators tap students' natural curiosity and
desire to become competent. They provide information about the success of these
explorations and help students become more proficient learners. Not every
student relishes every aspect of every task, of course, but the act of learning
is ideally its own reward.
Things are very different in a classroom where
students are put to work, as Hermine H. Marshall at San Francisco State
University has persuasively argued in a decade's worth of monographs devoted to
the difference between work and learning environments. In the former, the tasks
come to be seen as - indeed, are often explicitly presented as - means to an
end. What counts is the number of right answers, although even this may be seen
as just a prerequisite to snagging a good grade. In fact, the grade may be a
means to making the honor roll, which, in turn, may lead to special privileges or
rewards provided at school or at home. With each additional inducement, the
original act of learning is further devalued.
It is interesting to notice how commonly the advocates
of extrinsic rewards also endorse (a) a view of education as something necessarily
unpleasant and (b) a curriculum that is in fact unappealing. A sour "take
your medicine" traditionalism goes hand in hand with drill-and-skill
lessons (some of which are aptly named "worksheets") and a reliance
on incentives to induce students to do what they understandably have no
interest in doing. Such is the legacy of seeing school as work.
"Measurable outcomes may be the least significant
results of learning," as Linda McNeil of Rice University has observed, but
measurable outcomes are the most significant results of work. Moreover,
students are pressured to succeed because it is their "job" to do so;
it is expected or demanded of them that they produce and perform.
It isn't hard to find schools that have undertaken
this mission, where posters and bulletin boards exhort students to ever-greater
success, which typically means higher standardized-test scores. (Many of these
tests are normed, of course, so that success is defined as something that not
everyone can achieve.) In such factory-like schools, you will often hear words
like "performance" and "achievement," but rarely words like
"discovery" or "exploration" or "curiosity."
Even those of us who do not recognize our own schools
in this description may want to rethink the work metaphors that creep into our
speech. We may wish to reconsider the extent to which learning is corrupted by
talking about it as work - or by talking about learners as "workers,"
which amounts to the same thing. Even some progressive thinkers have given in
to the latter temptation, intending to elevate the status of students but in
fact compromising the integrity of what distinguishes classrooms from
workplaces.
We are living in an age when education is described as
an "investment," when school reform is justified by invoking the "need
to be competitive in the 21st century." The implication here is that the central function of
schools is to turn out adequately skilled employees who will show up on time
and do whatever they're told so that corporations can triumph over their
counterparts in other countries. (Interestingly, Catherine Lewis, in her book Educating
Hearts and Minds, reports that "the metaphor of the school as a
factory or workplace where children do 'work,' so common in American schools,
was notably absent from the Japanese [elementary] schools" she visited.)
But if it is repugnant to regard children primarily as future workers - or,
more broadly, as adults-in-the-making - it is worse to see what children do
right now as work.
To get a sense of whether students view themselves as
workers or as learners, we need only ask them (during class) what they are
doing. "I'm doing my work" is one possible response; "I'm trying
to figure out why the character in this story told her friend to go away"
is something else altogether. Better yet, we might ask students why they
are doing something, and then attend to the difference between "Because
Ms. Taylor told us to" or "It's going to be on the test," on the
one hand, and "Because I just don't get why this character would say
that!" on the other.
Another way to judge the orientation of a classroom is
to watch for the teacher's reaction to mistakes. Someone who manages students'
work is likely to strive for zero defects: perfect papers and assignments that
receive the maximum number of points. Someone who facilitates students'
learning welcomes mistakes - first, because they are invaluable clues as to how
the student is thinking, and second, because to do so creates a climate of
safety that ultimately promotes more successful learning.
Moreover, a learning-oriented classroom is more likely
to be characterized by the thoughtful exploration of complicated issues than by
a curriculum based on memorizing right answers. As Hermine Marshall has
observed, for students to see themselves as learning, "the tasks provided
must be those that require higher-order thinking skills."
Does a rejection of the models, methods, and metaphors
of work mean that school should be about play? In a word, no. False dichotomies
are popular because they make choosing easy, and the "work vs. play"
polarity is a case in point. Learning is a third alternative, where the primary
purpose is neither play-like enjoyment (although the process can be deeply
satisfying) nor the work-like completion of error-free products (although the
process can involve intense effort and concentration).
To question the work metaphor is not to abandon
challenge or excellence. Rather, it is to insist that work is not the only
activity characterized by those features - and play, for that matter, is not
the only activity that can be experienced as pleasurable.
Of course, to talk about students'
"projects" or "activities" instead of their
"work" represents only a change in language. My objective here is not
to add to the list of words we are not supposed to mention. But how we speak
not only reflects the way we think; it contributes to it as well. Perhaps a
thoughtful discussion about the hidden implications of workplace metaphors will
invite us to consider changing what we do as well as what we say.
Copyright ©
1997 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed
without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with
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