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“Well, Duh!” -- Ten Obvious Truths That We Shouldn’t
Be Ignoring
By Alfie
Kohn
The field of education bubbles over with
controversies. It’s not unusual for intelligent people of good will to
disagree passionately about what should happen in schools. But there are
certain precepts that aren’t debatable, that just about anyone would have to
acknowledge are true.
While many such statements are banal, some are worth
noticing because in our school practices and policies we tend to ignore the
implications that follow from them. It’s both intellectually interesting and
practically important to explore such contradictions: If we all agree that
a given principle is true, then why in the world do our schools still
function as if it weren’t?
Here are 10 examples.
1. Much of the material students are required to
memorize is soon forgotten
The truth of this statement will be conceded (either
willingly or reluctantly) by just about everyone who has spent time in school
-- in other words, all of us. A few months, or sometimes even just a few
days, after having committed a list of facts, dates, or definitions to
memory, we couldn’t recall most of them if our lives depended on it. Everyone
knows this, yet a substantial part of schooling – particularly in the most
traditional schools – continues to consist of stuffing facts into students’
short-term memories.
The more closely we inspect this model of teaching
and testing, the more problematic it reveals itself to be. First, there’s the
question of what students are made to learn, which often is more
oriented to factual material than to a deep understanding of ideas. (See item
2, below.) Second, there’s the question of how students are taught,
with a focus on passive absorption: listening to lectures, reading summaries
in textbooks, and rehearsing material immediately before being required to
cough it back up. Third, there’s the question of why a student has
learned something: Knowledge is less likely to be retained if it has been
acquired so that one will perform well on a test, as opposed to learning in
the context of pursuing projects and solving problems that are personally
meaningful.
Even without these layers of deficiencies with the
status quo, and even if we grant that remembering some things can be useful,
the fundamental question echoes like a shout down an endless school corridor:
Why are kids still being forced to memorize so much stuff that we know they
won’t remember?
Corollary 1A: Since this appears to be true for
adults, too, why do most professional development events for teachers
resemble the least impressive classrooms, with experts disgorging facts about
how to educate?
2. Just knowing a lot of facts doesn’t mean you’re
smart
Even students who do manage to remember some of the
material they were taught are not necessarily able to make sense of those
bits of knowledge, to understand connections among them, or to apply them in
inventive and persuasive ways to real-life problems.
In fact, the cognitive scientist Lauren Resnick goes
even further: It’s not just that knowing (or having been taught) facts
doesn’t in itself make you smart. A mostly fact-oriented education may
actually interfere with your becoming smart. “Thinking skills tend to
be driven out of the curriculum by ever-growing demands for teaching larger
and larger bodies of knowledge,” she writes. Yet schools continue to treat students
as empty glasses into which information can be poured -- and public officials
continue to judge schools on the basis of how efficiently and determinedly
they pour.
3. Students are more likely to learn what they find
interesting
There’s no shortage of evidence for this claim if
you really need it. One of many examples: A group of researchers found
that children’s level of interest in a passage they were reading was 30 times
more useful than its difficulty level for predicting how much of it they
would later remember. But this should be obvious, if only because of what we
know about ourselves. It’s the tasks that intrigue us, that tap our curiosity
and connect to the things we care about, that we tend to keep doing -- and
get better at doing. So, too, for kids.
Conversely, students are less likely to benefit from
doing what they hate. Psychology has come a long way from the days when
theorists tried to reduce everything to simple stimulus-response pairings. We
know now that people aren’t machines, such that an input (listening to a
lecture, reading a textbook, filling out a worksheet) will reliably yield an
output (learning). What matters is how people experience what they do, what
meaning they ascribe to it, what their attitudes and goals are.
Thus, if students find an academic task stressful or
boring, they’re far less likely to understand, or even remember, the content.
And if they’re uninterested in a whole category of academic tasks -- say,
those they’re assigned to do when they get home after having just spent a
whole day at school -- then they aren’t likely to benefit much from doing
them. No wonder research finds little, if any, advantage to assigning homework, particularly in elementary or
middle school.
4. Students are less interested in whatever they’re
forced to do and more enthusiastic when they have some say
Once again, studies confirm what we already know
from experience. The nearly universal negative reaction to compulsion, like
the positive response to choice, is a function of our psychological makeup.
Now combine this point with the preceding one: If
choice is related to interest, and interest is related to achievement, then
it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the learning environments in which
kids get to make decisions about what they’re doing are likely to be the most
effective, all else being equal. Yet such learning environments continue to
be vastly outnumbered by those where kids spend most of their time just
following directions.
5. Just because doing x raises standardized
test scores doesn’t mean x should be done
At the very least, we would need evidence that the
test in question is a source of useful information about whether our teaching
and learning goals are being met. Many educators have argued that the tests
being used in our schools are unsatisfactory for several reasons.
First, there are numerous limitations with specific
tests. Second, most tests share certain problematic features, such as being
timed (which places more of a premium on speed than on thoughtfulness),
norm-referenced (which means the tests are designed to tell us who’s beating
whom, not how well students have learned or teachers have taught), and
consisting largely of multiple-choice questions (which don’t permit students
to generate or even explain their answers).
The third reason is the problems inherent to all
tests that are standardized and created by people far away from the classroom
-- as opposed to assessing the actual learning taking place there on an
on-going basis.
This is not the place to explain in detail why standardized tests measure what matters least. Here,
I want only to make the simpler -- and, once again, I think, indisputable --
point that anyone who regards high or rising test scores as good news has an
obligation to show that the tests themselves are good. If a test result can’t
be convincingly shown to be both valid and meaningful, then whatever we did
to achieve that result -- say, a new curriculum or instructional strategy --
may well have no merit whatsoever. It may even prove to be destructive when
assessed by better criteria. Indeed, a school or district might be getting
worse even as its test scores rise.
So how is it that articles in newspapers and
education journals, as well as pronouncements by public officials and think
tanks, seem to accept on faith that better scores on any test necessarily
constitute good news, and that whatever produced those scores can be
described as “effective”? Parents should be encouraged to ask, “How much time
was sacrificed from real learning just so our kids could get better at taking
the [name of test]?”
6. Students are more likely to succeed in a place
where they feel known and cared about
I realize there are people whose impulse is to sneer
when talk turns to how kids feel, and who dismiss as “soft” or “faddish”
anything other than old-fashioned instruction of academic skills. But even
these hard-liners, when pressed, are unable to deny the relationship between
feeling and thinking, between a child’s comfort level and his or her capacity
to learn.
Here, too, there are loads of supporting data. As
one group of researchers put it, “In order to promote students’ academic
performance in the classroom, educators should also promote their social and
emotional adjustment.” And yet, broadly speaking, we don’t. Teachers and
schools are evaluated almost exclusively on academic achievement measures
(which, to make matters worse, mostly consist of standardized test scores).
If we took seriously the need for kids to feel known
and cared about, our discussions about the distinguishing features of a “good
school” would sound very different. Likewise, our view of discipline and classroom management would be turned inside-out,
seeing as how the primary goals of most such strategies are obedience and
order, often with the result that kids feel less cared about -- or
even bullied -- by adults.
7. We want children to develop in many ways, not just
academically
Even mainstream education groups have embraced the
idea of teaching the “whole child.” It’s a safe position, really, because
just about every parent or educator will tell you that we should be
supporting children’s physical, emotional, social, moral, and artistic growth
as well as their intellectual growth. Moreover, it’s obvious to most people
that the schools can and should play a key role in promoting many different
forms of development.
If we acknowledge that academics is just one facet
of a good education, why do so few conversations about improving our schools
deal with -- and why are so few resources devoted to -- non-academic issues?
And why do we assign children still more academic tasks after the school day
is over, even when those tasks cut into the time children have to pursue
interests that will help them develop in other ways?
Corollary 7a: Students “learn best when they are
happy,” as educator Nel Noddings reminded us, but that doesn’t mean they’re
especially likely to be happy (or psychologically healthy) just because
they’re academically successful. And millions aren’t. Imagine how high
schools would have to be changed if we were to take this realization
seriously.
8. Just because a lesson (or book, or class, or
test) is harder doesn't mean it's better
First, if it’s pointless to give students things to
do that are too easy, it’s also counterproductive to give them things that
they experience as too hard. Second, and more important, this criterion overlooks a variety of
considerations other than difficulty level by which educational quality might
be evaluated.
We know this, yet we continue to worship at the
altar of “rigor.” I’ve seen lessons that aren’t unduly challenging yet are
deeply engaging and intellectually valuable. Conversely, I’ve seen courses --
and whole schools -- that are indisputably rigorous . . . and appallingly
bad.
9. Kids aren’t just short adults
Over the past hundred years, developmental psychologists
have labored to describe what makes children distinctive and what they can
understand at certain ages. There are limits, after all, to what even a
precocious younger child can grasp (e.g., the way metaphors function, the
significance of making a promise) or do (e.g., keep still for an extended
period).
Likewise, there are certain things children require
for optimal development, including opportunities to play and explore, alone
and with others. Research fills in -- and keeps fine-tuning -- the details,
but the fundamental implication isn’t hard to grasp: How we educate kids
should follow from what defines them as kids.
Somehow, though, developmentally inappropriate
education has become the norm, as kindergarten (literally, the “children’s
garden”) now tends to resemble a first- or second-grade classroom -- in fact,
a bad first- or second-grade classroom, where discovery, creativity,
and social interaction are replaced by a repetitive regimen focused on
narrowly defined academic skills.
More generally, premature exposure to
sit-still-and-listen instruction, homework, grades, tests, and competition --
practices that are clearly a bad match for younger children and of
questionable value at any age -- is rationalized by invoking a notion I’ve
called BGUTI: Better Get Used
To It. The
logic here is that we have to prepare you for the bad things that are going
to be done to you later . . . by doing them to you now. When articulated
explicitly, that principle sounds exactly as ridiculous as it is.
Nevertheless, it’s the engine that continues to drive an awful lot of
nonsense.
The obvious premise that we should respect what
makes children children can be amended to include a related principle that is
less obvious to some people: Learning something earlier isn’t necessarily
better. Deborah Meier, whose experience as a celebrated educator ranges from
kindergarten to high school, put it bluntly: "The earlier [that schools
try] to inculcate so-called 'academic' skills, the deeper the damage and the
more permanent the 'achievement' gap." That is exactly what a passel of
ambitious research projects has found: A traditional
skills-based approach to teaching young children -- particularly those from
low-income families -- not only offers no lasting benefits but appears to be
harmful.
Corollary 9A: Kids aren’t just future adults.
They are that, of course, but they aren’t only that, because children’s needs
and perspectives are worth attending to in their own right. We violate this
precept -- and do a disservice to children -- whenever we talk about schooling in
economic terms, treating
students mostly as future employees.
10. Substance matters more than labels
A skunk cabbage by any other name would smell just
as putrid. But in education, as in other domains, we’re often seduced by
appealing names when we should be demanding to know exactly what lies behind
them. Most of us, for example, favor a sense of community, prefer that a job
be done by professionals, and want to promote learning. So should we sign on
to the work being done in the name of “Professional Learning
Communities”? Not if
it turns out that PLCs have less to do with helping children to think deeply
about questions that matter than with boosting standardized test scores.
The same caution is appropriate when it comes to
“Positive Behavior Support,” a jaunty moniker for a program of crude
Skinnerian manipulation in which students are essentially bribed to do whatever
they’re told. More broadly, even the label “school reform” doesn’t
necessarily signify improvement; these days, it’s more likely to mean
“something that skillful and caring teachers wouldn’t be inclined to do
unless coerced,” as educational psychologist Bruce Marlowe put it.
In fact, the corporate-style version of “school reform” that’s uncritically endorsed
these days by politicians, journalists, and billionaires consists of a series
of debatable tactics -- many of them amounting to bribes and threats to force
educators to jack up test scores. Just as worrisome, though, is that these
reformers often overlook, or simply violate, a number of propositions that aren’t
debatable, including many of those listed here.
_________________________________________
This essay is an abridged version of the
introduction to Feel-Bad Education…And
Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling (Beacon Press, 2011)
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Copyright
© 2011 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and
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