It has been a week of dealing with a teenager who is struggling to learn academic responsibility and hearing reports about rising college tuition and debt and declining college graduation rates. Needless to say, I have been thinking about personal responsibility and the degree to which we are teaching children accountability.
I, personally, think that we are not teaching kids to embrace the struggle. I think, if we want to improve the outcomes of a college education (e.g., graduation rates), we have to make K-12 harder—we have to accept the possibility of our children failing. We have to make success about the education not the diploma.
I see a lot of capable college students who struggle with due dates for assignments and with knowing (i.e., not knowing) what to study because they have been conditioned to rolling due dates and “taught to the test” (something for which teachers are not entirely to blame—I blame the parents and the legislatures who insist on faux success).
Dr. Travis Beck—one of my most respected and admired colleagues and research collaborators—taught me that “a student never really learns something until he/she is first completely confused by it.” I take this to heart in my teaching—as well as my child-rearing.
Getting high grades may be easy—especially if we make it to be. Getting C’s, however, may be far more valuable, especially if they come with effort and promote self-reflection. I believe true success not from winning, but from overcoming defeat. I find it less important to reveal to a student what he or she knows, and more important to show him or her what is not known.
As we prepare students and children for life, we do them a disservice by removing obstacles (e.g., “lawnmower parenting”). At some time in life, the child will become an adult and need to manage his/her own course.
There are days, as a college professor, when I feel like I am trying plant seeds in infertile soil. I see students who are just checking off the boxes until they buy their degree. I have always been happy to see my students get A’s on their transcripts, but an “A” is just a letter—as is a “B” or a “C” (and pluses and minuses are just decorations). The outcome of an education is not the flower that has been plugged into the still-infertile soil—a flower that will soon wither and die. Rather the outcome of an education is the fertile soil where seeds will take root and produce seeds in the lifetime to come.
As parents and educators, we are preparing the future. If history teaches us anything it is that you can’t teach to the test and expect the world to change for the better. We can’t blaze new trails by studying old roadmaps.
No amount of money is going to fix education until we fix education. We can (and should) pay teachers more, reduce classroom size (I am not convinced that is as big a problem as some want us to believe), improve access, reduce costs (to which I say: “You can’t eat your cake and have it to.”), and achieve a 100% graduation rate, but we aren’t going to “fix” education until we acknowledge that education is not about degree completion. Education is about the advancement of knowledge, not the procurement of knowledge. Recognize this and we have begun to “fix” education.
Be your best today; be better tomorrow.
Carpe momento!