Sunday, September 4, 2011

The Residue of Learning

 
At one of my son's freshmen orientation sessions, there was collection of professors, including the college president, who were talking about the vision of the school and what parents could expect from the institution.  Like any good educator, I took lots of notes, and looked  for tips and strategies that I could steal and share with others! 

What I found most remarkable about the presentation was that it didn’t focus on  academics as much as I would have anticipated.  Instead, what the professors talked about was the residue of learning …or the stuff that was left behind after all of the teaching and testing was over.

One philosophy professor stated that over 85% of the information that the students would learn in the four years that he/she would be present at this well-respected higher institution of education would be either forgotten, irrelevant or just plain wrong by the time that the students might actually begin to use it in a future career.  But, let’s just say the professor is wrong, and that number is only 50%.  That number still should send shockwaves through education systems around the country. It certainly has gotten me to think and I hope you will consider it too. A few thoughts haunted me.

We must construct teaching and learning around the ideas that last.

To do this we must consider a student's personal formation and his/her developing world-view.  I think that this is a too often overlooked part of our profession.  Very often we look at education as a list of dos and don’ts. At the very least, teaching becomes a checklist list of standards that  can  be knocked off.  either physically, or mentally, allowing us to move onto the next standard or teaching point.

All of the recent studies of past standards have shown that those standards, forged out of the good intentions of well-meaning people,  have, rather than helped most educators, harmed the education of students in America. And we have all been duped and have all played a role and a part. Mind you I am not saying that standards are unimportant, they are, but perhaps not the ones we have used in the past. The new Common Core standards are measurably better than the standards of the last 20 years.   I am also not saying that content is unimportant, it is very important.  However,

Content and knowledge is not the end of education, it is the means by which we educate.   

I want to propose to you that one of the biggest education issues that we have today in America is that we have a muddled sense of why we are all here.  We do not have a good narrative to follow. We often have many well-meaning, confused educators following many different narratives. Do we teach to create good citizens?  Or perhaps teach for an educated workforce?  Is technology the silver bullet to solve our educational woes?   How about environmentalism?  Multiculturalism? All of those ideas are relevant and important, but if any of those are to have any true lasting meaning we must transform the culture of why our students sit day after day in the classroom.  There must be a higher calling to their education.

In the journey of personal formation and the development of our student’s world-view what can we consider?  There are many ways to go about this.  However, to get started  I think we need to go back to Aristotle and other western and eastern philosophers and consider virtue.

If our students are going to experience a higher end to their education, we must infuse the education of our young people with virtues like justice, character, wisdom, honesty, self-restraint, and civic virtues like listening, civil discourse and being informed. 

As a teacher,  when you consider your first grade lesson, your read-aloud, your classroom management, your fourth grade science lesson, your eighth grade history class could you consider these virtues?  Please, be amazing, remarkable and spectacular at teaching the content but don’t forget the bigger lasting, transferable ideas as well.    

Remember,  while 85% of all content and knowledge that kids learn will be forgotten, irrelevant or wrong in the future, there is no expiration date on virtues. 

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