Protecting the Child’s Eagerness to Learn
Today, on the Op Ed page of the NY Times Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College asks this question: “Why don’t children get intrinsic satisfaction from learning in school.” It is assumed that they don’t. And in fact for most of us, school was always more a tasteless, sometimes bitter pill that we had to swallow than an uplifting, often joyful experience from which we gained fresh and exciting insights into ourselves and our world.
We know all too well, and Schwartz reminds us, that by fourth grade students are no longer eager to learn. As a result children need to be bribed to learn, with gold stars and candies in elementary school, and in high school with grades and college acceptances implying eventually good jobs and successful life experiences. Now in NY City they’ve upped the ante. It is proposed that diligent, high-achieving seventh graders, based on their attendance records and exam performance, be paid up to $500 a year.
In case you’re wondering Schwartz makes it clear in his Op Ed piece why money for gold stars won’t work. (In this regard see also Heather Mac Donald’s article in the weekly Standard, Learning for Dollars.) But other than to say that neither intrinsic (love of learning) not extrinsic (dollars) rewards do work he makes no attempt to answer his own question, as to what has made the schools so "dystopian" that the children go from eagerness to learn to absolute boredom "almost overnight." Actually the process usually takes a few years, that which is a tribute to the great strength of the innate desire to learn within all children, at least at the start of school.
But isn’t the answer to Schwartz’s question staring us in the face? Isn’t it obvious that children’s (and people’s) learning varies directly with their interests and abilities, and that no two children share the same interests and abilities? And doesn’t it follow from the fact that schools group their students together by chronological age, and not by interests or abilities, that they are thereby placing students, differing widely in both respects, into a single learning environment with a single teacher?
In most cases this seems to have been enough to destroy the child’s eagerness to learn. For it has meant that most children spend most of their time witnessing the efforts of others to learn, and very little time with efforts of their own. School for most children has turned learning into a spectator sport.**
So why would we ever expect children in this situation to be eager to learn!? Perhaps a few will learn in order to outdo the others. But most, of course, can’t and won’t. It does take our schools three years (everyone points out that it is gone by year four) to destroy the child’s eagerness to learn, but destroy it they do, as anyone who has taught the middle school years knows.
How sad and dismal places our schools have become when the highest achievements we can point to are all related to such things as how well the children do what they’re told, how neat and ordered is the classroom, and now, in particular, how many students in the class have reached proficiency on standardized tests.
Yes, only radical solutions are relevant. And one has to start with the most radical of them all, bring an end to grouping by age. This of course has never been seriously proposed by the political and educational establishment and hence the failure of all (lesser) reforms up until now.
To end grouping by age would mean many more places of learning, and for the most part outside the school building itself, in places where there are working and caring adults with time for children. The school buildings would find better uses, for times when large group spaces are necessary, but they could never, by themselves, provide hundreds of classrooms for hundreds of students all differing from one another in terribly relevant and important respects. Only the society at large could do this.
We have to rethink what we mean by education, and the rethinking has to begin with the absolute necessity of protecting the child’s natural eagerness to learn. We have to be sure this time around that whatever we do we do not take away the child’s natural curiosity. Horace Mann and his followers in the common school movement never seemed to understand that it wasn’t enough just to put all the kids together with a single teacher in a single classroom.
Finally, what is it that differentiates the one room school house of the 19th. century from the large inner city middle or high school classroom today? Many things of course. But in the one room school house, especially when the children were of many different ages, children were much more apt to be taken as individuals, each with his or her own individual interests, talents, strengths, weaknesses, and all the rest, and then as individuals helped to learn and grow. Not, alas, what currently takes place in the places we call school.
** I find unexpected support of my comment about student learning being a "spectator sport," in a "featured article" from this month’s TCRecord, The Cultural Myths and Realities of Classroom Teaching and Learning: A Personal Journey, by Graham Nuthall, 2005.
"We were discovering the ways students live in a personal and social world of their own in the classroom. They whispered to each other and passed notes. They spread rumors about girlfriends and boyfriends, they constantly commented on each other’s and the teacher’s behavior, and they continued arguments that started outside school. It became clear that the students cared more about their peers’ judgments than they cared about the teacher’s opinion. Within this pervasive (but hidden) peer culture, sexism and racism were alive and flourishing even when the teacher actively promoted fully inclusive learning activities or believed she was treating girls and boys equally (Alton-Lee, Nuthall, & Patrick, 1987; Alton-Lee, Densem, & Nuthall, 1991).
