Car-Wreck Education
This is how I learned to drive a car:
My dad took me to the Thompson High School parking lot. Then, I drove around. I am sure, looking back, that it was terrifying. I am sure that I wobbled left and right, and accelerated unevenly, and braked much too suddenly.
And then, for the next year, I drove a lot, with a parent in the seat beside me. I got a ticket in Ohio when I pulled off the left side of the interstate at 55 mph to let a State Trooper pass. (Young drivers: Ohian troopers get very angry if you pull off the wrong side of the interstate.) One week after receiving my license, I drove straight into a ditch for no good reason whatsoever.
I got better: I'm 37 now, and I haven't wrecked or gotten a ticket in over 5 years. (The fact that I was dumb enough to actually type that sentence means that both will inevitably happen tomorrow.)
This is how I did NOT learn to drive a car:
My dad did not sit me down and make me memorize the definition of all the parts of the car. I learned them as I used them.
My dad did not force me to learn to drive a car against my will; I recognized on my own that learning to drive the car was an essential component of the autonomy I so desperately desired.
My dad did not, when the time came to practice, force me to practice things piecemeal and incrementally.
I was not required to properly label a map of my city and county roads before he turned me loose to drive on them.
My dad did not spend one day on "acceleration practice" and one day on "braking practice" and one day on "blinker operation practice" and one day on "air conditioner controls" and then, after 18 weeks, have "final car-driving assessment" in which we finally pieced the whole thing together.
My dad did not set a certain amount of minutes I had to practice driving each week. If anything, he got tired of me asking him to take me out for practice driving.
My dad DID offer feedback and tell me when I did something incorrectly (or really, really stupidly)...
...but my dad did NOT periodically sit down with me and fill out a rubric to assign a numerical value to my proficiency thus far in my car-operating journey.
And I'm a proficient driver. Like 99% of all the humans in modern countries who have ever attempted to learn.
The same logic applies to sports (learned while they're played), music (all the theory in the world doesn't replace just sitting down with the guitar and sucking until you're decent at it), relationships (we learn to navigate other people by messing it up until we figure it out), walking (babies learn by running into stuff and falling down)--the list of extremely essential skills that we learn in the most haphazard ways is endless.
This is why I'm always amused by the calls for "more tech training in schools." Kids eat that stuff alive. They learn technology by sitting in the room with it. The average 15-year old can swim intricate technological circles around the average 45-year-old professional. The music industry was brought to its knees by fifteen-year-olds figuring out how to stream music for free. It's happening to cable TV networks right now.
So why does American school work the way it does? At some point, shouldn’t we look at the things with a near 100% success rate — like driving and walking and procreation and ordering food in restaurants and working your iPhone and booking a cruise—and start asking “I wonder why literally everyone figures out how to do those things, but it feels like I have to pistol whip kids through Algebra?”
If you’ve read much of the site, or ever talked with me about education, you know what my answer will not be complicated: people will learn what they want to learn, and not much else.
Assuming we get to decide what students should want to learn is a pretty arrogant assumption in and of itself. But let’s say we deserve that power, just for argument’s sake. We’re still limited in how we can make that happen:
- We can try to our best to force them to learn against their will.
- We can try our best to convince them it’s in their best interest.
- There is no (3)
It doesn't matter what you teach: if you want it to stick, you have to figure out how to turn it into a story they want to be a part of. "Because I said so" doesn't work. It wouldn't work on you, and it won't work on them.
(Thanks to Alfie Kohn for the impetus.)
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