So. Your child is one of the millions who think school is a drag.
He or she gets bored. Doesn’t stay focused. Avoids homework. When you ask what happened at school earlier in the day, the response is, “Nothing,” or, (my personal favorite, one that I’ve heard countless times from my own nephews) “I don’t remember.”
Perhaps you think your child is lazy. Undisciplined. Incurious. Even limited.
And some of you, unfortunately, may be correct.
But for others, the problems may lie beyond your child. According to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, it could be the school that is boring the heck out of your child.
A professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, Willingham studies how people think and learn by looking at the biological and cognitive basis of learning. His conclusions about what this all means for your child sitting in class for eight hours a day may cause you to rethink how your child is being educated.
If the folks who decide what goes on in classrooms understood the work that he and other cognitive scientists do, perhaps more kids would stay interested—and learn in class. And perhaps school “reform” would be geared more toward how kids learn than on standardized test scores.
A discussion of Willingham’s views from his new book, “Why Don’t Students Like School?” starts with the somewhat startling notion that the brain is not designed to think efficiently.
It turns out, he said, that thinking is slow and unreliable, at least compared to activities such as seeing and moving. Unless the cognitive conditions are right, the brain will avoid thinking and instead try to rely on memory.
The human brain does, however, like a challenge. Our brains make us curious and interested in exploring new things. But if the problem a brain is asked to solve is too difficult, it tries to give up. If the problem is too easy, it quickly gets bored and tries to find a way to stop working.
Adults can more easily opt out of doing things that are too hard or too easy than can kids in school. So how do children react when forced to do something they do not feel they can handle? They tune out. And sometimes act out, too.
I learned some other things from Willingham, too, or rather, I unlearned some things I thought were true.
One of them involves the “visual-auditory-kinesthesia” theory that holds that everybody can take in information through each sense but learns best through a preferred one.
It turns out, Willingham said, that the processes by which children learn are far more similar than different. So that many of the efforts teachers make to help kids learn through different “learning styles” don’t really help.
He also takes on the notion that teaching “critical thinking”—or “higher order thinking”—to kids trumps the learning of facts. In fact, the former can’t be done without the latter. Background information matters, and is in fact, necessary for deeper thinking. One joker from the State Department of Education in Charleston once informed me that the reason my students excelled in Advanced Placement English was because of my high expectations.
No duh.
He also said that I should not worry about the affluent students at Shady Spring High School, that their parents would see they got to attend superior colleges and universities out of state.
“Besides,” he reasoned, “we have too many students falling through the cracks.”
“You mean the ones that don’t come to school to learn?” I ventured. “The ones just biding their time until they are old enough to quit?”
I could tell that the former drafting teacher now supervising the state curriculum didn’t want to hear my opinions.
“Let me say this,” he began, “we get $18,000 for each student at risk, but we only get $6,000 for your high achievers.”
From then on, until the day I retired, I figured that public schools were all about the bottom line. It has come to pass that many schools don’t ever bother to salute the award-winning achievers in today’s WOKE society. Apparently, administrators don’t want the underachievers to feel bad about other students’ successes.
—
And Willingham dispels another of the common techniques that I confess has always bothered me: The effort by textbook writers and many teachers to make classroom material “relevant” to students’ interests and lives because, the thinking goes, it helps them stay interested.
It actually doesn’t, Willingham says; content is no guarantee of interest. You can turn on a documentary about a subject you love but find it boring, or you can watch one on a subject you don’t like and find it fascinating.
Willingham’s book goes on to discuss how thinking and memory work, but explains how teachers can use this to keep their students engaged.
The reasons that I find his conclusions so interesting is that they go beyond the shattering of a few myths about education.
What it shows is that there is still a great deal for all of us to learn about how to engage and teach children—and make sure they are learning what they need to be successful adults.
—
Meanwhile, we talk about students as “not wanting to learn. We talk as if such students don’t want to learn anything at any time in any place for any reason, when, in fact, it may be that a particular student doesn’t want to learn a particular thing in a particular place at a particular time for a particular reason.
This outlook is not mere stupidity or insensitivity, but a way of dismissing the notion that any priorities the students have might take precedence over those imposed upon them at school. They are obliged to be in school, by the way.
It is not that the circumstances the students find themselves in are inconducive to learning, we insist rather it’s that the students simply don’t want to learn, period. Holy hypocrisy, Batman!
But what is a teacher to do when the kids’ priorities do not allow him or her to conduct the lessons he or she has been hired to teach?
And it may not be enough. We may not be able to reorganize a child’s priorities sufficiently to get him or her to work in class. Coercion, love, or extrinsic reward may not be enough to offset the outside influences that affect the child’s behavior in class.
What do we do, then? The very least—if we have made persistent, wholehearted, intelligent attempts—is not to let ourselves suffer guilty consciences. We are not gods. If there is fault, it certainly has to be shared by those who assign us to teach children in conditions of such scarcity that the reprioritization of students’ motives is practically impossible.
Even in affluent schools there are the effects of movies, television, electronic games, and computers to deal with. Compared with the instant gratification they provide our normal classroom teaching styles are boring. On top of that, teachers are expected to make more demands of students than do the students’ own parents.
Despite all of this, despite the burdens of poverty and the distractions of affluence, there are kids who want to learn what we as teachers can offer. Or there are times when any given child, poor or rich, will open up to us, if only for a short while.
But even if we make the most of it, it will be insufficient to impart much in the way of a coherent body of knowledge. Our meager successes will certainly be condemned as insufficient by those educational theorists far from the trenches who prate about “raising expectations” so long as those expectations don’t include raising expenditures, which we call “unfunded mandates.”
The readiness (much less the need) for serious study at any specific age varies tremendously from individual to individual. Just as stories of dragons and sea monsters dissuaded would-be explorers in ancient times from novel adventures, so the myth of students-who-don’t-want-to-learn shores up our fast-deteriorating factory system of schooling, dissuading us from looking for viable alternatives for the future.
Meanwhile, we can only hope and pray that in time, we can take our schools out of the hands of bureaucrats and return them to our communities at large.
—
Top o’ the morning!
