Here’s a complaint you often hear: We spend a lot of money on education, so why isn’t all that money having a better result?
It’s because we’re doing the same thing over and over again. We’re holding 40 or 50 million kids prisoner for x hours a week. And the teacher is given a set of rules as to what you’re going to say to the students, how you’re going to treat them, what you want the output to be, and let no child be left behind. But there’s a very narrow set of outcomes. I think you have to open the system to new ideas.
When I was a student, I went through all the same rote repetitive stuff that kids go through today. And I did lousy in any number of things. The only thing I ever did any good in was English. It’s what I love. You need to find out what each student loves. If you want kids to really learn, they’ve got to love something. For example, kids may love sports. If I were putting together a school, I might create a course, or a group of courses, on sports. But that would include the business of sports, the culture of sports, the history of sports — and once you get into the history of sports, you then get into history more broadly.
How does the role of the teacher change?
I think (and this is not going to sit very well with the union) that maybe teaching shouldn’t be a lifetime career. Maybe it’s important for teachers to quit for three or four years and go do something else and come back. They’ll come back with better ideas. They’ll come back with ideas about how the outside world works, in ways that would not have been available to them if they were in the classroom the whole time.
So, let’s sit down as a culture, as a society, and say, “Teachers, parents, people outside, how do we completely rethink this? We’re going to create a new system from ground zero, and what new ideas have you got?” And collect those new ideas. That would be a very healthy thing for the country to do.
I couldn’t agree more with both of these ideas. For example, I teach English at the high school level. I wholly accept that not everyone loves (or even likes!) literature. It is not my job to make you love literature, or to make you recite a rote list of motifs that can be found in Catcher in the Rye. It is my job to show you how reading and writing can help in fostering and articulating your own passions and interests. The things that make you tick. You love math? Well then we’ll read Borges and figure out the mathematics of The Library of Babel. You love World of Warcraft? Write me an essay comparing conventions of epic questing in gaming to Beowulf. You love film and drawing? Storyboard and script five scenes from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I have never handed out an essay prompt. These are all true examples, and the students in question have gone on to: 1) Engineering at MIT, 2) Teledramatic Arts, 3) Film school. I don’t know how much I aided in the shaping of these decisions, but I do know that I aided in helping them find ways to articulate what interested them. I got them excited, which, to me, is much more fulfilling as a teacher than reading a perfect five paragraph essay.
(interview excerpt via Edutopia)
