The ultimate goal of all education is, or at least ought to be, to teach the individual how to learn. In my mind, what they learn is less important than that they learn how to learn. why? Because if you know how to learn, there is no limit to what you can learn!

Not only is there no limit to what you can learn, but you will have the skills to teach yourself what you need to know. Part of that process, at least in my mind, is learning how to question what you see or hear, to challenge your own assumptions, and to have a desire to seek out answers to the questions you have.

Unfortunately, this appears to be seldom the case. And I only partly fault the teachers. Let me explain.

Somewhere down the line, many, many years ago, decisions were made on what was important for students to know. Now, there’s nothing wrong with those decisions. Having foundational knowledge in science helps you to understand the physical world around you. Having foundational knowledge in history and civics makes you a better citizen and helps you to understand why things are the way they are in the world. Having foundational knowledge in math helps you to manage your finances, construct buildings, and do all the other things that require foundational math in order to do them. Spending time reading the classics in literature helps you to build an understanding of people, their motivations, their regrets and allows you to know that your experiences are not unique. Studying the social sciences helps you to understand and appreciate different cultures and different peoples.

And, if these topics were taught with these goals in mind focusing on them would not be a bad thing. Somewhere over time, though, the focus shifted from helping students glean the benefits of these topics and how they can benefit the student and society, to making the topics themselves the goal. That is, we began focusing on the specifics of the topic almost to the exclusion of the purpose for studying them. Knowing the dates of some historical event became more important than why we need to study that event. We began testing the student on the minutiae rather than the concepts.

How, exactly, this occurred I cannot say. I just don’t know. But I can hazard a guess on the why. It’s just easier to evaluate the minutia than to think about and evaluate the student’s grasp of concepts, particularly since the student may have a unique interpretation which, though not wrong, is different fro what is expected.

So, at the end of the day, we’re not teaching students to learn. We’re teaching them facts that they can regurgitate but cannot use. They may know the facts, but have little comprehension of the value of those facts or how they’re could be used. Why do kids struggle? Because learning facts by rote is boring and, disconnected from context, have no meaning. Give them a reason to learn and connect the facts to utility and they may learn more easily. This is how you teach someone to learn.

As a consequence of that focus on facts over concepts, students struggle. It’s hard to hold a lot of facts in your head, particularly if you don’t see the value or utility of them. But, when students understand the ‘why’ behind what they’re learning, or they understand how it can be applied to their lives, they’re more likely to understand and remember the information and concepts they’re learning. And it’s far easier to transfer those concepts to new and novel situations.

This is, I think, generally how children learn. They don’t sit down and memorize terms and relationships and dates and such. They draw from their experiences to create concepts that they can apply. They learn, for example, that if blocks are not stacked neatly the stack will fall. No one explicitly teaches this, they learn it through observation and experience. They are unlikely to be able explain the concept but they do understand it and will apply it routinely once it’s been learned. That is, as I understand it the idea behind the Montessori method. Through normal exploration and curiosity students will build a knowledge-base that they can use to learn new ideas.

It seems to me that too many people, teachers included, believe that somehow students will develop the skill of learning by repeated exposure to the classroom. I think this is wrong. That’s like expecting a person to learn perform surgery by throwing them into the operating room and handing them a scalpel. They might do surgery, but they won’t do it well. If you want them to learn they must be explicitly taught the skills of learning, just as the teaching physician explicitly teaches the skills of surgery.

Where am I going with this?

Well, let’s rethink education. Rather than teaching lists of facts, let’s tell stories that engage the student. Let’s help them to learn the skills of how to learn so that the can then take those skills and apply them to whatever captures their interest.

Let’s begin in the second or third grade (in the US) to teach students how to learn. Teach them to ask questions about what they’re learning. Teach them to consider alternatives to the ‘answer’. Teach them to dig more deeply rather than accepting what they’re told.

Learning is not a spectator sport. It requires engagement. You’ll never learn to play basketball by sitting in the stands, you must get out on the court.

But let’s don’t just do it once and assume the stud net “gets it”. Let’s repeat that teaching at regular intervals, adding more skills and challenges to the mix as the student ages and matures.

Then, let’s figure out what it is we really want them to know and understand and focus on that rather than on facts and dates and theories that are of little real use to them.