Imagine this common scenario. A teacher is starting a new lesson on some abstract idea\u200a\u2014\u200aimaginary numbers, angular momentum, Shakespearean prosody, something like that\u200a\u2014\u200aand a student asks the following question: \u201cWhy are we learning this?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019ve heard this before. You\u2019ve probably asked it before. As an English teacher who teaches novels and plays frequently, I hear this question so often (though not as often as math teachers, I\u2019m sure) that I\u2019ve learned to all but tune it out or give some sarcastic response:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Student: Why do we have to learn about poetry in school?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Me: I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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But now that I\u2019m several years into teaching at the high-school level, I\u2019ve started to reconsider this question. It turns out that answering this question honestly is actually harder than it seems, and it gets harder and harder to answer the more difficult your content is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Think about it. How would you answer a student who asked you this? One option is to appeal to the authority of your curriculum and say, \u201cBecause it\u2019s on the test.\u201d This is a relatively safe answer because even if the student pushes further, there is always a higher authority to appeal to. It\u2019s on the test because it\u2019s in the curriculum because it\u2019s on the big test because it\u2019s in the standards because the state follows the federal guidelines because the state was incentivized to do so. If you have a problem, call your senator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I\u2019ve told this to students before: I\u2019m sure many teachers have. But I\u2019m not convinced by this answer. It implies a powerlessness, a lack of faith even, in your subject. There\u2019s also the issue that telling a student they must learn about iambic pentameter because it\u2019s on the test is basically the same as telling them they have to learn it because \u201cI said so.\u201d Nobody wants to be told that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The truth is that the content that is regularly taught in high schools\u200a\u2014\u200athink of all those \u201crequired reading\u201d sections in bookstores or the kinds of math problems you might find in an SAT practice book\u200a\u2014\u200ais actually difficult to justify in practical terms. Students, not nearly as oblivious as we sometimes (implicitly) imagine they are, realize this early on and communicate it by asking, \u201cWhen am I going to use this in my life?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Another approach, you might think, is to frame high-school content in terms of, what my administrators like to call, \u201cbuy-in.\u201d A principal once told me, \u201cThe trick is to show them how this stuff matters in the real world.\u201d This is all well and good when you\u2019re teaching arithmetic or basic reading. I don\u2019t think any person has ever questioned why they have to learn to read or count. But how exactly am I, an English teacher, supposed to connect Macbeth to the \u201creal world?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Seriously, how? You might think this is easy, that I\u2019m just being annoying, that Macbeth is the easiest thing in the world to teach in terms of real-world value. \u201cShakespeare,\u201d you might say, \u201cteaches us about ourselves.\u201d This is true. There is something to be learned about ambition, about pride, about guilt, about power, about nihilism from Shakespeare. But this is also not what students mean when they ask why they have to read a fantastical story of a mad Scottish king. What they really want to know is what the Thane of Cawdor has to do with the real world of getting a job, paying the bills, and acquiring wealth. They want to know what tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow has to do with today today today. The truth might be that it\u2019s all sound and fury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This problem isn\u2019t exclusive to English class. It\u2019s probably worse, actually, in math. Walk into any junior-level math course and you\u2019re walking into a sea of abstractions: imaginary numbers, inverse functions, and sin waves. Of course none of these things are useless. Science and math have given society uncountable gifts. But remember, most school districts force every single student to take every one of these types of classes, and there doesn\u2019t seem to be a good reason why. Does everybody actually need to learn this stuff? The answer, I think, depends on how you look at school and the kind of world you think we live in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Things get really tricky for you if you think that high school subjects are giving students real-life or career skills. Most people generally considered successful in the US (think the white-picket fence, mortgage, 2.5 kids type) live their lives in blissful ignorance of complex numbers. Or if they don\u2019t, they probably live their lives in blissful ignorance of the works of Samuel Beckett. Even most teachers do. It\u2019s a common trope in any particular department to hear people say that \u201cI just don\u2019t understand <other subject>,\u201d or, \u201cI was just never very good at <other subject>.\u201d Yet we say this in a building where we force every human being to learn every subject despite their particular interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Why do we do this? Are we torturing students? Are we forcing them to learn everything and thus nothing? Are teachers actually the bad guys students often picture them as?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No. School only looks Kafkaesque if you think of it as a place for training rather than a place for learning. To illustrate my point, let\u2019s turn to Oscar Wilde.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cAll art is quite useless,\u201d Wilde writes in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, but he did not mean it as an insult. I say high school is the same. High school is useless, but that\u2019s why it\u2019s important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This might anger some people, but the truth is that the harder and more abstract your course is, the more difficult it is to build strong, real-world connections between your subject and \u201creality.\u201d My argument is that we don\u2019t need to, and we should not, justify content by saying \u201cbecause I said so\u201d nor by drawing connections to careers. In other words, to assume every math problem one solves or every story one analyzes or every equation one balances needs to be part of a direct lineage linking work done now to success achieved later in order for it to be valuable is to assume learning itself is linear and that its rewards ought to be tangible. Often they are not, and to even attempt to draw a connection between Lord of the Flies and material success seems not only disingenuous but somehow just plain wrong. Realistically, and in the vein of the grandest clich\u00e9 (the one that says that the journey is the destination), the content is secondary to the process of learning the content. That is, there is inherent value in using your brain to solve challenging problems in any discipline because the brain is kind of like a muscle that needs exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This type of thinking is well-known. Think of the cliche about school teaching you \u201chow to think.\u201d What I\u2019m arguing is that teachers and school districts need to do a better job at explaining to students what this actually means, at explaining that the content you learn is secondary to the growth you experience from learning the content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Of course we, as educated adults, know this already\u200a\u2014\u200anobody who does a crossword puzzle or reads a book about the Napoleonic Wars does so because they want to become better accountants. Rather, educated adults who watch Ken Burns or play sudoku have learned the thing that all of us educators want our students to learn: that there is value in using your brain to solve abstract problems and that this value has very little to offer in the way of explicit material payoff, at least not right away. But sometimes educated adults\u200a\u2014\u200aa subset of which group includes teachers\u200a\u2014\u200aforget that children in high school are not educated adults and, for them, the value of learning is not yet self-evident and must be taught. In other words, there is some meta teaching-about-learning that needs to happen. But we must be careful when teaching this type of value in order to make sure we aren\u2019t repeating the same, tired mantras our teachers told us: that somehow life leads directly from high school-geometry to CFO of Google. It doesn\u2019t. So instead of this, we need to be honest with ourselves and with the children who depend on us for an education and live by the idea that knowledge is valuable for its own sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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What I\u2019m arguing is that the point of learning about, say, the Seven Years\u2019 War is simply to learn more about the Seven Years\u2019 War. We learn Shakespeare to learn Shakespeare. The more we bend over backwards to try to prove real-world relevance of our abstract topics the less connected our topics tend to feel. The overall aim of a high school education, when viewed this way, is quite literally to make people more well-rounded, knowledgeable human beings. Why would anybody think this is a bad thing? To think like this, though, requires an admission, and it might be a hard one for most of us to make. But, here it is. When you are teaching high-level courses on things like poetry and calculus there really is no direct connection between your CCSS-aligned, objective-driven lesson plans and material success in a free market. Why would we even want this to be the case? Academic success and financial success are two different types of achievements and they should remain so. Of course there are correlations between performance in school and performance in the job market. But, in my experience, these correlations are less to do with the actual content and more to do with the system of grades and academic hierarchies that funnel students into certain channels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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A question worth asking, maybe, is why do students and teachers think like this? Well part of the blame is on us as secondary-school teachers. We tell children that school is preparing them for the so-called real world. The problem is, though, that after, say, 8th grade, what type of world we are preparing them for is never explicitly stated and is, even for somebody who literally crafts curricula for a living, frustratingly abstract and nebulous. In what ways, exactly, is an 18-year-old senior more prepared for the world than a 14-year-old freshman? and, more importantly, how much of that preparation is thanks to high school? and if any of it is owed to the school, how much of it is owed to the curriculum and how much to the complex and varied social structures present in every high school building?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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If teachers can\u2019t even answer these questions, maybe students aren\u2019t just being petulant when they ask, \u201cWhen will I need this in the real world?\u201d Maybe they actually want to know. Maybe they\u2019d like to know what type of world is out there and how exactly we are preparing them for it. Based on the gymnastics some schools do to justify their content, one might start thinking that in order to check out in a grocery store you have to somehow evoke Euler\u2019s equation or to finance a car you need to understand behavioral economics. This simply isn\u2019t the case. One can live a perfectly ordinary, 9\u20135 life in blissful ignorance of imaginary numbers. Again, most teachers do. I think a lot of us are guilty of this thinking, which is not to say our assumptions are arbitrary\u200a\u2014\u200awe teach content we love for its own sake and then try to work backwards and assign real-world, material value to it. I\u2019m saying we should stop doing this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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If instead we told students they are learning hard, high-level concepts not because they are automatically meaningful to everybody, but rather because skills and content are themselves not only worth it from a personal growth and consciousness standpoint, but that learning itself is a transferrable skill, then we wouldn\u2019t have to constantly fight against this capitalistic, content-justifying mentality. If we can think like this\u200a\u2014\u200aand genuinely believe it as educators\u200a\u2014\u200athen maybe we might actually start agreeing with our students. Maybe learning about the causes of World War I won\u2019t help you land a job designing sneakers at Converse. Maybe the only reason to read Milton is because it\u2019s Milton. Maybe art is useless but that\u2019s precisely what makes it important. Maybe, just maybe, the value of a challenge is the challenge, and maybe the culmination of four years of high school isn\u2019t preparation for some career, but rather a general increase in empathy, compassion, and human consciousness. Is there not value in being conscious and aware of the world in which you must live? Do we all have to aspire to be dead-eyed automatons clocking in and out of jobs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Perhaps if we start thinking and teaching like this, we can get students to grasp a concept a lot of us educated middle-class people seem to know implicitly: that learning is its own reward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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But learning is hard. And we need to stop lying about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Talk to most people\u200a\u2014\u200aincluding high school students\u200a\u2014\u200ayou won\u2019t find anybody who thinks learning in general is bad. Yet, saying that \u201clearning\u201d in an abstract sense is important is different from saying hard concepts are worth the effort required to actually understand them. It goes back to another grand clich\u00e9 that says it\u2019s not writing that\u2019s fun, it\u2019s having written. In other words, we all like the idea of learning, but not the realities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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All of us teachers have seen this problem in action before, even if we haven\u2019t noticed it or named it. Imagine a lesson that starts off strong. Maybe you dress up like Abraham Lincoln and give his Gettysburg Address. You nail it. Kids are invested. They clap. They love it. They ask questions. Then you give them the summative assessment that asks them to draw connections between rhetorical devices in Lincoln\u2019s speech with the political realities of the time, and they bomb. Something like this has happened to all of us. But why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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What\u2019s going on is that in the above scenario, the Abraham Lincoln teacher is mistaking engagement with entertainment for engagement with learning. To fix this, we as high school teachers have to do some difficult things. One, which we\u2019ve already talked about, is to admit that there is generally not a direct connection between our content and the job market. But the other is to admit something much more taboo: that learning is, and ought to be, hard<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This is especially true in secondary school. We lie to students when we tell them learning is exciting, that reading is entertaining, that math is invigorating. In reality, these activities are, generally speaking, not fun. Sure, having solved a hard math problem is fun, having read a great book is fun, having learned about World War II is fun. But it\u2019s important to remember these activities are typically seen as fun by educated adults who\u2019ve already learned to value learning and who, more importantly, already have the skills necessary to accomplish these tasks. But, for a minute, step outside of yourself and imagine you\u2019re a student with dyslexia or you\u2019re a student who effectively missed a whole semester of English because her family got evicted from her apartment or you\u2019re a student who got \u201cpushed through\u201d middle school with failing grades. Or, Hell, imagine you\u2019re just a tired, hormonal teenager stretched thin by social pressures, parental expectations, and extracurricular obligations. Now imagine picking up your copy of Jane Eyre after being told reading is \u201cfun\u201d and feeling like a complete idiot when you have no idea what being \u201chumbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority\u201d means. Then, imagine yourself failing the quiz on the book you were too under-skilled or too anxious to read. For our imaginary reader of Bronte, everybody else\u2019s idea of \u201cfun\u201d seems not only miserable, but actually impossible. Repeat this experience 100 or so times across 12 grades and it\u2019s no wonder so many young people just simply do not read. It\u2019s also probably why urban classrooms tend to feel so challenging. Students are \u201cbehaving badly\u201d because they have lost faith in a system that has denied them access to the bottom of Maslow\u2019s Pyramid, and all the while told them that learning is \u201cawesome!\u201d and simply a matter of \u201cdoing the work.\u201d Would you not feel bitter every day in an environment like this? Would you not rebel against such a system? Would you not be compelled to ask \u201cwhy?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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My suggestion here is to embrace the idea that learning is\u200a\u2014\u200aand ought to be\u200a\u2014\u200ahard. When learning something feels hard and boring and tedious, that\u2019s when it\u2019s most important to keep going. A good analogy is to think about our rampant, headline-obsessed consumption of media. Reading the news is simple if you only read the headlines, but if you only read the headlines you are never reading the actual news. Likewise, if learning feels \u201cfun,\u201d there\u2019s a good chance you aren\u2019t learning. I refuse to dress up like Macbeth and drone on about \u201cTomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow\u201d because, entertaining as it could be, where exactly in such an act is critical thinking evoked? Sure students might laugh, they might even feel like they are learning Shakespeare. But they aren\u2019t: They\u2019re reading the headlines. Unless I couple this performance with actual analytical practice, it\u2019s just entertainment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not suggesting that classrooms should be capital-B Boring. There would be no point in becoming a teacher if you didn\u2019t want to occasionally practice your standup routine. What I am saying is it\u2019s disingenuous to tell children that learning is fun. When a student hears \u201cfun,\u201d they are going to think \u201cpassively entertaining\u201d because most of the entertainment in our modern, comfortable lives we (young and old) consider \u201cfun\u201d is actually, simply put, passive. Real learning will never be fun in the same way watching an action movie is. Closely reading and explicating lines from Homer will never be as fun as watching Timothy Chalamet swing a sword around. Perhaps the challenge lies in embracing boredom, in teaching students to disconnect, in fighting tooth-and-nail against the accepted notion that the most important virtue in life is the pursuit of entertainment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Part of the problem is we all tend to forget what high school actually asks students to do. In other words, you might disagree with me and argue that you\u2019ve had fun learning before. Maybe you had a great time learning about relativity, or Alexander\u2019s conquests, or the Fermi Paradox. But there are a few things to consider about these types of examples and this way of thinking. One, as I\u2019ve already mentioned, we, as educated readers, come into these types of experiences equipped with the skills required to grasp them and also the ingrained belief that learning has self-evident value. Two, learning a series of interesting facts\u200a\u2014\u200athe universe has a speed limit, Alexander was Macedonian, and that the universe appears empty but statistically speaking it shouldn\u2019t be\u200a\u2014\u200ais quite different from the type of learning that we do in a modern American high school. In other words, even if you\u2019re amped up about light-speed paradoxes, try to prove them using a Minkowski diagram, or try to understand Greek case endings in order to examine a primary source from Alexander\u2019s time, or try to perform the necessary statistical analyses to determine how close to correct all the various layers of the implications within the Fermi paradox are to really see what I mean when I say learning isn\u2019t fun: it\u2019s work. Learning something new is painful, is discipline-testing, is scary, and is worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Just because something is hard work doesn\u2019t mean we should avoid it, of course. What it means is we should stop misrepresenting our content to children and teach them that the work we do in school has self-evident value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I think there are two ways the US\u2019s education can go. It will either adapt to the demands of the current generation of neoliberals who want schools to be practical, measurable, and career-focused, or it will double down on the humanities and perhaps be one of the last places where intellectualism can exist for its own sake. Of course, this might be a false dichotomy. It might be possible to do both. Some recent grumblings about the lack of tech schools in America make me optimistic for a future where students are given choice. But I will forever remain a proponent of the value of a liberal arts education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No matter what, though, the question of what students should learn and why they should learn it will remain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I\u2019ll close with a thought. I\u2019ve always found it slightly annoying that we call what happens in school \u201cwork.\u201d We aren\u2019t working: we\u2019re learning. But I think \u201cwork\u201d is not an accidental term and I don\u2019t think about it as cynically as I used to. Because the hard truth is that real learning is work. Real learning is hard. Real learning is frustrating, slow, tedious, obnoxious, cumbersome, messy. But it\u2019s also necessary and it simply isn\u2019t happening where it ought to be. There are various factors at play that explain this, many of them outside an educator\u2019s control. Yet, as educators, one thing we certainly can do, instead of trying to \u201cmake learning fun,\u201d is make learning learning by embracing and loving, and teaching our students to embrace and love, the struggle. We also should stop devaluing intellectualism by trying our absolute best to connect academic subjects to labor. These connections are anecdotal, tenuous, and contrived, and kids know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Perhaps a big part of the issue is that schools and classrooms are run by people who tend to have a natural inclination and respect for the entire learning process. This sounds like a good thing. But the hidden sad truth is that it\u2019s quite rare for a child whom schools have failed\u200a\u2014\u200awhom schools have lied to, whom schools diagnosed, over- or-under accommodated, and pushed through\u200a\u2014\u200ato grow up and become a teacher. This perpetuates the cycle and it\u2019s why the disconnect between students who struggle and their teachers isn\u2019t closing. The problem is that most teachers were \u201cgood students,\u201d which is really just a way of saying they found it easy to navigate a system designed for them. The system is not designed to suit everybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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In the end, by the time a student asks why they must learn something difficult, it may be too late. People who don\u2019t work in the classroom, especially in the upper grades, can\u2019t experience the deep, deflated, disenchanting sadness that comes with the knowledge that most of your students view the lessons you stayed up all night planning as worthless to them and whatever they imagine the \u201creal world\u201d to be. It\u2019s even sadder if you start to think about why there even exists this line between the \u201creal world\u201d and whatever world high school students live in now. What is so \u201cunreal\u201d about school?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Here\u2019s some reassurance. Abstract math, science, history, and English are not worthless. In fact, the very reason our students tend to think reading poems or solving physics problems is worthless\u200a\u2014\u200anamely, that it has no immediate and obvious connection to material payoff\u200a\u2014\u200ais the precise reason these things have value. Knowledge for its own sake is a healthy escape from a society that demands, in one way or another, that everything has a price tag. Learning is hard work, but this is the very fact that makes it worth anything at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imagine this common scenario. A teacher is starting a new lesson on some abstract idea\u200a\u2014\u200aimaginary numbers, angular momentum, Shakespearean prosody, something like that\u200a\u2014\u200aand a student asks the following question: \u201cWhy are we learning this?\u201d You\u2019ve heard this before. You\u2019ve probably asked it before. As an English teacher who teaches novels and plays frequently, I hear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","hide_page_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258,"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crburgess.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}