A Thought About Education

"I study war and politics,

so my sons can study business and finance,

and their sons can study

art and music."

--attributed to John Adams

It's the American dream, isn't it? A generation hard-pressed responds so the generation behind it can make money and provide wholesome leisure for its own successors. It doesn't work out so neatly, of course. In our own recent history, the "Greatest Generation" fought the Nazis and began to provide a materialistic world for the "boomers," my own contemporaries, but we knew plenty of conflict ourselves, and our kids, "gen-x," and the "millenniums" certainly don't seem to have been able to achieve much as artists.

However, recently, the high school and middle school near the library where I work posted a selection of paintings, drawings, photos, and a few sculptures around the branch. Some of them are very good. I don't see any future professional artists among them, but it's early days yet, as they say, and any one of these students might actually make a living from art.

What's of interest to me is the amount of work the youngsters actually accomplished with their posters and plaster. Clearly, many of them were interested in what they were doing. Often, we think of our progeny as alienated and uninterested in their education, but here is evidence to the contrary.

How do we reconcile the image of teenagers sleeping or snickering their way through school with what I've just described? I think it's a matter of the kids doing what's actually of interest to them. This tends to vindicate John Dewey, who a century ago claimed schools should find out what kids want to know and draw that from them, rather than try to pound knowledge into them.

But that's exactly what our modern education system is trying to do! We bemoan the perceived lack of scientists and engineers in our land, and try to rectify the situation by force-feeding high schoolers into math and science classes, whether they want to be there or not, whether they have any aptitude in that direction or not. I wouldn't say for an instant that learning algebra, geometry, trigonometry, chemistry and physics isn't valuable, but why put all our kids through it? The results are before our eyes - kids graduating from school with only the vaguest idea of what they were supposed to learn, and for whom the whole experience was boring or hateful. Is it any wonder that such kids become adults who show no interest in further education?

We have de-emphasized the very things our kids would actually pour some effort into and thrown them all into classes most of them find irrelevant and uninteresting. We need to pay attention to John Adams and help our kids investigate what they really want to know.