Education Usually Fails: Lapham's Quarterly 14-4.

 Lapham’s Quarterly 14-4: Education (2022) Every society ever known has some method of passing on its culture, its values, customs, knowledge etc to the next generation. All societies also mark the transition from childhood to adulthood, and well as other changes in status. However, the new generation doesn’t grow up in the same environment as their parents, and so the transfer of culture is always incomplete and variable. Stories and instructions will not have the same meaning and force for the children as they had for the parents. I take it as a given that raising one’s children is one of the main drivers of cultural change. For no matter how hard we try, something is always lost in translation.

     This collection focuses more on the process, and mostly on formalised institutional education, which began with literacy in Sumer. Literacy’s great advantage is that it enables people to record and reflect on their experience. That’s also its great disadvantage. People who feel it’s important to write about education, especially if it’s their own, usually have an axe to grind. In fact, literature generally is one long wail of complaints. Even fantasy, which implicitly complains that real life lacks its intensity. Much of the evidence in this collection explicitly or implicitly complains that education, especially formal education or schooling, not only fails to achieve its ostensible goals but is more or less actively hostile to them. 

     Depressing. 

     For the record, I often felt frustrated by my work as a teacher. When I reflect on my career, I have only one serious regret, that I didn’t agitate for the abolition of the grading system. We group students by age range, so that in a typical class there is about a one year range in chronological age, and as often as not more than that in developmental age. To expect them all to be capable of arriving at the same place after a course of study is a kind of delusion. That’s bad enough, but focusing on a good grade as the purpose of learning doesn’t encourage students to actually learn anything. What they actually learn is how to ace the test, not how to understand material they have studied. Worse, grades encourage invidious comparisons. 

     The above paragraph is not too far off the most common tone of the selections in this compilation. So I’ll try to strike a positive note: Students do want to have a pleasant experience of school, and any teacher who tries to provide it will be rewarded by seeing their charges grow and develop as persons, and achieve insights and accomplishments that delight them.

     The student-teacher nexus is one of the most intense personal relationships, which no doubt explains that everyone has strong feelings about their schooling. We use the verbs “teach” and “learn” as if they were transitive verbs denoting independent processes. As if teaching a student was like painting a wall. As if learning a subject was like eating a meal. In fact, teaching and learning denote the same reality. Neither can occur without the other. It’s a reciprocal process: the teacher and student both teach and both learn. Each changes the other. I’m grateful to the many students who taught me what I needed to learn.

     Another recommended compilation. ****