January-February 2009 Selected Content

For the past 17 years, I've been employed professionally in day jobs for which I have had none of the listed qualifications, neither academic nor experiential. I manage to get these positions because I am well-spoken, write well, and have turned what might be perceived as the weaknesses of my resume into strengths.

I have a track record as a "quick study," can digest large amounts of new information very quickly, and use it in the development of policy. I pick up new tools easily - I use quantitative analysis and epidemiological statistics in my work...and I haven't taken a math course since high school. I am collegial, a team player, and since I don't derive my identity from my work, am perceived as non-threatening (if personally unambitious).

A requirement of being a state employee and a manager, is that I attend "training." I can say with some certainty that, in terms of assisting me in doing my work better, the taxpayers are not getting their money's worth.

This isn't to say that I never learn anything. Occasionally I do. But the transfer of skills and information is tremendously inefficient. Some of this has to do with the training itself; most of it has to do with me. The training, prepared and packaged in advance, is based on the initial assumption that I don't know what it is that is to be delivered. When I do, well, I end up drinking a lot of coffee, now and then I write a letter or two; my notepad is full of doodles; sometimes I make shopping lists, get very bored, and try to control my more sarcastic instincts.

The second assumption is that I am ready to learn that which is being taught. There are infrequent occasions where there is basic knowledge that is assumed which I simply don't have. When this happens, knowing that I could take up too much of other people's time (as well as being unwilling to appear too ignorant), I simply wait it out.

More commonly, there are other influences on whether I learn much. Did I have time to eat breakfast? Am I sleepy after lunch? Are the chairs comfortable (or too comfortable)? Are there other things happening in the office or in other parts of my life that require my attention?

Finally, will I have a near-immediate use for any of this, or is most of it remote from my day-to-day responsibilities? If the latter, the only vestige of my day will be the training notebook, which is likely to be lost quickly in the crush of paper on my desk.

From years of experience, I have learned that the teacher doesn't matter much. I've had instructors who were kind, engaging, amusing, and entertaining, and I will long remember the jokes they tell or their training techniques, but the content will be quickly wiped cleaned from my poor brain. In contrast, I can learn from teachers who speak in monotones, who are disorganized, or easily rattled or short-tempered, provided I am already interested and know how I will make use of the information being transferred, and there aren't other personal factors (mine, not the instructor's) that get in the way.

Frankly, I doubt that my experience differs significantly from that of every government school administrator who ever walked the earth. So why, when it comes to kids, do we as a society choose to saddle ourselves with an educational paradigm and structure that, in terms of learning, has such a proven track record of downright stupendous inefficiency, and we all know it?

Left to their own devices, children are like me - or more accurately, for reasons of which yet I am not entirely cognizant, I am like a child. If you spend enough time around children who aren't as yet browbeaten into conforming to the education enterprise, you know that they have a style of learning that both fits their condition and meets their individual developmental needs. Children work to make sense of their world, to see patterns and consistency within the limits of their own development, and are constantly growing out of the patterns they've previously perceived as out of old shoes. They organize, correct, self-check, all in an unending upward spiral that allows them to make increasing sense of, and to navigate in, what is for them an ever-expanding material and mental environment.

In other words, they know how to think, and no one ever had to teach them how. What we do in school, in contrast, is, to quote John Holt, "teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favor a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely use ourselves."

We don't have to motivate them either. Children strive to make sense of their world, through increasing competence expand their realm of freedom, to do those things which they see the adults around them doing. They are building neural pathways, booting and rebooting the hardwiring of the brain, and pruning those dendrites that atrophy through disuse.

But the obverse is true as well. When the world presented is limited; when children's strivings are constrained, narrowed, or discouraged; when the realm of freedom becomes more circumscribed rather than increasingly expanded; and when the roles played by significant adults with whom they spend most of their day are limited to teaching, it is not surprising when we grow into more limited versions of the human beings we might otherwise have become.

In listening to thousands of homeschoolers over the past decade, I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of their problems are a result of far too much attention being given to "schooling" and not enough being given to "learning." We search for answers in the perfect curriculum, in a facsimile of what might occur inside a classroom, in scope and sequence, in organizing the content in some way vaguely familiar enough that it might please our "inner schoolteacher" even when it leaves the kids flat.

The reality is that none of the content with which schoolers are confronted inside the boxes is rocket science except rocket science, and there are desperately few institutions teaching rocket science these days. As in the case of my training, whether it is learned or not often has very little to do with the content or its delivery and everything to do with whether it "speaks to our condition."

My success on the job, such as it is, is due to my flexibility, adaptability, curiosity, and drive to learn new things. I am rewarded not so much for what I know, or even what I know how to do, but how I behave when confronted with that which I don't know. And since the realm of that which I don't know is so vast (and continues to be so interesting to me), somehow I've managed to make a career of exploring little pieces of it.

As for schools? The one concession I am willing to make these days is a grateful acknowledgment that they often provide breakfast.

© 2009, David H. Albert