I generally appreciate columns by David Brooks, the New York Times columnist. Though, when he writes about education issues, he can be way off base.
He’s just published a rather odd, but interesting, piece in The New Yorker Magazine titled Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.
It’s pretty meandering, but there are some intriguing parts. Here are a couple of excerpts:
One of Harold’s key skills in school was his ability to bond with teachers. We’ve spent a generation trying to reorganize schools to make them better, but the truth is that people learn from the people they love. In eleventh grade, Harold developed a crush on his history teacher, Ms. Taylor. What mattered most was not the substance of the course so much as the way she thought, the style of learning she fostered. For instance, Ms. Taylor constantly told the class how little she knew. Human beings are overconfidence machines…
Ms. Taylor was always reminding the class of how limited her grasp of any situation was. “Sorry, I get distracted easily,” she’d say, or, “Sorry, sometimes I jump to conclusions too quickly.” In this way, she communicated the distinction between mental strength (the processing power of the brain) and mental character (the mental virtues that lead to practical wisdom). She stressed the importance of collecting conflicting information before making up one’s mind, of calibrating one’s certainty level to the strength of the evidence, of enduring uncertainty for long stretches as an answer became clear, of correcting for one’s biases. As Keith E. Stanovich, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, writes in his book “What Intelligence Tests Miss” (2009), these “thinking dispositions” correlate weakly or not at all with I.Q. But, because Ms. Taylor put such emphasis on these virtues and because Harold admired her so much, he absorbed and copied her way of being.
Here a second excerpt:
Harold was gripped by the thought that, during his lifetime, the competition to succeed—to get into the right schools and land the right jobs—had grown stiffer. Society had responded by becoming more and more focussed. Yet somehow the things that didn’t lead to happiness and flourishing had been emphasized at the expense of the things that did. The gifts he was most grateful for had been passed along to him by teachers and parents inadvertently, whereas his official education was mostly forgotten or useless.
I’d be interested in hearing other reader’s reactions — do you think it’s as odd an article as it seems to me?
I’ve admired David Brooks for a long time. I don’t think what he writes is odd at all. It’s beautiful. It’s very human. He is not “way off base!” He’s trying to bring us back to a place where we recognize what true learning is. True learning is absorbed naturally through our interactions with others, not through the forced teaching of standards and skills deemed important by strangers or education “experts”.
Our institutionalized educational system can be very dehumanizing. I had to leave teaching because of what the system was doing to me and what it forced me to do to students. For generations now, schools have not looked at students holistically. The focus has been all on the teaching of stuff that someone other than the student feels is important to learn. Luckily students and teachers are still human enough to learn things from eachother other than curricula.
David writes, “The gifts he was most grateful for had been passed along to him by teachers and parents inadvertently, whereas his official education was mostly forgotten or useless.” Of course! I think David recognizes what a waste of time school can be. I can easily argue it is much more than just a waste of time, it’s truly harmful to many students. The more sensitive and compliant the student is, the more harmful schools can be.
When I look back on my supposedly excellent education (2nd-best school district in the country in the late 1960’s), the only thing I learned that I think was truly worthwhile was typing, which I learned in 7th grade. Everything else of any imprtance such as reading and writing I could easily have learned at home on my own and through my interactions with the adults I grew up with.
I loved what he wrote about Ms. Taylor, because that describes absolutely what I was like as a teacher. I tried to share as much as possible about my personal self with my students….. my lack of expertise, my tendency to get distracted easily, my jumping to conclusions…..
No, David is not off base! He recognizes what true learning is.
No matter how many or how much SEL, PBL, collaborative learning, RTI, IEP’s, and all that other stuff we throw at our students, if they are not allowed to choose what, how, when, with whom, where, etc….. they learn, then it’s meaningless and a waste of time. We need a giant paradigm shift when it comes to our educational system. We can start by getting rid of standardized testing and all the grades….. not just A’s and B’s, etc., but also K-12.