Teaching children is not about memorization; it’s teaching them to be curious about the world
Originally published in July 2021
You’ve seen the memes on social media, extolling the virtues of teaching life skills to kids in public schools. Stuff like how to balance a checkbook, file your taxes, or fold a fitted sheet. Presumably, these are the same people who believe that bringing back shop class will magically return our culture to its former glory, through the overwhelming force of misshapen bird houses and wooden cutting boards.
What all these memes have in common is a misunderstanding of what is important when it comes to education. The real complaint is that young people today are not being taught what the old people were taught when they were young. Life has changed, and we don’t like it.
For most people, school is not about memorizing specific facts, figures, dates, or formulas. It’s about critical thinking and learning how to learn. It’s a general preparation for life, not a trade school making widgets.
Early in my career in advertising, I used to hire recent college graduates, almost exclusively, for entry-level creative positions. I found they tended to be more valuable over time than more experienced professionals. I determined that talent was more important than experience. Creativity was more critical than expertise. It was easier to teach someone how you wanted things done and then let them loose. Plus, they didn’t come with all the baggage of “at my last job, we did it this way.”
I was often shocked by student portfolios I saw that featured antiquated processes and archaic exercises in abandoned technology, no longer applicable in the real world. They were being taught by professional academics who had learned a process that they were passing on, long after it applied to the real world. You don’t learn the art of typography by hand-drawing letters. We simply don’t do that anymore.
It’s fine if you want to learn how to develop 35mm film, but it’s of zero use to me professionally. I need you to understand how to use a stock house’s algorithms to effectively search for a photo of a multiethnic child in a winter holiday situation that isn’t specific to any particular faith tradition. Your knowledge of stop bath chemicals, a biography of Ansel Adams, and a history of daguerreotypes won’t help.
This is not to say that learning about those things is useless; it’s just that the facts themselves are not relevant. If you’re not learning something deeper, then it’s just a waste of time, driven by an irrelevant curriculum.
It’s not actually all that important to know when the War of 1812 was, but it might be relevant to understand America’s expansionist agenda in relation to the course our history has taken. You might not think higher math is particularly relevant to you as an artist, but since you’ve decided you want to design video games for a living, it’s actually going to come up more than you think.
There are some classes we need because they form a foundation of knowledge we might need for higher education. If you end up pursuing specific fields of law, medicine, engineering, and science, you will need basic skills and understanding of subjects before you can progress. Most of the skills we will need in our chosen professions will be learned on the job. You need the foundation to be able to adapt to those skills.
A quality education comes down to learning to think critically. We don’t learn to write merely so we can tell tales of melancholic women living lives of quiet desperation at a beach house in Nantucket, though that has a place. We learn to write so we can communicate complex ideas in a way that makes them relatable to others. It might be business, law, science, or a novel about life at the beach, but it must provide insight into something important and relevant to humanity.
If we teach kids how to figure things out on their own, how to think independently, critically, logically, and empathically, they’ll be prepared to figure anything out, or at least know how to go about finding the answer themselves. If we hand them everything without teaching them how or why, then they’ll remain helpless and dependent. The worst thing we can do is quell their natural desire to question common understanding.
Why, is always a fair question.
Our current pendulum swing is to concentrate on STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In today’s high-tech world, where becoming a lifelong factory worker is no longer feasible, these skills are certainly more valuable to the future workers of America. But it’s come at the cost of what are often referred to as the humanities and liberal arts. Civics, literature, art, music, theater, history, foreign languages, and composition, to name but a few.
Just like with more technical subjects, the value isn’t always in specific knowledge or the hope of becoming proficient in a field, but in critical thinking. Learning how to think, and learning how to learn, or to teach oneself, is critical to future success. How will you learn a new skill for a new job? How will you evolve your understanding of an ever-changing world over time?
Expanding your mind to endless possibilities, not rote memorization and testing, is what prepares you for success. You don’t have to pursue a career in art or master the Oboe for it to have an impact on your ability to think creatively. To quote Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society, “Medicine, law, business, engineering—these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.”
It’s not just performance on an academic level. A 2010 study in Missouri found an inverse relationship between arts programs and student discipline.
“In school districts in which there was a higher percentage of students enrolled in art classes, there were fewer reported behavioral incidents. This includes violent outbursts and other behaviors that resulted in out-of-school suspensions. Suspensions as a whole, particularly those of 10 days or more, were markedly lower in schools that had robust arts programs. In fact, schools with low student enrollment in the arts reported nearly twice as many disciplinary incidents as schools with high student enrollment in the arts. The study also revealed that the arts have a positive impact on student attendance. Schools with the greatest student involvement in the arts reported the highest attendance rates, at an average of 95.1 percent.”1
Art, music, literature, and creative writing are all massively important, not only to aid in the development of brain function, but to become well-rounded human beings. We should teach kids, beginning at an early age, how important art, music, reading, writing, and storytelling are. They should learn to appreciate and understand the forms, but also to engage in them. Artistic pursuits have the benefit of expanding our ability for abstract thought, contributing to a more optimistic outlook, activating the reward centers of our brains, and reducing stress. This isn’t some silly extracurricular activity; it’s an integral part of being a well-adjusted human being.
Obviously, I’m immersed in the arts, both vocationally and avocationally. But I’m also a voracious reader and consummate scribbler. On my business card, my title reads “raconteur,” which simply means storyteller. This might sound frivolous, or even childish, but what I do is direct billion-dollar companies in how they present themselves to the world through my understanding of behavioral psychology, sociology, economics, graphic design, typography, photography, filmmaking, sound design, and copywriting.
I’m a storyteller, for hire.
Learning how to spell, the rules of grammar, and complex sentence structure are the building blocks you need to communicate effectively. Being able to think critically and logically, about any subject, and then distill complex subjects into concise, entertaining, and illuminating prose is the basis for creating an effective billboard for laundry detergent, same as it is for publishing an academic paper on a major scientific breakthrough.
One area that I believe we have failed stupendously in America is in making education fun. We think of education as serious business, where entertainment is a luxury we can’t afford. Because we rely on standardized testing, teachers are forced to teach kids answers to tests rather than life. We teach our children to fear failure, rather than using it as a means for learning. There is far more value to be found in failure than you’ll ever discover from winning.
If you can teach a kid to love books, to immerse themselves in stories, they will expand their worlds long before they can set out on their own. If you learn to love reading, you will be capable of learning anything you ever need to know.
There used to be a philosophy, and probably still is, that assumes that a solid education is an understanding of common knowledge, which includes books someone has determined are important. I believe academics are far too slow in keeping up with what would excite the youth of today. Rather than teaching the classics, we should concentrate on getting kids hooked on reading.
If that means feeding them sugary, crack-like stories that will keep them coming back, then so be it. I read many of the classics of literature long after high school and well past college. I read To Kill A Mockingbird one Sunday in my twenties, and it changed my understanding of life. I read The Hobbit in the third grade, and it opened up a realm of possibilities. This morning, I read an academic study on the importance of the arts in education. Now you’re reading this.
I am not an expert in education. I am not a teacher or a school administrator (although I did spend three years on my local school board). I don’t have a degree in education. But I do hire young people. I know what I need to make corporations successful in business, and it’s creativity, innovation, critical thinking, abstract thought, and liberal, open-minded thinking.
We need to teach kids how to fish. We also need to teach them to draw, paint, sing, play music and sports, act theatrically, read fantastic stories, and write. Mostly, we need to teach them to think for themselves. There is nothing more powerful, dangerous, exciting, or valuable.