The Picture of Dorian Gray<\/em> wrote, \u201cAll art is quite useless,\u201d but he did not mean it as an insult. I say high school is the same. High school is useless, but that\u2019s why it\u2019s important.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOf course we, as educated adults, know this already \u2014 nobody who does a crossword puzzle or reads a book about the Napoleonic Wars does so because they want to become better accountants. Rather, educated adults who watch Ken Burns or play sudoku have learned the thing that all of us educators want our students to learn: that there is value in using your brain to solve abstract problems and that this value has very little to offer in the way of explicit material payoff, at least not right away. But sometimes educated adults \u2014 a subset of which group includes teachers \u2014 forget that children in high school are not educated adults and, for them, the value of learning is not yet self evident and must be taught. In other words, there is some meta teaching-about-learning that needs to happen. But we must be careful when teaching this type of value in order to make sure we aren\u2019t repeating the same, tired mantras our teachers told us: that somehow life leads directly from high school-geometry to CFO of Google. It doesn\u2019t. So instead of this, we need to be honest with ourselves and with the children who depend on us for an education and live by the idea that knowledge is valuable for its own sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I\u2019m arguing is that the point of learning about, say, the Seven Years\u2019 War is simply to learn more about the Seven Years\u2019 War. We learn Shakespeare to learn Shakespeare. The more we bend over backwards to try to prove real-world relevance of our abstract topics, the less connected our topics tend to feel. The overall aim of a high school education, when viewed this way, is quite literally to make people more well-rounded, knowledgeable human beings. Why would anybody think this is a bad thing? To think like this, though, requires an admission, and it might be a hard one for most of us to make. But, here it is. When you are teaching high-level courses on things like poetry and calculus, there really is no direct connection between your CCSS-aligned, objective-driven lesson plans and material success in a free market. Why would we even want this to be the case? Academic success and financial success are two different types of achievements and they should remain so. Of course there are correlations between performance in school and performance in the job market. But, in my experience, these correlations are less to do with the actual content and more to do with the system of grades and academic hierarchies that funnel students into certain channels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A question worth asking, maybe, is why do students and teachers think like this? Well part of the blame is on us as secondary-school teachers. We tell children that school is preparing them for the so-called real world. The problem is, though, that after, say, 8th grade, what type of world we are preparing them for is never explicitly stated and is, even for somebody who literally crafts curricula for a living, frustratingly abstract and nebulous. In what ways, exactly, is an 18-year-old senior more prepared for the world than a 14-year-old freshman? and, more importantly, how much of that preparation is thanks to high school? and if any of it is owed to the school, how much of it is owed to the curriculum and how much to the complex and varied social structures present in every high school building?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If teachers can\u2019t even answer these questions, maybe students aren\u2019t just being petulant when they ask, \u201cWhen will I need this in the real world?\u201d Maybe they actually want to know. Maybe they\u2019d like to know what type of world is out there and how exactly we are preparing them for it. Based on the gymnastics some schools do to justify their content, one might start thinking that in order to check out in a grocery store you have to somehow evoke Euler\u2019s equation or to finance a car you need to understand behavioral economics. This simply isn\u2019t the case. One can live a perfectly ordinary, 9\u20135 life in blissful ignorance of the quadratic equation. Again, most teachers do. I think a lot of us are guilty of this thinking, which is not to say our assumptions are arbitrary \u2014 we teach content we love for its own sake and then try to work backwards and assign real-world, material value to it. I\u2019m saying we should stop doing this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If instead we told students they are learning hard, high-level concepts not because they are automatically meaningful to everybody, but rather because skills and content are themselves not only worth it from a personal growth and consciousness standpoint, but that learning itself is a transferable skill, then we wouldn\u2019t have to constantly fight against this capitalistic, content-justifying mentality. If we can think like this \u2014 and genuinely believe it as educators \u2014 then maybe we might actually start agreeing with our students. Maybe learning about the causes of World War I won\u2019t help you land a job designing sneakers at Converse. Maybe the only reason to read Milton is because it\u2019s Milton. Maybe art is useless but that\u2019s precisely what makes it useful. Maybe, just maybe, the value of a challenge is the challenge, and maybe the culmination of four years of high school isn\u2019t preparation for some career, but rather a general increase in empathy, compassion, and human consciousness. Is there not value in being conscious and aware of the world in which you must live? Do we all have to aspire to be dead-eyed automatons clocking in and out of jobs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps if we start thinking and teaching like this, we can get students to grasp a concept a lot of us educated middle-class people seem to know implicitly: that learning is its own reward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But learning is hard. And we need to stop lying about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Hard Truth<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Talk to most people \u2014 including high school students\u2014 and you won\u2019t find anybody who thinks learning in general is bad. Yet, saying that \u201clearning\u201d in an abstract sense is important is different from saying hard concepts are worth the effort required to actually understand them. It goes back to another grand clich\u00e9 that says it\u2019s not writing that\u2019s fun, it\u2019s having written. In other words, we all like the idea of learning, but not the realities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of us teachers have seen this problem in action before, even if we haven\u2019t noted it or named it. Imagine a lesson that starts off strong. Maybe you dress up like Abraham Lincoln and give his Gettysburg Address. You nail it. Kids are invested. They clap. They love it. They ask questions. Then you give them the summative assessment that asks them to draw connections between rhetorical devices in Lincoln\u2019s speech with the political realities of the time, and they bomb. Something like this has happened to all of us. But why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s going on is that in the above scenario, the Abraham Lincoln teacher is mistaking engagement with entertainment for engagement with learning. To fix this, we as high school teachers have to do some difficult things. One, which we\u2019ve already talked about, is to admit that there is generally not a direct connection between our content and the job market. But the other is to admit something much more taboo: that learning is, and ought to be, hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is especially true in secondary school. We lie to students when we tell them learning is exciting, that reading is entertaining, that math is invigorating. In reality, these activities are, generally speaking, not fun. Sure, having solved a hard math problem is fun, having read a great book is fun, having learned about World War II is fun. But it\u2019s important to remember these activities are typically seen as fun by educated adults who\u2019ve already learned to value learning and who, more importantly, already have the skills necessary to accomplish these tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My suggestion here is to embrace the idea that learning is \u2014 and ought to be \u2014 hard. When learning something feels hard and boring and tedious, that\u2019s when it\u2019s most important to keep going. This, in my opinion, is the key to a strong humanities education: if studying humanities is valuable less in the ends than in the process, studying humanities ought to exercise the brain as much as possible. In other words, the true value of a liberal arts education is the training it gives your brain in critical thinking and problem solving. The actual knowledge is much less important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, I\u2019m not suggesting that classrooms should be capital-B Boring. There would be no point in becoming a teacher if you didn\u2019t want to occasionally practice your standup routine. What I am saying is it\u2019s disingenuous to tell children that learning is fun. When a student hears \u201cfun,\u201d they are going to think \u201cpassively entertaining\u201d because most of the entertainment in our modern, comfortable lives we (young and old) consider \u201cfun\u201d is actually, simply put, passive. Real learning will never be fun in the same way watching an action movie is. Closely reading and explicating lines from Homer will never be as fun as watching Timothy Chalamet swing a sword around. Perhaps the challenge lies in embracing boredom, in teaching students to disconnect from, and in fighting tooth-and-nail against, the accepted notion that the most important virtue in life is the pursuit of entertainment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of the problem is we all tend to forget what high school actually asks students to do. In other words, you might disagree with me and argue that you\u2019ve had fun learning before. Maybe you had a great time learning about relativity, or Alexander\u2019s conquests, or the Fermi Paradox. But there are a few things to consider about these types of examples and this way of thinking. One, as I\u2019ve already mentioned, we, as educated readers, come into these types of experiences equipped with the skills required to grasp them and also the ingrained belief\u2014 based on experience\u2014 that learning has self-evident value. Two, learning a series of interesting facts \u2014 the universe has a speed limit, Alexander was Macedonian, and that the universe appears empty but statistically speaking it shouldn\u2019t be\u2014 is quite different from the type of learning that we do in a modern American high school. In other words, even if you\u2019re amped up about light-speed paradoxes, try to prove them using a Minkowski diagram, or try to understand Greek case endings in order to examine a primary source from Alexander\u2019s time, or try to perform the necessary statistical analyses to determine how close to correct all the various layers of the implications within the Fermi paradox are to really see what I mean when I say learning isn\u2019t fun: it\u2019s work. Learning something new is painful, is discipline-testing, is scary, and is worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just because something is hard work doesn\u2019t mean we should avoid it, of course. What it means is we should stop misrepresenting our content to children and teach them that the work we do in school has real human value separate from the job market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I think there are two ways the US\u2019s education can go. It will either adapt to the demands of the current generation of neoliberals who want schools to be practical, measurable, and career-focused, or it will double down on the humanities and perhaps be one of the last places where intellectualism can exist for its own sake. Of course, this might be a false dichotomy. It might be possible to do both. Some recent grumblings about the lack of tech schools in America make me optimistic for a future where students are given choice. But I will forever remain a proponent of the value of a liberal arts education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No matter what, though, the question of what students should learn and why they should learn it will remain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ll close with a thought. I\u2019ve always found it slightly annoying that we call what happens in school \u201cwork.\u201d We aren\u2019t working: we\u2019re learning. But I think \u201cwork\u201d is not an accidental term and I don\u2019t think about it as cynicaly as I used to. Because the hard truth is that real learning is work. Real learning is hard. Real learning is frustrating, slow, tedious, obnoxious, cumbersome, messy. But it\u2019s also necessary and it simply isn\u2019t happening where it ought to be. There are various factors at play that explain this, many of them outside an educator\u2019s control. Yet, as educators, one thing we certainly can do, instead of trying to \u201cmake learning fun,\u201d is make learning learning by embracing and loving, and teaching our students to embrace and love, the struggle. We also should stop devaluing intellectualism by trying our absolute best to connect academic subjects to labor. These connections are anecdotal, tenuous, and contrived, and kids know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps a big part of the issue is that schools and classrooms are run by people who tend to have a natural inclination and respect for the entire learning process. This sounds like a good thing. But the hidden sad truth is that it\u2019s quite rare for a child whom schools have failed \u2014 whom schools have lied to, whom schools diagnosed, over- or-under accommodated, and pushed through \u2014 to grow up and become a teacher. This perpetuates the cycle and it\u2019s why the disconnect between students who struggle and their teachers isn\u2019t closing. The problem is that most teachers were \u201cgood students,\u201d which is really just a way of saying they found it easy to navigate a system designed for them. The system is not designed to suit everybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, by the time a student asks why they must learn something difficult, it may be too late. People who don\u2019t work in the classroom, especially in the upper grades, can\u2019t experience the deep, deflated, disenchanting sadness that comes with the knowledge that most of your students view the lessons you stayed up all night planning as worthless to them and whatever they imagine the \u201creal world\u201d to be. It\u2019s even sadder if you start to think about why there even exists this line between the \u201creal world\u201d and whatever world high school students live in now. What is so \u201cunreal\u201d about school?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s some reassurance. Abstract math, science, history, and English are not worthless. In fact, the very reason our students tend to think reading poems or solving physics problems is worthless \u2014 namely, that it has no immediate and obvious connection to material payoff \u2014 is the precise reason these things have value. Knowledge for its own sake is a healthy escape from a society that demands, in one way or another, that everything has a price tag. Learning is hard work, but this is the very fact that makes it worth anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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