By PETER BERGER
The snow is still up to my window sill, the government is scarcely more effective now that it’s open than when it was closed, the President is under mounting suspicion, and moderation is under assault on both sides of the aisle. The only good news is Mr. Lincoln hasn’t yet risen up out of his memorial seat and strode off in disgust and disappointment.
Meanwhile public education alternates as usual between recycling bad ideas, commonly known as best-practice innovations, and rediscovering commonsense practices schools dropped at some time in the past but nobody remembers why or whose fault it was.
Student motivation, or its lack, is a perennial hot topic. Even those of us who enjoyed school can remember teachers and classes that left us less than enthralled. In the same way, adults who enjoy their jobs rarely enjoy every aspect of what we do for a living.
Education experts have long chided teachers who don’t prioritize fun in their classrooms. Schools have also ridden repackaged waves of “student-centered” education, where children decide what they want to learn. From the resurgent 1960s Summerhill philosophy that rejected any “school lessons unless they are voluntarily chosen,” to the twenty-first century contrivance touted as “personalized learning,” reformers have attempted to remedy the motivation problem by allowing students to wander academically in the hope that they’ll come home wagging their well-rounded intellects behind them.
I’ve even sat through meetings where advocates have asserted that a student’s unwillingness to do his work is a special education “motivational disability.” Naturally, if he can’t want to do his work, we can’t hold him responsible for not doing it.
You think I’m kidding.
I wish I were.
“Student engagement” is the rhetorical fashion today. That’s because motivation sounds too much like it’s the student’s responsibility while engaging students sounds more like it’s the teacher’s job. Motivation also conjures up controversial schemes where students are rewarded with everything from movie tickets and gaming vouchers to electronics and cash.
Some engagement advocates begin from the premise that “the most meaningful learning happens outside school.” They conclude that engaging students requires connecting what they learn to the “world beyond the school walls,” specifically when they “solve problems, explore ideas, rally for a cause, or learn a new technical skill.”
They cite the elementary student who visited a college biochemistry lab. She was “fascinated by the dry ice bubbling up in water” and “the multicolored protein solutions,” but back at her school science was “boring and irrelevant” because it involved too many “facts and figures.”
Other reformers tout project-based learning where students “solve real world problems.” They spotlight a junior who produced an iMovie to promote himself to college lacrosse coaches. Then there’s the case of the high school duo that hacked into their district’s network and stole passwords, locker combinations, and grades for 15,000 students. Engagement boosters prescribe that schools provide “meaningful learning opportunities” suited to the hackers’ particular skills and “tendency for probing boundaries.”
Heading off student felonies isn’t a curriculum goal. There’s more to communication skills than promoting yourself in a video. Bubbling, colored beakers are nothing without science facts and figures.
It’s not that individual student interests never matter. But airy goals like “comprehending everything that’s coming into you” and allowing each student to “own their pathway through the educational system” will inevitably deny children the general education they deserve and we need them to possess. Our proper task isn’t to make education, meaning the world, relevant to our students. We need instead to make our students relevant to the world by educating them.
Some engagement prescriptions make sense. For example, proposing that classroom discussions involve “more and deeper questions” wouldn’t be news to Socrates. It’s also advisable that teachers be “transparent” in explaining the purpose of their lessons. Engagement advocates contend that “it’s in the book” is insufficient.
When I teach grammar, I acknowledge it can be a dry topic. I also explain that like math it’s systematic, logical, and good training for thinking. I remind my class that many of them will one day study a foreign language, and that it’s hard to understand what adverbs are in French if you don’t know what they are in English.
Yes, I try to pique their interest with humor, drama, and anecdotes. But I have to hope I’ve earned their trust because much of my ability to lead them into learning comes down to “because I say so,” or because somebody once removed says so.
I’m not afraid to tell them I know more now than when I was fourteen.
Advocates like to compare paying me for doing my job with rewarding students for doing their work. They ignore the fact that I’m performing a service while my students are receiving a service, just as I do when I visit my physician. Besides, my tangible reward for teaching, aside from the satisfaction I derive from working with students, isn’t my paycheck. My reward over time is the life it allows me to live, the people it allows me to care for, and their simple freedom from want.
This perspective isn’t popular in these days of instant gratification.
We need to teach our students that their reward for engaging in their education isn’t the feeling they get now.
Their reward is the body of knowledge and skill that’s been refined and handed down through generations.
As was ours.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for thirty years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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