From time to time, my boyhood friends and I would complain that school was boring. Not once did our parents sprint over to console us.
Not long ago “The Kids Are Right: School is Boring” was a headline on a leading education website.
Times have changed.
When it comes to the problems at school, every expert’s got his specialty, but one of the complaints you hear from regular people is that students don’t seem to know much. Most regular people still believe education rests on old-fashioned skills like reading, writing and arithmetic, and that students should know there are 50 stars for 50 states, what erosion is, who won the Civil War and what nine times eight is without consulting an iPhone.
Education experts — the people who tell teachers and the rest of us how schools should work — don’t think knowledge is especially important. The way they see things, students instead need to learn how to think. Experts have named this 21st-century skill “critical thinking,” as if it’s something new that schools need to begin teaching, an assumption that ignores the obvious fact that someone evidently taught the experts how to do it, though apparently not that well.
Experts argue that students should learn “to see systems rather than disconnected facts.” The trouble is, two facts often seem disconnected when you don’t know any of the other facts that lie between them. Of course, learning facts can be far less fun, and far more work, than expressing your opinion, especially when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Unfortunately, ignorance doesn’t make for many meaningful thinking experiences in classrooms or in life.
Some experts and 12-year-olds complain that learning facts makes school boring. Everybody’s natural sympathy goes out to students who are bored because everybody’s been one. Teachers don’t like boring classes, either. After all, we have to be there, too. I don’t like feeling as if the air is being sucked out of the room myself.
It’s a fact of life, though, that some things by nature are boring. That doesn’t make them unnecessary or irrelevant. Beside that, students haven’t stopped learning to multiply because teachers suddenly lost the knack they once had for making the times tables fascinating. Yes, there’s more to mathematics than memorizing math facts, but if you can’t readily multiply and divide, you can’t manipulate fractions and if you can’t manipulate fractions, you can’t do algebra.
People say teachers need to motivate their students. I do have a responsibility to present material in an appealing and understandable manner, the same way my physician’s supposed to help me understand what I can do to keep healthy. But blaming a teacher if a student doesn’t want to learn is like blaming my doctor if I don’t want to exercise or eat right.
Experts contend there’s simply too much to learn these days, as if this wasn’t true 50 years ago. This is nonsense. Students don’t know who we fought in the Civil War, not because American history suddenly got too long, but because too many schools stopped teaching history. At the same time, our students’ knowledge, our nation’s knowledge, is shrinking because too many people aren’t willing to know as much. It just doesn’t feel good.
Information isn’t the same as knowledge. Knowledge is the body of information and skill that you command. Education is the process by which you acquire and master that information and skill. Technology, for all its glitz and all our idolatrous worship, hasn’t changed what it means to be educated. Retrieving information on your smartphone doesn’t make you educated, any more than Alexander the Great was educated because he could google Aristotle.
We as a society need to make up our minds. What is the common knowledge we want our children to command? Do we care if they know our principal rivers and mountains? Do we care if they know how our government works? Do we care if they can use quotation marks? Do we care if they can multiply without a calculator? Because, if we care, then it’s time to recognize that learning these things won’t always be fun, and that you’re no more excused from learning the multiplication tables because your teacher can’t keep you in stitches, than you are from ignoring a traffic cop because you aren’t enthralled by his choreography.
Fun isn’t the point.
Poor Elijah thinks children should have fun, in and out of school. But he also has an answer for students who don’t find learning decimal fractions or the names of states entertaining enough. He doesn’t let them compare it to soccer or Snapchat or basking in the sun. He asks if they’d rather be packing matchsticks like children in India, or stitching Nike sneakers, or sorting buttons 12 hours a day because their fingers are nimble. There are alternatives to school.
Fleeing Ukraine is an alternative. Having your classroom shelled by Russian artillery is another.
When Eisenhower was president, if I didn’t want to eat what was on my plate, some nearby adult would remind me to think of the starving children in Europe. In my generation, they meant displaced persons uprooted by the Nazis. Before that, they meant the victims of World War I and the Armenian genocide. Closer to our age, the starving children lived in Cambodia and Biafra.
My point isn’t that we should make American children feel guilty about famine so they’ll eat their vegetables. Nor am I suggesting that we burden them with an adult measure of the world’s grim sorrows.
They should be mindful, though, that there are worse hardships than homework. Boredom, like $4 a gallon for gas, is survivable. Sometimes it’s even necessary.
Students, like the rest of us, need perspective. So, the next time your child complains that learning something is boring, give him a hug. Then just say, “So what?”
It’ll do us all a world of good.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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