The Learning Gaps that Schools Can't Fill
Making the most of summer, the real costs of learning gaps, and cold hard truth: these gaps are only getting larger.
Hello Bar-Setters! Today, I want to begin with a brilliant insight from author Mark Manson about the cost of learning gaps—not just for our children, but all of us:
Processing information and understanding something is not only more valuable than ever before, but the value compounds over time. The lessons you learn today will improve your ability to learn important and useful lessons tomorrow. Similarly, the cost of not being able to learn well is compounding as well. Failure to learn from today’s experiences will be even more costly tomorrow because you will be left that much further behind.
One way to think of the stratification in society at the moment is that there is an increasing gap between those who learn well and quickly and those who do not. That gap comes in all sorts of guises: not just income gaps, but also gaps in health, well-being, divorce rates, addictions, and so on (bolding is mine).
School’s Out For Summer!
Summer is around the corner. To most students this means a break from learning. But it’s worth remembering that summers have a way of activating more genuine learning than any other time period.
Summer is a time for freedom. It is a time for granting kids greater independence to socialize and explore. It’s a time for learning new chores and getting invaluable work experience. It’s a time for camps, camps, camps. It’s a time for family vacations that open our eyes to different ways of living. It’s a time for new experiences that change how we see ourselves and those we live with. It’s a time for parents and kids to take on new hobbies and to stretch themselves in new ways. It’s a time for reading, napping, cooking, hiking, and tapping back into the things that make life worth living.
I’d encourage everyone to find the time to clarify some goals, challenges, and new routines for this summer. If you can place boundaries between your kids and easy passive entertainment, they might just find that this summer activates a number of interests, passions, and life-altering learning experiences.
Learning Gaps that Schools Can’t Fill
This reminds me of a section from chapter 13 of Setting the Bar, where I discuss the real source of the large learning gaps schools have so futilely sought to bridge. I’ll include it below, as it is a great reminder of how much each student’s home experience dictates their life and academic success:
Many organizations, such as the Knowledge Matters campaign, argue that accumulating more knowledge brings many educational advantages and enhances students’ lives. I couldn't agree more. Students do better when they know more history, geography, science, math, classic literature, and have a broader familiarity with how things work. These students tend to find school more interesting, because school subjects begin from familiar building blocks.
However, this familiarity comes best from an enriching home environment where knowledge is not shoved down children’s throats but is a natural extension of parent interests, family dinners, vacations, and trips to the zoo or planetarium. It is fostered by homes that feature physical artifacts like globes, books, chess-boards, and instruments. There is no substitute for an environment where learning is a part of living.
We can’t ignore the vast differences between children’s home experiences—the number of books they read, the number of different words they hear, the amount of time spent in passive vs. active entertainment, and the psychological connotations they’ve formed around learning. If a learning tradition does not come from home, then students may need to spend more time on basic knowledge accumulation in order to best close the substantial gaps by the end of high-school. Unfortunately, this is an enormous challenge, which many students, particularly those whose families don’t emphasize education, will not bridge. We will have to continue to adapt to make these gaps less common.
Still, it is foolish to suggest that all children need the same things or that teachers in one classroom can best facilitate extreme differences in students’ home educational environments. Different school populations will have different predominant needs and charter schools can help provide for major differences. But the public education system and its prevailing educational culture should not be built upon an expectation of bookless homes, lest they continue making that a more likely reality.
Most schools would do well to break free of the heavily compartmentalized, knowledge-accumulation approach. Today’s subjects are sanitized and separated from the real world. Students chase test scores on broad state tests. They craft essay responses for the simplified grading standards of a far-away reader but rarely learn to think critically or express themselves well.
What good does it do you to learn 20th-century world history if, after three months, you have no idea what caused World War I or what contributed to the rise of totalitarian governments? What good is passing a geography course if you still refer to Muslims as Islams and have no clue where Vietnam is in relation to Somalia. What good is any class if it doesn’t change how we interpret, experience, and act in the world? Students will always forget many specific details but, for a class to be worth it, it has to create understandings that last after the final exam. We don’t learn in order to pass tests or achieve ceremonial outcomes. We learn to create a richer human experience. The goal of school is to promote long-term human flourishing.
Today, the number of possible future occupations far surpasses our ability to speculate. We can’t possibly teach our children everything they will need to know. We have no idea what the future will look like, nor can we expect our students to remember every concept covered over the course of their education. What matters most is that youth cultivate higher order sense-making skills, learn how to learn, and feel inclined to do so. In addition, they need to build the antifragility to learn from failure and adapt as situations change. If students have these skills, regardless of their situation, they’ll have the tools to improve their circumstances and guide their own future.
Thank you for reading and sharing with anyone you think would find value.
Also, I’ve come across a couple related articles this week that are worth your time:
The Parents Saying No to Smartphones, by Olivia Reingold
Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health, by Jonathan Haidt
Carry the fire!
Shane