What we can take home from school

The take-homes from school – the goals – can be discussed in the context of our expectations and our hopes for the graduate: Upper percentiles graduate, typical graduate and minimum requirements for formal graduation.

Whatever I wish for my own children is chiefly my own responsibility as a parent. I know of parents who are not interested in the education of the larger society, either because it is not their own responsibility, or because they are quite happy with the weak competition against their own children. I don’t subscribe to that point of view. While I am a believer in competition, and I like to be successful, I also like to compete against – and with – worthy opponents. It is more interesting, expanding, gratifying and fun. I wish the same fun for my children. So let’s take a wider view and look at the society of graduates into which my children will grow. This is the responsibility of the national or global education establishment.

There are a few types of goals we can have for any graduate of the schooling system:

• Knowledge - Just facts. Like “The capital of France is Paris”
• Skills - The ability to do something. Like adding any two whole positive numbers
• Habits - Tendencies, expectations, typical ways of responding to events. Like the tendency to assume that nothing is beyond one’s capability to understand it, and that one can learn anything
• Values - Morality, ethics. What’s Good and what’s Evil. Values vary a lot among people, nations, religions, etc. They have a place in an educational establishment only in homogeneous societies. Even as an individual I don’t feel homogeneous enough to discuss morality with great conviction, so I will stay away from the issue of values

Of the three remaining goal-types: Knowledge, skills and habits, knowledge is the easiest to deal with. Teaching can be achieved quickly: “You know, the capital of France is Paris.” Measurement of the success of teaching is straightforward: “What is the capital of France?” If the answer is “Paris” - teaching was successful, otherwise - teaching failed.

Skills are more difficult to deal with. It takes time to teach a kid to add correctly. It takes sustained concentration, repeated practice, etc. over many months. Measurement is not straightforward. For one thing, we can’t test the skill exhaustively: We can ask the students to add two specific numbers, or as many pairs of numbers we want, but ultimately we would have to say we tested enough and we believe the student can add any pair of numbers.

Habits are even more difficult to deal with. Developing the habit of assuming the ability to learn, takes building layer upon layer of experience. What happens when something is easy to learn, what happens when it’s difficult, what happens when one teacher could not explain something, and another teacher could. It develops over many years.

Habits, skills and knowledge interact with each other. With the habits of self-discipline and of assuming one can learn anything, the student - or the graduate - can acquire any skill they put their mind to. With the basic skill of reading, one can acquire any available knowledge they wish for, just by reading a book.

Knowledge is a commodity, in the sense that it can be acquired at any time in a person’s life.
Acquiring certain skills, such as a spoken language, are said to favor a certain age - a rather young age, at the beginning of K12.
Habits take a lifetime to develop. For example, a person’s assumption regarding what’s understandable and what is not, has its roots in very early childhood, in the responses to a two-year-old’s incessant “why?”

Since K12 education has the power of continuity over many years, it is a good vehicle to develop habits and skills. Acquiring knowledge in itself is less urgent, but knowledge is accumulated as a happy side effect of learning the skills of reading, listening, calculating, etc. Teaching various skills is also a good way to develop desired habits. With every skill successfully acquired, the students strengthen their habit of expecting everything to be learnable.

Setting the super-goal of giving the graduates every power to reach their own goals in life, here are some thoughts about the different goals; this time in the order of importance:

Suggestions for top priority habits and attitudes:

• Learning is fun
• Everything is learnable
• Critical thinking
• Self discipline
• Being a life-long learner
• Being a life-long physically active person
• Coping with frustration
• Coping with change
• Coping with uncertainty

Suggestions for top priority skills:

• Languages - as ancient as humanity
• Effective communication - as ancient as humanity
• One-on-one
• Public speaking
• Conflict resolution
• Arithmetic - as ancient as history
• Effective dealing with data - emerging - worthy of its own discussion

Suggestions for nice-to-have knowledge:

• History
• Any specific science, E.g., Physics
• Any specific social theories
• Geography
• Anything, really

Nice-to have skills:

• Math - as high as possible - a few hundred years old
• Scientific methodology - a few hundred years old

All of the above suggestions are an incomplete list of what I wish for myself, for my children, and for everybody else. The list reflects my own values, which I falsely claimed to leave out of the picture. Oh well.