Dodging the banality of modern fables

Luke Epplin at theatlantic.com argues, in "You Can Do Anything: Must Every Kids' Movie Reinforce the Cult of Self-Esteem?" —

For all the chatter about the formulaic sameness of Hollywood movies, no genre in recent years has been more thematically rigid than the computer-animated children's movie. These films have been infected with what might be called the magic-feather syndrome. As with the titular character in Walt Disney's 1943 animated feature Dumbo, these movies revolve around anthropomorphized outcasts who must overcome the restrictions of their societies or even species to realize their impossible dreams. Almost uniformly, the protagonists' primary liability, such as Dumbo's giant ears, eventually turns into their greatest strength.

But first the characters must relinquish the crutch of the magic feather--or, more generally, surmount their biggest fears--and believe that their greatness comes from within.

Epplin cites a profusion of current and recent offerings — Planes, Turbo, Kung Fu Panda, Wreck-It Ralph, Ratatouille — that follow the same formula. He takes the perspective that this message is naive: it's a patent falsehood that grandiose hopes can be achieved with minimal failure after a 90-minute quest.

Epplin suggests that Charlie Brown — whom Charles Shultz gives a home-run to after forty-three years — might serve as a useful counter-example.

I'm less concerned about the specific moral of contemporary kids' movies — though I agree that the anti-cult-of-self-esteem partisans have a point — than I am about the monotony of morals.

One of the things I'd love to see in our school — in the early grades, particularly — is a plurality of messages in the stories kids read. What glorious grist for their mental mills Aesop — even at his most brutally pessimistic — can be!

Any recommendations for heterodox children's stories?

Our Big, Fat Goals, part 1

Nietzsche wrote:

the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…

In the spirit of producing good, mediocre, and bad ideas, so we can winnow them down the best, let me kick off a long(ish) list of the potential Big Fat Goals for our school!

A. Genius/Brilliance

Should the aim of our school be to regularly pump out brilliant kids who can do amazing things with their minds?

I’m not talking IQ here — or at least not primarily. Though IQ seems to be quite elastic, it seems that how far it can be stretched does have some limits. (The largest contributions to IQ seem to be one’s experience in abstract thinking, and the amount of information one is able to hold in one’s working memory.)

(That said, if some trustworthy method does arise for radically expanding IQ — as seemed to be the case for a while with the double-n-back-tests, I’m not opposed to talking about whether our school would like to embrace it.)

More importantly, folk tend to fixate on IQ in a silly manner that makes more of the measure than seems justified. The correlation between IQ and any measure of success isn’t particularly strong. Having a ridiculously-high IQ doesn’t seem to guarantee that one will do impressive things with his or her brain, as the Terman Study famously showed.

Doing impressive things with your brain: that’s what I’m excited by. How can we help kids become adults who think smarter and harder than others do on problems that matter? Who bring together insights from diverse fields to make new breakthroughs? Who find all this fun?

Again, this is less a product of hardware than it is of software. Brilliance isn’t the product of just one factor (e.g. IQ, skull size), but rather a whole host of factors. (I’ll be spending much of the next year, in my “How to Become a Genius?” course — exploring those factors, and blogging about them here.)

Do we want to make meeting that “whole host of factors” one of the big goals of our school?

I’ll give the last word here to Jonah Lehrer, in his somewhat-overrated-and-much-maligned-but-I-think-eminently-useful-food-for-thought book Imagine: How Creativity Works:

In fact, we’ve already proven that it’s possible to create a period of excessive genius, a moment that’s overflowing with talent. The only problem is that the geniuses we’ve created are athletes.... The question now is whether our society can produce creative talent with the same efficiency that it has produced athletic talent. Our future depends on it. (p. 239)

I like this.

B. Flourishing/Well-being/Happiness

Living well is difficult, and it seems useful for our school to help kids (and faculty, and the community at large) reflect on and practice it.

Flourishing — my favorite synonym for this — can be tied into the academics of our school. The questions of the good life have strong ties to literature: some of our greatest novels, poems, and sugary-breakfast-cereal jingles make definite (and competing) claims to what will really make us happy. History is, in part, the story of groups and individuals seeking to flourish, according to their understandings of flourishing. Religions and philosophies (as I explore in my World Religions/Worldviews course) contain explicit theories as to what the good life entails, and how to achieve it. The arts have long contended that they provide a necessary role in ensuring human happiness.

All in all, a deliberate focus on well-being can bring us deeper into the liberal arts curriculum. By emphasizing flourishing, we can make our school more academic.

(Flourishing can also link to the social sciences, and the natural sciences. What is the cognitive psychology undergirding human happiness? What is the evolutionary psychology that has led Homo sapiens to a particular happiness formula? What are the economics of happiness? What is the sociology? More broadly, does it make sense to talk about “the good life” of other species? A chimpanzee? Can a duck flourish? Can an evergreen? Can fungi?)

But the deeper payoff of a focus on flourishing is the strong personal and community angle. It’s not enough to talk about the good life, at least in a K-12 school; we must also experiment with living it!

This would, I imagine, include a host of diverse practices. Anti-bullying programs would definitely fit under this. Meditation might, too. Communal eating, and group rituals, could come into this, as could nuanced discussions of the role that competition plays in our school. Should we bring plants and animals into the classroom? What should our architecture be? All these topics, and more, could appropriately come under a big goal of “flourishing.”

“A school for flourishing.” I like that.

More to come! In the meantime, please do post your thoughts, critical as well as supportive!

On putting the cart before the horse

Life is constant reinvention — online life, much more so!

I had been planning to walk through Kieran Egan’s “Learning in Depth” idea last week. Learning in Depth (LiD) is a powerful idea — a strong contender for a “teensy tweak that changes everything in schooling” award, if such an award exists.

(Sidenote: why the hell doesn’t that award exist? Tech billionaires, take note!)

But then a chance comment by a friend ruined everything. (Thanks, Vicki…)

The friend, speaking in a wholly different context (we’re working to start an atheist church together, but that’s another story), criticized product pitches that don’t solve previously-felt problems. She said that a terrible (and terribly common) way to pitch an idea is: “here’s-this-thing-I-invented-and-here’s-why-you-desperately-need-it!”

A much more effective way — and this shouldn’t be news to anyone — would be: “If you’ve been struggling with x, this fix may help you resolve it.”

And then I realized that I was about to pitch Learning in Depth without first identifying the need for it.

And then I realized that we’ve been outlining this school without first identifying the big problems in American education that it will attempt to rectify. What are the primary things we want this school to do?

What are our overall goals?

I realized we’ve been unintentionally inverting the customary arrangement of steed and tumbrel: that is, we’ve been putting the cart before the horse.

Well, no more!

Before we go an inch further:

what do we really want this K-12 school to do?

I invite you, beloved reader, to offer your own goals for such a school in the comments. Don’t hold back: let’s get out all the possible goals we care about, and then decide on which trump the others.

Identifying these “big items” will help us make other decisions — say, whether to go public, private, or charter, or whether to have grades or badges or portfolios.

Presumably, this will be one of the most important conversations we have, so ideate away!

The stupid power of stupid stories

One of Kieran Egan’s major emphases is how tremendously foundational stories are for human cognition. Almost anything, it seems, can be understood more readily if we put it in the form of a story.

Why this is complex and fascinating — stories seem to sit in the nexus of culture and biology. At some point, I’d like to unpack some of this here.

For now, I’ll just relegate myself to (ha!) a simple story. A week ago, my family took a camping trip out to the San Juan Islands, off the Washington coast. It was an excellent trip, all in all, but the drive back home was a little vexing.

James, my three-year-old, was kvetching in the back seat — he had been cooped up far too long — and I decided to distract him with some of the cool studies on crow intelligence that had been done recently at the University of Washington, from which I recently graduated.

I put on my super-excited-distract-the-kid voice:

“JAMES! Some people wanted to SEE how SMART CROWS were! So they went to the CROWS’ NESTS and…”

Epic fail. James’ attention was barely pricked, and he fell back to whining and violently thrusting his toy airplane around the car.

I remembered the cognitive primacy of simple stories, and abased myself, this time in a more measured tone:

“James! Once there was a crow named — erm — ‘Crowster.’”

Attention: snagged.

“And one day he saw a human walking toward his nest.”

It was amazing — in teen argot, “stupid” — how immediately he paid attention, and how perfectly he maintained it. (And, for that matter, how frustrated he was when, for purposes of navigation, I had to break off the story a few minutes later.)

(Fuller accounts of these studies on crow intelligence, incidentally, can be found at the New York Times and at this TED talk. Neither uses simple stories, or, alas, the character of, erm, “Crowster.” They’re still pretty great.)

I don’t want to press this too far: anecdotes featuring one’s child are perhaps the lowliest form of empirical evidence. But this seems to illustrate something broader: stories are magic.

Stories are a format our minds (innately? culturally?) are biased to pay attention to, and to remember. We are the storytelling animal, par excellence. (Take that, dolphins!)

Stories even factor into the System 1 / System 2 division. Daniel Kahneman writes, in Thinking, Fast and Slow —

A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent... does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.... The mind — especially System 1 — appears to have a special aptitude for the construction and interpretation of stories about active agents, who have personalities, habits, and abilities. (p. 29)

Well, well.

A few questions seem to arise for we who wish to design a new kind of school:

• How can stories enrich all the disciplines, not just (say) literature and history?
• How can we design the curriculum so that these stories connect up with and support each other?
• What are the limits of stories? Are there situations when a story is exactly what a student doesn’t need to understand something?

The $100,000 teacher?

How can we attract, and retain, amazing teaching talent?

At the Corbett Charter School’s presentation at the IERG conference, their principal emphasized that what they do was not “scalable” or “replicable,” “unless you can replicate our teachers.”

That is, this method of schooling (Egan’s Imaginative Education, as interpreted through Corbett Charter School) relies on finding talented individuals to teach — people with drive, and wit, and zeal. Such individuals, famously, can often make much more in private business.

Is one hundred thousand dollars a year enough?

Controversial reformer Michelle Rhee, onetime chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s public school system, offered even more (at least for some teachers whose students improved scores on standardized tests). Per Wikipedia —

In 2008, she also tried to renegotiate teacher compensation, offering teachers the choice of salaries of up to $140,000 based on what she termed "student achievement" with no tenure rights or earning much smaller pay raises with tenure rights retained.

Now, I doubt this proposal could have provided that much money to every teacher in the district — the average wage would be lower.

But could a school, if it wanted to, pay every teacher a hundred grand? (2013 dollars)

And should it? Would it be helpful to attract and retain great talent? Could there be some unintended consequences?

Three closing thoughts:

1. If we’re able to pay teachers a lot, I’d love to see administrators paid slightly less. That would help instill a fantastic message in the community. Is this just romantic nonsense on my part? Am I ignoring something important?
2. Eventually, I’d love to see us develop a model that didn’t lean so heavily on the hard work of finding such gifted teachers, if only because I do want to replicate this, and such people are hard to find. But since we’re essentially asking the first generations of teachers to invent this school system along with us, this problem looms large.
3. I’ll be curious to talk about how we can keep other costs in the school down, to make things like this possible — having the community fulfill some of the roles of the janitor, for example.

A school of glass?

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel did a series of investigative reports some years back on the city’s charter schools. Some, it reported, were amazing — I toured one myself, and my twenty-two-year-old self was blown away.

Others, it reported, were abominable: windowless rooms in which students scribbled answers on a never-ending series of worksheets.

The funny thing, the paper reported, was that parents didn’t pull their kids from the school.

This story has been lodged in my memory for years now, and I still don’t know how to make sense of it. Were parents not aware of the awfulness of the school? Were they hoodwinked by the administrators (who, if memory serves, took a nice fee for their work)? Did they just not care?

Famously, many contemporary teachers have an ideal of the closed classroom door. The superintendent, principal, and PTA may bark, but then the teacher closes the classroom door, and does what she believes to be best.

I get this — my allergy to bureaucracy loves this ideal.

But if we’re looking to display the wonder and glee of our students’ learning on display, I imagine we may want a little more transparency. If our kids are doing remarkable things, how can we show that to the community?

(I almost typed “show that to the world,” but the question of large-scale publicizing may properly be a separate topic.)

“Transparency,” the aphorism goes, “is the best disinfectant,” and there’s a move toward almost total transparency in (e.g.) government. Maybe full transparency is good in that realm, but in a school this is more fraught.

Good teaching / deep learning can be intimate acts. Putting teachers and students on display threatens to kill exactly what we seek to cultivate.

This may be the rare situation for which a metaphor to quantum physics actually is helpful — to observe the teaching/learning situation is to effect it. I know I lock up when a parent asks to sit in my classroom. I become a different person under observation, and don’t particularly like that person.

So: how do we do this? How could we do this? How do other schools do this?

One tact would be to have recurring “public showings” — monthly information sessions where we show the kiddos’ paintings and compositions and whatnot. These might be very useful (particularly because they could fit in nicely with parent work schedules) but they don’t seem very transparent. I wonder if we could really communicate what goes on in the classroom through these.

Another might be to have prospective parents and students just tour at any point. (The private school at which we both worked did this strategy, I think well.)

Should we even have doors for the classrooms?

Gah. So many questions.

A school–to–college connection?

I supped this morning with a friend, former student, and sometime reader of this blog (all delightfully wrapped into one person), so I’ll keep today’s rumination brief —

What role might college students play in our school?

There’s a lot of human capital lost in sending kids off to college. In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris notes that traditional societies are made up of an unbroken chain of ages, and argues that each age cohort learns much from the cohort slightly older than it.

But in modern middle-class America, she notes, we break that chain, removing the 18-22 year olds from the community by packing them away to university.

As a result, the natural teachers of teens are hundreds of miles removed, and taken up with tasks that don’t relate to what teenagers are struggling with.

Might our school attempt to have some meaningful role for college kids?

I pose this riddle because I’ve lately been hatching a plan to potentially do some community-building with undergraduates.

The idea, in brief:

College is perhaps the best chance most Americans get to expand their boundaries. In college, people are supposed to put their beliefs to the test, to imagine living inside other worldviews, and to try out this whole “life of the mind” business.

I won’t say that colleges are doing a bad job of that (though some others do). Instead, I’ll just suggest (from my own experience) that they could be doing a better job.

Anti-intellectualism of various forms is present on campuses (sometimes in classrooms). Some do honestly explore neighboring ideologies and religions; many only engage them as opposing philosophies to be refuted.

A shame! Because of this, some of the best years of possible intellectual expansion are diminished.

Professors such as Gerald Graff (author of Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education) and Mark Edmundson (Why Read?) have argued that a more richly intellectual atmosphere can be sparked in college classrooms. May Allah bless them and keep them!

But I wonderful if the easiest route to improving this doesn’t from the classroom, but from campus student groups.

What I have in mind is a sort of “Campus Crusade for Christ” for humanists — a category I’ll here define by borrowing the first sentence in this moment’s Wikipedia entry on humanism:

Humanism is a group of philosophies and ethical perspectives which emphasize the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers individual thought and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism).

Humanists think that human life matters, that there are pressing problems in need of solutions, and that the big questions are open for discussion.

Notably, this definition does not exclude religious believers. (In fact, the first “humanists” were Renaissance Christians — e.g. Erasmus — who rebelled against the medieval synthesis and sought to bring the Greek and Roman classics into discussion.)

Some personal history might be helpful:

I grew up an evangelical Christian, and was very active in a few campus ministry groups.

I’m no longer a Christian — another story entirely — but I still think that these groups often (though certainly not always) did an amazing job providing holistic community for students. By “holistic” I mean practical and intellectual, emotional and theoretical.

They draw together students around the existential questions of where we come from, what we are, and where we’re going.

Of course, these groups also gather people around the answers that their specific brand of religion provided. (Although I think a better way of stating this is that they gathered people around the frameworks that their denominations provided for talking through the questions. In practice, there was often much leeway in actual beliefs. In my dozen-odd-years in Christian groups of all kinds, Protestant fundamentalism included, I can attest that there was always much greater intellectual variety than detractors of religion typically assume.)

Religions shouldn’t get to keep such fun to themselves!

What I’m suggesting is a safe space for talking through these important personal and societal questions, open to people of any (and every) persuasion willing to have an open mind.

I’m suggesting a middle space between the caffeine-fueled bull sessions of dorm hallways and formal academic classes.

The group could make personal and vital what college courses treat as objective and quizzable.

While an intro to astronomy course might talk about the origin of the Universe, a campus humanist group might discuss the lingering riddles of the Big Bang, and what seemingly-mindless cosmic evolution entails for our vexing questions of meaning.

While an Anthropology 101 course might talk about the shocking array of cultural diversity (in, e.g., sexual customs) and the professional practice of cultural relativism (judging actions in another’s culture only by the culture’s own rules), a humanist student group could consider whether there are universal norms to ground our own ethics in.

While entire disciplines are wedded (sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly) to political worldviews — this is why economics majors and literature majors don’t often get along at parties — a campus humanist group might note all these ways of conceiving of the world, and sift carefully through them.

This group could even, in my blurred imaginings, be a safe space for crucial discussions on impossible topics — religion, philosophy, politics, culture, gender, race, and so on.

This may be a problem I work on as the years progress, and is the reason I raise the question of whether college students might play a role in our school.

Any potential connections spring to mind?

A shortcut to presenting Imaginative Education?

We interrupt our regular broadcasting: on Thursday I was mulling over something one of the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG) people mentioned to me some time ago: that Kieran Egan’s “cognitive toolkits” idea (which is to say, all his work) is difficult to explain to others even for the people in IERG.

And here I thought the problem had been mine!

Here’s an interesting (if slightly made-up) statistic: 80% of the attempts I’ve made to share Imaginative Education with others have failed.

I can’t count the times I’ve energetically tried to explain Egan’s idea (particularly the cognitive toolkits), only to be met with polite nods, or near-total misunderstanding. (“Ah, so you’re saying that teachers should jump up and down to rile up their students?”)

And in most of these cases, people have actually been nice enough to read a chapter or two of Egan. So the problem may be with the method that Egan himself — who, to be clear, is usually a joyously lucid and engaging writer — uses to introduce his thinking.

Yesterday, I think I came up with an exposition of IE (with an emphasis on the toolkits framework) that could have general appeal: a way of explaining the work of Kieran Egan to the world.

Here’s an excerpt of what I sent one of the IERG folk:

…I've had an idea I'd love your criticism of: a way of coming at IE that (1) just might make more sense to people upon hearing it for the first time, and (2) better emphasize the awesome aspects of IE (or at least those aspects I find awesome).

It's a four-step unveiling of what seem to be, when given in order, sensible arguments:

1. Human cognition is more than logic: it's complex and rich and shot through with emotions.  We are (per David Kresch) “perfinkers,” we are (per R.J. Snell) “lovers more than we are thinkers.”  

(Note: “perfinkers” is short for “perceivers, feelers, and thinkers” — it’s a funny term Egan has borrowed to get at this idea that our cognition is more than mere rational thinking.)

Most schooling, however, leans on rather simple, unemotional forms of cognition; it has a deficient view of human nature.

(Note: it’s since occurred to me that I’m not working with a real opponent here. “Schooling” subsumes ten thousand different theories. That said, I think this criticism is onto something.)

2. As Egan writes, “Everything in the world is wonderful,” which means that everything in the K-12 curriculum is full of the types of complexity that our minds are able to uncover and find deeply interesting.  Most schooling, however, treats the content as information to be covered.  (The implied question: but how do we engage that interest?)

3. To engage that wonder, let's not invent faddish and ephemeral teaching strategies: let's instead depend on what's been working for hundreds (and thousands) (and maybe millions) of years: the cultural–cognitive tools (stories, irony, binary opposites, abstract theories, metanarratives...) that have already demonstrated their ability to engage full human cognition simply by lasting this long. (Presumably there were myriad awful cognitive tools that we no longer know about, precisely because they didn't pass themselves down.)  (The implied question: but how do we decide when to use which tools?)

(Note: I think this point may be new to me, or at least I’m giving it a centrality that I don’t remember seeing in Egan’s writing. It brings the idea of cognitive tools into the framework of memetic evolution.)

4. To help us figure out when to use which tools, we invent a theoretical construct: “cognitive toolkits.”  We know, of course, that language & literacy has expanded cognition on the level of historical cultures (see, e.g., Walter Ong — cultures that write think differently); well, it doesn't seem like too much of a jump to imagine that they could change kids in similar ways.  Thus for kids who can speak but who can't read, we teach by borrowing tools from non-literate cultures.  For kids who can read, borrow tools from literate cultures. 

So here's what I'm thinking might be gained from this framework for presenting IE:

• Step 1 starts by talking about brain science, which people like, and find easy to latch onto.  (“Oh, yes, of course — schools aren't engaging the whole child!”  “Kids are only using a fraction of their brains!” and so forth.)
• Step 2 strikes a romantic note that resonates with people, too: “oh, yes, everything really is interesting, isn't it?  Why didn’t they tell us that in school?”
• Step 3 holds a sort of commonsense conservationism — let's not throw out the stuff that works!  (It also has a multicultural tinge, which I should expand on more.)
• Step 4 — the crucial idea of the toolkits, which tends to confuse the people I share Egan's work with (I think it sounds fanciful to them, sort of Waldorfian) — is saved for the end.  At that point, it answers the practical question of “so when do we use which tools?”

Overall, it also explains IE without recourse to the word “imagination.”  Now, Egan and the rest of the IE community

Note: it occurred to me here that I was critiquing the utility of the word “imagination” to one of the men who chose that word) 

…mean something very specific by it, but that meaning can only be understood after understanding the (#4) full toolkits idea, which can only be understood after understanding (#3) cultural–cognitive tools, which can only be understood after understanding (#1) that we need better ways of engaging specifically human cognition.

(And, after sitting through session after goddamned session in which conference presenters who didn't know IE from a hole in their head tossed around the word “imagination” without meaning anything at all by it, I think I've all but given up on using the word.  Maybe you can help me with that?)

Rather, it situates IE in a fuller conception of our humanity — relatively unclaimed ground in the terminology of educational philosophy.  (And one that lets us interface with the contemporary turn in cognitive science which is embracing emotions, linguistics, and narrative.)

So: I’m wondering if I’ve actually stumbled on a framework for explaining Egan’s conception of Imaginative Education that might better capture the excitement that we get from it.

Thoughts?

You are not a Vulcan.

In his college days, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (he of The Happiness Hypothesis, perhaps the worst-titled and best-written book I’ve read) majored in philosophy. In his youthful zeal, his goal was to “discover the meaning of life.”

As you might expect, if you’re, say, over 20, he was in for something of a letdown. But curiously his disappointment was less that he didn’t find an answer and more because philosophers weren’t raising the question:

Modern philosophers specialize in analyzing the meaning of words, but, aside from the existentialists (who caused the problem for me in the first place), they had little to say about the meaning of life. (Happiness Hypothesis, p. 215)

Why? Haidt suggests that the field of philosophy, which had been birthed in such grand human questions, had taken an unprofitable turn when it parted ways with psychology:

It was only after I entered graduate school in psychology that I realized why modern philosophy seemed sterile: It lacked a deep understanding of human nature. (ibid)

Instead of paying close attention to the complex weirdos populating the world around them, contemporary philosophers retreated into abstractions. Alas:

The ancient philosophers were often good psychologists, as I have shown in this book, but when modern philosophy began to devote itself to the study of logic and rationality, it gradually lost interest in psychology and lost touch with the passionate, contextualized nature of human life. (ibid, emphasis mine)

Why is this a problem? Because:

It is impossible to analyze “the meaning of life” in the abstract, or in general, or for some mythical and perfectly rational being. Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life. (ibid, emphasis mine)

Ahh…

I’m wondering if the same illness might beset educational thinking, both academic and popular. As soon as we lose track of humans as ridiculously complex critters — shaped all at once by evolution and culture, social norms and individual eccentricities, emotion and logic, family and personal whims — as soon as we lose track of humans as all of that, we craft our schooling to fit simplistic people who don’t really exist.

Which is all to say: We need schools for humans, not for Vulcans.

I’m on something of a “let’s talk about complex cognition!” kick, so I hope you’ll excuse my foray into this. On Monday (if I get back from our weekend camp-out in the San Juans in time), I’d like to post on the opposite of all this — a case study in Getting Humans Wrong.

A School for Intuition?

Schools, I’ve suggested, are designed on an outdated vision of human nature. We are, in fact, feelers more than we are thinkers — even the most unsentimental of us. This seems a crucial point for, frankly, everything that we want to do at this school of ours, so let me unpack this point, and sketch out the revolution in cognitive science that’s behind it.

Not too long ago, cognitive scientists treated reasoning as a conscious, logical thing. As Antonio Damasio writes in Descartes’ Error:

as the sciences of mind and brain flourished in the twentieth century, interests went elsewhere and the specialties which we loosely group today under neuroscience gave a resolute cold shoulder to emotion research. (page ix)

But, Damasio writes, this changed in the late 1990s — now, emotions are back with a vengeance! Damasio himself is leading this charge, arguing that

the reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning process.

Our rationality, that is, is an outgrowth of our emotions.

And, more practically: Our thinking is shot through with feeling.

One of the most exciting developments in cognitive psychology has been the “two system” model of reasoning. Daniel Kahneman’s excellent Thinking, Fast and Slow is the most complete book-length treatment of this idea.

Kahneman argues that our reasoning can be best thought of as composed of two quite separate systems: System 1, which is automatic and instinctive, and System 2, which is purposeful and deliberate.

Kahneman gives some examples of automatic activities that can be attributed to System 1 —

Detect hostility in a voice. Answer 2+2=? Find a strong move in chess (if you are a chess master) Understand simple sentences (p. 21)

He also gives examples of controlled, System 2 operations —

Focus attention. Search your memory. Fill out a tax form. Check the validity of a logical argument.  (p. 22)

Both are necessary (for humans — not so much for tarantulas), but System 1 comes first.

Western (and sometimes Eastern) intellectual culture has tended to heap praise on System 2, sometimes identifying it as the essential trait of humanity. (We are Homo sapiens — the wise thinker.)

The trouble with this is that it puts the cart before the horse:

When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. (p. 21)

We are deliberative, that is, precisely because we are instinctive.

Or, to focus on one particular side of that: we are rational because we are emotional.

System 2 can only work with the inputs given to it by System 1. And when System 1 doesn’t like something, it’s very difficult for System 2 to override it.

Though Kahneman repeatedly mentions feelings and emotions, his central research has been the non-emotional aspects of intuition. (I imagine that this has been because of the previously-cited skepticism in the psychology community toward emotion, but this is just a conjecture.)

To get to the heart of emotion, I’d like to turn to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s work. But I’ll save that for Friday.

For now, the question for us is: how can we build a school that takes full advantage of students’ instincts and intuitions? How can our school build thinkers out of perceivers and feelers?

CONTENT is KING. Or maybe not? (part 2)

On Monday, I tried to explain why I found Kieran Egan’s model of Imaginative Education (and Corbett Charter School’s living out of Egan’s model) so danged exciting. I attempted to explain it in terms of the depth of content that their teachers and students regularly swim in. Instead of skating the surface of a topic, covering what’s most important, they dive into topics, constantly uncovering fascinating details.

As I pointed out, that explanation fails. Depth of content can’t, all by itself, be what strikes me so powerfully about IE, because diving deeply into content can still be boring. (Horribly boring, in fact.)

If content-focused education is to be wonderful, I suggested, it would have to be nested inside something larger.

So let me try this again:

What strikes me so powerfully about IE is that it engages emotions, not just cognition. Furthermore, it sees all academic content as potentially rich in emotional substance.

There are two pieces of this, which I’ll explore for the rest of the week. First, IE is making a statement about human psychology: our emotions are more fundamental than our rationality. Second, IE is making a statement about the external world: virtually everything already has emotional resonance; we don’t have to try to “make” things interesting, as much as “bring out” how they’re already interesting.

Again, I’ll sketch out these two pieces this week, but in the end this discussion boils down to this:

How can we create a school that puts human interests, emotions, hopes, and fears at the center of the curriculum? How can we create a school that sees “academic content” (gods, that term is so dry, isn’t it?) as full of rich complexity that can feed many aspects of our students? How can we conceive of a school that sees itself as a portal to the wonder of the world?

CONTENT is KING. Or maybe not? (part 1)

I suggested, in last Wednesday’s post about the consummate awesomeness of organizing all lesson planning around teams of teachers, that having the teams themselves wasn’t sufficient. The amazing thing Corbett is doing, in my mind, is both who and what: they combine team-planning with a specific method of planning —

they put the question of “what to do in class” after the question of “what is amazing about this content?” That is, they don’t explicitly talk about the form of instruction (game? debate? art project?) before nailing what the beating heart of the story is.

(This is one of the central characteristics of “Imaginative Education,” an approach coming from Kieran Egan and the rest of the Imaginative Education Research Group at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver, B.C.)

Ooh how I love this.  But why, precisely?

At first, I thought we might distill it (with apologies to Bill Gates, and the Internet as a whole) quite simply —

Content is king.

That is, I thought that IE’s wonder might come by getting teachers and students deep into the heart of academic subject-matter. And it’s there, I thought, where the wild things are — where the excitement and pleasures of learning reside.

I think this is a little right, and a little wrong.

First, the rightness of putting content at the center of pedagogy:

Teaching the “content” of the world is the one thing schools are charged to do that differentiates them from all other societal institutions — from the scouting and television and summer camps.

Schools, to be clear, do a lot of things: they socialize kids with one another, prepare people for careers, and teach us all not to wipe our noses on our sleeves (shout-out to my second-grade teacher!). Thus, the school overlaps with other institutions — we can, for example, have productive discussions about what our school can learn from the Green Berets, or from (gods help us) a nineteenth-century free love commune, or from whatever.

But at the end of the day, I’ll suggest, a school is fundamentally about doing something else: engaging academic content, which is to say bringing the swirl of the external world to the consideration of five-to-eighteen year olds.

So, again, my initial theory as to why what Imaginative Education says (and what Corbett Charter School does) strikes me as so amazing is that it doesn’t allow us teachers to skate on the surface of content, but to dive right in.

There’s a problem with this idea, however: content can be dead.

That is, content can be dull, dreary, meaningless. It can be any other nasty adjective we’d like to apply to it. Focusing on content can lead us to a pointless, thirteen-year trudge through minutiae.

And we’ve all experienced this sort of education. (If, someone, you’ve avoided this, watch 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Ben Stein’s immortal lesson on the Hawley Smoot Tariff.)

This charge has led many to de-emphasize rich content, in favor of thinking skills or child-centered learning, or practical skills.

(I don’t, for the record, mean this as a criticism, though I have my criticisms of these movements. Educating is hard, and one mussn’t be too ornery.)

I’ve been drawn, in the past, to those who oppose this rising tide, and attempt to bring “rich content” back to the heart of schooling.

A contemporary leader of the “content = king” paradigm is the wonderful E.D. Hirsch, whose thinking I have a complex relationship with. His popular work includes The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and the series What Your N^th Grader Needs to Know.

Hirsch is vexed by the contemporary movement to replace rich content (myths and historical accounts and literature) with what he sees as soulless skills (“finding the main idea” and “making reader–text connections” and similar bilge). Here, I largely (entirely? vociferously?) agree with him.

He’s done wonderful work in arguing, from the work of cognitive psychologists, that specific knowledge is crucial for higher-level thinking. Want to be a powerful reader? Learn stuff! Want to be a masterful writer? Eat the world, and ruminate on it in your writing!

(If you’re interested in his argument here, you’ll want to check out cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham’s wonderful Why Don’t Students Like School?)

There were a few years in which I found this compelling. But I’ve slowly circled around to the idea that idea that Hirsch’s conception is simply not enough. Rhetorically, it’s open to complaints that schools “teach dead content” and “engage rote memory.” Practically, it doesn't guarantee that classrooms won't devolve (under the control of less-than-inspired teachers) into a succession of "one damn thing after another.”

If we want to put content at the center of schooling, we need to nest it in something bigger.

On Tuesday, I’ll sketch out a better way — what, I think, IE and Corbett is doing that is so wonderful.

Who doesn't love a good marathon?

I came across this quote last night while reading the chapter titled “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in Gladwell’s Outliers. My experience teaching Algebra last year, to a group of students who began the year many years below grade level and were faced with the reality of needing to pass the state math exam in order to graduate, would have fit nicely into his chapter. He argues: “We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as innate ability. You either have “it” or you don’t. But…it’s not so much about ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try…success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after only thirty seconds.” My question here is this: How does our school best teach these ways of being? How, from the very earliest ages, do we inculcate persistence, doggedness, grit, and a determination to do whatever is necessary to learn?

Or better yet, how can we, over the course of twelve years, build students who enjoy and thrive in situations that require intense effort over long periods of time? And, how do we develop students who know, deep down, that they will be able to understand any concept they choose to master…students who believe that learning and mastery is a choice rather than a gift or the result of fate or happenstance?

This conversation can go in many directions…I am imagining an elementary curriculum that intentionally includes the development and celebration of extended focus. A curriculum that consistently includes activities that require students to stick with complex puzzles over long periods of time. Perhaps, for instance, a curriculum that consistently includes time when students return to the same “impossible puzzle”, many days in a row, until they are finally able to enjoy the sweet reward of success after days and weeks of concerted effort and thought.

I am fascinated, right now, with the potential power of including periodic “focused learning marathons” in the curriculum, as a consistent, expected, and cherished part of what makes our school different. These periods of intense, focused effort could take many forms. One possibility would be the adoption of monthly math, reading, or writing marathons – an expectation at our school could be that, once per month, students, faculty, and parents would engage in a 10-18 hour event that is entirely focused on mastery or making significant progress in one specific area or project.

These could take place all day Saturday, or perhaps sometimes they would take the form of an overnighter, or a series of after-school events. Perhaps during these events, instead of a five-day week, our school calendar is adjusted so that the community participates in a regular schedule Monday-Wednesday, a 12-18 hour marathon on Thursday, and then a day off on Friday?

Or, perhaps once per semester, an entire week of classes is devoted to one skill area – what would happen if our community celebrated the joy of reading with a reading week, where everyone (parents, teachers, and students) focused on nothing but reading? Workshops on speed reading, slow reading, analytic reading; book groups; EXTENDED periods of independent reading; out loud reading…Or if mathematics was the focus of our entire school for one week?

Or, optional full-day marathons during summer, winter, or spring break?

We took this approach last year when preparing students for the state math exam. 13 1/2 hours was our longest math marathon (the students participated in many 8-10 hour marathons as well). Certainly, mathematics learning grew in leaps and bounds during these sessions, but by far the greatest growth was in students’ characters – in their abilities to push themselves beyond the point they thought possible; in the breadth of experience they viewed as enjoyable; in the closeness and cohesion of the learning community to which they belonged (community through shared struggle and conquest!). It is certainly not too much to claim that our math marathons, for those students who chose to participate consistently, were personally transformative.

Gladwell seems to measure “meaningful learning” by the extent to which the connection between effort and results is obvious to students. He argues that students find academic work meaningful for much the same reason that an independent garment worker or wet rice farmer finds her work meaningful – when they are able to see a clear connection between their effort and the results of their work…when the intensity of their work is directly reflected in the “payoff” they receive. In this sense, learning marathons have an advantage over the more traditional learning schedule: Students who take part in a 10+ hour learning marathon, whether they be math, reading, writing, etc., are able to clearly see significant and immediate improvement in their understanding and skill level. Rather than plodding through a subject and experiencing often imperceivable growth, they are able to witness and celebrate their obvious leaps in understanding and achievement. One reason learning marathons are empowering is because they clearly tie work to results.

It is not a surprise, then, that quite quickly, students began to enjoy and look forward to our evening and weekend math marathons. Significantly, students did not fit the marathons into their previously existing constructs of “fun”. The marathons were certainly not enjoyable like a party is enjoyable (though we did have food, snacks, and the occasional fit of sometimes delirious group laughter). It seems clear that taking part in multiple sessions of intense and extended focus expanded our students’ spectrum of what an enjoyable human experience can be. They learned, perhaps most importantly, that extraordinarily hard work, over a long period of time, particularly when others are engaged alongside you, can be one of the most fulfilling and enjoyable of human experiences.

I wonder about a school that deliberately mixes “low-intensity” learning (the classic 60-90 minutes per day for each skill or content area) with consistent periods of intense, long-term focus on one skill, idea, or concept. I think the benefits could be extraordinary…if nothing else, our kids would not be intimidated when faced with a college term paper or with the need to read an entire college text in one weekend…they might even see such tasks as an enjoyable challenge.

There is power in a teaching team

One of the most compelling aspects of the Corbett Charter School, from what I gleaned at the IERG conference, is their method for planning lessons. They said that they don’t use any textbooks or outside curriculum — again, everything is “home-brewed.”

Four folks are on a team — that is, there are 2 teachers in the combined fourth-through-sixth classrooms (principal Bob Dunton called age grading “the original sin” of American education, and I’m prone to agree).

Let me lay out, so far as I understood it, the method the instructors at Corbett use:

1. Members of the team research the topic their classes will learn about — say, Thomas Jefferson. They do this with all manner of books — kids and adults and whatnot — and, I presume, also with online materials.
2. They meet together to talk about what they personally find engaging/absorbing/fulfilling about the topic, and which of Kieran Egan’s “cognitive tools” might best bring that aspect out. (For the fourth graders in the “Romantic” toolkit, that could be a sense of wonder, an identification with heroic qualities, the extremes of reality, and so on. Again, I’ve really got to post on Egan’s cognitive toolkits…)
3. After they decide on their focus (and on which of Egan’s cognitive lenses they’ll employ), the members go back to their books, and swim more deeply in the content. It’s also only now that they talk about what they’ll do in class.

(Proviso: presumably I’m getting some of this wrong. I’m rehashing my memories of a short presentation that was itself a summary. Hopefully, though, what I’ve described above captures some of the rare beauty that is teaching at Corbett.)

One of the teachers said that they followed this method exactly, and every time.

One thing I love about this: they put the question of “what to do in class” after the question of “what is amazing about this content?” That is, they don’t explicitly talk about the form of instruction (game? debate? art project?) before nailing what the beating heart of the story is.

Precisely why I find this so spectacular I may sketch out in Friday’s post.

For me, this is a game-changer. In the past, when I’ve considered using Egan’s method, I’ve thought about doing it as an individual. And yet I’ve long known that my best thinking happens in intimate community.

This shared “geeking out” of what’s amazing about a topic — done for the purpose of inspiring students — is everything I love in teaching high schoolers. And in adult exchanges of philosophy. And in college Bible studies. And, and, and…

God, I could so imagine spending the rest of my life engaged in a team like this. Paradise.

Bottom-up, or top-down?

Should we start this school with the early grades (preschool, say, or kindergarten) or the upper grades?

Lee, you and I have been talking these years as if it were wiser for us to start with a high school, and gradually add on a middle and grade school. I think we’ve liked that idea for the following reasons:

1. You and I both work with, and love thinking about, the upper grades: it’s where our expertise (and our highest aspirations for education) lay.
2. There is no second reason.

What I saw from the Corbett Charter School staff, though, is making me seriously ponder starting from the early grades, and building up. I’ll state the obvious reasons first:

1. As kids grow, it’s easy to populate the higher grades.
2. As kids grow, you have a population to engage in progressively more complex and exciting learning — understanding (and relationships) can build.

Those I knew before going to the conference. Here’s what I’ve witnessed:

3. An early grade-school education can be more intellectually vibrant than anything I experienced in high school — or, for that matter, college.

It’s hard for me to explain the richness and wonder of the Corbett presentation — suffice to say that they described a schooling for children full of philosophical pondering and vivid stories, of poetry and play-acting. (They said that they often hear parents express envy at their children’s schooling, and say that after putting their kids in bed for the night they go online to research the topics the kids are studying!)

I think I could be very satisfied in working in such a school.

And, crucially:

4. Someone is already doing this sort of education — we don’t need to invent it ourselves.

As Steve Jobs said (paraphrasing a complex history of writers), “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

This isn’t to say that we can’t tweak this to be our own — we will necessarily have to do so.  (Corbett’s principal, the impressive Bob Dunton, boasted that the school was “entirely home-brewed” — that it couldn’t be scaled or replicated except insofar as the teachers themselves could be replicated! Wise, wise.)  But we have a model to work off of. (I’d like to lead a contingent of interested parties down to Portland in September, shortly after they begin their teaching year, to observe the school.)

And, supporting that:

5. This may be simpler than we think.

Certainly starting the school will be harder than I can possibly imagine — as another school founder told me, “Starting a school will take everything you’re willing to give it — and more.” But the theory behind the school may be simpler than I’ve suspected.

At lunch after the Corbett presentation, one of the teachers told me that the teaching staff more or less only practices Imaginative Education. Teaching according to IE, she said, is so challenging and all-consuming (and, she added, deeply rewarding) that she was skeptical if anyone could mix it with any other daily lesson-planning theory.

There’s a final point which might be compelling here. Lee, you and I have kids. Starting this school with the earlier grades, and sooner, rather than later, would allow us (or, at least, Kristin and I) to enroll our kids in the school from the get-go.

All right — thoughts? (Tomorrow, I’ll write about a notion of the specific configuration of the staff that I gleaned from the Corbett folks, and on Friday I’ll write about how we might start small.)

Apologies, and a tweak for the week!

My regrets for staying away from the blog last week — I poured my time into a conference on “Education and the Imagination,” held in beautiful British Columbia. It was put on by the Imaginative Education Research Group, and I presented on Lee and my “big spiral history” framework. (If you haven’t yet heard of that, it’s fun stuff! I’ll be laying it out here at some point.)

The presentation, incidentally, went well enough, though it wasn’t particularly well-attended. (Special thanks, if any of them are reading, to those who did come — good questions were posed!)

Overall, the conference was underwhelming. Its ostensible goal was to discuss the exciting work being done around the theorizing of Kieran Egan, curricular theorist to the stars. (He’s dubbed his framework “Imaginative Education” — hence the name of the research group, and the title of the conference.)

But many of the presenters seemed absolutely ignorant of his ideas (which were, again, what most of us came to the conference to learn about). Instead, they talked about “imagination” in an entirely nebulous way. (If pressed, I’d say a number of them would have defined “imagination” as something like “don’t whack kids,” though I may be exaggerating.)

It was like showing up to, say, a conference on hummingbirds, only to sit through presentation after presentation by people talking about how they’ve trained their chickens to hum, or about how they theorize extinct quails might have emitted a soft buzzing noise. Not exactly wrong, mind you — these are all humming birds — but really not what we the conference goers came for (in many cases, traversed oceans for).

In other words: adventures in missing the point.

I’m very glad I went, however, if only for one particular session: that of the staff of Corbett Charter School, of Corbett, Oregon.

Their presentation was, for me, a religious experience: for the ninety minutes I was transfixed, jaw hanging down, at their description of what they’ve been doing.

To state this very briefly, they described the most delightful, bewitching, and magnificent learning community I’ve ever heard of. It met my highest hopes for what our school could be (at the K-6 level, which was the focus of their talk), and ever-so-slightly exceeded them.

And now that I’ve seen that, I have three questions I’d like to ask, which, gods willing, I’ll post on this week.

(For the record, there were a number of other great presentations, some of which I may blog about in the future.)

A School for Ants?

Can we build a school for ants?

By which I mean: can we build a community in which people (both students and faculty) are deeply and meaningfully connected with one another, even to the extent of functioning together as a single organism?

This topic of eusociality (sometimes spelled “ultrasociality”) is in vogue in the evolutionary wing of the social sciences. Thinkers like E.O. Wilson and Jonathan Haidt have noted that scientists have gone down a bit of a dead end. Traditionally, they’ve tried to explain the success of Homo sapiens in terms of the features of individuals — opposable thumbs, say, or freakishly large brains.

But, suggest Wilson and Haidt, if we take a big-picture look at our species as it compares to the rest of the animal kingdom, one obvious difference is that we’re ultrasocial: unlike all but a handful of critters, we’re able to live in enormous communities which divide labor. We’re built to be social.

Our “groupishness,” these thinkers suggest, is at the core of our human nature. We are (as Russell Genet has puckishly put it) “the chimpanzees who would be ants.” (Ants, of course, have taken this path to the nth degree, so much so that entomologists kick around the notion that the community of ants itself might be itself considered a single “superorganism.”)

So, if we’re set on building a “school for humans,” trying to leverage human nature for all it’s worth, how can we capitalize on this deep aspect of human nature?

Obviously, we can’t command this into existence: community arises organically when the right people are in the right spaces doing the right things. Let’s leave the question of the “right people” (what sorts of students are we imagining when we talk about our school, anyway?) for a future discussion.

Right now, what are the right spaces? That is, how can the built environment (room design, campus design) contribute to cohesiveness? And what are the right actions? What activities can we have students and faculty doing that will encourage close-knittedness?

A few other questions —

• Where can we look to for examples of this — what groups already do this well? (The military, for example? Sports teams? Benedictine monasteries? Prison gangs?)
• What would be the advantages to doing this — of having a school be more than just a place folk show up to, chat with friends at, and leave? (And would there be any disadvantages?)
• Is this sort of community good for all students?  Are there some personality types, for example, that wouldn’t benefit from being enmeshed in a close-knit community?
• And, provided we think it good to move toward this, how will we know when we’ve achieved it? That is, how does one measure sociality?

Can a school develop superpowers?

Can our school develop superpowers in kids?

I once wrote an article for my college newspaper, titled “In Praise of Everyday Superpowers.” In it, I pointed out that most of the “superpowers” flaunted by the denizens of comic books would be of limited value (and maybe downright unhelpful) in the nonfiction world. The Tick can lift an I-beam, but we have machines to do that. The Flash can traverse continents in seconds, but so can Skype. And anyone who could really fly would make alluring target practice for anyone envious of their abilities.

So: comic book superpowers are silly. But real-world superpowers are most emphatically not.

The folk around us, I pointed out in the article, possess a host of “everyday superpowers”:

Muscle-bound superheroes are regularly described as possessing the strength of "100 men!," but how useful is that? I’d take organizational skills any day — the ability to accomplish three times as much as the ordinary slob, for example, before passing out in bed at nightfall.

What counts as an “everyday superpower”? Here are a few starters:

• The art of story-telling: being able to enthrall with simple narratives, and to pluck out the delicious from what seems to be mundane.
• Charisma: being compellingly attractive, whatever your physical appearance, and attracting people like a magnet.
• World-class productivity: being able to get done all the things you set yourself to, with a minimum of stress.
• The ability to negotiate shrewdly — to keep your own emotions out of the fight, and invite your opponent to a win-win compromise.
• Public speaking: enough said.
• Wry humor, and quick-wittedness — the ability to say precisely what needs to be said, in any situation.

(If you’ve got more, please suggest them in the comments section!)

But wait — aren’t these just “practical skills”?

Fundamentally yes — but crucially no. To say that (e.g.) organization is a “practical skill” is to imply that it’s useful in the “real” world. Good good. But the term “practical” also (at least for many of us) carries the note of the dull and mundane. It carries the sense of being lesser — here, beneath the implied glory of academic pursuits.

That’s a wrong connotation — damnably wrong. If anything, practical skills are more important than academic abilities, and I say that as a dyed-in-the-wool intellectual (who wants to build a school to make more intellectuals!).

To speak of these skills as “superpowers” brings out the real excitement that they possess.

Moreover, calling them “superpowers” might — I’ll venture, with no evidence whatsoever — encourage students to develop these skills to an extreme level. To talk of “superpowers” isn’t to talk about mild skills — Peter Parker doesn’t have pretty good agility; Batman doesn’t have a fairly sharp mind. As soon as the word “superpower” leaves our lips, we’re waist-deep in the world of romantic exaggeration. We’re giving kids a high ideal to aspire to.

I’ll end this question right here, and save the obvious next question — if we intend this school to develop superpowers, how can we do it?

Presumably it will involve radioactive spider bites.

Can every kid pwn calculus? (or: where does mathematical brilliance come from, and can we make it boringly normal?)

Can every student succeed brilliantly at math? Where does talent come from, anyhow? As we imagine what our school might look like, and what it might aspire to pull off, we should keep this fundamental question of expertise always in view.

Let’s overstate this a little: if we can’t guarantee that every student who wishes to, regardless of IQ, can actually succeed at a subject as famously vexing as math, why start a school in the first place? What right do we have to claim to teach the “higher level” skills (creativity, empathy, &c.) if we can’t iron out something as straightforward as math?

To be perfectly clear: I don’t doubt that some people’s brains are better attuned than others’ to learn math. (Years ago, I did — I held, almost as a matter of dogma, that people were born as blank slates, cognitively equal. Then I started [1] reading summaries of twin studies, and [2] actually teaching math.) Genes matter. But do they limit?

We usually approach this sort of question through the old “nature/nurture” dichotomy. But as a chorus of cognitive scientists have been pointing out, this framework isn’t helpful — mental traits (e.g. mathematical brilliance, or mathematical stupidity) arise through the dynamic interplay of genes and culture. As David Shenk writes in The Genius in All of Us:

Contrary to what we’ve been taught, genes do not determine physical and character traits on their own. Rather, they interact with the environment in a dynamic, ongoing process that produces and continually refines an individual. (p. 13)

So: can we build a school that makes it easy for all kids to understand everything in the math curriculum? Can we make it boringly normal for even the kids who stink at math to brilliantly succeed?

Can we build a school for human flourishing?

So here’s a question  — can we put “flourishing” at the center of our school?  Can we have it be the criterion by we judge all other curricular decisions? Can we build a school for human flourishing?

The idea has, I think, some fairly obvious advantages.

First (and a bit boringly), it seems self-evident that folk who are mentally healthy (that is, who are flourishing) will do better academically: they'll stay with math problems longer, for example.  If they feel safe in the community, they'll feel more comfortable advocating contrary opinions in a literature class.

Second, flourishing is a goal that can rouse learners.  If we can help kids see that math is a way of, say, increasing their cognitive armamentarium, or if we can help them see that history is a way to borrow from others' hard-won wisdom, then (I'll bet) they'll want to do the hard work of learning.

Third, flourishing is a deliciously slippery concept; it invites intellectual engagement.  Asking "what does it take to flourish — what does it even mean to flourish?" plunges us very quickly in some of the deeper thinking of human history (I've recently taught a combined philosophy/psychology class on these question for high schoolers.)  But profound ethical/introspective thinking can be done on this question for anyone in kindergarten on up.

Finally, flourishing is just a fantastic human goal in itself.  Aristotle, actually, wrote that it is the ultimate goal, the very center of ethics.  As such, it has the possibility for uniting a broad community of supporters.  And a diverse one at that: Republicans and Democrats, atheists and evangelicals (and Muslims and Hindus), blue-collar workers and tech entrepreneurs.  Putting "flourishing" at the center of the school gives us faculty a reason to roll out of bed, too.

Okay — I'm probably overlooking some pretty obvious 'cons', right?  Help me out!  In what ways might putting flourishing as the central goal of our school be a bad idea?