What Should Students Learn?, Part 1
I’ve had about 23 years of schooling. About halfway through, I started wondering about what I was being taught: Why these topics and not something else? I quickly started to suspect that the curriculum served up to us was pretty random – that there was no good reason for studying these things and that we were just blindly going along with traditions that no one ever thought through.
Later, as a college professor, I developed a more nuanced view. I recognized that of course many smart people had thought for a long time about the design of curricula; they were just extremely bad at thinking about it. Probably because their thinking was mainly aimed at rationalizing the status quo and protecting entrenched interests in the academy.
By the way, I served for a few years on the curriculum committee for the college of arts and sciences at my university. I never effected any significant curricular changes, though, in part because no one else ever agreed with any of my main ideas. I have also hated pretty much every idea that other people have had about revising the curriculum.
So anyway, this is the first of a series of posts on what students should learn as part of general education (as opposed to education in one’s major, grad school, etc.)
1. The Status Quo
From my experience, here’s what students from grade 6-12 study in America: every year, a math class, a science class, an English class, a history/social studies class, a PE (“physical education”)/gym class, and an elective. I think the first five grades are also similar to that.
In college, the following are popular general education requirements: some number of math classes (pretty much any math classes will do), some science classes, one or more writing classes (usually taught by the English department), some history classes, a foreign language, and of course one or two “diversity” classes.
Are these actually the universal subjects that everyone needs to know about to be generally educated? How did we arrive at these lists? Why, for example, is English one of the central subjects, but philosophy isn’t?
Let’s go through the justification for each of the classic subjects.
2. PE/Gym
This is a “class” in which students are forced to play competitive, physical sports with cliquish, bullying other children, every year from about 6th to 12th grade. Here is what you learn: you learn the rules of baseball, basketball, football, and various other sports. In later life, you will use this information every day in your career as a professional athlete. In the unlikely event that you don’t become a professional athlete, you can still use this information to enhance your entertainment experience when you’re sitting on the couch watching sports on TV.
Now, this may sound incredibly valuable. However, if you’re a sports fan, you’re going to know those rules anyway with no need to study them in a class. If you’re not a sports fan or professional athlete, then this information will be of no use to you whatsoever. (I know this because it’s now been >30 years since I learned those rules, and I have yet to get any value at all out of that knowledge.) It is also, needless to say, of no theoretical interest at all.
In addition, gym class will help you get adequate exercise to maintain cardio-vascular health during the crucial middle- and high-school years, when teenagers are at most risk of suffering heart attacks.
3. Foreign Language
Using your foreign language
Many high school students in the U.S. take foreign language classes, usually Spanish or French, as part of their preparation for college. If, for example, you take French for three years in high school, this will get you out of having to take foreign language classes in college. It will also be of inestimable benefit to you years later, when you move to France, as most Americans do. At that point, if you were a particularly good student, you will still know how to say “Je ne parle pas français” when appropriate. This will get you out of a lot of tight spots.
This education, combined with four years spent living in France, will leave you just about ready to have conversations with French people, watch French-language movies without subtitles, and read Pascal’s Pensées in the original.
Note: In the unlikely event that you don’t spend four years living in France, you’re still going to need the subtitles and the English translation of Pascal. I know this, because I studied French for about 5 years in middle and high school, I was one of the best students in each class, and yet today I cannot understand a French-language film or book, with the possible exception of children’s books.
Understanding language
When I was in college, I read something by John Searle about the college curriculum. (John Searle, in case you don’t know, was and is a leading philosopher of language.) He explained that everyone needs to study a foreign language because “you can’t understand one language until you know two.” As far as I recall, he didn’t actually try to list any of the insights about your language, or about language in general, that you would come to appreciate after learning a second language. I can’t think of any, either, even though I learned a second language per the traditional curricular requirements, I learned it much better than the vast majority of students do, and I’m much smarter and more reflective than the vast majority of students. So, whatever lessons students are supposed to be learning about the nature of language, I don’t think they’re getting them.
If our goal is to have people better understand the nature of language, I suggest that a much better strategy would be to just have them take a course in philosophy of language. That would take a fraction of the time, and it would contribute vastly more to their understanding of language.
Btw, I took a philosophy of language class in college, from Searle. It taught me infinitely more about the nature of language than my multiple years of French classes.
Why it really exists
Q: Why do high schools teach foreign language?
A: Because colleges have foreign language requirements.
Q: Why do colleges have foreign language requirements?
A: This is a tradition that goes back many generations. The tradition cannot be changed, because there are many professors of French, Spanish, German, and other foreign languages in the universities. These professors need courses to teach. The only way to put on enough courses is to force students to take a foreign language. If we eliminated foreign language requirements, lots of professors would have to be fired and their children would go hungry. We can’t do that to these nice professors.
Obviously, we can’t give that as the official rationale for the foreign language requirement, though, so instead we’ll have to make up some story about how learning a foreign language really helps you understand your first language.
4. History/Social Science
Here was my experience of history classes throughout grade school (I never took any in college): memorize a random collection of names, dates, and other details about people you never heard of before. The people were mainly government leaders, and what they were doing was mainly gaining or losing power and winning or losing wars. I couldn’t relate to any of these people and didn’t care at all about them.
Sometimes, at the beginning of a history class, students are told why history is important: It’s important because it teaches us lessons that we can apply to the present. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, etc.
When I first heard this, I may have believed it. I patiently awaited the lessons for the present that we could draw from history. Time after time, we got to the end of the class without the teacher ever telling us any of those lessons. I eventually figured out that these lessons were never going to come. Then I realized that what I’d been told was just a BS rationalization. Historians study history because they just like it for some reason, and they think that everyone else should be forced to learn about the thing they happen to like, so they make up some rationalization for why it’s important.
This isn’t to say that one couldn’t in fact draw useful lessons from history applicable to present problems. But if that’s our goal, wouldn’t it make more sense to have courses focused on present problems, where historical information could be included, along with data about the present, and used to illuminate the present problems?
Students could take a course about, say, environmental problems. This course might include some historical information about how past environmental problems were dealt with, along with empirical data about current environmental problems, and then there could be discussion of solutions to the current problems, possibly informed by the historical information. That’s the sort of thing we would do if we were sincere about wanting to draw lessons for the present.
Similar courses could be designed for other social problems – crime, war, discrimination, poverty, and so on.
[To be continued . . .]