Restore The Paradigm: Learn How To Think, Not What To Think!

When I was in grade school, I remember having one of the most influential teachers of my life.  She was an avid reader, and would share her favorite books with us in class.  She was fond of saying that she viewed her job, not as filling our minds with memorized facts or detail, but with teaching us “how to learn.”  She believed that if she was successful, we would spend the rest of our lives learning.

In fairness, I should also mention that in those days, the “cold war” was very much alive, and young Americans were learning about it, and about the ideals and promises that assured America’s victory.  We learned the differences between “history” and “Americana,” but we also learned the importance of our American legends and the sources of our idealistic tales of great leaders and their great feats.

I recall those days often, and the great sense of optimism that came, not from any false belief that America had solved the inherent problems that an ever growing human race faced, but from the knowledge that we as Americans had not and seemed bent on never giving up on finding these elusive solutions.  Back then Americans, even we children, knew that people were hungry and many were homeless and war still loomed before us perhaps as often as once in every generation.  But we knew that our quality of life continued to advance toward a better future with every new innovation, every new technology and every child who committed to life-long learning to better themselves and the nation, and eventually the world.

Tales of what lay beyond the “iron curtain,” terrified us, though.  It seemed that just out of sight was an Orwellian world where dreams were shattered by a constant pragmatism.  It was a mysterious place where children were tested for aptitudes and, we were told, limited in their ability to chase individual dreams based on these aptitudes and the needs of society.  I grew up to believe that America’s greatest promise was that I might rise to greatness or sink to failure or grow in prominence or fade to obscurity because of my own drives, ambitions and desires.   I believed that this promise, and the ability to spend a lifetime learning and growing for the mere sake of choosing to do so and choosing what to do with my own hard won knowledge was what being an American was about.

As I grew to adolescence, and later adulthood, these lessons stayed with me.  I served my country as a United States Army Infantryman, after which I became a salesman.  Eventually I chose to pursue a career in management, and honed my abilities as a writer at every available opportunity.  Later I returned to college to earn a degree and focus on becoming a better communicator.  I became a journalist and worked as a reporter for 4 years.  Always hearing that teacher’s voice inside my head encouraging me to dream and learn and be the independent and sometimes rebellious American that might through desire, skill, innovation or just blind luck, change the world for the better.

While recently publishing my first book in my early 40’s, and shifting into another phase of my evolution as a human being, I started back at college to pursue my next degree and most importantly to learn.  What I learned was disturbing.

With no malice or corrupt intent, the message I was hearing in class after class had become so very different from the one I had placed my life’s hope in.  Educated and respected professors with no truly nefarious intent were professing the very message I had spent my young life holding in contempt.

I have heard so often, that the purpose of academia, now, was to assist students in preparing for the workforce.  I have begun to notice that institutions of once higher learning were tailoring programs to ensure that graduates could find jobs in the fields most likely to demand their services.  It made me re-evaluate those lessons from my youth, and pay closer attention to the lessons being taught to America’s young people today.  I wanted to know if perhaps this was just a natural progression from raising young adults to dream, and teaching advanced students a sense of pragmatic responsibility.

I have begun to notice that students are being taught as young as seventh grade where I live to appreciate “having a job” and becoming a part of the “workforce.”  I have learned that often times these youths are tested toward their “natural aptitudes,” and encouraged as they progress through high school to work toward how those aptitudes can serve them in a practical world and what jobs they may “land” with these aptitudes. It sounds so familiar. 

I now wonder, what is it all for?  Should students be taught to pursue a “living” and to hone a marketable skill set as early as middle school?  Should high school students forego experimenting with social and artistic endeavors in favor of memorizing the tasks and skills that will get them a job after graduation.  Should college students seek to learn less Latin and less Humanities and more accounting?  Should these young minds focus on today’s tasks and less on expanding their personal ability to learn?  Is a “Renaissance Man” really just a “jack-of-all-trades and master of none?”

I taught my children to dream.  I taught them to weigh and measure themselves by the lives that they touched and not the depth of their professional success or failure.  I taught my sons how to learn, and that they should spend their lives learning.  From me they learned, I hope, to chase their dreams until their dreams surrender. 

Mrs. Wagner, was I wrong?

I imagine a world where Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would be limited by their “certifications” and where Mark Zuckerberg would be told his innovation served no useful purpose.  I imagine a world where we need no patent office because all that could be created had been created or where IBM might be right and no one would use a personal computer because no needed to.  I imagine Leonardo Da Vince limiting his mind to painting walls or designing weapons without creating stories on canvas or perfections in stone.

These imaginings of times gone by turned asunder are not rewrites of our history, but fears for our future.

In this future, that which exists is served.  Today’s companies are protected, while tomorrows real innovations are stifled.  Today’s wealth is defended by society, while today’s young are taught to work for it, never work to create it. 

We are not there yet.  We are still the descendants of rebels.  Yes, we know that Washington could likely lie and that Lincoln may not have drunk his beer from a barrel hoisted over his head.  We know that our heroes were mortal men.  But, their dreams endure.  Their ideals, even those they might not have risen to, are alive in the spirit a proud nation that still leads and still awes the world.

Am I wrong, Mrs. Wagner?

Perhaps I am.  Bu if this is so, than wrong I will be.  Teach your children to learn.  Teach your adolescent to challenge any notion that the only measure of success is in conformity or that mediocrity is not the bar for which to reach, but rather their true duty to reach past.  Tell our teachers to focus on showing our children how to think, and not what to think. 

I have no evil intent or over-arching nemesis guiding this evolution of education.  I have observed it as the mere natural curse of an unbalanced desire to bring about those solutions to the problems of unemployment, underemployment, poverty, and hunger.  Such desires to themselves noble, but such solutions cannot be forced or rushed.  They must be earned through struggle just as every justice we have known.   Great men knew that slavery was an evil, but they too were made to wait and earn its abolition.  Civil inequity and injustice followed for another century, as we as a nation earned with pain and blood the insight to recognize each other as brothers in the human family.  So to, must each act of greater conscience and greater justice must be hard fought and earned.

Teaching a generation to learn how to perform the tasks of today to do the work needed by today’s industry without regard for the needed innovations and necessary creative ambitions to shape tomorrow’s world is short sited.  In doing so, we may put every willing person to work.  We may, through these measures put the proverbial chicken in every pot today, and create a stagnant tomorrow. 

We must work as diligently to preserve the individual ability to fail or succeed as we do to ensure a better more equitable society, because the true equity in our society is in its promise that each one in it might rise to meet its unseen challenges or fall and be toppled from its highest past achievements.

Recall that it was once impossible for humans to fly.  Space did not exist beyond an academic argument, speaking to someone across the world while picnicking in an open field was impossible as was posting this “rant” on a unfathomable invisible wall of ones and zeros housed nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

YES!  We must honor those teachers who taught us to reach unwavering for impossible dreams, as only through this stubborn adherence to belief and impertinent adherence to diversity of spirit can the impossible become possible.  Only if we persist can we steer away from the dull grey monochromatic existence of our childhood fears and toward the vibrant ideocracy that remains just beyond the lighted future, and ever-past the reach of current generations, but no less attainable by posterity than liberty was once upon a time in America.

I don’t know where she is today.  I hope she sees this adhered with digital tape to a cyberspace wall where a simple writer not any smarter that his anonymous readers can dream a better way to teach the young.  It took me 30 years to have her most valuable lessons tested.

Did I pass, Mrs. Wagner?