by Samuel Levin
What’s more, isn’t one of the key goals of an education system to prepare the next generation to inherit the earth? Isn’t the goal to cultivate stewards so that, in the future, the planet and society are in better hands than they were in the previous generation? But how can high school cultivate stewards if it never lets them practice stewardship? For four years, I realized, we steward high schoolers, like a flock of sheep, when we should be slowly handing them the reins.
It was this deep, pervasive, insidious flaw of high school that I wanted to fix first in my new school. Because it made no sense to me, none whatsoever, that high schoolers didn’t have any ownership over their own education.
Once Sam began muttering about how enfeebled he and his friends were at school, I started to notice how true this was. Until then, when I’d drop by his school to attend a meeting or bring him his baseball uniform, I tended to notice whether kids were smiling or frowning, whether they seemed lonely or were having fun with friends. Now, whether I bumped into the cheery superstar or the sulky kid who was failing, all I could see was that most of the students seemed to be following someone else’s script. Looking at the way they walked down the halls and sat in their classrooms, listening to them talk about their work, I realized that not one of them felt this was their education. Looking closely at their faces, I began to realize Sam was right—this couldn’t be the best way for them to move forward.
When I asked James—this was a few weeks after the day on the fire escape—what he felt was missing from school, his answer surprised me. “I wish we could go more in depth, sometimes.” At first blush, this seemed odd. He’s a smart guy, but he struggled in high school. He got terrible grades in math and science, and his results elsewhere were unpredictable. He’d ace a history paper one week and get an F the next week. He battled with his teachers, and some of them hated him—thought he was insolent and rude. He and Red caused endless trouble when they were placed in classes together, and I wasn’t always removed from this. Our freshman year James and I got booted out of our English class for playing pranks.
James wasn’t considered a good student. So, at first, I expected him to say he wished we could have more free time or do sports during the day or watch films. And yet, when I reflected a little more carefully, I wasn’t so surprised. Outside of school, James often became obsessed with specific pursuits, and these obsessions would take over his life for months at a time. He decided he wanted to be a filmmaker, and every weekend for six months we would spend all of Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday morning making a film that he had dreamed up.
Then he wanted to be a cop. He went to a state trooper academy in the summer. He interned for six months at the police station in town. He got a crew cut and started wearing his shirt tucked into his navy blue shorts. Then he discovered snowboarding. He started wearing baggy snow pants, giant sweatshirts, and bandannas. He’d come to school every Monday limping and wincing because he had tried some new trick that was out of his depth. Then there was fashion, then hiking, then karate, then boxing.
His teachers thought these were just phases, passing fancies, a sign of his lack of seriousness. But what was really happening was that he was searching for exactly the thing he told me he wanted: more depth. He wanted to dive into something, to really grapple with it, to become an expert in it, and since he wasn’t getting that at school, he searched for it elsewhere, often finding things that didn’t quite meet his intense desire to become a master at something.
He got it, eventually. He was accepted into a small middle-tier college that most people haven’t heard of to study sports management. But he found that the other students weren’t curious, weren’t interested, weren’t passionate. So a fun-loving goofball who had spent a lot of high school partying buckled down and became a bookworm. He quickly rose to the top of his class and joined the dean’s list. By the end of that year, he was able to apply and transfer to Syracuse University. And again, he quickly moved to the top. Along the way, he found a fancy that was more than a fancy. He’s now as knowledgeable on conflicts in the Middle East and the EU as anyone I’ve met, and he’s been offered a prestigious place at LSE to study them.
It didn’t take me long to suspect that James wasn’t alone in pining for the chance to experience real mastery. Soon I saw it as another shocking hole in the American high school experience. It wasn’t that we didn’t get enough mastery or experience enough depth in school. It was lacking altogether. The closest we ever came were book reports and extended projects, which, compared to really taking ownership of a discipline, a topic, an endeavor, were like drops in the ocean. This is the difference between reading a summary of Einstein’s theories in a textbook and re-deriving his equations for the theory of relativity; the difference between reading Auto Repair for Dummies and building an engine from the ground up.
Again, this befuddled me. Weren’t we expected to master something eventually? Get a job, a career, make a difference in the world? Wasn’t that part of being an adult? How could we get there if we never got to practice mastery in high school? Expertise, it seemed to me, was like anything else. It required practice. Yet we were being flung into the game of life without so much as a scrimmage.
I saw all of this a little differently from Sam. To me, it wasn’t just that his friends were prevented from learning how to master things, though this was true. But just as bad, the absence of true mastery meant the absence of true engagement. Years before he undertook the beeper study, Csikszentmihalyi had identified a new psychological phenomenon: flow. He had shown that under certain circumstances people could become so immersed in what they were doing that they lost any awareness of what was going on around them, how much time was passing, or who else was near them. Anyone who plays a musical instrument, tinkers with machines, or writes knows what he was talking about. Further, he argued, the chance to feel such flow frequently was essential to well-being.
When he and Larson began studying teenagers, they noted that the kids who regularly experienced such flow were the ones who seemed to thrive and do well as they got older. These episodes of flow, which he and Larson renamed “negentropy” (the opposite of the decay and decline entailed in “entropy”), seemed to buffer kids against the unavoidable frustrations and lows of adolescent life. When did the teenagers in the study feel such engagement, focus, and absorption? When they were hot in the pursuit of mastery—it could be music, mathematics, theater, or politics. The researchers discovered, however, that such negentropy was the exception, not the rule. Few of the kids in the study spent significant time immersed in something they cared deeply about. This meant that, for the most part, kids had few chances to learn how to master things and rarely experienced the fulfillment and happiness the pursuit of mastery could bring them.
Considering a student’s typical day at school, it is no wonder this is true. How could a fifteen-year-old become really good at something if he was required to switch activities every forty-two minutes? How could a seventeen-year-old face the challenge of excellence if she rarely had the chance to toil away night and day at something she really cared about? The school day, and the kind of work it offered, was one big, fat barrier to the intensity and drive teenagers most need.
Not long before Sam tripped over this problem of mastery, Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, published an exciting new study showing that self-discipline, rather than intelligence, was the best predictor of success in high school. Her work revived an important old idea—that effort was more valuable than intrinsic ability. She followed this study with an intriguing new construct: grit, a combination of self-discipline, interest, perseverance, and purpose. Duckworth set out to show that if we could instill grit in our students, we’d go a long way toward improving the educational prospects of underachievers. Think of the kid who decides she’ll do anything to become a first-rate debater, volleyball player, or science student. She spends every spare minute practicing, learning, devoting herself to her goal.
> On the face of it, Duckworth’s grit was not that different from Sam’s mastery—except for one thing. Most of the psychologists and educators who liked the idea of grit became hell-bent on figuring out how to teach kids self-control. In other words, instead of making room in school for kids to find things that would elicit grittiness, they felt sure they could simply train kids to try harder, concentrate more, delay gratification, and keep their eyes on the prize. However, so far, there is little evidence that you can train kids to be more self-disciplined for tasks they don’t care about.
As my kids made their way through high school, I noticed teachers trying to encourage or admonish kids to finish their homework, stop glancing at their friend in the next seat, and concentrate on the lesson. But neither Sam nor I saw much attention given to the kind of desire or single-minded purpose that might spur kids to grittiness.
When I first set out, in the beginning of my junior year, my visions of a new school were still mired in traditional approaches. After all, I had been part of traditional school my whole life. As a result, in the beginning, I thought we could keep the traditional subjects intact: science, the humanities, math, English, foreign languages, and so on. The difference would be that students would have more control over what they studied within those subjects. In biology “class,” rather than being told exactly what parts of the cell to study, kids could choose to study lions or mitochondria or vernal pools. Whatever they wanted, as long as it was biology!
It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year, the summer before the Independent Project began, that I suddenly realized this conception was both dated and flawed.
What dawned on me that summer was that studying subjects just didn’t make sense anymore. Maybe in the Victorian era, when it was important for a well-respected gentleman to be moderately well versed in many different subjects—but not in the twenty-first century. I can list about a thousand reasons why not, but there were a few big ones that struck me that summer. We live in the age of the Internet, when information is literally at people’s fingertips, all the time. Having lots of information stored in your head, on its own, is not very useful. That’s what Google is for! This may sound glib, but I don’t mean it to be. I’m not saying information isn’t valuable—not at all—but memorizing it is a waste of time in our information-saturated society. Instead, we have a deluge of information, and learning how to sift through it, becoming curious about it, learning how to discern between reliable and unreliable information, how to absorb and articulate it—that’s how we should be spending our time.
Second, to the degree that being well-rounded is important, learning bits of history and science and math doesn’t actually lead to well-roundedness, partly because when knowledge is discretized the way it is in school, people start to think of themselves as science people or humanities people, which doesn’t help much with well-roundedness, but also because knowing a little bit of biology doesn’t help you understand an article in a newspaper about new research that’s come out. Having a bit of mathematical knowledge doesn’t help you understand the role that mathematicians played in developing the military’s new weapon. Instead, to become well-rounded academically, you need to learn to think like a scientist or a mathematician or a historian. Only then can you become well-rounded in a meaningful sense. Only then can you use those disciplines to understand new information, to make more informed voting decisions, to appreciate the world in more varied ways, to be a better employee, and ultimately to get more enjoyment out of life.
And finally, the real world isn’t broken down into categories. I’ve been out of high school for only a few years now, but the problems I’ve faced—whether starting a garden, organizing a ball, or conducting evolutionary biology experiments—all lie at the intersection of different subjects. The real world almost always requires an interdisciplinary approach.
I knew just what Sam meant. My own sense of the mismatch between the curriculum and the world came, in part, from my experience working in liberal arts colleges. Where I teach, at Williams College, professors talk constantly about the balance between offering students specific expertise in a field (in my case psychology, but it could be English literature, quantum physics, or American history) and providing them with a set of intellectual skills that are essential regardless of their major. Now, in 2016 many of us still want students to learn what Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, wanted them to learn a century ago: the ability to think carefully about a new idea, the ability to draw on data to form an opinion, the ability to use what they know to learn something they don’t know—in short, the ability to think well.
Strangely, there are few clear expositions of what good thinking entails—at least expositions that would be useful to educators. Most schools (including colleges) assume that they are teaching their students to think well, without articulating what good thinking really is, or what it takes to learn to do it. This disjuncture is particularly striking (and egregious) in high school. A lot of what students between the ages of fourteen and eighteen spend their school time on has little to do with building ideas, developing opinions, asking questions, or finding answers. Follow a tenth grader around for a day and this becomes vividly clear.
I watched Serena, a sophomore, from 8 a.m. until 2:20, when her school day ended. Here’s how it went: she spent twenty minutes in homeroom chatting idly with her best friend. She didn’t like her homeroom teacher, so she didn’t talk to him at all. Then the bell rang and she rushed to English, a course pitched to the middle-ability kids who had no learning problems, weren’t on the vocational track, but weren’t headed for AP courses either. Once in the room, Serena spent the first five minutes getting settled and saying hello to a friend; the next twelve minutes correcting mistakes, along with the class, on a vocabulary homework sheet; and fifteen minutes summarizing a chapter of a novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (the only novel they read all year). Out of twenty-three students, five contributed to this summary (with some additions from the teacher). Then they spent ten minutes discussing whether they could identify with Paul, the protagonist, and one minute going over the homework, and then it was time to go to the next class. I followed her through six more classes (math, art, American history, Spanish, gym, and computer) and I saw some version of the same thing in each class. If a cognitive psychologist had charted the moments in the day calling for higher-order thinking, she might have found enough to fill eight minutes. Except perhaps halfway through lunch when Serena and her friends got into an argument about whether Mexican families should be allowed across the border. That was the closest thing to a serious discussion I saw. It’s fair to say that, though good thinking is the cornerstone of a good education and one of the few things we can agree all adults need, we spend precious little time on it in high school.
Sadly, there is solid evidence that high school is indeed failing to have a substantive impact on how students reason. Recently, Andrew Shtulman, a psychologist at Occidental College, asked high school and college students to explain their reasons for believing in a variety of invisible entities (ghosts, god, and fairies, for example). Students who had not only graduated from high school but gained admission to selective colleges were no more sophisticated in the reasons they offered for their beliefs than high school students. Given the fact that using evidence to back up a belief or opinion is one of the prime components of higher-order thinking, Shtulman’s data suggest that kids are graduating from high school no more sophisticated in their ability to reason than they were when they began. In my own lab we have data supporting this. Asked to convince others of their position on a controversial topic, students at the best colleges in the country have difficulty backing up their arguments with evidence. How did we come to have a high school curriculum that did not teach the most important skill: good thinking?
A confluence of historical events got us here. During the early nineteenth century, as educators tried to teach more and more students to think in complex and
abstract ways, they came up with the reasonable idea that if they broke these processes down into their components, they could teach more children more efficiently. Meanwhile, psychology, a burgeoning new field, appeared to be teasing apart the strands that went into reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Somehow, once researchers had identified the components of higher-order thinking, it seemed to make sense to teach those components separately. But if you never are asked to think about complex things that actually matter to you, practicing the parts of good thinking does not lead anywhere.
More recently, a wide range of seemingly unrelated studies have provided evidence for something my own mother would tell me is obvious, but apparently is not. The best way to develop inquiry is to have lots of opportunities to become curious about things and to pursue that curiosity. The best way to learn how to take apart someone else’s argument is for students to get into lots of discussions about interesting controversial topics, with enough guidance so that they are nudged to exchange views in a reasoned and open-minded way. Finally, the best way to get students to think about the scientific method is to ask them to critique the work of other scientists. However, what students actually do, day in and day out, in the class and in their homework is quite different from this. For four years they are asked to work at a whole host of specific and somewhat isolated tasks, studying all kinds of topics (learning formulas for geometry, memorizing species’ names, following instructions, expanding vocabularies, writing five-paragraph essays). It seems as if we hope that when students come out the other side, at graduation, all those rituals and sheets of paper will have somehow magically transformed them into better thinkers.
