"If you want to
build a ship...teach [people] to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry
There was a joke I used to hear quite often, growing up. In
the joke, a Jewish synagogue (Reform, like the one I went to) is plagued by an infestation
of rats, and the congregation can’t seem to get rid of the pests, no matter
what they do. They try poison, they try traps, they try sonar, they try cats—nothing.
Finally, the rabbi comes to president of the congregation and says he can help.
He stands in the middle of the sanctuary, raises his arms in benediction, and utters
some prayers in Hebrew. Then he turns to head back to his office. “Wait a
minute!” the president says. “That’s it? What did you do?” “I gave the rats a Bar Mitzvah,” the rabbi
said. “You’ll never see them in here again.”
The joke definitely rang true for my generation. Once we had
gone through the obligatory lessons and delivered our obligatory prayers and
speeches, most of us had no desire to hang around for…whatever. There didn’t
seem to be anything worth hanging around for. We had learned all there was to
learn, and most of it held little meaning or relevance to us. It was dumb. It
was kid-stuff. We were over it.
Of course, we didn’t know what we didn’t know—a cognitive
lapse that now has a name to help us define and describe it: the Dunning-Kruger
Effect. The effect explains why the least knowledgeable and least competent
among us are often the most confident: we simply don’t know any better. With limited
horizons, we think we can see the ends of the earth. And we are wrong.
Fortunately, in my generation of suburban, assimilated Jews,
many of us made our way back to temple, or at least to a library, and discovered
that there was far more to our history, our culture, and our faith than what we
were taught as children. And the same is true of many people who find the core
subjects they study in high school and college to be a snooze, but who wind up,
in their 30s and 40s, as history buffs or passionate readers of Neil Degrasse
Tyson. It’s a version of the quote attributed (perhaps apocryphally)
to Mark Twain:
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand
to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how
much he had learned in seven years.
What informs the joke is precisely the Dunning-Kruger
Effect. What it’s really saying is: when I was a boy of 14, I was a bloody genius.
But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how little I knew.
The more we learn, the more we understand that there’s more
to learn. Unfortunately, (though I hate to disagree with Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry), you can’t really teach people to “yearn for the vast and
endless sea” if they aren’t aware there is
a vast and endless sea. You can’t make people hungry for something they don’t
know exists. If you don’t keep learning, you’ll be just as convinced of your
brilliance at 21, 31, and 41 as you were at 14.
What does this mean for us as educators? It’s hard enough to
get students to grasp the academic content we’re cramming into our curriculum. There
is so much to teach, so much to learn, so much to do, and there’s never enough
time. What’s missing, I think, and what we need, isn’t more stuff to teach. It’s
an awareness in our students of how much else is out there, how much we’re not going to teach them today. Senior
year—of high school or college—isn’t supposed to be the end of your education,
with a sharp break between Learning (what you’re done with) and Doing (the
series of jobs you’re about to start); it’s supposed to be the end of your
introduction to the great, wide world, and the beginning of an adult life of exploration
and discovery. Our students need to know that what we’re bringing them is just
a drop in the bucket.
How do we let them know that? Well, first of all, we have to know it. We have to know and
love our subject matter far beyond the limits of what’s in the textbook or the
curriculum map. We have to know how what’s in
the course connects to what’s outside
the course, so that we can make hints and references to the Great Beyond all the time. We have to tantalize our
students with the richness and depth and breadth of what’s out there. Instead
of apologizing for having to teach them so much (whether we do so out loud or
just in our minds), we need to be apologizing for teaching them so little of what there actually is to
know. We have to bring bits and pieces of grown-up level knowledge to their
attention, even it’s a little above their heads—whether it’s piece of a Brian Greene video on wormholes or
string theory, or a few pages from Stephen Jay Gould’s exposé
of how racism infected 19th century science; whether it’s a scene
from Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,
or a scene from Ken Burn’s epic series on the Civil War.
We err grievously by dumbing-down academic content for our
students and pre-chewing their food for them. The simpler, more straightforward,
more black-and-white we make our material, the less valuable, interesting, and
intriguing it becomes to students, and the less compelled they feel to engage
with it within the classroom, much
less beyond it. Yes, we need to teach them the basics, the fundamentals, the
core skills. Yes, they need to walk before they can run. But we also, from time
to time, need to dazzle them—awe them—blow their minds—with a true picture of
what lies beyond the ABCs and 123s, so that they get a sense of what running feels like—so that they know what’s worth
running towards.
The world is built to support self-service learning in such
profoundly different ways than I grew up with. Whole universes are out there,
in the cloud, for the taking. It’s our job to point at things they haven’t seen
yet—things that are strange, perplexing, confusing, amazing—and say “LOOK!”
