Education professionals love to talk, even at this time of year as the school year wraps up, about how they develop young people to be contributing citizens to society.
It sounds noble but it's not true.
Teachers and professors teach subjects. They cram heads with facts but that shouldn't be confused with wisdom or even knowledge. The best thing they teach is how to learn and how to process information. They certainly don't teach anyone the important subjects that dominate our lives - how to love, how to work, how to get along with others, how to be alone without being lonely, how to care about others, how to spend and save wisely, how to raise kids, how to grow old, how to die.
Just look at the names of the high school courses, for example. Biology. Chemistry. Math. English. Social Studies. History. Psychology. Those are the names of academic disciplines, divorced from their connection to life.
It's not much better in college or university, although at least there is some technical training on how to do certain jobs.
Alain De Botton has written extensively about how teachers have abandoned their true calling - to teach others how to live - in favour of teaching facts and details. Teachers with noble ambitions eventually become bored by the curriculum and they see how it bores their students but it doesn't have to be that way.
Besides just writing about it, De Botton founded The School of Life in London. These classes for adults could easily be converted to school-age children, tackling both the big and small daily challenges of our lives. Here's a sample of the classes: How To Be Creative, How To Have Better Conversations, How To Be Confident, How To Make Love Last, How To Be Cool, How To Find A Job You Love.
The trick, De Botton argues, is to take the material taught in the academic disciplines and drop them into these courses. For example, Grade 10 students in the How To Be A Better Friend class would read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird (just like they do now in English) to explore how friendships built on trust, loyalty, morality and inclusion makes communities and our individual lives better. The same class could look at friendship from a biological perspective, exploring how friendship manifests itself in the animal world and from a historical perspective, how it shaped our evolutionary development and then was a key instrument at central moments in ancient and modern history.
Instead of seeing academic disciplines as isolated pillars of knowledge, children would grow with a broad interdisciplinary understanding of the world, based on the foundation of learning how to be a human being alone, in a family, in a community, in a country and in the world.
Parents coming home and asking their kids "how was school today?" would be told about how it was Albert Einstein's imagination to tell a story about a passenger on a train and a person waiting on a platform helped shape his theory of relativity. In other words, it was his creativity, not his raw intelligence, that led him to this important scientific discovery.
They would tell their parents about how they learned to do something or think about things, instead of just regurgitating facts - Canada became its own country on July 1, 1867. What kids would learn each day would have a direct connection to what their parents do every day at work.
"Well, son, I'm no Einstein but I thought up a plan today that might save the company thousands of dollars per year and make the job safer at the same time."
The "how to" focus would be particularly valuable for teenagers, to help them make the awkward transition into adulthood with more tools at their disposal, while also keeping them more stimulated about learning. They would learn the basics of science, math, literature and so on but within a more meaningful context that would help them decide not just their future educational and professional pursuits but also who they should hang out with and whether their first love is really their true love.
Schools have been turned into factories and teachers into shop foremen, moving their students along the assembly line. It wasn't always this way.
It's time for a new course called How To Teach to take those old and noble goals about education and make them right again.
