Remember when you were a young child in elementary school? Do you remember the field trips to the park, movies, and museums?
Now think to today: do your children, nieces and nephews, or neighbors go on field trips? If they have, it is likely to be far less frequent than you ever experienced.
Cutting back on field trips to balance tight budgets limits a child’s education; putting effort solely into academics ignores other areas where students need to grow, such as broadening their horizons and discovering interests.
Having experienced both extremes of the spectrum, I can confidently say the time during my education where field trips and community activities enhanced the ability to communicate with peers, allow a look into the real world, and help develop ideas a child otherwise would not have had. It allows students to experience what the classroom has shown them. These experiences reinforce what children learn and can often create the platform on which perceptions are built, i.e., experiencing different cultures in museums and communities.
We cannot teach children about the real world without exposing them to it.
Yet, schools still try. It is commonly argued that schools are modeled on factories. Google “school” and “industrial” and you’ll get 42 million hits supporting this view.
The factory analogy leads to other charges. The goal is a nation of drones. It’s a system designed by businessmen and corporations. The product is obedience and compliance. As with so many things that feel like conventional wisdom, none of this is true. The confusion does make a certain sense, though. Much about school appears mechanized or factory-like but the industrial feel of school is mostly an incidental similarity created by space, economics, and efficiency. It is neither intended to create a vast army of clones nor purposefully designed for obedient, compliant robots.
If school were an actual factory, students would make things, or at least learn how to make things. Instead, they learn about things.
It might be argued that business is not relevant to a 16-year-old; that every kid needs a foundation of math and English and science, a kind of base knowledge or skill set to apply later; and that most classes meet those terms. And this is true—until seventh or eighth grade.
But it’s also true that the academic understanding of math or literature or science is a very narrow lens. A child first learns language outside a classroom; a three-year-old acquires a new vocabulary word about every 20 minutes. There is no intellectualized explanation of purpose and meaning. Imagine if a school was able to introduce, explain, apply, and put into practice a new concept every 20 minutes—without coercion, not within an unnatural learning environment, and with an excellent retention rate. We are so captivated by the idea that education is what we study in school that we cannot conceive of how we might otherwise learn. We don’t realize how deeply learning already infuses everything we do.
School tends to treat learning as an almost exclusively academic exercise, just as it tends to favor any and all academic content. Unbiased. Theoretical. Truth-seeking. Even formulaic. It privileges the written word over physical action. Learning in school is not merely a mental exercise; it’s somehow purest when the content or skill can be reduced to mental abstraction. No high school exam involves doing anything more physical than putting a pen to paper, and this is in the service of abstract concepts and mental demonstrations.
Learning is a deep and profound aspect of living a life. We are, in some sense, always learning, always adding something new to our functioning selves.
The question of purpose is rarely asked in school. The purpose of school is simply to know, which is like answering “because I told you so” to the question “Why?” “To know” narrowly applies to the multitude of forms and shapes of all things human. We nurture. Heal. Grow. Play. Laugh. Cry. Gossip. Eat. Shape. Create.
Not all of these can be confined in “to know.”
Learning is a deep and profound aspect of living a life. We are, in some sense, always learning, always adding something new to our functioning selves, whether it’s a skill, a fact, or an experience. Learning is not simply about new things; it’s also mastery and control over things we already understand. Falling in love is an act of learning about someone new. Cooking a meal is the act of learning a new taste, or the repetition and practice fundamental to mastery.
Change is happening in the classroom, to some degree, but it’s occurring far more quickly outside school walls, and schools are aggressively trying to keep it out. We live in an information-saturated world that feeds learning.
Investing in the future of our nation needs to begin in our schools. In order to spur creative thinking, career interests, and professional competency, as parents, siblings, employers, and teachers, we need to invest in the minds of the future; our children. By creating experiences for young children throughout their formative years, we help foster compassion for those different from ourselves, we provide a platform for these children to build on for their futures, and help to opens the minds of students to different opportunities and potentially opens doors for future endeavors.
Let’s encourage students to learn about life outside of the traditional textbook.