More Thoughts on Education: Our Culture of Comparison

Two weeks ago I wrote about the potential of implementing flipped learning-style classroom models. While flipped learning, and especially Khan Academy’s approach, is drastically better than normal educational methods, there is another problem in our educational culture that may be even greater than than pitfalls of traditional teaching: the attitudes towards testing.

Testing has obvious benefits; it’s important to measure how good students are at something. With that information, we can target what students know and what needs to improve. The problem is that our attitude towards testing breeds comparison rather than emphasizing improvement. Teachers’ salaries are increasingly being determined by how well kids perform, which was the cause of the Chicago teachers’ strike. Students become competitive and care more about their grades rather than what they learn from the class. Especially for standardized testing, the need for comparison puts more emphasis on rote memorization and template completion than on the intellectual venture that is learning.

Testing should focus on improvement. Kids are bound to fail at things, but our scholastic culture leads those kids to believe that their failure is a sign that they are not smart enough for school. They learned at a young age that failure is not an option, and if they cannot get themselves out of a rut, they can ultimately become disinterested in school altogether. We need to encourage a culture where failure is acceptable because otherwise we will not be prepared for it when it will inevitably occur.

We’ve created a culture of comparison where students must not only pass their classes, but do so with flying colors. They face expectations from their peers, parents, teachers, and just about everyone else. This doesn’t prepare people for college and the real world. We aren’t teaching kids what it’s like to fail, and that’s a really important experience to go through. Think about how some college denials affect kids who’ve never experienced failure before. At least 25% of Harvard applicants with a 2400 SAT get rejected, and that was in 2007. The numbers of rejected 2400s have gone up drastically since then. This shows more than anything that the real world takes a dynamic, multi-dimensional approach in evaluating the capabilities and performances of students. Kids are not going to be able to cope with this sort of rejection because our culture teaches instills unhealthy values.

In this culture of comparison, we are punishing kids for failing when failing is how you learn. This is related to many things I’ve heard about innovation recently.

To foster an atmosphere conducive to innovation (which people are going crazy about these days), we should be encouraging fast failures. How quickly can you fail, pick yourself up, and fail again? If you keep on trying, one of those failures just might bring success. It is in our continued failures that we learn about ourselves and the world around us, why we failed and what we can do to prevent it from occurring again.

The other day I heard of a journalist who hung up every rejection letter he’d received from the companies he applied to. He used that wall as motivation and, because he never lost sight of his dream, eventually found employment.

I’m not sure how to tackle this problem—eliminating standardized testing and weighting students’ improvement over their numerical grades seems like a good start. I think an amazing way for students to learn would revolve around a lenient curriculum the students create for themselves. This way, they’re passionate about the material they’re learning and they wouldn’t have to worry about “performing to the grade;” they could express themselves and find out what they truly want to do.

Even if that idea is utopian, one thing’s for sure: students will not be prepared for their lives if they are bred in our unhealthy culture of comparison.