Our culture desires better schools. Today, however, we believe (deeply) in myths about educational excellence. To get what we desire (educational excellence) we have to strip away, give up, and burn down our mythologies and embrace truth.
Here are 10 of the most powerful myths that drive education today. We have to kill these myths, if we want to build schools that serve our children and communities more effectively.
- Technology is key to educational excellence.
Technology is a powerful tool….but it is just a tool. It does nothing in and of itself to make education better. A good teacher using technology well can make their classroom even better! Technology can, however, do a lot to make a classroom worse. It often puts teachers (even good teachers) into an environment where students know more than they do and where the difference between their class going well or poorly is predicated on whether a machine works or does not work.
- Paying teachers substantially more will cause (in and of itself) education to improve.
Not true. Teaching is founded on love–love of the students and the material. Money can be the difference to enable good teachers to make a living. Money cannot replace the need for love. There is ample evidence from history that in our schools today great teachers are driven by love and not by the bottom line.
- Standardized testing is a critical element of educational excellence.
Standardized testing could be a good objective check for teachers, parents, and schools to make sure that students are learning, but in our culture we have taken something that could be a helpful small part of an education and have made it a central piece of education. This is abject foolishness and I say this as an educator at a school where students do very well on SATs, ACTs, and PSATs. Our culture, our educational establishment, and their political overseers cannot believe anything that is not quantifiable. Great teaching is about passing the love of a subject and the love of learning from a teacher to a student. Love is hard to quantify. It is impossible to quantify with black dots on an answer sheet. We lack the ability to make discerning choices. Today, if a student fills in the right bubbles on a sheet, we call them well-educated; if not, we call them subpar. We need excellent teachers and administrators that will make sound judgments about teachers and teaching. We don’t have this and so we try to substitute little black dots that can be read by a machine!
- Pushing all teachers toward master’s degrees and additional training is a critical element of educational excellence.
Teachers should keep growing, but pushing all through to Master’s work is wrongheaded. Many teachers can grow without the high cost and questionable content of Master’s work. On a deeper level, educational theory is moving around so much in our universities that it is questionable what the shelf life on a master’s degree–particularly in education–is today!
- Specialization and tracking is critical for educational excellence.
On the contrary, transferable skills are much more valuable than specialized technical skills. I spent 6 years learning Lotus 1-2-3. Six years. Young people need what they have always needed. They need to know facts. They need to know how to think critically and clearly. They need to know how to communicate and persuade. These skills are needed in a free society at all times. We do not know the vocations and careers of the future, and we should not pretend to by tracking students in Middle School into career paths that might have the shelf life of Lotus 1-2-3.
- Grades harm educational excellence because they harm self-esteem.
Grades at their best are just honest assessments. I do believe that they can be harmful and that striving too hard for them can actually keep students from the most excellent learning–learning motivated by love of the subject. Grades can and should tell us when we have not learned something. Grades can motivate but they cannot cause love. This might cause a drop in self-esteem. Good parenting might cause a temporary drop in self-esteem also. Good parents tell their children when they do things that are wrong. We need to help our children be tough. They need to develop the ability to be criticized and to learn from it. Failure can be the first step toward success. Masking failure for the sake of self-esteem, leads to a fragility that keeps children from falling down and failing. It therefore, keeps them from learning to brush themselves off, try again, and succeed!
- Online education will solve all our problems!
It won’t. It can’t. But it can help some things. It can push excellent education into areas that may not be able to build schools, such as very rural or poor areas where the educational options are few. We must not abandon the world of dirt and geography and bricks and mortar. Teachers should live with their students; rub shoulders with them; celebrate with them; coach volleyball for them and worship with them. Some forms of online education can be excellent, but we have to watch for versions that multiply students without increasing the number of teachers. I think that one of the Ivy League Colleges is offering some classes for free and hundreds of thousands of students are signing up. Christ said a disciple will be like his master. For this relationship to happen, the disciple must know the master.
- STEM is the only thing that matters for the future.
STEM can be important, but only if it is set within the context of an education that actually educates much more broadly than STEM. This is critical. Our future scientists need to understand ethics (a lot!) and philosophy. They need to understand that science and math are expressions of logic. They need to learn to think critically–especially about the ends of science.
- Stressing out is the real problem–nothing is really wrong with education today.
There are real reasons for real concern. Our children are struggling to keep up with children around the world and because of the rise of the global economy children all over the world are able to compete with them. This competition does not have to be a negative. These young people will collaborate and more open markets create more opportunities. We should not think, however, that our children are somehow going to be well prepared for being good competitors or collaborators without a good education and a strong work ethic. The problems are real and they have been knocking on our door for a while.
- Children can learn without morality and morality can be taught effectively with religion.
This sentence, I know, touches the third rail in education. It pushes us outside of our secular culture for answers. Interestingly, this statement would be common knowledge for almost anyone anywhere at any time in history–except now. We are scandalized by a statement that would have caused almost everyone in history to say, “Duh!” Right now, the biggest drag on excellence might be that in secular schools we cannot tell our students why they should be learning. We cannot talk about the meaning of life. We cannot call them to anything greater than getting “a good job” or being “a good person.” If we want educational excellence, we need to create an environment where education helps them come to grips with who they are, and what in life is worthwhile, and how life can be lived well. We can’t do that without morality and religion.
