What do you know to be true? Why?
Our household regularly watches YouTube. In fact, I believe watching YouTube takes up the bulk of our viewing these days. I know our family is not unusual in that practice, but from our position, it’s just so much safer to choose to watch videos as they are recommended vs taking our chances with with anything else on tv, as our daughter is almost always in the room. Even Netflix and their new auto-play trailer option sees horrifically scary and overtly sexual junk playing before we can stop it and we just don’t need hours of our day derailed by those conversations yet. And while we’re nervous about YouTube’s commercials (last week we saw a horror movie trailer when clicking on a Disneyworld video….huh?), we usually find things to be innocuous.
At the same time, it’s nice to find things we all want to view. While the YouTube algorithm does seem to peter out after a few hours of viewing, not really sure what to promote next, we usually move between amenable clips and shows with ease. My daughter can see the YouTubers she follows, I get to watch plenty of disc golf coverage, and my wife enjoys the recaps of Ellen, while we all enjoy Colbert, Tasty recipes, and more.
As you might imagine, educational videos are recommended quite often. We sometimes seek them out while other times YouTube seems to place them in a regular rotation. Our daughter actually likes many of those that are not “obviously” educational. (She usually sniffs out a bait and switch video masquerading as entertainment but in reality pure education…she’s good like that.) 🙂
Last week, we saw an education (TED) video that referred to a topic that my entire family finds great humor in lately: Flat Earth. It astounds me how many people ignore scientific evidence, common sense findings, and logical reasoning as they rely solely on what they see or feel. “The Earth looks flat from where I’m standing, so it must be a conspiracy to call it round…”
Forget (for a moment) all of the alarm bells and arguments making you furrow your eyebrows. Just stick with me.
Because believe it or not, I learned something when we watched this short segment. As we watched the video, even seeing our daughter mock the ridiculousness of the claims these ignorant people were making, the speaker said something profound. He stated a basic truth, really. The TED talker, in slight defense of Flat World thinking said, “…most people believe thousands of things that they don’t understand, nor could they prove if they had to.”
That was over a week ago and I have not been able to get that notion out of my head since.
But he was exactly right. Take gravity. Can you explain and/or prove it in such a way that it explains WHY gravity occurs? Could you explain the physics, the astronomy, the geology, and more? No? Me neither. Aside from talking about centrifugal force, I could not “prove” it to someone, other than dropping something and saying, “See…there you go.”
Let’s take a cue from Einstein who said that a person doesn’t really understand something unless they can explain it to a kid. How about the markets? Can you explain WHY a bear or a bull market takes place in a way that is meaningful to a child? Or what about politics? Can you explain what the difference is between a Republican or a Democrat, outside of just stating that one believes a few things you also believe in? Or what about faith, religion, or God? How about why medicine works? Or how a telephone or television relocates information from one place to another place. Could you explain the world wide web?
Ok, those things are all higher order and hard for anyone to figure out. So let’s bring it down a level. Let’s talk about school-based information. Can you explain WHY historical events took place? Do you know how much fresh water our planet holds? (Less than 1% of adults answer the question correctly, which is about 3%.) Now, can you explain WHY that is the case?
Take math. Can you explain WHY long division works? Please read that carefully. I’m not asking if you memorized the algorithm and can still perform it (which 25% of British adults have forgotten, about half as many as American adults who could not perform long division if you paid them $1 million…). But if you are one of the 55% who can still perform long division, I am not asking about the method. I’m not asking HOW to do long division. I’m asking WHY the algorithm works. Let me get specific. I’m asking if you could explain to a 4th grader why taking the divisor into the dividend in long division, starting with the digit in the highest place value and working your way down, digit by digit, to the smallest place value actually works? Could you tell someone WHY that will work?
Could you explain WHY grammar works like it does or WHY we spell a dry arid place “desert” and WHY we spell a sweet treat “dessert?” Could you tell someone WHY the Earth rotates around the sun or do you simply just believe that it does without really another thought? The point I hope you are seeing is that you likely cannot explain why you believe most things, just as the narrator of the Flat World video suggested. Those “things” simply are. But is that ok? Should it be like that? Because it is not like that in other places…
When we moved to Florida for a chunk of years, my wife (with her Master’s in Education and a former primary school teacher) and myself interviewed a dozen or more school Principals, teachers, and administrators. We talked with public school advocates, private school advocates, charter school advocates, and other “creative” solutions. As Florida does not have a reputation for excellent K-12 schooling, we wanted to be sure we did not do harm to our child educationally, socially, and/or beyond.
In the end, we chose to home-school our daughter. The answers we got simply were not satisfying and the results we saw were too frightening in our minds. And now that we are back home in Colorado and she is back in school, we could not be more pleased with our decision. She is ahead of her peers in almost every way, with a far more complete toolbox of learning, rhetoric, literacy, numeracy, underpinning, social maturity, anti-bullying, non-sexualized living that we couldn’t be more happy with.
But as you might imagine, especially for a former public school teacher, we questioned the decision at every turn. This meant that any time our daughter had a friend over, or any time we came home to visit Denver and were able to set up some time with her old friends, my wife and I grilled them about their educational progress. Was she keeping up? Did we make a mistake?
However, as I talked with those kiddos, I always asked different questions than my wife. She would get to the heart of the curriculum and levels quickly, but I asked another question set. I always started by asking what classes they liked and what classes they disliked. (It was amazing to me how few classes the students liked…) But then, after they told me, I would start to ask them “why” questions.
“You like history? You guys are studying the Civil War? Nice! Do you know WHY the Civil war broke out?” The answer was flatly, “not really,” not even explaining the typical albeit incorrect answer of slavery which would not become a battle cry until well into the conflict. “You like science? You’re studying the food we eat? Great! Do you know why we need carbohydrates, protein, and fat in our diet?” The answer was, “I don’t think we’ve talked about that.” Unfortunately not a single friend of our daughter’s ever said their favorite was math because I had some good questions for them!
One example stuck out to me though. I asked a peer of our daughter’s why a giraffe’s teeth are shaped like they are after hearing him say that his class was specifically studying the biology of a giraffe. (I had recently received the answer from the world’s foremost expert on teeth and I was keen to show it off…) The young man responded simply, “My teacher doesn’t like when we ask why. She says it disrupts the lesson.” Ah. I see.
But those three examples were replicated dozens and dozens of times. No student EVER knew the answer to ‘why.’ Not one time.
Which brings me back to my question. Is that okay? Is it okay to memorize certain facts and processes without knowing the reasoning behind them? While it may be seen as a pragmatic reality to some, most reasonable people will quickly see how problematic that is. Part of the reason knowing why matters is how it helps a person weave together critical thinking and problem solving. Part of the reason is to help remember the algorithm in the first place. But another part…perhaps a bigger part, is to stop people from believing anything they see, read, or hear later in life (a massive problem in our society today, no?).
So WHY does this happen? The answers are many. Curricular bloat (we cram way too much content into everything from our textbooks to our school days) is a culprit, as a lack of subject matter expertise can be in some instances, while a lack of teaching and learning prowess can be in others, and a serious lack of brain based repetition over years (not weeks) must be discussed… Unfortunately, this list is not even close to exhaustive, but it does start to explain why we struggle to explain why.
Can it be done differently? Of course. Having traveled to so many other countries and witnessed their education systems, I posed the same kinds of questions to those students. Finnish students typically know why. Australian students often know why. Canadian students can almost always work their way back to why. But American students cannot. Not in elementary or high school, nor in college does “why” seem to be part of the equation.
So, while leaders push Reading Across the Curriculum programs, they rarely push Math Across the Curriculum, and they never, ever push “Why Across the Curriculum” initiatives. What we are left with are people who cannot remember how because they never knew why.
Good luck and good learning.