Learning or Earning?

Driving to work this morning I found myself thinking about what we are actually doing as teachers, is school about learning or earning?

Too often recently, I’ve listened to well meaning (I assume) people saying that some paths in education are better than others. In a time of belt tightening, as costs of education rise, the suggestion always seems to come up to cut out the “unnecessary”. Usually the speaker has an opinion as to what “unnecessary” means. Television pundits (usually not educators) regularly suggest that only those degrees that lead directly to (useful) jobs should be pursued or even offered. Even teachers often feel the need to justify their courses or curriculum and say things like “you’ll need this later”, “you’ll need this in college”. They may even begin to “teach” from that perspective, that what they are doing will only have value at some later date. To me, although certainly pragmatic, this seems pretty shortsighted. Many educational theorists, also trying to be pragmatic, are saying that we are actually in a situation where we cannot predict the kinds of jobs that will exist when our students enter the work force. That being the case, they argue, we should be offering a more expansive, skill based education that will ultimately allow our students to adapt to their future situations. But even then, some of the “what you will need” in the future seems overly distant and remote a reason for learning in the here and now.

I even find some of the language that our students and we teachers use in talking about grading troubling. “What did you get on the test?” “Why did you give me a B?” The language suggests that grades are concrete things to be acquired, or handed out or accumulated. Even when that is brought up both students and teachers will automatically adjust their verb use to earn. As if that makes a substantial difference. It still suggests that the work of school is to attain extrinsic rewards and that the work itself is merely a means to an end.

So if education is more about learning than about earning, what then do we teach, what then is there to learn? Some thoughts about that question in a future post.