Why Teaching Doesn’t Work

After trying out many, many different paths towards enlightenment, The Buddha finally reached his goal during a single, though extended, session of mediation. It is stressed in the tradition of the wisdom that it was not his Hindu roots, his childhood as a prince, or his recent jaunt into aestheticism that allowed him to reach this goal: it was a spontaneous enlightenment that arose out of his deep, profound meditation. Returning from nirvana, The Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, a step-by-step guide to end suffering.

Now look back up, there. Draw your attention to the fact that the lessons that the teacher taught were not a path to enlightenment, but a path to end suffering. Ending suffering is great, sure, but is it enlightenment? And was it these four truths and this path that The Buddha walked to get there? No. It was the single meditation that got him there. As Siddhartha points out to his friend in Hesse’s classic novel, “I am beginning to think, O Govinda, that there is no such thing as learning…No one is granted deliverance through a teaching!”

Now, I’m not picking on Buddhism, or at least not trying to. I’m simply showing that even the best of us, even the most enlightened, have a hard time teaching what we know through the way that we know it. Instead, we deconstruct what we know, systematize it, and then drill students on those steps. Is this communicating knowledge?

Schooling has been heading in the wrong direction for a long time. It’s ill-conceived to begin with, but in an effort to fix things, they’ve become more mixed up. The chance to spend a few hours a day pursuing an education should be enriching and it should spark curiosity, not kill it. The measure of our students, through grading and testing, is, essentially, this: how much has the student lost of herself and become what we expect them to be? Nothing is more important to a student — in our current system — than that they evolve on an arbitrary schedule to reflect an arbitrary set of skills and knowledge.

I am a writing professor. It is, I assure you, the greatest job in the world. I get to work with students on their words and, through them, I learn a bit about their lives and experiences; I gain insight into my own writing and into my own life. Most of my students work hard improve their writing throughout the semester and improve their own critical thinking skills — one of our primary goals in the course. This makes me happy because it is rewarding.

One thing I never do, unless I absolutely have to in order for them to pass the class, is instruct them. I do not tell them what to write, I do not tell them how to write it, and I do not tell them how or what to think. I am here to help them, I am here to show my experiences and let them air their own, and I am here to focus their work on improvement. But I don’t tell them how — I do not “teach” them in the sense that the Western world means “to teach,” because that is more akin to creating conformity to a system of logic that has them in its jaws and leaves the wonder and majesty of writing for other people who don’t follow directions.

Throughout school, students are exposed to many subjects. There are certain skill sets and core knowledge bases that students are expected to accomplish in order to consider themselves educated. And, ultimately, we measure their performance, stratify their accomplishments, and grant them the one thing that no one can be granted except themselves: an education.

If I bake a cake from a box, I do not become a better baker. But if I am exposed to ingredients, learn about textures and temperatures and flavors, then I can begin to construct a cake that goes much deeper. Maybe some of my early cakes will suck — but that shouldn’t affect my grade as a baker, it should be expected. It shouldn’t be measured. In the end, when I can bake a cake that is original and wonderful, then grade me. And I will be that much closer to being a baker.

So why should I teach my students to write cake box essays?

I can show students the outline of an essay. I can give them the plug-and-play version. Here is your thesis, here are where your points go, now support those points, and then bring us back to the top. This may produce better writing (be it boring), but it does not produce better writers.

You cannot instruct students to learn. You cannot force it. You cannot even accurately measure it beyond certain subjective criteria that we try to make as objective as possible. Learning, true learning, comes from self-motivated students who are interested in what they are learning and make it part of their own experience.

No one taught me how to write. Critique me how you will, I am a writer and that cannot be taken away from me. It cannot be taken away from me because no one gave it to me. When my teachers taught how to make an outline, I ignored it. When my teachers showed me where to put the parts of a sentence, I spaced-out. When my teachers told me how to engage an audience, I nodded my head. I wrote and got whatever grade the teacher would give me. But my satisfaction was within myself, not within that single, lonely letter.

If I did get an A, which was reasonably often, I felt like a fraud; I had fooled the teacher, I thought, into thinking I had done this “correctly,” when, in fact, I didn’t. I didn’t outline. I didn’t draft a thesis first. I didn’t even plan. It took me a long time to realize that what I was doing was legit because I was a writer. Writing doesn’t have a right and wrong way. It has many.

There were teachers who helped me make some things better. There were teachers who inspired me. There were teachers who exposed me to wonderful books and fascinated tales from history. But I was impervious to anyone’s direct instruction, when it came to writing. So what should I do now? Walk students through the very instruction that I found so misguided and alienating?

This is the way of students and learning: they must find it within themselves. They have to try and sometimes they have to fail. Then they have to engage with the process of improvement. This process has no formula, because their writing should be something I didn’t predict; it should come from them, their point of view, and their experience. Otherwise, if it is produced through a formula, they will adopt a strategy, or memorize a few facts, only to dump it later. They will perform when asked and fail to ever make the skill part of themselves. Neuroscience teaches us that 90% of what a student “learns” in class is lost within six months. 90%. Experiences are never lost.

There must be a paradigm shift. We must move schools and colleges out of the dark ages of the instructional paradigm and toward the light of the learning paradigm. We need to wake students up to themselves and stop alienating them and placing a value on them. Let their curiosity provide rabbit holes to jump through and let them see the magic of what granting yourself an education can be.