Time has a way of making certain tasks easier. If you ask me today to describe the most memorable of my high school STEM classes, there are essentially only two that remain. The first is the day that Daniel cut his hand to ribbons when a beaker shattered during an experiment, but since this wasn’t part of the lesson, I won’t count it. The second was the day that Mr. Jones brought a big thermos of liquid nitrogen and let us mess with it for about half an hour. We submerged balloons and racquetballs and sometimes even our fingers, withdrawing them rapidly as soon as the tingling feeling gave way to a harsh sting. I remember that day I was wearing a bright red hoodie and I pushed my hands back up the sleeves and then put the ends of the sleeves into the nitrogen till they were frosty and steaming, and when the bell rang, I ran through the halls to my next class holding my smoking, empty sleeves out of me with a look of mock terror and shock on my face. Other students didn’t find it as amusing as I did, but a pretty upperclassman did give me a pity laugh.

That was a fun class. But I don’t recall really learning anything. In fact, what I remember most from the regular content of that class is primarily doing a lot of math. In general, when think back on my time in school, I recall teachers writing equations on boards and giving lectures and assigning pages and pages of problems and drills and memory exercises. I remember in junior high having a grammar book with print small enough to rival your average Bible and pages on pages that were filled with tiny sentences written to exclude one word or another or requiring me to pick between one of two or three verb tenses. And I remember writing those sentences, one after another on lined notebook paper and then checking them against the teacher’s answer sheet. And what’s more, I remember learning that shit. I remember learning sentence diagramming and suddenly terms like “nominative clause” or “adjective clause” had some function, and therefore some reason to keep track of them mentally.

But if you talk to teachers today (and even more so if you talk to the administrators who make decisions about what teachers can and can’t do) and suggest returning to something like this (adjusted of course to some accommodation of recent tech), they will look at you like you have sprouted a second head and then a third head and that third head is speaking in aggressive German. 

Inevitably you will hear that such ideas are “out of date” or don’t take into account “student needs” and on and on and on endlessly, the most amusing of these being the idea that all courses need to incorporate contemporary tech because students need to be taught how to use tech in order to “equip them for the modern workplace.” I realize now that I ought to address education’s misguided obsession with updating its technology in a separate essay, and when that’s done, I will link it here. But for today, let’s confine the discussion to education’s misguided obsession with getting students engaged. 

Perhaps there is no better place to begin this discussion than with Neil Postman’s thoughts on the ways in which television has itself impacted the process of education, devoting an entire chapter to the subject in his shockingly prophetic Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman used the example of Sesame Street to show how the desire to meld new technology with the institution of education has had extremely unfortunate side-effects. At the time, Sesame Street was praised for being an entertaining way to educate kids and it was thought that this would translate to more and better education. Teachers were, on the whole, fairly open to this. 

Contrary to common opinion, [teachers] are apt to find new methods congenial, especially if they are told that education can be accomplished more efficiently by means of the new techniques. (That is why such ideas as “teacher-proof” textbooks, standardized tests, and now, micro-computers have been welcomed into the classroom.) Sesame Street appeared to be an imaginative aid in solving the growing problem of teaching Americans how to read, while at the same time encouraging children to love school.

Those were the optimistic hopes, but the reality turned out a little differently. 

We now know that Sesame Street encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street. Which is to say, we now know that Sesame Street undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents. 

The most important change that the television and the advent of shows like Sesame Street wrought on education was a totally novel idea in the history of education, “that education and entertainment were inseparable.” And while this idea remains more or less endemic to the field today, in fact, the opposite is true. Education demands something from its pupils that entertainment can never provide: 

Education philosophers have assumed that becoming acculturated is difficult because it necessarily involves the imposition of restraints. They have argued that there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be  submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories. Indeed, Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student form the tyranny of the present, which cannot be pleasurable for those, like the young, who are struggling hard to do the opposite–that is, accommodate themselves to the present.  

Instead of proceeding from this understanding of the opposing purposes of education and the natural state of youth, what has occurred is that education itself has attempted to accommodate itself to the young, which is to say, to the present. “Change” has become a holy word in the profession and the profession has in turn become drenched in a kind of lazy futurism that is all but completely untethered from its true purpose. The result is an embarrassing mess of futile pandering to the students and an overflow of jargonized disquisition which has the unenviable task of recasting education’s abject failures into success stories. 

Teachers now congratulate themselves for being “on the side” of the students and many of them, either consciously or unconsciously, are more concerned with “mental health” than any of the subject matter they are ostensibly responsible for transmitting to their classes. But this cannot be entirely laid at the feet of teachers. Many of them are simply responding to changes in the workplace that have come down from middle and upper management, changes which have made the correct performance of their role infinitely more difficult. But that, like the issue of tech, is a matter that must be saved for another time. 

Boredom

None of this is to say that having engaged students is not something worth striving for. However, this reasonable goal has been usurped by the infantile belief that education should not ever be boring, and that if students are bored, it must be due to some failing on the teacher’s part. I cannot sufficiently express how inane this belief is. 

First, it assumes that boredom is somehow an alien or enemy mood that has no value and must be avoided at all cost. This is simply false. But no matter how much research accrues to demonstrate its falsity, it shows no signs of going away within education where it has calcified into a prejudice among teachers and administrators alike and where the answer to any issue of students having no interest in the materials is eternally “well that just means we teachers need to bring our A-game and craft lessons so interesting that they can’t help but give us their attention” [read this in the voice of the dumbest person you have ever seen]. As if there would ever be a way of making Shakespeare have the same immediate appeal as an Instagram reel. The people who say this fail to understand that if you are trying to grab someone’s attention by appealing to the brain, then you will lose 100% of the time to those who are appealing to the brainstem. 

Secondly, it fails to understand fundamentally how education works and how interest works. 

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” –GK Chesterton

Chesterton’s insight here is understanding that what we find interesting is almost always a function of how much we know about the subject at hand. Learning the rules of a game is not entertaining, playing the game after you have learned the rules is. And it becomes more entertaining the deeper your understanding grows. 

Some subjects will never be able to boast a direct benefit to students’ lives. Unless they go into deeper mathematics in college, Calculus is unlikely to provide them with much real world benefit. However, we must believe that the exercise of this form of thinking holds value even after the precise content of the education has been lost. To crib yet again from Postman, what we learn is almost never as important as how we learn. The humanities are no different in this respect. Those who teach literature (what few are left of them) know that even the greatest art will seem boring to the person who has not made the sufficient investment of their attention, that the riches of Fitzgerald or Kundera or Dostoevsky are not had without a down payment of effort.  

Education has sent itself down a blind alley because it has given the power of how they will invest their attention over to the students. Everything about the language employed within the profession reveals this. Students are treated as if they are a hostile audience which the teacher must placate. Teachers are instructed to “meet them where they’re at,” to find common ground, to appeal to their interests. The paradigm is very much that of the entertainer and their patrons. This can have value when treated as an occasional aberration from the normal content–And it seems to me that young people prefer it this way too. They tend to find something off putting about an elder who apes their own mannerisms or appeals to their interests too obsequiously–but it should not be more than that. 

In Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt,” George and Lydia Hadley live with their two children in a fully automated house, where all necessary labor is performed by machines. In this house, the children  have been given a holographic nursery capable of producing whatever they desire to see, and the parents discover that, without their knowledge, the children’s interests have veered towards visions of brutality and death, and that their children themselves have come to regard the nursery as their true parent. George decides that he is going to remove all the labor-saving devices from the house and attempts to convince his son of the value of doing things for oneself rather than having all tasks performed by machines. 

“That sounds terrible,” the son replies, “Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the machine do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?”

“It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?”

“No, it would be horrible. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.”

“That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”

“I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?”

This mode, the passive consumer of experience, is what education is meant to relieve the human being from, and this task cannot be done by appealing to the impulse that it is meant to combat. 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I repeat that none of this is to say that education should never be entertaining; education is actually one of the purest pleasures available to us. But it is a fundamentally different kind of pleasure than students will be accustomed to, a pleasure is located on the other side of an investment which students will typically experience as boredom. This is not a bug; it is a feature, and it is the job the educator to cultivate in the student an appreciation for this elevated form of pleasure. Those who criticize school for being boring or demand that it “update” itself to suit the Age of Showbusiness, regardless of their credentials and regardless of whether they do so from within or without the institutions of education, are inevitably the least qualified to evaluate it because they inevitably have the least understanding of its purpose. There is really no room for compromise on this point. It is simply a line which must be drawn in the sand. On one side of that line, you will have educators; on the other, you will have pretenders. On the one side you will find education, and on the other side, you will find the current reality of our educational institutions.

I started this essay by recounting the most memorable day of my chemistry class, but the things which matter are those that aren’t attached to any particular memory. The most important lessons of my primary education were not about this or that equation, this or that principle, this or that text. They were about the nature of how we approach learning when we are serious about it. Which is to say, we approach it seriously, not looking for the next laugh.