We say often that the purpose of an undergraduate degree, whether taken in a specific domain or in the liberal arts, is not to teach any subject in depth, but rather to give a broad overview of the subject.

This is sometimes explained (excused?) as ingraining into the learner a kind of index of the state of a field and the methods of its practice, a thing that can be relied upon as a kind of highway map of knowledge, an intuition to direct the learner from then on onto the right arterial roads, from which their own research can then guide them to the actual street and building, per se.

But I would argue that the true function of an undergraduate degree, in surveying the subfields of a field, is to simply expose the learner to those fields, and hopefully bait them into an appreciation for one of them: to find the learner a specific cragged surface along the frontier of human knowledge that captivates them not only to explore it, but to solidify the foundations of their understanding of the field as a whole so that they feel better equipped to explore it.

(Certainly, while not everyone who graduates with an undergraduate degree can say they found such a thing, then at least everyone who continues within academia to become a researcher on the frontier of knowledge, will likely say they found their love of the subject they would eventually research some time during their undergraduate studies.)

I bring this up because it feels like early (elementary and secondary) education should be designed around the same goal, to the same degree if not moreso: to expose the learner to the many amazing things there are to be passionate about within every field of learning.

As a business would say, “you must convince your customer that they have a problem, before you attempt to sell them the solution.”

In other words, you must convince the learner that there is a promised land of continual wonderment on the other side of the huge inferential gap that separates them from those knowledgeable in a field, before they will ever be intrinsically motivated to cross that gap, and thus to accept your offer of tools and exercises to bridge that gap.

The funny thing is that everyone except the teachers and staff of primary/secondary schools, seem to know intuitively that this is the right order to approach education in. No science communicator on YouTube tries to lecture in the dry way schoolteachers do. No historian at a museum presents their subject to a tour group without a compelling framing narrative. No space center tries to teach you orbital mechanics before first convincing you how damn cool it is to ride in a rocket or do a space-walk, or how wonderfully alien the surface of another planet is. Aquariums hook you with the fleeting flashes of color of live fish you’ve never seen before first, never pushing the information about them on you, simply expecting your own building curiosity get the better of you as you decide to start reading the placards beside the most-interesting exhibits.

We have a special field, Early Chidlhood Education, that tries to guide educators into best attunement with the expectations and capabilities infants and young children bring to the table.

But we have no similar field of Late Childhood Education. We just have “education” (which is almost more the cargo-cult reverse-engineering of traditions inherited from aristocratic finishing schools, than it is a coherent theory of how to produce well-educated adults) and then, very separately, the loose assemblage of knowledge of our public educators, academic-topic communicators, edutainment media writers, etc. (which has, as far as I know, never been put together to be studied as an academic subject, let alone taught as a discipline.)

We can see fictional schoolteachers (your Mrs. Frizzles, your John Keatings) and on-camera educational personas (your Bill Nyes and Carl Sagans) doing a perfect [if implausibly-well-resourced] rendition of what an educator trained in such a field would be like, if it existed—yet we don’t expect real schoolteachers to engage with students on anything like that wavelength. We don’t expect real textbooks to present the world to children the way such a field would encourage. We don’t expect governments to evaluate late-childhood educational quality by the metrics the researchers in such a field would propose.

And while part of this is surely because we expect public education to serve certain public goods — one of those being to produce adults who are employable in the average entry-level job, jobs that in turn require certain skills and knowledge (and so to force children to absorb those skills and that knowledge whether they feel any interest in it or not) — that’s no excuse for making the process of ingraining that knowledge downright adversarial. Not when it would be both faster, cheaper, and less laborious to both the teachers and students (at least when measured by some long-term Total Cost of Education), to have the kids actually be enthusiastically cooperative in their own education.

But the downright-weird thing to me, is that even private schools don’t generally approach education this way. And nor do most homeschooling parents. They’re all either traditionalists of the “finishing school” bent who think the best possible education is each individual having a set of learned tutors there to force knowledge down their throat in a personalized way; or they’re believers in kids’ “drive to learn” (and so tend to provide no structure whatsoever, leaving kids to be “self-driven” — i.e. to either flail or hyperfocus on the few things they already know are cool, receiving little exposure to things outside their bubble, and so missing out on entire subjects because the existence of those things just never occurred to them.)

Is the problem just a lack of imagination? “This is how I learned, so this is what learning is”?

Or is it that approaching education this way would require that schoolteachers actually be both passionate and knowledgeable about something; and that each school retain enough such teachers that together they can share with their students a passion for every subject the school hopes to expose the kids to? And maybe the wrong “type” of people go into education (maybe people passionate about the process of education itself, or about giving kids opportunities, or something), so it’s actually challenging to build a school where every teacher is carrying the spark of some particular academic passion they wish to share with the students?

(Personally, I hypothesize that you could get by just fine with people holding a Masters or PhD in a subject of interest and no “education in education” at all, just common sense and empathy enough to not expect children to perform intellectual miracles. And hiring for that doesn’t seem to be too hard; there are vast swathes of “over-degreed” under-employed people, currently stuck doing something utterly divorced from their passion, who’d love to instead be communicating their love of a subject to the next generation. As long as the school can promise that that won’t translate to torturing unwilling students with rote memorization, and then giving them tests they know the kids will fail, because they never studied, because they had zero interest.)

I should have loved biology (2020)