Listerine Learning

"I am not saying, 'If it feels good, it’s good for you', but if we’re doing it right, it should feel good. If we’re doing literacy and language development right, teachers and students should be having a pretty good time. If there's pain, something's really wrong." 

-Stephen Krashen

The loss of joy and a cult of rigor has hijacked our education. What's scary is that the longer we immerse learners in a passive environment defined by worksheets and lectures, the more school becomes something not done by kids but something that is done to them. It's not long until we figure out that it's best to go along to get along.

In his book The Game of School, Robert Fried explains:

In schools and colleges across the nation and throughout the world, students and teachers continuously adopt roles and postures that remind us of uncomfortable visits to unpleasant relatives. We play out our roles as if we have lost the sense that learning is an intensely exciting and enjoyable activity, a necessary and joyful part of our humanity.

Fried says:

When we allow ourselves (or get convinced) to gear ourselves up so as to complete school tasks that have little meaning for us aside from the value of getting them done and over with, we lose touch with our own learning spirit. We become alienated from the natural learning desires and inquisitiveness within us. We tend to become compliant rather than creative, docile instead of courageous, inwardly passive instead of assertively engaged, cynical at a time in life when we should be idealistic. We become game players by reflex, and learners only on occasion.

For too many people, the game of school sounds all too familiar. It's like the learners and teachers exchange winks that say: you will pretend to teach and we will pretend to learn; it won't be all that enjoyable, but it will be easy.

Under these circumstances, is it any surprise that creativity is often seen as nothing more than a refusal to follow directions? Or that students grow up with an acute sense of apathy towards their own learning?

What's worse is that when kids have spent enough time playing the game of school - that is the teacher pretends to teach while the students pretend to learn - they come to think that what they are experiencing is normal; things are at their worse when students, teachers and parents come to see all this as an inevitable condition of learning. In his article on Progressive Education, Alfie Kohn explains:

And then there are parents who have never been invited to reconsider their assumptions about education. As a result, they may be impressed by the wrong things, reassured by signs of traditionalism — letter grades, spelling quizzes, heavy textbooks, a teacher in firm control of the classroom — and unnerved by their absence. Even if their children are obviously unhappy, parents may accept that as a fact of life. Instead of wanting the next generation to get better than we got, it’s as though their position was: “Listen, if it was bad enough for me, it’s bad enough for my kids.” Perhaps they subscribe to what might be called the Listerine theory of education, based on a famous ad campaign that sought to sell this particular brand of mouthwash on the theory that if it tasted vile, it obviously worked well. The converse proposition, of course, is that anything appealing is likely to be ineffective. If a child is lucky enough to be in a classroom featuring, say, student-designed project-based investigations, the parent may wonder, “But is she really learning anything? Where are the worksheets?” And so the teachers feel pressure to make the instruction worse.

Indifferent recall is the rule rather than the exception, and under such an oppressive bureaucracy of teaching and learning we live school believing nothing is wrong while everything is wrong.

Management expert Steve Denning chimed in on the K-12 reform debate with this interview. In a second part to the interview he said:

There is however a difference between hard work that is a grind and dispiriting and hard work that is exhilarating and uplifting. The current system specializes in the former. I believe that it will do better if it shifts to the latter.

Like Krashen and Kohn, I think Demming is suggesting that learning not only can be fun, but it should be fun, and if it's not, we are doing it wrong.

While it's true that Listerine learning passes the day, it would have passed anyway.

So how do we know if a school is engaged in pseudo learning and teaching?

If students, teachers and parents come to find their days occupied with something besides real learning, you can be assured that the Game of School and the Listerine theory of education are in full effect.

Not only is there no need for learning to be painful, but if we aren't careful, joy in learning will be regarded as nothing more than a bothersome distraction.

So where do we go from here?

Robert Fried explains part of the premise behind his book:

My hope is to bring this phenomenon to the attention of educators and learners at all levels; it is most destructive where least acknowledged. Those caught in the Game soon lose awareness of it; it begins to seem like the only way of doing business.

Thankfully school hasn't always been this way, so school doesn't have to be this way. But things won't change unless we are acutely aware of what we're losing when we normalize the Listerine theory of learning and the game of school.