Rhetoric of rigor

Tougher standards.

Higher standards.

Raise the bar.

Rigor.

For too long education systems have bought into the rhetoric that confuses harder with better. It's as if some brainiac woke up one morning and decided we can "save our schools" by ratcheting up standards for kids that educators already have a hard time coercing into learning what distant authorities believe to be important.

The underlying message here is that school is something that must be done to kids. When we see learning like this, is it any surprise that we justify the use of what Frank Smith called "the intrusive mass of unnecessary external controls in which teaching and learning have become embedded, including testing, grading, and contrived competitiveness"?

Under the tyranny of this system, the adults tend to focus mostly on what the students fail to learn, rather than on what they are learning, which likely has more influence on their lives. In other words, we are drowning in the deficiency model of Schooling (with a capital S).

Under the tyranny of this system, children come to learn that learning is a chore, or as Frank Smith puts it:

The main thing we learn when we struggle to learn is that learning is a struggle.

It's time we put rigor in the grave where it belongs and liven up our vocabulary for learning with a more preferable word: vigor.

Where rigor may demand compliance, vigor brings engagement. And where there's interest, achievement follows.

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.

The fear of exclusion

When we confuse harder with better, we run the enormous risk of allowing a scarcity of success, via desperate competitiveness, to creep into the classroom.

When we brag about how many kids couldn't cut it in our class, or how quickly we can cull the heard, or efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff, we frame learning as an act of compliance.

When we take as much pride in the number of students who fail as we do with those who succeed, we invest in a learning environment built on exclusion.

When we define our own success as educators by wearing students' failures as a badge of honour, we teach powerful lessons to not only those who are excluded but to all of us who witness the exclusion. Under these threatening circumstances, we wonder and worry what it means for us and for own safety and desperate need to be included - we eagerly comply to be included out of a fear of being excluded.

Under these conditions, real learning doesn't stand a chance.

Rigor vs.Vigor

I hear parents, teachers, administrators and politicians speak about education a lot, and too often I hear them speak of the need for more rigor in school.

Before blindly accepting the need for more rigor, I would like us to look more closely at the definition of rigor:

• strictness, severity, or harshness, as in dealing with people.
• severity of living conditions; hardship; austerity: the rigor of wartime existence
• obsolete. stiffness or rigidity.
• a state of rigidity in living tissues or organs that prevents response to stimuli.

Consider some of the synonyms for rigor:

• inflexibility
• stringency
• cruelty
• pain

Does any of the above sound like a good description of a learning environment you would want for you child?

Honestly, I would hope not.

In an interview with Learning Matters, Phillip Kovacs (columnist for EdNews.org) suggests we replace rigor with vigor.

Consider the defintions for vigor:

• active strength or force.
• healthy, physical or mental energy or power; vitality.
• energetic activity; energy; intensity: the economic recovery has give the country a new vigor.
• force of healthy growth in any living matter or organism, as a plant.

Consider some of vigor's synonyms:

• drive
• strength
• force
• flourish
• vitality

Doesn't vigor sound like a far more engaging and purposeful learning environment?

You could make the case that this is simple semantics, but I believe language matters - and the words we associate with learning and teaching should be chosen very carefully. I believe this to be true simply because today's educational reforms -unfortunately - are more apt to reflect rigor than vigor.