Misplacing Education

One Parents' Night about eight years ago at the excellent private school where I then taught, a parent asked me an interesting question. I had explained to parents that many homework assignments would be uploaded to my class website and could be readily printed at home, and even reprinted for extra practice when students were reviewing. Mr. Y, who I believe is a businessman, expressed concern: If I put my materials online where anyone could have access to them, wasn't I giving a [very expensive private school] education away for free? Why could someone from [a different school] not just take my materials and use them?
I reassured him that there were no trade secrets in my worksheets--everything I made was, if not common knowledge, easy to find out in a book. The important part of a [name of our school] education was what happened in the classroom.
He appeared to be satisfied with my answer, but upon further reflection, I realize that it was incomplete. Mr. Y was mis-locating or mis-placing learning in written materials. This is a reasonable mistake: excellent books and other materials do make a good education much easier.
However, the imprecise answer I gave him was also misplacing education. You might suppose my reference to "what happens in the classroom" meant instruction: my explaining ideas, telling facts, and demonstrating processes. This is also a reasonable mistake, because well-thought-out instruction is likewise a valuable component of education. But if I watch you do brain surgery and you narrate what you're doing, am I a brain surgeon? If I watch the Olympics and listen to the commentary, am I an athlete?
 If I had thought better of it (which I did not with an unanticipated question and only a few minutes with that audience), I would have told him that I could likewise videotape my instruction and put that online--and still not be giving a [school name] education away! I suspect that many teachers, as well as students and parents, misplace education by thinking of it in terms of instruction.

Learning, though, is the process of developing thought and performance, of changing from an incorrect or incomplete process to a better one. To answer Mr. Y precisely, I would have had to explain to him that the education happens when I have his daughter try doing what I just showed her how to do, she gets it wrong, I talk with her to uncover the error in her thinking, we correct the error, and then she tries another example and gets it right. And of course, there is no way to replicate that without feedback, the interactions between the student and teacher that indicate what is going well and what needs improvement. There is nothing I could put on my website that would replace that process.

How else do we misplace education?

• In urban and high-poverty schools in particular, we think of discipline as education, because discipline is necessary for instruction and feedback to occur uninterrupted. Some principals like discipline enough to overlook the fact that it is not education.
• We often think of standards and curriculum as education, but it is clear that they are not--especially when standards are not met and we keep marching right on through them, year after year. This is an error that might be associated with the Common Core. Setting clear and high standards is valuable, and well-aligned curricula make teachers' work easier, but if it were that easy, American education would be very different  right now. You might say that I should be able to run an eight-minute mile, but since I can't, obviously I need more than a "should."
• We think of assessment as education, when in fact good assessment is merely an indicator that education is or is not happening (and poorly designed or administered assessment does not even do that well). This is the error of No Child Left Behind. Okay, you test my mile time and I run too slowly. (I could've told you that!) What then?
• Class size matters, but it is not education. Like discipline, small class size helps education. In a class of fourteen rather than thirty-four, I'm much more likely to notice Miss Y's error and have time to talk through the process with her.

These errors in thinking are along the lines of supposing that if you gave me a scalpel, a video of a brain surgery, a great med school textbook, and a standardized evaluation afterward, I'd be a neurosurgeon. Anybody want to sign up to be my first patient? :)