Principal Leadership
(a publication of the National Association of Secondary
School Principals)
March 2003
What Does It Mean to Be
Well-Educated?
By Alfie Kohn
No one should offer pronouncements about what it means to be well-educated
without meeting my wife. When I met Alisa, she was at
Harvard, putting the finishing touches on her doctoral
dissertation in anthropology. A year later, having spent her entire life
in school, she
decided to do the only logical thing . . . and apply to
medical school. Today she is a
practicing physician -- and an excellent one at that, judging by feedback from
her patients and colleagues.
She will, however, freeze up if you ask her what 8 times 7 is,
because she never learned the multiplication table. And forget about
grammar ("Me and him went over her house today" is
fairly typical) or literature ("Who's Faulkner?"). After a
dozen years, I continue to be
impressed on a regular basis by the agility of her mind as
well as by how much she doesn't know. (I'm also bowled over by what a
wonderful person she is, but that's beside the point.)
So what do you make of this paradox with whom I live? Is she a walking
indictment of the system that let her get so far -- 29 years of
schooling, not counting medical residency -- without
acquiring the basics of English and math? Or does she offer an invitation
to rethink what it
means to be well-educated since what she lacks hasn't
prevented her from being a deep-thinking, high-functioning, multiply
credentialed, professionally successful individual?
Of course, if those features describe what it means to be well-educated, then
there is no dilemma to be resolved. She fits the bill. The problem
arises only if your definition includes a list of facts and skills that one
must have but that she lacks. In that case, though, my wife is not
alone. Thanks to the internet, which allows writers and researchers
to circulate rough drafts of their manuscripts, I've come to realize just how
many truly brilliant people cannot spell or punctuate. Their insights and
discoveries may be changing the shape of their respective fields, but they
can't use an apostrophe correctly to save their lives.
Or what about me (he suddenly inquired, relinquishing his comfortable perch
from which issue all those judgments of other people)?
I could embarrass myself pretty quickly by listing the
number of classic works of literature I've never read. And I can multiply
reasonably well, but everything mathematical I was taught after first-year
algebra (and even some of that) is completely gone. How
well-educated am I?
The issue is sufficiently complex that questions are easier to formulate than
answers. So let's at least be sure we're asking the
right questions and framing them well.
1. The Point of Schooling: Rather than attempting to define
what it means to be well-educated, should we instead be asking about the
purposes of education? The latter formulation invites us to look beyond
academic goals. For example, Nel Noddings, professor emerita
at
that "the main aim of education should be to produce
competent, caring, loving, and lovable people." Alternatively, we
might wade into the
dispute between those who see education as a means to
creating or sustaining a democratic society and those who believe its primary
role is
economic, amounting to an "investment" in future
workers and, ultimately, corporate profits. In short, perhaps the
question "How do we know if
education has been successful?" shouldn't be posed
until we have asked what it's supposed to be successful at.
2. Evaluating People vs. Their Education: Does the
phrase well-educated refer to a quality of the schooling you received, or to
something about you? Does it denote what you were
taught, or what you learned (and remember)? If the term applies to
what you now know and can do, you could be poorly educated despite having
received a top-notch education. However, if the term refers to the
quality of your schooling, then we'd have to conclude that a lot of
"well-educated" people sat through lessons that barely registered, or
at least are hazy to the point of irrelevance a few years later.
3. An Absence of Consensus: Is it even possible to agree
on a single definition of what every high school student should know or
be able to do in order to be considered well-educated?
Is such a definition expected to remain invariant across cultures (with a
single
standard for the
community, the upper East side of
argue that our criteria for "well-educated" today
are exactly the same as those used a century ago - or that they should be?
To cast a skeptical eye on such claims is not necessarily to suggest that the
term is purely relativistic: you like vanilla, I like chocolate; you
favor knowledge about poetry, I prefer familiarity with the Gettysburg
Address. Some criteria are more defensible than others. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge a
striking absence of consensus about what the term ought to mean.
Furthermore, any consensus that does develop is ineluctably rooted in time and
place. It is misleading and even dangerous to justify our own pedagogical
values by pretending they are grounded in some objective, transcendent Truth,
as though the quality of being well-educated is a Platonic form waiting to be
discovered.
4. Some Poor Definitions: Should we instead try
to stipulate which answers don't make sense? I'd argue that certain
attributes are either insufficient (possessing them isn't enough to make one
well-educated) or unnecessary (one can be well-educated without
possessing them) -- or both. Let us therefore consider
ruling out:
Seat time. Merely sitting in classrooms for x hours doesn't make one
well-educated.
Job skills. It would be a mistake to reduce
schooling to vocational preparation, if only because we can easily imagine
graduates
who are well-prepared for the workplace (or at least for
some workplaces) but whom we would not regard as well-educated. In any case,
pressure to redesign secondary education so as to suit the demands of employers
reflects little more than the financial interests -- and the political power --
of these corporations.
Test scores. To a disconcerting extent, high scores on standardized
tests signify a facility with taking standardized tests. Most teachers can instantly name students who
are talented thinkers but who just don't do well on these exams - as well as
students whose scores seem to overestimate their intellectual gifts.
Indeed, researchers have found a statistically significant correlation between
high scores on a range of standardized tests and a shallow approach to
learning. In any case, no single test is sufficiently valid, reliable, or
meaningful that
it can be treated as a marker for academic success.
Memorization of a bunch o' facts. Familiarity
with a list of words, names, books, and ideas is a uniquely poor way to judge
who is
well-educated. As the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead observed long ago, "A merely well-informed man is the most
useless bore on God's earth. . . . Scraps of information" are only worth
something if they are put to use, or at least "thrown into fresh
combinations."
Look more carefully at the superficially plausible claim that you must be
familiar with, say, King Lear in order to be considered
well-educated. To be sure, it's a classic meditation
on mortality, greed, belated understanding, and other important themes.
But how
familiar with it must you be? Is it enough that you
can name its author, or that you know it's a play? Do you have to be able
to recite the basic
plot? What if you read it once but barely remember it
now?
If
you don’t like that example, pick another one.
How much do you have to know about neutrinos, or the Boxer rebellion, or
the side-angle-side theorem? If deep
understanding is required, then (a) very few people could be considered
well-educated (which raises serious doubts about the reasonableness of such a
definition), and (b) the number of items about which anyone could have that
level of knowledge is sharply limited because time is finite. On the other hand, how can we justify a
cocktail-party level of familiarity with all these items – reminiscent of Woody
Allen’s summary of War and Peace after taking a speed-reading course: “It’s about
Knowing a lot of stuff may seem harmless, albeit insufficient, but the problem
is that efforts to shape schooling around this goal, dressed up with
pretentious labels like "cultural literacy," have the effect of
taking time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to
think. If the Bunch o' Facts model proves a poor foundation on which to
decide who is properly educated, it makes no sense to peel off items from such
a list and assign clusters of them to students at each grade level. It is
as poor a basis for designing curriculum as it is for judging the success of
schooling.
The number of people who do, in fact, confuse the possession of a storehouse of
knowledge with being "smart" - the latter being a
disconcertingly common designation for those who fare well
on quiz shows -- is testament to the naďve appeal that such a model
holds. But there are also political implications to be considered
here. To emphasize the importance of absorbing a pile of information is
to support a larger worldview that sees the primary petPub\ftproot\anonymous.
# * If Anonymous FTP is disabled for a Site, only the Site Administrator can ftp to the Site with his web Control Panel username/password.
# * For more information, please see online help. z | › Řk Ż ˙˙˙˙ Welcome to the FTP session # Please Note # # * After logging in as Site Administrator, you're inside your ftproot directory \Inetpub\ftproot. You have access to the following directories: # # home: which points to \home, your home directory. # log : which points to \LogFiles, it contains the web/ftp raw log data. # wwwroot: which points to \Inetpub\wwwroot , it contains your published content for the Web Site. # anonymous: which can be accessed by anonymous users. If you have anonymous FTP enabled, you can put content here for anonymous users to download from. # # * If Anonymous FTP is enabled for the Site, anonymous users can download files from their ftproot. The ftproot for anonymous users is: \InetPub\ftproot\anonymous. # * If Anonymous FTP is disabled for a Site, only the Site Administrator can ftp to the Site with his web Control Panel username/password. # * For more information, please see online help. z z Řk Ż ˙˙˙˙ Welcome to the FTP session # Please Note # # * After logging in as Site Administrator, you're inside your ftproot directory \Inetpub\ftproot. You have access to the following directories: # # home: which points to \home, your home directory. # log : which points to \LogFiles, it contains the web/ftp raw log data. # wwwroot: which points to \Inetpub\wwwroot , it contains your published content for the Web Site. # anonymous: which can be accessed by anonymous users. If you have anonymous FTP enabled, you can put content here for anonymous users to download from. # # * If Anonymous FTP is enabled for the Site, anonymous users can download files from their ftproot. The ftproot for anonymous users is: \InetPub\ftproot\anonymous. # * If Anonymous FTP is disabled for a Site, only the Site Adminityle='mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>aren't permitted to graduate from high school, the egregious
disparities in resources and opportunities available in different
neighborhoods, and so on.
More to the point, the fact that so many of us don't agree suggests that a
national (or, better yet, international) conversation should continue, that one
definition may never fit all, and, therefore, that we should leave it up to
local communities to decide who gets to graduate. But that is not what
has happened. In about half the states, people sitting atop
Less obviously, the idea of making diplomas contingent on passing an exam
answers by default the question of what it means to be
well- (or sufficiently) educated: Rather than
grappling with the messy issues involved, we simply declare that standardized
tests will tell us
the answer. This is disturbing not merely because of
the inherent limits of the tests, but also because teaching becomes distorted
when passing those tests becomes the paramount goal. Students arguably
receive an inferior education when pressure is applied to raise their test
scores, which means that high school exit exams may actually lower standards.
Beyond proclaiming "Pass this standardized test or you don't
graduate," most states now issue long lists of curriculum standards,
containing hundreds of facts, skills, and subskills
that all students are expected to master at a given grade level and for a given
subject. These
standards are not guidelines but mandates (to which teachers
are supposed to "align" their instruction). In effect, a Core
Knowledge model,
With its implication of students as interchangeable
receptacles into which knowledge is poured, has become the law of the land in
many places. Surely even defenders of
this approach can appreciate the difference between arguing in its behalf and requiring
that every school adopt it.
6. The Good School: Finally, instead of asking
what it means to be well-educated, perhaps we should inquire into the qualities
of a school likely to offer a good education. I've
offered my own answer to that question at book length, as have other
contributors to this
issue. As I see it, the best sort of schooling is
organized around problems, projects, and questions - as opposed to facts,
skills, and
disciplines. Knowledge is acquired, of course, but in
a context and for a purpose. The emphasis is not only on depth rather
than breadth, but
also on discovering ideas rather than on covering a
prescribed curriculum. Teachers are generalists first and specialists (in
a given subject matter) second; they commonly collaborate to offer
interdisciplinary courses that students play an active role in designing. All
of this happens in small, democratic schools that are experienced as caring
communities.
Notwithstanding the claims of traditionalists eager to offer - and then dismiss
-- a touchy-feely caricature of progressive education, a substantial body of
evidence exists to support the effectiveness of each of these components as
well as the benefits of using them in
combination. By contrast, it isn't easy to find any
data to justify the traditional (and still dominant) model of secondary
education: large
schools, short classes, huge student loads for each teacher,
a fact-transmission kind of instruction that is the very antithesis of
"student-centered," the virtual absence of any attempt to integrate
diverse areas of study, the rating and ranking of students, and so on. Such a system acts as a powerful obstacle to
good teaching, and it thwarts the best efforts of many talented educators on a
daily basis.
Low-quality instruction can be assessed with low-quality tests, including
homegrown quizzes and standardized exams designed to
measure (with faux objectivity) the number of facts and
skills crammed into short-term memory. The effects of high-quality
instruction are
trickier, but not impossible, to assess. The most
promising model turns on the notion of "exhibitions" of learning, in
which students reveal
their understanding by means of in-depth projects,
portfolios of assignments, and other demonstrations - a model pioneered by Ted Sizer, Deborah Meier, and others affiliated with the
Coalition of Essential Schools. By now we're fortunate to have access not
only to essays about
how this might be done (such as Sizer's
invaluable Horace series) but to books about schools that are actually doing
it: The Power of Their Ideas by Meier, about Central Park East Secondary
School in New York City; Rethinking High School by Harvey Daniels and his
colleagues, about Best Practice High School in Chicago; and One Kid at a Time
by Eliot Levine, about the Met in Providence, RI.
The assessments in such schools are based on meaningful standards of
excellence, standards that may collectively offer the best
answer to our original question simply because to meet those
criteria is as good a way as any to show that one is well-educated.
The
It's not only the ability to raise and answer those questions that matters,
though, but also the disposition to do so. For that matter, any set of
intellectual objectives, any description of what it means to think deeply and
critically, should be accompanied by a reference to one's interest or intrinsic
motivation to do such thinking. Dewey
reminded us that the goal of education is more education. To be
well-educated, then, is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure
that learning never ends.
_________________________________________________
Copyright © 2003 by Alfie Kohn.
This essay may be downloaded, reproduced,
and distributed without permission as long as each copy
includes this
notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the
periodical in
which it originally appeared, date of publication, and
author's name).
Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this essay
in a published
work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please
write to the
address indicated on the Contact page at www.alfiekohn.org.