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 ex-wife. When I met her, 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. She subsequently became a
successful practicing physician. However, she will 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?”).
So what do you make of this paradox? 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 didn't prevent her from becoming a 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 Stanford
University, urges us to reject “the deadly notion that the schools’ first
priority should be intellectual development” and contends 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 U.S. and
Somalia, for example), or even across subcultures (South-Central Los Angeles
and Scarsdale; a Louisiana fishing community, the upper East side of Manhattan,
and Pennsylvania Dutch country)? How about across historical eras: would anyone
seriously 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 Russia.” What sense
does it make to say that one person is well-educated for having a single
sentence’s worth of knowledge about the Progressive Era or photosynthesis,
while someone who has to look it up is not?
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 naïve 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 purpose of education as reproducing our current culture. It is probably
not a coincidence that a Core Knowledge model wins rave reviews from Phyllis
Schlafly’s Eagle Forum (and other conservative Christian groups) as well as
from the likes of Investor’s Business Daily. To be sure, not every individual
who favors this approach is a right-winger, but defining the notion of
educational mastery in terms of the number of facts one can recall is
well-suited to the task of preserving the status quo. By contrast, consider
Dewey’s suggestion that an educated person is one who has “gained the power of
reflective attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind.”
Without this capability, he added, “the mind remains at the mercy of custom and
external suggestions.”
5. Mandating a Single Definition: Who gets to decide what it
means to be well-educated? Even assuming that you and I agree to include one
criterion and exclude another, that doesn’t mean our definition should be
imposed with the force of law – taking the form, for example, of requirements
for a high school diploma. There are other considerations, such as the real
suffering imposed on individuals who 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 Mount
Olympus have decreed that anyone who doesn’t pass a certain standardized test
will be denied a diploma and, by implication, classified as inadequately
educated. This example of accountability gone haywire violates not only common
sense but the consensus of educational measurement specialists. And the
consequences are entirely predictable: no high school graduation for a
disproportionate number of students of color, from low-income neighborhoods,
with learning disabilities, attending vocational schools, or not yet fluent in
English.
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 Met School focuses on social
reasoning, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, communication, and
personal qualities (such as responsibility, capacity for leadership, and
self-awareness). Meier has emphasized the importance of developing five “habits
of mind”: the value of raising questions about evidence (“How do we know what
we know?”), point of view (“Whose perspective does this represent?”),
connections (“How is this related to that?”), supposition (“How might things
have been otherwise?”), and relevance (“Why is this important?”).
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.
(http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/welleducated.htm)
