Students learn. Whether or not we make them learn, whether or not it’s part of a curriculum, students are going to learn. It is human nature. It is a matter of survival. Human beings are not so strong or so quick that we can do without our intelligence and our ability to figure out how things work.
We are rational creatures. Not only do we learn from our experiences, but we also want to understand what is going on in our lives. We all construct a narrative in which the lead character and hero is ourselves. And we naturally want the hero to win.
Human beings need to be in control of our circumstances. We can learn and solve problems. We are the hero in our own narrative. We need to be able to play the role of a triumphant hero … and sometimes that is a problem.
For young people who are just discovering who they are and how to use the power of their own intellect, it is easy to make mistakes. It is even easier to allow their narrative to be written by someone else. When this happens, learning doesn’t stop, but sometimes the lessons they learn are not the most helpful kind.
We hope that the personal development that occurs in childhood and adolescence will produce well-adjusted, contributing members of society. But all of us know that the experience of growing up also produces unhappy, frustrated individuals who are convinced of their own inability to learn. How did these people turn out this way? How did the heroes in their stories become such outcasts?
For a great many of them, the answer is that they learned it in school.
A large part of the culture of schools is the practice of telling students that what they are doing is not the right thing. Whether it is grammar, math, or social behavior, the style of instruction employed by most schools is based on penalizing students for getting it wrong. We give negative attention to students who make mistakes, do not give nearly as much positive attention to students who correctly follow instructions, and hardly ever encourage students to discover how to learn on their own.
In recent years, there have been some positive moves towards empowering students in how they learn. Constructivist, student-centered, project-based learning models can be very useful in allowing young people to feel they have some control over a part of their own narrative. But state-mandated curriculums and required learning outcomes narrow the opportunities for students to learn.
Students who do not feel successful in school will rewrite their narratives. Instead of the hero being a brilliant scholar, he or she is brilliant at evading responsibility. The hero who can’t succeed within the narrow expectations of the school structure prevails by finding a way to succeed outside of the rules.
Students learn, and if they believe they cannot learn what school has to offer, they will learn how to construct a useful alternative. It defies human nature to think of oneself as a failure. It is good to keep this in mind when we look at the story told in our report cards. There may be a far more compelling alternative narrative written elsewhere.
J. Marcus Patton 