School isn't just about basic skills

On the "multidimensional nature of teaching"

Hey everyone—

Before we start: I have a poem in Farewell Transmission. I’m also in the latest issue of The American Bystander with a story about a washed-up Yiddish writer who tries his hand at trendy sci-fi romance. (No offense to trendy romance!) You should read and share both these things. Very grateful to the editors who published them.

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I’ve been thinking lately about how school is completely useless. How the mathematics we teach beyond a certain point exists almost exclusively in classrooms. Not just math—we are a country of people who vaguely remember a few words in a foreign language, who have forgotten the meaning of “covalent bond” and what exactly the War of 1812 was and whether we won it. And it’s not just k-12—somehow you can graduate with a degree in sociology or history or philosophy, get hired, and never think about Bourdieu again.

“How many classes did you take that you really never use on the job?” asks edu-skeptic Bryan Caplan. “How many years of foreign language did you have to take? Do you use Latin on the job? How much time did you spend studying poetry? Do you use poetry?”

He’s right—I never use Latin at work.

But then I think exactly the opposite—how school is so useful. How we need engineers and doctors and teachers and scientists and writers and readers and citizens. We need a lot of them, and we need them to be smart. And then I think about how we could eke out so much more learning from schooling if we wanted to. How is it that people spend four years in college but are taught in a way that, compared to k-12, is so pedagogically casual? In high school we ask kids to practice their skills in class. In college that’s rarer. You go to lectures and cheat on homework in the privacy of your dorm. School does not come close to maximizing learning.

The answer to this contradiction is that—despite how skeptics and critics talk about it—school is about more than just specific skills. But to talk about learning that goes beyond tests we have to open ourselves to a world of messier learning that happens, if it does, as the result of a hodgepodge of experiences, with a bunch of different teachers, taking place over decades.

Economists: Non-Test Learning is Real

How do we know that these supposed benefits are real? Kirabo Jackson has made this an area of focus. His papers have titles like “What Do Test Scores Miss?” and “What is a Good School, and Can Parents Tell?” These papers find that teachers have an influence on kids’ emotional learning. (He measures this using proxies like attendance, behavior, grade repetition.)

Skeptics might think that school does improve effort, motivation, behavior and all these other “emotional” factors—but only as a result of doing well academically. So it’s especially noteworthy that Jackson finds that his measures of a teacher’s influence on test and non-test factors don’t correlate very much. If that’s right, then kids learn more than just academics at school.

You want more research? Here’s more, found on the excellent LiveHandbook:

• Blazar and Kraft: “Teachers who are effective at improving test scores often are not equally effective at improving students’ attitudes and behaviors…These findings lend empirical evidence to well-established theory on the multidimensional nature of teaching.”

• Backes, Cowan, Goldhaber, & Theobald: “We find that teacher test and nontest measures both play important roles in predicting long-run postsecondary outcomes, but they appear to operate on different margins depending on the student outcomes in question.” (Top students are more impacted by test-improving teacher skills.)

So, hooray. Teaching isn’t a waste of everyone’s time.

But how exactly does any of this happen? Did I help my students with the noncognitive, emotional stuff this year? Did my children’s teachers? How does any of this happen? Should I be giving speeches about effort to my algebra class?

In short: do we have any idea how these emotional benefits are confered?

Cognitive Scientists: General Skills Don’t Exist

Let’s make things worse. There is a line of thought in cognitive science that the only skills and knowledge that can be taught are specific. From this point of view, we learn only that which we are explicitly taught. “Transfer” of skills to new domains is rare, maybe even non-existant. As a result, there isn’t really anything that deserves to be called “critical thinking” or “problem solving” abilities—all we can ever have are growing collections of individual techniques.

“We’re not even sure the general skills exist,” writes Daniel Willingham. “But we’re quite sure there’s no proven way to teach them directly.”

I basically agree with this perspective. I was radicalized by problem solving posters: the list of tips for getting unstuck which are hopelessly vague—kids don’t know how to productively draw a picture or “solve a simpler problem.” (Write a better introduction! Try jumping higher!) What has worked for me instead is to teach the more specific version of that skill.¹

But this is all very strange—Kirabo Jackson and the others are talking about longterm emotional benefits of schooling. These are, in a sense, general social-emotional skills. Why would you be able to impact a kids’ emotional life in general terms, but not their academic skills?

It’s Bigger Than the Individual

Here’s what I think is happening. I think that specific skills can be learned under specific, definable conditions. But the “fuzzier” skills are learned under fuzzier conditions.

Put it like this. General skills are abstract. Everything I know about pedagogy and learning says that there’s no shortcut for learning abstractions. It would be hard to learn what the word “mammal” means unless you’re familiar with a few different specific cases (“cow,” “human,” “dolphin”). Likewise, you can’t learn what “solve a simpler problem means” without learning a few different versions of this. Maybe “make the numbers smaller,” or “prove it for a convex polygon first.” As these specific heuristics pile up, maybe one day you’ll connect the dots and…tada, a general mathematical skill.

Maybe all those emotional, non-cognitive outcomes are like that. How do you become emotionally resiliant? How do you learn to be responsible and timely? How do you develop the ability to hold anger at bay? Probably not all at once. Probably a little bit at a time. You learn it in 1st Grade, then again in 2nd. You learn not to tell Mr. Pershan that you think his class is stupid, then you learn not to yell at Ms. Smith in music. Next year in science you get in trouble for pushing Susanna when she takes a pencil from your desk. You learn not to push Susanna in science. Eventually, these things pile up. One day you’re able to generalize—you can manage your anger. But there’s no shortcut. How could there be?

Here’s how it all might fit together. Teachers don’t teach “emotional resiliance” or “effort” or “responsibility.” We also don’t teach “problem solving” or “critical thinking” or “listening to others” or “respective disagreement” or anything like that. By their very magnitude they are skills that need to be nurtured over years and across many different contexts. It’s like if a teacher tried to teach “maturity.”

To be clear—please don’t do this. You can’t teach maturity.

The cognitive scientists are, however, are wrong to be skeptical of general skills. True, they are learned over a longer period than is convenient to measure. But those individual skills pile up, painfully, over many years. You can try giving the process a little nudge, but you can’t rush. It’s going to take time.²

Which means that the individual teacher needs to think about their work with some humility. We participate in a process. We have no idea what we ultimately contribute to it. We can teach what effort, behavior, reasoning, listening looks like in our classroom, for our subject. And hopefully one day that piles up into something significant, something a person takes when them into work and life.

Some of the roughest teaching I’ve seen comes when teachers have a hard time handling their own smallness in this process—they reach for more and try to teach something that feels weighty and significant. They’re trying to find a shortcut for that abstract learning. There is no shortcut.

But it also means that those who see school as, essentially, about individual academic skills are badly mistaken. Tests are wonderful but there is plenty of evidence that they are incomplete. What’s missing is an entire dimension of schooling that, honestly, most people recognize as essential, but those who think too much about tech or tests often end up eliminating, either out of misguided skepticism or economic convenience. If you define school as just about the War of 1812 or covalent bonds, you’re missing out on a lot. And as a personal favor, it would be great if everybody talking about the supposed “future of education” could recognize what it is that schools actually presently do.

1. For the math nerds: “Polya was of no use for budding young problem-solver” wrote Alan Schoenfeld in 1987. “The two dozen or so "powerful strategies" in How to Solve It are, in actuality, a collection of two or three hundred less "powerful," but actually usable, strategies. These strategies can be taught-but the fact that there are so many of them causes a new problem. With three hundred techniques potentially at your disposal, you have to know which ones to use, and at what times.” Thus metacognition, monitoring your progress and changing direction when necessary, becomes all-important for Schoenfeld. I digress.

2. I find myself wondering whether it makes sense to bring up Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in this context. I’m thinking it probably does.