On Choosing to Learn

In my Learning Sciences and Technology Design seminar we recently read a draft of an upcoming book by Dan Schwartz, a Professor here at Stanford. He argues that we need to reconsider our assumptions about assessment in order to better capture the things we actually care about as educators. Instead of evaluating student knowledge, understanding, or even skills, he argues, we should try to assess student choices. That is, what a information or skills a student knows, and even her ability to learn further information or skills is not as important as the decision to learn.

That choices are central to how we move through the world is perhaps obvious, but it is striking how infrequently choice is a core part of any assessment framework (multiple-choice tests certainly do not count as "choice" in the sense that Dr. Schwartz means it). Even forward-thinking educators tend to focus more on acquisition of skills or overly-ambiguous notions of "metacognition" or "critical thinking" than on the specifics of decision making.  And specifics are the keys.  "Making good choices" is as bad a curricular goal as "being able to organize the following events chronologically."  A better option is a synthesis of the two, perhaps something to the effect of: "Given the task of explaining a historical event, choosing to organize parts of that event chronologically."

It seems to me that little education - indeed, even little of my own education, excellent though it has been - is organized around this kind of formulation. I believe that the most successful students end up adopting good strategies and making good choices, but Denise Pope's Doing School (about which I've written previously) suggests that a great many of our most successful students (if grades are our standard for success) in fact make terrible choices, ethically, academically, and even physically.

For my own part, I am struck by how often the schools I've attended - even Stanford - have not only tacitly accepted but in fact actively encouraged poor choices and unhealthy habits.  And I don't just mean ambiguous moral choices, but concrete habits of mind and academic practice. For example, in spite of Stanford's ostensible lack of concern over grades, their various administrative policy practically forces students to waste hours of time engaged in a gamey calculus over which courses to take credit/no-credit, and which to take for a grade. If I choose not to engage in this practice, I put myself at a disadvantage in terms of various small-scale political interactions that are inevitable in a graduate school.   On the other hand, the process itself, besides consuming intellectual energy better spend elsewhere, has undesirable effects on the way students engage with the particular courses they are not taking for a grade and the way professors engage with those students.

In other words, by separating this seemingly administrative cultural artifact from the curriculum, we've set up a situation where knowledge and skills are within the purview of the course, but where the most important actual decision making is made at an institutional level.  In graduate school - which is at least theoretically preparation for a life in the academy - this is perhaps not overly troubling, but as we shift our gaze to undergraduate or k-12 education, it's easy to see that students are often well-taught to make bad learning choices by the broader curricula and institutions in which they find themselves.  My rule of thumb for this kind of supposition is simple: if Stanford's graduate programs have a fundamental pedagogical or curricular problem, odds are that same problem can be found - and, indeed, is probably worse - at earlier stages of the education system.

So what is there to do? Unfortunately, it seems to me that this problem is virtually intractable in our current education system because it is endemic not merely to our curricula and pedagogy, but to our very culture, our policies, our institutions, and even our economics.  That is, there is a good reason we teach bad choices in schools: because our political, economic, and social systems are built upon the majority of people making bad choices.

Stress as a Choice

It is not uncommon, just about everywhere, to hear people talk about how stressed they are. This usually stems from having too much to do and not enough time to do it, and manifests itself as a self-fulfilling inability to actually be productive. While stress certainly has external contributors, I believe that it is, at its heart, a personal decision about how to respond to those external contributors. Without going into psychology or trying to dissect that, I think it's fair to point out that there are many people who feel overwhelming stress when they have fairly little work to do, while others skate by whistling and smiling despite working almost non-stop.

Choosing stress, however, does not strike me as a conscious decision. Few people would say: "Oh good, I have enough to do now that I can start feeling stressed about it." Granted, there are certainly people who need the threat of a looming deadline in order to actually complete a task (similar to the people who need the threat of a torturous afterlife in order to be moral?), but that, I feel, is a different kind of stress than the crippling, miserable, and unhealthy stress that is so prevalent. Indeed, I might call a deadline motivation, and while you might say that's just the same thing as stress, I would say, in response, that that is my point. The words we choose to describe a similar phenomenon tell us a lot about our intellectual habits.

What is the original of this choice, then? Why do so many people choose stress? Being unconscious, I suspect that stress is a habit started very early in life. Children who have stressed parents are probably quick to learn stress themselves, and are likely to respond in concert. Add to that our achievement-driven academic system - which rewards neither intelligence nor effort, really - and you have children at every tier of the system terrified about how they are possibly going to succeed (and out-compete their friends). "That's life," you may say, but that again is exactly the point: we choose a stressful world, and impose it upon ourselves and our children.

I firmly believe that too much work gets done in the world (that's a post for another time), I think it is even more troubling that so much time is spent worried about getting work done. There is something backwards about a culture that is more concerned with what it does and how it is to do those things than why. Choosing stress is about forgetting why, if not personally, then societally. Of course, the widespread epidemic of stress in the world - especially in Western countries - is probably a symptom of an unexamined why. If purposelessness breeds stress and frustration, it is no wonder a culture built upon profit is rife with them.

That's probably also a post for another time. Meanwhile, I don't think there's a need to delve too deeply into the cosmic - or at least cultural - sources of stress. More important is the personal decision, which is tied so closely to personal habits and expectations. I have seen people who respond to mountains of work as a fun challenge to be overcome - even when that work is not ostensibly engaging - which seems to me a better choice.

Call that attitude "life as a game," where there is always fun to be had in almost any effort, if you make that choice. Sometimes that might involve a good deal of fantasy; sometimes, perhaps, too much. But we already know what too much stress looks like.