The Value and Meaning of Education:

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
 Wiliam Butler Yeats

As a teacher I spend quite a bit of my day working with young minds trying to inspire children to discover material and open up to new concepts.  I guess I am trying to understand where the joy of discovery has been beaten out of the students. Now this next statement is going to make me sound very ancient, but I remember a time when back in my day, when the process of working through a problem and getting the right answer was somewhat exhilarating. There was pride in doing it by myself and not having someone spoon-feed me the answer like I was an infant. It was a sign of maturity and self-sufficiency to be able to problem solve and do it myself. Many times when I am struggling with a student who wants material spoon-fed, I tell them they are regressing backward.  It seems like sometime my toddler nieces and nephews have more drive than many of the general students I have in class.

It disheartens me to see young minds full of promise want only immediate feed back. Their favorite line when I ask them to look it up is, "but you know the answer". I normally reply that if I tell you, you will only write it down and promptly forget it but if you work for it you will remember it and if you teach it to someone else you will know it forever. (They hate this and now by the end of the semester often quote this to other students who ask.)  They find no joy in the this electronic age of immediacy to go about researching something and discover it on their own or work through a problem set. I miss seeing the glint in their eyes when they see something unique and novel in the laboratory. I also want to say I hate the sentence, “I AM BORED.” coming from my own children. I always repeat what my Grandmother would say to us, “Nothing is boring but boring people with no imagination.” Then she would promptly put us to work.

I have to say part of the problem we educators create is the belief in the almighty work sheet and vocabulary lists. The lack of vigor in elementary and junior high school science is appalling.  I have AP Biology students who have never ever done a single laboratory. It horrifies me that my students have been denied the joy of watching seeds sprout, terrariums flourish, cells breathe and chemicals react until I get them at 14 or 15 years of age. My Mom was amazing! We were constantly sent outside to discover, catch turtles, frogs and fireflies. Even in the city streets of Chicago we were allowed to have a small garden and watched the fruits of our labor make it to our table. We wandered the neighborhood cemeteries of Chicago on adventures read grave stones and came back with dozens of questions for my Grandmother and Mother. May times she would talk about the great famine in Ireland and the flu epidemic. The discovery of antibiotics and how when my Mom was a little girl almost died because all they had were sulfa drugs and she has rheumatic fever as a child. It was an amazing adventure in story time not just family history but in science and culture and society. Everything and everyone had a story and it involved all subjects we were taught in school. It was magical to my young mind. 

I really believe it is not just the electronic age that is the blame but it is the lack of challenge and discovery we offer to and demand of our children. We have over scheduled and over organized our child’s lives and limited their playtime and discovery opportunities. I know I am guilty of this. We need to make an effort to at times to, un-schedule, turn off and go out. Don’t be that parent I see all too often with their children in a restaurant, at the movies, in a park and on their phone. Turn it off!!! Engage children and yourself and it will have a more profound effect on your child’s imagination and your fulfillment of time with your children.  Make not just learning but the discovery of knowledge an important part of your parenting, intelligence and the drive to discover is the real gift you give to a child. This world with all it’s troubles needs creative thinkers who can problem solve. We need individuals who not only are knowledgeable but are able to search and discover new ideas. It is not only amazing to see your child succeed but it is more amazing and powerful to see them struggle, discover and succeed beyond not only your wildest dreams but theirs.

"It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time -- for we are bound by that -- but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
" T.S. Eliot