The Disciplined Mind is the Path to Success

It’s a question every father asks himself not long after he brings his newborn child home: What will this child be when he or she grows up?  As Claire and Tim’s father, no one other than my wife will have a larger role in shaping that outcome for the first five years of their lives.  However, once they make that irrevocable step towards independence on the first day of kindergarten, the equation changes.  Spending roughly six hours a day and five days a week in various schools for thirteen years, the teachers and curricula Tim and Claire will encounter will have an equally influential role in their lives as I will.  As a parent and an educator, I want their classroom time to be structured in a way that will provide them the greatest possible exposure to future career choices. 

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Parenting, like teaching, is a hands-on job!



In order to do this, public secondary schooling should be reconceptualized so that when Claire and Tim are fully immersed in it in 2025, they will be taught “to think in a disciplined manner,” as Howard Gardner explains in Chapter 2 of Five Minds for the Future.  Too often today students are taught merely to memorize facts—the order of the planets, the Pythagorean Theorem, the names of famous authors, or the places and dates of historic battles—but with no meaningful explanation of how they can best use this material, or even why they need to know it in the first place.  The existence of this phenomenon is only exacerbated by the existence of high stakes testing.  No Child Left Behind puts so much emphasis on students’ ability to recall facts, yet it devotes no time to determining whether or not they know how to properly use them and how it matters for their future careers.  To remedy this deficiency, the system must undergo three significant changes—improved teacher preparation, increased problem-based learning, and enhanced parental involvement.

Since secondary students don’t often have a concrete idea about the career path they would like to pursue, what better way to suggest options than by structuring pedagogy to reflect the discipline that the course work reflects?  And to do so, who better to teach math classes than a mathematician?  Who better to teach chemistry than a scientist?  Professionals with graduate-level training in the fields they are teaching will be able to present subject material as more than just a pile of facts and will in fact convey the disciplines’ ways of thinking to their secondary students, giving an insight to Tim and Claire that as a historian I could only offer in the field of history.

Part and parcel of an increased focus on disciplining young minds is providing them meaningful learning experiences grounded in the techniques associated with the course’s professional protocol.  Gardner puts it best on page 29: “In law, the teacher engages in a Socratic dialogue with students…”  Why not employ this same method of teaching related secondary school subjects like government or civics?  He continues: “In business school, students come to class prepared to discuss a multi-faceted case; aware that the necessary information is incomplete, they nonetheless have to recommend a course of action…”  Why not make use of a similar exercise in an economics class?  These kinds of real-world, problem-based explorations would add immeasurable value and utility to the content of secondary school.

If the two foregoing reforms are to be enacted, it will require the participation of parents and the school community at large.  School districts should reach out to their parents in ways that recognize the fact that these adults are more than just procreators of the students; many are talented professionals, particularly in affluent regions like this one, who possess knowledge which should be made accessible to children in addition to their own.  To be sure, it would be the rare scientist or English professor who would be persuaded to change careers and become a secondary school teacher.  Even so, how much more meaningful would a lesson become if a gene therapist was merely invited as a guest speaker to a biology class or if a published author discussed her work in a language arts class?  Such a learning model would even leave room for family members without professional degrees; what better way to get social studies students already looking forward to the Summer of ’25 to sit up and take interest in study of the Vietnam War than to invite a veteran to discuss his experiences?

The striking thing about reforms like these is that they would not be that difficult to implement.  State-created curricula would not have to be altered in order for the same basic points to be conveyed in a more meaningful manner.  Many teachers already do possess graduate-level degrees in the fields they teach.  Many parents are eager to get involved in schools—they just aren’t being invited.  Everyone understands on some level that the purpose of school is to prepare students for their future careers.  The real question is, why haven’t these proposed pedagogical changes already been made?

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Tim is one month old today!

As Claire and Tim work toward the completion of their tenth- and eighth-grade years in 2025, the underlying idea of their coursework will undoubtedly be to teach them to process information.  Today we feel as though we are bombarded with information, yet the level of information we are asked to process in 2011 will seem quaint by 2025 standards.  How will they (and their parents and grandparents!) learn to manage it all?  I believe the answer is by developing a sharp and discerning mind.

Sometime within the last 10-15 years, the mainstream media seems to have made a decision, consciously or unconsciously, to no longer act as a responsible, impartial mediator of newsworthy events.  Light, in a manner of speaking, has given way to heat.  If someone claims loudly and forcefully enough that, say, the president of the United States was born on a distant continent despite indisputable evidence to the contrary, the media will report the controversy as “news,” even if the underlying premise is entirely bogus.  It is thus left to the consumer of news to think for him or herself and filter the illogical from the logical.  Howard Gardner agrees.  On page 11 of 5 Minds for the Future, he writes, “the ability to survey huge bodies of information—print and electronic—and to organize that information in useful ways looms more important than ever.”  As adolescents who will be starting the process of entering the adult world of information, it is my hope that Tim and Claire will be given teachers, schools, and curricula that will place a premium on helping them develop the tools they need to navigate the chaotic waters of this second yellow journalism age, particularly since these waters will likely only become more turbid in the next fourteen years.

In order to be able to do this, Claire, Tim, and their classmates must be taught to be independent thinkers.  But therein lies a paradox—how do you teach kids to trust what you as a teacher are saying if you are implicitly teaching them to question authority?  A firm but caring teacher-student bond of trust must be established.  Students need to understand why they are being asked to complete the assignments they are given, and how the work is relevant to their lives as young adults.  If this bond is cultivated, we as teachers will then be viewed as trusted sources of information.  A critical element of this “information trust” will be our classroom activities, which will have to evolve as well.  Out, I hope, will be pointless worksheets spoon-feeding pre-chewed information from an indeterminate source; in will be thoughtful examinations of primary sources, whether from a law passed the previous week or a diary entry written two centuries before.

These kinds of rigorous learning experiences will deepen the quality of Tim and Claire’s education, and will teach them to evaluate their own sources of information.  By role-modeling the importance of obtaining information directly from a first-hand account—and not from, say, someone’s opinion of someone else’s account of an event they heard about—we will teach our students to become more inquisitive thinkers.  By casting students in this more participatory learning role, we will engage those students who might otherwise have been left out of an old-fashioned, didactic lesson.  If we are able to reshape the learning experience in these authentic terms, we will make serious headway in banishing that dreaded student question: “Why do we need to know this stuff?”  By giving students the ability and the capacity to evaluate their information sources, the answer to that question will become clear: to be able to discern truth from propaganda—an ability that will be beneficial to them throughout their adult lives.