My son is in second grade, and complains regularly about it. Part of it is my fault; I’ve been pushing him to read, both together with me and on his own, since he could speak, and he now reads a lot. Unfortunately, the books of the moment are from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. I take heart in the fact that it’s written about and for middle school boys, and my son is thus reading comfortably at a level three of four levels above his grade. But the books do encourage a negative attitude about school in general. His second grade teacher is good, but this is her first experience at this grade level: interestingly, up until now in her career, she’s been a middle school teacher. And like his father, my son is a relentless and laser sharp critic.
I volunteer at his school every now and again – determined largely by when I’m in Seattle and when I’m not on conference calls – and have done so for a couple of years now. His first grade teacher was, quite simply, brilliant. She had a natural feel for what five-going-on-six and six-going-on-seven year olds need, namely, to develop a love of learning, to nurture a curiosity for the world around them, a robust willingness to ask why. Children at that age – and all of us, at any age, if we really think about it – don’t need facts and figures and dates and information. Information is obtainable from books, or today from the Internet, or in the past from our elders’ tales and myths and memories. What we need is the curiosity to seek out those facts, the desire to put them together to answer questions, the capability to state the questions, and the courage to say it out loud. My son’s first grade teacher nudged all of her young charges in that direction, and it was a wonderful thing to watch as a volunteer in the classroom, as I rebooted the class laptops and checked whether they had the latest operating system version or taped together overly-well-loved books or soothed the new kid who was ADHD but whose parents were anti-vaxxer anti-medical types so he was sort of out of control most of the time.
My son’s second grade teacher, fresh off a decade of middle school teaching where the major goal was to avoid parental criticism and, in Seattle, to ensure that minority students continued to increase their scores on standardized tests, is a bit of a culture shock for my son. Interestingly, though, it seems to be a bit of a shock to his classmates too. Every year there’s a bit of a shuffle among classmates across classrooms, so there are maybe eight or nine children who also had my son’s first grade teacher. When I volunteer now, I’ve got more of a crowd control role, but the children who remember me from last year – remembering that I expect to be called Mr. Freilinger, not “Peter” like some playground chum – seem to like my willingness to ask weird questions, and gravitate towards me as I read stories and listen to them read from books about the Titanic disaster and unicorns and Wimpy Kids. My son gets that at home and tends to grab his books and read independently, but the other kids surround me as I strain the tiny classroom chairs with my girth and, as I read, add side comments about how a book is incorrect or making an aggressive interpretation of something or just requires us to pause and ask “why do you think the author would write such a thing?”.
All of that is fun, but as I watch out of the corner of my eye, I can sense that their second grade teacher is not just caught off guard by the differences between 11 year olds and 7 year olds, but by their expectations. As a middle school teacher – and this was confirmed in casual conversation before and after the mid-year parent-teacher conferences – her role was to achieve success on standardized exams, and to maintain order among kids with hormonal stirrings and widening differences in capabilities, size, confidence, and self-awareness. The latter task is Herculean, and I’m amazed we consistently as a society produce an adequate number of people willing to attempt it. But the former, really, is a perversion of what “education” is. My son, over the next few years, will move from a first grade experience of education that was almost Platonically ideal, to an experience of education as “training”, even though his mind – if left solely to the efforts of the state schooling system – will still be unaware of what it means to think.
It was after a weekend with my son where I’d had the chance to volunteer in his art class on Friday, head to Tacoma and play and eat with friends overnight, then read and spend two hours of library time on Saturday, play board games on Sunday, and have the parent-teacher conference on Monday, that I was forwarded a link from a friend and loyal reader of these essays (who has his own phenomenal blog on books and libraries, The Deckle Edge, which everyone who reads this should link to and follow) to an essay entitled “The Lesson to Unlearn” by a venture capital guy named Paul Graham. It’s worth a read, although the writer’s style bothers me. I’ve worked with enough venture capital types to find their style to grate. They usually comes across as an annoying graduation day speech. It took me a long time to realize just what I had been missing, they say, but then a nugget of something opened up the world to me, and it was on that day that I realized that should commit to the Series B funding of Uber at what turned out to be merely pennies a share relative to where we cashed out with Softbank, and thus now I stand before you not only enlightened, but wealthier than you’ll ever be, and with pride of having changed the world by making sure cab drivers everywhere will never again aspire to the middle class.
Anyway, style aside, the author makes a valid point: broadly speaking, the educational system, both state and private, ends up implicitly training us to game the system, not to learn or to think. By “gaming the system,” Graham means to pass tests, to mold ourselves to pass the various gates that grant us access to higher status (better schools, rewards, recognition) and, ultimately, to succeed the social game of life (higher pay, more attractive mating opportunities, etc.). Transparently he is correct, but then he misses the point:
When I started advising startup founders at Y Combinator, especially young ones, I was puzzled by the way they always seemed to make things overcomplicated. How, they would ask, do you raise money? What’s the trick for making venture capitalists want to invest in you? The best way to make VCs want to invest in you, I would explain, is to actually be a good investment. Even if you could trick VCs into investing in a bad startup, you’d be tricking yourselves too. You’re investing time in the same company you’re asking them to invest money in. If it’s not a good investment, why are you even doing it?
Oh, they’d say, and then after a pause to digest this revelation, they’d ask: What makes a startup a good investment?
So I would explain that what makes a startup promising, not just in the eyes of investors but in fact, is growth. Ideally in revenue, but failing that in usage. What they needed to do was get lots of users.
….
There are certainly big chunks of the world where the way to win is to hack the test. This phenomenon isn’t limited to schools. And some people, either due to ideology or ignorance, claim that this is true of startups too. But it isn’t. In fact, one of the most striking things about startups is the degree to which you win by simply doing good work. There are edge cases, as there are in anything, but in general you win by getting users, and what users care about is whether the product does what they want.
(Note the style elements I described above. Paul really thinks he’s something pretty special.)
No, Paul Graham, you’ve totally missed the point. First, you’ve defined “winning” as the goal of the game. You’ve essentially endorsed the foundational failure of the system you’re lamenting: the idea that winning – getting the highest score on the test, getting into Oxbridge or Harvard – is the objective, not learning to think. All Paul has done is replace one kind of “winning” with another – instead of gaming the system, you game the system’s participants and get them to come to your poisoned trough. Society doesn’t win that way, nor does, really, the individual, who is craving meaning not just within society but within one’s soul. Individuals fulfill their potential – find their meaning – not by chasing little games within society (how many users can my social media site get?) but by thinking reflectively and asking good questions and demanding that we work to get the best answers. Facebook and Google are reviled today because they got so many of us to use their platforms but they did so by (often intentionally) masking or distracting us from the consequences of their use.
Graham’s educational system remains based fundamentally on tests, on hurdles, on chasing some form of recognition. It’s this false, empty promise – that passing such tests, whether the false tests of hacking how standardized tests work or the “unhackable” tests with no inherently known right answer, such the test of making investment choices in the market, is the purpose of our existence – that is drawing us closer and closer to an existential crisis on earth. We are not here to pass tests; we are here to explore, with no possibility of ever getting to the end of that particular road. There is no success we will achieve, as a species or as a tendency towards greater complexity and negative entropy as life itself, period. The only tests we really have are staying alive (arguably we’re failing that, as we watch Australia burn and the ice caps melt due to belching 400 million years of trapped carbon back into the atmosphere). All the other “tests” are just social constructions we make for one another.
Think about this in the context of what Mark and Viktoria have been writing about recently. Mark gags with frustration at academic economists who, willfully ignorant of how markets and individuals in such markets actually behave and think, play games with one another in an effort to preen, acquire status, and, hopefully, a comfortably tenured position which will allow for fawning young grad students and income sufficient to afford a second home. Viktoria struggles with the tensions of acquiring a degree in philosophy versus the joys of acquiring an understanding of philosophy. Both, in essence, are railing against what concerns me about the Paul Graham essay. Yes, there is an obvious falsehood in chasing obviously socially constructed hurdles. But the trick is not to then seek to “win” a separate game. The trick is to stop playing entirely.
Note I’m not anti-innovation; I’m not saying we all just sit quietly and sip tea and contemplate. What I am saying is that the purpose of our contemplation – and our tool creation, and our asking of questions and our relentless need to pursue the answers – should be pure in and of itself. We should create websites which allow us to share cat photos with one another because we like sharing cat pictures and we want to do it more efficiently so that cat picture lovers everywhere have a warmer, happier glow at the end of every Internet day. If our end is to make a lot of money, though – that is, if our goal is to “win” the societal game of status and allocation of resources – then we identify the fact that cat lovers who currently can’t share pictures easily, and then figure we’ll make a “platform” to enable us to mine their data without being fully aware of it to sell on to marketers and Russian identity thieves and the Trump campaign (sorry to be redundant there), then we have committed an immoral act. We’ve “won” in Paul Graham’s world, but we have lost as a society of human beings who, presumably, have as a collective desire our own sustainment. And eventually even the cat lovers feel betrayed, and sense that maybe the world does, in fact, hate them, even though the kittens are so, so very cute.
I look back on the last few paragraphs and realize I’ve used “should” several times. Should is, of course, a lousy word: of course we “should” do things but we’re human and we like stuff, we crave affection and sex, and as social creatures, we do in fact want to be recognized and get status, and so we do plenty of things which are not in our collective best interest. I do think, however, that when we design collective structures – those that educate our children is perhaps the purest example of such a structure – we have a real need to examine the downstream consequences of what we embed in such structures. Paul Graham would have us perpetuate a culture of “winning”, of searching for what we (as troubled and more or less self-centered beings) will grasp for and then programming to assault such tendencies. As Graham identifies, our existing school system also programs “winning” but defines “winning” as the ability to beat certain games which are essentially bureaucratic. Each system leads inexorably towards the uncomfortable world we live in today, in which we celebrate those who learn to play to our least reflective wants (Brexit on our need for tribal comfort, Facebook on our need to connect), and reward those who are fundamentally mediocre and unimaginative but know how to navigate the gaps in the bureaucracy (hedge fund arbitraguers, lobbyists, politicians).
I say we have a need to examine the consequences not because it is a moral duty – although I would argue that it is, it’s not the point I’m making here, which is not about morality, but about the effectiveness of the system as a whole. I think it’s just self-evident that if society is going to construct a costly, multigenerational system of influence, it should think carefully to simply avoid failure. Granted, there are multiple ideas of success – and I can easily envision a class of individuals who would intentionally design a system which is flawed in the long term so as to achieve a large short term gain. But having worked in high finance for twenty five years, I’ve met more than a few – and thus seen that they don’t fundamentally act as a class. They act as self-serving individuals, and their interests clash and they dislike one another viscerally and find coordination abhorent. Their individual resources, moreover, are great enough to ensure that they can act on their dislike of one another and effectively block any theoretically collective aim. So we’re not fighting a class war here, we’re simply fighting against the human tendency to not want to work hard enough to imagine deep consequences (a tendency to which the wealthy are usually more susceptible to than the poor). We want linear answers and narratives that are straightforward; consequences in the real world are interdependent, messy, and require us to bravely make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
An educational system which inspires curiousity, which encourages questions but not the finality of answers known in advance, which teaches iconoclasm while demonstrating respect for one another and the differential potentials we all bring to bear, would give us the ability to face the infinite incomprehensibility of the universe. Would we fix global warming? Maybe not. Would we create peace in the Middle East? No, of course not, because we’d still have our fundmental human cravings and fears, we’d still be trapped by our own language constraints and within the fortresses we create around our hearts. But would we add a kind of pause to our response mechanism, where first we look at the second, third, and fourth order impacts of our decisions, and question our own self-knowledge, and maybe seek others for help, and maybe realize we could still be wrong and we’d still need to act anyway? Yeah, I think we would.
What fascinates me is that such teaching happens a lot. It wasn’t just the magical first grade teacher of my son; at Green Lake Elementary, and earlier Pond Cove Elementary and Scarborough Elementary, it’s practically the norm. I received it from my parents (happy little Christmas, Mom), and while lots of parents are overwhelmed and terrified, I see that desire in their hearts and actions regularly (well, maybe not among the anti-vaxxers). But at some point along the way, we lose the will, and we end up with a second grade teacher who is honestly trying her best but is unwittingly planting the seeds of destruction in the hearts and minds of children who already unconsciously sense there is something better.
I’m trying to spend more time with my son encouraging him to be curious in his own way. It’s challenging; he likes doing things which are utterly uninteresting to me (lately, playing some kind of town building game on his iPad, and reading Wimpy Kid books) but I’m sticking with it, asking questions about what he likes, what he avoids, what he doesn’t like, whatever. I’m encouraging him to read and nudging him in the direction of things I think will keep opening up his world whenever he shows interests. The latest is an atlas; he and I spent a couple of library sessions leafing through the Oxford World Atlas, so we got him a copy of the National Geographic Atlas of the World (take that Oxford – USA! USA!) for Christmas and lugged the 80cm x 30cm, 5 kilo book across the country in carry-on luggage so he’ll have it in Seattle. I keep reading the books he likes, no matter how painful (Dav Pilkey should be sentenced to prison for creating Captain Underpants, and then granted a conditional pardon for creating Dog Man), while slipping in every now and again something a little more edifying. Tom Sawyer, say, or at least the Hardy Boys. I’m hoping this keeps the spark alive that was so readily lit in first grade.
Will it work? I have no idea. My best guess is, in a world where even those who see the folly of “the system” still endorse winning as our primary moral objective, the odds aren’t good. But that’s not the point. The point is to see what happens, and keep asking about how to make it better. Wish me luck.
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