Once Upon a Time on Tralfamadore

It's the grind

Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough. So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, “Tralfamadore.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

A Tralfamadorian (source)

In the physical world, humans have transcended many purposes. I no longer have to walk to the stream to get water, or start a fire to cook dinner, or perform many other mundane everyday tasks. My time is freed to serve higher purposes.

While humans have dramatically transformed the physical world, education is the realm of cognition. In the cognitive world, we are operating the same hardware that made its way out of the savannah a few tens of thousands of years ago. There are no shortcuts. The job of education is to make students smarter. That means the slow, effortful accumulation of synapses and schemas.

It’s physics. Thinking is expensive. Humans evolved to learn only with repeated effort. Those synapses only grow stronger by firing, over and over again. Encoding. Consolidation. Retrieval. Connection. Application. And in the modern world there is a lot to learn.

The magic of the human brain is that, once we have learned it, much of our own knowledge is invisible to us, and the effort expended to learn is forgotten. As long as humans exist we will want desperately to find a higher purpose, to move beyond the mundane everyday and reach for something more. We will believe that there must be an easier way, and we will try to find shortcuts for the endless grind that it takes to learn and grow intellectually.

The education world is full of “if only…” If only we could teach critical thinking. If only we could make learning more relevant. If only students had more choice. If only parents were more supportive. If only smaller class sizes. If only more school funding.

I have enormous optimism that we can produce better outcomes than what we see in today’s education system. To make that change we need to be humble, to accept that our job is to cause the slow, steady accumulation of knowledge that opens doors for young people and shows them what their minds are capable of. The volume of knowledge we need in the modern world only grows, while our brains learn at the same speed they have learned for tens of thousands of years.

Long-time readers know that I am a bit of a traditionalist and a staunch advocate for boring regular school. But the learning I’m talking about doesn’t only happen in schools, and it’s absolutely possible that we will stumble across a better model for education than the one we have. I don’t think the schools we have today work perfectly. Stop by my classroom some morning. You’ll see something a bit messy, still a work in progress. There is plenty of room to grow, to make student effort more efficient, to cut through the noise and focus on the learning that matters most.

Here is one thing I am sure of. If we do improve education, it won’t be fueled by “if only…” and attempts to bypass the humble grind of learning. Improving education will happen because of people who take the grind seriously, who dive deep into the details of the content that we want students to learn, who put the nuts and bolts together in a way that does all the little things right. That’s my purpose, my priority in my classroom. There are no shortcuts. There are a thousand little decisions every day, and my own slow, effortful learning as I figure out a little more about learning, as I help students figure out a little more about the world we live in.