What is worth learning?

Recently a colleague sent me an article summarizing Harvard professor David Perkins entitled "What's Worth Learning in School?" This is a worthwhile and incredibly broad topic, so I was both eager to read what was said, and also hesitant. 

I will admit that I am highly skeptical of any short article that purports to tell us what is worth learning. Most of the myriads of these kinds of articles that I read tell me that we really need to be learning "process" and "innovation" (and their derivatives) because they are the only really valuable skills in a post-industrial information-based economy. They tell me that "content", especially of the sort of content found from dusty books found in the cellars of liberal arts departments, should be consigned to the artifacts of bygone ages.

I would say that, with some exceptions, the David Perkins article seems to fit this norm and pattern. He has his Ph.D., not in philosophy or social studies or any liberal art that asks questions of ultimate meaning and ethical significance, but in mathematics and artificial intelligence. So what else can we really expect? I might expect him to have expertise in what is needed for mathematic or technological education, but when he spreads his wings to speak on education as a whole, I think there are problems.

Of course one of his prime examples of why we don't really need CONTENT, just PROCESS, comes from the Liberal Arts. After all, we would not expect him to say something so absurd as "We should teach kids to focus on the broad themes of software development and video game design, and not all the arcane intricacies of coding." Of course that is an absurd statement. He knows that without skilled content knowledge "on the ground" of how to construct well-formed code, you will get precisely nowhere in building software.

And yet, he uses the false Content/Process dichotomy for the Liberal Arts, urging students to learn about patterns in historical events without needing to dive into depth with the facts about historical events: "For example, rather than just learning facts about the French Revolution, students should learn about the French Revolution as a way to understand issues like world conflict or poverty or the struggle between church and state."

Really? From whose perspective will we learn these patterns? Will we take the Catholic interpretation or the Secular interpretation or the Capitalist interpretation or the Marxist interpretation (or one of dozens of others) to be the grid within which we decipher patterns? On what possible basis could we arbitrate between these interpretive frames? The only possible basis for discerning between interpretive frames is on the basis of the facts in which these patterns are embodied. Without fluency with the facts on the ground, we are doomed to place whatever interpretation we want on historic patterns, usually choosing whatever social-critical fad was current a decade ago in academia.

To be clear here I am not arguing a primacy of content over process, but rather an equality, or an inside-outside understanding of the relation between the two. And I am also arguing for the same kind of equality between the so-called "liberal arts" and the so-called STEM disciplines. Both are necessary to make a fully competent, fully flourishing human being. But a great many of these articles, including this one, apply great deals of nuance and importance to STEM learning, while insisting that "liberal arts" are useful only in outline, if at all.

My biggest gripe with articles like this is that they are NOT forming fully flourishing human beings. At best, they seem to want to form specialists who "innovate" in their chosen fields, not realizing how they are in fact building upon centuries of previous knowledge, and often repeating centuries of previous mistakes. At worst, we are educating, what Yale professor Bill Deresiewicz calls "Excellent Sheep": People who are technological wizards, but are completely unable to interpret or question the dominant cultural values they live within. To be more than sheep, Deresiewicz argues, we must deliberately engage, in depth, the "humanities" which cause us to ask and answer questions of ultimate meaning and ethical value by engaging literature, history, art, philosophy, and even theology. A great 15 minute summary of Bill's argument can be found in his TED talk.

To be a fully flourishing, fully functioning human being we need to learn and master a whole lot more than merely "marketable" skills in "innovation" and "productivity". When we are in the rat race, trying to make money to cover our growing credit debt, seeking to make a name for our product(s), and do better things for less cost than our competitors, then these "productivity" and "innovation" skills are great. But the truth is, these skills only account for a small part of our lives. Living and loving, making and rearing children, making ethical decisions, interpreting whether our culture and economic system are on the right track, burying our parents, and facing the end of our own lives, are just a few of the myriad life experiences that are untouched by "innovation" and "productivity". But they ARE experiences that are infinitely deepened by engaging the great themes of human existence in a "close read" of the "humanities" and "liberal arts".

And so, after all is said and done, my deepest fear in answering David Perkin's question "What's Worth Learning in School?", is that his answer is either intended to make us merely "Excellent Sheep", or because he has not questioned his own assumptions, will unintentionally lead us to become "Excellent Sheep". 

Now, this entire post is generated as a knee jerk reaction to having read a ton of articles like this over the years. I will be honest, and tell you my process. First I noticed the title of the article and who was putting it out, and I was skeptical. Then I searched the CV of David Perkins, and found that he has a PhD in a subject not really related to Pedagogy or Human Development or even Philosophy. Even more skeptical. Then I quickly read the article with an eye to see if there was an example of the bogus Content/Process distinction, or something that seemed to denigrate or simplify the liberal arts. I found it, then I wrote this.

I thought about going back and re-reading this article with greater depth and care, to see if I had missed nuance, and was mischaracterizing things. But then I thought no: If I am wrong because I failed to read the article deeply enough, that only adds to my thesis. In order to go through the PROCESS of correct interpretation and application, one has to go through the painstaking task of mastering the CONTENT of the facts on the ground. This is especially true if we are dealing with issues of value and ethics: In this case, which content is valuable enough to include in the process of human formation we call education.

So, if I am essentially wrong about Perkins, it is only because I am essentially right in insisting on a parity between process and content, liberal arts and STEM.