As I finish up the 9th course in my Ed.S. program after a week of focusing on digital storytelling, I find myself contemplating what story I'd tell to explain why I'm an educator and what I truly hope to get from pursuing a terminal degree in education.
I was born a lover of learning. Everything in life was a puzzle to be solved, a challenge to be mastered. You'd think someone like that would do exceptionally well in school. But I didn't. I struggled a great deal. Even when I got good grades it was because I was working at least twice as long as expected to achieve it. Like so many others, for the majority of my life I wrongly assumed education was not the problem. I figured I was the problem. If I was smarter, I'd do better and it would be easier.
I believe we experience pain to motivate us to help others with theirs. My desire to go into the education field was born out of great frustration. School had failed me in so many ways, and I wasn't alone. Some of the smartest people I knew were high school and college dropouts who held mistaken beliefs they weren't book smart. I looked around at this world, at our technologies and resources and wondered why we could do so many amazing things in this world, yet education was so poorly developed.
Then I had a life-changing experience of being educated extremely well in a very personal way by an amazing educator. It was quite informal and fueled entirely by a shared passion for a topic. My educator initially served as a mentor and guide, but quickly became a kind of colleague, student, and friend. We learned together through thought experiments and we tested our ideas where we could. Our unique experiences helped us take turns in the mentor role. Our learning path was not prescribed, it was organic. We dove deep into some rather esoteric theories one day and pulled back to practical applications the next.
I discovered in our discussions the true boundaries of my intellect and how much more I was capable of than school had ever shown me. And I discovered that true learning did not require agony or busy work or mindless repetition or stilted language. All it required was passion and a joy of discovery.
I suspect there are quite a few educators who, like me, wanted to enter this field to fix some of the problems they've experienced. Right now, in our political climate, there is great pressure to tear down the whole system of education, especially at the higher education level, and start over. I get the desire. I share it.
Education isn't a field of fame and fortune. Our ranks are not full of billionaires. Quite the opposite, going into education is often a license to comfortably enter the ranks of the lower middle class of our society. Despite that, it seems like it is a field created by business majors rather than educators.
I think one of the biggest takeaways I've gotten in this program so far is that this is a much more complex puzzle than it seems and tearing it all apart will probably not resolve all the problems. It might solve some, but would likely create some new ones, too.
So, as I sit here and reflect on what I've learned and what the world needs stripped from its education system, I think the first thing I'd trash is the business of it. I know I'm slitting my own throat here. After all, it's the business of it that pays my mortgage and puts food on the table. But it's the business of it that's created a system that isn't serving us. It's the business of it that distracts us to calculate our ROI in dollars rather than in open and engaging minds.
We know far more about the human mind and cognition than we ever have throughout history, yet we are failing to produce hordes of passionate lifelong learners. For the majority of documented time, education was a very personal experience driven by a student's desire to learn. Over the last century, we've tried to make it scalable and standardized. Those are two lovely terms that almost always mean impersonal.
I don't know the answer to how we educate ourselves best, but it must include incentivizing the passionate learner in each of us. I used to think that could be achieved simply by removing the tedious parts of coursework. If learning was more fun, people would want to participate in it more.
Now, as I've learned more about the ins and outs, I've come to realize that the tedium was more a symptom than a cause. I suspect the true cause is a lack of connection. Courses are often just a list of tasks to complete, not an invitation to connect. And students often have no desire for the course they're in. It's just a means to an end. Students are not rewarded for drifting beyond the fringe of a topic, and in some courses they are actually punished for doing so.
What is our goal here?
That brings me back to the title of this post and a question I find myself asking a lot these days. Why do I do this? Why am I pursuing this degree in a broken field when I could be doing so many other things that would likely make my life easier?
My answer is simple. Hope. Hope there are more like me that prefer authentic learning to whatever this is we currently have. Hope there are more than me that believe the point of education is not to teach people how to work, but rather how to find and fulfill their purpose. Hope we're going to figure this one out and hope I'm going to help.
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