CRISIS OF FAITH #5969

What am I even doing with my life.

I don't believe in Education to 18.
I believe in Education Forever, School to 14. Or maybe School to Whenever. Or School Never, Just Parasailing, if that's your thing.

We know teenagers have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes; it's why they come up with amazing ideas but can't predict the consequences of riding a skateboard off the roof. They lack impulse control; it's why we lock them up during the day under the guise of teaching them stuff.

I was thinking about geometry. Angles seem useful; I am in favour of children learning what a degree is and how to measure angles using a protractor. But we also teach kids a bunch of words like "acute" and "obtuse" and "reflex", which are words whose meanings they have to memorize. But why? Why is it important for a child to know that an angle less than 90 degrees is considered acute? I would argue that it is not.

I was also thinking about kidneys. In the Ontario curriculum, we spend a long time teaching students about the kidney, in a lot of detail. The names of all the pieces of the kidney, the impermeable regions of the loop of Henle, when the solutes move in and out. I don't know why we do this. When I teach the kidney, I relearn it all the night before because the little details always escape me. Fortunately, I have about 12304839 resources at my disposal, most of them digital, that are happy to instruct me in the minutiae of the kidney. I like kidneys; I think they're neat, I think they're elegant, I think it's weird that they are connected to blood pressure and red blood cell manufacturing and hormone release. I think it's important for doctors and nurses and diabetes educators and pharmacists to know how kidneys work. I don't understand why I have to make sure every seventeen-year-old can tell me how a kidney works before he or she leaves high school. Even those who will use that information later are going to relearn it. It's easier every time, sure. But is it worth precious class hours, drawing the nephron over and over, making students memorize words devoid of inherent meaning - glomerulus, Bowman's capsule, efferent arteriole - because 10% are going to need the information again later?

So the question is, what do we need to teach our students? I don't know. Reading. Fractions. How to amortize a mortgage. What it means when the car makes that weird ka-clunk-a-clunk noise. Why tontines are a pretty solid insurance idea on the surface but actually a good way to encourage murder. When do I get to just show Family Guy in class and then have my students figure out what all the literary allusions are? When do I get to smack phones out of kids' hands and tell them to stop texting in class because that is fucking rude, dammit? Not because I am your teacher but because we are all humans in this room, and when we talk, we look each other in the face and give each other the undivided attention and respect we deserve? When does my student come to me and say they want to do a marketing project where they use physics to analyse the claim that Company X's snowboards are better than Company Y's? When do I tell my students that we're making a garden and they can grow whatever they want as long as it's not something that the police would disapprove of? When do they get to build decoding bombes and we play WWII-at-Bletchley-Park? Never, because I am supposed to teach children to be quiet and open their textbooks.