Why Don't Students Like School by D. Willingham

Someone recently referred me to a book that they thought I'd like. It's a 2009 book, aimed toward teachers of grades K through 12, titled Why Don't Students Like School? It's by a cognitive scientist named Daniel T. Willingham, and it has received rave reviews by countless people involved in the school system. Google the title and author and you'll find pages and pages of doting reviews and nobody pointing out that the book totally and utterly fails to answer the question posed by its title.

Willingham's thesis is that students don't like school because their teachers don't have a full understanding of certain cognitive principles and therefore don't teach as well as they could. They don't present material in ways that appeal best to students' minds. Presumably, if teachers followed Willingham's advice and used the latest information cognitive science has to offer about how the mind works, students would love school.

Talk about avoiding the elephant in the room!

Ask any schoolchild why they don't like school and they'll tell you. "School is prison." They may not use those words, because they're too polite, or maybe they've already been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can't be prison. But decipher their words and the translation generally is, "School is prison."

Let me say that a few more times: School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison.

Willingham surely knows that school is prison. He can't help but know it; everyone knows it. But here he writes a whole book entitled "Why Don't Students Like School," and not once does he suggest that just possibly they don't like school because they like freedom, and in school they are not free.

I shouldn't be too harsh on Willingham. He's not the only one avoiding this particular elephant in the room. Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody says it. It's not polite to say it. We all tiptoe around this truth, that school is prison, because telling the truth makes us all seem so mean. How could all these nice people be sending their children to prison for a good share of the first 18 years of their lives? How could our democratic government, which is founded on principles of freedom and self-determination, make laws requiring children and adolescents to spend a good portion of their days in prison? It's unthinkable, and so we try hard to avoid thinking it. Or, if we think it, we at least don't say it. When we talk about what's wrong with schools we pretend not to see the elephant, and we talk instead about some of the dander that's gathered around the elephant's periphery.

But I think it is time that we say it out loud. School is prison.

If you think school is not prison, please explain the difference.

The only difference I can think of is that to get into prison you have to commit a crime, but they put you in school just because of your age. In other respects school and prison are the same. In both places you are stripped of your freedom and dignity. You are told exactly what you must do, and you are punished for failing to comply. Actually, in school you must spend more time doing exactly what you are told to do than is true in adult prisons, so in that sense school is worse than prison.

At some level of their consciousness, everyone who has ever been to school knows that it is prison. How could they not know? But people rationalize it by saying (not usually in these words) that children need this particular kind of prison and may even like it if the prison is run well. If children don't like school, according to this rationalization, it's not because school is prison, but is because the wardens are not kind enough, or amusing enough, or smart enough to keep the children's minds occupied appropriately.

But anyone who knows anything about children and who allows himself or herself to think honestly should be able to see through this rationalization. Children, like all human beings, crave freedom. They hate to have their freedom restricted. To a large extent they use their freedom precisely to educate themselves. They are biologically prepared to do that. That's what many of my previous posts have been about (for an overview, see my July 16, 2008, post). Children explore and play, freely, in ways designed to learn about the physical and social world in which they are developing. In school they are told they must stop following their interests and, instead, do just what the teacher is telling them they must do. That is why they don't like school.

As a society we could, perhaps, rationalize forcing children to go to school if we could prove that they need this particular kind of prison in order to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to become good citizens, to be happy in adulthood, and to get good jobs. Many people, perhaps most people, think this has been proven, because the educational establishment talks about it as if it has. But, in truth, it has not been proven at all.

In fact, for decades, families who have chosen to "unschool" their children, or to send them to the Sudbury Valley School (which is, essentially, an "unschool" school) have been proving the opposite (see, for example, my August 13, 2008, post). Children who are provided the tools for learning, including access to a wide range of other people from whom to learn, learn what they need to know--and much more--through their own self-directed play and exploration. There is no evidence at all that children who are sent to prison come out better than those who are provided the tools and allowed to use them freely. How, then, can we continue to rationalize sending children to prison?

I think the educational establishment deliberately avoids looking honestly at the experiences of unschoolers and Sudbury Valley because they are afraid of what they will find. If school as prison isn't necessary, then what becomes of this whole huge enterprise, which employs so many and is so fully embedded in the culture (see my posts on Why Schools Are What they Are)?

Willingham's book is in a long tradition of attempts to bring the "latest findings" of psychology to bear on issues of education. All of those efforts have avoided the elephant and focused instead on trying to clean up the dander. But as long as the elephant is there, the dander just keeps piling up.

In a future post I'll talk about some of the history of psychology's failed attempts to improve education. Every new generation of parents, and every new batch of fresh and eager teachers, hears or reads about some "new theory" or "new findings" from psychology that, at long last, will make schools more fun and improve learning. But none of it has worked. And none of it will until people face the truth: Children hate school because in school they are not free. Joyful learning requires freedom.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh

Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham

How can any educator resist a book with the title “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

The answer is quite simple, according to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham. We all would rather not think if we don’t have to. That’s why we have memory.

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it,” Henry Ford once observed. The mind is not designed for thinking, Willingham says in the first chapter of his book.

Once we learn how to do something (like cook spaghetti sauce), memory becomes the brain’s big crutch. It’s the primary way we “avoid thinking.” When we want to make spaghetti sauce, we prefer to do it the same way we learned how to do it rather than rethinking sauce ingredients and recipes every time we have spaghetti. Think how exhausting our lives would be if we didn’t have memory to do the heavy lifting in our lives, if for instance, we didn’t drive our cars automatically but had to think through each step every time we drove to work.

Consider how much better our brains are at the complex operations of seeing and at moving our bodies, Willingham says. Our brains do them instantaneously and effortlessly. Thinking, by contrast, is slow, painstaking and unreliable. Humans don’t think very often because our brains are designed for the avoidance of thought, Willingham writes.

Memory is residue of thought

Why don’t students remember more of what they’re learning? Willingham says teachers need to beware of preoccupying themselves too much with making subject matter relevant to students. If a teacher has students baking biscuits to learn about the Underground Railroad or working on a PowerPoint to learn about the Spanish Civil War, what students will remember is how to bake a biscuit and how to make a smoking PowerPoint. They will remember next to nothing about the Underground Railroad and the Spanish Civil War.

Memory is the residue of thought, Willingham says. So students will mostly remember what they spent a lot of time thinking about (e.g. baking biscuits and making the PowerPoint). “Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about,” Willingham writes. The goal of lessons and assignment should be for students to think about meaning.

One risk with an attention-grabbers in class is that students will remember the wrong thing. Willingham thinks teachers work too hard bridging class material to students’ interests. It may not be possible to bridge some topics such as trigonometry to students’ interests, he says. Trying to make these topics directly relevant to students is too much of a strain and might seem phony to students.

Stories structure learning

We remember what stirs emotions in us, which is why stories are so powerful in any learning situation, Willingham says. But stories have other characteristics that make them potent tools in learning. They have a predictable structure or familiar organizing principles. Stories are based on the 4 C’s: Causality, conflict, character, complications. With many foreshadowings and medium-difficulty inferences, stories continually force us to focus on meaning.

Story structure can be used in many lesson plans, Willingham writes. Organizing a lesson plan around conflict can be a real aid to learning, Willingham says. As complications arise and are resolved, this continually re-focuses students’ minds on the central meaning of the lesson.

The other widely accepted wisdom that Willingham tries to debunk is the idea of multiple learning styles. He is not disputing that students have different cognitive styles, but he says cognitive scientists have been unable to prove that students learn any better when instruction matches their style. So if Anne has an auditory learning style, there’s no evidence that she will learn more vocabulary words by listening to a tape rather than she would by watching a slide show.

Learning styles

It is content rather than learning styles that should drive use of different senses in instruction, Willingham says. “You might want students to experience material in one or another modality depending on what you want them to get out of the lesson; a diagram of Fort Knox should be seen,” he advises ” the national anthem of Turkmenistan should be heard, and the cheche turban (used by Saharan tribes to protect themselves against sun and wind) should be worn.”

While you may take exception to some of his sometimes contrarian and blunt statements, such as “some students are simply smarter than others,” his book is a good primer on the messy process of learning. He validates many traditional practices with the latest research in cognitive science. Memorization and use of mnemonic devices most certainly have a place in education, he says, and facts and knowledge are not tangential to learning, but are essential to learning.

Einstein was wrong when he said “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Willingham says, in another of his stunning statements. Facts are what help learners bridge the many logical gaps in texts. The more you know, Willingham says, the more you will learn.

Each chapter ends with practical implications for the classroom. When Willingham discusses how students (and adults for that matter) like problems that are challenging but solvable, he suggests that teachers who want to find that “sweet spot of difficulty” keep a journal or diary. Just a few notes on how a lesson plans fares in the classroom is enough to remind a teacher how to set the right level of difficulty.

“Why Don’t Students Like School?” provides useful insights into what it’s really like to sit on the other side of one of those desks in the classroom.

“Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham, Jossey-Bass, John Wiley & Sons, 2009.

http://www.ernweb.com/educational-research-articles/why-dont-students-like-schoolby-daniel-willingham/

Why don’t students like school… In 30 mins!

August 8, 2013 § 11 Comments

One of the challenges faced by all instructors is ensuring that students actually read the textbook. This summer we came up with a innovative assignment to address this issue. The book in question was Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom.

We called it the 3 x 3 x 3 project since their task was to create a video overview for each of the chapters in the book under the following guidelines: the video should be no more than 3 minutes long, it would provide 3 key ideas from the chapter and 3 practical implications of these ideas for educators and for teaching (hence 3 x 3 x 3!).

Beyond that we provided no constraints on the technology to be used, style to be followed. SInce we had 5 groups and the book has 9 chapters and a conclusion, each group got to create two of these short videos.

Here are the 10 videos the students created. In essence these 10 videos are a video summary of the book in 30 minutes! Enjoy.

Chapter 1: Why don’t students like school?