Humanizing Education
During the spring semester of my sophomore year, I decided to take a class about the psychology of gender and race. In this class, we explored the process by which people choose to identify with a specific gender and race and how it shapes the way they dress, behave, choose a career and so on. In addition to case-studies and readings, we had class discussions where students shared their experience. Some Asian and Asian-American students shared how being told that “Asians and Asian-Americans are good at math” made them more interested in the subject and pushed them to work harder in order to meet those expectations.
Things got more insightful when we started looking at this stereotype and noticed that reality was much more nuanced. While Chinese, Japanese and Koreans benefited from this perception, it was less the case for Cambodians and Filipinos. What’s more interesting is that the well documented socio-economic successes of Asian-Americans are understood differently by Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans. While popular American culture tends to explain and understand achievements as a consequence of “natural talent”, Chinese, Japanese and South Korean cultures encourage people to achieve by focusing more on discipline and hard work instead of relying on their “natural talent”.
Another interesting experiment we did during the psychology class was the following: Try to close your eyes and imagine an American. What do you see? Chances are, the character you imagined is a white male.
Our perception of others and ourselves is shaped by our media exposure and ideas circulating in society rather than a direct consequence of our day-to-day experience. If the popular perception of an American is a white male, people would probably imagine the American president to be a white male. As a female latino, these implicit biases may subconsciously limit your political ambitions regardless of your abilities and the ideas you have for society. Beyond exploring the consequences of how popular culture impacts our daily lives, I started to wonder “Why am I only learning about this now?” Given the importance that our biases and preconceived ideas have on our decisions, I was surprised that such an important topic was left to a college elective. People knowing more about each other, how their beliefs form and what shapes the way they act can promote a more understanding and collaborative society.
As the eventful 2015 year has shown us, we still have some challenges to address together: racism is still a burning issue in 21st century America, politicians can still bring division amongst us and exploit our fears, and the technology sector could benefit from a greater workforce diversity. There is hope because thanks to collaboration, we are able to set up an agenda to fight climate change and condemn violence and bigotry. The more effective we get at collaborating and thinking about the problems surrounding us, the more issues we can solve together.
A visible problem can be the manifestation of a bigger, more underlying weakness in our society. If we think that having more women and minorities in Computer Science boils down to having more coding bootcamps, we forget that the cartoons children watch, the toys they play with, and the overall tech ecosystem play a role in the representation of women and minorities in STEM fields.
In that line of thinking, I suggest that in addition to directly solving the visible problems, we also look beyond what’s observable and think about some other areas where interventions may lead to solving many challenges at once. I suggest that if we rethink what and how the current school system teaches its students, we may solve bigger problems down the line.
From my personal experience and conversation with friends, the current public K-12 school systems in America and France are great at making us learn the products of human thinking and actions: formulas, diagrams, techniques and historical facts. We can enrich this perspective by learning to go beyond the products and also look at the process through which this knowledge was derived. If we are able to transform art, history, and science classes into not only an investigation of formulas, dates, and facts but a lens by which we can study human nature, we’ll educate people to not only see E = mc^2 as a formula describing our physical world but also a manifestation of human curiosity and hard work over a long period of time.
Adding this new perspective to education is not only an intellectual exercise. There is recent psychological research suggesting new ways we can make education more relevant at building our character and preparing us to address the main challenges of our time. Angela-Lee Duckworth and Carol Dweck’s research have shown that grit and a growth mindset are far better predictors of success than “talent” is.
This means that if education spends more time cultivating and rewarding these traits in students by teaching them how they manifest in the various actions humans have taken throughout their history, we can have tremendous payoffs down the line. Eric Lander recently stated something along these lines. In his introductory remarks of the controversial “The Heroes of CRISPR”, he informs us that “the human stories behind scientific advances can teach us a lot about the miraculous ecosystem that drives biomedical progress — about the roles of serendipity and planning, of pure curiosity and practical application, of hypothesis-free and hypothesis-driven science, of individuals and teams, and of fresh perspectives and deep expertise. Such understanding is important for government agencies and foundations that together invest, in the U.S. alone, more than $40 billion in biomedical research. It is also important for a general public who often imagines scientists as lone geniuses cloistered in laboratories. And, for trainees, it is especially valuable to have a realistic picture of scientific careers, as both guide and inspiration.”
We should not present vaccines as just an invasion of our body by weakened antigens but we should also spend some time studying how they were discovered, the sacrifices and hard work scientists such as Pasteur had to do to bring them to us. According to his biography, Pasteur was “an average student with a passion for drawing and painting” who “studied hard”. Being average didn’t prevent him from running experiments and dedicating 47 years of his life to research. This curiosity led him to sometimes be challenged by his contemporaries who didn’t believe some of his results. La Presse, a french newspaper expressed concerns about his ideas of bacteria and germs being the cause of fermentation and other diseases: “I am afraid that the experiments you quote, M. Pasteur, will turn against you. The world into which you wish to take us is really too fantastic.”
By spending a little time studying the context in which some theories were developed and the personal struggles innovators had to go through we will teach lessons any student can relate to and convey more than technical material.
These principles extend beyond science, and schooling can also help us gain more insight into the processes by which books are written, how authors found the inspiration and discipline to imagine new worlds or criticize the societies of their time and more generally how the societies and objects surrounding us came to be.
In addition to giving us a better understanding of the complex world surrounding us, such a format of learning would increase the role of teachers as caring mentors who can emotionally connect with students, know and inspire them through their personal stories and life experience instead of lecturing content which can be found online. The Internet, with its vast encyclopedia and online courses, democratizes access to facts and new psychological research helps us understand what makes us happy, successful and engaged at work and at school.
It is increasingly important that education gets reshaped to deemphasize temporary retention of facts available online and focus on cultivating traits that will make students confident and successful in their endeavors. We should focus on guiding them through the discovery of the role they want to play in society and how they can bring change effectively by tapping their potential and establishing successful collaborations with their peers.
After 15 years of schooling, I know a little about the physical world and facts which happened throughout human history. However, I rely on my intuition, informal readings and a painful trial and error process to adopt the best teamwork practices, motivate people to achieve a specific goal and present my work in an interesting way. Many people are in the same boat.
Besides the lack of product-market fit, one of the most common reasons why 90% of startups fail is because of interpersonal issues and disagreements between co-founders. Similarly, a Nature article published in 2015 reminds us that “being a professor is a human-centred activity” involving “working with people”, “mentoring and teaching students” and “persuading people in funding agencies to give us money”. The article goes on and remind us that “at most universities, junior faculty members must learn leadership skills on the job by trial and error, to the detriment of their students and careers”. We are all learning these vital lessons the hard way and this lack of preparation to operate with people is a preventable cause of failure in our collective attempt to make the breakthroughs required to help us understand our past, assemble the present, and invent the future.
One last motivation for such a reform is that given the rate of technological progress, predicting the future is hard and many of the facts taught at school may become irrelevant. Therefore if we want our school to stay relevant in an age of rapid technological progress, grit, growth mindset and knowledge about how to work with people are imperative skills to also give to students because they are likely to need them in their endeavors throughout their lives.
With online encyclopedia, MOOCS, and tutorials we have the ability to learn new technical skills, know more theories, and hone our problem-solving on our own. Why not spend our time in the classroom benefiting from each other’s perspectives by collectively reflecting, building our dreams and working on group and individual projects? The sooner we bring this humane touch to public education, the better.
