Breathing In and Breathing Out

The Bait-and-Switch

Education can be transformative, or it can be transactional. In theory, it can be both. In practice, not so much.

What does it mean that education can be transformative? It means that learning can change you—change the wiring in your brain; change the rhythms of your mind. Just as a rigorous regimen of exercise, committed to over a period of time, will change the shape and capabilities of your body, so will a rigorous regimen of learning, committed to over a period of time, change the shape and capabilities of your mind. You will have thoughts and ideas you could never have entertained before. You will be able to do things—real things in the world—that you were never able to do before.

The value of going to law school isn’t that you come out with a bunch of legal facts at your disposal; it’s that you have trained your brain to think uniquely and differently—to think like a lawyer. When I started working on my doctoral dissertation in education, one of my advisors told me that the process was as important as the final product. The process was going to train me to pursue a line of inquiry and chase it to a conclusion in a radically different way than I had ever done before—the result of which, he said, was that the university would change my name (by calling me “Doctor”).

What does it mean that education can be transactional? It means that if you comply with the rules, you can pass a course. If you pass enough courses, you can get a diploma. If you get a diploma, you can have access to higher-level schools and then jobs. You give; you get. You may end up with some new information in your noodle if you can hold onto it long enough. That can be part of the bargain, part of the ticket price. But the you at the end will still be the more or less the same you who walked in the door at the beginning.

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We do a lot of Big Talk in this country about the transformative power and potential of education. It’s why equity has become such a hot topic in our discourse: we want every child to have the access and resources and opportunities they need to make something wonderful—and new—of their lives. Education is the beating heart at the core of the idea of social mobility that we still hold onto, even as actual mobility has calcified over the years.

If what we promise to be transformational turns out to be merely transactional, we’ve committed a bit of a bait-and-switch on our young people. They gather up the necessary ingredients for a magic spell and take those ingredients to the wizard. Words are said; there’s a bang and a flash. But when the smoke clears, the frog is still a frog. They thought they were paying to become a prince, but in fact, they were just paying for the flash.

Was it always a lie? I don’t think so. Alexander Hamilton’s education was transformative. Anyone who’s seen the play—especially this song—knows that. Abraham Lincoln’s education used to be a story every schoolkid read about. Frederick Douglass committed a literal crime by learning how to read—that’s how important and dangerous slaveholders understood education to be. There are countless stories. I met an old man at a conference once who told me that because of the faith of a single teacher, he persevered against all odds and became the first person in his immediate family to become literate, the first person in his extended family to go to college, and the only person in the family’s history to leave their home state. Now he had grown children who were engineers and lawyers with children of their own. His education hadn’t just transformed his life; it had changed the trajectory of his entire family.

So what happened? I blame accountability.

Not the concept itself. I’m a fan of accountability when it’s authentic, and mutual, and healthy. But accountability as an official movement, tied to high-stakes tests in math and reading at every grade level—the one that started in the early 2000s—I think that has done a tremendous amount of unintentional and unanticipated damage.

The idea was to hold schools accountable to rigorous and broad learning standards, but the tests were how standards were measured, and the gap between a standard and how it was assessed could be profound. It created some cognitive dissonance. Which target was the serious one? Which target mattered? It turned out that the test scores, tied as they were to punitive actions from the state, mattered a great deal more than the actual learning. Thus, a new transaction was born: get scores over a certain threshold and you’ll be left alone.

We all saw math and reading instruction narrow into test-prep sessions focusing on test-taking strategies. Working in education publishing, I saw school leaders reject high-quality programs if they offered material that varied even a little bit from the Big Test in look and feel. Nothing was worth doing if it wasn’t aimed directly at test performance. Teachers didn’t like it, of course. Principals and superintendents didn’t like it. But in the end, the test ruled. If writing wasn’t tested in your state, writing instruction withered. If history wasn’t tested, history got shoved aside, especially in elementary classrooms. If reading novels didn’t lead directly to test success, reading novels became a luxury.

Transactional in the extreme.

The hangover we’re all living in now, after more than 20 years of this stuff, casts a pall over everything. Reading is not about the joy of words or imagery; it’s not about engaging with another mind and seeing another way to understand the world. It’s just about downloading information—the faster, the better. Efficiency is the key. Which is fine in some contexts. Sometimes all you really need is to distill some basic facts from a text. But if every act of reading is undertaken solely to answer some multiple choice questions, why not just feed the whole text into ChatGPT and let it give you a bullet-point summary? Cut to the chase.

I had friends in school who never understood the point of reading a novel when you could simply skim through the Cliff’s Notes to find out what happened in each chapter. As though “what happens next” is the only question worth asking about a narrative. And they had a point, I guess…if it is the only question worth asking.

Likewise, writing in school, after the elementary grades, is rarely about finding and cultivating your voice, or pursuing and exploring an idea (of your own or of someone else’s) to its conclusion, or learning how to share your thoughts with another human being. It’s about getting to the point, quickly and cleanly. Delivering information as generically as possible. That’s how you’ll need to write on a job somewhere, so that’s what writing is for. So, again, if that becomes the only point of committing words to paper or screen, why not just make a list of bullet points and let AI do the writing for you? Better yet, why stick yourself in the middle at all? Just let AI do the reading and the writing.

If school is purely transactional—you do what’s required to pass the course—then why not do the minimum required? Why not use all the tools available to you, as I wrote here? You’d be crazy not to.

If there’s no value in doing the work, only in getting the result, then school and education are very different things from what I grew up with—very different endeavors from what I thought I was committing my life to. And when something with moral value becomes a simple transaction, it can do real damage to a community, as Daniel Pink shows us:

School can be a place where we build knowledge, wrestle with ideas, and develop skill competence in order to become wise and capable human beings. School can be a place where we sit still, speak only when called on, and jump through a variety of hoops that placate authorities who have control over our lives. It’s kind of hard for it to be both. And what is required in order to thrive and succeed in each of those systems is very different.

Transformative Reading and Writing

Reading is like breathing in, and writing is like breathing out.

— Pam Allyn

I want to challenge us (and myself) to remember what reading and writing are really for—what they mean beyond their basic, transactional, informational purposes. It’s not super-complicated. I think Pam Allyn nails it.

Reading is like breathing in. It’s a way of taking the world—or somebody’s vision of the world—deep into our lungs. The ideas we take in are not finished products that simply pass through us. It’s not a passive process. “You read and you’re pierced,” as Aldous Huxley says. The words and phrases invade us in pieces and have to assemble themselves into ideas in our minds. Like the air that we take into our lungs, they go deep inside and spread out, touching many parts of us in order to bring nourishment. We breathe in the same words millions of times, but they’re assembled into phrases and thoughts in different ways, used differently by different people. Each word, each phrase, takes on new shades of meaning in our minds every time we breathe in a new use of it. Even the same phrases—the same stories—can mean new things when we breathe them in again, years later. Other people’s words fill us nearly to bursting. And then we exhale.

Writing is like breathing out. All things that come into us transform and come out in a different form (I know, I know—resist the urge to be disgusting). I’ve known young writers who didn’t want to read because they were afraid of being influenced. But that’s absurd; everything influences us. Everything touches us. No one gets through life unscarred, untouched. The world pierces you and flows through you, but the unique you-ness of you, whatever that is, becomes a filter or a prism, and when you create—write, paint, sculpt, sing, whatever—when you exhale, you cannot help but transform those materials. They leave your mind and body with indelible traces of you on them.

As a teacher, I want to know what you think. But more, I want to know how you think—how the world has left its traces on you, and how you have interpreted and touched that world in return. I want to read students. I want to breathe in their words.

Do we take time to teach children how to write multiple sentences about a single idea—sentences that are beautiful, and then angry, and then funny, and then weird—to show them how flexible a tool a sentence can be? Do we take the time to have all the children write the same story, with the same plot and the same characters, so that they can discover how radically not the same the resulting stories turn out? Do we help them learn how powerful that exhalation can become if they understand their own breath?

Or do we simply tell them that a simile is a something that uses like or as, and that a paragraph is a something that has five sentences, and call it a day? What is the scoring rubric that matters here?

No one expects every 18-year-old to know exactly who they are and what they should be about in life. But our job is to give them the tools they need to engage in that exploration—to search out the wisdom they need, to know how to distinguish wisdom from nonsense, and to share their thoughts and feelings—and, yes, even a summary of information on a TPS report—with other people. It’s our job to give them the tools they need to help them become themselves—the greatest possible version of themselves, as this old, rabbinic story tells us:

I don’t know what I’ll say when the time comes. But I know that “Choice C” will not be the right answer.

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