What if We Graded Students on Motivation Instead of Content-Mastery?

It’s back-to-school time for many of us, and as we buy planners and sign parental consent forms, it’s a good time to consider why we’re doing this, anyway.

Our local school refers to its curriculum as “units of mastery”, IB schools talk about “mastery-learning”, and standardized tests refer to “content-mastery” and “scholastic achievement”.

But what if all of these terms are putting an important-sounding name on a phenomenon that is really superficial and temporary?

How much can he absorb?

We’d like to think that by October, our seventh-grader has “mastered” four qualities of igneous and sedimentary rocks, our ninth grader has “mastered” the factoring of quadratic equations, our eleventh-grader has “mastered” six economic and political dynamics preceding the American Civil War. But where has this content gone, and how will it interact with other bits of knowledge, ways of thinking and solving problems in their future minds?

Admittedly, our children and their school experiences vary, and some of them will hold on to facts and rules for a surprisingly long time. (I can still sing the 50-states song, and chant the most common English prepositions in alphabetical order). But with the exception of songs, chants and Please-Excuse-My-Dear-Aunt-Sallies, many of which hang from a disjointed scholastic neuron in our aging minds, where does the rest of this content go?

If we can be honest with ourselves, it goes to the same cognitive rubbish heap as administrative process-rules from the job you held 12 years ago, phone numbers of earlier contacts, turn-by-turn directions to the grocery store in the town you lived in three towns before this one… And what would an adult say about any of those forms of knowledge? Well, actually, that you don’t need to know them, because an app knows them for you. You need to know how to get at them, how to find them when you need them, how to update or revise them when necessary.

But it’s uncomfortable to say that about teenagers. We feel viscerally that they should know how to find the roots of a parabola, say something about the Monroe Doctrine, name various kinds of wetlands, even as we ourselves could not, and most of us have never been asked to do so since high school. If you asked me right now, I would ask Siri.

Where does all the information go?

For our teens, who would love to hear me say that, we fear it’s letting them off the generational hook; it’s excusing them to return to Instagram and Buzzfeed. But the “content-mastery” approach is misguided for two reasons.

First, we are over-optimistic about our human capacity to meaningfully assimilate arbitrarily-assembled content and hold on to it over time. Admittedly, for every subject in our teens’ classes, from the water cycle to post-Civil War reconstruction to Hamlet to sexually-transmitted diseases, we find important lessons that ought to guide their future interaction with society, decision-making and perspective. In the same way, policymakers wish that adults would learn to wear seat-belts, get health insurance, eat vegetables and file a 1040 correctly. But we’ve learned a lot about the failures of massive-education in these contexts (for example, about improving adults’ financial literacy, energy efficiency, and health). In particular, the failures of classroom-style learning, excessive content, boredom, poor timing, disjointedness, and disconnection from practice, have been explored for years, but seemingly in a separate space from our attitudes about teen education. We wish for activated knowledge and informed decision-making, but our approach is like the Microsoft User Guide (notice how the iPad comes with no guide and just one button).

Second, the champions of content-mastery (many of whom hold tenured positions) poorly prepare students for the cognitive iron-man that is lifelong skills adaptation. Yuval Noah Harari’s October Atlantic article warns about the demands of an accelerating knowledge-assimilation cycle brought about by artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies: “Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times.” She predicts the emergence of a cognitive under-class: “By 2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills.”

So what are we missing? What’s the ingredient that makes things knowable? That bridges the gap between knowledge and action? That makes the best entry-level job candidate and the strongest mid-career transfer?

Motivation.

Would it matter if I had forgotten the particulars of the Dred Scott Case, if I was generally motivated to read news, listen to analysis, and talk about the world? Would I be so badly off if I had forgotten the formula for compound interest if I was generally motivated to search around and try to use an online calculator before signing a mortgage? There is an obvious advantage to knowing things, and don’t think I’m making a defense of ignorance and forgetfulness.

What if how she approaches learning is more
important than what she's learning?

Only a reality-check about the limits of our confused and tired minds. As when the office changes the e-procurement system for the the seventh time in two years, I humbly suggest that we are not designed for this kind of learning-by-firehose.

But we are designed to get motivated, and I really believe that it’s how we want to be most of the time. I am motivated to look good, to make people like me, to do things that I can be proud of. We are motivated when we feel that we are in control, when we create things ourselves, and when we’re recognized for the things that we create (Ariely explores this wonderfully in The Upside of Irrationality. Also, there’s a great literature about all the things a bad boss can do to de-motivate her staff, and it’s funny how much of it is built into the structure of classroom learning).

It doesn’t make sense to measure content-mastery across students, because the structure which it applies uniformly to everyone de-motivates the individual learner. It doesn’t matter what you want. You are not in control. Learn these things here. It’s also not terribly useful, because content-mastery, we have seen, is a dressed-up fallacy. Today’s “master” of polynomial long-division is tomorrow’s blank slate. Don’t get me wrong-- there is content, and it can be studied and learned. (Let’s measure that at the individual level.) With motivation and context, it can be remembered and applied.

But that’s the kicker. Motivation is what matters. We would do our teens a huge service to cultivate it and reward it. And if there’s something that will more reliably track to success, not just on next week’s test, but in the eleventh job in the fifth city with the nineteenth information system, it is our relentlessly human motivation.

Agency Makes Boys Manly, and that’s a toxic word

What is agency? Agency is having and exercising the power to do the things you want to do. It is more than the wrestling of a man’s rational and passionate selves. It is also what Hegel called his thymotic self, what Nietzsche called his demand for dignity, what Fukuyama described as his demand to be recognized and to assign value to things. Man has agency when he not only has the cognitive faculty of decision-making, but has a full chest. He decides what is moral, valuable, useful, and acts accordingly.

What is not agency? I recently asked my brother if he thinks his 13-year-old son has agency in learning, and he told me (rather defensively) that he most certainly has. There are electives at school,

and he has selected orchestra and Spanish. Will you wear the blue shirt or the red shirt? is not agency. Will we start with math or Bible? is not agency. These are pretending at agency in an environment of pre-determined opportunities and potential outcomes. And while stylized choices make a good practice for smaller children, a few years later, they insult the emerging man.

What turns a boy into a man? 

I ask this question anticipating the now-ubiquitous prickly response to these words. Man. Manly. Before Harvey Mansfield and a resurgent social movement had to reclaim manliness, I was trying my own experiments on our pre-teen sons. My husband was away for months at a time in Army training, becoming a Ranger, and then deploying to Iraq. I worked among international professionals who shot condescending remarks at the always-pregnant American mom whose husband believes in fighting terrorism. And I sensed that my boys were on the brink of something alien to me, something that would take several leaps of faith to find. 

She's a bad mother.

Nobody applauds the mother-bird when she throws her young out of the nest, especially if he tumbles and falls. We reserve the worst judgment for her. We’re ready to applaud when he soars splendidly upward, but we close our eyes to the awkward process that brings this about. So, too, with the minute-by-minute coordination of kids’ time; hundreds of permission slips; opt-outs for PG movies; zero-tolerance policies; and the de-risking of kids’ playgrounds. I looked around me at other Army children--pudgy, hypo-allergenic, addicted to video-games--and I wondered, who will fight the next war? (If you’re cringing at my honesty, Condoleezza Rice made the same observation).

So I tried a few things. I didn’t ask anybody’s permission, and to be honest, a lot of this was probably terrible parenting. In Cambodia in 2011, I put our then-11-year-old son up to swimming across the Mekong River in a charity competition with me and other athletes. I sent our boys on an unaccompanied trip to Mongolia to live with a family I'd only heard of through a friend. I left my oldest son in Bishkek for a month in a woman’s apartment whom I had just met to work as an intern for an American company when he was 15. And at 16, I sent him to Shanghai to study, and he got lost in the train station for 24 hours. As the mother-bird watching her chick fall (or not getting any response to calls for 24 hours), I can say this is a really terrifying process.

But I believe that what was kicking-in within my sons’ chests when they fought against the current, or navigated an airport, or found the way to Xinxiang, was an instinctive agency. I will make myself survive. I can figure this out. And I believe that this agency can only be unlocked when there are real choices and real risks.

Now I am guiding the first clusters of teenagers in BreakAway Learning, and we message each other almost constantly. There is a recurring theme. Which online course should I take first? Which biology book should I read? Which pages should I start with? How much should I read today? These are 17 and 19-year-olds. And while I’m glad to make preliminary searches on Udemy and Coursera, to provide the Scribd subscription so that they have access to an e-library, I want them to take charge. Decide which course is more interesting. Decide which tutorial is more helpful. If a book is poorly organized or not captivating, put it down. Overcoming a deeply-ingrained view of education as an externally-applied process to which one passively conforms is turning out to be a very difficult transition for many of our teens. They are trained to believe in an intelligent machinery that has planned their education and linked it to a future pathway, that the utility of content and the promise of later reward are certain. What is required of them, they have been told, is to FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS.

The great betrayal: We have no further plan for you

School administrators and the education industry work up to a climax that precedes the fall from the

Tell me what I should do after the clapping, mom.

nest, and therefore, absolve themselves of any guilt when the chick flutters hopelessly down. The boy is reminded to sit still, to keep his hands to himself, to follow directions, to perform when asked to perform. He achieves stylized successes in de-risked scenarios where only a handful of outcomes were possible from the start. If he’s a good boy, he gets into college. In college he takes more classes, including on many campuses required core courses that strive to remold his errant worldviews toward a more ‘socially conscious’ reality that at the same time admits little room for disagreement, cannot be opted-out, and tends to view his emerging manliness with suspicion or downright scorn. The hallmark event is graduation.

But what comes next? Here is the great betrayal. Noone within this self-enclosed system has any relationship to the real world. No one knows what this empty-chested man will do with himself when he is 24, 27, 32. Will he start a small business? Enlist in the armed forces? Marry the girl whom he got pregnant? In other words, will he MAN UP?

How can we expect it, when the words themselves are toxic?