The U.S. education system owns some responsibility for why we have the current president. I’ve heard a lot of people say something like that, but they mean something different than I do. They typically mean that voters needed more education on civics, the Constitution, learning to spot lies, or some other missing skills or knowledge. All those may be true, but that’s not what I mean when I ascribe this blame. In my experience, it’s the system itself that bears some fault – what its goals are and how it operates daily. I internally debated whether to write and post this essay because of the serious, current attacks on education. I wondered if this is the time to add a critique to my profession. However, my concerns subsided when I realized that this is exactly the time to offer this critique – at the time when we should be questioning our role and past efforts so that we can strengthen this work against the barrage of attacks.
Understanding what I intend means understanding the difference between explicit learning versus internalized learning. Explicit learning is what we expect learners to know as a result of any learning experience. We may want learners to understand how to multiply fractions, to write a paragraph, or to know about the causes of the Revolutionary War. Those are explicit intentions. In contrast, internalized learning is what happens as a result of learners experiencing the lesson. They may come to internalize, for example, that multiplying fractions is too hard for them to do, or that organizing a paragraph into a logical order is enjoyable, or that history like the Revolutionary War is uninteresting. Internalized learning defines the relationship that the learner has to the subject. If you’ve heard someone say, “I didn’t like math and wasn’t any good at it,” or, “History just wasn’t my thing in school,” you’ve heard them express the lessons they internalized.
Explicit and internalized. Both exist every time learning is supposed to happen. But educators and systems tend to focus only on explicit learning objectives with not as much care for the internalized. That’s a mistake since the internalized relationship that learners develop to a subject greatly influences how they’ll really learn that subject. People who connect positively to a topic will learn. People who don’t make that connection won’t. A teacher can force learners to memorize information, but that teacher can’t force people to learn it. There’s a difference. Just ask any adult what information they remember from a school subject they didn’t enjoy. While most adults passed the courses they disliked during their education, they retain little to nothing from the experience.
It's like the last day of a course I recall from my undergraduate days. As we left the last session, a fellow student and I walked out of the classroom and the building. When we crossed into daylight, my classmate took the course book from under his arm and threw it with force into nearby bushes where he left it. He exclaimed that he was done. His act embodied what people do with the subjects where they make no connections. It is a sad truth that much of formal education alienates students. By the time children enter early elementary grades, education is less about inquisitiveness and exploration than it is about regimented bits of information that only engage some learners.
Unfortunately, that leads to an internalized learning for many people that schooling, and by extension formal learning, isn’t for them. I hear this expressed all the time when people tell me something like, “I wasn’t good at school.” Or, “My sister was the smart one.” We use those experiences to internalize who is “smart” and who isn’t. That internalization establishes our self-belief in how far we can go in the education system. It’s also a system that favors some kinds of learning over others as people who succeed in the model of education benefit from it. Education is not, despite all our claims, a meritocracy where the best succeed. It’s a system that values and rewards certain kinds of thinking and certain ways of exhibiting knowledge. It’s a system that intentionally culls the student population into learners and non-learners because of how it favors and rewards people who can succeed at it.
Here's the problem: By creating systems of who’s “smart” and who’s not, we start segregating ourselves by those categories. We socialize by those categories; we engage in activities by those categories; we set expectations for our offspring by those categories; we live our lives by those categories. People who complete college tend to come from certain ZIP Codes. Children of professionals become professionals and move to those ZIP Codes. Children of trades workers become trades workers. Yes, there are exceptions, but those are despite the system. The U.S. educational system helps support a social stratification that we claim doesn’t exist – a separation that gets broadened as the education system favors some over others. These internalized lessons of education help determine our life paths. We become insulated from others who aren’t on similar paths. In that insulation, we can start to distrust people who aren’t like us. So people who succeed in the education system can come to distrust those who don’t, and people who don’t attend college can come to distrust those who do. It’s an outcome of isolation and a system that favors some over others.
My descriptions come from my personal experiences in the education system. These observations began when I was an elementary and high school student who experienced a system that didn’t think like I did – a system where educators told me I was “smart” but not very capable because I was unfocused and lazy. I was fortunate that I never internalized that lesson (see the explanation for HERE, on pages 65-82). My observations continued through an undergraduate degree and two graduate degrees where I learned to succeed in the system. But I saw others fail when they couldn’t – and I saw that most people never got the chance to try.
My experiences as a secondary English teacher affirmed my observations as I saw many students discarded by a system that neither understood them nor cared to understand them. I taught in systems that celebrated the twenty percent who went on to four-year colleges while condescendingly smiling at the remainder and showing them the exit. What I saw continued when I became a community college teacher and asked students to tell me of their prior experiences in education and received overwhelmingly negative responses. Finally, as I became a researcher, professor, and consultant to educational institutions, I saw how deeply committed that the education system is at maintaining the status quo that favors some over others. My observations don’t arise from ideology. They come from intimately witnessing.
No wonder 77 million people didn’t trust the “elites.” Folks with education, the people who succeeded at the education system, got a lot of advantage that others didn’t. Republicans discovered how to exploit that gap a long time ago. They’ve been stoking the mistrust that came from that gap since Richard Nixon’s appeal to “hard hat” and “silent majority” voters in the 1972 election. Nixon, raised as a Quaker and trained as a lawyer who’d graduated from Whittier College and Duke Law, was by every definition an elite. However, he learned to exploit workers’ misgivings about educated people. Reagan built on that in 1980 by appealing to blue-collar workers and the Moral Majority that televangelist Jerry Falwell organized in the previous year. The right-wing fundamentalist groups of the era were also stoked by a deep-seated distrust of people they identified as elites – enough so that they rejected one of their own, a Sunday-school-teaching, pious Baptist, in favor of a B-grade actor who could spin a folksy tale about the glory times of the past. The most recent federal election refined that appeal through targeted social media, a sealed right-wing media ecology that ignored or lied about troublesome truths, and a cult base of voters that believe anything their leader says.
It's a split in the nation that got incubated in the classroom. Childhood experiences in the education system gave a lot of adults a reason not to trust anything that’s a product of it. The split was inevitable when so many people have so many bad experiences in school. Denied opportunity in any form creates a reaction. Langston Hughes warned us what would happen with a dream that’s always out of reach. It may take a while, but the reaction to exclusion eventually explodes. And if someone is devious enough to see the pressure building and take advantage of that reaction, it can be used by any conniving demagogue astute enough to use rhetorical trickery. In the current nation, a lifelong con man who spent his life wrangling power and money from others knew exactly what levers to pull. It’s why he exploits every facet of mistrust, whether it’s vaccines, elections, or diversity work. If he can effectively label something as coming from “the elites,” he can harness people’s support against it. The people and systems labeled as elites are the straw man to which all evils are ascribed.
If my observations are right, then the nation has a deep problem that a new president, elected legislators, or the courts can’t fix. The disaffection with education has created a group of people who are resentful of everything that education means. That group is large. And it has grown to contain not only people who don’t go to college, but people who attended college and found the processes dissatisfying.
The solution involves words that have become anathema to the right wing: equity and inclusion. An education experience that puts learners’ success at the foreground, that ensures that every learner has a fair chance of success, and that supports every learner’s needs creates a different internalized lesson for learners. At the core of our society, we all share the common experience of schooling; yet some of us leave it with an internalized message that has us distrustful of it and anything it produces. That’s not a political statement. It’s a statement of need. The nation needs an education system that includes every learner and provides every learner equitable support to succeed. Right now, we’re a long way from that.
