Socratic Arts' Newsletter

A Monthly Newsletter by Roger Schank

Home Schooling and Corporate Training

I have never been a big fan of home schooling. I am not against it – I am just not much for it. This seems odd to the home schooling set. I am seriously anti-school so when home school parents read what I write they appreciate it and then wonder why I didn’t say something nice about home school as an alternative to school.

Yes, I know. This is supposed to be a column about corporate training issues. It is. Stay with me.

Home school parents believe that school is an unpleasant place for a child to hang out. They believe this because they don’t like how their children are treated by the teachers, by the other kids, and by the system in general. For the most part they are justified in their concerns. School can be quite an unpleasant experience for many children. Even those who enjoy school, and they are in the minority I think, tend to enjoy it because they have learned to play the game and win. They have learned how to please teachers, how to get good grades, and how to get the other kids to see them as admirable in some way. Enjoying school tends to be associated with winning. The winners usually like school. (Although I did once hear a valedictory address at Columbia University where the valedictorian said she hated what she had to do to win and would never do anything like that again – but that’s another story.)

Home school parents are not into all this and rightly so. But their solution is funny because they have misidentified the root of the problem. School is the way it is not because teachers are mean, or other kids are annoying. School is so bad because the curriculum is mind-numbing. Of course you have to compete about grades. There is no other way of knowing you did well. Algebra, the Smoot-Hawley tariff and the Ancient Mariner do not come up in real life. They only come up on tests. So test scores have to be the currency of a world in which what is taught simply doesn’t matter in any other way.

You would expect that home school parents would reject the school curriculum and teach things that interest their kids and are exciting to learn – things that will be of use in their lives. Instead we find home school kids winning national spelling bees. What a waste of time. They ought to be playing a different game, not trying to win the game they have rejected. Home school parents need to ask hard questions about what is worth learning. They simply cannot accept that what is taught in school is what ought to be taught. The current school curriculum was designed in 1892 for a whole different set of people and purposes and is completely irrelevant for today.

Which brings me to corporate training.

The fix for education starts with asking some hard questions:

What is worth learning?

This is a terrible question because inevitably someone says that algebra is good for the mind and literature is good for the soul and by the way isn’t Latin the root of English? In a jiffy you have the same old curriculum again.

Curriculum redesign, which needs to be at the heart of any effort to reform the schools as well any effort to think about corporate training, starts with a different question:

What is it that people are having trouble doing?

No one is having trouble (in real life) doing algebra or literary analysis because no one does that outside of school.

Similarly, orientation and policy courses or courses in how to use software packages or new managers schools are all based on the school-based notion that what is known ought to be taught. The real question is what is screwed up in these areas? Are people having trouble become oriented? What are they failing at? How do we make sure that they don’t fail at it? One can be sure that telling them not to fail or the correct way to succeed will have no effect at all.

Identifying what the real problems are, what people don’t do well at and why that failure is causing trouble, is the beginning and end of all curriculum design, for employees or for kids.

Corporate curricula are usually archaic and useless for the same reason that school curricula are that way. It has been a long time since people took a long hard look at them and asked some hard questions. If you don’t do this in your company you will be holding corporate spelling bees soon enough.