Some Thoughts on Education

Stories and Principles

My day job is in education. I am a professor at a regional university in Texas. I have taught at UNLV¹, at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, and now here at SFA. There are lots of great things about being a professor, but I am also on the front lines of seeing problems that exist in higher education. Sometimes I get frustrated by students and their attitudes and limitations. However, I am learning how to think about those problems in terms of positive principles that I can share and teach rather than simply being a “nattering nabob of negativism” and running down a list of complaints.

I have the following screensaver on my computer and my personal website to remind me of what education should be - it helps temper the little frustrations that can creep into the daily grind.

Some Lessons from my Own Schooling

School was something that I was always “good at.” I was a bright kid and I liked to please. I was also lucky to have wonderful teachers in my younger years who appreciated that I was learning to control myself. I was a hand-raiser.² I was also a joker, but I didn’t usually go too far in class.

I had elementary school teachers who encouraged me to spend my free time reading. It was a quiet activity that didn’t bother other students. I learned how to read in chunks and to have the discipline to put down my books when the teacher was teaching, but to be quiet and absorbed when my work was done. I was probably accurately thought of as a nerd for much of my childhood.

However, I had brothers and parents and friends and others who encouraged me to learn and develop in areas where I wasn’t comfortable. One of these areas was in scouting (something I’ve discussed in another post)³. I also learned to be competitive in a number of sports and games as a kid.

In high school, the social part of life was an education that I needed extra time and effort to develop.⁴ I began to be challenged academically by teachers who saw I had potential and who invited me to work harder and take AP and other classes that were a real challenge. Courses like AP chemistry and Calculus were really hard. I spent more time studying for AP chemistry than I probably did for every other class I had ever take in my entire school career up to that point. It was a great experience. I got an education in learning - even though I was not a super successful chemist.

Don’t let school get in the way of your education.

Learning from my Grandpa

I lived with my grandparents both before and after my mission to Ukraine while I went to Utah State University. My grandpa was a world-renowned irrigation engineer. He was recruited to be a professor and joined the faculty at Utah State as a full professor after he had spent more than twenty years as a researcher for the USDA.

Even though he was a busy professor, Grandpa always grew a garden. He mowed his own lawn. He had lots of hobbies that were creative. When I was a kid it was wood carving. Later he learned how to polish gemstones. He got so good that the local jewelry store would bring him their tough cases to repair or replace vintage stones. Grandpa served in the church his whole life. He went once a week to visit his friend at the local care center and to cut his toe nails.

Grandpa was well-rounded. He was educated, interested in people, and interested in learning and understanding the world right up to the day he died. He loved teaching because he loved what he did. He boiled his work down to two main principles: water runs downhill and you need someplace to put it. He told me that many of his students, PhD students from all over the world, would make really fancy designs and solutions to problems that often ignored one or both of these core principles.

He would often quote the line in the pull quote above as I was walking out the door. He reminded me of the importance of not getting too focused on the training or the classes at the university and to look for opportunities to learn everywhere. He was always inviting me to attend lectures, presentations, and cultural events with him on campus.

Principle - School is not education

Education can take place in school, but the two things are not always equal. Schooling covers many functions in the state. It is a place to keep kids during the day. It is a place to ensure the nutrition of the population. It is a place to inculcate students with values (indoctrination). It is a place to provide sports and other extra-curricular activities that are important to a community.⁵

Schools are also a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies operate under incentives that may or may not be aligned with their original or stated purpose. The bureaucracy around testing what students know can (and has) taken on a life of its own. If teachers are paid, or otherwise rewarded, by what students know, and what students know is the function of a standardized test, then it makes sense that teachers will “teach to the test.” Students, knowing that their learning doesn’t matter, are rational in thinking that the role of school is to do only what the teacher asks.

This is further incentivized by the fact that student learning and success are further measured using a grade point average. If the game is grades, then gaming the system for grades is really rational. But it doesn’t always correlate with learning.

Education is a balance, and school was part of that - but not the only, and maybe not the most important part.

One of the principles that we learn in church that is important to me, and which I appreciate more and more, is the injunction that we have to be life-long learners. We are taught that:

18 Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection.

19 And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come. (D&C 130:18-19)

We are also taught that our learning is not confined to the things of heaven. Ours is an injunction to learn of practical things so that we can teach them:

78 Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine, in the law of the gospel, in all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God, that are expedient for you to understand;

79 Of things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land; and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms—

80 That ye may be prepared in all things when I shall send you again to magnify the calling whereunto I have called you, and the mission with which I have commissioned you. (D&C 88:78-80)

I am grateful that my parents and grandparents taught me the importance of learning and education. I have had success in school, but mostly because I was taught the principle that education was important. When I teach, I do my best to remember that the school parts are important, but that they are not the most important thing - they are a means to an end.

1. A one year visiting position right after I completed my PhD.

2. If I’m being honest, I probably still am.

3. High and Impossible Standards

4. The Man in the Arena

5. I love the book by Bruce D. Porter called “War and the Rise of the State” that discusses, in part, how many of the social services in states are a result of wanting to prepare the population to fill the ranks of the military in times of war.