On progressive vs. rigorous education
Growing up in Vancouver as a second generation Canadian, the dinner table conversation often revolved around education; more specifically, my parents complaining about it. They attended K-12 in Israel in the 1950s and 60s and, to hear them tell it at least, it was a superior educational system. “What is all this newfangled business about choosing your passion and choosing your own grades?”, they would ask me. (Yes, I really was asked to choose my own grades once.) “In our days we had no electives, just the fundamentals.” The evils of electives are, apparently, self-evident. Throughout my career in education, these conversations about modern vs. traditional education maintained a presence in my worldview.
In the decades since then, these trends in our education system have only continued. Individualized learning. Inquiry-based learning. Project-based learning. Peer instruction. Learning how to learn. One might ask, “What about just learning the content?” And, indeed, there is cause for concern about lowering standards. When I taught at UBC, veteran colleagues expressed deep concern that students are entering university less and less prepared each year. Many high school teachers report that standards are lower every year. Once, when I was bored in my own Grade 11 math class many years ago, the teacher dusted off a decade-old textbook, commenting that it was much more challenging than the contemporary textbook and would keep me busy. Kids immigrating from all over the world — from France to Romania to China — report that it takes years for their Canadian math class to catch up to what they were learning back home. Here in BC I am increasingly faced with the refrain that in the age of Google, knowledge is unimportant (see also On the depths and shallows of knowledge). Overall, it sounds like our education system is becoming more progressive and less rigorous. Are we making a bad trade?
I believe this is a false dichotomy, an incorrect assumption that more progressive means less rigorous. We are making a trade but we don’t have to. Rather than being at odds with teaching rigorous fundamentals, progressive teaching actually aids this process. How? By sparking motivation. Student motivation is critical because teaching and learning are not the same thing: I can teach all I want, but learning can’t occur without my students’ active participation. Students don’t have to listen to me when I talk; they don’t have to think about my class after hours or discuss it with peers; they don’t have to attempt the homework, or struggle with the challenging parts if they do. If my students are not willing learners, teaching is futile. By bringing students into the learning process — whether through inquiry or projects or self-reflection — progressive education rightfully identifies that students need to be active and willing participants in their learning. While the old-fashioned system may work for certain students in certain cultural or historical contexts, transplanting that system to our society won’t just work. If a teacher talks but no one cares, did they still make a sound?
Beyond its pedagogical efficacy, progressive education has many other benefits. Projects, for example, promote communication and teamwork skills, which are increasingly important both in the modern workplace and in modern life, more broadly speaking. Inquiry-based approaches promote creativity in a way that rote memorization does not. Viewing our society with a critical lens builds our collective awareness of injustices that we must strive to correct. At age 7, my daughter is aware of her feelings and expresses them in a way that took me until adulthood to master; I am convinced that those skills, nurtured in our modern school system, will serve her well. For all these reasons and more, I enthusiastically embrace progressive methods in my own teaching. I would not want to let go of this progress our education system has made.
It is not a matter, then, of progressive versus rigorous education, but rather a matter of facilitating progressive and rigorous education. Occasionally these two forces may be at odds, or we may be told that they are; more often, though, we can have both. Why can’t students work on projects they are passionate about, using sophisticated scientific methods in the process? Why can’t we learn empathy and citizenship alongside rigorous scientific approaches? With enormous challenges looming, from climate change to global pandemics, we need education that is both rigorous and progressive to train the next generation of problem-solvers who are both skilled and knowledgeable while also creative and collaborative. When the next global challenge hits and we are scrambling to find solutions, we won’t be able to just Google the answers.
Let’s embrace progressive education, but use those approaches to fuel a rigorous education rather than stifle it. And if we need to dust off some old math textbooks to remind ourselves of the standards of yore, let’s do it. Let’s start there and make a project out of it.
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