“Why are we learning this?”

A TOK student brought this video in last week, enriching the class dialog about the value, purposes and limitations of school.

The video provoked some reflection on one principle that creates relevance, meaning and sustenance to the work of teaching and learning.

The video laments, among lots of other things, that “I wasn’t taught how to pay tax…” “… how to vote…” “I was not taught the laws for the country I live in.”

But the video ends with some statements one of which is

One of the threads that runs through the video is how worthless some of the topics seem to Boyinaband. Memorization on Mitochondria vs Learning about Health, for instance. Had Boyinaband and the legions of students who share his stance learned the conceptual connections between health and discrete cellular function, would the conceptual understanding that discrete cellular functions contribute to health of systems in organisms including the human being made the learning more relevant and meaningful, and useful? He might also learn that topics are useful, in illustrating and illuminating concepts, allowing for breadth and depth of understanding.

Taxes, voting and citizenship, and laws are micro-concepts of local, national, international and global issues. Had these been integrated in the study of social sciences, mathematics and other productive relationships between disciplines, would the student have found learning more relevant, meaningful and useful?

Creating contexts, which frame topics through concepts and authentic connections to the world and allow students to discover the significance of why we learn what we learn, is something that an IB education would have gifted Boyinaband and the learner he represents.

And what if Boyinaband had opportunities to transfer skills across and within disciplines, allowing him to learn that the ways of knowing in social sciences through the concepts of systems and change directly impacted the ways he understood systems and change in the natural sciences?

I wish we could have had someone like Boyinaband in a holistic, contextual, conceptual, integrated school framework (something like the MYP, which is research-based and follows a continuum of flexible education that is accepted globally and is known to prepare students well for problem-solving in a changing world).

Oh, wait. We do.

If I met Boyinaband as a student, I might say to him, “You are upset with school because what you learned through your schooling seems meaningless and useless to how you need to problem-solve in the world outside school.

“And what you want, is to believe that the school experience includes answers to the question, Why are we learning this?”

And if I met his parents in that faraway past when they are deciding about his education, I might take time to explore with them the following notions.

• How about an education that provides multiple entry points to understanding, skills, knowledge and attitudes?
• How about schools, which provide productive relationships between disciplines through careful planning of conceptual transfer and opportunities to consider and employ new perspectives?
• How about complex assessments, which require authentic performances linking knowledge in subject areas to current and historical issues in local, national, international and global contexts?
• How about a school, which values student experiences and incorporates student questions into lines of inquiry that culminate in open-ended problems allowing students to rehearse and manifest prior and new learning in novel ways?
• How about education that provides ways for students to take action, and changes their thinking so that they understand human commonality and diversity?

And I would say to the parents, here is an open secret. I know 4,267 schools worldwide that can answer these questions.