Where Questions are More Important Than Answers

Nothing destroys the love of learning more completely than the academic tradition of cramming for tests. Indeed, those last minute, late night cram sessions have very little to do with learning, and everything to do with playing the game of schooling. I would even argue that the very existence of cramming is evidence of the failure of modern schooling.

"Ideas, fact, relationships, stories, histories, possibilities, artistry in words, in sounds, in form and in color crowd into a child's life, stir his feelings, excite his appreciation, and incite his impulses to kindred actives," wrote mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. "It is a saddening thought that on this golden age there falls so often the shadow of the crammer."

That said, I was an excellent crammer as a student. I was an excellent test-taker in general, because I enjoy puzzles and games, which is how I approached them. I don't know exactly when it happened, probably around middle school, but at some point I came to see school as hoops to jump through rather than an opportunity to learn. It wasn't until I discovered play-based learning in preschool that I came to understand that becoming good at schooling had caused me to waste so much of my "golden age." 

We focus on the children that school is obviously failing, but we often don't see that are likewise failing our "good students", teaching them that this game is anything more than a game.

When I started attending cooperative preschool with our daughter, I discovered what school should and could be. By dropping to my knees to be one with the two-year-olds, joining them under tables, in rolling down grassy hills, in entering fully into a doll house, I re-discovered my preschool self, the self that had not yet embraced, like a good boy, the cynical games of school. I found myself inspired by the children's curiosity, their capacity for wondering at the smallest of things. And that incited me to wonder what else I'd missed. I became a willing student, not just of play-based learning in preschool, but learning in general. 

As Whitehead writes in his 1929 essay "The Aims of Education", "We should banish the idea of a mythical, far-off end of education. The pupils must be continually enjoying some fruition and starting afresh." This is what was happening to me during what I now look back on as my awakening, the real beginning of my "education". I was a 35-year-old preschooler starting over by being awed and inspired by dust motes in sunbeams.

School taught me how to get good grades and pass tests, but I wish that it had instead allowed me to see that the joy in learning is, well, the learning. "(A)ll training . . . should begin as well as end in research," writes Whitehead, "and in getting hold of the subject-matter as it occurs in nature." In other words, as it occurs in life itself. As Whitehead's contemporary John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

Today, I see myself as a life-long researcher, a collector of perspectives. I still like my puzzles and games, but solutions and victories and good grades and passed tests, are falsehoods that create the illusion of wisdom, of knowledge, while blinding us to what ties it all together.

For too long, the academic game of schooling has been ascendent, deceiving us into thinking that it represents learning and even life itself, attempting to replace each child's self-motivation, their wonder, with an empty series of meaningless external hoops. The children who cannot or will not play the game are deemed failures while those, like me, who embrace the game, are tricked into believing the lie that their success equates to learning.

The real lesson of learning is found in our play-based "pre" schools, under tables and on the slopes of grassy hills, where we finally find life itself, a place where questions are more important than answers. No cramming required.

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