What’s In a Label?

By: Lockey Webb Coughlin 

I run a small educational resource sharing center. Trying to keep people from labeling it a ‘school’ is a battle that I fight every day. My parents, students, and teachers call it a school and I correct them, “It is not a school.” They roll their eyes. “What am I supposed to call it then?” “A resource sharing center, EWoW, Education without Walls, classes, tutoring, 65 Bridge (our address), or home of the brave, the brilliant, and the miraculous.” They seem to find this very frustrating.

Labeling is easy. It allows us to open our mental filing cabinet, cataloging all things into their appropriate places. Unfortunately, this includes us. “I was an English major for a reason” or “sorry, I am such a control freak” or “I’m not artsy, I can’t draw” are ways that we place ourselves into boxes. And yet, another oft-heard phrase is, “come on, think outside the box.” As a society, we are at war with ourselves.

When translated to education, this need to label things becomes intensely detrimental. Classes that are labeled ‘math’ or ‘science’ or ‘history’ or ‘English’ discount so much. No discipline exists in the absence of any others. How are students supposed to learn to make these connections and to develop problem-solving skills when such specific categorical distinctions are superimposed upon their education?

Who is your problem-solving hero: Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes, Christopher Kimball, Garry Kasparov, or maybe an NFL coach? My favorite these days is Bryson DeChambeau, a hugely successful professional golfer who has used his physics degree and interest in nutrition to change his game. He is one of the many inspirations for having a pool table at Education without Walls – geometry and physics every day. Sneaky.
Memorization and regurgitation are of paramount importance for young children, they are terrific at it; but they are beyond boring for almost anyone over the age of 11 or 12 years old. Then, they need to learn differently; they need to be challenged differently. The insistence that students constantly memorize facts, regurgitate information, and work in a vacuum, educators are stunting their development.

History is a true passion of mine. This is a relatively recent development, by the way. I detested history in school. Even though I love it now, I resist placing history classes on our middle school schedule. This upsets parents to no end. “Where is history – I don’t see it on the schedule. There is no geography, either?”

Middle school students are hyper-focused on other human interaction, i.e. social skills. So, we offer a cross-curricular class called “World Languages, Cooking, and Culture”, which allows time for immersive study of other cultures through cooking, language, history, geography, art, and political structure. Our year of romance languages, for example, begins with Latin and the Romans, moving on to all things Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, with 6 – 8 weeks for each. We have years dedicated to Germanic and Asian concentrations, as well. Fun, memorable, a great deal of breadth, and not a single worksheet required.

Our answer to science is called “Questions, Inquiries, and Conundrums”. The kids love it and list it as their favorite class consistently. I call it a ‘follow your nose’ class, which allows students to ask and answer their own questions. Recent topics have been mustelidae (the Family including honey badgers, wolverines, and skunks), the science of sleep, the effects of nutritional deficits, and the physics of figure skating.

We want students to complete their high school education having touched on numerous topics, so they have both a strong base from which to launch their college studies, and one from which to choose a direction for their degree. This is almost impossible in a traditional high school environment where AP and now IB classes are pushed as the way into the college of their dreams; or where the time and investment in standardized test outcomes dwarfs the same in art or music.

Advanced placement classes, very clearly labeled and boxed up, are simply counter-productive. If a student is taking AP Biology, for example, they are putting a huge amount of their time, which often requires pre-class work the previous summer, and is a quarter to a third of their science education, into learning biology. AP Biology does not, by the way, include all life science disciplines. It excludes foundational information like human anatomy, among others. This intense study leaves very little room for exploring other topics that might interest that student and, all too often, puts them off the life sciences all together.

An alternative approach, based on the German model of science education, is to offer topics that include physics, chemistry, and biology all four years of a student’s high school education. With two or three science teachers working as a team, learners get to dive in, exploring connections deeply. Science teachers love this curriculum, because they can cover, for example, the chemistry of osmosis and the applications of osmosis in biology simultaneously. I am told these topics are all interconnected. Labs are designed to cover, in an interconnected way, both life and physical sciences. Which ones are chosen depends on the interest of the students and the passion of the instructors. Right now, we have scorpions in the building. Not sure how they convinced me to allow that, but there it is.

For social sciences, we teach classes like “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which, while not Billy Joel’s best song, is a fantastic list of topics to cover if you want to learn about the cold war and post-WWII culture. Mr. Joel was even kind enough to put it in chronological order so that every time the kids hear the song, the topics are reinforced.

Looking for more rigor? How about something like “Revolutions”? This class studies revolutions, their causes, and outcomes. Very dense, difficult material and forget a textbook. Economics, psychology, history, philosophy, and luminaries like Hannah Arendt and Gene Sharp are not covered in one place and if they were, the text would no doubt be an insurmountable list of names and dates, burying the most important concepts of the curriculum. The final? Write a research paper that predicts a future revolution. One of our students famously predicted the Venezuelan revolution.

But AP classes confer college credits and save money, you say. This is true only if they succeed on the test. Some of our current high school students are on track to graduate from high school with 15 to 30 stress-free college credits. No traumatic tests or APs required because they are enjoying dual-enrollment with a local university. Calm and happy, even in these crazy times, they are often surprised by their own success. When I smile and say, “Why are you surprised? You have the benefit of an excellent education and you work hard,” they often look perplexed. But what they say is, “Yeah, I know.”

One of the many difficulties with all of this is that it does not fit neatly into anyone’s checklist of requirements for a high school diploma. Students and their parents compare the list of requirements for an Education without Walls diploma with that of public or even private schools, and they have a lot of trouble with my list, which is longer. There is more breadth and less depth to my suggestions. Classes here involve more independent thought, more problem-solving, and less drudgery. Once enrolled, parents grumble that their kids have too much free time and not enough homework. How could they be learning if they are not studying for tests and stressed about their grades?

I question this often, as well. I graduated from an elite private high school, myself, and that often colors my perception of what constitutes a strong education. And then I go back and look at our outcomes. Education without Walls graduates are Ivy League and mini-ivy league school attendees, have achieved CEO status at 20 years old, are successful entrepreneurs, and all college graduates so far have been Magna Cum Laude honors. Easily labeled successes abound, but there are also students for whom the completion of college classes in and of itself is a success. One thing they have in common is that they are invested in their own education.

So, why do I resist the label of school? While certainly not always the case, the word school implies extensive internal structure, bureaucracy, a lack of parental involvement, and a lack of choice for students. One-stop shopping for education does not mean the best. Parental involvement and student investment are both absolutely essential to a rich and varied education. When this is the case, we get to curate a highly individualized education that is optimized for each individual student. No labels, no boxes, just innumerable problems waiting to be solved.

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