Rethink.

From Michael Lewis’ “The Bal­lad of Big Mike,” in The New York Times:

His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Bri­ar­crest aca­d­e­mic marathon, in which Michael started out a dis­tant last and had instantly fallen far­ther behind, came to a sur­pris­ing end: in a class of 157 stu­dents, he fin­ished 154th. He had caught up to and passed three of his class­mates. When Sean saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose; you just ran out of time.”

He had had a truly bizarre aca­d­e­mic career: noth­ing but D’s and F’s until the end of his junior year, when all of a sud­den he became a reli­able mem­ber of Briarcrest’s honor roll. He was going to fin­ish with a grade-point aver­age of 2.05. Amaz­ing as that was, how­ever, it wasn’t enough to get him past the N.C.A.A. He needed a 2.65. And with no more classes to take, he obvi­ously would not get it.

Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene.

From a friend, Sean learned about the Inter­net courses offered by Brigham Young Uni­ver­sity. The B.Y.U. courses had mag­i­cal prop­er­ties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semes­ter on a high-school tran­script. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry aca­d­e­mic record could be ren­o­vated in a sin­gle sum­mer. Sean scanned the B.Y.U. cat­a­log and found a promis­ing series. It was called “Char­ac­ter Edu­ca­tion.” All you had to do in such a “char­ac­ter course” was to read a few brief pas­sages from famous works — a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a let­ter by Abra­ham Lin­coln there — and then answer five ques­tions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from char­ac­ter courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high-school Eng­lish classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!

Thus began the great Mor­mon grade-grab. Mainly it involved Sue Mitchell grind­ing through the char­ac­ter courses with Michael. Every week or so, they replaced a Mem­phis pub­lic school F with an A from B.Y.U. Every assign­ment needed to be read aloud and decoded. Here he was, late in his senior year in high school, and he had never heard of a right angle or the Civil War or “I Love Lucy.” But get­ting the grades was far eas­ier than gen­er­at­ing in Michael any sort of plea­sure in learn­ing. When Bri­ar­crest gave him a list of choices of books to write a report on, Mitchell, think­ing it might spark Michael’s inter­est, picked “Great Expec­ta­tions.” “Because of the char­ac­ter of Pip,” she says. “He was poor and an orphan. And some­one sort of found him. I just thought Michael might be able to relate.” He couldn’t. She tried “Pyg­malion.” Again, he hadn’t the faintest inter­est in the thing. They got through it by per­form­ing the work aloud, with Michael assigned to the role of Fred­die. “He does won­der­ful mem­ory work,” Mitchell says. “It’s a sur­vival tech­nique. You can give him any­thing, and he’ll mem­o­rize it.” But that’s all he did. Engag­ing with the mate­r­ial in any deeper way seemed impos­si­ble. He was as iso­lated from the great works of West­ern lit­er­a­ture as he was from other peo­ple. “If you asked him why we’re doing all this,” she says, “he’d say, ‘I got to do it to get to the league.”’

I’m not quot­ing any of this to pick on Michael Oher, who really is an awe­some force on the foot­ball field and — even more impres­sively — worked hard for the edu­ca­tion he has. Toward the con­clu­sion of the arti­cle: “He could read and write… Drowned in nur­ture, his I.Q. test score had risen between 20 and 30 points.” I’m not going to knock the B.Y.U courses, because truth be told they helped give expo­sure to things like Lin­coln and Pyg­malion and Great Expec­ta­tions that either didn’t get through in high school (most likely) or weren’t taught (elite schools gen­er­ally tend to have some very sur­pris­ing gaps).

I’m more inter­ested in Oher’s lack of inter­est in the mate­r­ial, which is obvi­ously excus­able for a num­ber of rea­sons in his case. He was more than likely inter­ested in get­ting to do some­thing he was good at (foot­ball) at a higher level soon, and given the rest of what we’re told, there are plenty of excuses. The thing about the dis­in­ter­est: I run into it far too often among peo­ple who can’t make excuses, and what’s sur­pris­ing is the peo­ple we’d label “edu­cated” who also have that sort of dis­in­ter­est. One thing that’s shin­ing through what I’ve excerpted — it’s pos­si­ble to do well at a num­ber of tests, get A’s and gen­eral knowl­edge, and not relate to knowl­edge on any deeper level whatsoever.

I guess my ques­tions are:

1. Can we really insti­tu­tion­al­ize edu­ca­tion and learn­ing? To some degree, we have to, but where do the tests and classes start fail­ing spectacularly?
2. What about the need for focus? The more one focuses, the more prac­ti­cal learn­ing gets. Not the worst thing, but the more prac­ti­cal you get, the less edu­cated you are and not because we still have some liberal-artsy prej­u­dice about edu­cated peo­ple need­ing to know lots of use­less stuff. It’s more like: if you’re edu­cated, you can for­mu­late ques­tions about prob­lems peo­ple don’t even real­ize exist.
3. What about the appeal to honor? Com­bined with ques­tion 2, the appeal to util­ity, it seems to be a pow­er­ful moti­va­tor: “I got to do it to get to the league.” But we’re clearly see­ing a case where honor and util­ity col­lapse into each other above. More­over, it isn’t just Michael Oher who may not have cared for learn­ing — the rea­son why I’m bring­ing this up is because there’s a fright­en­ing num­ber of zom­bies around who will jump through hoops for cer­tifi­cates and offi­cial look­ing pieces of paper. A slightly dif­fer­ent ques­tion from the first: to what degree is edu­ca­tion a self-making?

• The Value of an Edu­ca­tion, Perhaps
• Com­put­ers and Education
• On Amer­i­can Education
• So, Um, What’s the Value of a Lib­eral Arts Edu­ca­tion Again?
• Why Hav­ing Vouch­ers For Edu­ca­tion Is The Most Impor­tant Issue In America

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