Trying Too Hard

By Sue Stewart, BrainBuilders Gymnasium Founder | Thu, 20 Oct 2011

Here’s a radical concept:  Maybe we’re failing at education because we’re trying too hard.

It’s difficult to argue that we, as a nation, are not trying to triage education.  Politicians pass programs; parents hire tutors and “educational therapists;” education Ph.Ds conduct research on the latest method to teach reading; therapists prescribe ADD medicine; teachers scramble to perform within increasingly stringent standards.   Kids in college prep high schools study for hours each night, forsaking valuable social experiences and pumping stress hormones into growing bodies.  But still, most people agree that high school students’ reading and writing scores are dishearteningly low.  

Maybe all this intense “trying” is counterproductive. Think about other examples of people trying too hard.  How many women do you know who couldn’t get pregnant, finally adopted a child, and then miraculously conceived within a year or two?  And do you remember kids from middle school who tried too hard to have friends?  They were too funny or too loud or too nice to be really likable.

I’m seeing that any genuine fix to an intractable, many-tentacled problem often has an element of profound simplicity—a simplicity that seems inversely proportional to the complexity of the problem.  This is a bit counter-intuitive, but the more impossible and inexplicable a problem seems, the more we probably should just lean into it and hold it loosely.

There’s a family whose young adult children read, think and write very well, especially by today’s standards.  The kids had a smorgasbord-type education—some public, some private, some home school.  The parents never really checked their homework, rewarded or punished them for grades, or really even bothered too much about their report cards.  The only exceptional thing they did was read good literature aloud as a family, from the time the oldest was a toddler.  They read books like The Wind in the Willows, Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, A Wrinkle in Time, The Secret Garden, To Kill a Mockingbird, Little House on the Prairie, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.  There were more books than toys in the house.  The oldest used the word “mutter” correctly at four.  The youngest used the word “ infinitesimal” correctly at 6.  They never worked with vocab flashcards or took any kind of test over the books.  They didn’t even discuss the books.  

They just listened and enjoyed them.    And then read lots of books on their own.  And enjoyed them.

Detect a pattern?  To get pregnant, genuinely enjoy sex and your spouse.  To have friends, genuinely enjoy people.   And to understand what you read, no matter how advanced, maybe you start young reading lots of the time-tested “good stuff,” and then just enjoy the story.

So simple, it just might work.