Venkatesh Rao surprised me in What makes a good teacher? by saying the opposite of what I expected him to say re: his educational experience, given who he is:
While my current studies have no live teachers in the loop, each time I sit down to study something seriously, I’m reminded of how much I’m practicing behaviors first learned under the watchful eye of good teachers. We tend to remember the exceptionally charismatic (which is not the same thing as good), and exceptionally terrible teachers, but much of what we know about how to learn, how to study, comes from the quieter good teachers, many of whom we forget.
It also strikes me, reflecting on my own educational path — very conventional both on paper and in reality — that the modern public discourse around teaching and learning has been hijacked to a remarkable degree by charismatic public figures mythologizing their own supposedly maverick education stories.
These stories often feature exaggerated elements of rebellion, autodidact mastery, subversive hacking, heroic confrontations with villainous teachers and schoolyard bullies, genius non-neurotypical personal innovations and breakthroughs, and powerful experiences outside formal learning. These stories often sound like self-serving tales told by middle-aged Ferris Bueller caricatures trying to process distorted memories of somewhat traumatic school years. But they don’t strike me as a particularly accurate view of schooling, either as I experienced it, or as I witnessed most of my peers experiencing it.
These discourses understate the extent to which actual maverick outliers are in fact quite rare, and actually quite well accommodated by at least good schools. They understate the extent to which formal education not only comprehends and accommodates natural patterns of rebellion, but even designs around it, and encourages students to cultivate personal mythologies of heroic unaided agency for their own good.
Turning to his own personal experience:
Take for instance, one of my own “maverick” memories, of the sort I might put into a startup application for Y Combinator (an institution that invites and thrives on educational self-mythologizing). As was generally the case in the late 80s, nerdy students like me generally understood and used computers much better than the teachers who were supposed to be teaching us. Our computer science teacher was a mediocre math teacher who had taken some sort of bad certificate course in programming and understood very little. It was obvious to me and several of my friends that we were much better than her at both math and computers.
I feel a bit bad for her now — an average middle-aged woman who did her best. But us self-satisfied, self-styled wannabe hackers, we laughed at her behind her back. And we found opportunities to sneak into the computer lab on weekends and evenings to learn more, and faster, than she knew or could teach.
But what all of us in that cohort forget is that the “sneaking” comprised going and asking the custodian of the lab keys (the American Jesuit priest who ran the Astronomy club) to let us in — which he genially did. Despite our run-ins with the teachers we were easily leaving behind, the school did recognize and support us, putting us on programming competition teams, structuring term projects to let us get creative, and so on. The teacher I am kinda maligning once sent me to the Vice Principal’s office for mouthing off (I got slapped a couple of times — it was a different era), but also put me on the programming quiz and contest teams. That my buddies and I knew more than her wasn’t exactly a revelation to her. She did her best to deal with it in a positive way. Only later did I realize that dealing compassionately and positively with young people smarter than yourself is a basic teaching skill. …
The bulk of my educational experiences were positive. Most teachers were at least passably good enough, and a handful were standout formative influences.
Of course, this was partly because I was fortunate enough to go to very good schools throughout. My grade school was a solid Jesuit school. My university experiences were at top public universities in India and the US.
This is of course not the median experience. The median school is probably much worse at every level. But the point is, the university system at its best is where we should be looking for answers to why it is worth defending.
Venkatesh Rao surprised me in What makes a good teacher? by saying the opposite of what I expected him to say re: his educational experience, given who he is:
Turning to his own personal experience:
I like this steelman.