Treat high-schoolers as adults
At least, when it comes to teaching.
I’ve been thinking about how many problems would be solved if we started to teach students from 15 to 18, using some of the principles we use to teach adults.
For more than 5 years, I’ve worked as a corporate trainer. Even though I’ve left my own company to work directly with students, from time to time, I’ll do Training Sessions or Workshops.
To be honest, I think that’s why I’m able to educate with love, bringing some of the elements of corporate training into every learning experience I have with students.
When I talk with different teachers, see different curriculums or experience different learning approaches in the “traditional” school, I get sick to my stomach. Of course, there are outliers, but most learning experiences for students are fundamentally broken. That’s why bringing some principles from corporate training is a great way to do things differently!
A Modern Golden Age and our praise for Wisdom is something that directly correlates with education. In fact, as I talked with Visa in my podcast, maybe the only thing that’s missing is to actually educate people to see that we’re already living in one.
In order to continue this idea though, we need to make sure that the people in the future (current young students) are aligned with it. That they see a Modern Golden Age as something worth pursuing.
This means we need to change the way we educate our students.
One step in the right direction would be to treat them as adults.
Pedagogy vs Andragogy
When we talk about teaching and learning there are 2 great theories:
Pedagogy - focused on children and “dependent personalities”;
Andragogy - focused on adults and “independent personalities”.
Basically, until you’re in college (sometimes, even there) you’re being taught according to pedagogical principles. These assume that you’re dependent on an external agent to decide what you learn, how you learn, and why you learn it.
However, when speaking about adults, things change.
Regardless of having someone directing your learning, here’s one thing that’s pretty common when facilitating learning to adults: they don’t care about you or why you’re there. Not until you proved to them you’re worth caring about.
Why should students be any different?
When we look at high schoolers we see them as people that don’t have a choice but o sit there and listen. This leads to laziness whenever you need to plan a learning experience.
By having guaranteed audiences as educators, we have the luxury to overlook aspects such as quality, engagement, and student interest. If you try to pull that with adults, especially in a corporate setting, they’ll “rip you to pieces”.
Adults don’t have time to sit there while you ramble on topics you think are important.
The main reason any adult will do your course/class is the question floating in his head:
How can this make my life better?
If you’re not solving a problem, you’re done. If whatever you’re teaching is not a clear solution for something they may face, you won’t have students.
Even when companies pay people to be there, the moment your ideas go into murky waters, as soon as a worker starts questioning why they are useful to him, the attention and interest will disappear.
Back to my basic question. Why are we not thinking about these kinds of things when teaching students?
They seem to have a lack of agency in what/how they learn. Personally, I think that’s one of the most important skills to teach students. I’ve written about that before, and how it shaped the way I saw life.
The thing is, we have an agency crisis in our schools.
We stopped questioning if the knowledge we’re teaching matters to students but we also don’t give them space to do the questioning themselves.
I had a conversation with my girlfriend about this.
We both agree that the world is a better place by having a certain body of knowledge that’s common to almost all educated people. However, who gets to define that body of knowledge? And how? And why?
When Malcolm Knowles coined the term Andragogy, he pointed out 6 principles that should be taken into account when teaching adults.
I believe we will drastically improve our education if we put them into practice, starting with high schoolers.
Let’s go through each one and see how to apply them.
They need to know why something is important;
Whenever you're teaching an adult, you face resistance. In order to dissipate it you must, as I’ve previously mentioned, explain why what they’re about to learn is important.
Once again, students have the right to demand a clear answer to this question. It’s our job, as educators, to provide it and explain what problems will that knowledge solve.
They have a self-concept about who they are;
High school is a moment of transformative change.
We’ve all gone through it, a moment where we start to explore our identity in a more profound way. That does not mean students lack a core identity, a self-concept.
While exploring the boundaries of their own self, they need (and almost always have) a core self-image. Adress it. Work with it.
Give them the agency to craft their goals based on that core instead of assuming what kind of goals they should have.
They bring experiences and want to be recognized;
I’ve talked before about the “Educator Throne”, a mental state of superiority that educators bear when facing their students.
We are the educators, they are the students.
We are the ones who talk, they are the ones who listen.
We are the ones who know, they are the ones that need to learn.
There are a bunch of problems that come with this attitude. One of them is ignoring the range of experiences a high-schooler has already gone through and how those can be used as building blocks for future knowledge.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a teacher say: “They lack real-life experience”. Which is kind of normal since they’re students.
However, there are a lot (I would say most) of them that have had previous experiences with a profound impact on their worldview. Those are meaningful to them. Because of that, they should be meaningful to the learning experience.
I’m not saying every single high-schooler story is relevant to teaching.
I am saying that, as educators, we should give them the space to share experiences and work with them to understand how those can be used as learning moments.
They prefer relevance;
This one is obvious, right? The fact that we don’t even consider it when talking about young students is preposterous.
We need to give students relevant knowledge.
Now, one of the ideas I've encountered, offering some resistance to this principle is that “what’s relevant to students nowadays is not meaningful at all!”
Sure, some students love to spend 5 hours on tik-tok, watching dance videos and memes. But if you’ve ever had a deep conversation with a high-schooler, you know they have pretty relevant and meaningful questions! And we should try to answer them!
Not only that but, as educators, we can guide them through the process of understanding WHY a certain thing is relevant instead of finishing the conversation with “because I said so” or any variant of that argument.
Knowing things for the sake of knowing is good. But it should not the purpose of school.
We should help them develop the curiosity that incites pleasurable future learning experiences while also giving them practical knowledge that helps solving problems they face or are interested in.
They are practical;
Since most of our current experiences follow Paulo Freire’s Banking Model of Education, our classes are not practical at all.
Freire proposed that we see teachers as active subjects (banks) and students as passive objects (vaults). There’s precious knowledge held by the banks that will be stored in the vaults. There’s no chance for reciprocity, only consumption.
Because of that, we think that a class where a teacher just talks and a student just listens is normal.
When working with adults, will quickly realize that it’s not possible.
For some reason, we believe we have the right to do it with students, telling them to “shut up” and labeling them as “rude” if they don’t comply.
A learning experience for high schoolers should be practical.
Not only through exercises or debates, but also through projects and experiments.
They are internally motivated;
This is the one topic where I disagree with Knowles.
Not with the idea itself but with the phrasing. Both adults and teenagers can be internally motivated. However, most of the time, you’ll need an external motivator to dissipate resistance in learning, so they can get to the internal motivation.
If we put into practice the previous principles, this one will naturally emerge.
By providing agency and active participation in a learning experience, they’ll have ownership, and feel more engaged in it.
I know that educating high-schoolers as adults is not enough to bring a Modern Golden Age into fruition. It’s a complex challenge, filled with different forces and players.
We need to come up with a long-term strategy that allows for its existence and making students love learning and actually understanding how knowledge can help them solve problems is a first step into the right direction.
Creating a sandbox philosophy to education, where learners can have access to different problems in the world (plus all the ones that are part of their daily lives), pick some of them and craft their own goals around learning and growing into the type of person that can solve those same problems is promoting the praise of Wisdom.
It’s praying to Métis.
Thank you for sharing these ideas and resources! I really like your writing style- your language is clear; your ideas are organized and flows well. It's very helpful for people like me who wants to understand more about education.