When I think about the current state of the education industry in the USA, I am confronted with a system which is fixated upon accumulating knowledge as a prime purpose of the system. I have seen some ‘talk’ about authentic assessments and other jargon, but the bottom line is that knowledge is what the game is about.
Interestingly enough, I always thought that skills are what separate us from complete barbarians (wherever they may be…), knowledge is merely something which allows us to develop a skill, or later on distinguishes those who posses deeper knowledge from others. In this manner, I think that the use of the term knowledge is about professional specialty knowledge, such as what a doctor might know which you might not (otherwise, why go to a doctor?). Skills are things which produce things of tangible value, for instance, a poet produces an artistic masterpiece, but without mastery of the forms it isn’t poetry
So, as we look at skills, I will tell a story to showcase how developing skills are often fundamental pieces of our lives. Many years ago, back in the 1970’s I started to learn to play the guitar. A consequence of this was that I also started an ongoing set of discussions with my brother which was related to guitars and playing the guitar.
At first we talked about all kinds of superficial things which related to guitars and guitar playing, famous players, guitar gear, and in some ways the text of much of our conversations way back then (remember we started in the 1970’s) resembled the 2000 era Rolling stone magazine list of the 100 most important rock guitarists. That is, we covered things in a quite sophomoric manner, and about the only thing which kept our conversations from being as puerile and inane as that infamous top 100 list is that we used this ongoing discussion as a means to plumb deeper and deeper into what exactly it is to play the guitar.
Over the years the text of our discussions slowly changed. Instead of talking about gear (guitars and amplifiers) we started to talk more about how to use guitars and amps. We started to talk about chords and music theory, about picking technique and comping.
As time went on the nature of our talks become more and more esoteric, so that we ultimately got to the point where we were talking more about philosophy than guitar playing. I think that this metaphor about what guitarists go through in real life (versus mere ‘ongoing talks’) is yet another metaphor for the fact that there are innumerable skills, hobbies, avocations, and pastimes we all deal with, indulge in, or have to take care of.
There are innumerable other topics with which I could have spent the time developing some equivalent skills. The point is that there are almost always deeper emergent properties to these ‘journeys’, where can see more and more of life.
I used to play chess (a lot!), and after a while I could see deeper into my opponents than I could into ‘non-players’. By this, I mean that in this other case, chess became a set of glasses by which I could see other aspects of reality, far outside the parameters of the game.
In the broadest sense, I think that the education we give the next generation should allow us, and give them more (and deeper) connections to our society and life in general than merely having them go through some sort of arbitrary gauntlet of tests.
