Chapter 2
Learning Agendas: The Mixed Blessings of Achievement, Information, and Expertise

I got my first bicycle on my birthday in January, not the best bicycle moment for a boy growing up in the middle of snowy Maine. But the gods of childhood smiled with a winter thaw, subduing the snow to patches on the lawns and rows along the sides of the street. It was riding weather, or close enough. The new two-wheeler seemed like a tippy catastrophe of a gizmo, but my dad had a solution: our first test runs were on the driveway. I got aboard as he steadied the bike. No training wheels for me! He ran alongside with a hand on the frame as I tried out the pedals. We did that a couple of times, pretty soon he let go, and I discovered something miraculous: the bicycle almost balanced itself. Soon I was riding all over town.

Those winter rides come back to me today as we ponder the nature of knowledge. What is knowledge? Knowledge is like a bicycle. That is, knowledge is for going somewhere. If we know something about the French Revolution or the nature of democracy or statistics and probability or opportunity cost, we want to go somewhere with it. Maybe we want to understand an issue in the headlines or think about a medical decision or get a project off the ground in the most effective way. For any of these missions and thousands more, we want to go somewhere with what we know.

Of course, “going somewhere” is just another way of calling for knowledge likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live—lifeworthy learning. As I noted in chapter 1, a great deal of what we teach and learn doesn’t go very far, as a bicycle with tiny wheels wouldn’t or a bicycle with wheels designed by Salvador Dalí wouldn’t. Only a small percentage of teachers and schools are seriously exploring the six beyonds mentioned in the Introduction to this book: twenty-first-century skills, updated treatment of the disciplines, interdisciplinary topics, global perspectives, connecting content to life situations, and much more choice of what to learn. They plainly think that such approaches carry learners much further.

When you think about it, this go-gap is very odd indeed. Every parent, politician, and educator recognizes that education aims to prepare people for their personal, civic, and professional lives. So what stands in the way of lifeworthy learning despite all those good intentions?

Some factors are familiar to anyone acquainted with the educational scene. Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack. It sits solidly in the minds of parents: “I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it?” The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: it generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.

Granted all that, a large part of the challenge appears to lie not in educational inertia but, paradoxically, in noble educational aspirations. Three prominent and important agendas often stand in the way of lifeworthy learning: achievement, information, and expertise. We certainly don’t want to dismiss them, yet all three have “soft tires”: they are not ready to go nearly as far as we need. Let’s see why.

The Achievement Agenda and Its Soft Tires

Considerable educational research and innumerable practical interventions focus on the achievement gap—that deep canyon between the learning of middle-class, reasonably well-off people and the learning of disadvantaged youngsters. Particular ethnic groups in inner cities, rural populations in impoverished areas, and other segments of society consistently underperform compared to national norms. Increasing their mastery of reading, writing, computational competence, and basic knowledge has become an urgent mission for generations of educators.

The achievement gap also refers to certain problems even in middle-class and up populations: stubborn shortfalls in, for example, solving story problems in mathematics, genuinely understanding tricky science concepts, and writing in a well-organized and compelling way. Special issues of journals debate its ins and outs, while diverse programs tackle the challenge in tough settings. The achievement gap is often viewed as the paramount educational challenge of our times.

The problem is a serious one, and not just for ideological reasons. Shortfalls in basic educational achievement are part of a pattern of limited participation in, benefit from, and contribution to a contemporary society. The achievement gap is one element in the cycle of poverty, where parents, themselves undereducated and participating only in the lowest levels of the workforce, raise children locked into the same template. With the bicycle metaphor in mind, certainly champions of focusing on the achievement gap want to empower learners to go somewhere with what they have learned.

However, there are a couple of soft tires slowing the journey. For one, it’s not so much that we don’t understand the achievement gap as that we’re reluctant as a society to invest in fixing it. This is the eloquent argument from Linda Darling-Hammond in The Flat World and Education. Focusing on the United States but sketching circumstances elsewhere, Darling-Hammond sees a dramatic lack of intelligently equitable economic and policy-based support for education. While the problem has many facets, two figure centrally in this book: what’s taught and how it’s taught. As to the “how,” in chapter 2 of her book, Darling-Hammond rounds up research showing that quality teaching makes an enormous difference in achievement—greater than the impact of race and parent education combined. However, quality teaching varies hugely across more and less affluent areas in the United States, reflecting entrenched patterns of investment.

Turning to what’s taught, Darling-Hammond shares evidence that schools differ greatly in level of challenge and opportunities for more advanced learning. Moreover, and somewhat surprising, supposedly lower-performing students gain much more ground from a higher level of challenge. At one point, she sums up the situation this way: “A substantial body of research over the last 40 years has found that the combination of teacher quality and curriculum quality explains most of the school’s contribution to achievement, and that access to curriculum opportunities is a more powerful determinant of achievement than initial achievement levels” (p. 54).

Now for a second soft tire, one addressing lifeworthy learning point-blank. With the uppity question on our minds, we might consider another gap alongside the achievement gap. Let’s call it the relevance gap. The achievement gap asks, “Are students achieving X?” whereas the relevance gap asks, “Is X going to matter to the lives learners are likely to live?”

If X is good mastery of reading and writing, both questions earn a big yes! Skilled, fluent, and engaged reading and writing marks both a challenging gap and a high-payoff attainment. That knowledge goes somewhere! However, if X is quadratic equations, the answers don’t match. Mastering quadratic equations is challenging, but these equations are not so lifeworthy. Now fill in X with any of the thousands of topics that make up the typical content curriculum. Very often, these topics present significant challenges of achievement but with little return on investment in learners’ lives.

Here’s the problem: the achievement gap is much more concerned with mastering content than with providing lifeworthy content. All that talk about achievement leaves little room for discussing what’s being achieved. To use the bicycle metaphor, a soft tire of the achievement gap is its neglect of the relevance gap.

Let’s take a topic area by way of example: geography. I learned what might be called descriptive geography, and probably you did too: capitals of the states, major rivers, and all that. To be sure, a rich fund of geographical information is a fine thing to have at one’s fingertips and an achievement to store up and keep handy. But let’s contrast descriptive geography with causal geography—how the locations of rivers, harbors, seas, mountains, forests, lakes, and other large-scale features of the land are forces that have shaped and continue to shape the course of history.

At its grandest level, here is to be found the perspective advanced by Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, where he argued systematically that the dominance of Eurasian civilization in the world today reflects the East-West sprawl of the Eurasian landmass among other things. Causal geography gives us a lens through which to see a wide range of historical and current phenomena both local and global. Such ideas offer much more lifeworthiness than a bag full of facts. They are likely to be experienced by learners as more meaningful and motivating. Of course you can’t really learn causal geography without learning a lot of descriptive geography along with it because you need concrete cases to make sense of the big ideas. All in all, descriptive geography plus causal geography is likely to yield a lot more encounters of the third kind.

So why don’t we see more attention to the relevance gap alongside the achievement gap? Well, attention to the relevance gap upsets the apple cart of conventional...