I often see memes on social media complaining about various skills that people didn’t learn in schools. Sometimes, it’s accompanied with “Here are the things we should be learning instead.” But I want to reflect on that statement through the bigger question of the future of learning. What exactly do students need as they exit school?
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Why I Relate to this Sentiment
“Dude, I wish I had taken a class in high school that taught me how to do minor repairs. Simple things. Stuff like changing the air filters. Taking out wallpaper. Changing the valves in a sprinkler system,” I say to my twin brother.
“Dad taught us how to change sprinkler valves twice. He showed us, step by step, how to put in PVC pipe, too. You don’t remember?”
I shrug. I vaguely remember. But I also remember doing it incorrectly, getting yelled at, and heading into the house to make art.
“As for air filters and wallpaper, I hate to break this to you but there are text-based and video directions walking you step by step through the process,” he points out.
I nod. My brother is right. All of these things that they “failed to teach me at school” are things I actually mastered on my own with the help of YouTube and maybe a few phone calls to more knowledgeable people.
But I share this because I understand the sentiment when people say, “Why didn’t I learn this in school?” It’s hard to be working through tax forms knowing that you spent hours playing “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder. It can feel disheartening to be stuck trying to understand the functions of local government while realizing that you haven’t factored polynomials in decades. It can be frustrating to see gaps in your historical or civic knowledge all the while knowing that you have a relatively useless knowledge of iambic pentameter at your disposal.
However, while I empathize with the sentiment of “they didn’t teach us that in school,” I think it’s more complicated than it first appears and I want to think through this together. So, here are a few big ideas.
Big Idea #1: You Might Have Learned It But Forgot It
I know I learned the Quadratic Equation by heart. In high school, I would have told you it was etched into my mind. Well, apparently, that etching isn’t permanent and my mind is more like an Etch-A-Sketch. The Quadratic Equation is gone. I can look it up if I ever need to use it, of course. But the point is that a particular fact that I learned so well that it had hit a level of automaticity is now permanently gone.
We often conceptualize the brain as an information processing machine. We move information from short-term to long-term memory and engage in a retrieval process.
The implied metaphor is that of a computer. We simply move information from long-term to short-term memory when we need it on demand – not unlike opening a file on a desktop. But our brains are not machines. For all the talk of being “hardwired,” we are messy, organic creatures. Our brains are sloppy. Efficient, yes, but not always in the ways we want them to be. The truth is that emotions shape not only how we perceive information but how we remember and even reimagine facts. Factors like sleep and diet and stress shape how well we remember specific skills.
Meanwhile, our brain engages in a non-stop process of neural pruning. This means we not only forget key facts or even misunderstand concepts (often through a process of interference) but we forget events.
So, when someone says, “Why didn’t we learn that in school,” sometimes they learned it. They even mastered it on a test. But then . . . neural pruning. They lost the skills. They forgot the facts. They might have even lost the episodic memory of that particular event.
On some level, we don’t get to decide what we remember and what we forget. I know every lyric on the Fleetwood Mac Rumour’s album. Is that necessary? Actually, yeah. But I also know the starting line-up of the 1988 San Francisco Giants complete with their jersey numbers. I wouldn’t mind forgetting that.
On another level, we can remember specific information by devoting time and attention to it. For the longest time, I thought I was really bad at remembering names and faces. I would tell people, “I’m just not very good at that kind of thing.” But researchers have demonstrated that this isn’t an innate trait that some people have. It turns out the biggest factor to to remembering names and faces is whether we give specific attention to it in the moment and then practice it shortly thereafter.
Often, our ability to remember key details depends upon whether we attach information to a specific schema. This is why you might forget all the names and dates in a lecture-oriented, fact-based history class but you will remember those same names or dates in a class where the focus is on larger themes and bigger ideas around causes and effects. It’s why concept attainment lessons, inquiry-based activities, discussions, and Socratic Seminars have a tendency to stick a little better.
But we also tend to remember key information and master important skills when we see it as relevant. If I’m a ninth grader learning how to fill out taxes, I might think, “Yeah, this is boring and it’s not all that important. Sure, someday I’ll do taxes but I’ll just read the directions and maybe watch a YouTube video about it.” In that moment, I’m more likely to forget what I am learning. On the other hand, if I am doing a financial literacy simulation where I have to make key decisions, fill out forms, make investments, etc. the “game” might feel relevant in the moment but also important for my future.
This sense of relevance doesn’t always have to be inherently “fun.” Kindergartners see phonics and blending as relevant because they want to learn how to decode text. As a middle school teacher, I systematically taught each of the verb tenses of the English language using verb tense formulas. Sure, we made it fun with podcasts and blogging. However, students also filled out handouts and packets to practice the verb tenses. And yet . . . they were dialed in. As English Learners, they wanted to master the language.
When the learning feels relevant, we are more likely to remember it over a longer period of time. But it’s also important to recognize that the definition of “relevant” can change over time. We don’t always know what we need in the future.
Big Idea #2: Sometimes Relevance Changes
It’s my second year of teaching and we are in a professional development about problem-solving in different subject areas. I’m fascinated by the various facets of creativity but I notice a visible frustration as we move into math.
One teacher crosses his arms. “Why are we teaching students things like proportional reasoning and two-step equations when what they really need is consumer math?”
“Exactly,” another chimes in. “You know what they need to learn? How to balance a checkbook. Some of my son’s friends don’t even know how to do that.”
“Isn’t that a parent’s job?” Another teacher asks.
“But if a parent doesn’t teach them . . .”
“True.”
I sit there silently. I mean, yes, I read my bank statements. I stick to a budget with categories (which actually has a downside to it given the way I slowly stop viewing money as fungible). But balancing a checkbook? The only checks I write are for the bills that come due each month.
Fast forward over two decades and hardly anyone balances checkbooks. Most of us rarely even write checks. We have auto-debit, auto-payments, and ATM cards that we use regularly. I check my account on an app and manage my budget with QuickBooks.
But I have seen this same trend occur in education. I remember the huge push to make sure that every student learns how to code. We had hour of code, coding games, coding curriculum, and conferences focused solely on coding. I watched TED Talks and attended keynotes imploring us to make sure that every child learns to code.
At one point, a few members of our school board pushed to have our STEM courses replaced with coding courses so that students would be prepared for the future.
To be clear, I believe in the power of coding. I taught a four-week programming unit in my STEM course with middle schoolers. But the power of coding isn’t in preparing students for a specific job. The real power is in the systems thinking they learn as they maneuver blocks of code. It’s in the combination of language and logic. On some level, they can learn these same skills in Mock Trial and. World Languages and chess.
But this has has me thinking of a bigger question. What is the ultimate goal of education?
What is the Ultimate Goal?
If you ask twenty different people about the purpose of education, you’ll get twenty different answers. However, in general, we see certain streams. Some view education as a pathway to a better career. This is often framed as a pathway to a four-year university but it also includes CTE programs and a push toward training students for specific vocations.
Others see education through more of a civic lens. The goal here is to prepare students to be active participants in democracy. Some view this through a lens of national identity (saying a pledge, learning the dominant language, etc.) while others see it as a chance to challenge systems of injustice. I’m not weighing in on any of this here. Just pointing out that there is a shared philosophy (despite partisan differences) that education exists to develop citizens.
Still others view education through a holistic lens of “learning to live well.” This is often framed as life-long learning and includes everything from “core” academic subjects to skills one needs to thrive in day-to-day life to Social and Emotional Learning competencies to the overall love of learning. Again, this approach varies widely. Some of these schools skew toward a more progressive educational approach while others take a classical learning approach. But, again, this stream focuses on helping students think well about life.
Most of us identify with all three streams to a certain extent. As a middle school teacher, I wanted students to think well about life but I also wanted them to engage in a democratic society and I knew that many of the skills they would develop in PBL would help them in their future careers.
Wherever you land on these three approaches, one thing remains true. Our students are stepping into a chaotic and changing world. With generative AI, their careers will continue to evolve. The corporate ladder is gone and they’ll need to navigate the maze of an unpredictable future. They will also step into an unstable civic landscape where they will need to think critically and creatively on a regular basis. In the midst of this turmoil, we also want to see them thrive as humans.
So, what does this mean, in terms of “they didn’t teach us that?”
In our book Empower, AJ Juliani wrote, “Our job is not to prepare students for something. Our job is help students prepare themselves for anything.” Note two core shifts in this approach. The first is from a narrow “something” (balancing a checkbook, doing taxes, learning to type) to “anything.” It’s the notion of helping students to learn how to learn so that they can handle whatever challenges they face.
The second shift is from teachers as the sole source of preparation toward students as the ones preparing themselves for the future. This is the idea of shifting from compliance or engagement alone and into a place of empowerment, where students own the learning.
In other words, the best way to prepare students for the future is by empowering them in the present. When this happens, students develop the transferable skills that they will need in their careers, in a democracy, and in life.
This doesn’t mean we abandon content for “soft skills.” It simply means we teach the content at a deeper level, in a way that helps prepare students for an unpredictable world. In an often shallow world, it means inspiring deeper learning that requires deeper focus and deeper thinking. However, if we want to make this shift toward deeper learning, we need to recognize where we got off track and how we can change things.
Where Did We Get Off Track?
I entered the teaching profession right at the start of the No Child Left Behind era. We later shifted toward Race to the Top. But notice the implied metaphor. Kids are falling behind and we need to go as fast as possible to catch up. I now see this proliferation of AP courses and the obsession with grades and college entry. I’m watching students regularly tackle the kinds of math that only a select few students could do when I was in high school.
And yet . . .
We still see this panic about students failing and falling behind. Every year, I read another snarky think piece from college professors complaining that “kids these days” can’t read a classic novel. The focus seems to be “how do we improve academic rigor?”
The solution often seems to be adding more standards to the curriculum map. More content. More skills. More standards. But the net result is something rushed. Students learn the material at a shallow level and then forget it.
Meanwhile, this obsession with academic rigor, students are missing key practical skills that they need on a daily basis. I’ve seen schools cutting recess and PE in elementary school and students fail to develop healthy habits. I’ve noticed so many upper elementary and middle school students who spend hours on laptops but never learned how to type. They lack the fluency needed to type at the speed of thought. I’ve never seen so many high school students who never learned how to drive.
I would love to see schools bring back driver’s education courses. Perhaps we need to have more Family and Consumer Science courses for students of all genders focused not on job preparation but on life preparation. Maybe we need some courses that teach home repair (and, yes, I know that we can learn these things by watching YouTube videos, but again, this would focus on learning how to learn) rather than purely focusing on construction as a vocation.
As I think about these courses, whether they are driver’s education or public speaking, students aren’t just learning key practical skills that they need in the future. They’re also developing independence and self-direction. They’re growing resilient. They’re learning problem-solving. In other words, they develop the depth advantage they need in a changing world.
In terms of the more “academic” courses, one of the greatest benefits of learning content is learning how to think in a particular discipline or domain. I love this idea from Jerome Bruner that the greatest reason to learn history is not only the rich background knowledge you learn but also the ability to think like a historian or an economist. We may forget how to calculate p-values but there’s something powerful about learning to think statistically and probabilistically in life. I do not work in film or television but my Literature and Film and Intro to Cinema courses gave me a new lens for analyzing cinema and storytelling.
Where Do We Go from Here?
If we think about the notion of “they didn’t teach us that in school,” we continue to face the challenge of being relevant in a changing world. The hard part is that we can’t predict many of the skills students will need in the future. We don’t know how AI will change key industries.
But that’s why we need to adopt the mindset of vintage innovation. Vintage innovation is the overlap of “tried and true” and “never tried.” It’s the notion of classic ideas (recovering what we lost) with novel approaches. It’s the overlap of lo-fi and high-tech. Vintage innovation embraces both the timeless and the timely.
But it’s also a reminder of the power of deeper learning. Instead of moving toward a futuristic embrace of every tech tool or an old school obsession with test scores, our students will need the skills that grow into habits that eventually become mindsets. This is often what we see when school develop a Profile of a Graduate or a Portrait of a Learner.
In a world packed full of distractions, we need focus. In a world where students will face huge challenges, we need resilience and self-direction. In an age of AI, they will need to communicate with better contextual understanding and a unique voice.
We will always have moments where students leave school and say, “I wish they had taught me ______.” And that’s okay. But my hope is that students can go from saying, “I wish I had learned _______” to “I’m going to go learn ________” from a place of confidence and self-direction.
