Last week my son spent 6-8 hours a day doing “online school,” which consisted of the technology version of worksheets. There were multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks, short answers—all the stuff he would have done at his physical school… only without human interaction.

With schools closed indefinitely because of COVID-19, it’s worth asking:

• How much of what we call “learning” is better described as “schooling”? [1]

• Conversely, what kinds of deep learning do students experience independent of—or even in spite of—“school”?

Kids learn all the time—informally and often peer-to-peer. Watch two kids two figure out how to do something new and you will see that we are hard wired to learn.

Are we trying to prepare students who are good at schooling or who are good at learning?

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[1] In Work Rules, Lazslo Bock, former VP of People at Google, writes, “Chris Argyris, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, wrote a lovely article in 1977, in which he looked at the performance of Harvard Business School graduates ten years after graduation. By and large, they got stuck in middle management, when they had all hoped to become CEOs and captains of industry. What happened? Argyris found that when they inevitably hit a roadblock, their ability to learn collapsed:

‘What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking of the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation…. Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure…. They become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it most.’

So the “best learners” were only great at “schooling,” not at actual “learning.”

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