What is the Purpose of School?

Nathan Holbert:
Welcome to Pop and Play, the podcast all about play in its many silly, serious and powerful forms. I'm Nathan Holbert.

Haeny Yoon:
And I'm Haeny Yoon. And today we're bringing you another pop off, a short episode where Nathan and I have a conversation about play and pop culture as it's currently happening or being reflected in the world. And let's be real stuff that we're popping up about in class.

Nathan Holbert:
There's a lot of stuff to pop off on these days.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes. But before we get into that, we'd like to tell you about our next play date.

Nathan Holbert:
Play date. We got another play date coming up. As a reminder, instead of waiting till the spring to release all of our episodes, we're releasing them approximately every two weeks. So you should be finding these episodes in your feed every two weeks on Tuesday. And as you already know, because we've done a few of these play dates so far, or at least one of these play dates so far, a play date is a time where we, Haeny and I, play some activity, we experience some form of play, and we invite you ahead of time to play along with us, to have that same experience on your own, and then join us for that conversation with an expert or a guest about that specific form of play. We have a new play date coming up. Haeny, you want to make sure our audience knows what our play date is?

Haeny Yoon:
Sure. That's right. Our next play date will be woodworking.

Nathan Holbert:
Woodworking.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes. Put on your flannel, pick up your ax channel in your inner Ron Swanson. Sorry. Parks and Rec ref, if you don't know.

Nathan Holbert:
I should have worn a flannel today just to really, really smile.

Haeny Yoon:
I will say though, if you don't get to woodwork, you don't get to put on your flannel. You don't get to pick up an ax. You don't channel your inner Ron Swanson. You can still listen to that episode.

Nathan Holbert:
That's right. That's right. Join us either way.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
But what are we talking about today, Haeny?

Haeny Yoon:
Today we are talking about the purpose of education.

Nathan Holbert:
Another small topic.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes. So I thought we should talk about what is education for?

Nathan Holbert:
Sure.

Haeny Yoon:
And is school the right place for it to happen?

Nathan Holbert:
Whoa. I love that framing. I'm very excited about that framing. Are schools the right system or model for doing what we believe to be important for the process of learning, socialization, all that stuff?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. What's your quick 10-second answer to that?

Nathan Holbert:
Oh man. One thing I do love hearing people say is the reason we do work in schools is because schools are where the children are. And I think that's an important thing to recognize. And we should value that. I think there's something very important and valuable about collectively through our tax dollars investing in education. I don't think that school as a system that's currently structured the way it is always the best place for the wide range of things we want young people to learn.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
And I have more to say, but I'll let you go now.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. And maybe it's good then to parse out education and schooling.

Nathan Holbert:
Ah, okay. Good. Good.

Haeny Yoon:
Because I feel like sometimes we automatically think just because someone is schooled, that they are educated, which I think are two different things. Learning and education is different than at school.

Nathan Holbert:
You're going to school us now though.

Haeny Yoon:
I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to. Okay. So let me tell you why I wanted to even talk about this in the first place. Okay. So I looked at one of the latest Pew Center reports, and it's from 2024. And I feel like a lot of times whatever research and statistics come out of the Pew Center gets taken up by education writ large. And so a recent report was talking about teachers and their satisfaction and just the work that they're doing. And so I wanted to parse out like three bullet points about things that teachers are talking about in their classrooms. And so it said, 47% of teachers say students show little or no interest in learning, that 33% say students being distracted by their cell phones is a major problem and 72% in high school settings say this is a major problem. That one in five teachers say students getting up and walking around. I'm not making this up. I'm like literally reading it. Okay.

Nathan Holbert:
You're reading it from the... Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Getting up and walking around when they're not supposed to and being disrespectful towards them are major problems. And teachers in elementary and middle schools are more likely to say those things. So let's talk for a minute about the narrative.

Nathan Holbert:
More than one in five teachers in elementary school are complaining about kids getting up when they're not supposed to. Okay.

Haeny Yoon:
Yep, yeah. So this episode is not about teachers because I think we both said this, teachers have a really hard job and they're doing hard work and in no way do we ever want to do any kind of a thing where we talk about how bad of a job teachers are doing. I think though this says a very, at least calls on a larger narrative of what we think school is for, So what messages are you getting from this?

Nathan Holbert:
When I look at those stats, I want to hang my head in shame, first of all. I think the 47% of teachers say students show little to no interest in learning is, that's half of teachers have this impression of young people. And the first thing I want to point out about that particular framing is it's entirely about the student. It's positioning, learning as a thing that students either want or don't want, and that it's their fault if they don't want it. As opposed to recognizing that school takes place in a context and a classroom as a context and the kid has all sorts of things going on in their lives.
And they have interests and all these kinds of things that all of that come together to create the conditions for somebody having an interest in learning, but that's missing from that context. And then the cell phone one, we could go on a whole thing on that. In New York City this year, actually in New York state, I believe this year, there's a cell phone ban. So cell phones are not allowed in any schools. And my kids have to put their phones in these special pouches and all that stuff.

Haeny Yoon:
Like they're going to a Broadway show?

Nathan Holbert:
Like you're at a Broadway show.

Haeny Yoon:
But you don't get to see a Broadway show.

Nathan Holbert:
I mean, their schools are cool. And then the last one being this getting up and walking around, that one just feels insane to me. The idea that that's a thing I have to be upset or frustrated. So you asked me a more simple question, which was like, "What impression kids are the problem and they're not behaving properly in school. They're not having the right attitudes. And part of the reason they're not having the right attitudes is they want to move and they want to have their phones out. It's all atmospheres.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. And they want to learn things that we're not necessarily willing or able to teach them.

Nathan Holbert:
Right, right.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. And I do feel it's like a larger indictment of what we think school is actually for and why kids will want to go there, So if I think about showing little or no interest in learning, I think, yeah, I've never actually met anyone who has no interest in learning something and I think it just really depends on whether it's something that I want to learn about, for instance, just this week I spent a lot of time on TikTok learning Chi Tong.

Nathan Holbert:
Oh weird. Is that unusual for you?

Haeny Yoon:
Okay. Anyway, one of the enormous amounts of time I spent on that was learning how to hem my pants because I went to the dry cleaner recently, altered a whole bunch of stuff, but it cost me so much money that I'm like, "I need to freaking learn how to hem my own pants."

Nathan Holbert:
Hem your pants.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes.

Nathan Holbert:
I thought you said hide my pants. I was so confused for a minute there.

Haeny Yoon:
No, not hide my pants. Yeah. That would be very scandalous, so we don't want to do that. But I feel because I'm interested in that, it's a skill that I want to learn that I am willing to watch anybody in a boring voice or however, really show me how to do this. And so, and I feel like it's something that I have interest in and I could pursue that and I don't necessarily think I have to go to school to do that. I know I can learn it online in a different kind of community.

Nathan Holbert:
Or you could come up to the Snow Day Learning Lab.

Haeny Yoon:
That's true and learn.

Nathan Holbert:
I'll get the sewing machine out and I'll teach you how to hem your pants.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, why don't I just bring my pants here and you hem it and I'll give you a nice little thank you card?

Nathan Holbert:
Oh, no, no, no, learning. Remember you're interested in learning. We just said that.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, yes. Yeah. But I think that when we say that they have little to no interest in learning, I think it's partly the interest in learning the things that we are telling them to learn. And we know that that is very arbitrary and subjective. So what we learn in school is not necessarily all things that are essential to learn in life either.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, 100%. And when you have a classroom full of students, they have different interests, they have different prior experiences, they have different goals, they have different breakfasts before they come to school, and there's a range of what each of them are ready for in a given day. And a lot of the work that I do and people in my area of research do is focusing on how do we think about building tools, technologies, curriculum, classrooms, pedagogy that can support young people finding those interests that they're passionate about and then pursuing them and exploring them in educational settings. And the most common response I get from people is, "Well, that sounds hard. Sounds like that would take a lot of time. How are you going to do that in a classroom full of kids?"

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what, my response to that would be, "It is hard. It's supposed to be."

Nathan Holbert:
Boom. It is hard. Get over it and do the work.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. It's supposed to be hard, but I feel like the payoff of that is really like, it's something else to see children really be interested and excited about learning. I would say those skills, basic skills that we are trying to build in young people through school can be achieved and attained in those spaces where they're interested in pursuing something of their own volition.

Nathan Holbert:
A thousand percent. And we have mountains of empirical evidence that suggests that to be true.

Haeny Yoon:
Right. Yeah. I think the last part of it too is I'm thinking about the disrespectful getting up of walking around part. And I just started to think about what we normalize in school settings. Even a very small thing where you're talking about this in class the other day, even a small thing like raising your hand, it's just so ingrained in us to raise our hands everywhere we go, but then we don't do that anywhere else, but in a classroom setting because it became so normal to us that that is the way that we learn to speak. Like you get reprimanded if you don't raise your hand. If you want anything like to go to the bathroom to do anything, you raise your hand. If you have a question, you raise your hand. If you have an answer or response, you raised your hand.
And I think that's a small little example, but even the sitting in a circle, being as still and quiet as possible, like putting bubbles in your mouth while you're walking down the hallway so that you don't say anything, like walking in the straightest line as possible, in a line, those are arbitrary norms that somebody made up, And somehow we've all decided that we're going to follow those arbitrary norms. And I think that statistic is really telling because then it says, oh yeah, teachers struggle with that because, and maybe perhaps instead of indicting teachers or thinking about curriculum that helps children not walk around, then maybe we shift and change that framing and that it's something else that we decide to do.

Nathan Holbert:
Not only are the social norms that somebody is invented, they become stand-ins for whether or not somebody is learning or not. And they're based upon a particular kind of cultural frame of what behavior is appropriate and not appropriate. And that's like, it has all sorts of other problematic aspects to it. The kids have to sit, they have to behave in a certain way, they have to speak a certain way, they have to talk a certain way. Not all kids are like that. And in fact, the kids that are, they're not always like that. And that doesn't mean they're not learning when they're not sitting quietly. It just means that they're... In fact, oftentimes the best learning is the loudest and craziest.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. You're making me think of something that our colleague Lolita Vasudevan, I've heard her say this before, is that just because their bodies look a certain way does not mean that they're engaged. And just because they seem distracted by a cell phone doesn't always mean that they're disengaged. And so I think sometimes we think about engagement and behaviors and maybe we need to disentangle those two things.

Nathan Holbert:
Absolutely. And disrespect is part of that. I actually wrote an article once that I'm quite proud of called-

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, what's it called?

Nathan Holbert:
It was called Constructionism as a Pedagogy of Disrespect. And it was all about the ways in which people, kids in particular, not doing what you want them to do isn't a sign that there's something wrong with the kids. In fact, it's often a sign that there's something you're missing, that you're not doing to enable them to be creative, to enable them to explore, to enable them to follow their interests and their passions. And I think that's a lesson that I... Part of the purpose of that particular article was me reflecting on my own times that I missed that and didn't engage in that, but so many of us do. And there's also, there's lots of different reasons why and how we can do that. I have this quote.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, of course. Yes, yes.

Nathan Holbert:
That I quickly had to find here because this is one of my favorite quotes from a scholar, the late Michael Eisenberg. In an article in 2012, he said, "Children don't need skills so much as they need, as do we all, a reason to get up in the morning and the morning after that, a person equipped with such a purpose will, as people tend to do, acquire the various skills that they need to achieve it. A person without such a purpose may garner dozens and dozens of skills and spend long months and years in joylessly employing them." Purpose matters.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, it does. That's very dark, but very true and also very hopeful though.

Nathan Holbert:
I find it really hopeful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. It does all of those things in one, which is great.

Nathan Holbert:
Masterful.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. So I feel like you're ready to tell us what the solution or the takeaway is, but I'm going to throw something out there. I'm going to ask you to comment, okay? So recently I came across this idea called the Politics of Possibility, which is something that Peter Moss, who's an early childhood scholar talks about. And he drew that from Loris Malaguzzi, who is credited and the founder of Reggio Emilia philosophy. And so Loris Malaguzzi created this early childhood, inquiry, play documentation place in Reggio Emilia post World War II.
After the fall of the Nazi regime, they were trying to rebuild a very war torn city circumstances that were like unimaginable. And I think you could look at that and think about the unimaginable loss that a place has, But he said, "It was the ridiculous capacity of being able to think anything and to think that anything could be physically realized." And I feel like that's the contemporary landscape that we see ourselves in, the generations before us have seen themselves in. That there is unimaginable loss, there seems to be hopelessness, it just seems like everything is broken, but that in that brokenness, there's actually a chance to reimagine something very, very different. So what is your what if as we close this?

Nathan Holbert:
So I mean, What you just said made me think of COVID and I don't want to go back to the dark place. I want to stay in a happy place here, but I think this is another example of a time where school did not exist, could not exist in a way in which we were used to it being. And we had an opportunity to imagine something different, imagine something new. And we didn't, What did we imagine? We imagined Zoom school, which was the worst version of school, but on a computer instead. It was worksheets and lectures and it was terrible. But there are lots and lots of opportunities and times that we can try to imagine some new version of school, a school that's more centered on young people's passions as Eisenberg was just talking about that's more centered on the histories and the experiences of the kids that are in the school or in the classroom, a more social, a more loving, a more joyful space. And that might involve getting up and walking around at random times of the day.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. And I think that's why we've done six seasons of Pop and Play because we really believe that there is a space for play and inquiry to be happening in classrooms. And maybe that is the pivot that we want to take when we think about pedagogy in curriculum.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. There's tons and tons of very specific, very practical examples out there. Maybe we can link some of those in the show notes, but I think it starts with this respect, this play attitude.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. All right. Thanks for another great conversation. We want to give you a reminder that our next play date will be making stuff with wood. And I will say interpret as you will.

Nathan Holbert:
I'm not even sure what we're making with wood yet but we're going to do it.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, exactly. Because I was going to ask, what does that mean? And my answer is whatever you think it means.

Nathan Holbert:
That's right. We look forward to playing with wood with you sometime soon. In the meantime, please leave us a comment, send us a message to tell us about your feelings of the episode, what we could do differently, and share it with other people.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. All right. Thank you for joining us again.

Nathan Holbert:
Great.

Haeny Yoon:
Bye.

Nathan Holbert:
Bye.