The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith

Learning what we want is easy. Forgetting what we're forced to learn is easy too.

America is interested mainly in money-making and its auxiliary occupations such as publicity and the media; purely cultural education is something extra and is regarded as a luxury. We want schools to teach 'excellence' as we want our cars to have a shiny finish...Are there outstanding cultured citizens? Of course there are. But only because at age 25 or 35 they understood that the system had cheated them all along.¹

— Thomas Molnar

The question about school should not be, “Why don’t students learn?” Rather the question should be, “What are students learning?” In Frank Smith’s The Book of Learning and Forgetting he asserts that students are always learning. They can’t help but learn, none of us can. We’re learning all the time, but not everything learned is worthwhile. Sometimes, for example in schools, most of what is learned is not.

Smith contrasts two views of learning, what he calls the “classic” and “official” views. The classic view

says, very simply, that we learn from people around us with whom we identify. We can’t help learning from them, and we learn without knowing that we are learning.²

The classic view is the oldest view and has been around far longer than the official view which

is a theory that learning is work, and that anything can be learned provided sufficient effort is expended and sufficient control is enforced.³

Smith argues that learning is not hard work. Learning is effortless. When students are learning what they want to learn, they’ll remember those things without even trying. But forcing students to learn something that they are not interested in will soon be forgotten. What they’ll learn from the experience is that learning is boring, learning is hard. Remember all those tests we crammed for?

The official view of learning is all about memorization. Learn this list of vocabulary words. Memorize the periodic table of elements. Answer these questions about the story. The classic view of learning is about growth. Real learning builds on what preceded it. It is easily remembered and carefree.

If this sounds like pie in the sky thinking, it’s because most of us went to school where we were subjected to the official view of learning. The official view is new. In a myriad of ways it teaches students things that are harmful.

We can all learn things that we might be better off not learning, that diminish our opinion of ourselves or of other people, to the detriment of the way we view ourselves and our place in the world.⁴

It’s easy to rationalize, “Well school worked for me.” But did it? Think about it. My experience with school was boredom and drudgery as it was for millions of others forced to sit in classrooms for hours and hours everyday, filling out worksheets, taking quizzes, reading textbooks knowing you had to answer the questions at the end of each chapter. There was always a task to complete after an event. “Learn these 10 words….there will be a test to make sure you did.” “Read about the American Revolution….there will be test to make sure you did.” “Read this short story….answer the questions at the end.”

I remember homework. I would read the first question at the end of the chapter…first. Then look for the answer. Then the second question, then look for the answer and so on.

Education can be better than that!

Students are not allowed to simply enjoy reading, they have to be tested to make sure they enjoyed it and more importantly that they “learned” something. The by product of that is they’ll forget whatever they might have learned because the goal of the reading is to do well on the test.

But we can only learn from activities that are interesting and comprehensible to us; in other words, activities that are satisfying. If this is not the case, only inefficient rote-learning, or memorization, is available to us and forgetting is inevitable.⁵

Smith brings up many arguments against the classic view of learning and answers them. One of these is “Then what should teachers do? What is their role if they’re not giving tests and assigning homework?” Smith says teachers should be guides. They should help students excel at what they’re interested in and help them find activities and a life’s work they’ll enjoy.

I didn’t become a reader until my early twenties. I’m not exactly sure why that happened. I was obsessed with sports which might be one reason. My parents never read to me that I can remember, that could be another. The books I was assigned to read in Junior High and High School I didn’t enjoy. The only two I can think of are The Scarlett Letter and The Call of the Wild. I’ve read both books since then and enjoyed them. But as I’ve chronicled in another book review, school was boring. It was, for me, drudgery getting through the day.

Smith advocates for fixing public education, though he acknowledges that changes may come slowly and be difficult. He writes:

The first step, in short, if for teachers to uncover the consequences of what they do; what things are good, and what things are not. The second step is to do more of the productive things, and less of the others.⁶

Teachers, he says, have to be ready to “change the world” one small step at a time. This is asking a lot of teachers who will have dozens of different views about what it is they think they’re supposed to be doing in the classroom. This is what Smith recommends:

I offer a number of positive suggestions, including abolition of all of the following:

• tests,

• fragmented instructional materials and procedures,

• memorization and recapitulation exercises,

• segregation in special ability groups,

• coercion,

• and time constraints.[bullet point structure added]⁷

This a good list. How long until it happens?

This is where I differ with Smith. I don’t think the schools can be fixed (maybe he’d think so now). Unfortunately, schools are working as those who set them up intended them to work: to create obedient citizens to fill the jobs necessary for an industrial, corporatized, bureaucratic and consumer-driven society. John Taylor Gatto, who taught in New York City for 30 years, thought the schools were unfixable. Even with good teachers the structure is set up to inhibit critical thought and the best kind of learning.

So what should we do? What should parents do?

Homeschool.

Parents can do all of the above immediately. Why wait? Why let children languish in the school system while people are trying to change it—if it can be changed at all? Here’s Smith in another passage:

But to say that even such teachers [who fight against the system] and their students can be unaffected by the general environment of education is like saying that health-conscious individuals can safely swim in polluted water. No one escapes the second-hand smoke of the official theory of learning.¹

Exactly. No one escapes.

Parents should pull their children out of school. Return them to the classic method of education, a method that has worked for thousands of years.

Homeschool now, not tomorrow, not next week, or next year. Now.

Children deserve that.

Notes

1. Molnar, Thomas, "The Teaching of Humanities and Other Trivia," Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, September 1990, pp. 24-25, p. 24.

2. Smith, Frank, The Book of Learning and Forgetting, Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York and London, 1998. p. 3.

3. p. 4.

4. p. 31.

5. p. 87.

6. p. 92.

7. p. 90.

8. p. 98.