Paul Lockhart is a mathematician that has taught at Brown University and UC Santa Cruz. Most recently since 2000, Lockhart has dedicated his life to teaching math to K-12 students at St Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York. Lockhart's Lament is a necessary albeit depressing wake-up call to teachers, mathematicians, parents and policymakers alike. Lockhart's critique of conventional education extends beyond mathematics and can be applied to all fields taught in academia, from kindergarten to university. So what about the system causes one such grief?
Math to Lockhart is an art form. Like math, the sciences, the humanities, the social sciences can all be treated in a similar manner as there is always room for creativity no matter what area you're in. He starts by comparing mathematics to music. In Lockhart's eyes a math class is the equivalent of music class where in which we take out our staff paper and copy notes down and transpose them into another key... or a painting class that spends the whole class teaching kids the names of every brush variant or how to dip their brushes in paint and clean it off, In this nightmare, the great musicians are the ones with perfect penmanship, the great painters are those that... don't paint.
This world is becoming increasingly optimistic in the wrong way. Peter Thiel called it 'indefinite optimism' - where you assume the world would get better automatically without doing anything about it yourself. As Lockhart puts it, the politicians say, "we need higher standards." The schools say, "we need more money and equipment." The only people that know what's going on are the students. It's weird because usually when the clients or customers say the product is shit, businesses usually that it quite seriously but in this case, we say fuck you and proceed with no changes whatsoever. A unique combination of social pressures has allowed dynamic to persist for a very long time and it's this phenomenon that one laments over.
The reason academia conducts itself in such a rigid, stodgy format is due to the fact that we as a society don't recognise mathematics, history, biology even literature as an art form, at least not the academic versions. Lockhart says that this uninspiring method of teaching is a self-perpetuating monster:
"Students learn about math from their teachers, and teachers learn about it from their teachers, so this lack of understanding and appreciation for mathematics in our culture replicates itself indefinitely. Worse, the perpetuation of this 'pseudo-mathematics', this emphasis on the accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols, creates its own culture and its own set of values. Those who have become adept at it derive a great deal of self-esteem from their success."
Since math is an art form it is a process of hard creative work. It should be taught by people who appreciate the art of mathematics. Would you accept an art teacher who has never picked up a pencil or stepped foot inside a museum? It's not that every maths teacher needs to be Isaac Newton but they should at least like the subject enough to explore it in their own time.
If we reduce learning to a mere transmission of data the excitement of stumbling upon something new gets lost in the void. Teaching is about honesty. We all know that the best teachers we ever had were honest people; they had an actual relationship with their students that extended beyond the scope of whatever they were doing in class. The best teachers in some sense were not "teachers" in the traditional sense - they weren't up on a pedestal; they didn't snap at every inconvenience; they simply treated you like a person... they were open and comfortable sharing their excitement with the class. Because teaching is about character more than anything else, Lockhart firmly believes that you can't teach teaching.
"Students are not aliens. They respond to beauty and pattern, and are naturally curious like anyone else. Just talk to them! And more importantly, listen to them!
So.. what next. Like many outspoken critics of education have many opinions on this, such a complex topic is not so black and white but it begins with teaching people to be fascinated by the world around them - to allow students to discover the world for themselves. Creative work is hard and everybody has their own intuition with things so teaching things from the top down instead of from the bottom up. Lockhart would rather a student spend gruelling hours trying to find out why the area of a triangle rather than just giving them the formula because they would've constructed their own neural networks and discovered something themselves - something that will allow them to keep chasing secrets in the world.
