What is Lifeworthy?

Several months ago, when I was exploring graduate programs, I came across the following short interview of David Perkins who recently retired from the teaching faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education after forty years.  He still works with Harvard on research.  It intrigued and shocked me to hear a powerful policy voice say that “90% of what we typically teach in school is a waste of time.”  The short clip gives a general overview of Perkin’s ideas about what should be learned, but it left me wanting a more elaborate and specific explanation.   A short time after watching this interview, I saw that David Perkins would be one of the plenary speakers at the Future of Learning Institute at Harvard.  Last week, I got to hear David Perkins explain his ideas over what should be learned in an hour and a half talk. 

I find the following summary of some of Perkins’s ideas a poor substitute for listening to his plenary session at the FOL Institute.  Harvard did make a recording of the talk, and I hope they will release it to the general public at some time.  

Perkins started with the idea that we are educating today’s youth for an unknown world.  Previous generations could count on their children’s world looking fairly similar to their own.  However, with the rapid changes in technology and globalization, we can no longer say this is true.  Students need to concentrate on learning “lifeworthy” content and skills -- tools and knowledge that will be useful in an unknown world.

Lifeworthy skills and content, according to Perkins, lead learners to insight, action, and ethics.  He also believes that schools should focus on “comeupance,” that is things that come up regularly in a person’s life.  He gave a few specific curricular examples. First, students should learn basics of statistics and probability instead of the quadratic formula.  In evidence of this, he asked the 200-plus member audience to raise their hands if anyone had used quadratic equations some time in the last ten years.  Only a ten or fifteen people responded.  He then refined the search by asking how many use quadratic equations in a way outside of teaching it to others.  Only three people were left with their hands up, with the conclusion that “the main purpose of teaching quadratic equations seems to be to enable the next generation of teachers to teach the quadratic equation.”  Perkins would describe the teaching of quadratic equations to be “niche learning” that may be important to a deep understanding of the field of mathematics but is not a lifeworthy topic.  Another example that he gave of niche learning that is taught in almost all biology classes is mitosis.  Instead of spending time teaching mitosis, he argues that schools should focus on topics like communicable diseases and how they spread in a global world.  The last of his example was the the teaching of the French Revolution.  If we are teaching the French Revolution as a stand alone piece of knowledge, then it does not meet the criteria of being lifeworthy.  But, we can investigate topics like social injustice through the lens of the French Revolution to make them relevant.

Perkins certainly does not want to abandon the traditional disciplines that are currently taught in most schools.  He begs us to examine what we teach and only teach what will provide insight, lead to action, or help develop ethics. We must incorporate the "lifeworthy" and dismiss the "lifewimpy."

The Knife

On our recent trip to Boston, my seven-year-old son, Charlie, was finally allowed to purchase a pocket knife.  One of the requirements of ownership was for him to get training from me once we returned home.  
We arrived back in Asheville at 6:00 on Saturday evening after a full day in the minivan, and among Charlie’s first words were, “Can I get my pocketknife training now?”

“No, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.  We’ve got to unpack, do laundry, and get some rest.”  Moaning and disgruntled looks followed.
First thing on Sunday morning, “Can you train me now?”
“No, you’ll have to wait until we get back from church.”  More moaning and disgruntlement, but Charlie knew not to be too vocal proclaiming injustice because I still held all the cards.
Finally, the moment had arrived, and I had an internally motivated learner on my hands.  We sat on the back porch and I asked him to think about the difference between a tool and a toy.  He immediately answered that the knife was dangerous and toys weren’t dangerous.  So we talked about under what circumstances a knife could be dangerous.  I also talked about places where knives were not allowed and why they weren’t allowed.
Next we went through the process of actually using the knife.  How to open it safely, how and what to cut, and how to close it safely.  
The last thing I talked to him about was under what conditions he could show it to his friends and let them handle it.  (Owning a pocket knife has got to raise you a few levels in seven-year-old coolness factor.)  Then we were done, or so Charlie thought.
He was just about to run out the door to run down to Graham and Reed’s house when I told him that he would have to wait until later in the day to show them.
“WHAT?”
“Well, I want to see if you can actually remember all the stuff we went over.”
You can imagine the look I got.  Yes, I should have told him going into the lesson that there would be a quiz, but I didn’t think of it until I started imagining Charlie waving his knife around replicating some crazed street fighter because the learning did not stick.
So, after a few agonizing hours, I sat Charlie back down and asked him to tell me what he remembered about our talk.  He immediately said, “Knives are dangerous.”  
“Okay, what else do you remember.”
Charlie thought for a while.  “I don’t know.  I don’t remember what you said; I only remember what I said.”
I had just spent four days at the Future of Learning Institute at Harvard that was partly focused on trying to shift people’s thinking from a belief that learning is achieved through transference to a view that learning occurs through process.  Charlie’s response was the explanation point to this theme.

Charette - Learning Through Process

                                     -  video created by Julie Daughtry

As a part of the Future of Learning (FOL) Institute at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, a small number of the 200-plus institute participants volunteered and were selected to participate in a charette.  When asked to volunteer for this experience, we were told little about the process other than the fact that it would involve designing an artifact to represent the learner of the future.

While others may define a charette to fit their own needs, our experience in charette could be defined as a small group working together over multiple, intense sessions to design and construct a product through collaboration.  The process was valued equally, or perhaps more, than the product.

The success of the charette was achieved by the intentional and thoughtful planning of our facilitators, Justin Reich and Arzu Mistry, along with several FOL Fellows.  The sessions were an outstanding example of excellent teaching and reinforced my belief that great teaching occurs as a result of great planning.  While what happens in a classroom has been referred to as art, that art only occurs when the teacher is constantly engaged in the creation of the experience.

This charette experience focused on the process of creation.  Daily elements of scaffolding were put into place before we began our design work.  The intention of the scaffolding was to prepare us for the process that we would undertake during that specific class period.  The best example of this scaffolding was prior to the session when we were asked to develop our design elements.  We were asked to create something in five minutes given a concept and a medium.  We all randomly chose slips of paper from two piles; my medium was a sculpture and my concept was “tension between old and new.”  I had five minutes to think of an idea and make something.  The limited time forced me just to do something without thinking.  Most of the time this is the exact opposite of what teachers try to get students to do, but in this case the purpose was for us to generate ideas.  It was freeing not to have to think about whether the idea was good or bad and just do something with it.

The other effect of this small exercise was that it lowered tension and stress for me.  Justin told us that we didn’t have time for good ideas, we just needed to jump in and do it.  This removed the expectation of judgement by others.  We were all in the same boat, individuals creating something under impossible constraints with little or no expectations.  Many of the products of this brief exercise were creative because the exercise forced us to get out of our normal analytical minds and access the creative parts of our mind.  One of my partners stated that before the charette she thought she was not an artist and after it she thought that she was an artist.  I had the same feeling as I accessed and employed my “creative mind.”

There were many other short scaffolding sessions before and during our work.  All of them were purposeful, and, for me, effective.

The other element that focused us on the process was forced reflection.  At different points of our work session, we were asked to reflect on how we felt or what we were doing in front of a camera.  This was done in two different ways, one was in the “confessional booth” where we responded in front of a camera to a written question without anyone else present.  The other method occurred when we were filmed responding to oral questions in the middle of our design work.  Perhaps Arzu and Justin were really interested in documenting the process, but the effect for me was that it forced me to look inside myself frequently throughout the process.  The filming was essential to this process as it made my reply spontaneous.  I didn’t have time to craft a response.  While I don’t remember specific revelations in design that occurred as a result of this process, I do remember feeling less stress and more focused afterwards.  I was never asked to look at my recorded reflections, and I don’t know if anyone ever looked at them.  This made and makes no difference to me as the value gained was in the moment.

The final essential element in process was getting outside input into our design.  There were a couple of formal review periods where people outside of the charette were invited to question us about our process and design.  There were also informal reviews done by Justin, Arzu, and the Fellows.  The reviews were always done by questioning:  Have you thought about this?  Why did you do it that way? What are you trying to express?  What about the use of color?  Why did you choose wood as a medium? Getting input was crucial to the process.  Nearly every time someone interacted with us it changed our design to some degree.  At the very least it forced us to think in deeper and broader ways about the design.


While I have believed in Constructivist learning for years, participating in this charette gave me a personal understanding of the process that I previously lacked. To be a student in a classroom where process was central to learning deepened my appreciation for this model and will give me a framework to build upon.