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."