Technically, I’m a high-school dropout, despite having taken more than a few college-level courses. I never bothered to stop long enough to collect any formal certification. And I have certainly never stopped learning.

I was lucky enough to be born white, male, and middle-class into a generation that was literally handed permission to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” I grew up assuming that the education I needed was available to me. If I wanted to know something, I could find someone who knew it, read a book, take a class, try something, make a mistake, ask a question, or simply follow my curiosity until it led somewhere interesting.

I still learn that way. In fact, I suspect most of us do. Which is why I’ve long wondered whether we have teaching a little backwards. We spend an enormous amount of time deciding what students need to know, teaching it to them, and then testing to see whether they learned it. What if we spent more of that time creating the conditions that make people want to learn in the first place?

What if the real work of teaching is helping someone become curious enough, confident enough, and free enough to learn for themselves?

Watch a young child and it’s obvious. They touch things. Take things apart. Ask endless questions. Imitate people. Invent games. Fall down. Try again. Nobody has to teach a toddler how to be curious.

Maybe the teacher’s job, then, is something different: to notice what catches someone’s interest and help them follow it. That might mean introducing a possibility, providing a tool, asking a good question, offering encouragement, or creating a challenge. Sometimes it means simply getting out of the way.

This doesn’t make teachers less important. It makes their work more interesting. Instead of asking, How do I get someone to learn what I want to teach? we can ask, What makes someone want to learn?

‍Curiosity does. Purpose does. A problem worth solving does. Making something does. Discovering that you can do something today that you couldn’t do yesterday does.

And agency does. I know that some of my own sense of agency comes from privilege. I grew up assuming the world was open to me, that my questions were worth pursuing, and that if I wanted to learn something, I could find a way. Not everyone grows up with that assumption.

But I don’t think the answer to privilege is shame or embarrassment. It is recognizing what that privilege gave me and wanting everyone to experience the same sense of possibility.

Maybe that is one of the greatest things a teacher can give us: the confidence that our questions matter, that we are capable of pursuing them, and that the world is ours to explore.

Maybe part of the answer to our “education crisis” is helping more people understand that their education belongs to them. Agency and belief in our own capacity don’t require another curriculum or another program.

They begin by helping people discover that they are capable of learning, and that their education never has to end.

One liners

*About the painting

Winslow Homer painted Snap the Whip in 1872, just seven years after the Civil War. It shows barefoot boys playing what we would now call crack-the-whip before a small red country schoolhouse. Homer made two closely related oil versions; the smaller is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Painted so soon after the war, the image can be read as a vision of the country’s future. The game depends on cooperation and coordination: each child must respond to the movements of everyone else. As the Met observes, those qualities might have been understood as virtues essential to reunifying the nation. Yet the broken chain also suggests how difficult it can be to sustain that connection.

There is another reading available here—one that doesn’t need to be presented as Homer’s intention. The schoolhouse sits in the background; the learning takes place in the foreground.

These boys are not seated at desks, receiving instruction. They are organizing themselves, testing their bodies, cooperating, discovering cause and effect, and taking risks. Some keep their footing; others tumble into the grass. Then, presumably, they get up and try again.