Stephen Day is Director of the VCU Center for Economic Education at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Business. The Center educates future and current K-12 teachers in how to teach economics, conducts research on economics education, and supports teachers in central Virginia. He is also a board member of Scholé House, a Christian Study Center adjacent to VCU. In this essay, Day continues our series on the question What Is Education? by exploring two things: the analogy of the growth of a plant with the process of education and the experience of the Biblical figure Daniel who receives wisdom in the pagan courts of Babylon. When you’ve finished reading the essay, please feel free to “like” it, comment on it, and share it with others.
A Seed Grows in Secret
After our students leave our classes, how do we know if they learned anything? Upon completing a college class, students rarely have further contact with their professors. Professors may wonder if the students retained their lessons. Indeed, as time passes, professors, in a moment of dangerous ennui, may wonder if their work has borne any fruit. Course evaluations are of little help for informing this question, as they over-sample both the most happy and the most angry students. Other metrics are similarly besmirched by sampling bias. And nobody who values their dignity and self-worth should ever look at RateMyProfessor.com.
I will give you a report from the future, as it were, on two types of educational outcomes that I have experienced. I hope that with some illumination from education studies and Christian thought, they can help answer the question posed by this essay series, “What is Education?” by showing us what education is and disciplining our thinking by considering how it happens. Of course, there are many possible definitions of education (Curtis, et al., 2013); by focusing on how education happens, I hope to provide additional perspective on what it actually is.
During my doctoral coursework, I took a required class in Educational Psychology, and it was a smashing success. Almost everything the professor taught blossomed into applicable knowledge. I recognized everything he described from my eight years teaching high school: Students need to learn how to manage cognitive load! Students need to interpret new information according to a schema! Students cannot learn well while multitasking! With each new lesson in Ed Psych, I thought, “Yes! That’s exactly what I saw as a high school teacher. If only I had learned all this earlier, I would have been so much better equipped to teach my students. Why didn’t they teach me this in the School of Education when I was in college?” I had in fact taken an Ed Psych class during summer term after my freshman year. So I decided to go find my old undergrad notebooks and see what they had actually taught me.
They had taught me exactly the same material.
As an undergraduate, I had apparently learned the material well enough to get a decent grade (a B), but had done exactly what every professor fears – I had forgotten it all or never really internalized it in the first place. If I had been a plant, I would have grown roots just deep enough to sprout in July (for the exam), but not deep enough to sustain me past August. I failed to take hold of quality instruction that would have helped me in my career. Only after struggling through teaching high school did I learn to value the key lessons: what inhibits student learning, how people memorize things, how teachers can help students transfer knowledge from one situation to another, and so forth.
To classroom teachers, education might just be a war for students’ attention. After all, people are constantly learning. They are just not necessarily learning what schools want them to learn. Some students will not spend any time on their math assignments, but will spend hours practicing kickflips on their skateboards. If this sounds over-cynical or critical of students, it is not meant to be. Remember, I did eventually learn that Ed Pysch material, and I am even communicating about it years later in this essay. Before our lessons become real education, sometimes they just need the right conditions and motivation. And even then, education can occur slowly.
Education, then, is the growth of the mind. In this definition, the verb “growth” shows the slow, complex, often-perplexing way that people’s thinking improves as they learn. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all without the right conditions. The noun “mind” emphasizes that education has to do with thinking and cannot be only an improvement in physical abilities (though it often includes these, as in learning sports or music). “Growth” is not only a definition, but can also be a metaphor for what the educational process looks like. Growing a mind is a lot like growing a plant.
My brother-in-law operates a family farm (a nursery) for growing trees, flowers, and other decorative plants. As he told me: “In both education and farming, you can control a lot of things, but you can’t control everything. You plant a seed and do everything you can to help it grow, but in the end, you’re not the one that makes it grow.” There are many things that can go wrong in his nursery. Weeds and pests can attack the plants. He has even had to deal with a large herd of vandalizing deer. There can be too much or too little sun, water, or heat. Some plants thrive where some struggle. Just so in education.
Consider this successful experience from my senior-year undergraduate course on the American Revolution. My professor assigned a research project on any relevant topic we chose. The research had to be done using primary sources, which meant using the microfiche reader in the library’s sub-sub-basement to browse through 18th-century newspapers. I did what many novice researchers did: I balanced an impossibly broad and imprecise thesis statement (“The nature of Protestantism caused the disestablishment of religion in the United States Constitution”) upon lots of dorm-room philosophizing and a tiny spindle of evidence. I believe my evidence consisted of four total primary source quotations: one from a newspaper article, two from sermons, and one from Edmund Burke.
After I defended my paper in front of the class, my professor began his feedback by saying, “A word of advice to everyone: If you are ever writing a research paper for a class, avoid writing it in your professor’s area of expertise.” It turns out that he was a scholar of early American religion. He asked a few questions that I couldn’t answer (“if Protestantism leads to disestablishment, then why did the colonies have established churches?”), and thereby politely but not too gently demolished my argument. He gave the paper a B-minus for being “well-written and well-structured” but lacking evidence and being wrong.
What the professor never knew is that I reflected on this experience for years. I considered that my claim was so broad as to be unprovable without mountains of evidence, if at all. I noticed that I had decided on my claims before I had read any sources. I reflected that it would be easier to write a good paper if I kept my claims narrow and close to the evidence. I started applying these thoughts to other empirical claims, and these got me interested in research. When I started working on my doctorate (in education, not history), I employed these lessons as soon as I started research assignments. Though he did not know it, my history professor had given me an excellent education.
When did this education actually happen? Was it in the class? Or upon reflection in the years after I graduated? Or upon application in grad school? Or some combination of these? And did it happen because I had more instruction, or more reflection, or more maturity, or because I felt a need to know the material? Or was it just because I had a feeling that I was being challenged by my professor? And would other students have thrived when being so sharply and publicly challenged by their professor? For this growing plant, it was the right combination of sun, water, and heat.
It appears that education in this instance began with the class, but grew slowly as I reflected on my ongoing experiences with research methods. The interaction between formal learning and my ongoing reflection on it in light of experience shows that education can be both an outcome and a process, in that people create meaning as they apply their experiences to the real world and then apply the stimulus from the real world to their experiences (Splitter, 2009). The alert reader will recognize this as the psychological theory of constructivism, which in its broadest sense means that we create meaning as our experiences encounter reality.
Sometimes the learning process is so gradual as to be nearly invisible. In my own field (economics and personal finance education), scholars have even questioned the efficacy of university education. Brian Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, for example, posits that the wage premium students receive from a university education is almost entirely due to signaling talent, rather than creating talent (Caplan, 2018; Loveday, 2019). In other words, a university education is mostly just a very high-cost version of a standardized test. Indeed, curriculum studies often show small or weak effect sizes to educational interventions when compared to control groups, especially when measuring real world impact rather than grades or test scores. For example, this result has played out in critiques of personal finance education. Several studies have shown that a formal personal finance education has no impact on peoples’ financial choices (Fernandes et al., 2014).
But the most well-designed educational studies show that if students receive deep instruction in something, they tend to learn it. To take the example of personal finance education, a more recent meta-analysis shows that if students have a mandated class in personal finance, their teachers are well-trained in curriculum, and the class is implemented faithfully (that is, students get lots of instruction), students actually do improve their financial decisions several years into the future (Urban, 2018; Kaiser et al., 2022). This is one example of a theme in curriculum studies: The learning effects are often difficult to see up close, but if someone learns something faithfully over the years, and reflects on it, the lessons tend to stick. One startling example of this comes from South America. Economists found that a number of communities, all close to missions created by Jesuits who emphasize education, are still associated more than 200 years later with better education and earnings than areas influenced by other missionary groups who value education less (Valencia, 2019).[1] Education matters. Our educational choices matter. Sometimes these effects are difficult to perceive without well-designed, quasi-experimental methods or natural experiments.
In a similar way, learning grows almost imperceptibly, like a plant. A seed encounters soil, sunlight, and water, eventually growing up into a plant. Some seeds never take root, some develop shallow roots, and some flourish. The planter has some control over the growing environment, but that control is not total. The planter cannot control the weather. In the same way, teachers can plant seeds, but do not have total control over how they grow. However, they do have some control. Just as planters are constantly tending to the plants and trying to find every possible way to help them grow up strong, good teachers are always working to cultivate learning as best they can. Good planters never say, “Hey, I plant the seed and then leave the plant to grow on itself. I can’t force it to grow.” Planters are always alert to the growing environment, looking for ways to draw the plant to new heights.
As my brother-in-law put it, “The roots always grow first, then the top grows. Plants go through that cycle: roots, then shoots.” He might have also added “fruits,” to round out the common agricultural saying. In this view, a plant prepares for future growth by setting roots. It then grows visibly as green shoots emerge.
The Christian thinker can take this process deeper by invoking the biblical concept of wisdom. In the Bible, the story of the prophet Daniel shows how education can flourish into wisdom. This account occurs after Babylon conquered Israel. The victorious empire sought to inculcate the ruling class of the subjugated land with Babylonian values so the Babylonians enrolled Daniel and his friends in an advanced three-year educational program. They were chosen for “showing aptitude for every kind of learning, [being] well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace” (Dan 1:4). Daniel and his colleagues walked a fine line during their studies: they remained fastidious in their observance of God’s law, even at the risk of offending their sponsors. They also excelled in their Babylonian education. The result was that “God gave them learning and skill in all [Babylonian] literature and wisdom… And in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom” (Dan 1:20).
In Daniel, wisdom is education in full bloom. It encompasses maturity, learning of all kinds (including secular learning), godliness, discretion, intelligence, bravery, and purity. In addition to these, God gives extra insight, the “deep and hidden things” that he reveals with the “light that dwells in him” (Dan 2:22). All this serves a purpose: God had providentially orchestrated events to put a spotlight on his own Name and glory in the face of the greatest emperor in the world.
Daniel’s story shows the majestic heights that are possible through wisdom. My own growth in wisdom has been fitful and tentative. I did grow in my appreciation of research methods in history, but I missed applying the insights of educational psychology to my high school classroom instruction until they hit me all at once in graduate school. By then, I was mature enough to hunger for new insight that would help my students. Roots, shoots, and fruits.
My story, Daniel’s story, and viewing education as a process should encourage professors and teachers if they feel like their efforts are going to waste. Students, it seems, forget everything they learned as soon as they take the final exam. Sadly, many probably do; not everyone is a top-flight student like Daniel. But when students encounter enough teachable moments and combine these with their personal experiences and growing maturity, education happens in ways that we might not expect. In this process, Christians can see God’s providential hand at work. As theologian John Piper wrote, “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life. Not only may you see a tiny fraction of what God is doing in your life; the part you do see may make no sense to you.” Professors should take this insight as an opportunity to pray, having faith that God is working in the lives of their former students in ways that they do not see. Christians can have faith in the providence of God, knowing that he is always at work and that he rewards the seeking of wisdom.
As a young student, I initially missed my Ed Psych professor’s wisdom, so I had to learn the hard way. But at the same time, I slowly internalized my history professor’s lessons about research. Eventually, applications from lessons I had learned years before began forming. When professors teach, we usually get very little feedback about what students have actually taken away from our work, but we can know this: our former students are still learning the lessons we taught them. They are turning at least some of those lessons into knowledge. Sometimes even wisdom.
By faith, Christians can trust that God is intimately involved in everything that happens, including the effects of our work. Where we might see a failed lesson plan, he sees 10,000 things that he is doing in our and our students’ lives. Equipped with this knowledge, Christian professors can react by praying regularly for ourselves and our students, then walking with confidence into the work that God has put in front of us, knowing that he is faithful to complete what he has begun.
Sources:
Caplan, B. (2018). The case against education: Why the education system is a waste of time and money. Princeton University Press.
Curtis, Will; Ward, Stephen; Sharp, John; Hankin, Les (2013). What is education? In Education studies: An issue based approach. Learning Matters. https://books.google.com/books?id=B_9OAgAAQBAJ&pg=PR3&source=gb_mobile_entity&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&gl=US#v=onepage&q&f=false
English Standard Version Bible. (2001). ESV Online.
https://esv.literalword.com/
Fernandes, D., Lynch Jr, J. G., & Netemeyer, R. G. (2014). Financial literacy, financial education, and downstream financial behaviors. Management Science, 60(8), 1861-1883.
Kaiser, T., Lusardi, A., Menkhoff, L., & Urban, C. (2022). Financial education affects financial knowledge and downstream behaviors. Journal of Financial Economics, 145(2), 255-272.
Loveday, V. (2019). The case against education: Why the education system is a waste of time and money, by Brian Caplan (Review) . Journal of Cultural Economics, 12(1).
Piper, J. (2013). God is always doing 10,000 things in your life. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/god-is-always-doing-10000-things-in-your-life (Accessed December 7, 2022).
Splitter, L. J. (2009). Authenticity and constructivism in education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28(2), 135-151.
Urban, C. (2018). Better borrowing: How state-mandated financial education drives college financing behavior. National Endowment for Financial Education.
Valencia Caicedo, F. (2019). The mission: Human capital transmission, economic persistence, and culture in South America. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(1), 507-556.
[1] I implore students of the liberal arts to forgive my repeated use of money as a measure of educational success; it’s my area of study. I do not disparage more humanistic educational outcomes.
This is lovely, sensitive, practical stuff, Dr. Day, for which many thanks. Jesus' teaching about the sower and his four soils helps me constantly, as does the Apostle's reminder about Who gives the growth in the gardens we more or less conscientiously tend. We have to think long-term, yes, and we have to think in faith—for, unlike most gardeners, we won't see the fruits of our labours ever.
Thank God, then, for the occasional note from a grateful alumnus/a. My advice? Multiply every such communication by at least 10x. That's easily the number of people who feel the way that former student does, I'm sure of it.