Education Is Intended to Be a Gauntlet, Not Just a Credentialing Process

Is the value of an education in the credential that you receive or in the learning itself?

I think it's a combination, but often we leave one of them out.

And the best way to think about this to my mind is like a gauntlet, like an experience that you go through that is tough, that has a filtering effect on the people who are going through it.

Not everybody makes it, but that also has a beneficial effect on everybody who goes through it.

in the sense that it makes them better off, it makes them stronger, right?

And this is obvious for some things like bootcamp, right?

Like if you join the military, you go through a process that does weed people out.

Not everybody makes it through bootcamp.

Not everybody makes it through basic training.

Certainly not everybody makes it through BUDS, the SEAL training.

And that is part of what they're going for, right?

They need to filter out the people who are not going to make it, but they also need to make everybody stronger.

And I think that's a good metaphor for how K-12 education should work in the sense that we do want everybody to make it through.

We do have different goals than the Navy SEALs.

We want everybody to graduate from high school, but we want everybody to get stronger along the way.

We want people to get smarter.

We want them to learn things.

We want them to develop skills that they will need for success in life.

And when we only emphasize the credentialing aspect and we say oh it would be so terrible if these students didn't graduate that would be bad for their lives so let's lower the graduation standards even if that means they don't learn the things that they really need to and this often makes the news when we see a particularly egregious case like a kid who graduates from high school they walk at graduation they've got the cap and gown they've got the piece of paper but they obviously can't read.

Those are the cases that make us say, wait a minute, this is not just a credential.

This is actually a process.

Getting an education is a process that is supposed to educate you.

You are supposed to walk away with knowledge and skills that you can actually use, not just a piece of paper that says that you acquired that knowledge and those skills.

So I think we've got to consider both functions of an education, both functions of a gauntlet in that if there is going to be a meaningful credential, okay, part of a meaningful credential is that not everybody gets it.

And I don't want to live in a country where like a huge number of people don't graduate from high school.

Like I want everybody to graduate from high school.

But at the same time, that credential has to be meaningful.

And that means you have to be able to not earn it if you don't do what you're supposed to do to earn it.

And attendance is a big bright line for me.

We have schools that are really trying to fudge on attendance and say, well, you know, you can kind of make it up with credit retrieval or, you know, there are all these ways that you can like not go to school, not learn, not get educated and still get the credential.

I think what happens in those cases, as I've said in earlier videos, is that the value of the credential just goes down.

If everybody knows your high school diploma isn't worth the paper it's written on because they give them out to everybody, even kids who don't show up, well, the credential value goes down.

And remember, if the credential value is all we're focusing on, then the learning is probably not where it needs to be as well.

So let me know what you think about education as a gauntlet.