A Challenging Education

Why Rigor?

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project 

Recently I was reading a discussion posted to a Classical education group. The OP was a parent of a student in 7^th grade trying to frame a good educational plan for her child while not over-stressing him. Her question was simple yet complex: Why is it important to provide a rigorous education for one’s child? What is “rigor”?

Rigor is too often defined as simply “challenging” (lots of AP classes) or maybe just college preparatory. A rigorous education is more than just being academically busy, though many programs and students treat it that way. I see three main components that help define a rigorous education for any student.

1. Thorough

Education is a luxury. Over a lifetime we fortunate few will enjoy a window of opportunity to focus specifically on our own education. While our earliest years should feel like play, as we mature in our education, we must gradually learn that education is a thing we do for ourselves rather than being a thing done to us in the form of a lengthy check list of chores before certificates of completion are offered.

Statistically, most do not mature much beyond “consuming” education primarily by completing check lists and seeking certifications with few distinctions or preferences for the quality or intensity of each part, provided each required category is completed. Even students who have limited interest in an academic future will finish half their high school courses as dual enrollment to save “time and money” at the college level. Once at college they’ll often find those dual enrollment classes weren’t much of a challenge after all and credits need to be repeated.   

A rigorous education is one that exceeds base levels and goes beyond check boxes. Students read the whole piece of literature, not just the summary. Learners master a topic at level rather than just cursorily “cover” the topic workbook style for a given period. They might “take” French for the expected two years in a check-list model or, with rigor, they might learn enough that they can navigate and converse in the language with relative ease. Both approaches take two years, only one matters in the long run.

A rigorous education is thorough enough that each level is a proper foundation for the next for as long as the learner chooses. If she comes to completely understand the mechanics of English in middle school, she can stand on that foundation to master even more interesting things in writing or foreign languages in subsequent years and eventually enjoy a wide variety of options professionally in the future as a writer, speaker, journalist, or interpreter.

The check-box education may result in the same certification of completion in the same number of years as a rigorous education. Only rigor builds a foundation to stand on and as you build and climb to even higher goals. If you have the choice between a heart surgeon who was at the top percentile of her exclusive cohort or one who enjoyed a program that allowed 100% to pass with minimal effort, you wouldn’t hesitate to pick the first one as you grow to appreciate rigor in education.      

2. Challenging

A rigorous education must always push a student to go just beyond his current skill levels, whatever those levels might be. This is why a student doesn’t need to be academically gifted, per se, to deeply profit from a rigorous education to the same degree that an academically gifted student will. The goal is to constantly challenge yourself and perpetually try things that are just beyond your reach. If you plant a sapling tree but leave it tethered, supported, propped, and protected, it never becomes robust enough to weather storms. Challenging yourself in your own education helps you weather the storms to come as they certainly will.

There is no real distinction in the outcome of an unchallenged gifted student and a well challenged average student who braved a rigorous education.  

Real challenges in education even at the college level are now rare. Public education is not designed for rigor. Private education is only a little better. In both approaches, education is diluted to increase the commodity of students who check their boxes and get their papers. Profound topics that once challenged human minds for centuries are now efficiently reduced to short summaries followed by multiple-choice questions in a pass-fail course with unlimited tries. Challenging doesn’t “pay” anymore for most schools.

Unusually, rigor works at The Lukeion Project because students who achieve mastery at a lower level are ready to climb to our next steps. We don’t list our classes as “9^th grade English” because a student must go back to basics or even surge forward to the levels that challenge them so they can build up.

3. Comprehensive

A rigorous education doesn’t decide a student’s path prematurely. A student with a strong interest in dinosaurs or chess at age 10 is still led through a robust selection of literature, art, music, writing, philosophy, public speaking, and foreign language along with more typical STEM topics and even basics in the garden, kitchen, and shop. We need well-rounded electricians, astrophysicists, and journalists, please.

Why is Rigor Important?

In terms of overall life satisfaction, being genuinely challenged by a subject and then enjoying a sense of achievement by overcoming that trial is a true boost to ego and self. Nobody looks back on a check box education as being intrinsically rewarding. Ever hear a grandparent entertain the family with harrowing tales of doing the bare minimum or going through the motions or just staying busy until time expires? A big part of feeling confidence is the assurance that, having overcome challenges before, we can overcome them again.

A person gains the confidence to continue to bigger challenges when she has a history of prior success over actual challenges. In a world of participation trophies and easy wins, we have a generation of deeply depressed young people. They’ve not overcome anything difficult before and, as adults, don’t know how... and are terrified they can’t.  

Every student’s rigorous education should, ideally, be crafted for her and well-suited to him. Rigor means that the next level up should be difficult to reach without strong effort. Top grades should not be granted to anybody that merely followed the instructions but no more. There’s a level above that! Rigor means that excellence—overcoming the challenge fully—is not a check list but a genuine victory.  

AI Makes a Poor Educator

Defining Difference

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Societies have always been stratified. How those social layers are defined varies from nation to nation, era to era, and crisis to crisis. Wealth is normally given first place when deciding one’s stratum sociologically but there is more nuance than counting one’s cash on hand. Wealth gained by luck, pluck, grit, wit, or inheritance varies from a momentary flash of luxury to generational wealth. More often than not, one’s education and training are the better distinction between a lottery winner blowing through five lifetimes of money in a year and a frugal family that spends nothing unless it offers measurable benefits decades in the future.

Education, at least how many view it today, is a relatively new part of societal stratification but not because children were uneducated in prior centuries. For most of human history, even when examining the elite, education typically prepared a child to continue doing what his or her family had always done. A farmer’s child was readied for the family business well before size and strength allowed. Roman senators trained their sons to be Roman senators. Bakers brought up bakers.

Formal public schools were not trialed until around 150 years ago. They became compulsory only a century ago but only for the elementary years for basic literacy since older children went to master whatever industry parents pursued. Only in the last 50 years have we viewed education as a compulsory conveyor belt from pre-kindergarten through high school, and in the last 20 years, through college even for students who had little interest in a four-year degree.

For the last 50 to 75 years, one could make pretty good assumptions about the economic trajectory of an individual based on the length and intensity of her education with some assurances that the more years spent in an institution gathering credentials, the better one’s financial outcome. This package was sold to several generations of students who bought it and paid for it only to discover that enjoyable careers are as limited as affordable houses made less so for those with massive student loans.

Education is Changing Once Again

There is another major evolution in education already in motion. There is no stopping this next change and so it is impossible to predict how education will look in three years. Today’s “normal” is gone. A far smaller than usual cohort of college freshman starting classes next year will find their chosen field has been either subsumed or wholly transformed by AI well before a diploma is in hand. What will define education over the next few years?

I have many thoughts on this answer as an educator, but I offer the top item on my list and only briefly today. AI is going to change everything but not for the better.

The Use or Abuse of AI in Education

Various tech development groups have already rolled out the first generation of personalized education apps and promote them as the ultimate opportunity for student development. Each student’s education will be “completely personalized” through an AI app namely in that each student will work at his own pace and advance at her own skill level. All of this will be done at the fraction of the cost of putting a human before the children each weekday. Sounds great.

As the new primary educator, AI will “get to know” the student and then tailor its responses to the child, mimicking a human teacher as closely as its creators allow while employing the most effective psychological enticements. Whole schools have fully or partially inaugurated this approach already. In a year or maybe two, AI will be standard, especially in depressed areas. “Teachers” in brick-and-mortar schools will not so much teach as patrol to ensure their students maintain engagement with a device all day.

Clever and competent critics forecast multiple issues by handing our next generation over to AI. Entrusting students to a device for twelve years is the stuff of nightmares. Most who attended a brick-and-mortar institution (K-college) between 2020-2023 have suffered educational gaps that will continue to change the nature of education even if AI were not here. Very few people prospered in an education exclusively through a device. Humans aren’t meant to.

My suspicion of AI in education sounds odd coming from a person who educates online. Lukeion Project core values have always valued human interaction, the ability to ask questions, give answers, converse respectfully, debate productively, and gain feedback from human instructors. It isn’t perfect but we have done our best to offer the humanities through human educators. We are daily bombarded with offers to become fully automated through AI learning tools making all our students fully self-paced. All topics become just a check list to rush through with a few well-worded multiple-choice questions! Forget grappling with the plight of the Trojan women in Greek Tragedy, disregard reading Shakespeare with your peers, never mind the sounds of Latin and Greek by her best poets, Ignore the power of history, philosophy, logic, and rhetoric. AI will keep you busy all day. You’ll hardly notice life slipping by.

An AI tutor will deliver a homogenized pulp of thoughts and subjects with no parental input nor ethical complexity, neither variations for local, political, social, traditional, nor religious preferences. For what dismal future does AI hope to shape a young mind this way?

My email inbox is loaded with AI vendors screaming students must start early so they are ready to use AI in the future! Absurd. They don’t need 12 years of preparation. Children entering middle school now are AI natives already with the smallest range of experiences. Dinner table debates are already being resolved by AI responses as the gold standard of truth to settle all. Public service campaigns are already here to remind people to be wary of AI images and recordings that are good enough to fool grandpa. AI is here now already, and this generation takes to it fish to water.

Heavy AI use has already shown grave issues educationally, ethically, socially, and most seriously concerning mental health. Societies across the globe push on. Many educational institutions say students are “going to do it anyway” so why not abandon reading, writing, and arithmetic but be sure to polish one’s AI query skills from an early age!

Higher education way already be doomed today, and all formal education will follow tomorrow. If people are keen to abandon the basics now--even before AI is universal in education--what will it look like in a couple of years?

This blog hasn’t offered too many encouraging words. A few imagine I’m taking too dark a view of this innovative new tool while some nod in agreement. AI will have many uses but serving as a student’s primary educator should not be one of them. Unfortunately, AI will be used primarily on the poorest students and will very quickly become the defining difference.

     

The Death of Socrates

History Repeats

By Amy E. Barr at The Lukeion Project

After the Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC, Athens was fragmented. She had just lost to her rival Sparta in a series of conflicts that started almost thirty years earlier. Both city-states had allies in this conflict, so the war threw all of Greece into turmoil. Athens had been a superpower and now Sparta was in charge. Economics were unstable. Politics wobbled between a demand for democratic reconstruction and support or resistance to the Thirty Tyrants set up by Sparta in Athens. Athenian society was a mess but into this mess stepped 70-year-old Socrates.

Socrates avoided the rules set out for him in his own society but in the most impossibly peaceful fashion. Instead of public lecturing and campaigning to reach a political post, instead of writing political plays or literary works to shift opinions, and instead of loudly aligning with one side or the other, Socrates pursued rational inquiry with others. He believed that simply getting everyone to use their brain would give birth to a better world.

Socrates was styled as an irritant, a “gad fly,” a pest because he simply talked with other people, particularly the young people of Athens who had both time and interest in debate as their world was all too turbulent. Athens, formally known for her long years of renowned philosophers, was no longer in the mood for such debates. Everyone pushed and shoved to become preeminent in trying times. Conformity was key. Critical thinking was not on their agenda.

Socrates’ friends and students would, in today’s vernacular, come from both sides of the aisle. Naturally, the military members of Athens tended to listen to him since he served in that capacity for much of his life. His father was a sculptor, and so art was Socrates’ only “formal” education. Sculpting was blue collar work. His rivals often became his best students. They came from families of both rich and poor, famous, infamous, and completely unknown. Socrates was willing and happy to debate with anyone, and he always did so respectfully.

His methods of simply talking, debating, and exchanging ideas with people, especially young people, were innovative. Not that many Athenians considered Socrates’ innovation to be a promising idea. The popular vote demanded that everyone needed to be on exactly the same page. Socrates was being disruptive and irritating. Young people needed to unquestioningly learn their places, but Socrates was busily getting them to expand their world.

Socrates would put to debate firmly held moral claims through pointed questions. Sometimes those moral claims were just new and popular, other times more traditional. His partners in debate needed to support their beliefs. Holding popular assumptions quickly fell apart while those that listened and responded to his probing questions were guided to a deeper understanding of themselves and the world as well as their moral duty. This was his whole point.

Socrates believed people held unhealthy beliefs because they lacked knowledge. Most would never look for that knowledge until they were forced to make an account for why they believed what they believed and why they acted as they did. His onlookers and debaters were primarily individuals that we would now consider college age whom much of Athens dismissed for being too young and foolish to count for much.

Athenian leaders were not amused. Socrates did not seem to support one side over the other politically even while he enjoyed all debate. Followers, usually prior resisters, would come from all walks. His personal convictions were far more important to him than anyone else’s dainty political interests. Athenian society was not in agreement. Unity with populist opinions was the highest good. Questioning was not allowed! Socrates would be stopped.

Socrates was charged with honoring non-state-approved gods and, in punishment for his tendency to debate the young, he was charged with corrupting the youth. By corruption, they simply meant it was unacceptable to ask the brightest young minds of Athens to think critically about their own long-held positions on things. In other words, he was charged with gently compelling others to examine their own lives. Socrates would not back down.

Athenian law was built on democracy! A simple vote prevailed! Socrates, now known as the principal founder of the largest percentage of modern western philosophical tradition while never writing a single thing and the framer of the Socratic method, still considered the most successful way to develop critical thinking, wisdom, and maturation of the human mind, was sentenced to death. He could have compromised and appealed the conviction, but he refused. He could have bent or flattered the jury or found protection from political elites or even escape, he didn't quit. He accepted his death.

Several weeks after his trial Socrates was given a cup of poison. He drank it even while continuing to speak calmly and clearly to a room of friends and students as an example of moral courage until his last breath. 

His students would change the world. They would become famous philosophers (Plato and, in turn, Aristotle), historians (Xenophon), and politicians (Critias and Alcibiades). What Socrates began as a personal compulsion to seek truth for himself and others would change the world. Nobody even remembers the name of the jury that put him to death.

Mind Skills

Memorization Builds Brains

By Amy E. Barr at The Lukeion Project

 

    Charles attended his local gym every other day for months but nothing about him changed. He was no more fit and no more flexible than when he had first joined this ultramodern facility. To him it was a mystery! He attended the very epicenter of fitness and health so often that the front desk crew knew his name. He put in a full hour each weeknight. He put in two hours on Saturday. The other regulars knew exactly where to find him during his habitual visits. Charles made zero progress and saw no results but yet he continued to attend. His failure to make gains was no surprise to anyone who knew him. Charles refused to lift any weights, work on any cardio equipment, or take part in any swimming or cycling opportunities. 
    This sounds ridiculous. Charles paid the membership fee after extensive research looking for the right facility with the right coaches. He even bought a handsome exercise outfit which allowed full flexibility and to show-off any future gains. All this only to enter the gym and do nothing but see others lift weights, swim, exercise, climb, move, and stretch. 
    Charles attending an expensive gym for sizable parts of his week and doing nothing to improve his heart and muscles is very much like a student who plans to navigate 12+ years of education without once memorizing anything.
    Never being asked to engage one’s brain in this manner explains our public educational plight, at least in the U.S. though certainly the practice continues to spread to other nations. Never memorizing anything means that students live in the perpetual state of first steps and first impressions with no ability to climb the educational ladder to anything more complex. The brain is a muscle. It needs work and heavy lifting. Looking at charts, videos, and other students doing the work creates no benefit for yourself though it will certainly fill one’s day.
    Working memory, our superficial thoughts, takes any first exposure to new information and begins to engage the brain into a sorting exercise. The brain must decide if information needs to be stored short term, long term, or only briefly engaged and quickly forgotten. At best, working memory can keep around 7 items stored before everything gets jumbled. 
    If you look at your vocabulary flash cards for your Latin class only once or maybe twice before evaluating your retention, you’ll probably get around 5 to 7 things right and the rest wrong. If you enter a room to meet a bunch of new people, good luck. You might remember 5 to 7 names if the only thing people tell you is their name and nothing else like “nice to meet you” and “lovely day isn’t it!” Our brains are usually thinking up clever responses and we’ll not likely remember any names at all if we aren’t making a real effort. 
    Long term memory is what gives you the top score on your quiz and the ability to greet your new teammates when you see them again in a couple of days. Working memory is, at best, a tiny holding place for a handful of facts that will fade before the hour has ended. An educational system that is not built around developing long term memory skills condemns a student to live in mental deficit, like a case of amnesia. 
    Depending on how you prepare long term memory facts, you can store information in your mind for days to years to a lifetime. Learning the fundamentals of a subject for one year and then applying fundamentals the next as you add newer and more complex elements requires long term memory. This success requires memorization. If you’ve come from the vast majority of brick-and-mortar schools you’ve likely never been expected to memorize much. You’ve certainly never been taught methods to help yourself because “trendy education” has thought it old fashioned as our nation’s scores plummet lower than any other developed nation. The inability to develop topics over years means students limp through life with only a jumble of ideas temporarily stored in working memory and nothing more than hopes to look it up online.
    “When will we ever need algebraic formulae?” you might ask. Good luck moving up to more complex levels if you are juggling pages of facts you never learned but only saw. You can’t. Your brain can’t juggle working memory and the introduction of new concepts beyond that small group of 5-7 facts. You aren’t progressing because you are never learning. You are never learning because you have cognitive overload by asking your short-term memory to try to the job of long-term memory. Comprehension collapses. Your brain can’t juggle information and tires quickly, your learning slows, you get frustrated, and then you lose all motivation. 
    Listing the necessary outcomes of only using short-term working memory and never memorization sounds like a typical diagnosis of a learning disability: low comprehension, mental fatigue, delayed learning, frustration, disinterest, and low motivation. What if we didn’t need to hire all those classroom assistants? What if we started teaching students how to memorize and then expected them to progress beyond the basics by having long term memory functioning normally if not robustly?
    Let working memory do its job (juggling 5 to 7 new facts) but then move the important things into long term memory every night. The outcome makes an average student into a genius in today’s terms: increased comprehension (you memorized yesterday’s facts and can juggle the new ones today), increased mental stamina (you have sorted out how to process information efficiently and have confidence that you can keep doing it), faster learning (you don’t need to spend half your time looking up the things that you should have memorized but never did), and increased enthusiasm (look at that successful exam or project after the hard work paid off!)
    Having mastered what memorization can do for you, you get to move on to application (build that engine or complete that experiment or participate in that cool project), creation (apply what is known to new problems that must be solved), evaluation (swiftly sort out good ideas form bad ones to plan even better projects). 
    n the modern educational arena, too many have made a choice between memorizing a thing and understanding a thing. Use both as a tool to aid the other. 

Can't or Can?

Attitude Starts at Home

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Parents, I’ll keep this brief. All of you are busy. This week’s blog is all about modeling the attitude that helps propel a student through the most challenging academic trials. Since some of your children have not yet met many challenging academic trials, here’s your primer. The first month of academically challenging classes will be taxing but we have tips.

Survive the Drama – Everyone Hates New Challenges

It is your first week at a new job. You have a lot to learn, you don’t know anyone, you forgot your lunch, and you don’t know where to eat. As an adult, you struggle and stress tremendously when starting this new challenge, but you will likely wait until you get home to complain about getting lost while looking for the break-room and all the scheduled meetings. Sure, you are excited about new opportunities and certainly the gains in income, but starting new challenges is, well, yucky. This scenario is no different when you first start educating at home, only the lunchroom is sometimes easier to find. 

When your student starts a new academically challenging class there will be complaints. Everything is new, they want to do well but fear they won’t, and they don’t know all the answers nor understand all the expectations, they aren’t sure yet where to go. Yucky. We get it. For all of us, a good snack, hydration, and supportive words will help you and your student survive this dramatic start.

Praise the Effort, not the Smarts

Your student is putting in the time. All the signs are good because flash cards are in use, assignments are getting read, tasks are being completed. Praise all of this excellent activity because a growth mindset affirms that one can only get good at something after putting in some effort. You are fighting against the far more normal mindset of the undeveloped mind, namely that our talents are somehow already “fixed in place” (as in set in stone, stationary) at birth. Logic prescribes this isn’t so.

Don’t wait until that fabulous grade arrives on the first big exam to say, “well done.” The goal is steady consistent effort. Ever-improving grades are a nice bonus side-effect of putting in determination and struggle.

I like to use one of my son’s college experiences as an example. He’s now a gainfully employed physical therapist but his first class for his first semester of college was much the same as every other student who has grand plans for a medical career: anatomy and physiology. A&P lost half of the students before the drop deadline. Students who had luminous academic scores in high school were clawing towards scores in the low C range, the minimum to pass a course that is needed to move on in medicine. Another half of the remaining students didn’t pass and changed their majors. My son was pleased and proud to earn a low B (and retook it his senior year for an A).

An academically challenging course that was a career-do-or-die offered no chance for glamorous rewards but needed determination and grit. That score didn’t look particularly “smart” on paper, unless you too have been through this type of class. The work that really matters may not always look smart but sticking with it? That’s the prize!  

Don’t Foster an Addiction to Do-Overs

A trendy policy in public education right now is the habit of constantly allowing re-dos and retakes and do-overs and mulligans. In all the history of education, this was never normal, primarily because there is zero motivation for a student to study for anything. Enter that quiz and keep whittling away at a quiz score until boredom hits or you’ve toggled through all the multi-choice options and game the system. Consequently, we have millions of students who not only don’t need to study but now certainly can’t study if needed. Why would they?

This approach was introduced when personal devices became a major part of every classroom. Educators could put together a short multi-choice computer graded quiz online and leave it sit. Students can keep retaking the quiz until scores go up, the only goal (learning? Not so much).

The only type of quizzes that work for eternal re-dos are fairly basic by necessity. There isn’t time to grade, regrade, and re-re-grade complex assignments and projects with a room of 40 students. Material is kept at an artificially rudimentary level so it can be completely computer-graded. Now we have students who never learn to write under any type of pressure.

Offers of unlimited retakes give a student no pressure to surpass basic levels but why? If you must prepare a 20-minute well-researched speech to a group of esteemed peers, you prepare fervently. You never know what question the audience might ask! Nobody feels that level of concern over, say, an email in which you casually assemble your points and add important links then answer questions at leisure.

That stressful speech—just like a one-chance-only quiz, exam, or timed essay—pressures you to prepare. You want to present your case knowledgeably. Research, preparation, memorization, and practice naturally help. The reasonable response is subject mastery.    

Unlimited re-dos do not mimic real life. Mess up the quarterly report, your boss isn’t going to repeat the meeting. Tangle up holiday plans, you don’t get a second week of vacation to fix everything. Forget your college midterm, you don’t get to reschedule a week later after a second study period. Forget to pay the bills for two months? Good luck. 

Your Child Can Do This

Unless the faculty educating your student started teaching yesterday, he or she has had a lot of experience getting students from very limited experience in a particular subject to the point of proving very decent mastery. Constantly model confidence that your student can overcome, persevere, work hard, have determination, and ultimately succeed. Setbacks are expected! Occasional hurdles are required! Failure here and there? Normal! Failure is a teachable moment rather than shame but only if we allow natural heights of success and valleys of failure.

Set Things Up for Success

Provide tools, time, and encouragement. Subtract distractions. Avoid too heavy a load but don’t be afraid to challenge your clever and competent student. A greenhouse plant will quickly perish in the sun and wind unless you acclimate that rose. A common thing that sabotages success at the start of each new semester is the desire to get in “one last” break. Some students can manage the stress of hurrying through the first couple of weeks of classes for a trip. Most can’t. Set things up for success might mean keeping things boring until your student gets on their feet.    

Don’t Fill in for Them

Unlike faculty who might have your student for just one semester, our program hosts students often throughout both their middle school and high school years. This means that we can see how they did at the start and compare that work to what they are able to do four, five, or six years later. Unless you are a homeschool parent (and many of you are, so this is a big benefit to home education) there will never be an educator who has the opportunity to see a student start with, say, Latin 1 and finish with Latin 5. All of this is preface to the following absolutely true statement: no student whose parents “fill in for them” ever make it to Latin 5 …or even Latin 2.

It is out of love and concern that we parents are tempted to help by doing a bit of this assignment or that assignment as good examples of how to get the assignment done. It is often very difficult once you help a student in this way to stop because all the prior struggles were lightened and all the necessary coping techniques were never mastered. Never do any of your students’ work.

Make It Ok to Not Be Perfect

Perfectionists struggle more than any other type of student. This form of self-torture will make even the most capable and clever student miserable to the point that they often give up. When questioned, perfectionists will claim their approach is the preferred one! Why shouldn’t one strive to be perfect?!

The problem is that there’s no such thing as perfect here on earth. We are all but shadows of the real thing if ancient Greek philosophy is to be observed and we have all fallen short according to the Bible.

Perfectionists often give birth to other perfectionists. Your task may not just be to help your child navigate towards a healthier relationship with struggle and failure. The fight might start with yourself and how you model perfectionism at home. The next time you mess something up—if you are like me that will be before you go to bed tonight—do your best to model healthy recovery with a little humor and old-fashioned live-and-learn attitude.

 

Don’t Let the Goldfish Win

Work Your Attention Span

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

It used to be when somebody wished to insult your ability to pay attention, they would say you have the attention span of a goldfish. Naturally this inspired a number of studies that found the average attention span of a goldfish is in the range of 9 seconds. That is indeed a very short period of time. Observing the life of a goldfish, you seldom see them enjoy good literature, long conversations, introspective journaling, nor expressions through painting or drawing. 9 seconds is just enough time to remember that some food was sprinkled in the fishbowl or to swim a different direction to avoid your grumpy goldfish roomie. Neural research has also been done on average humans. Dr. Amen of Amen Clinics, who knows more about brains than almost anyone, estimates that most people in the U.S. have attention spans in the range of 8 seconds long.

The Goldfish are Winning?

As we examine all the splendid things people have done with their brains over the course of history, we must come to the logical conclusion that the average length of the human attention span was once much, much longer because our lives depended on it. Carefully guarding livestock, conscientiously weaving cloth, crafting, sculpting, cooking, writing, gardening, preserving, and inventing new ways to do all of these things better require much longer attention spans than 8 seconds at a time. Spoiled by the luxury of not living minute by minute to survive, most of us have more free time than our ancestors.

With free time came entertainment. A zillion things to grab our attention but very few things hold our attention. The luxury of the modern world makes it possible to survive a distracted lifestyle, mostly unharmed by our lack of attention. Some of us can afford to bounce back and forth between entertainments while we wait for our food to be delivered or our appliances to do the hardest chores. An attention spans less than that of a tiny fish seems like a setback in human progress. How do we do better?

Read Don’t Watch

The current generation typically doesn’t enjoy reading that much because it is difficult for them to maintain focus long enough to become engaged in a good story, much less good information. The average reader needs around 30 seconds just to read this far in this blog. Many will have stopped reading or have gotten distracted several times already. Consider the implications of how much educators might expect students to accomplish in a single assignment!

Around a third of people under the age of 20 consider themselves avid readers but admit that they typically read eight or fewer books per year even though they are enjoying a period of life that is uniquely suited to reading books as students. Self-described avid readers from older generations easily consume roughly twice as many books per year even with a more demanding schedule. Today, average high school students in literature courses with comparatively moderate reading assignments are overwhelmed by what would have been considered light reading five or certainly ten years ago. Most high school students never complete a single book and even fewer college students. Literacy is sliding backwards.

Reading for pleasure is the best test for a strong attention span. If you’ve never developed the habit, you should. You will at once encounter two surprising facts about yourself. First, you’ll discover that at first you will struggle to read for longer than a minute without getting distracted, even when you are reading a subject of interest to you. Extended reading is a muscle that must be worked and developed. Second, you’ll discover that once you can start reading with intensity, your life will be greatly improved. Deep engagement in excellent storytelling is deeply rewarding. Watching a story or hearing a story doesn’t work the same part of our brains as reading a story. Challenge yourself to consume entertainment in book form instead of screen or audio form.

Screen time (short-form entertainment, apps, games, TikTok, movies) have been designed for—and are much to blame for—the attention span crisis. Programming produced today is intentionally built around our 8 second attention spans to recapture our focus every few seconds with sounds, lights, and sound. “Older” movies from even a decade ago are considered unwatchable without the constant flash and glitter so there’s your answer about why companies remake so many classics. Recorded media is a little bit better (music, podcasts, books “on tape”) but still must multi-task instead of focus attentively. To extend your attention span, read rather than watch and if you must, listen with focus.    

Green Entertainment

I hope you like this term because I just made it up. Green entertainment always builds longer attention spans. How well does your soccer match go if the goalie has an eight second attention span? How does your hike progress if you can’t recall which direction to walk after a short break? How’s the chess match with your sibling turn out if you are staring at your phone instead of planning your next move? All of these are unplugged “green” entertainments.

If you grow your attention span simply by engaging in team sports, mentally stimulating logic games, gardening, hiking or a zillion other engaging tasks, you also enjoy the side benefits and gaining new skills, gaining physical strength, and maintaining appropriate distance from the snack drawer in your house. Want to double all of that benefit? Engage in green entertainment without electronic input of any kind. Yes, this means you leave earphones and devices at home. If you bring your phone “just so you can play some music” you’ll fall back into engaging mainly with your phone instead of your teammates or task. Engage your focus fully instead of splitting it with recorded media.    

Memorization Isn’t a Dirty Word

If you hang out in modern educational circles for even a few minutes, you’ll get hit with snarky comments about any educational approach that forces children to “merely memorize” material. Initially this was a reaction to approaches that never ventured beyond basics when the basics were the periodic table, the U.S. presidents, or the mathematical formulae of algebra or geometry. Sure! What’s the point of memorizing these things if you go no further? At some point, memorization was dismissed entirely, not because it is a thing that won’t serve us well as we educate ourselves throughout our lives, but because memorization became impossible in a world in which students have a shorter attention span than a goldfish.

Memorization is an excellent way to build your own attention span, but it is also a necessary skill to master anything complex. I assigned memorization tasks to my elementary age children to build that muscle. Do they still remember those poems, presidents, or geography? Probably not but when they move into the logic stage around age 13 and the rhetoric stage around age 16 or 17, they will prosper greatly having built that mental muscle and never letting it atrophy throughout life. Learn how to fill your brain with the intellectual ammunition you need to pursue more complex subjects.    

The Search for a Life Well Lived

Write Well, Speak Well, Think Well

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Completing a good education, we are told, must be the main goal for everyone under the age of 22. We can easily believe the lie that getting a good education is just a matter of ticking boxes, formatting a transcript, and getting into a “good” school at a price we are willing to pay. We look forward to college tours and narrowing down the list of possible majors in college only to repeat the process, albeit at more expense for four more years. Walking the college graduation stage means we’ve done it and “off we go” to obtain that career we’ve chosen or a seat in a graduate program where we repeat that check list a third time. Is this a good education? Will this give us a life well lived?

The opportunity to seek gainful employment after each level in this process passes the vaguely defined notion of a “good” education today. Soon, nobody cares if you made top scores in high school but watch for highest marks in college and then beyond. When is the goal reached? Eventually, most who have ostensibly obtained a good education wonder if life is more than earning institutional certification to continue to work hard.

Eventually we must all think about life as more than keeping a decent job with good prospects for promotion. This can cause a little confusion. The main impetus that occupied our first twenty-two or more years fades quickly as we “finish” our education. Is this it? Now what? We can presumably pay bills now but how do we go beyond that to have a good life? How do we discover the most direct path to that goal?

Defining a “good” life is the real riddle. It has been the subject of much philosophy and theology stretching as far back as we have written records. By comparison, choosing and then training for employment is easy. Keeping a job and becoming successful in that job is practically a no-brainer even though we use a quarter of our life on that one thing. Having and enjoying a good life is a profound mystery that few people solve to complete satisfaction having, in their view, run out of time before they “arrive” at that destination. Advice is mainly ignored by each new generation as though earlier ages didn’t quite work out the answers properly enough for their modern tastes.

A good life is subject to individual definition after decades of living with or rejecting different modes. Each person must evaluate where to place energy and passion. Some stay forever focused on the pursuit of good looks and good money. Others prefer slower investments that yield life-long relationships and a support system of friends and family. Others prefer intellectual challenges and are happy with a good library, garden, and book.

How Do We Live Life Well?

My deepest apologies for my inability to summarize a well-lived life in this short blog. I wish all of you many productive hours searching for this answer in trusted, wise, and virtuous sources as well as novel ideas (as each generation prefers). Instead, I suggest three basic skills that will help you the most in your search. They aren’t the absolute secret to a life well lived but they are the best tools to pack for that journey: learn how to write well, speak well, and think well.

Write Well

The main thing that prevents people from expertly expressing themselves in creative writing or formal academic writing is inexperience. Usually, they’ve been asked to play a complicated game but are never taught the rules. Some trendy pedagogical approaches today insist there are no rules! Write whatever comes to mind! You tell your truth! Such writers quickly discover there are rules to be followed and good examples to emulate if one hopes that other human beings will be interested in what they have to say.
Many students miss the most basic fact, namely that writing is meant to convey meaning to others so that they not only understand you but might even come to agree with you. How does this apply to a life well lived?

Long before there were pricey college degrees and peer reviewed journals, there was The Great Conversation, the exchange of ideas that has been going on for thousands of years that have to do with God, relationships, truth, knowledge, life, hope, despair, and how we must live. Every great thinker, writer, and doer of deeds not only consumes materials written on these topics but also takes part in the conversation about those subjects. Nothing is new under the sun. No fresh idea is truly fresh. Ideas have been in refinement for as long as people have written words and thought thoughts.
If you want to earn the highest academic accolades or learn how to fix small engines, being able to communicate in written form is a top tool for a life lived well.

Speak Well

The other day I was having a friendly conversation with a friend who runs a humble country greenhouse. He has never considered himself well educated since he set foot neither in college nor any formal classroom. He easily discusses thoughts on a wide variety of topics and speaks skillfully. He would be as comfortable in a boardroom, lecture hall, or a greenhouse full of tomato plants chatting with a customer. He enjoys the close support of family and community, and the competent success of all his efforts is easy to see. He is enjoying a life well lived! His ability to speak at ease with anyone and everyone on all subjects is as useful a tool in a greenhouse or at a campfire in the Rockies while he serves as a hunting guide. His clients range from adventurous millionaires to widows on a fixed income looking for garden advice.

Learning to confidently and boldly speak to others is a worthy tool for the job of building your own meaningful life. Just like there are rules and correct approaches to writing, verbal communication also has rules. The aim is to fully understand those rules and integrate them with such polish and practice that both tasks come quickly and easily to you. There are classes like rhetoric to help you learn how to overcome the fear of public speaking, attract interested listeners, and persuade them that you have clever ideas. The best success in speaking well is by doing more of it.

Think Well

Humans get so busy working on what they must think that they never master how to think skillfully. Expert use of one’s brain incorporates the ability to evaluate, study, memorize, and master new concepts without the need to have others teach that material to you or at least being judicious about the help you do need. People who know they can learn anything with a bit of perspiration and persistence, do. Not only are such people seldom bored, but the richness of their life compounds yearly, monthly, and daily. Their words are interesting to read or hear because they love to learn new things. They need no permission and seek few accolades, but their lives get richer daily. Those that can think well do so because they’ve given themselves the ability to learn new things, the humility to recalibrate when corrections must be made, and the confidence to employ their brains well, even without lofty credentials and costly degrees. 

“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; refusing to set aside trivial preferences; neglecting development and refinement of the mind; attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero