Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University the article Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance with the following statement:
The most significant problem with education today is the problem of significance itself. Students – our most important critics – are struggling to find meaning and significance in their education.
Wesch argues that the way to judge what is significant in a classroom is to look to the questions that students are asking. For example, if the following type of questions are being asked:
What do we need to know for the test?
How long does this paper need to be?
Is attendance mandatory?
then it should be clear that assessment and not learning is what is significant. In contrast to these questions Wesch suggests that good or even great questions are those that force students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases–but we seldom get these types of questions.
Significance isn’t just a problem with students but with the educators and with the system as a whole. The statement “some students are just not cut out for school” is an often-heard lament that reflects just how out of touch with our learners our system is. If you exchange the term “learning” for “school” you get the statement, “some students are just not cut out for learning” which is clearly wrong. Wesch states that learning is the hallmark of humanity and it is learning is part of what makes us human.
Wesch points to anti-teaching and the grand narrative of saving the earth as just two ways that significance can be brought back into learning–but to fully understand these points a good read of the article is required.
Read the full article – Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance
