Everyone Can Learn: A Radical Belief
Why the American educational approach helps career development, Part 1
As a guest speaker for Career Camp this year, I have several times revisited an episode from my first year of working at Taipei American School. From the very beginning of my six years working full time at TAS, I was confronted with a question which very few American educators ever have to face: what defines an American education? In the US, it's just considered education, full stop! Here in Taiwan, working at a private American school, I was regularly asked: what does this choice really mean? What are parents paying for? What does this offer students? The simple and radical answer I came to realize defines American education and is also intimately related to how people see and develop their careers in the US versus in a place like Taiwan.
Let me explain.
“Who gets to take these courses?”
As part of my work for the TAS Alumni Office, I gave school tours to many outsiders on a weekly basis: while some alumni had not visited the school (and this campus) in decades, others were merely new visitors to Taiwan altogether. In my first year, I hosted representatives from a medical college in the Philippines, including administrators and teachers. I took them around school, making sure to include our newest building, the Tech Cube. Completed in 2019, this six-story building of glass and metal was undoubtedly the fanciest part of an already glittering campus. Walking through this space, which is dedicated to science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, I could tell my visitors were dazzled by our facilities and resources.
After examining the computer science and robotics classes offered to high school students, the head of the delegation asked me, which students were permitted to take these courses? I was a bit confused, since such classes were actually required for all elementary and middle school students, and in the high school, 1/2 credit from a one-semester course in computer science and robotics was actually required to graduate. But I gamely responded that all students were able to take such classes. The administrator responded that in the Philippines, they would only allow the best students to take these classes, and gave me a look that implied, this is how it works everywhere in East Asia. (Which is the truth.)
That was the moment I realized the very simple and radical assumption behind American education: everyone can learn. Educational opportunities should not be and are not hoarded for the “best” students, however best can be defined.
What does that mean? First, it does not mean that educational opportunity is spread evenly in the US. Education is paid for by local and state governments, so plenty of schools in America, primarily in less well-off areas, are not able to offer classes in certain subjects like computer science and robotics, performing arts, debate and speech, or classes with a rigorous curriculum like AP and IB courses. There are very many students who never get that chance. But if your school does happen to offer those classes, the only tests that you have to take to attend might be a placement or pre-requisite test to make sure that you are actually prepared to learn this material; any test given would not be used to select the best students who then get to have this opportunity.
But also, to be sure, such classes in the US don’t really have a line out the door either. What would schools in the US do if we had the numbers of students in a country like China who were beating down the doors to get into these courses? I would like to think that we would actually still sit them down and truly assess them for interest through essays or interviews or something a bit more qualitative. If we still had two hundred students who could prove that they were really interested in taking this class, but only space for 30, I would also like to think that we would default to a lottery system to give everyone an equal chance.
The East Asian system of determining educational opportunity would be akin to putting together a high school English class like you put together your varsity soccer team.
It makes no sense to the American educational mindset, because we are not in the business of skimming the cream off the top and identifying the most excellent people. We are in the business of cultivating as much talent in as many people as possible.
Why these different goals? The test-driven achievement culture in China and Taiwan have their roots in the imperial civil examination system that functioned as a way of weeding out 99% of candidates in a bid to find people to fill the administrative bureaucracy (Elman 2013). Talk about being burdened by history! On the other hand, public education developed in the United States as a drive to fill a young country’s need for human capital in an industrializing world and informed citizens to fulfill its promise of democracy. Believing that everyone can learn was a key assumption behind the push to broaden public education, and even then, it took over three hundred years for the United States to truly take action on that belief.1
Viewing the Pass List: Imperial examination candidates gather around the wall where results had been posted, a work by Qiu Ying (仇英) (attributed) - In the collection of the National Palace Museum, Public Domain
Thanks for the history lesson, but what does this have to do with career development?
Does your country really want to pick out the best soccer players and put them on one team? Or do you want as many good soccer players as possible? Hoarding educational resources is not the best model for developing all the talent that you could possibly have in this country. It would be incredibly arrogant to say that we can pick out the people who are going to be best suited to be computer scientists and engineers, at age 13, so they’re the only ones who get these classes.
And how are you picking out “the best” anyway? Going by test-based standards make me think of stories like C’s: C never thought of herself much of a “math person” because her quantiative skills were mid at best compared to her classmates in Taiwan. But when she enrolled in an MBA program in the US, C was surprised to find that she actually enjoyed microeconomics, and compared to her classmates in the US, was actually fairly adept. She went on to work in Silicon Valley, and shared her story with me a few months ago to let me know that she was better able to find her own value once she stopped comparing herself to everyone else in the Taiwanese context.
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. - Albert Einstein (supposedly)
Each one of us is unique, and we will each have a unique career path. Everyone’s talents and strengths and inclinations are going to manifest in a lot of different ways at a lot of different times depending on the economy, society, and just plain life circumstances. If all of those things are unique and unpredictable, then the most efficient (or really, the only) way to allow as many people to develop themselves is to give as many of them as much opportunity and exposure as possible so they have the time and space to figure it out themselves.
I firmly believe we cannot know who is going to be a great software engineer or artist or teacher (they don’t even know themselves), and to pretend that we could all before they reach the age of 20 is just hubris.2
For me, it all boils down to this: if you want to centrally plan people’s careers, then you will restrict their potential, and in turn, the potential of your country. Give them what they need to figure things out themselves, and you will see things you could never have predicted or imagined. People like Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, and Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, are examples of the types of talent that Taiwan could have had, but notably, they all received their formal education outside of Taiwan in the US. There are of course people like them here too, but those people thrive inspite of what the educational system has done to them, not because of it.
That brings me to my last point: career development is an existential thing for this country. Taiwan’s birth rate has been falling since the 1970s; this country literally cannot afford to raise more young adults whose potential they seek to predict and control. Without opportunities to find and make sense of their own education and lives, they increasingly feel that they lack aim and purpose beyond competition with each other, when they have so much more to contribute. We really have to do a better job of engaging those young adults and help them find their path!
Very cheerful. Can we end this post on a high note?
For the reasons I have discussed, I have become so much more optimistic about American education. It is easy to share an insight like “You should cultivate everyone’s talent and treat them all like they can learn” with anyone who will listen, but the chances are virtually nil that someone will chose to actually practice it. American education, for all its faults and flaws, has a strong kernel of optimism. As long as we believe in this radical egalitarianism, we have an edge that will be very hard for other countries to replicate.
The other good news is that no matter where you grew up or what educational system you were a part of, it is never too late to plan your career. To honestly ask yourself what matters to you, what your strengths are, and how you can impact the world. While I specialize in working with young adults, I have seen how people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s all have made changes and pursued greater meaning in their working lives. You are the best person (and the only person) to decide what you can and cannot do in the world. Once you gain belief in your own potential, no one can take that away.
Want to get started?
I put a slide together to illustrate milestones in expanding the definition of public education in the US:
1) The nation’s first public school was founded in 1635 (for white young men of a certain background)
2) By 1870, about half of public school students were girls
3) In 1930, we finally got to all schools requiring students to attend school through elementary (up to Grade 6)
4) Not until 1954 did we have Brown v. Board of Education ending the practice of race-based segregation in schools.
So yeah, it did take us over 300 years to really begin fulfilling the promise of education for everyone.
Similarly, it is hubris to decide that a student can only major in a certain subject if they have a certain score on the entrance examinations, or that your school can only have a maximum of 300 English majors at any given time, but that’s what Taiwanese universities have decided to do. If anyone can explain how that !@#$ makes any sense, I will buy you dinner!