The Six R’s
It is already upon us. Like a tidal wave breaking on springtime shorelines, hordes of American students—from know-it-all college grads to blissfully unaware kindergartners—are being released from their respective institutions of learning to overrun their households and neighborhoods for the summer. Many of them will never return to the hallowed halls of academia, headed as they are for pursuits in Higher Ed and the workplace that may prove either meaningful and self-sustaining or tiresome and temporary. The majority, however, will be given a few months respite from those pencils, books, and teachers’ dirty looks that kids once chanted. Upon this occasion of near universal glee—felt by teachers even more than students—it is fitting for each of those students, and their parents, to ask one of these two simple but telling questions:
What did I learn this year?
In what ways did my child grow in the past nine months?
Every year is important in the life of a child, this year especially so. For it marks the end of a long siege of interrupted education that was imposed from on high back in March of 2020. COVID did a number of things to us in its two-year reign, most of them unpleasant and regrettable. And those who have apparently survived it—if survival is the right term for a condition that hangs over our heads like Damocles’ sword—are just now coming to terms with the toll it has taken on families, schools, and our way of life. Learning was transferred from the face-to-face dialogue afforded by school classrooms to online lessons and chats received in bedrooms and on kitchen tables. While information could be so dispensed, learning by most tested measurements, seems to have suffered. Time will reveal the lasting impact of this hiatus from those customary environments of learning wherein generations of American students had been prepared to step into adult life.
So whether your children were in that minority who continued to attend classes with peers and teachers—however masked and restricted—or sat it out at home staring into a computer screen, with or without adults present to keep them on task, the terminal question must, nonetheless, be asked and answered. In fact, the number of interruptions and work-arounds that schools have had to implement during the pandemic adds more than the usual urgency to the asking.
Traditional school learning focused on the mastery of what was once called the three R’s. It was a curricular objective that has been central to human learning since our ancestors became civilized, i.e., city-fied. And since those days of cuneiform and clay, it has been imperative that children come to grips with words and numbers. The objective hasn’t really changed over the thousands of years of our development. Knowledge and ability give people more control and power in their environments than when they lack either or both. While students today may benefit from the technological advances and pedagogical strategies available in their schools, many involving games and collaborative projects, the outcomes of their learning remain remarkable consistent over time: readin’, writin’, and rithmatic.
Providing students with a the requisite knowledge of vocabulary and grammatical construction still enables them—dare I say empowers them—with the tools upon which communication depends. Whether their preferred medium is the letter, email, or text, the first two R’s continue to be lynch pins in the process by which we understand each other, and are understood in return. Upon this ability rests all hope that we can live with and work with each other. In concert with the third R, rithmetic, we have fashioned a world where adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing have become the calculus for just about everything we need to survive. Measuring, estimating, buying and selling, and pushing our mathematical abstractions into scientific formulas and theories have lifted the curtain behind which many of the universe’s most inscrutable mysteries have been hidden. Such food for thought continues to satisfy appetites that were first whet on the arithmetic pablum we were fed as children.
In an ideal world, every student in May will have become more proficient in these three R’s than when they stumbled in from summer vacations nine months ago. And along the way these three have granted them passage into the boundless horizons of history, science and languages that are so critical to a well-rounded, relevant education. I think most parents and teachers would be overjoyed at any sign of progress that their children might manifest in these areas we value as essential to being knowledgeable. And how delighted will their university professors and employers be should they discover that the diplomas, awards and GPAs that litter their resumes actually translate into the smarts and skills that make them not only credentialed, but qualified.
Life, after all, is a lot more than what we may know in solving a Wordle, manipulating numbers in Suduko, or even crafting a sentence or two for a weekly essay. It involves our growth in two more competencies, or sensitivities if you will, that tie us together, knitting our lives into cooperative, constructive, and caring relationships. These two additional R’s are responsibility and respect, each transforming our homes, schools, teams, businesses and neighborhoods from dog-eat-dog jungles to care-and-be-cared for communities.
When do we become responsible for our words and actions? While some overindulgent parents and authority figures try to postpone or excuse their charges from responsibility, most of us see this as a process that begins shortly after our first utterance and ambulation. By the time we get to school both of these R’s become necessities of our social existence. Fulgham’s kindergarten lessons were not the culmination of what he learned in life, but the first germinations of behaviors that would prove worthy of his emulation as a grownup. In his distillation they catalogue much of what being responsible and being respectful are all about. But these two R’s are anything but kids’ stuff. They, in large measure, determine whether or not, and how much, we are developing into human beings worthy of another’s friendship and trust. So they too must be asked at the end of a school year. Is my child more responsible, more respectful now than when the school year began? The answer to these inquires will likely not appear in comments on a report card. But they will be apparent and sensed in the upward arc of maturity that parents, and others, hope to see in children.
There is a sixth R that is worth interjecting into this conversation about learning. It falls more in the realm of a discipline than a subject area or mark of character. We used to talk about it more openly in schools than we do today, but its loss in conversation is no indicator of its lessening importance. The sixth R: repetition. If at the end of this year we have shown signs of improvement and growth in our academic abilities or our personal maturity, it is likely because of those habits—those good habits—we have incorporated into our daily routines and preoccupations. Learning always entails repetition, repetition that takes us beyond fleeting familiarity with an idea or aptitude to an internalized understanding of what a word or idea really means and how a task should be done. It takes us well beyond knowing about something in a casual, conversational way, to actually knowing it at such depth that we can apply it appropriately in reasoned discourse or problem solving.
Making and reviewing flash cards, saying aloud the lines in a play or speech, writing and rewriting a paper, memorizing conjugations and declensions, doing ten math problems rather than just one—these are the steps in the choreography by which learning has the best chance of happening. Coaches and athletes build repetition into their conditioning and practice routines. So do musicians, dancers and actors in rehearsal after rehearsal. We learn through repetition, and our success in almost any endeavor will be directly proportional to the time and effort we put into this sixth R.
The 2021-22 academic year will soon be little more than historical recollection. But what we and our children learned this year will set the tone for the future to which we are all lending a hand or adding a thought in creating. That is how it has always been, and how, I suspect, it will continue to be in the years to come. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, himself a precocious student of Plato who became an educator and mentor to no less than Alexander the Great, knew more than a thing or two about learning, particularly the sixth R:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
“The habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference.”
The six R’s are neither magical talismans nor simplistic formulas for success and happiness. But attending to them, and embracing them will give us the power, the power of knowledge, that helps us steer a course in life that will make all the difference.
