About time
Many readers know that I am a psychologist, not an educator. Time has a different meaning in our field. We train to answer the question from patients about how long psychotherapy will take by saying, “We will take as long as we need; sometimes it moves quickly, and sometimes it takes a while.” Elementary and secondary educators, by contrast, assume 12-14 years, depending on when they start counting.
Time is the great unspoken bugbear in education. It is what we tend to hold constant while letting mastery, competency, or acquisition of knowledge vary. While treating time as the independent variable may serve an industrial-societal objective of classification and sorting, it very likely serves individual students poorly. I have wondered, ever since I heard Sal Khan pose the question at a California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) meeting, what would happen if we held mastery constant and let time vary? In other words, what if education approached time the way we do in psychotherapy?
David Perrell, an extraordinarily insightful online writer, wrote this about education in his September 6, 2021, Monday Musings newsletter:
How School Bells Harm Creativity
In school, none of my classes lasted longer than an hour. Once the bell rang at the end of class, every student had to stop what they were doing, walk to the next classroom, and start thinking about something else. But bells prevent the kinds of obsessive flow states that generate our best ideas
Behind the need for short classes is the assumption that kids don't have long attention spans. Sure, they may not enjoy listening to lectures for multiple hours every day, but are you any different? How would you feel if you were told to sit still, ignore your need for movement, and listen to non-stop lectures?
It turns out that kids have long attention spans if you let them take action. Think of all the hours they spend playing video games — when they forget about time and sometimes stay up all night to achieve their goals.
Zooming out, school bells show how the clock can crush the creative spirit. You can't get lost in your work when you're hyper-aware of the clock. Writing about the precise quantification of time, John Gatto once said: "Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not.”
To the creative mind, seconds are not equal. An hour spent writing when you're sharp in the morning can be worth three hours of writing when you're tired in the evening. An hour spent writing at the tail end of a retreat, when you have the context of an entire book loaded into your mind, can be worth ten hours of ordinary writing time.
How much more creative would our kids be if they weren't trapped by time?
So, where do you stand? Is time a friend or foe in education, independent or dependent variable, subject or object? Now you know why I am a proponent of progressive education beginning my 15th year as a trustee at a highly progressive school in Los Angeles. This field just haven’t gone far enough.