Education is like the gym. No one lifts weights because they from the floor because they are trying to move them. They lift weights because they’re strengthening their body to meet challenges they don’t know about yet. Education strengthens the mind for mental challenges we haven’t anticipated.
That’s not a new analogy. I’m sure you’ve read it before. I mention it because Dan Rockmore1 has a nice essay in The New Yorker making the point again: “Should the classroom be more like the gym?”
The great challenge of teaching is not to transmit information—machines do that cheaply now—but to engineer those moments of genuine understanding reliably enough that students come to crave them. The intellectual equivalent of the body’s feedback is real and, when it arrives, more powerful than any endorphin.
- Rockmore is the William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science at Dartmouth. https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/daniel-rockmore ↩