Is the Educational System Moving Society from Learners to Achievers?

This is a recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics.

My wife and I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about the difference between learners and achievers. Learners being the students that during the educational process, do not just learn bits of information and act on them, but seek understanding and transformation through the process. The result of the information is not just doing a job, but understanding how the information challenges their lives and their worldview.

Achievers are the students who you can challenge, and who without understanding the nature of the challenge, go out and correct the problem or behavior by the answer given. They do not strive to figure out why the problem happened, but simply solve the problem

Both of us agreed that we enjoy working with learners much more than achievers. I have worked with students who may not change the world, but wherever they are, will challenge the nature of the institutions and relationships that they are in. I have also worked with students who will change the world around them, but never fully understand why they do what they do. I would take a world of learners over achievers any day.

The truth may lie somewhere in the middle. Learners can often fall into understanding everything but achieving nothing, and achievers can do great things, but understand nothing. They can learn from each other.

What I see in the study may be the result of an ends oriented educational push. For the past few years, K-12 educations job (from the government) has been to "ensure that every student graduates with the skills needed to succeed in college and in a globally competitive workforce. This appears to give a strong push to achieving. Education needs people to achieve a certain level of understanding to do certain jobs. Learning seems to be more holistic to me, and the push is not necessarily to be the perfect worker for a job. I believe that a learner would be able to do almost any job, but they will understand the depths of it, as opposed to an achiever who will be able to plug in the equation to do the job, but not really understand why the equation works.

Think back to any of the No Child Left Behind purposes. Reading and math are extremely important, they are the foundations of learning. But they are rarely taught that they are good because reading and math are good, they are seen as good from a pragmatic focus of achieving more in the future. Something feels very wrong about this to me, and please feel free to discuss this with me or anyone else.

Peace,
DEW