Schooling Has a Meaning Crisis.. Our microschool is four years old now… | by Sai Gaddam | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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Schooling Has a Meaning Crisis.

Sai Gaddam

9 min read·<br>Just now

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Our microschool is four years old now! Well, that was a few months ago but we didn’t really get to sit down and reflect on it, because running it continues to be a giant energy wormhole. It’s a bit like parenting. The days can be pull-your-teeth-out frustrating, but joy seeps in pools up and lifts you up, and changes you.<br>Over these four years we’ve worked intensely on what we call the full-stack of education: philosophy, pedagogy, practice, and process (the day we add praxis here is the day you should unfollow us). It’s only now that we’ve begun to articulate how we are different, and it really is beautifully simple. Education, or schooling, the words are not quite synonyms but close enough for our purposes here, is our collective effort to impart learning in a structured setting. It has four main dimensions: meaning, motivation, mechanics, and measurement . That also happens to be the natural order of things when it comes to learning. Everything we do is to do justice to this natural order.<br>Conventional schooling has it exactly backwards because of a well-intentioned, but ultimately counterproductive focus on measurement: what are they learning.<br>Everything we know about learning, whether it is from practical sensible empirical knowledge, or the latest neuroscience screams out that we need to find meaning first.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

“The effect of the early introduction of arithmetic had been to dull and almost chloroform the child’s reasoning faculties.”<br>“What possible needs has a ten-year-old child for knowledge of long division? The whole subject of arithmetic could be postponed until the seventh year of school, and it could be mastered in two years’ study by any normal child.”

These were the words written by Louis P. Benezet, a school superintendent in a small city in the US, in 1929. Precisely my sentiments now, about a hundred years later, when I do my weekly maths class. But he went on to do something that sounds pretty radical even now. He eliminated formal arithmetic instruction from the first six years of school.<br>He experimented with a few schools in his district where students spent those years reading, talking, reasoning, and measuring when measurement came up naturally. But they did not sit down and practise long division as an isolated skill.<br>The results were striking. By seventh grade, after just one year of formal arithmetic, Benezet’s students had caught up with and, on many measures, surpassed students who had been drilled since first grade. More importantly, they could think mathematically.<br>He went on to write in an article about his experiment that the “ability to read problems intelligently and explain how they should be attacked is far more important than the ability to add large columns of figures without an error”.<br>Nearly a hundred years before our time! But of course we’ve never heard of Benezet, and this lesson that less is often more has been discovered and lost presumably a few hundred thousand times. It’s lost in the jargon thicket of educational psychology because we’ve not asked the most important question of all .<br>Why?<br>Why does all this matter? Why do I care about this? Why do any of this at all?<br>One could argue we systematically prevent the question from surfacing until adulthood when it finally bursts through and emerges as what we label a midlife crisis.<br>That’s just the meaning vacuum finally caving in.<br>The Crisis<br>Without the why, what we end up with is a crisis of meaning.<br>Without meaning, there is no motivation.<br>Our education system, with all its anxiety-inducing measurements, morphs “No Child Left Behind” into “Cannot Leave a Child Alone.” The kids must be doing something where the learning is measurable.

And in that immense urge to measure, we allow for the most malicious malaise of all to slither in: learning as a carefully titrated mechanical act.

We create curricula and age-based levels and checkpoints and concepts to cover in a calendar year. Because we must measure how kids are learning, we reduce learning to what is measurable . In education circles that’s known as “teaching to test” and it’s really insidious because the test or measure tells us the kid is learning something. But this is illusory learning. Mechanically multiplying numbers or learning how to write compound clauses is not learning. It is performance that leads to shallow, surface level memory that just fades as soon you exit the classroom or school.<br>Think about how a young child learns to speak. No one hands them a grammar textbook. No one drills them on verb conjugation. They are immersed in a world where language matters. Saying “more” gets you more food. Crying out “Mama” brings comfort....