The Deeper Purpose of Learning | Robert Pondiscio

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an affiliate of AEI’s James Q. Wilson Program in K-12 Education Studies. Robert challenges the notion that education aims to teach people how to think rather than what to think. They discuss the importance of literacy and equipping students with the basic background knowledge and vocabulary to be able to decode the texts they encounter, and how classical education does this well. They conclude by talking about the telos of education, in which students learn what it means to be human, not just how to get a job. 

A previous Anchored episode featuring Robert Pondiscio is mentioned in this episode. 

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:01.176)
Welcome back to the Anchor podcast, folks. We have returning with us today, Robert Pondisio, name that for many of you needs no introduction. Robert is actually one of the first guests ever on the Anchor podcast three or four years ago. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an affiliate of AEI's James Q. Wilson Program in K-12 Education Studies, where he focuses on K-12 education, curriculum, teaching, school choice, and charter schooling.

Before joining the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Pandisio was a policy analyst and education reform expert at the Fordham Institute and Education Think Tank. He previously worked for the Core Knowledge Foundation and as an advisor and civics teacher at democracy prep public schools. Mr. Pandisio became interested in education policy when he started teaching fifth grade in a struggling South Bronx public school in 2002. Before that,

He worked in journalism for 20 years, including in senior positions at Time and Business Week. Robert Pondisio, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. Thanks for being here.

Robert Pondiscio (01:09.177)
Thank you. Boy, that bio needs some work, man. I'm not an expert in anything, and I'm not even sure I would describe myself as interested in education policy.

Jeremy Tate (01:18.85)
But you have this rare thing that most people don't have. You have this thing called common sense. And so when you speak about education, it's like, that's which we love. So you've got your ear to the ground. There's, we're kind of, there's a flurry of activity right now with, kind of in between administrations, potentially we're on the precipice of, major, potentially major change. I know you're working with a number of states, you know, to see what that could look like. When you think about,

Robert Pondiscio (01:24.143)
Fold another one.

Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (01:48.844)
the next five, 10 years in American education. What makes you optimistic? What do you get excited about?

Robert Pondiscio (01:51.567)
Oof.

Robert Pondiscio (01:55.213)
Wow. Well, how much time do we have? That's a lot to chew on. What am I excited about? Well, look, I've said this a bunch of times in recent months. The relationship between Americans and their schools, or their children's schools, has just never been more in play than it is right now. When I give talks about this, I love starting off by asking people that I'm...

Jeremy Tate (01:58.83)
Yeah.

Robert Pondiscio (02:23.467)
subjected to listening to me like, how many of you went to a geographically zoned school? Meaning, raise your hand if you lived here and that was your school and that was the end of it. And of course, almost every hand goes up. Historically, 85, 90 % of folks, at least of our generation, that was where I lived was where I went to school, period, full stop.

Jeremy Tate (02:45.516)
Yep. Yep.

Robert Pondiscio (02:46.157)
That world is changing a lot more quickly than I think people really realize, even frankly, people like us in education. I mean, when you add up a school choice, a charter, magnets, homeschooling, micro schools, even intra-state or intra-district school choice where you're still in the public system but you have some choice.

My best guess is like 35 to 40 % of kids are doing something other than that right now, meaning they're doing something other than I live here, I go to school there. So there's been this ongoing paradigm shift in how we educate kids and it's just gonna gain momentum. mean, I'm sure you know this Jeremy, but at least about a dozen states now they have these education savings accounts, which even if the uptake is somewhat slow,

It basically means you can take the state's money and run and get yourself some education how you wish on public dollars. So it feels like we're kind of in this landslide moment where just our relationship to schools, again, has never been more in play. But I think by the end of this decade, as early as the end of this decade, we could be looking at a situation where half of American kids do something other than what I assume you did, what I certainly did was I live here, I go to school there. It's just really changing.

Jeremy Tate (04:03.502)
So we shared a similar experience. I taught in Brooklyn from 2004 to 2007. You were in the South Bronx, 2002. folks, go back and listen. One of the early anchor pods, we'll link that in the show notes for sure. When you think about how that experience shaped your hopes and dreams for education, to talk to us about that.

Robert Pondiscio (04:11.652)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Pondiscio (04:28.611)
Well, it really hasn't. mean, okay, yes, it's shaped my views, but my priorities, I don't think have changed one iota in 20, 25 years. I I left the media world in what was supposed to be a two-year public service stint and turned into 20 plus years and counting. The alpha and omega of my interest is in making the system work more fairly for the kind of kids that I taught in the South Bronx, low-income kids of color in a...

in a poor neighborhood. And a lot of the homilies that I was taught about what those kids needed were just demonstrably wrong. As I think you know, I became kind of a devotee of E.D. Hirsch Jr. and his core knowledge vision of the world. So to me, I've said a thousand times since then, equity is literacy, literacy is equity. And one of the reasons, to get back to your previous question, what am I excited about?

Jeremy Tate (05:19.725)
Really?

Robert Pondiscio (05:25.251)
Well, this burgeoning era of choice that we just described, I think that has the ability to make things work a little bit more fairly for those kids. I'm not naive about these things. I'm not one these people who thinks, the market's magic and pull this lever and everything will be fine. It's a lot more complicated than that for reasons we can discuss if you want. But I mean, you

What I wake up and think about in the morning has not changed from my first day in the classroom 20 odd years ago. How are we gonna make sure that societies have nots as it were, have what they need to be successful, upwardly mobile, be fully engaged citizens, all the things that well-off Americans take from

Jeremy Tate (06:14.694)
There's a phrase that is contested more and more kind of within the classical ed movement, and that is the phrase, you know, we don't teach students what to think, we teach them how to think. There's some thoughtful folks that have pushed back against that.

Robert Pondiscio (06:25.891)
No, you don't. No, you don't. You teach them. Yeah, you just don't. mean, that's just like, you you just winded me up, Jeremy. You know, I've learned at the knee of not just Edie Hearst Jr., but Dan Willingham, who, you know, drummed it into my head years ago that all of these skills, reading comprehension, problem solving, critical thinking, they are, you know, what cognitive scientists like Dan call domain specific. You're not going to teach kids to be all purpose.

Jeremy Tate (06:33.632)
Ha

Ugh.

Robert Pondiscio (06:53.593)
problem solvers, critical thinkers, et cetera. You've got to fill their head with lots of knowledge and then they can think critically and problem solve about the things that they know. But that's one of the things that's kept me in this work for more than two decades now is there's no end of dragons to be slain, meaning these homilies, as I like to call them, that we have as educators that sound, as I like to say, seductive, intuitive.

Jeremy Tate (07:04.174)
Hmm.

Robert Pondiscio (07:22.113)
appealing and wrong. And that's another one.

Jeremy Tate (07:28.184)
Well, one of the most powerful talks, know, 10 years of CLT, you've been to a lot of great conferences, heard a lot of amazing talks on all things education. One of the most powerful, I believe we were at the Heritage event in maybe Arizona, and you were talking about kind of the prior knowledge that's needed for learning. I think you may have even used a baseball analogy. You're using the language of kind of furniture in the mine that's necessary.

I've borrowed heavily from that and I do give you credit, but I'm wondering if you could kind of share with our listeners, what is, especially in terms of literacy, love for you to speak into that and share that analogy.

Robert Pondiscio (08:07.063)
Yeah, I mean, there's a reason I became an Edie Hirsch Jr. fanboy. It's because, as I've said countless times, his work, it was as if he was in my South Bronx classroom. Like he described to a T what I saw every day, kids who could decode, read the words in front of them, but struggled with comprehension. This has become a lot more.

common knowledge now than it did a few years ago, thanks to the work of Emily Hanford and her podcast, like, Sold a Story and Hard Words. So, you we're having this kind of science of reading moment now. And but a lot of us have been nattering on about this for a very long time. So, look, I mean, you the reason I became a Hirsch person was because of, you know, what I like to call it, I'm not sure this is original to me, you mental furniture. Hirsch's point made simple, maybe oversimplified is, look, you know,

In any language community, writers and speakers make assumptions about what their listeners and readers know. And when those assumptions are correct, language is a well-oiled machine. It proceeds fluidly. When it's not, comprehension falls apart. So the implication of that is that we need to make sure that every student, rich or poor, white or Black,

is dealing with the same basic set of background knowledge, of vocabulary, of common knowledge. That's how this works. And it's not really up to us to dictate it. We can curate it, so to speak. We can try to catalog, as Hirsch has done over the years, what it is that the average person knows and thinks you know, too.

Jeremy Tate (09:43.118)
Hmm.

Robert Pondiscio (09:51.951)
But one of the things that you see in settings like where I taught and perhaps where you did as well, the struggling reader is not the kid who cannot decode. You don't put a piece of text in front of them and they can't read it. What you hear them say is, well, I read it, but I didn't get it. So then that should make us curious. Why didn't you get it? And the reason, the analogy that I've loved to use over the years is I describe a reading passage as like a child's game of Jenga.

Jeremy Tate (10:12.366)
Hmm.

Robert Pondiscio (10:20.729)
you like if you know that block game that you play with your kids where you can, you know, pull out a couple of blocks and it's fine, you pull out one too many and it falls apart. Well, think of that game of Jenga, that block tower, where every block is a bit of background knowledge or a vocabulary word. And so what happens, you you can pull out a few, you could be missing a little bit of background knowledge, a vocabulary word or two, and it's fine. And then at some point you pull out one too many and the entire thing collapses.

Jeremy Tate (10:49.358)
Hmm.

Robert Pondiscio (10:49.547)
So all sense and meaning is lost. Now that's an oversimplification, but I think it's a useful one. Yeah. And it explains why kids suddenly, it's as if they're reading in a different language. They can decode, but a critical mass of missing information is there that just causes all sense to be lost.

Jeremy Tate (10:53.966)
It's a really powerful image, yeah, okay.

Jeremy Tate (11:12.504)
You know, one of the questions we get a lot over the years especially is, you know, what exactly are you testing for at CLT? Are you testing for aptitude or achievement? And we try to cut through that and kind of go back to first principles and we say, look, if a student, what we want to cultivate is a kind of fluency, you know, where if a student, maybe they pick up something from Alexander Hamilton that's really dense and kind of over their head, but they're coming in with the prior knowledge that he was a Federalist and that he was on this side.

of this debate. So that's prior knowledge that is then allowing them to have some furniture, if that's the right use of the word, to then make more sense of the passage. Whereas if they had just come in knowing nothing, even if potentially their actual reading rate was a little higher.

Robert Pondiscio (11:59.673)
That's right. You know, a few moments ago, and I realized I over or waved on this, you had mentioned the baseball analogy or I think you're referring to the baseball study, which was kind of obscure 20 years ago. And now a lot more people know about it, thanks to Emily Hanford and others. This was a study and I believe the researcher's name was was wrecked in Leslie. I can't remember their first name or the university, but they did what is what is commonly called the baseball study. And the reason it's

it's so gripping is because it's like that hammer through glass moment for a lot of teachers. Once they're presented with the results of this study, they're like, wow, now I get it. And again, what this study was, they, reading researchers, Recton Leslie, sat kids down with a, I think it was like a fifth grade level reading passage about a game of baseball. And they very cleverly asked the kids, they stopped them while they were reading from time to time and said, okay, now,

move the players around on this model diamond to illustrate what you had just read. Pretty simple idea, right? Now, what was fascinating about this was there were two groups of students that took this test, one who, at least according to a standardized test, were quote, good readers and some that were poor readers. And then within those two groups, there were those who had a lot of domain knowledge about baseball. They knew the game. And there were some...

that knew very little. So now you have four groups, good readers who know baseball, good readers who don't. Poor readers who know baseball, poor readers who don't. Well, if reading was a skill, the way we teach it, the way we test it, well then the good readers should have had no trouble passing this test and scoring high. That's what they do, they're good readers. What was fascinating about this study was the so-called poor readers with high domain knowledge of baseball outperformed the

Jeremy Tate (13:27.022)
Hmm.

Okay.

Jeremy Tate (13:40.972)
Hmm.

Robert Pondiscio (13:48.867)
good readers with low domain knowledge. So in other words, it's not like you've got some kind of skill called reading. It's again, what Dan Willingham and others would call domain specific. The thing that enabled you to make sense of the passage was your domain knowledge, that you understood baseball. So as I've said for years ever since, if this makes you question who was a good reader and who was a poor reader, well, that's exactly the point. So follow this idea where it leads. You just invoked Hamilton.

Jeremy Tate (13:50.604)
Wow. Okay.

Jeremy Tate (14:14.914)
Hmm.

Robert Pondiscio (14:18.083)
Who's going to understand Federalist Number 10? Is it somebody who understands the way our government is structured, who knows who Hamilton and Jefferson or Madison were, John Jay, or is it somebody who didn't have a day of history, a day of social studies, and is trying to apply these kind of tips and tricks and reading strategies? It should be obvious to us. The kid with the walking around knowledge.

of civics in history is going to do better comprehending that passage than somebody who never is encountering them for the first time when they read Federalist 10.

Jeremy Tate (14:59.628)
Yeah, this is an incredible thought. I I feel like you're saying, but in a pretty different way, what I hear a lot of the folks within classical education kind of saying, you know, that this maybe is the furniture, this familiarity with the tradition. You read something like Dante, and he's got, there's so many references to so many giants, you know, throughout antiquity, and it's so much richer if you've got some familiarity.

with them. You could probably still understand the words if you don't, but it's kind of like the, yeah, so when you think about the insight that you had,

Robert Pondiscio (15:38.057)
But also, Jeremy, if I can add, I've never read Don Quixote, but I sure understand what somebody means when they say, I'm tilting at windmills. That's the other piece of this, right? Which is that there's so many allusions and idioms and references that the language you and I are engaging in as literate adults is just sloppy with assumed knowledge. We're doing it right now. It's the most difficult thing for people to wrap their head around.

Jeremy Tate (15:46.254)
Yeah

Robert Pondiscio (16:04.983)
like the proverbial fish that doesn't know it's in water, we are swimming in knowledge and vocabulary. It enlivens our speech and our writing. And when others don't have what we have, they're not welcomed into this conversation. They're like, what are these guys talking about?

Jeremy Tate (16:21.102)
When you hear folks in the classical movement speaking about this, do you feel that you're mostly seeing things the same way, understanding of literacy? We've got more more folks we talk to that love kind of the idea behind classical ed, but they think that the word itself is kind of loaded politically right now, so they prefer not to use it.

Robert Pondiscio (16:43.033)
Classes, that's what, yeah, no, look, I mean, I don't think you can be an E.D. Hirsch guy as I am and not admire classical education. You know, one of the things, because it's built on the same foundation, right? Like there is a body of work, there's a tradition that we know and we want you to know too. I'm making a much more prosaic point about how language works. Classical Ed, when done well, I think exists on a higher plane.

I mean, you're starting out with that shared foundation and then you are exalting the true and the good and the beautiful as it were. And it's just a richer kind of education. But I mean, interestingly enough, Hirsch, and then we can talk about other things because otherwise I'll just bore you to tears forever on this. When Hirsch first was developing his theories of what he called at the time cultural literacy, this was a man of the left who was pilloried as trying to impose a dead white male canon on children.

And his point then and now is like, no, no, that's not it at all. It's this bit about mental furniture. It's this bit about curating what the average or what native speakers know and assume you know too. So classical education can't avoid doing that in a sense. I'm not saying that's the reason why it's become such a popular burgeoning movement, but they cannot avoid.

offering what I would think of as kind of an ED Hirsch style education. It's just kind of in the genetic code.

Jeremy Tate (18:13.998)
You know, I think back to my time in New York and even speakers we'd have for assemblies and it was, you do good in school kids. You're going to have five cars like I do and get the big place. And you would ask students and they would say, you know, we're here to get a good job. Same answer from kids in the affluent public school, know, in Brodick High School. It was jobs, jobs, jobs.

Robert Pondiscio (18:23.919)
you

Jeremy Tate (18:39.306)
Even at a great AEI event, loved the folks at AEI, but we had a couple of speakers where actually one of them said that if you are doing a job that you could have done without a college degree, that you got ripped off and your college education failed you, right? I that's weird. There's a bunch of Harvard kids right now who are farming and doing farm to table kind of work. they didn't need to go to Harvard for that. I view the main problem with education as this

Robert Pondiscio (18:52.719)
Hey.

Yes.

Robert Pondiscio (19:04.926)
Hahaha

Jeremy Tate (19:08.632)
this TELOS issue, the goal, what are we doing here? Is it what Cornel West says? Is education a deep dive into be human? Or is it jobs training? C.S. Lewis says that when education becomes jobs training, civilization dies. How do we do this in terms of, is this primarily about the, what even is education?

Robert Pondiscio (19:26.669)
It's a great question, Jeremy. And I'll be honest, I'll tell it myself here a little bit. I didn't even have my bachelor's degree until I was damn near 40 years old. I took a semester off from SUNY Oswego midway through my sophomore year and they may still be holding my room. I never quite found my way back. And the only reason I ended up getting my bachelor's at all is because I wanted to teach in the New York City public school system. I mean, I had, you

accumulated enough credits over the years to have probably two degrees, but not enough of them in one place. So had to stitch them together into a degree program at a school called Empire State College, which is the independent study branch of the SUNY system. So I kind of, you know, but I mean, I'll flatter myself to say I wasn't poorly educated. I just wasn't necessarily credentialed. That said,

The last thing I want to do is, even though, look, we have to acknowledge what you just said is true. A lot of people have a very utilitarian view of education. What do you want? Why do you go to school? To get a good job. Why don't you get a good job? To earn a good living. If parents and students view that as the means to an end, the last thing I'm going to do is judge them. But you've heard me do it already in this conversation, taking a fairly utilitarian view of knowledge as building literacy.

And I need to remind myself sometimes that's just a starting line. Now, you know, it may not be beyond that for a lot of kids. If they want to just go right into the work world, that's fine. But there's a lot more that we can offer as educators beyond, you know, college and career ready. You know, I like to joke that Horace Mann went to his grave having never uttered that phrase, college and career ready.

Jeremy Tate (20:47.502)
Mm-hmm.

Robert Pondiscio (21:12.131)
He had a different idea, which was citizenship. We lose sight of that too. But then beyond that is the things that you work on, really kind of call it varsity academics, if you like, exalting education to be fully human and fully educated. Is that a bar that we should pursue for every child? Well, it's probably not possible. I'm not sure that there's a demand for it, but we sure as heck could get a lot better.

at offering a media richer education to those who both wanted and are prepared to take advantage of.

Jeremy Tate (21:47.596)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (21:51.054)
One reason I think I'll never be able to consider myself a seriously educated person is because I can only really think in one language. And a couple of times over the past year, I've been out to Budapest and met with a bunch of high school students and they all speak three or four languages. they've mastered multiple languages. when you think about it, it's amazing. Soren Schwab, our mutual friend, he speaks six or seven.

Robert Pondiscio (22:06.031)
I speak better English than I do. That's right. Yeah. Isn't that amazing?

Jeremy Tate (22:20.782)
And he corrects me on the one language I know. I'm like, bro, come on, this is all I've got. That's right. He's soaring, you're the worst. You're the worst. But talk about that, know, language. Why do we not even start languages until middle school? We know language acquisition peaks at like six years old. And in other countries, they're immersing them in languages very young.

Robert Pondiscio (22:20.931)
my goodness.

I hate him.

Robert Pondiscio (22:44.035)
Yeah, look, I'm wholly out of my depth on that. I was a terrible language student. One of the things I was hoping when I became a South Bronx school teacher is what little Spanish I learned in four years in middle school and high school would come back. And I suppose it did, because I didn't have much to begin with, but what little I had didn't come back.

So yeah, I was never able to get over that bad habit that bad language students have of translating in my mind. I never learned to kind of think and speak in that language. I'm like you, I'm just in awe of people who master and are fluent in multiple languages. My daughter had a volleyball coach who spoke six languages fluently.

And there were kids on the team, were at least three different languages with kids on the team. And he conversed with them, know, fluidly in their own language, which was just so damn impressive to me. have no, look, I don't think this is gonna change. There's a lot of things we're gonna change in American education. One thing I don't think we're gonna get good at anytime soon is mastering other tongues, because frankly, we don't have to. The world has done us a favor, thanks internet, by making English the de facto global standard.

Jeremy Tate (23:52.206)
Yeah.

Robert Pondiscio (23:57.249)
So it's going to reinforce that kind of intellectual laziness that we have.

Jeremy Tate (24:02.606)
I think you're right. was thinking last time I was out, our friends in the UK, they owe Americans a debt of gratitude because otherwise English would just be another one of 30 or more European languages. But because Americans refuse to learn any other language, it's become the language that every European country also has to master. So Robert Pondisio, you're doing great work.

Robert Pondiscio (24:22.634)
Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (24:26.19)
highly in demand on the speaking circuit and you've got your ear to the ground in terms of changes. I love your optimism. I love your clarity with speaking about some of the changes that we really can make. So thanks for coming back on the Anchor podcast and love to have you on again in the future.

Robert Pondiscio (24:45.741)
And right back at you, Jeremy, I admire the work that you and your colleagues are doing at CLT. It's been wonderful to watch from a distance the incredible growth and uptake of what you're doing. So keep at it, my friend.

Jeremy Tate (25:00.092)
Thank you, Robert.

Robert Pondiscio (25:01.305)
Thank you.