President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to serve as the secretary of the Department of Education is an unconventional one. Linda McMahon, who for more than 25 years held key executive positions with World Wrestling Entertainment, has little formal experience in education. She has not been a teacher, a school administrator, or an elected official with responsibility for schools (though she did serve for a little more than a year on the Connecticut state school board). What she does have, on the other hand, is extensive management and business-leadership experience, including as the head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first term.
As a former teacher who now helps lead an organization that supports educators worldwide, I have mixed feelings about this. Although McMahon and everyone reading these words will have spent many years in school, my experience teaching tells me that it’s hard to understand how education really works—and, too often, doesn’t work—without knowing what it’s like to stand in front of a room of students or communicate with students’ families or balance the many competing demands that educators must juggle every single day. At the same time, and as I’ve now learned the hard way, the skills required to lead complex organizations successfully are different from those required to teach effectively. The Education Department is a very complex bureaucracy, and it’s possible that McMahon’s business acumen may be what’s really needed to run it effectively.
There’s a reason we call watching TV ‘mindless entertainment’ and that ‘brain rot’ is the Oxford Dictionary’s word of 2024.
There is, however, one way in which I fear McMahon’s past success with professional wrestling in particular may fail to prepare her for the challenges that lie ahead. Education is not entertainment.
There are plenty of people who think that it is—or should be. When I trained to become a teacher, I was told quite clearly that my job was to put on a show. I should stand at the board every day and perform my lessons; the more entertaining I was, the more my students would engage and learn. Many of us have had teachers who double as brilliant entertainers. We like their classes because we know they’ll keep us at the edge of our seats and when we think of great teachers, we remember Hilary Swank in “Freedom Writers” or Edward James Olmos in “Stand and Deliver.”
The theory is that if we can just make class as exciting as those movies—or, say, a professional wrestling match—our students will learn. And you can find online courses today that attract students with the same message: “Take our courses, because our lecturers are amazing.”
It’s a compelling pitch. But there are three big problems with this conception of a great teacher as a captivating lecturer.
The first is that, sadly, most of us just aren’t that riveting. I know I’m not. This is what distinguishes actors like Swank and Olmos or pro wrestlers like The Rock in the first place: They can hold our attention in a way that most people simply can’t. They also have the advantage of acting or performing with content and in settings that are designed to hold viewers’ attention, whereas teachers like me need to teach writing and math in classrooms. There’s no way we can compete.
Hard as we try, we also can’t compete with the multitude of entertainment options that are available to our students every day. And, frankly, I don’t think we should try—at least not on the level of entertainment. We can give our students meaningful, inspiring assignments and show them that solving challenging problems or writing poetry is ultimately far more rewarding than scrolling endlessly through TikTok. I’m all for that! But if we try to make our lessons into TikTok-style bites, we won’t be helping students gain the deep understanding and critical-thinking skills they deserve.
Finally, and most importantly, sitting and watching just isn’t a great way to learn anything. It may be easy and comfortable and it may be what many learners are accustomed to. But if you actually want to learn anything, you usually need to get your hands dirty. You need to solve problems or write or debate or anything else that activates your brain. There’s a reason we call watching TV “mindless entertainment” and that “brain rot” is the Oxford Dictionary’s word of 2024. Learning can’t be a passive process.
If we want students to learn, we can’t just entertain them. We must engage them instead. We must provide every learner with content that is appropriately challenging and give each learner the supports they need to achieve mastery. We must connect the content we teach to the questions our young people care about. And we as educators must sit down with the young people we serve, get to know them as human beings, show them that we believe in them, and show them that if they apply themselves, there’s no limit to what they can achieve. Our students’ potential is infinite. We just need to help them unlock it.
Even the most entertaining lecture in the world can’t achieve that.
For our teachers’ and young people’s sakes, if McMahon is confirmed as education secretary, I wish her all the best. I hope she’ll lead the Department of Education as effectively as she ran WWE. And I hope she’ll remember that education and entertainment are fundamentally different endeavors.
2024-12-11 18:19:34
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