What’s a thing you wish schools actually taught?
Active listening.
Not simply hearing. We already know how to do that, at least those of us who can. I mean listening as an act of attention. The deliberate decision to turn toward another person and make an honest effort to understand what they are trying to communicate before deciding how we feel about it.
We teach children how to read. We teach them how to write. We teach them how to speak in front of a classroom and defend an argument. We test comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, mathematics, science, and history. Somewhere in all of that, though, we seem to assume that listening will take care of itself.
I am not convinced it does.
I have a deaf grandson and a blind great-nephew, and both have complicated the way I think about words like listening and seeing.
My grandson listens with his eyes.
That sentence alone should make us reconsider what listening actually means. He watches faces, expressions, hands, posture, movement. He pays attention to things many of us miss because we are busy preparing our response before the other person has finished speaking. He reminds me that listening was never solely about hearing in the first place.
My great-nephew has taught me something similar from the other direction. He is blind, but that does not mean he moves through the world without perception. If anything, he has made me think more carefully about what seeing actually means. Sight is biological. Seeing is something deeper. It requires attention, interpretation, memory, context, and the willingness to notice what others overlook.
Those of us with functioning eyesight can be remarkably careless with it. We look without observing. We pass people, places, expressions, and moments without ever really registering them. We assume that because something entered our field of vision, we saw it.
That is not always true.
Sometimes it takes a blind man to teach us how to see.
The same is true of listening.
A person can hear every word and understand almost none of what was said.
Maybe schools should teach that distinction.
Imagine if active listening were part of the curriculum from childhood onward. Students would learn how to repeat another person’s position accurately before disagreeing with it. They would learn to ask, “Is this what you mean?” before charging ahead with an assumption. They would learn that understanding someone does not mean surrendering their own position.
Perhaps most importantly, they would learn how to recognize when they might be wrong.
That may be the part we struggle with most.
We often enter conversations believing our job is to defend what we already know. We gather evidence while the other person is speaking. We construct rebuttals. We wait for an opening. Sometimes we are not listening at all. We are simply reloading.
Active listening interrupts that impulse.
It asks us to remain present long enough for another possibility to enter the room.
That does not mean everyone will agree. I am not suggesting that teaching children how to listen would somehow eliminate conflict, prejudice, stubbornness, or plain old foolishness. Human beings have been finding reasons to argue with one another since somebody first pointed at something and another person said, “No, that’s mine.”
Listening is not magic.
People can understand each other perfectly and still disagree.
But disagreement might become different if understanding came first.
Imagine what that could mean in a classroom. Then imagine it in a marriage, a workplace, a friendship, a neighborhood, or a family sitting around a dinner table. Imagine what might happen if people entered difficult conversations trained not merely to speak clearly, but to receive clearly.
We live in an age that has given us more ways to communicate than any generation before us. We can send words across the world in seconds. We can broadcast our thoughts to hundreds or thousands of people before breakfast.
The technology improved.
I am not certain the listener did.
Maybe that is because we have always treated listening as something automatic instead of something that requires practice.
Will teaching active listening fix the communication breakdown we seem determined to perfect? Of course not. But that is another conversation for another day, isn’t it?
My grandson listens with his eyes.
My great-nephew reminds me that seeing is larger than sight.
Perhaps they understand something many of us should have been taught much earlier: attention is not passive.
It is a discipline.
And maybe schools should teach us how to practice it.
Memoirs of Madness 