I am interested in education and I have a PhD in educational research, statistical analysis and experimental design. I began attending school when I was five years old and I have been in and out of school for more than 70 years. It is not surprising that the subject of school, teaching and being a student is of interest to me.
Tons of data show that school matters. Usually what is stated is that education or educational level matters. Higher educational level is correlated with better health, happiness and wealth. But as the interesting recent book, "The Bad Food Bible", emphasizes, "research", associations between this and that, anecdotes (my grandmother took a teaspoon of Tabasco every day and she lived to be 101), and several other sorts of data are not very solid evidence of cause.
I like to use the word "schooling" instead of education to try to emphasize that what happens when you sit in a classroom and participate as directed by the teacher is rather mysterious. Generally, what happens to you is not a duplicate of what happens to other students right in the same classroom. If I come out of a freshman history class with a new grasp of the tensions between the new French king and other barons and earls and other local leaders, someone else in the same room might have spent the whole time wondering why the teacher seems to dislike him.
If you had signed up for a different history teacher, you might have learned about the Spanish king instead of the French one. No one can teach about everything that happened and every teacher has to do some selecting, some emphasizing and some summarizing. We can do a fairly good job of teaching you about 500 years of events without taking 500 years to do it.
The most helpful book on research methods I know of is a small one called "Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research" by Campbell and Stanley. It can be downloaded for $10 from Amazon.
One of many outside-the-classroom forces that matters along with schooling is simple maturation. We love our children and nobody wants to let a childhood pass by without fitting some good schooling in. However, all the while, the young body is maturing, developing all sorts of abilities and strengths on its own. The brain is developing and natural curiosity and memory and critical thinking ability and doubting ability and questioning ability.
Another factor that matters is the home life of a student. Does he get enough rest, good food, encouragement, talk with other members of the family? Finally, the individual personality of the student matters. Some people like school and books and tests and others simply don't. The general feeling seems to be that people, especially males, who like school very much and do well are not very manly. There are plenty of people who don't especially like school but do well in later life.
