How Do You Know If Your Child Is Actually Being Educated?
Every few months, another report seems to arrive telling parents that American students are falling behind. In the research we discussed recently on the Celebrate Kids Podcast, the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results showed historically weak performance among high school seniors in reading and mathematics. Numbers like that deserve attention, but they can also make parents feel as though an entire generation has suddenly become less capable. Before we accept that conclusion, Dr. Kathy asked an important question: what exactly are we measuring, and are the measurements still capturing the skills today's students are actually developing? A senior who stopped taking math two years earlier may perform poorly on an assessment containing material they have not used recently, while changes in how students read, write, search, and interact with information may complicate comparisons with students tested decades ago. The results may reveal real problems, but the larger question for parents is more useful than the national score: How do I know whether my own child is actually becoming educated?
That question feels increasingly important because education itself is changing underneath us. In the episode, I shared the experience of a recent graduate starting a college program in elementary education who was encouraged to use artificial intelligence to help produce written assignments rather than spend as much time wrestling with the writing itself. Whether that approach is wise matters less than what it represents: teachers, colleges, parents, and students are negotiating technologies and educational philosophies that did not exist when many of our current assessments were designed. It is no longer enough to assume that completing the traditional sequence of classes automatically produces an educated adult. We need a clearer picture of what education is ultimately supposed to form so that we can evaluate new methods without either rejecting everything new or embracing innovation simply because it is efficient.
Four Questions That Matter More Than a Score
When I asked Dr. Kathy how she would judge whether teaching has actually been successful, she offered four questions that I think give parents a remarkably useful framework. First, does the child love learning? Second, are they willing and able to ask good questions? Third, can they use what they know? And fourth, can they explain what they have learned to someone else? None of those questions dismiss academic knowledge. A child still needs vocabulary, mathematics, history, science, literacy, and all the foundational content that allows deeper thinking to occur, but the content is meant to go somewhere. If a student accumulates information for twelve years and leaves school with no curiosity about anything outside the next assignment, something important has been missed.
The first question may be the most foundational because a child who stops wanting to learn is vulnerable in a world that will continue changing long after graduation. Technology will change, industries will disappear, and new ones will emerge, and adults will repeatedly find themselves needing to become beginners again. Dr. Kathy connected lifelong learning with the ability to adapt, noting that young people may have to move through multiple careers and changing economic realities during adulthood. Loving learning does not mean enjoying every book, subject, assignment, or teacher. It means maintaining enough curiosity and confidence to believe that when you encounter something you do not understand, you can move toward it instead of avoiding it.
Good Education Teaches Kids to Ask Better Questions
That brings us to the second marker: questions. Dr. Kathy referenced the idea that Jesus often taught not merely by supplying answers but by asking questions that provoked people to think more deeply. Questions expose assumptions, reveal motives, force us to clarify language, and often lead us beyond the answer we thought we were seeking. A student who only learns to wait for the teacher's answer may become very good at reproducing information while remaining dependent on someone else to frame every problem. An educated child should increasingly be able to look at something unfamiliar and know what kinds of questions will help them understand it.
Parents can nurture that skill without turning every dinner into a Socratic seminar. When a child tells you something they heard, ask, “How do you know?” When they disagree with a teacher or friend, ask them to describe the other person's argument fairly before explaining why they reject it. When they come home excited about a new idea, ask what they think the strongest objection might be. These conversations teach children that questions are not threats to faith or knowledge; good questions often lead to stronger understanding.
Knowledge Becomes Wisdom When Kids Can Use It
Dr. Kathy's third marker may be the one schools most easily neglect because application takes time. She defines wisdom as the application of truth, meaning information has not reached its full educational purpose until the student knows what to do with it. A child can know every grammar rule and still be unable to write an email someone wants to read. They can memorize economic vocabulary while making terrible decisions with money, or study historical events without developing any ability to recognize similar patterns in the present. The real value of education emerges when information begins changing how the student acts, creates, solves problems, communicates, serves, and participates in the world.
This is one reason I increasingly appreciate educational environments that let learning escape the classroom. If students learn persuasive writing, let them make a real proposal. If they study economics, give them a budget to manage. If they learn history, ask them to compare competing sources and explain how different interpretations emerge. If they study science, let them observe, experiment, predict, and discover rather than only memorize the conclusion. The goal is not experiential education for its own sake; it is to help kids understand that knowledge is a gift God gives us to use faithfully.
If You Really Understand Something, You Can Begin to Teach It
The fourth question Dr. Kathy offered was whether a child can explain what they know to someone else. She gave the example of asking a creative Picture Smart child to teach a younger sibling something she had learned about watercolor or design. Teaching exposes the difference between familiarity and understanding because the moment another person asks, “Why?” the learner discovers whether they actually understand the idea or simply recognize the vocabulary. It also builds humility because explaining something well requires thinking about what the other person needs, not just displaying everything you know.
Families have endless opportunities to practice this. Ask your teenager to teach you the concept from math class rather than simply showing you the grade. Let an older sibling explain a science experiment to a younger child. Ask kids to summarize what they learned from a sermon, documentary, book, or trip in a way Grandma could understand. Learning becomes much more durable when children organize knowledge well enough to give it away.
Build an Educational Vision Around the Child You Actually Have
After those four measures, our conversation moved toward the larger question every family has to answer: What do we want education to accomplish in this particular child? Dr. Kathy encouraged parents to begin with who their children are and who they hope they become. Do we want them to be caring, curious, wise, responsible, and willing to put others ahead of themselves? If so, those qualities cannot remain vague aspirations somewhere outside the academic day. Character formation has to be part of the educational vision, whether it happens primarily at school, around the dinner table, during family devotions, in church, through chores, or while serving someone together.
This is also where a child's strengths matter. If education is preparing children to make meaningful contributions in the world, they need to recognize the gifts God has placed in them without constantly comparing those gifts to someone else's. A child who thinks, “They can do it better, so why should I try?” has misunderstood both gifting and purpose. The 8 Great Smarts help us show children that intelligence is broader than the narrow range schools have historically rewarded, while still challenging them to develop areas that do not come as naturally.
Truth Should Be Current Enough to Meet the World Kids Actually Live In
Dr. Kathy also argued that education should be both true and current. That does not mean abandoning old books, historical knowledge, or classical learning. We need the past precisely because it gives us perspective on the present, but studying the past should prepare children to understand the world they are entering now. If students can explain the fall of communism but cannot thoughtfully discuss the ideological questions currently shaping their own communities, we may have given them knowledge without helping them make the transfer.
The same is true in literature and other subjects. There are enduring books worth reading because they have survived for good reason, but older does not automatically mean better, and newer does not automatically mean shallow. Students should encounter enduring ideas and contemporary ones, learn to evaluate both, and become capable of deciding what is true, beautiful, meaningful, and worth carrying forward. Good education should widen a child's understanding of reality rather than trapping them in either nostalgia or novelty.
Life Is Integrated, Even When School Isn’t
The final idea in our conversation may be the one I think schools and families can most readily improve: knowledge needs to become integrated. School schedules naturally divide life into subjects, forty five minutes of English, an hour of mathematics, then science, history, music, technology, and perhaps another course after lunch. That structure helps institutions function, but it can accidentally teach children that knowledge exists in separate boxes. Dr. Kathy pointed out that real life looks nothing like that. We move through a normal day using language, mathematics, history, relationships, technology, judgment, creativity, and faith all mixed together, more like a plate of spaghetti than a set of neatly labeled containers.
A child who learns to write a clear argument in English should bring that skill into history. The reasoning learned in mathematics should influence how they evaluate claims in science or economics. The history they study should give context to literature, politics, theology, and culture. Scripture should not exist as a disconnected devotional subject but as the larger truth shaping how Christians understand people, morality, work, creation, purpose, and wisdom. Education becomes much more powerful when children begin realizing that truth connects.
Luke 2 Gives Us a Beautiful Picture of Formed Curiosity
Luke 2 gives us one of the few glimpses Scripture provides into Jesus' childhood, and I think the scene offers an important picture of education. At twelve years old, Jesus remains in Jerusalem and is eventually found in the temple sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. The people hearing Him are astonished by His understanding and His answers, and Luke places the episode inside a larger picture of Jesus growing “in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.” The scene is not presented as Jesus collecting trivia or competing for the highest score. His learning is relational, spiritual, intellectual, and tied to His identity and His Father's purposes.
Of course, Jesus is unique, and we should not turn the passage into a modern educational method. But Luke's picture of adolescence is still striking. Curiosity is not aimless; it is oriented toward truth. Questions and answers belong together. Wisdom develops inside relationships, worship, community, family, and a growing understanding of identity and mission.
That is much closer to the vision of education I want for my children than simply being able to say they completed twelve grades.
Education Should Help Kids Understand Why God Gave Them Their Minds
Maybe that is the larger measure parents need. Education should help children discover not only what they know but why knowing matters. It should awaken their smarts, reveal strengths, expose weaknesses worth developing, deepen character, cultivate curiosity, and increasingly prepare them to use what they know in service to other people. The goal is not merely a transcript that proves they finished the system. It is a young adult who can keep learning when the system is gone.
That gives parents a much richer set of questions at the end of a semester than, “What grades did you get?” Do you still enjoy learning? What kinds of questions are you learning to ask? Can you use what you know? Can you explain it to somebody else? Are you becoming wiser? Are you learning how different areas of truth connect? And perhaps most importantly: Are you beginning to understand why God gave you this particular mind and how you might use it to bless the world? Those are harder things to measure than a standardized test. But they may tell us much more about whether education is actually working.
Engaging True Education Through the 8 Great Smarts
Word Smart: Ask children to write, explain, teach, persuade, and communicate ideas across subjects instead of treating strong language skills as something used only in English class.
Logic Smart: Encourage questions, comparisons, cause-and-effect thinking, evaluation of evidence, and the ability to transfer reasoning from mathematics into everyday decisions.
Picture Smart: Let kids draw connections among ideas with diagrams, timelines, designs, maps, models, and visual teaching projects that reveal whether they actually understand.
Music Smart: Connect history, culture, poetry, mathematics, emotion, and worship through music so children see how one form of knowledge can illuminate another.
Body Smart: Give learning somewhere to go physically through experiments, building, performance, service, fieldwork, demonstrations, and real responsibilities.
Nature Smart: Use creation as a place where science, theology, mathematics, beauty, stewardship, and observation naturally intersect rather than remaining separate subjects.
People Smart: Ask children to collaborate, teach younger students, interview adults, serve others, discuss ideas, and learn that wisdom is often transferred in relationship.
Self Smart: Give them time to reflect on what they are learning, why it matters, where they struggle, what excites them, and how their growing knowledge connects to their identity and calling.
Remember: However your child is smart, remember this: successful education does not merely produce a student who knows more. It helps form a person who loves learning, asks good questions, applies truth wisely, communicates what they know, connects ideas across life, and increasingly understands how God might use their particular mind for the good of others.