Should the Classroom Be More Like the Gym?

Which brings me back to the gym. No one does a bench press because they expect to spend their life pushing bars off of their chests. The bench press is a proxy—a way of building underlying strength that will serve you in ways you can’t fully anticipate. A problem set, a close-reading exercise, a research paper: these were always proxies, too. Einstein—the physicist, not the software product—gave a remarkable address in 1936, on the three-hundredth anniversary of higher education in America, in which he reminded his audience of a hard-to-source aphorism: “Education is what remains if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” The specifics of your coursework aren’t what’s valuable—what’s valuable are the habits of mind that education can cultivate, what Einstein described as the “general ability for independent thinking and judgment.” We learn how to think, even if we don’t exactly recall what we were thinking about decades ago.

We take it upon ourselves to do the bench press, to ride the exercise bike. But we try to avoid the homework. Why? Some of it, I think, comes down to feedback. The body offers something that the mind—at least in a traditional classroom—rarely does: clear, immediate loops linking effort and result. In the gym, you feel the burn, see the muscle respond, track the weight going up week by week. The resistance knob on a spin bike gives you a continuous, private metric of effort. The feedback is embodied. But, when you are wrestling with a complicated text or idea, it can be days or even weeks before the clouds begin to clear. In the gym, we can steadily feel ourselves getting stronger. In the classroom, progress can be difficult to see.

As a kid in the early nineteen-seventies, I learned to “read for comprehension” through something called the S.R.A. Reading Laboratory—a box of sequenced, color-coded cards, which, as I moved from one color to the next, gave me a small, visible marker of progress. It was, in retrospect, a gym for reading: you worked at your own pace, you felt yourself improving, and the improvement was legible. One colleague of mine, unwilling to wait for that legibility to arrive on its own, has redesigned some of his courses around a core principle: he lets students retake exams until the concepts finally click (or as often as his own schedule permits). This is not because he’s indulgent but because he treats mastery the way a coach treats a skill, as something built through repetition, correction, and return. The grade, in his classroom, is a by-product of learning rather than a substitute for it.

The great challenge of teaching is not to transmit information—machines do that cheaply now—but to engineer those moments of genuine understanding reliably enough that students come to crave them. The intellectual equivalent of the body’s feedback is real and, when it arrives, more powerful than any endorphin. It is the “Aha!” of a hard problem suddenly solved, a proof that clicks into place, the moment when an argument you’ve been wrestling with finally holds its own weight. I have seen it on students’ faces, and there’s nothing quite like it. “The most important motive for work in the school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its results, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community,” Einstein said. “In the awakening and strengthening of the psychological forces in the young man, I see the most important task.” That’s what the best coaches have always known. And it’s what the best teachers have always striven for.

The ancient Greeks did not separate the training of body and mind as cleanly as we do. Their gymnasion was simultaneously a place of athletic exercise and of philosophical exchange; Plato taught in one. Centuries later, the German gymnasium became synonymous not with athletics but with intellectual rigor. Somewhere along the way we shortened the word and split the practice. Society treats physical and intellectual training as though they obey different laws—as though the mind, unlike the body, might get strong without being made to struggle.