"You cannot make anybody learn anything that they're not interested in learning, if they don't see and feel the relevance of it."
-Sir Ken Robinson at the Hacking Education Event by Union Square Ventures in NYC March 2009
That's the crux of the problem, right? Well, there are a myriad of problems, but that is one of them certainly. I can't help but think that I've done more learning in the last 5 years than in the previous 16. Led by my varied and random interests I've delved deep into topics on a number of fronts. And the thing is, what can I remember from my education? All the cram down teaching left me without a conversational understanding of many of the subjects I passed with flying colors ten years ago, while some rudimentary skills are lacking.
"Two fingers" in relation to whiskey or alcohol. What does that mean? Is it a unit of measurement like ounces? I don't know!
I've spent the past few years reading sporadically on education. Sir Ken has an interesting take above, which would lend credence to the Sudbury Valley School Model. Sadly, no such school in AZ. It seems that attempting to teach someone who isn't interested in learning is a colossal waste of time. I should have more to reflect 16 years of very expensive education.
Let's start with Sir Ken as he breaks the problem down.
He says Education has three main purposes:
1)Economics. Preparation for a vocation.
2)Cultural. Enabling children to engage with the wider global culture from a firm sense of personal identity.
3)Personal. Developing a student's unique personal capability (Ha!)
To begin with the concept of preparing a student to make a living (number 1). Obviously the world is changing so quickly with regard to technology, business models, etc that we cannot prepare a student with the skills needed 10 years after graduation. Ongoing education will be needed. More than that, a love of learning will be required. Sir Ken emphasizes creativity and innovation which seems likely to be the competitive advantage required as Americans will not be able to compete with technical expertise the hundreds of millions of engineers produced by India and China simply by virtue of the bell curve. Technical expertise is already becoming a commodity. Elance.com anyone?
More important vocationally is the ability to recognize business opportunities and take advantage of them. Entrepreuneurship. This is because Entrepreunerialism may be a skill, but it is one that comes with a few very distinct downsides. Not for everyone. The roller coaster is real.
Back to Sir Ken:
He says that schools around the world are standardizing, rather than customizing education, which is a mistake. Does it make sense to plug everyone into the same curriculum and then test them on their retention on that? It leaves out learning styles, individual interests, aptitudes, and abilities. The athlete, musician, artist, and entrepreneur are marginalized. The student and factory worker are idealized.
Bullet points:
- people graduating from school now, their goal should not be to get a job; their
goal should be to create jobs for other people. And when you look at that type of
entrepreneurialism, now, you can't teach that as a disciplin because it's inherently
interdisciplinary. - college degrees, their value in the job market is getting less and less, but their cost is increasing.
- we always want to create. And everyone wants to create. We want to leave our hands on things. And we have a system that doesn't enable this... wondering why education
does not have -- like, Google or 20 percent rule, that people use 20 percent of their time to create something and that education becomes an incubator for that creation - the assumption -- on behalf of the students, and I don't know where they got this
idea -- they can't find what they really want to do because they need to make money. - the education system is teaching students along the way that the pursuit of doing something you really want to do is not economically viable. And I think that's the real problem.
- I think people have gotten so caught up in the social aspect of school (vs. home schooling options) that they've forgotten really about what we're really there for,
that we're there to learn and we're there to find a passion and maybe find a vocational skill, a useful skill. - The goals of the students, I think it's pretty universal, based on my experience with the
students and teachers, is to be cool. Fundamentally, when you are a middle school child
and you are in a social setting where there's all sorts of social pressures to fit in, I think the
driving force in the life of a child, starting much earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit
in, to be accepted by peers. (Makes determining the children's peer group through school selection VERY important) - one of the fundamental flaws in our K-12 education now is the amount of discipline. Teachers invest so much time, so much energy trying to manage a class, and by the time they've done that, there's so little energy to actually differentiate the instruction, personalize instruction. (Why? Because the students are not intrinsically interested in the material)
- the most formative periods... I stumbled into a peer group where the cool kids were the smart
kids. - part of what people wanted to do is to have their voice heard, mainly develop their own voice. And that's where a lot of the passion comes from, developing your voice, because that's important, to give you the opportunity to create, create the rule of creativity. And we don't give enough opportunities for people to create.
- We're also in a room where people have negotiated and networked their way to here. You
wouldn't be here if you weren't somehow connected to other people in this room. And one of the things that takes place, especially at the teenage years, starting in middle
and high school, is that people actually learn how to network; they learn how the social world works.
That is more than enough food for thought for one post. Also, see Rafe Esquith's "Teach like your Hair's on Fire" for the best conventional teaching strategies I've seen, and John Taylor Gatto's writings for why modern education's format (classes, age segregation, authoritarian discipline, etc) is organizationally screwed up. "A Different Kind of Teacher" is recommended. You can read his book, "the underground history of education" for free here at his site.
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