Tuesday, December 07, 2004
A schooling or an education?
[Part two in a series on educational reform. See below for part one.]
First off, let me say that we are actively seeking comments on these education policy posts. Please feel free to leave comments or email me at ehaspel@virginia.edu.
When I spoke last time about the underlying assumptions of modern American education (that we all need calculus, for example), I didn't even get at the assumption overarching that assumption. This brief essay will address the topic of education vis a vis fact versus education vis a vis methodologies.
As things stand, our education privileges knowledge above all else. Fact is the pinnacle of the system; In his fascinating tome The Underground History of Education, former New York City and State teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto comments that many Western ideas of education are drawn from the Eastern tradition. In Chinese, he says, the symbol for education is a teacher pouring knowledge into the head of a passive child.
Teacher -> Knowledge -> Student.
In the tradition of challenging everything: Why should it be that way? In fact, evidence and logic suggest that that model is a terrible way to achieve true learning. [True learning, crudely defined, encompasses the ability to think creatively, critically, judgementally.]
I heard a story the other week about a teacher who had just completed a long unit on Virginia history with her 4th graders (a class of average achievers). A special reading teacher was working with them on parts of a book, and she asked them what a geographical glossary was. Silence. Well, what's a glossary? That they knew. So what information are we going to find in a geographical glossary? Silence. Ok, what does geographical sound like? After a moment, someone figures it out -- it sounds like geography! Right! So what's in a geographical glossary? Silence.
The kids knew Virginia geography down pat. They knew the five regions, and the rivers, everything. But they had no capacity to think, to deduce, to reason, to infer, to analyze.
We are teaching our kids things to think, not how to think.
Facts in and of themselves do little good. I know quite a bit about history -- I could tell you all about the Battle of the Hydaspes or Anglo-Saxon England or the Civil Rights Movement. But what is far more important is that I know how to think historically; I know the methodologies through which to approach a problem historically. When trying to deduce the reasons behind the Democrats losing power in 1994, my first instinct was to analyze the trends leading up to it, the context in which it happened, etc. I can apply these skills to any problem. My father has so internalized problem-solving techniques that he can handle with equal grace climate change and Native Americans. The kids in my story can tell you the five regions of Virginia and define a glossary, but they can't tell you what a geographical glossary is.
What I've been saying thus far probably sounds very reasonable, but it actually takes a bit of effort to wrap your mind around, because it's not the system we were brought up through. One of my friends put forth a valid criticism of my comments in the last post about biology class: "For those who are going on to college, even if you don't want to be a biologist, or even to be involved in sciences at all, you need that basic fundamental grounding in the sciences, and that comes from surveying the four major branches."
Here's the rub, though: Why? If I didn't know a damn thing about Chemistry, would I -- a History and American Politics double-major -- be any worse off? I can tell you with reasonable certainty that my high school chemistry class has provided marginal benefit to my life. On the other hand, if chemistry was taught towards the objective of letting me think like a chemist (in terms of formulas and balancing equations and breaking things down to their constituent parts, e.g.) that would have been extremely useful. Instead, I had to memorize the periodic table of elements. This is the pathological idiocy of American education: The system isn't designed for teachers to get away with not teaching the periodic table.
Similarly, and this could occupy a whole extra post but I'll mention it here, the system isn't designed for the students to direct their own learning. My friend tells the tale of his one 8th grade class which consisted every day of the teacher putting up an overhead and the students copying it down. Think back to your own experiences: How many (largely incorrect) history lectures on the American Revolution did you have? How many times were you asked to do research and tell the teacher all about the American Revolution, focusing on whatever parts happened to pique your interests? Gatto points out that we've had a paradigm shift over the past century and a half from student-led learning (usually with one teacher per 300+ students while the students taught one another and themselves) to a system where 95% of the "learning" is teacher-fed.
At the core of our educational reform arguments is this truism: Teaching how to think is superior to teaching what to think. The status quo is designed in the exact opposite fashion.
Teacher -> knowledge -> student.
How about if the teacher oversaw the student and gave her or him the basic tools to enrich her or his own mind? How about if we taught paradigms and methodologies and let the students dive into the details? (Hey, I know some people who find the periodic table fascinating). How about:
Teacher -> student -> knowledge.
Challenge everything.
-Elliot
