Onderwijs op de schop

Sat Sep 5 15:35:32 CEST 2009

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Zouden er meer leden van de regering en het ambtenarenkorps zo over kunnen
denken? Om over de politici nog maar niet te praten ;)

Groet / Cees

http://zenhabits.net/2009/08/education-needs-to-be-turned-on-its-head/
“Our culture lies. They say they want to encourage and reward
individuality and creativity, but in practice they try to hammer down the
pointy parts, and shame off the different parts.” – Sandra Dodd

Going through the traditional school system (in California, Washington and
Guam) was never my favorite thing as a kid, but as a parent, I’ve grown to
realize that the whole system is upside down.

Not the system of any particular state or nation, but system of education
as a concept.

Traditionally, schools use this model:
1. Decide on what kids need to know to prepare them for adulthood.
2. Prepare a curriculum based on this.
3. Give students a schedule based on this curriculum.
4. Have educated teachers hand them the info they need, and drill them in
skills.
5. The student reads, memorizes the info, learns the skills, and becomes
prepared.
6. Students must follow all rules or be punished. This is actually more
important than the info and skills, although it’s never said that way.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a great model. Mostly because it’s based on the
idea that there is a small group of people in authority, who will tell you
what to do and what you need to know, and you must follow this obediently,
like robots. And you must not think for yourself, or try to do what you
want to do. This will be met with severe punishment.

This is ideal if you’re going to be a corporate employee, and need certain
skills in order to work for the corporation — mostly skills of obedience,
actually. This isn’t ideal for the workplace of the coming decade, when
people are less likely to be employed by a large corporation, and more
likely to work for themselves. And have to think for themselves. And
figure out, for themselves, what they want to do. And learn new things for
themselves, without a teacher.

Things are changing faster than ever before. Every month, new technology
is announced that alters the way people work, or will work in the future,
and we need to be able to learn and adapt to this ever-changing landscape.

How are we to do that, or how are our children to learn that, if they have
no authority telling them what they need to know, or how to learn, or what
to do?

People often grow up to be competent learners, and achieve great things,
after going through the traditional school system. But this is in spite of
the system, not because of it. We are pretty adaptable people, inherently
curious, and we can learn without an authority, but the current school
system tries to beat this down. It usually fails to some degree, but to
the degree it succeeds, it harms people.

Schools fail not because they don’t impart knowledge or skills, but
because they kill curiosity, smother excitement for learning, club down
with a furious brutality our desires to be independent, to think for
ourselves, to learn about things that actually interest us.

    “I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays,
and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable
to produce their own ideas.” - Agatha Christie

But Teachers are Great
----------------------
Yes, I agree, they are. My wife was a middle school teacher, of English,
and she worked tirelessly with her students’ interests at heart. She
really wanted to teach them to love reading, and did everything in her
power to do so. Unfortunately, she was frustrated by the authoritarian
nature of school administration, and left. She now homeschools our kids,
and is trying to give them the freedom to learn on their own.

My grandmother was a teacher for decades. My aunt is a teacher, first of
elementary and middle schools, now of children in a juvenile detention
center, and is wonderful at getting kids to love reading. My father is an
artist teaching others to love art, and to do it well. I love teachers,
and have the highest respect for them.

I just think they’re in a system that doesn’t work. That cannot work,
given the nature of what the world has become.

How can we prepare children for a future we cannot foresee? How do we know
what skills they will need, what knowledge will be important, in 10 years,
or 15? We have no idea what the world will be like then. I sure don’t. Do
you? Does anyone know how people will be working 15 years from now?

I submit this is impossible. And what’s more, it always has been
impossible. The workplace now is vastly different than it was when I was a
lad in shortpants three decades ago running around in the schoolyard,
wiping snot from my nose and learning about the Cold War. People then
didn’t have computers in the workplace, at least not most of them, and
those who did have computers didn’t have anything resembling what we have
today. Most people used electric typewriters, and fax machines weren’t in
offices yet. Fax machines.

So yes, I love teachers, and think they are incredible at what they do.
What I think they need to do, though, is not be teachers, but
facilitators.

Don’t direct learning, because when students grow up they won’t be
directed in their learning, they’ll be self-taught. Think about it: when
you learn things today, as an adult, do you learn from a teacher, or do
you learn things on your own? And isn’t learning on your own more fun?
Don’t you love learning new things? Doesn’t that make the learning stick
with you for longer than when you had to memorize things in school?

What we learn in school isn’t nearly as important as how we learn, because
how to learn is the lesson of school.

      “The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an
unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called
school, equipped with tortures called education.” - John Updike

How to Learn
------------
And the way we’re taught to learn is as receivers of information,
non-thinkers. Follow the rules. Read pages 100-132. Do the exercises.
Memorize the information. Spit it out in a test. Do this project, because
we tell you to, not because it’s fun or interesting.

The way we need to be taught to learn is completely different. It’s this:
learn about what interests you, gets you curious, gets you excited. Figure
out where to get the information you need. Read about it, talk to someone
about it, find out about it. Try it. Do it, make mistakes. Figure out how
to correct the mistakes. Figure out how to solve the problems you
encounter. Repeat.

In other words, find problems that interest you, and figure out how to
solve them.

Sometimes, you’ll have to solve problems that aren’t so interesting, just
to solve problems that do interest you. That’s OK. That’s how things work.

And here’s a secret: we already know how to do this. From birth. This
method of learning is innate in all of us. It’s built in.

When a toddler wants to do something, like get a stash of chocolate you’ve
hidden on top of the fridge, he’ll figure it out. He’ll find ways to move
a chair to the fridge, or climb up onto a counter near the fridge, in
order to get the candy. Along the way he’ll learn a thing or two about
cabinet doors and fridge doors and why you shouldn’t lean too far in one
direction on a chair if you don’t want to fall and get bruises.

When a kid wants to play a video game, she’ll learn things like how to set
up and turn on the PS3, how to navigate menus, how to get started with the
game, how to convince mother that she’ll clean her room later and that her
homework is pretty much all done so that she can play the game now.

Kids know how to solve problems, when they want to do something.

We don’t need to teach them to learn. We need to get out of their damn way.

And that’s the problem with schools. They can’t motivate kids to learn,
because they’re forcing it. They’re trying to impart on them a rigid
system of authority that kids naturally rebel against. In fact, this is
the main problem kids face, and they come up with all kinds of incredibly
creative ways to solve it, from skipping school and smoking pot to drawing
incredible doodles in notebooks instead of listening to a history lecture
to finding ingenius ways to communicate with peers, through technologies
like texting and iPhones and through old technologies like passing notes
and so on.

Creativity isn’t dead in our kids. It’s alive, but it’s being marshaled to
beat the forces that are beating them down.

    “No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the
materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his
attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of
exhortation of threats will bring it back.” - John Holt

Turn Education on Its Head
--------------------------
So how to prepare our kids for tomorrow? Better people than I have written
on this. Look up Unschooling — it’s already been invented, and it’s what
I’d recommend.

It’s pretty much just getting out of the way of kids. Let them learn about
what they want to learn about, and you know what? They’ll actually care
about what they’re learning, because they chose it themselves. They’ll get
excited about things, something schools usually fail to achieve.

They’ll learn how to deal with the delicious problem of freedom, a problem
most kids don’t have these days. They’ll get some hands-on, down-and-dirty
experience with autonomy, something they’ll have in spades as adults.

But what if they watch TV or play video games all day? What if they aren’t
interested in math or science and never learn them? What if they’re
totally unprepared for the workplace?

These are newbie questions in the world of unschooling, and I won’t answer
them all here. You’ll have more, in the comments, I’m sure. I’m not the
guy to answer those questions. Google unschooling and read up, because
many smarter people have answered all your questions and more.

I’ll just say a couple things. One, we need to relax and not look at
childhood as a time when every minute needs to be filled up with rigid
rules and learning. It’s a time that should be enjoyed, and kids should
play, and in playing they’ll learn. They’ll learn to play well and work
well with each other. They’ll learn how to figure things out for
themselves. They’ll learn to love the lovely freedom and its associates,
autonomy and responsibility and choice and time management and, yes,
passion.

Two, remember what we talked about above: we have no idea what the
workplace of the future will be, so stop worrying about preparing them for
that. In fact, stop worrying so much. Let kids learn how to learn, and
learn how to be excited about things. That will prepare them for the
future.

Three, also realize that we don’t need to be hands-off. We can be
hands-on, if we’re facilitators instead of directors or dictators. We can
help kids find things they’re interested in, expose them to worlds of fun
(like science and math), teach them games that they might like, help them
solve problems so they’ll learn how to do it on their own, guide them to
resources and people who will give them mountains of information. Be there
for them, as guides.

This is a huge topic, and one that I can’t adequately cover in one post.
I’ll do another post sometime, talking about homeschooling and
unschooling, and how we do it and how to make it work for you. But for
today, I just wanted to throw out some thoughts on schooling, and get you
riled up a bit perhaps. We could all use some good riling now and then, I
think.

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********