This post is following up on a post I made (of the following quote) and a comment from 1redpill:
"Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position."
-Bertrand Russell
"My life is built on a theory ... I am not to be an old fogy or go by any rules other people give me ... if I should turn old fogy or obedient lad my life wound in troth be a failure."
-Charles Sanders Peirce
Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
- John Dewey
Stanley Milgram's experiments
http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm
There is a flaw to schooling in America that has nothing to do with teacher sallary, Administrative percentage of budget, classroom size or even lack of textbooks. That flaw is the flaw of authority. Teachers come into the classroom as arbiters of facts, owners of knowledge, resevoirs of information and the belief is the teacher is there to pass this on to the student somehow. As early as Socrates, this belief was questioned as impossible. No amount of teaching can make learning occur. The problem with our schools, their ultimate failure if you will, is that this realization goes unheeded.
Like the scientist in Stanley Milgram's experiments, the teacher has almost complete say on what is truth and what is fiction in the eyes of school children. Even were it the case that this was so, still there would be no justification for the rote memorization and regurgitation of facts in the school for this very model undermines the heart of democratic activity.
Authority may please the religious, but it is abhorent to those who value critical thinking, engaged and active intelligence and thinking for oneself. The continued downward spiral in the schools of America will continue until this truth is realized
Imagine what skill-set one is taught in the current school system. The skill-set would be something like the ability to memorize minutiae and be capable of regurgitating it on a test later. Now, imagine for one second a job where this skill-set is useful. Second example: the classroom is a place where critical thinking, problem solving and conflict resolution are premium. The ability to solve difficult problems and work through complex conflicts is considered the aim of this alternate educational format. Now imagine which jobs this skill-set is valuable for.
I think it is clear and obvious that the memorization and regurgitation skill-set is a throw-back to industrial revolution thinking. Critically engaged problem solving is a 21st century skill-set. The problem isn't democrats or republicans, it is the very heart of our educational system. We need a new engine to run our vehicle or we will very likely burn-up.
Let us take science and math as perfect examples of what I mean. Contrary to a rather unsophisticated view of science, I do NOT believe it is mere memorization of fact. Why not? Because there are paradigm shifts that occur (now more frequently than ever) in the sciences that literarlly turns what was previously known on its head. This was seen when we moved from Ptolemiac astronomy to Galilean, from Newtonian to Einsteinian, from Einsteinian to Quantum, from Quantum now to m-theory. If someone were to view science in this unsophisticated fashion, after any one of these shifts they would literally be left in the dark. If instead they were trained to INQUIRE, to approach tasks through skilled investigation, they would have the skills to investigate the gestalt shift and learn how to cope with the new system better.
As to mathematics, an unsophisticated view of math is that it is some system to be memorized, one formula at a time. I think this view completely ignores the findings of mathematicians in this century (especially knot theory) whereby math is an EVOLVING discipline. Knowledge is NOT static. It isn't that one memorizes facts and pass those facts along. By the time a doctor leaves medical school, it is estimated that almost HALF of the hard knowledge they learned has been disproved. If they were trained only in the memorization of facts handed down by authorities (and not skilled in finding information through investigation and research) they would be dangerous entities indeed. Thankfully, medical school is not JUST rote memorization (although there is a modicum of that ... after all, thinking requires facts as contextual background).
Further, this country is ranked as 18th out of 24 developed nations for public education. It isn't that we aren't spending enough money on education (in fact, I believe that we are probably spending too much, but this is typically on administration ... the average salary for a teacher in Florida is around $33,000 a year. That is peanuts for someone with a four-year degree), or that the classroom sizes are wrong. I am merely claiming that our reliance upon memorization and regurgitation as the ONLY or at least DOMINANT form of education is our Achilles heel.
Here is a quote from a report by UNICEF recently (the one that found us 18th):
"The United States focuses more on procedure, and we try to teach many topics fast. Other countries tend to break topics up and go much more in-depth. They work on the concept, not just the procedure, " Marsh said. "Countries that did well in rankings focused on teaching the ideas and taught a few topics a year. Kids will learn what a fraction really is, not just how to add or subtract them."
This sort of intellectual engagement with concepts only comes about through inquiry and not through memorization of formulas or even procedural "drill and kill." This country is lagging behind not because of legislation (although I think that is now contributing VERY negatively in the form of "teaching to the test" with Bush's NCLB), classroom size (the Asian countries tend to have MASSIVE classrooms) or educational spending (although, once again, I do believe teachers are on average paid too little for their level of competency). I believe this problem is MORE systemic than that, it is the very structure of what is taught in the educational colleges, it is the very concept of what a classroom environment is supposed to be.
Our country is headed into the information age completely unarmed. Every year, we produce fewer Nobel prizes. Every year, fewer children go on to higher education (although that is perhaps because of the rise in tuition costs at public universities). We are most assuredly in a crisis and that crisis is one of education. In an age of information, those whom know how to find information are king. Our children are trained to memorize what the teacher tells them, but they are woefully inadequately prepared to find it themselves. I know how ill prepared they are because those freshmen come into my class and are like wide-eyed doe.
