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Evolution to Guide Our Learning Revolution

5/11/2013

2 Comments

 
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Is education simply about teaching us to parrot back answers we have been given a few days ago? It's quite obvious the answer is no.

This week, I'm moving on to another item concerning societies. I'm moving from culture to education, which is one of the chief methods by which culture is created and passed on. I'm not an educator, but like all of you, I have spent many years of my life in an education system. I don't have children, but children all around the world are joining me in society after passing through their own education system. I'm not an expert in education, but I know it's important enough to pay very close attention to experts who do devote their lives to this field. I have an old friend Jonathan Martin who has been a very progressive teacher and headmaster at schools in the past and who is now consulting to schools around the world about how they can improve their techniques. He runs a wonderful blog that explores trends in 21st century education and I have picked up not only many interesting ideas from his site, but perhaps more importantly, a small passion for news about the field. (Inculcating passion, curiosity, the desire to learn - these are big themes of his.) And there is no shortage of stories about education in the news. Just in the last few weeks there have been fascinating articles about the need for greater professionalization of teachers, the ongoing exploration of  MOOCS (massive open online courses) and their place in learning institutions, and even the technique of encouraging "cheating" in the classroom to help students understand the game theories that underlies all our social interactions. I love reading about these things.

Another leading education thinker is Ken Robinson (who I probably came across on Jonathan's blog ages ago, but I don't really remember anymore), who has given a couple of very compelling TED talks about the education system. His first one, Do Schools Kill Creativity?, contains the following quotes: 

"Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects ... at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. ... And there is a hierarchy within the arts: art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to students the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? ... We all have bodies. ... but we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side. ... The purpose of education systems throughout the world now is to produce university professors. They are the people who come out at the top. ... But they are rather curious ... They live in their heads, and slightly to one side. ... Our education systems are predicated on the idea of academic ability. ... They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. ... The hierarchy rests on two ideas ... 1) the most useful subjects for work are at the top ... and 2) academic ability (is paramount),  because the universities designed the system in their image. ... The consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative, people, think they're not."

(see the entire talk here:)

This is tragically wasteful. And it is not evolutionarily robust. Monocultures are fragile, and our education system has become one. I should point out that I'm not picking on just educators. This is a typical evolution of all distinct cultures - they become more extreme as a majority arises and they share their views with one another, becoming more and more convinced they are right and less and less aware of minority opinions. Who designs education systems? Professors! Of course they end up designing a system that suits their impression of the world. The same holds true for lawyers and legal systems, doctors and health care, police and law enforcement. I'm not trying to single out teachers; this is just what happens to groups when they are separated. That's not to say these issues aren't recognized by elements within these groups, but it does make it harder for those prescient people to successfully change the culture. But we know we need to.

Ken Robinson's second TED talk urged precisely this need to change. It was called Bring on the Learning Revolution and you can watch it below if you like.
His guiding principles for the future of education are good ones. Get kids excited about learning. Recognize diversities of intelligence. College is not the only goal. Focus on personalization not standardization. I agree with all of these, but wanted just to add some more momentum to the movement by putting some principles of evolutionary philosophy behind the argument as well. To wit, I have written:

Education

Gene-culture coevolution, the ability to learn and pass on our learning from person to person and generation to generation is the greatest strength of our species. Education is required for the further progress and survival of the species. Education is required for each individual to find his or her place in society where they can be happy and productive. This is the purpose of education - to ignite the spark of learning that lies within each human and make accessible the learning that they need.

The diversity of our species is what makes it so strong and adaptable. Education needs to account for this diversity in the population. Education needs to take into account different abilities and interests. No one should or needs to be left behind. Society requires many levels and different kinds of ability. Society works much better when everyone is in their own “flow states,” when they are functioning at levels that are just hard enough to challenge them out of boredom but not so hard as to induce frustration. A one-size-fits-all, production line mentality for education makes no sense with this view of humanity. The goal is not minimum of complication, it is maximum production. Different requirements should not be stigmatized, but celebrated, and met. Education in this manner costs less than a broken society filled with uneducated and unhappy citizens.

The ongoing development of our brain over the first 25 years of our lives implies the need for a long education. One of the defining characteristics of our brain development is the increasing capacity for long-term thinking as we age. While we are young, society must restrain our actions because that is when we are more likely to be short-term-focused and destructive to self or society. Education should have as one of its goals the inculcation of a long-term cooperative outlook on life.


These are just a few guiding thoughts - vision statements as it were. Like pretty much all of my topics right now, whole books can, are, and should be written about them, but those details will be explored later. For now, it's enough to point the general direction and move on if it is agreed to. In the spirit of a life-long education, I hope you will share with me any points of view I haven't taken into account. We need to hear them, and I would be glad to learn about them.
2 Comments
Andrej
5/13/2013 10:11:49 am

Deep and Random Thoughts:

I cringe at the standardized testing revolution in the US and the world. Here it is basically driven by our poor ramkings in standardized testing compared to much of the rest of the world. (I don't completely buy this, but that is for another time) My oldest son just got done being prepared for the Maryland Standard Achievement Test which I know for a fact is taken way more seriously by the school administration and teachers than the students. Ths school is still a very good one, but for a few weeks, they sorta morphed into a Japanese-style exam prep school. How does a third grader understand that if the principal wants to keep her job, he better do well on the test? What possible test could be deterministic about a third grader's future ability - none, so they rely on Eastern European rote memorization. Very little of the test is about creative problem solving... Ah well....

Another thing that is strange about our school system is that a kid born a day before the cut-off date goes to school with a kid born 363 days earlier. A kindergartner born at the last possible date would be 5 years old and she would be competing against a student who is 5 and 364/365ths years old, or 20% older and more developed. How does this make sense? There has to be an accounting for development not based strictly on age. Maybe do a K-2 grade where the students are matched up by development and understand that some may graduate into 3rd grade at a differnet rate than others.

Part of my job is talking with high school foreign exchange students on scholarship here. Almost do a one, they all say how much easier high school is here than back home (be it Ghana, Russia, or Jordan). This to me at first seemed like a problem. But as I spoke more with the students they and I realized that the learning style here was much different. They were learning to learn more here (even given standardized testing) and back home it was about an accumulation of knowledge. I do believe though that most of the high school gradautes in the northern hemisphere are at the level of our college sophmores and freshmen but that our university system blows them away after that...

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@EdGibney link
5/13/2013 11:21:15 pm

Did you see the news this week about Britain considering boosting the exam scores of pupils born in the summer? They apparently have an August / September cutoff for grade entry and they were exactly considering your point - but all the way through to the end of their high school! (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22469216) That's more than a bit much in my opinion. The differences they saw in the distribution of good grades by month was not perfectly even, but it wasn't enough to justify across the board action. I suspect that will get squashed.

Now K-2, that's a more interesting story. In the first TED talk posted above, Ken Robinson said he was once told by a teacher friend that a 3 year old is not half a 6 year old. Awesome. I know I went to kindergarten at age 4 (and 9 months - I was a December baby), but was still put in reading classes with second graders on a regular basis because I could handle it. I have pretty much no recollection of this, but I assume that kind of flexibility is what you are after and probably did me some good. Based on what we know about "flow states" and keeping people engaged by giving them tasks that are juuuuuust hard enough for them, it seems pretty clear that a one-size fits all system (or maybe three-sizes fits all in the case of schools with tracking systems) doesn't meet the individual needs of pupils. It's a hard problem. I like what people like my friend Jonathan are trying to do about this. Check out his blog sometime.

That's really interesting about the exchange students you are talking to. Tanya and I haven't been all that impressed with the British school system or university system. It's too early specialized, and not as long or as much work as the US system. However, we have been impressed with British people. Somehow, the flame of learning keeps burning in them and your average bar patron knows quite a lot of history and trivia at a pub quiz, to speak nothing of the very impressive friends and university colleagues Tanya and I have met. This says something to me about the role society plays in our educations irrespective of the school experience. With history plaques everywhere, BBC on the tv and radio in every home, and a long tradition of world leadership in the arts and sciences (see Genius of Britain: The Scientists Who Changed the World sometime - it's amazing http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1673443/), somehow that seems to seep into peoples' heads in the UK. Perhaps it's the cool and misty weather with long winter nights too that drives everyone indoors rather than allowing them to give in to the hedonistic pursuits possible on the mediterranean coast or the gold coast of Australia. I'm not sure. But I find cross-cultural studies in this area fascinating. We have much to learn about learning yet.

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