I’m reading this book about how to make schools more interesting. It provides a bunch of clever tricks, strategies, and techniques based on cognitive science. As I read it, I’m trying to remember my own experience in school, and I cannot remember a single thing I learned in school. You might ask, “How about your knowledge of math, science, English, and history? Someone had to teach you all that.” Actually, no. I never paid attention in class. I’m not exaggerating when I say never. I always just drew cartoons. Even if I tried to pay attention to the teacher, it never lasted more than a few minutes. Everything I know, I studied on my own at home. That was the only way I could learn anything, and I’ve always known this about myself, so I never bothered to pay attention in school. The ideal school for me would be where I go to play with my friends; no classes or teachers. I would then go home and study on my own. The school should have exams twice a year to make sure that I studied enough, but that’s all they would need to do.
All my professional skills like graphic design, animation, and computer programming are self-taught too. When I worked in Wall Street, I had to teach myself calculus and statistics (art schools don’t teach you those things). In fact, I see a fundamental problem with the idea of taking classes for professional skills. Firstly, if someone is teaching those skills in school, it generally means that the market is already oversaturated with them. Secondly, if you need 4 months to learn a skill (say Photoshop or Excel), you will never catch up with the speed of the technological evolution. By the time you finish your class, a new version of the application would be out.
If we want to be life-long students, the most important thing to learn is how to learn on our own. All these tricks and techniques for making the classrooms more interesting would just make students lazy. They would always expect the teachers to be Hollywood actors, or else pay no attention. Once they are out of school, they wouldn’t bother studying anything because they wouldn’t know how to learn anything on their own. So, if they had to learn something new, they would resort to going back to school. In other words, the teachers are spoiling them by turning the classrooms into theatres.
Perhaps the best arrangement would be for schools to have classes, but make them optional. If the kids don’t want to attend, they shouldn’t have to. They can just play all day with friends, and go home and study on their own. As long as the schools make it clear what the students are supposed to learn that year, this should work fine for many kids. And, naturally, there should be exams and interviews to make sure that they are learning enough. Does this sound too outrageous, naive, or far-fetched?
I think this would work for many kids who are motivated to learn and have stable home lives with loving parents who care about them and can provide them with the tools required (paper, computers, books, etc). It’s pretty hard to imagine this working for children of broken families who don’t have time for the kids and who aren’t encouraged to learn.
I once tutored English to a man who forbade paper in his household. His children (who I also tutored elsewhere) were astonished and fascinated when I brought a clipboard of paper on our first home session. They played with it, drew all over it, and generally had a great time until the father raised his voice sharply and shooed them away. He was not able to adequately explain to me why he did this when I asked. His children glumly wandered away and played more video games.
What intellectual curiosity they possessed was being systematically suppressed at home. That’s why I suspect this idea would fare poorly for such children, of whom there are a depressingly high number. Then again, our current school system fares poorly for these kids as well. This is why I believe what we need is more choice, not more uniformity. Your idea may well work. But it is unlikely to work for everyone, which is why we need diversity in teaching methods, pedagogy, style, and focus. We need different types of schools for different types of children who come from different types of families.
To my knowledge, a market economy is the only force we know of that can efficiently provide this kind of choice in a practical manner. Our 150-year experiment with nationalized schooling is a failure, and we all know it. What we don’t know is how to fix it for everyone. With a market in education, we don’t need to know, because the best and the brightest will fix it themselves and offer diverse services for a profit. To pay for it, local property taxes can fall and poorer people could be given money that had to be spent on education.
Let’s face it, as long as the state remains in control, neither your idea here nor anything else truly innovative will ever happen in public schools. The system will plod ponderously along, failing more and more children. Uniformity has killed it. For anything like what you propose to gain traction anywhere, only the diversity imparted by a competitive market will allow it to be offered and tested.
For more information, I recommend http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm
Thanks, Nathaniel
True. Diversity is the key issue. As I mentioned in the past here, I’m skeptical of any scientific approach to formulating how we should teach or raise our children, because science has a normative effect, which is not how evolution works.
Thanks for the link. It looks interesting; I’ll check it out.
I remember that you always drew cartoons during a class.