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Programming Our Kids:
November 4, 2002:
Recently I posted a very critical essay on teaching. After thinking
about it, I realized I did not finish that piece. There is more
to say. In that essay I said no one seems to understand that it
is the focus of education which is wrong. We really need to get
back to basics. We need to teach our kids how to do research and
teach them how to communicate. Then we can give them the special
tools they may need for analyzing and organizing information,
including math. Now, let me expand on that.
I believe the purpose of all education should be to teach us how to investigate the world, analyze and organize information, and communicate our findings. That is all that education can or should do. It should, but it does not. Instead, what the educator attempts to do is program his student to give the same answer he would give to a particular question. Education and programming are two different things. Unfortunately, most educators see the task as one of programming the students. This is also the biggest problem with in-home education which takes it to an extreme.
In-home education tends to make absolute parrots out of children. The children are programmed to perform rather than to think. I have seen some examples of this on television. The point was made that children who were educated in-home are very good at spelling. One of them won a spelling bee. We were shown this as though it were a good thing. They showed this kid standing at attention and performing for the adults. He was very clearly performing, much like a dog jumping through a hoop while wagging his tail. I doubt that the kid was thinking about anything except pleasing the adults. That is not a good thing.
The child really has no choice in this process. He is powerless and completely dependant on adult approval. After all, the child's whole life is about pleasing adults as a condition of survival. In pleasing the adults, the child must give up his own critical abilities. He becomes alienated from his own self. Education is where much of this alienation takes place, when we first begin to frustrate the child's mind.
In K-6 education as it now is, we subvert the natural will to learning and demand conformity as the price of acceptance. We insist the child stop thinking and memorize datums. That we do not challenge the child to think is the fundamental error of American education. Artificial measurements, like the infamous Michigan Educational Assessment Program "MEAP" test only reenforce this error. Teaching kids to memorize datums and pass tests is not education. I repeat, it is programming. Programming is what we do to computers because they are stupid. Our kids are not stupid until we program them that way. They would rather think!
So, what should we be doing? Let me lay out some of what I believe is the proper school curriculum for grades K-6. To begin with, we wait too long to start the process. There is ample evidence to show that kids who have so called preschool adapt better. So preschool at age four is a must. When our kids were raised, there was no such thing as preschool. My wife solved this by taking them to the local library and teaching them to read. When they got to kindergarten they knew how to read. They had a head start.
Now, what should we be teaching the kids in preschool? I think the only thing we can teach at that age are the social skills including communication. We teach them how to get along which must be based on communication. Since most of the kids will not have a mother who will teach them to read, we can begin with verbal communication. We teach how to speak, which kids want to do anyway. We also teach how to listen. Listening is that part of communication which often gets lost in the shuffle. Later, we find that kids do not learn well because they have not learned how to listen well. We find out if they have learned to listen by asking them to tell us what they learned; not what they heard, but what they learned.
As our kids gain social skills we can move into communication in language. We begin with how to listen and how to speak. Then we move into how to read and write. We do it the same way it occurred in history. Communication began as a verbal tradition Later, communication through writing evolved. If we teach it that way, it will evolve easily for our kids. We teach our alphabet and the sounding of words as we go along.
In communication, we should never teach the rules of grammar as a memory course. We should teach the techniques of communication in which the rules of grammar are embedded. We speak and write so that others will understand us. We will learn this because it is effective, not because it is rule bound. As we learn to communicate, the exceptions to the rules will expose themselves. We will not have to memorize them. Memorizing rules or exceptions without the reasons is dumb. If we learn the reasons the rules will fall out naturally. If they do not, the rules are wrong.
As to the other subjects we must offer in K-6, they could be added gradually on a need to know basis. There is no need to learn anything else until our communication abilities are solid. Then we can acquire other tools with ease. We can learn about things by reading about them. Except at the very beginning of school, a teacher should not try to teach by reading to children. We must insist that the kids do their own reading.
Kids will want to know history and we can let them read about it. The same is true of science. They will want to know how and why plants grow, why the stars shine at night, and what the moon is all about. We can let them read about these things, then we can let them experiment. They can grow plants and they can look through telescopes, and a whole lot of etceteras. All of this time, we continue with communication by allowing the kids to report their findings.
Gutenberg gave us the power to achieve the accurate and repeatable transfer of data through the printed word. Anyone who has ever seen the witnesses in a court trial will know that word of mouth is not a reliable way to transfer data. Reading is necessarily the primary way we acquire data and tools. Writing is necessarily the primary way we share data and tools.
As I have said in another essay, we are as smart as we will
ever be the day we are born. All we can do after that is acquire
data and tools. As to tools, they are just a special case of data
of the variety how-to. The important thing is that all of this
is based on communication. The ability to communicate is the single
most important thing we give to our kids. It is a terrible mistake
to make it difficult by making it boring. It does not have to
be that way. It can and should be exciting. Look at your kids
when they are learning and reporting about new things that they
discover. They are excited. Let's not take that away from them.
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