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On Teaching and Education:
October 21, 2002:
I have been reading a book by Alan Watts called "The Book."
It is a rather ancient tome first published in 1966. Briefly,
it is an attempt to establish that we are not really individuals
separate from the rest of nature. I have struggle with it for
several days for many reasons. It is not that I have a problem
with what he is trying to prove. In fact I agree with the premise.
It is simply that to me his arguments are convoluted and unclear.
However, the book was valuable to me in another way. It gave me
a sudden understanding about something I had almost forgotten.
I speak of my primary education, K - 12.
When I went through K - 12, I did poorly. I did not really like school. Alan Watts finally let me understand why I did not like it. The whole thing was suddenly clear. It opened up like a gestalt. The problem was the manner of the teachers. They addressed me as though I were simpleminded. In his book, Watts does the same thing. He addresses me as though I am simpleminded. Though he fails to prove his premise to me, he does go to great pains to make the obvious clear. It's as though he thinks I cannot understand simple concepts.
This is exactly what my early teachers did. They did not just do it to me. They also did it to all of my peers. This behavior was, and I believe still is, common in the education industry. Without even realizing they do it, teachers confuse ignorance with simplemindedness. It is their beginning unaware assumption that ignorance is synonymous with simpleness. So, they belabor the obvious ad infinitum.
My own experience with children reveals that they are the most clear minded of all humans. Let's try to differentiate between intelligence and learning. People tend to believe that we get smarter through education. That is simply not true. We are as smart as we are ever going to be the day we are born. All we can do through education is expand the database we have to work with. Most of us don't do that well. We filter our input through our cultural conditioning and get more rigid as we age.
It is we adults who have become simpleminded due to our unexamined convictions. Children don't have that built in accumulation of assumptions. They want to question and examine everything. Teachers, of course, want to prevent them from doing that. There is an unconscious desire to train the child in our own image. Hence, teachers will insist that children remain within the box at all times. "Good Children" don't color outside the lines.
This got so bad for me at one time that the teachers convinced my mother I was an idiot. This madness came out of an alleged intelligence test. You may say that it was my own fault. I will continue to believe that it was the built in stupidity of the system. In a very early grade, I remember it as third, a test was administered to the class. No one told us it was an intelligence test, but that was indeed its intent. It was sure not a comprehension test. It was a multiple choice set of questions.
When I first saw the test, I was amazed. The questions seems so pointless, inane, and silly that I took it for a joke of some kind. I answered the questions accordingly. I only remember one of the questions. What do you like best an apple or an orange? I wrote in a pear. I treated the rest of the test the same. If there was a choice which was silly on the face of it, I chose that. If not I wrote in my own answer. Well, it turned out that the test officials had no sense of humor at all. This is something I have since confirmed many times. Teachers, and particularly educational administrators, are usually sterile in the humor department. You might think they would at least have talked to me to confirm what they concluded. I guess it never occurred to them.
A few days later, my poor mother was summoned to the school. The powers who be were very kind and gentle with her. They carefully explained that she had, unfortunately, birthed an idiot child. There was nothing to do about it. It was gently explained that she should not expect too much of her simple minded son. Thereafter, for many years, she did treat me differently.
This insanity only affected my mother's behavior. It did not affect my teachers behavior at all. The average class size in those schools was about 35 students. Now, all teachers have their own precocious teacher's-pets which they nurture to build their own ego. Other than that, they had no time for individuals. They treated us all like simpletons. Much later, my mother finally recovered her own perspective. She did figure out that she had been swindled by rigid minded dullards. The teachers, she realized, were wrong.
One of the wonderful things I too have realized in my old age is that the teachers were often wrong. It was not always me who did not understand. In many cases, it was the teachers who were off base. They were teaching with no real understanding of their subject material. This is due to the rather bizarre fact that teachers in K - 12 need not be qualified in the subjects they are required to teach. All that is required to teach in the primary system is a teaching certificate. This is true in Michigan. I suspect it is also true in other states.
I firmly believe that our entire primary educational system
needs reevaluation. It is very, very wrong and has been for decades.
In fact, we emphasis the wrong things. We concentrate on passing
tests rather than true learning. Thus, children are taught to
follow the rules, memorize the facts, and please the adults. Enormous
emphasis is placed on rule-based-behavior rather than on learning.
Teaching should be driven by two things and only two things. First,
of course is the natural curiosity and bend of the student. Based
on that, the need to know should guide the learning effort. It
is totally stupid to teach things before they are needed to satisfy
the students goals or curiosity. We should teach things when,
and only when, there is a reason to know them. That is why we
should teach only communication skills in the first few years.
Communication is essential to all other learning. The lack of
these skills, caused by poor teaching methods, is why most children
fail to learn.
I believe the two most important goals of all education are communication and research. That is learning and sharing. We must teach people how to find and organize information so it becomes useful knowledge. With that we have taught them everything possible about knowledge. Now, if we also teach them how to communicate their knowledge, we have created the basis for civilization.
We have lost sight of that. Instead, we teach our kids how to pass tests. Even the best tests are artificial. Teaching them to pass tests gives nothing of value to them or our culture. Our ancestors had it right. They called it the three R's, reading, writing, and rithmetic. That is correct. Reading is how we begin our research. Writing is how we communicate our knowledge. Arithmetic is how we figure some things out. It is properly last. It is necessary, but useless without the other two. You cannot know how useless mathematics by itself is until you have tried to communicate with a math nerd. It is, however, necessary to most aspects of modern culture.
Everyone seems to agree that we have a crisis in education. In our scramble to fix it, I have never seen so many hair brained notions come along. Mostly they come from political hacks looking for a way out. To do that they pander to special interests. There are charter schools, school vouchers, academies, in-home-ed, and etceteras. The problem is, they all come with the same focus. Teach the kids to pass tests. Make the kids into parrots.
No one seems to understand that it is this focus which is wrong.
We really need to get back to basics. We need to teach kids how
to do research and teach kids how to communicate. Then we can
give them the special tools they may need for analyzing and organizing
information, including math. One thing you may notice from this
is we would need really good teachers to make it work. I think
we have enough really good teachers, but Willie Gaffer has already
made that case. You can find his essay, "The Alleged Teacher
Shortage," at our website in Willie Gaffer's Archives.
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