#104/111: Why don’t Students like School?

The next title that talks about schooling. Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist, took the interesting topic of students and school and asks Why don’t Students like School?

If you haven’t read the post of Dumbing Us Down this is probably a good time because Willingham talks about a lot of statements which were made by Gatto.

Do we have to force kids to learn? No. People are naturally curious, it rather happens that school is destroying this natural curiosity. He talks about the differences in people. Why are some kids good at maths and other aren’t? Some part is genetically but not everything. A theory is that e.g. maths feels easier for you, that leads that you want to learn more about maths, maybe join a math club, etc. which in the end leads to extraordinary abilities. The process of deliberate practice was discussed in Talent Is Overrated.

Which brings us to the next point. Deep knowledge is better than shallow knowledge. Firstly, we will need some factual knowledge before going to more difficult tasks. This has to do with working memory. You can only hold up a specific amount of information at a time. However, you can compress this knowledge. For example, it’s hard to remember this letters: O, D, E, L, E, W, N, K, G but if you scramble them it becomes knowledge which is quite easy to remember. The same holds for mathematical formulas, design principles and other things. The second important thing is that deep knowledge leads to long term knowledge. Willingham cites a study which tested the ability to do calculus after 5, 10, 15 and 20 years. People how took more than one class and got C remembered substantially more than people how just took one class and got an A.

This aren’t the positive things about deep knowledge, furthermore it helps you to connect to new ideas more easily which is named context learning. In conclusion, deep knowledge rocks. Learning in Depth talked about more soft criteria of deep knowledge and is a nice complement to this book for this aspect.

The last chapters talk about some misconceptions like learning styles. Research shows that they aren’t existent. There are no auditory or visual learning. Some things stimulate auditory regions and other visual regions.

Why don’t Students like School? is my opinion are really great book which shows what’s important and why we should recheck our theories after some years. If you are interested in learning and want a nice introduction, this is the book for you. Recommendation.

#103/111: The Rational Optimist

A better title, but less appealing one, would probably be A history of markets. Matt Ridley tells us about the economic history from the beginning human kind till today. How does it come, that we build cities, have markets for food, internet services or books and can communicate easily over thousands of miles. How come that other creatures can’t do this? Ridley begins about 500,000 years ago where some humans haven’t just traded equal things but rather unequal things. We can see, for example, for some races of apes that clean themselves mutually. But they don’t exchange cleaning for food. When this began, the humans could specialize. We know that specialization leads to efficiencies and surplus.

This was the beginning of our modern history. It was the first time humans really advanced. Ridley states that for millions of years the design of axes haven’t changed, because nobody had the possibility to invest time in trying better design and doing everything else, only specialization allowed that. The next thing is exchanging ideas. He tells about a tribe which knew how to build boats and lived in isolation. Some generations, nobody knew how to build boats and they switched back into more primitive technology. That is, without the exchange of ideas, technology will be lost.

The next big thing were traders. For the first time, people haven’t produced but rather solely transported goods and traded it with others. Why is this so important? The traders not only transported goods, the transported ideas. The bought ideas from India to Europe and vice versa. Furthermore, they often lead to building of cities which were often later destroyed by people obsessed with power.

So we have specialization, exchange of ideas and traders. What happened in these centuries where our progress seems to stop or even shrink. The same that happened to the tribe with their boat. States decided to become nationalistic and to close their boarders. This stopped trade and with it the exchange of ideas and for some part specialization. Furthermore, this lead to decreasing specialization and people moved back to rural areas and became farmers again.

The last part talks about the Malthusian fallacy which hasn’t happened but could if we move back to more primitive technologies, nationalization or generalization. If you haven’t informed you about the last 100 – 200 years of economic history, this part is pretty interesting. 

In conclusion, I really liked The Rational Optimist. Matt Ridley took lots of time for researching this topic and introduces you to economic history. If you are interested in this, this book is a great choice.

#102/111: Dumbing Us Down

At first, I had not read the book because of its sensationalist title which would have been a pity. John Gatto, former school teacher and winner of lots of teacher of the year awards, talks about what he taught in his year as a teacher. He taught in several different schools, public, privates, some in wealthy school districts, other in Brooklyn but he always saw the same. He taught: confusion, indifference and dependency.

It is reasonable to ask how one can become teacher of the year with this curriculum. Let’s start at confusion. Pupils learn bits of knowledge: they learn that Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, they learn that force equals mass multiplied by acceleration, they may learn the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But they don’t learn something in depth. They don’t understand different schools of thought, they don’t understand different approaches to learning in depth and they don’t intuitively can apply what they learned. Pupils learn bits but not the whole picture.  

What about indifference? You get into your class, learn for 45-90mins and then you get into the next class as if it isn’t worth learning for more than 90mins at a stretch. And if so, you should do it after school. You may be happy that some classes only last 50mins.

The last one I want to highlight is dependency. Kids learn that the have to please their teacher to be rewarded. “If I’m a good boy my teacher will be nice to me.” Furthermore, the teacher says what’s right. They studied their subject for years, they have to know it. They are the experts. That is, kids are emotional and intellectual depend on teachers.

You may agree but say: “Sure, that’s bad but it is necessary.” – Gatto’s recommendation is destroying the monopoly. He wants to create a diverse market place for education. He’s a proponent of unschooling (and home schooling). Kids shouldn’t be forced to learn because they don’t have to, they are natural curious and furthermore it’s damaging to their learning. Instead of learning thirty different subjects about 90mins per week for 12 years, kids should learn what their interested in. He cites studies that show that you can learn in about 200 hours the basics in how to read, write and calculate and afterwards kids should explore for themselves what they are interested in.

I will address some further implications of unschooling in later posts for other books. It’s actually pretty interesting that more recent studies show that this approach of learning is better for education that it’s alternatives.

In conclusion, I liked Dumbing Us Down. John Gatto collected several of his articles and speeches and presents his ideas in a clear manner. Some students will be relieved that a teacher understood how they felt in their schooldays.

#101/111: Learning in Depth

I continued to think a lot about education recently, mainly after watching a Google Talk with Salman Khan from the Khan Academy. Lots of people associate learning with grading and tests and I hear many adult persons say that they are happy that they don’t have to learn anymore. However, most of them learn everyday but they don’t have to write exams and they don’t have to sit in classrooms.

However, these thoughts took me to do some searching and look for books about improving education. After reading the first twenty pages of Learning in Depth, I was already in love with Kieran Egan’s ideas. He suggest that each student gets one topic at the beginning of his schooling and builds a portfolio of this topic in his 12 years in school. This project is ungraded and voluntary. I sketch you how this can look.

You are in your second week in school and your parents are there. The whole class is assembled and your teacher gives you your future topic: Apples. You are eager to learn more about apples, you ask your parents and your teachers about them. You may paint them or collect pictures of them. Six years later. Your still working on your portfolio. You collected facts to different apples and identified rare types. Furthermore, you discovered apples in popular culture and talked to seniors which got the same topic as you about what they learned. Skip ahead another six years. Your in your final years and you still working on your portfolio. You covered different aspects of apples from cultural, to economical, to philosophical, to scientific factors. You helped lots of other peoples with your apple portfolio and you started about website about philosophical aspects of apples.

Why all this? You learned one topic in depth which will help you to connect to other topics more easily. Furthermore, you experienced learning without compulsion. You learned different approaches of learning about topics and structuring them. And all for the joy of learning.

If you are interested in this idea or hate it or have some objections, you should definitely read this book. Egan covers lot of problems and objects. Definitively worth reading if you are interested into new schooling methods.