teaching the wrong people and doing it the wrong way

[miriam_e]

If you have two water tanks before you, one full and the other empty, you don't pump water into the full one. If you have a well lit room and a dimly lit one, you don't add lights to the well lit one and leave the dim one alone.

So why do we concentrate on educating the rich, who can afford books, travel, and private tutors, and leave the poor substantially without it? Why is it acceptable for poor kids to miss out on university, or to drop out of high school? It doesn't make sense to provide public assistance to the rich for their education -- it amounts to the poor paying for the rich to be educated. It is not a case of getting the education you can afford, it is simply a matter of effective use of limited resources. We should all have access to as much knowledge and skills as possible -- rich, poor, all of us. To limit a child's potential because of the lack of wealth of their parents is unjust, counterproductive, and a recipe for disaster.

Also, school exams are designed to exclude people rather than provide any real assessment of potential. As far as I can see, exams perform very little realistic function at all. All of us are different. We all intuitively know this. So why do we insist on forcing young minds into uniform little boxes? We need to pour more money and resources into schools, as they are where our future lies. All children are good at something. It is just how human brains are. If we focussed more on finding that in each child and promoting it in more personally oriented schooling then how much more successful would our society become? Some children learn really well through their eyes, but find it extremely difficult to retain information through their ears. Some children have long attention spans and can connect things together linearly in time, while others operate more in a gestalt mode, apprehending complex patterns at once. Some have terrific mechanical understanding, and others can intuit others' emotional states. When we talk of a child failing, we should be talking of our educational system failing to find that kid's potential.

How do we find each child's special ability? We, each of us, have an inbuilt guide to these capabilities. It is called fun. It is an emotion whose main purpose is to get us to learn. It directs us to the things that our brains find most stimulating -- that is, it finds the best way to grow and learn. (We need to be careful though, because it can be easily perverted by fast, bright, noisy things, and by peer pressure.) I remember one teacher telling our class that we weren't here to have fun, we were here to learn. At the time I was struck by what a stupid statement that was, and I've never forgotten it. I was a very bad learner at school because I get lost in thought all the time and I don't learn auditorily. I was a consistent A-grade student only because my obsessive reading brought me into contact with all our school work long before it ever came up in class. I was lucky that my parents could afford lots of books -- I come from a moderately rich background. I had many poorer friends who were not so lucky. School stunted them -- confined, bored, and taught that learning was not fun. How twisted is that?! School taught them not to learn!

We need a more flexible schooling system that cultivates all children to maximise their capability, so that our society can use its fruit.

What is the most precious thing in the world? Money? Gold? Oil? No.

Human minds.

How stupid and wasteful are we if we throw away most of the human minds we produce?

Comments

[flemco.livejournal.com]

I turn you to the eternal wisdom of Lazarus Long:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck".

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Strange how when people talk of giving the poor a chance at anything, it is often reacted to as if call was being made to tear the rich down. I don't wish the rich ill -- I come from, as I said, a privileged background myself. To restate my point: it is wasteful and shortsighted to discard vast amounts of human potential because children were born to less than wealthy parents.

As I mentioned above, "We should all have access to as much knowledge and skills as possible -- rich, poor, all of us." To give the rich a boost at the expense of the poor is a terrible waste of resources. In Australia, and I'll bet in most countries, wealthy, private schools receive federal assistance funded by taxes largely from the poor.

The fictional character, Lazarus Long was really the mouthpiece of writer Robert Heinlein. Heinlein felt, in typical classist fashion, that the rich were a special people who deserved their special privileges more than the poor. It has been shown time and time again that human potential isn't restricted to any particular social class. What makes the big difference is how we foster or stunt that potential.

[satyapriya.livejournal.com]

Working as an integration aide in both public and private schooling has given me a new disrespect for the education system. We have a society of children who don't want to learn, and have an absolute distaste for it. I have seen kids prefer to sit and do absolutely nothing to even doing an art class.
Many of the Grade 5 and 6 boys I come across(and not just the special needs ones) can't hold a pen or pencil properly, and cannot do basic maths, or write a complete sentence.
I despair, in 50 years, when these kids take over the world.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

But put these kids in front of a computer, give them something relevant to do (or that the perceive to be relevant) and they come into their own. There has always been a large number of children who don't do well at school. The idea that people used to school better is, I think, a widely held myth. There is ample evidence that kids today are smarter than our generation ever were. Many of my peers are functionally illiterate, haven't read a book since school, and hardly know how to use a computer. Show me a kid today who doesn't use a computer.

Today it's not the simple ability to hold data in your mind that is important. Rote learning has no place in the modern world. I am quite unable to manipulate numbers, yet I regularly perform unbelieveably complex calculations upon vast arrays of numbers when I make 3D virtual worlds... or rather I get my computer to. I understand what I'm attempting to do and I direct my machine to do it. In today's world the data is far less important than understanding why and how. I don't need to memorise large amounts of detailed facts. I have a thumb-sized datastick to do that. It can hold a library of several thousand books. And when I'm online I have quick access to the greatest encyclopedia ever created, Wikipedia, as well as the wider net.

All that's needed is to understand why and how, or how to find those things out. Kids today are generally very well equipped to do that. Sadly though, I think it is largely in spite of the education system. It is still operating back in the paper-based days, when exams cherry-pick a few kids, based on quite artificial and unrealistic parameters and dump the rest.

The only thing I worry about with kids today is that so many are still being fooled into believing that there is honor and glory in war and that violence can achieve peace (rather than the reality of more violence). Thankfully the irresponsible mass media are becoming obsolete -- TV is falling out of favour, newspapers are being read less and less, and radio is hardly heard anymore. The biggest problem now is violent video games. This is one of the reasons I've been so delighted to stumble across ren'ai. (http://www.renai.us/all.shtml) (I'm currently creating a short ren'ai piece using the free Ren'Py (http://renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Home_Page) software.)

Helen? I had no idea this was you. I am rapt. How are you, my old friend?

[satyapriya.livejournal.com]

I'm good Miriam. Working one job I don't particularly like or agree with, still writing, doing my stuff. You know how it is. Kids nearly grown(17 and 15).
My perception is that the kids I work with have huge resistance to even doing something they like. Huge attention problems, cannot stop from poking, prodding, bugging each other for 2 seconds, and many of the boys like be deliberately stupid. I'm sorry, I have to disagree with you here.