There are two beliefs in education about teaching that must be replaced:
1. We must teach children rather than encourage them to learn, discover, or figure things out on their own.
2. There are certain things that everyone ought to know.
Rather than admit that that neither of these things are reasonable or even possible, we argue over what essential knowledge students must know and how we can hold them accountable for learning it. It is not naive to think that children should discover things on their own. Students discover things on their own for a reason: because they use the knowledge. All human learn what they need to know out of interest and curiosity. Real learning - learning that stays with us for a lifetime, not something we learn for a test and then forget - is what we should aim for. There is no way for us to compile a list of essential knowledge for every culture, gender, and walk of life. (If we were to argue for the "essential knowledge" belief, this is what we would have to do.) However, every child needs to have basic reading, writing, and math skills in order to function in any society; additionally, we must include 21st century skills of multimedia development and technology use.
What is it that we need our education system to provide our children in the 21st century?
It seems quite simple. We have to eliminate one thing: compliance, and we need to try and understand a bit more about how the learner learns. There are several other things we need to look at:
1. The learner controls the learning, not the teacher.
2. Learning must be about building meaning, not memorizing information.
3. Learning itself is about experience, and life experiences are what make up our prior knowledge.
4. All new learning is based on the learner's prior knowledge.
5. All input to the brain is through sensory input; our 5 senses are the only way information becomes embedded in our brains. Also, the more ways we can receive input, the more neural connections will be made and the better embedded it will be.
In school, we use a lot of seeing and hearing, not a lot of touching, smelling, and tasting, which is unfortunate because those are very powerful senses. We should also ask ourselves, which is going to better teach a topic? Doing a worksheet or doing a hands-on activity? Listening to a teacher lecture about it or doing a dance about it? These are questions we ask ourselves as learners and we must ask ourselves this as teachers: what is going to get the idea across better and what is going to connect to the students' prior knowledge better? The more active the lesson, the better. Too often, students are stuck sitting quietly at a desk, listening or watching.
All humans learn by thinking, viewing, listening, and speaking. We need to stop kidding ourselves. Kids don't learn because WE want them to; they learn because THEY want to. Why don't the two of our sides meet? The adults and the children; the teachers feel they know best because they've been there and done that. Parents tell their children all the time, do as I say, not as I do. Does it ever seem to happen? Not often. But that is how people learn: through trial and error. You can't understand the good and bad of a situation unless you've been there; of course, this isn't necessarily true of everything, but it would be a good rule to apply to our teaching. Learning is a process of individual choice and motivation.We each choose what we learn; what we tend to overlook as adults is that when we are immersed in something we want to do, we learn. Why don't we consider this when we design our schools and classrooms?
We don't care what the previous generation learned. We live in our own world, and it's different than our parent's world. So why do we keep trying to mandate learning through compliance in schools that looks the same as when we were in school? It doesn't matter what we want, it only matters what we do, and the doing in education has to be about providing the environment and the experience for students rather than telling them what to do, what to remember, and how to do it. We can't make every student successful in the same way. No two students remember the same way or are the same at all. It's time to give up the issue of compliance.
It's ridiculous that policymakers and government officials believe that learning can be forced to comply with standards. This belief cries for a challenge, yet no one challenges it because we can't imagine the alternatives.
It is so sad to say this, but it easier for us to force compliance than for us to trust creativity.
Learning is the most natural function of the human brain. Why then do we struggle to have students be successful? We blame the students, the teachers, the parents, the society, yet the human brain is nothing more than a learning machine. If a child can learn how to walk and talk (two of the hardest things to learn), then they can learn anything!
If schools in fact did engage the mind, we would have to force children to go home at the end of the day because they would be so enthralled about what they were learning at school.
We need to stop the mandated compliance in order to better serve our children and their future. We are only doing a disservice to every child in school and to the future of the human race by forcing everyone to be at the same level at all points in time. It crushes creativity and the human spirit. It's okay if everyone doesn't learn everything; it's okay if some people know more about some things than others - it ends up being that way anyway. Not everyone is a nuclear physicist, and not everyone is an expert in 17th century European music either. People will truly learn only the things that interest them.
