What We Do to Them - 2

How we are failing children in our education systems.

Part 1 - Some basic facts:

1. Children learn better in a reward based system. Those rewards do not always have to be praise or presents as such. Reward = “They see something in it for themselves and can get it.” One such reward – they actually enjoy what they are doing!

2. Children learn better contextually. E.g. Teach them Pythagoras’s theorem with diagrams on a blackboard, some will get it. SHOW them how it is used, e.g. in calculating the height of a mountain top, most will get it. That is “Get it”, not just “Memorise it”.

3. This is the twenty first century, with computers and the Internet.
“What is the Capital of India?”
Old way - err, I’ll try to remember.
New way “Let’s check with Encarta or Google.” - on my cell phone!
Trying to store away a mass of facts is both useless and redundant:
• There are far too many for any human to gather in a complete lifetime
• Most are up there on the Internet.
We do not need to teach how to memorise, we need to teach how to search, understand and extrapolate. Using something in a practical way actually tends to plonk the ‘facts’ into memory with far less effort.

4. Yes, there are some basic skills we need to teach – yet these are the very ones that are becoming weakest in children now. Communication, social interaction, initiative, TEAM WORK!

5. Teaching in a categorised way prevents cross-fertilisation of ideas.
E.g. This lesson is Chemistry, or Physics, or History. It is in total contrast to our world, which is rarely so neatly categorised.
Most of the greatest advances today are coming from combinations of very differing fields. E.g. Computer graphics concepts are being used in cancer research and have sparked an amazing new approach and understanding.

6. We haveTIME, but we introduce specialisation far too early! This is the result of mixing two concepts:
• So much to memorise!
• If you haven’t made it by 30,20, 15?, you are a failure.
We misuse time, choosing to abuse it and create needless pressure/stress. “Only two months until the exams, get to work!”

7. Exam based learning is USELESS!
Oh, it provides stats for Education Ministries, helps rank schools in competition with each other, makes ’A’ student’s parents feel proud, and gives us some superstars to praise and write about in the newspapers.

They’re a great KPIs (Key Point Indicators) for the supposed success or failure of the latest implementation of an education policy. Note the word I used – “Supposed”.
And – hey – we get results every year, that’s almost instant gratification.

Truth is, each new set of exams supersedes the previous, effectively negating them.
e.g. In my school days: Eleven plus passed? Forget that, you must get O’Levels. Forget them, it’s A’Levels. Forget them, it’s a degree that counts.
Then, at the job interview, “What experience do you have?”

We use these stages for one simple reason – few of us actually learned how to assess someone. Look at the plethora of “Personality Test”, “Interview Techniques”, “Personal Assessment”, etc tools being sold. All with check boxes and computer calculated results.
As someone who has had to interview and recruit literally many hundreds of people over the last three decades, and had to work with people selected by others using these “techniques”, I can’t emphasize enough how crap these systems are.

8. Children, despite the strength of the Myth, do not develop at the same rate or in the same way. Yet schools generally lump them all together based on age bands. So one six year old is bored to tears amongst the others, while one eight year old struggles to keep up with the others.



Although, in many countries, there are pockets of people that understand these facts - I know of only one country as a whole that is applying them and changing the way they deal with education.
Singapore.
Unlike most of the other “Let’s make changes” we’ve seen over the decades, they also understand the need to phase in their approach – with a carefully worked out transition plan.