We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.There you have it. American education has been failing since somewhere in the middle of the 19th Century. And, Neal has been a teacher at the college level, so he is partly to blame.
American author Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
All I can say is, never let school interfere with your education.
Regards — Cliff
1 comment:
Education is a noun and in most American minds, an event or a place as if one goes there he or she acquires "education." An entire education industry has sprung up over the decades because of this concept, and, arguably to some extent, a necessary one.
However, LEARNING is a process and a goal and is not time or place or even "thing" specific. It is a VERB. It is something involving action, movement, etc. To that end, one of the absent but critically central outcomes of the "education system" is that the recipient (or as in the case of America....the victim) should possess honed learning skills developed from the inside out. That requires motivation to become curious, perhaps if nothing else out of an aching need to continue life and somehow improve one's lot. And THAT is the crux of "teaching." It is NOT about dumping facts (aka, knowledge) into endless student minds production line style and then having quality control measure the "efficacy" of the "teaching" by administering quantitative tests...aka...regurgitation on demand of "knowledge."
Understanding of one's world is what its all about. And you cannot achieve understanding, "how everything relates to everything else" unless you become curious enough to try to find out what all the everythings are.
I have for years plead the case for a much more Socratic, mentor/butterfly approach to education. In some important ways, the more recent growth in home schooling is a real life approach to that method. And in fact, that elder/junior mentorship speaks directly to one of the central axioms of learning; that it is effective only when it is situated, or in other words, has relevance to the learner's known world. Parents, or another suitable mentor would in all liklihood speak to and through that "known world."
And finally in this rant.....learning NEVER ends....or should....every discovery in life should create and reveal an entire host of unknowns that demand investigation.
Oh....and I am guilty but largely "rehabilitated" for the sin of being part of the Great American Problem in Education......I played the game.....cooperate...graduate....
I bought into the magical dictum underlying applied medical training today...."Watch one, Do one, Teach one."
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