Month: August 2018

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Many schools have, as part of their mission or vision, a goal to produce leaders. But the way schools are traditionally structured does not encourage students to be good leaders, but rather, good followers.

Part of the reason is that teachers are usually those who do well as students. They follow instructions, they pass their tests, and they get above-average grades. Because they were so good in following the system, they now perpetuate it, and more so later on, if they become administrators.

Many of the entrepreneurs and trailblazers I know were those who got into trouble while they were in school. They didn’t like following the rules. They would deliberately cut class. They would talk back to their teachers and challenge their authority. Two of the biggest brands in technology for the past 3 decades — Apple and Microsoft — were founded by college dropouts.

The world has transformed beyond the concrete factory walls of the industrial age into the boundless reach of the information age where even outer space is no longer an unreachable goal.

Yet, we remain fixated on the idea that adults know what sort of “basics” to teach our children. Adults today who probably never dreamed that we would see the day that we would hold in our hands a device that can help us communicate with people on the other side of the world, where we can fit an entire library of books, and music, audio clips and videos, and even play games or take and store photos.

How can we know what material our children need for their future when we cannot even predict our own? How dare we presume to want to fill their heads with what we think is important and what we think is essential.

No wonder many kids today find school irrelevant — even those who do well. I used to do very well in school but I thought a lot of the stuff I was memorizing was useless. And I was right. I never really used around 90% of what I learned and a lot of the things that I found useful in life I learned elsewhere.

And guess what? A lot of teachers I talk to also feel this way, yet they hardly do anything about it and just go back the classroom doing what they have always done. The inertia of tradition, of doing what has always been done, is almost impossible to overcome. I know because I’ve been there, having been a teacher for a total of around 10 years.

This is not to say that teachers do not work to improve things. That would be unfair because they do (at least the good ones). They look for more effective methods of teaching. They prepare better materials. They improve their own skills by taking public-speaking lessons or learning how to be humorous.

But all these are still done within the system and it doesn’t matter what you do within it, you still end up with followers. You cannot produce self-directed individuals by directing and dictating to them what they should be doing every hour of their lives.

They need time and freedom to figure that out by themselves.

They need a new, and different kind of school.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Where does the idea of the basics of education come from anyway?

It comes from a parental orientation. Parents are the child’s first teachers — coaxing them to form their first words, holding them when they try to stand and walk, teaching them how to say “please” and “thank you,” and so on. In ancient times, it also meant teaching them how to hunt, cook, build a fire, build shelter, and so on.

In that mindset, the parents or guardians act as the authority — “I know better, you listen to me.”

In those days, there was a certain limit to what you could do. You trained to become a warrior or a hunter, a farmer, a craftsman building weapons or tools, a merchant or an entertainer. If you were a woman, your options were even more limited.

That was more or less how things were until the industrial revolution came along in the 18th century. The birth of more and more factories now demanded a certain class of workers that historically did not exist in large numbers. Now remember that factories in those days were nowhere near the factories of today where you have a lot of robots and machines working on automated processes. Before, you needed hundreds or even thousands of humans working on some part of an assembly line.

In other words, humans were doing robotic tasks before robots came along.

In order to do so, they needed people who could read — because it is much better to circulate written instructions, announcements, warnings and so on than it is to keep verbally repeating them all the time. They needed people who could write — they should at least be able to write their own name, to log data, write reports, and so on rather than having someone else take dictation all the time. And they needed some rudimentary arithmetic to do simple calculations at work — and of course, managers, accountants and bookkeepers needed a bit more than what was rudimentary.

Most of all, they needed people who were good at following instructions, who would do exactly what they were told to do. It’s not exactly a good thing for an assembly line worker to suddenly get creative with his tasks.

So the “experts” came together and figured out a way to produce these kinds of people and thus, the school system was born with the basics, of course, being reading, writing and arithmetic. And these were enforced with the same authoritarian mindset — “We know better. You sit down and listen to us.”

The subliminal effect of this method of instruction produced subservient children who would obey, respond well to praise and good grades, and be afraid of committing mistakes for fear of being reprimanded or getting failing marks. Those who did well in school went on to becoming good factory workers, securing tenure and earning a steady income.

Today, after 200 years since the birth of the school system, not much has changed. Oh sure, we’ve added more hours and days and more subjects that “experts” have deemed as basic. We’ve also relaxed on methods of correction and punishment. But most schools are still run on the same fundamental premise — that there are experts who know better what kids are supposed to know and do not know. What is worse is that schools are still in the business of producing followers, no matter the lip service they give to producing leaders.

And I’ll show you why in Part 4.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Just how basic is “basic education?”

While people may complain about incompetent teachers, lack of physical facilities, too much homework, and so on as some of the problems of basic education, I think the more fundamental question is what exactly do we mean by “basic” and who determines what those basics are, and how do we know that they are really that?

One of my readers reacted to what I previously wrote in a previous article, Teaching Too Much: “You…included subjects like geography, mathematics and some science subjects in the trivia category. How can young people make sense of the world when they don’t even know basic geography? Climate change, which is a existential threat to us all, is difficult to comprehend if you don’t have some scientific awareness. Understanding The Scientific Method is also very useful if you need to deal with fake news etc.”

My response was that I didn’t say that the subjects themselves are trivial but that a lot of the material presented in them are trivial to those not interested in them. And just who decides what are the “basics” of geography? What do we have to teach about geography that people cannot absolutely live without? Is memorizing the capitals of countries important? How about knowing what countries are in what continent? Is that essential for survival? Can a kid not make sense of the world if he doesn’t know that Uganda is in Africa?

Speaking of geography, how about teaching kids how to navigate and go around their own town or city? I don’t know of any school which teaches this extensively although this seems to me a more useful and basic geographical skill than knowing what a latitude and longitude are. Put a kid down in the middle of San Pedro Street. Even if he memorizes all the places of the countries in the world map and all the regions and their provinces in the Philippine map, he’ll have a big problem if he doesn’t know enough to make his own way home. At that moment, everything he might have learned in school about geography would be trivial, wouldn’t you agree?

You can take any subject in the supposedly basic curriculum and I can ask the same kind of questions for every one of them. But I suppose the heart of my objection is this — that there is no set of basics that will apply to everybody. What is basic depends a lot on what the child wants in a particular situation.

For example, a 9-year old kid playing video games suddenly gets interested in programming his own games. So of course now, he has to learn how to read and he has to learn some elementary programming structures like if-then statements, loops, functions, and so on. That will pretty much be basic for him at that point and he would be pretty motivated to learn all of those.

But what do we do at school?

“Listen, kid, it’s all well and good that you want to learn how to do all those things, but right now, you have to sit your butt down on that chair first and listen to your teacher discuss how to multiply fractions, and then your science teacher will come in to discuss the different kinds of rocks, and then your music teacher will teach you how to read notes in the F-clef, and then your Filipino teacher will tell you about pandiwa and pang-abay and then your English teacher will discuss gerunds and infinitives…”

The typical kid’s response?

“Zzzzzzz…”

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

What if tomorrow, there was a law that would require all adults to enroll in a special school that would teach you the basic skills in surviving today’s world? You would need to go to this school from Monday to Friday for half a day every day and take some classes.

From 7:30 to 8:30, you would study Social Media (What? You don’t have a Facebook account? That’s unacceptable in today’s world). Then from 8:30 to 9:30, you’d have classes on Using Email. Then there would be a 30-minute break, then from 10:00 to 11:00, it would be time for Using Smart Devices – Smartphones, Smart TV’s, Refrigerators, etc. Then from 11:00 to 12:00, you can choose from several electives such as Operating a Drone, or How to Take Better Selfies, or Basic Wifi Troubleshooting.

You would need to take these courses daily for the next 10 months, and there would be required coursework like seatwork, quizzes, projects and exams and if you pass all of them, you would get a diploma stating that you are now 21st Century literate and fit to work in most job environments. Most companies would be giving job priorities to those adults possessing these diplomas.

For those of you who think this is fun, think again. This is 10 months of your life and it is compulsory. It doesn’t matter if you already think you know these things. You need to have a piece of paper that certifies you.

Some of you may be thinking, “This is ridiculous. 10 months studying how to email? I can do that in a couple of hours.” But the experts would reply, “But we would be teaching you more than just how to send and receive messages. We’ll break down the SMTP Protocol, teach you how to read email headers, how to recognize spam and phishing attempts, then how to setup your own mail server and so on.”

Then you might think, “But that’s crazy, I don’t need to learn all that. I’ve been emailing for the past 10 years and I’ve been running my business that way and it’s fine.”

“Oh no,” they will tell you. “The experts have determined that these are essential skills for you to learn. You simply need to go through them because you might need them someday in the future.”

If you think it is a crazy idea to force adults to take classes that other people have deemed is important and essential for them to learn in order to survive and properly function in today’s society, then think about what we are doing to our kids.

We let them sit through 12 years of “basic” education (more if you count preschool), with no regard for their interest nor even their skill level in a particular subject. A student who finds math easy has to sit through an hour listening to a lesson he already understands, while a student who is struggling with it has to sit through the same hour trying hard to catch up.

A 10-year old who wants to be a professional dancer has to go through 12 years of sitting through different subjects of little or passing interest before they can really pursue what they want. They’re told that these subjects are “important” and “fundamental” and they need to learn these in order to function properly in the world they will enter as adults.

There is something very wrong with this.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

One of the fundamental problems of education is that we teach too much.

Too much? The powers-that-be don’t seem to think so. They constantly think of ways to heap more and more material on students. We used to have 10 years of “basic” education. Now we have 12. We have more subjects, more things to memorize, more seatwork, more homework, more projects, and more problems.

Look at today’s teenagers. A lot of them are tired, stressed and bored out of their wits with school — even those who do well at school. Look at today’s college graduates. A lot of them do not know what to do with their lives. This is the time when they’re finally out and ready to go “apply” what they have learned and work and be “productive” citizens. But what is it they really want to do?

A friend of mine recently asked her niece, “Ok, you just graduated, now what do you want to do?”

“Sleep,” was the girl’s tired reply.

It is not an uncommon answer, as most of you who have talked to young graduates would probably know. Other similar answers are, “I want to take a break,” or “I want to find myself.”

Do you know why?

Because, as I’ve said, we bombard these kids with too much. We force so much material upon them hoping some will stick and be useful for them but the reality is that they will not use probably 90% of whatever it is they “learned” in school.

Think about it, you who have finished school, who are in your 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and so on. Have you ever had any use of knowing the difference between monocotyledon and dicotyledon plants? If you have not gone to medical school, have you ever had to dissect frogs and name each of its organs? Have you ever had to solve a real-life problem using logarithmic functions? Have you ever had to balance chemical equations? Did you lose your job because you didn’t know the difference between pandiwa and pang-abay (which I confess I have long kicked out of my memory) or who that damned crazy woman in Noli Me Tangere was? Do you still remember what prepositional phrases are and how they differ from gerund phrases? Do you know where Portugal is on the map, and what is its capital?

Yet, these are just some of the “basics” that the so-called educational experts have deemed are important, essential and crucial for us to learn in order to succeed in life. I would wager that you could bring any “expert” here and ask them 100 random questions from the entire K-12 curriculum and even they won’t be able to correctly answer half of those.

Here is the heart of the problem. We teach our children too much trivialities. We teach them too little about finding themselves and forging their own paths.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.