A common mistake we adults make is that when we think kids aren’t learning enough of something, then not enough teaching is happening. We think learning is as simple as adding sugar in coffee — the more sugar you add, the sweeter it will taste — therefore the more teaching there is, the more learning will occur.
Compared to us oldies, however, kids today have more topics crammed into their schoolday and have even a couple of years added to their curriculum. Why is it then, that many of them still seem not to know a lot (and some seem to know even less), despite all the additions?
The answer is simple. The equation is wrong. More teaching does not equal more learning. In fact, more teaching may even hamper learning if the teaching is forced on a student. The mild disinterest he or she feels for the subject may spiral downwards into open hate or disgust for it.
Coercing a child to learn something when there is clearly no interest or motivation for doing so may push a child further away from liking or loving whatever it is you want them to learn.
As a child, I didn’t go to a Chinese school as most of my other Chineses friends did. My parents felt I was missing something by not taking Chinese (Mandarin) lessons. So they arranged for me to have a Chinese language tutor and I had to go there every Saturday morning and spend an hour or more writing and reciting passages from a small booklet. I hated those lessons for two reasons:
- Hardly any Chinese kid or even adult I knew spoke Mandarin in everyday conversation. Chinese people here usually speak Fookien which is about as different as Tagalog is to the Visayan language. So there was no practical application of whatever it was I was learning by rote.
- Saturday morning was when all the great cartoons were showing on TV. I hated missing Scooby Doo and Super Friends and Space Ghost.
So after a few years of missed Saturdays, I got so fed up I finally told my dad I didn’t want to take those lessons anymore because they were useless . He was adamant at first and didn’t want to budge, but I asked why he was forcing me to take those lessons. He seemed taken aback by my use of that word, and said that he didn’t want to force me, but rather thought that learning Chinese was for my own good and that I might come to regret it someday. But that if I really wanted to stop, then he would accept that.
So I said yes, I wanted to stop. There were times after that when I was mildly interested to learn Mandarin on my own, but because of those words — that I might regret it — I willed myself not to regret it and even prided myself on being illiterate in Mandarin.
How different things could have turned out, I think, had they not forced me but rather tickled my curiosity by speaking a bit of Mandarin here and there, and left me to wonder what they were talking about, until it drove me crazy enough to spark the desire to learn.
That is the key. Without the desire to learn, no true lasting learning can occur.
Of all the years I spent in that Chinese tutoring class, I remember nothing but a single sentence from that booklet, and I only know how to speak it, not write nor read it — “Wǒ ài fēilǜbīn” — I love the Philippines.
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.
Originally published in Sunstar Davao.