Category: Essays

Posted on

How Teaching Hampers Learning (Part 4)


“What is the use of this?” is probably the most asked question in school, whether spoken or unspoken. And it is the question most often ignored by teachers, giving such formulaic and even smart alecky answers as “you’ll find this useful for college,” or “you’ll need it to get a passing grade in my class.”

They do not understand that unless they answer this “why” with all sincerity, their teaching amounts to nothing, and their students are merely learning by rote, which is probably the most ineffective learning style there is because when summer vacation comes, you’ll be lucky if they remember even 10% of whatever they were able to memorize just to “get a passing grade.”

Indeed, students who understand why they are learning something, who display genuine interest in the subject, are those who do well in it — and even if they don’t understand it in the alloted time, they will persist until they get it.

In 1929, Louis Benezet, the superintendent of schools of Manchester, New Hampshire, wrote the following to a colleague:

“In the first place, it seems to me that we waste much time in the elementary schools, wrestling with stuff that ought to be omitted or postponed until the children are in need of studying it. If I had my way, I would omit arithmetic from the first six grades. I would allow the children to practise making change with imitation money, if you wish, but outside of making change, where does an eleven−year−old child ever have to use arithmetic?

I feel that it is all nonsense to take eight years to get children thru the ordinary arithmetic assignment of the elementary schools. What possible needs has a ten−year−old child for a knowledge of long division? The whole subject of arithmetic could be postponed until the seventh year of school, and it could be mastered in two years’ study by any normal child.”

He then proceeded to convince teachers in his school to conduct and experiment. They would eliminate teaching any form of arithmetic from the first to fifth grade. Instead, they would focus on allowing their students to express themselves, to learn to read and reason, to tell stories and give their own opinions. The result was astounding:

“The children in these rooms were encouraged to do a great deal of oral composition. They reported on books that they had read, on incidents which they had seen, on visits that they had made. They told the stories of movies that they had attended and they made up romances on the spur of the moment. It was refreshing to go into one of these rooms. A happy and joyous spirit pervaded them. The children were no longer under the restraint of learning multiplication tables or struggling with long division. They were thoroughly enjoying their hours in school.”

But even more astounding was when Benezet introduced arithmetic in the sixth grade level, these 12-year old kids who had no previous formal training arithmetic were very quickly able to catch up and even perform better than their peers in traditional schools. They did especially well in story problems that required a mix of general understanding, analysis and plain common sense. Benezet performed the same experiment in other schools in Indiana and Wisconsin, with the same results, showing that this was not merely due to chance or a fluke accident.

When we teach less, children learn more.

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

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Posted on

How Teaching Hampers Learning (Part 3)

The way we learn is a mix of our natural individual tendencies, as well our experiences, from when we first started to form words, and to curl our fingers, and to stand and walk, up to the present. We learn in different ways and at different speeds.

In high school, I found the math and physics lectures easy to absorb. Halfway through the class, I and another classmate with a similar interest would already be answering the problems at the end of the chapter. He was seated at the back so I would turn around and we would use hands signals  to compare answers with one another. Meanwhile my seatmate would be scratching her head in frustration because she couldn’t get past the teacher’s first example, and at this point, the teacher assumed everyone had got it and had moved on to the second part of his lecture.

What I described still happens (in varying degrees) every day, in every traditional classroom around the world. You have a group of kids with different learning styles, listening to a single topic, each with varying degrees of interest, delivered by a singular teacher in her singular style, which was also developed from her own unique set of abilities and experiences.

In this day and age, how can we still see this as the optimum way to learn?

My seatmate never got over her math phobia and to this day utters her disdain for the subject. The way I see it, the act of teaching hampered her learning in several ways:

  1. Perhaps the way math teachers traditionally teach just didn’t jive with her learning style. Being her friend, I also tried to tutor and help her, but she couldn’t get me either. So our styles don’t match as well.
  2. Perhaps she subconsciously found a certain pride being in the “not good in math” crowd — a far larger crowd than the opposite — and thus identified with more people.
  3. Being seatmates with one who found the subject easy certainly didn’t help. Perhaps she felt pressured to catch up. “Why does he get it so quickly and I don’t? Am I dumb or something?” This pressure in turn made it harder for her to just relax and go at her own pace.
  4. Perhaps she just didn’t find any practical use for it at that time. She is currently a pediatrician and does just fine when computing medicine dosages for kids of different weights. That shows she can learn well enough and master certain aspects of math when she finds it interesting and useful to do so.

In an article entitled How Early Academic Training Retards Intellectual Development, Dr. Peter Gray asserts that “It is generally a waste of time, and often harmful, to teach academic skills to children who have not yet developed the requisite motivational and intellectual foundations.  Children who haven’t acquired a reason to read or a sense of its value will have little motivation to learn the academic skills associated with reading and little understanding of those skills. Similarly, children who haven’t acquired an understanding of numbers and how they are useful may learn the procedure for, say, addition, but that procedure will have little or no meaning to them.”

Teaching does not equal learning. The tragedy is that we know this, yet send our kids to school anyway.

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

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Posted on

How Teaching Hampers Learning (Part 2)

Some people are alarmed over today’s kids not being literate enough. They complain that kids spend too much time on gadgets and video games and Youtube, and not enough time reading books. The solution, they think, is to require more reading in the school curriculum, to add more material, to force them to “love” reading, even to like reading a certain sort of literature (e.g. the classics) over others.

I used to think in the same terms, that kids ought to be guided and gently coerced into appreciating reading and literature.

However, my own experience with my kids has taught me to see with different lenses. Even though we brought them up in almost the same way, exposing them to books and stories while they were young, they had varied reactions towards books.

My girls like to read and they ask me to buy this or that book every now and then. My boy hardly touches a book and for a time would not even look at comic books, preferring instead the aforementioned Youtube and video games. His grandfather often bought him Spider-Man comics over the years while he was growing up but he hardly touched them except to look at the pictures. I am an avid comics reader myself but even I could not get him to read the books.

But I was surprised when just a couple of weeks ago, he began reading them, and even brought them along on a recent trip to Manila. Even though they weighed heavily on his backpack, he happily lugged them along so he could take one out and read when there was a dull moment.

So often we do children a lot of injustice by forcing them to like what we like, to know what we know, to learn at the same pace we do, or as their siblings or peers do. We forget the basic principle that each individual is different in every sort of possible way — interests, skills, abilities, competencies, and so on — and that they ought to be respected, even as children, because they are no less human than we are.

How will kids learn to read if you don’t force them to? Well, as long as they live in a family or a community, they will naturally develop an interest in reading — children are naturally curious anyway and often want to mimic what older people are doing.

Once they decide they want to read, there is nothing you can do to stop them, much as there is nothing you can do to stop them from learning how to pinch, swipe left and right, and lock you out of your phone.

My Australian friend, Derek Sheppard, relates, “Of our 5 sons, two didn’t read until they were about 11 or 12 years.  Needs drove their quest to learn. They taught themselves. All 5 of our sons are individuals following their own paths.  All are independent, and successful in their own ways. None have been disadvantaged, and probably gained advantage over peers in mainstreamed schooling, through their democratic Sudbury education.  One of those two sons who taught themselves to read, went on to achieve a science degree, now works in energy supply, lives in Melbourne and is married, and the other is a department manager of a high turnover store of one of the two largest Australian retailers.”

He further asserts that the “conveyor belt system of industrial schooling is at fault for the failed literacy of graduating students, university students and too many Teachers.  Authoritarians in mainstreamed schooling a couple of decades ago decided to push, prod and manipulate young people into falsely believing their only course and path to success was via university education.  Young people ought to have had the time to look around, understand the world around them, and decide for themselves how they could become independent. A third drop out of university in the first year, because they simply don’t know themselves, or what interests them, or even how to be self-managing.  They are accustomed to being extrinsically directed, monitored and their time filled wastefully, by others. As a consequence they don’t know themselves, in the same way as those who were charged with the responsibility of teaching them didn’t know them, or their interests.”

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

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Posted on

How Teaching Hampers Learning (Part 1)


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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Posted on

Breaking the Rules

One of my friends, Bryan Tenorio, had an interesting reaction to last week’s article:

“Schools teach us to conform and follow the tried and tested norms…Schools should allot half of the school time encouraging students to think out of the box. However, it is essential for the kids to know and understand the rules first before they break it. That way, there is deeper appreciation of both the orthodox and the unorthodox. 

In photography workshops that I’ve been to, it is always stressed that one should know the rules first before you break them. I find it effective so far.”

I do agree with the general sentiment but I feel the need to explain just a bit further. Whenever I talk about education in my articles, I am almost always referring to what is known as Basic Education or what we call primary and secondary education, or in short, pre-school to high school.

I am not talking about students choosing a particular course of study, or professionals taking special seminars to enhance their knowledge of a certain skill which may be a hobby or which may be essential to their profession. It is in this case that I agree with Bryan’s assertion of knowing the rules before you break them.

But when we talk about Basic Education, however, well what exactly are the rules? What is basic education for, anyway? Isn’t it to equip young kids with how to deal with life?

I mean, sure there’s reading and arithmetic and basic science and languages, but that quickly progresses to things that are not so basic like solving complicated word problems, or algebra and trigonometry, or the various layers of soil or the atmosphere, or Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion, or learning complex vocabulary words you will almost certainly never use in your lifetime, or diagramming sentences. What’s the line between basic and not-so-basic? And is it really necessary to force children to learn them before they can break them?

And how about many “basic” things that should be there but aren’t taught? Like how to talk and relate to people of all ages — not just to sit still and listen to adults. Or how to settle issues by talking and reasoning, how to voice one’s own opinion, how to cooperate and collaborate? How about how to find your own way home? Or how to slice, peel, and chop food, and then cook it? Or using common tools like a hammer, screwdriver, pliers, or a handsaw? Or how to earn a living or how to protect yourself or how to report abuse? Aren’t these more “basic” than a lot of the useless stuff they put into the Basic Education curriculum?

How about finding yourself? Knowing who you are, and finding your purpose in life? Aren’t children entitled to explore these from a very young age, rather than being forced to go through the rigmarole of school and going all the way getting elementary, high school and college diplomas, but not knowing what to do with one’s life?

In fact, children have already begun this process since they began learning how to communicate and how to move around. For a lot of these kids, school is an interruption of this process. Instead of of being a help, it has become a hindrance, and a huge one at that.

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

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.