Tag: education

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The Problem with Education (Part 2)

Many parents today lament the fact that kids spend a lot of time playing video games, particularly in worlds of fantasy, zombies, futuristic settings, or make-believe cities. They fail to see that they willingly pay and send their kids daily to an institution that immerses them in a fantasy world that is far from reality — and that is school.

Where, in today’s adult reality, are people batched together by age, and asked to perform a certain task, then at the sound of the bell, they are to stop that task and start on an entirely different one altogether, and they have entirely no choice in the work to be done or the subject matter to be discussed? Adults at least, can resign from jobs they deem too preposterous or unfit for them. But can students resign from biology or history if they think it has nothing to do with their future plans? Or if they cannot understand the teacher or think that he is incompetent?

No, they have to suppress their feelings of disdain and waste a year (or even years) of their lives studying something in which they totally have no interest. The sad thing is, when they fail and don’t do well, they are shamed and labeled as “slow.” Their parents are called to school (and oh how parents hate it when this happens, and sometimes take it out on the child later).

Schools place a lot of emphasis on rewarding compliance, on recognizing students who do well in exams. The real world, however, rewards those who can actually perform. I once interviewed a candidate for computer technician for our company. He had what one might call an impressive resume. He had high grades in his transcript, and added to that, he had numerous certificates from different seminars and trainings he attended.

His first task for the interview was to turn on a computer that I had intentionally rigged to malfunction. I had loosened or removed some parts and I wanted to know if he could figure out what was wrong. He spent a whole hour trying to make the computer work, to no avail. He didn’t get the job.

The one who got the job didn’t have as impressive a resume but got the computer working in under 10 minutes.

Schools make a lot of fuss over their students who win over students of other schools in spelling bee or math contests. In reality, however, who really cares if you can spell “eudaemonic” or multiply two 3-digit numbers in your head?

Our math teachers used to tell us that we should learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide by hand or in our heads because we won’t always have a calculator. Well, it’s now 2019 and for a few years already, we have been carrying a cellphone that has a calculator app (and more). In fact, you don’t even have to type in the numbers anymore, you can just ask verbally Google or Siri to add or multiply some numbers for you and listen to the answer.

Welcome to reality.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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

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The Nature of the Beast (Part 3)

The current educational system is another Gordian knot of tangled problems. Aside from the problems we usually read about in the news like lack of infrastructure (e.g. classrooms), equipment and skilled teachers, there is the students’ apparent lack of motivation, increasing stress levels and disconnect with the needs of industry — that means that graduates find out that very little of the little they learned has any practical use when they start working.

For decades also, educators have tinkered with the system trying to untangle this knot — making a few modifications here and there, but they always seem to end up not solving anything or very little at all.

Very few know, or have heard, that this knot has been solved. Just as Alexander the Great sliced the Gordian Knot with his sword, it is somewhat appropriate that another Alexander — Alexander Sutherland Neill — cut through the Gordian knot of education by founding Summerhill School in 1921 with the revolutionary idea that children learn faster and better without coercion — a stark difference from traditional schools which until now use different methods of coercion to make students want to learn things we adults deem as important.

Summerhill was one of the first democratic schools and is the oldest one still in existence. Neill wrote a book with the same title expounding on his ideas and it generated a whole flurry of debate and interest that led to an explosion of “free schools” in the United States in the 1960’s.

Dan and Hanna Greenberg built on these ideas and established the Sudbury Valley School in 1968, and holding steadfast and true to its democratic principles, became the only school from that era still in existence today. Dan is also a prolific writer and has published many books expounding his ideas on education — which I have written much about in past articles. These ideas have spread and there are now several Sudbury-model schools all over the United States and in other parts of the world.

Even though these ideas have existed for a long time — in fact close to a century for Summerhill — they seem to have made very little headway into the educational system. This, I see, is another “nature of the beast” problem. The democratic school model is so different from traditional education that it would require a massive shift, not just in thinking, but in implementation, training, and even infrastructure.

It would take a courageous, even heroic, public official to make such changes that would mean people losing their jobs because their skills no longer apply, or because they would become redundant. The system itself would be naturally against such a model even if shown that it works better and more efficiently than the current model.

Sudbury Valley School, for example, runs on less funding than it costs the American government to fund public education on a per student basis. Imagine how that savings would scale, or how that would apply to our country — we who are always complaining that the education budget isn’t enough — a huge part of which I believe is wasted on bureaucracy and unnecessary expenses.

But the light at the end of the tunnel is that more and more parents are becoming aware that the system simply doesn’t work, and are more willing to commit to a system that will ultimately benefit their children without stunting their natural curiosity and love for learning.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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

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The Teachertainer (Part 2)

The modern understanding of the word education is perverted. In fact, if I ask you right now about your education, you would probably enumerate the schools you’ve attended and the degrees you’ve earned. The more letters you can put after your name, or the more expensive your school is, the prouder you are of your education.

We have taken education to mean the time you spend in the classroom, or your government-approved instructional institution (whether public or private) that confers degrees or diplomas on individuals. We have taken education to mean sitting on a desk and listening to an expert lecture on a certain topic, and the measure of your being educated is how well you perform on certain tests that these experts deem you must pass, otherwise you are uneducated.

It is this misconception that has led us to expect great educators to be great teachers, and thus to be great entertainers.

The classroom is only one way to get an education. Listening to a teacher’s lecture is only one, among hundreds, of ways that we learn, and it is not even the most important or most significant. In a survey done among adults asking them to rank their own methods of learning, the number one method turned out to be conversation or interaction with others, and of the lowest ranked methods of learning was through teaching or lectures.

Dan Greenberg said it best in Turning Learning Right SIde Up (co-authored with Russell Ackoff):

“Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without it being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant. In most schools, memorization is mistaken for learning. Most of what is remembered is remembered only for a short time, but then is quickly forgotten. (How many remember how to find a square root or ever have a need to?)”

What I realize now, having been both a student and a teacher, is that students barely remember the lessons you painstakingly prepared for in the classroom (maybe they will remember one or two lectures, three if you’re lucky ), but they will always remember how you treated them as human beings. This truth is especially felt when I think about and meet my former teachers, and also when I get together and talk with my former students.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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

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Visiting Sudbury Valley School (Part 3)

“Don’t do it,” said Mimsy.

Mimsy Sadofsky is one of the pioneers of Sudbury Valley School (SVS). Apart from Dan and Hanna Greenberg, she is one of the school’s longest-serving staff since it opened in 1968. All her three children graduated from the school.

She said those three words as her advice on our desire to open a Sudbury school here in Davao.

“Don’t do it,” she repeated, when I chuckled the first time. “I’m serious,” she said. “Move here, send your kids here.”

Then we talked about the never-ending challenges of starting and running this type of school. You literally get bombarded from everywhere — government, other schools, even parents. She knew the pain, and wanted to spare us or prepare us for it.

Society has a hard time wrapping its head around the idea that there can be any other type of “education” than the “standard” model. Many people have become successful despite not going through the school system or dropping out of it. In fact, some of the most recognizable names in the world were once dropouts – Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres, Tom Hanks, Coco Chanel, Al Pacino, Jim Carrey, Ralph Lauren, and so on.

I’m sure you know someone who didn’t do well in school but are at the top of their game in their business or profession. The person who has the reputation as the best doctor in your community may not have topped the board or graduated with honors. I know several successful businessmen who admit to just copying from their classmates or who were troublemakers.

Even my own father did not finish high school. His schooling was interrupted by World War 2, but his education went on as he learned how to fight and struggle for survival — building a pharmacy business that started from a box of medicines he and his brothers carted to the public market every day.

When he was still alive and active in the business, he was often mistaken for a doctor because he could tell you, from memory, what this or that medicine is for, what the dosage was and what are the side effects. He told me that he and his brothers had to learn all those the hard way, by painstakingly reading the literature found in each box.

Education does happen in the absence of, and in spite of schools. The goal of SVS to provide an environment where students have the time and freedom to explore what it is they really want out of life, how to relate with other people, and discover who they really are — but not to dictate to them what it is they should be learning. Without the desire to learn, teaching is useless.

It is a difficult journey we face, but when my wife asked Mimsy if it was worth it — the heartaches and trials — she answered, “Oh every minute, every second.”

That’s all I need to know that this is a cause worth fighting for, because Davao deserves a Sudbury school.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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

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A Final Word on Finland

Having spent the past few weeks dissecting Finland’s educational system and comparing it to my preferred model, the Sudbury Valley School, has been enlightening for me. I’m not sure if you, my readers, have been similarly enlightened. But they do say that the person who learns most from any lesson is the teacher.

I guess the task of trying to understand the strengths of each model, and then trying to simplify and explain those models in small 500-word chunks (which is my weekly limit for this column) forced me to think of them in ways I had not thought of before.

So what’s my final verdict on the Finland system?

In a previous article, I mentioned seeing it as a halfway point between the strict confines of traditional schooling and the almost total freedom in a Sudbury school. I also mentioned the reason it is so successful in their country is because it moves towards liberation from the rigidity of the old systems.

In fact, an article recently caught my attention that Finland was already considering removing subjects from the curriculum in favor of a more holistic approach:

“Subject-specific lessons – an hour of history in the morning, an hour of geography in the afternoon – are already being phased out for 16-year-olds in the city’s upper schools. They are being replaced by what the Finns call “phenomenon” teaching – or teaching by topic. For instance, a teenager studying a vocational course might take “cafeteria services” lessons, which would include elements of maths, languages (to help serve foreign customers), writing skills and communication skills…More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union – which would merge elements of economics, history (of the countries involved), languages and geography.”

Instead of teaching various trivia per “subject,” they now want students to understand “topics” perhaps like global warming or pollution or recycling. And if it needs a little math or science or history along the way, then that gets taught as well, but it is now relevant because it helps the students understand the topic. It’s not just taught because “hey, you need this in college” or “it’s part of the curriculum” or something like that.

If I were to start a school, I would still go with the Sudbury model. I think it’s the best educational model there is. But for those already running traditional schools, shifting to a Sudbury model might be too radical and would bring a host of other issues that might overwhelm them. The best bet for them is to shift to the Finland model which I think can be done quite easily.

The problem lies not in the “how” as Tim Walker already lays down so many ways schools can start implementing the Finland system. The question is, are the school’s stakeholders — administrators, teachers, parents, students — willing to shift their mindset to accept this more liberal and collaborative approach to education?

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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