Tag: education

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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.

There is a scene from the 1936 Charlie Chaplin film, Modern Times, called The Eating Machine.

In this 4-minute scene, Chaplin, who plays a factory worker, is chosen to demonstrate a contraption designed to automate eating. He is made to stand before the machine, then is strapped so that he can’t move his hands, and before him is a turntable with food.

At first, the machine works well. A small platform underneath the bowl of soup moves it up to his mouth level, then tilts automatically for him to sip the soup. Then the turntable moves around and a plate with bits of food is again raised to his mouth. Then a lever pushes the food into his mouth. Next comes a machine with corn on the cob that automatically moves from left to right, and turns the corn as he eats it.

Chaplin seems to be enjoying this very much as he pretty much doesn’t have to do anything except open his mouth to receive and chew the food. Then things begin to go wrong with the machine. The corn feeder doesn’t stop moving and turning and keeps rolling over his mouth even when he is done eating. The mechanics scramble to fix and reset the machine. They try again and this time, the soup gets spilled down Chaplin’s chest or gets thrown in his face. Another plate smacks pie on his face and another device bangs onto his lips.

Those who enjoy slapstick will probably laugh at this short clip, but I was actually sad as I watched it because it shows a lot that is wrong with our educational system. Kids sit helpless as adults decide what subjects they ought to learn. They force feed the material and keep heaping it on them even if they can no longer take it. The system itself is broken as there are many teachers who are incompetent, who abuse their authority, or pass arbitrary judgements on their students.

I just had a conversation with a friend, John, who talked about an incident he had with his chemistry teacher. He got into a heated argument with the teacher about a statement that she had made until the teacher finally told him to shut up because he was wrong. Later in the term, the teacher corrected that statement. One of John’s classmates then blurted out, “So ma’am, John was right after all.” As a result of that, John got the lowest grade possible for that class.

Talk about throwing a bowl of soup in one’s face…

Children have boundless energy, persistence and creativity. But we force them through the Eating Machine we call the educational system. That system tells them what is “important” for them to learn and tells them to “prioritize” those things first over other things that might interest them more, like maybe drawing, or fishing, or playing computer games. After around 20 years of their lives in this system, only the toughest ones will emerge with that energy and creativity still intact, but most will have been eaten by the Eating Machine.

Is it any wonder then, why we have so many “graduates” today who lack initiative, creativity and direction? You only have to look at the system that produces them and wonder no more.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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