New Thought of School: The Human Schools are Making Us Dumb

--First off, I just want to say that Reddit sucks. You suck Reddit (but see you Tuesday anyway c: ).--

To keep this brief, I will not detail exhaustively the inner workings of the school system today. I realize this may lead to me leaving some things out, but don't worry, the level of abstraction is that of political parties. I will operate on this plane unless to give specific examples of action and effect.

--Side note: You ever noticed how people driving by always look like they are looking at you and then quickly turn they heads away? Funny trick of the brain.--

Every school I've been to was in one way or another focused on information retention. Over the course of years , I was taught that in order to do well in school, I had to remember x amount of information. Proving I had retained the knowledge I was supposed to was done in two ways: Homework, and tests. Homework always felt dull after I got home, and I always moved on to more challenging things like whatever I was interested in at the time. Doing the same math problems written a different way a thousand times is duller than sand. Often times I did the first few pages of homework, but to put the work in to do all of it over the course of a few weeks seemed like torture. So I didn't do it. As you may have guessed, my grades plummeted. I was making straight Cs by my sophomore year in high school, but on tests I was getting mostly As and some Bs. How could this be?

Most people might say, "Oh, he's a smart kid, but lazy." I am anything but lazy. Just the other day, I could be caught outside helping my neighbor move a few chords of wood around. That is joint-breaking work, literally, but I did it all day. Granted, there are times when I put some things off, but in general, I love to work. I wasn't just born smart. I worked for all of that, and I believe I did it not through doing repetitive tasks, but through doing a multitude of tasks. This to me honestly seems like the biggest duh in the history of duhs, but I will get to that later. For now, I want to talk about my understanding of the brain.

Far as I've learned, the human brain can flex. People say it is like a muscle that gets better and better the more you use it. By the way, I didn't hear this information a million times just to memorize it, but I digress. The human brain automatically adjusts to best handle whatever information it is presented with, and in doing so retains its shape over time once information is presented enough times. So imagine a brain that did the same things, thought the same thought patterns, over the course of decades. When presented with new information, I don't know how it will handle it, but I can't imagine it will go 100% well for it. Teachers on the west coast of the USA seem like they deeply subscribe to this style of learning:

Pound the same information in students all year round, same information as last year, and check to see how much they remember. If they remember it all, great! If not, well, give those students a bad grade (Grade F at the supermarket).​

The assumption is that time-tested information will always be useful and relevant. I would also assume this is true, but it's not true for everyone. Just because you teach someone higher level math does not mean they will be inclined to use higher level calculus in their everyday life. Likewise, if you only teach them math, they now have a crutch to make their understanding of the world fit with what they were taught. There is no philosophical exploration for them and they become unable to function in society unless in a math field. Now, this is pretty unrealistic, given that schools teach a variety of subjects, and that people in general don't just end up like robots. Let's explore that for a bit.

Just because schools teach a variety of subjects with a plethora of material to give away does not mean they are preparing people for worldly activities. Example, I did not know how to do my taxes until I did it, and it sucked. Sure, online tools make it easy, but there is still a lot to know about what to do BEFORE you become an adult. And then there's the age old argument, I'm never going to use this, why am I being taught this? And right there teachers think they know better than kids what to learn. So what's wrong with that?

They are teaching kids to only learn what they are told to learn.​

You may have heard of the concept that one has to learn how to learn, and while this is true, it's a little deeper than that. People already know how to learn. Otherwise, they couldn't learn how to learn. No, the issue people from an older generation have with kids these days isn't that they are a bunch of old farts stuck in their ways. It's because kids these days aren't learning how to learn. Okay, so what do they mean by "Learning how to learn"? That just sounds dumb. Well, at first it does sound dumb, but what they are trying to say is, learn how to intend to learn. Learn how to tell yourself you should learn, instead of someone else. That's all. The fact that the older generation noticed this right away tells me the backwards style of teaching started happening relatively recently.

I propose a new style of teaching: Information saturation. Present as many new ideas and concepts to the student as possible. Flood them with information. It doesn't matter if they don't retain one byte of information in a sea pf information, because, chances are, they can just interpolate the missing data! And that is how I passed tests. I didn't worry about the work, I was too busy enjoying the concept. And that simply meant I was trying to figure it out. Working my mind and taking breaks and taking in new information, I believe it made my mind more flexible and more able to solve problems just by the sheer amount of experience it was getting. Locking kids away in white-walled rooms for eight hours a day sounds like bullshit. I hardly remember anything super detailed from school because I was stuck reinforcing the same barren connections every day, instead of making new ones doing something different all the time. Because in the real world, learning about a concept and applying it for the first time will produce better retention than being told it without context a billion times, ime. The same way a scientist at work discovers a new formula: hard work and determination; experimentation. Not doing the same thing over and over. He will forever remember the discovery he made because he put a lot of time and experience into making it happen. A lot of trial and error. I believe saturating the mind with information and just allowing it to do its thing will greatly improve literacy, instead of trying to force it to down purpose-built information.

 

Dammit I didn't keep it brief.

 

I think you hit on a couple of very important points here. Although I think schools are oftentimes scapegoats for the deficiencies that may be caused by more ubiquitous factors. but yeah, the schools could be doing better. I say this as an ex student and as a current educator.

It's true that the U.S. education system is doing very little to impart real curiosity in its students. Knowledge is sadly an obligation rather than a goal. This gets reinforced by performance requirements, standardized testing, and punishments for those who can't meet the rigid standards. The problem with this model is that it promotes a very tepid, rote level of understanding that hardly holds up to complex and relevant applications. But again, I think there are larger factors at play.

For context, I'm an instructor for college aged kids learning to become pilots. They aren't required to be here like they were in public schooling -- they want to be here, and pay a lot of money to do so. A professional pilot is a highly romanticized occupation, and my students will get relevant experience in every facet of aviation imaginable -- hands on systems classes with airplane mechanics, flights to congested air traffic controlled airspace, experience with complex navigation procedures, all of it concluded with meaningful scenario based testing -- it's exactly the kind of education every self motivated high schooler yearns for. Yet, I'm still seeing many of the deficiencies found in the average high schooler churned out of the public schooling machine. As a teacher I am consistently dealing with underwhelming study habits, short attention spans, and an all around lack of curiosity. They are simply failing to correlate abstract ideas into new levels of understanding. Honestly, it was a little shocking at first. Don't they want to be here? Isn't this their dream? Clearly something major is at play, and I'm not convinced that prior education is to blame, particularly because many of our students are coming from various countries overseas with highly regarded education systems.

I think it's very hard for a young person to learn the importance of true curiosity in today's climate. The way we consume information and format knowledge has changed a lot in the last few decades, and the general pursuit of knowledge doesn't really need to be an in depth effort when it can be so easily retrieved. Free time is therefore being spent consuming more trivial and addictive media that greatly arouses attention, yet seldomly encourages inquisitiveness in any form. These tendencies are having huge intellectual ramifications. In fact, certain boards backed by the Department of Education monitor student proficiency on basic subjects (The NAEP for example) and the results have been consistently trending downwards.

Frankly, I'm not really sure where the change should come from. I look to some of my biggest role models like Ben Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt and I see rigid discipline, tireless self learning, and above all else, an endless appetite of curiosity. How do you promote these with today's youth drowning in a vast sea of novelty? I don't know man. Reforming the schools may help, but no school can create educated and well informed citizens without truly curious students, and imo it takes more than a school to stimulate a lifestyle of learning.

@nicename I think you would enjoy The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein. That book has a lot of interesting takes on some of the points you've brought up here

 

This curiosity you speak of has a name: Philo-sophy. I'm lucky because my brother asked a bunch of confusing questions when I was younger, and now I wonder. (I wonder) As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink (and why would you? That's the horse's job.). But you can starve it until it has a voracious appetite for anything you throw at it. I don't at all endorse starving people, but I have noticed that people tend to follow the opposite of words and also tend to follow a strong example, even if that example isn't real.

So perhaps stop telling them what they should do (with graphs and charts and standards and grades) and start showing them how to do it? If they get it once, that's all they need, really. Then, I think, they are ready for the rest of their educational career. Then you can leave them alone and they can handle their stuff the way they need to, but you still show them how to do it the first time.

Kinda like being a parent, honestly. I don't have kids, but I have worked with special needs children in the past and I have younger siblings. Plus I was a TA. It all amounts to the same thing: being a role model. God I hope I did the best I could (Lol).

Little Sister: (in response to something on tv) "Yeah! Beat her up!"
Other: "No.... Not funny."
Me (If I was in the room): "She's not actually beating her up, lil sis."
There is a difference...

 

What constitutes filler information? An important question.