I agree with the premise. Sure people nowadays are better informed but often they're informed with masses of information that isn't true. Sometimes when I get into an argument with someone I think they're going to manipulated the truth and instead they present an outright fabrication. Did they lie? No. They say it must be true because they got it from a book or a website.
In school I never had a class on critical thinking. Could it be that the government doesn't want people thinking critically so they'll swallow their lies? Not all lies come from the government so these people will also believe lies from many other sources as well.
I'd say that the curriculum not only fails to include critical thinking but is directly opposed to critical thinking. Students learn lessons such as truth comes from authority, all books tell the truth and you have a dissenting opinion you should keep it to yourself instead of telling your peers or the authority figure.
Sure in school I may've been a rebel without a cause but most of my classmates where brown nosers. Maybe the curriculum is designed to make kids into obsequious adults.
Kids who aren't good little conformists are drugged into submission. This is what happened to me. It ended my rebellion but it made me into a dull, exhausted student and even made my social skills worse.
I could speculate further and suggest that the curriculum is not only designed to make students fail in critical thinking but actually make them fail academically. True there may be many high school graduates who are unprepared for college but there may also be many college graduates who are unprepared for work in their field.
I've heard it suggested that the worst teachers are sent to the poorest neighbourhoods. Could their plan be to make the poor fail so they can't gain professional employment and then when they're either unemployed or working class they can just tell them its because they didn't try hard enough?
Why would those in power want to make the poor try less hard while simultaneously telling them to try harder? It could be that wealth and power favour the top 1% but if everyone tried harder it was increase the amount of effort required to be in the top 1%.
I also disagree with the idea that more education can solve unemployment. If jobs go to the most educated people and you raise the average level of education jobs will still go to the most educated people. For example, here in South Australia they've recently made school compulsory through year 12. All that will do is raise the minimum level of education. Employers will still not want to hire those with minimal education. It won't create new jobs. As for whether or not year 12 schooling will make them any smarter, that would depend on on what they're teaching them.
Here's an example of the curriculum from my home country;
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationa ... 6853056250
It seems like they can get away with anything in the name of being politically correct. I suspect such things were put into the curriculum to deliberately waste students time so there'll be less time for them to learn something of use.
They didn't have that curriculum when I was in school but I didn't much like how they taught maths. I've heard it said that maths class designed not to apply to the real world (I've also heard students say they don't need maths in adult life, not even remotely true but perhaps its a sign of the sort of maths they're being taught). An example from my schooling is in year 6 they made a big deal about converting degrees to radians. Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't most professions content to just use degrees, not radians?
Children are naturally curious. Since prehistoric times kids have had a natural instinct to seek out knowledge. This instinct is a survival trait. Kids love to learn from others but also on their own through experiment. I think the education board must be very skilled if they can take something that kids enjoy through natural instinct and make them hate it. It's the equivalent of using conditioning to make kids hate candy.
Even their lessons on building a good work ethic are wrong. They say study hard and work hard because you must. They don't say under the right circumstances study and work can be enjoyable. The work ethic they teach is based entirely on self-sacrifice.
In physics and chemistry I learned scientific principles but not once did they mention the scientific method (something every man, woman and child should know about). They teach kids to read their books and do the experiments they're told but they don't give them much idea of how to make any new discoveries. Newton didn't get the laws of motion from a book, he wrote the book. Galileo invented his own experiments, he didn't just do the ones he was told to.
A fundamental example of this applied to younger children is that they play at recess and learn in class time. In times past young children learned by playing, not before and after playing.
In school I knew kids who practically learned to read by playing Pokemon yet some schools wanted to ban it because it was "uneducational". In school I'd get told off for looking up stuff on the web when really I was learning better stuff there than was on the curriculum.
Also I think education should have more practical elements. Sometimes I think being educated for a career is like learning to be a chef by reading a hundred cookbooks but not entering a kitchen or touching food.
So how did my education go? I can honestly say I learned more after school mucking about with a computer than I did at school. I learned history from websites. I learned Pythagoras when I saw a TV advertised by diagonal measurement and wanted to know how wide it was. I learned punctuation by reading books and later by writing. I built my vocabulary by reading books (not school books). I learned how to build a computer by mucking about with a computer (school computer class should be more than just instruction in how to use Microsoft Office, skills and computer hardware would be beneficial to the general populace, not just IT professionals.
Anyway, good thing I had a computer, some students don't. What if their only computer is a flawed by design school laptop? They come with net filters. To stop them from seeing porn? No. That's what they tell the parents. Really it's to stop them from seeing dissenting political opinions. Anyway the government would prefer it if everyone got their news from TV, not the internet. TV is so much easier to control. I don't know about other countries but when Australia switched to digital TV the poor where even provided with free set top boxes, just to ensure they wouldn't miss out on a moment of TV. How generous. Winston Smith didn't have to pay for his Telescreen either.
How are students supposed to learn the details of computers when the school laptops are locked by admin? If they're only allowed to look at certain websites than how can they learn to do independent research? In history class I did source reports were we were chastised for using any source not provided within the assignment (even if that source was prior knowledge). Is that an example of how the government wants people to treat the information they provide to them, as the only allowable source? If you train kids to ignore their prior knowledge, is that training them in doublethink?
For another example in how schools have failed to teach people critical thinking, ask yourself, when was the last time you got into an argument with someone who relied on thinking in absolutes or false dichotomies? How many times have you heard someone say some opposing idea is wrong therefore his idea is guaranteed to be right? How many times have your opponents used strawman arguments? Perhaps the government thinks that if people get used to using strawman arguments themselves than politicians can get away with using them as well.
Sure I'm critical of public education but that doesn't mean I think privatising schools would be much better. It's no better to be lied to by a corporation than the government. Critical thinking can be taught in a class but the best way to teach it is to tell kids to learn on their own and then critical thinking comes naturally.
I would also speculated that this everyone wins attitude was designed to teach kids not to try harder. I had one teacher who got the class to play competitive maths games and trivia games. You'd be amazed at how much this motivated the kids to work harder so they could win the next game, except they didn't think of it as work.
The wilfully unemployed will often play elaborate RPGs instead of working or studying. I've enjoyed these games myself. My favourite one is Borderlands. I find it quite addicting (I suspect it was designed to be addicting). I kept on going through the game, keen to level up or find a better gun but after a while I realised, the game itself is actually quite tedious. I only played it to level up or get a better gun. I didn't go through the tedious bits because a teacher told me but because I was self-motivated to get the in-game reward.
Then one day I thought, what if the wilfully unemployed use such games as a substitute for a career. Just as in a career you go through long periods of tedium in order to gain some reward, most games are quite tedious if you break them down to their core elements. Imagine if a video game designer designed the curriculum. They could make even the most tedious parts of school addictive. Learning is already additive so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch. They could make competition a core part of the curriculum. They could make creativity a bigger part of the curriculum (many popular games rely on player creativity). Get a good grade and you unlock another customisation option for your uniform, just like in Halo. Don't divide up the grades by year but by ability.
In video games and the game of life you get rewards in return for tedious work but the reason games are more addictive is because in games you find out about the reward instantly. There's no waiting to see how you did on the test or even to take the test in the first place. When you get an achievement on the Xbox you know about it straight away. Even if a game has a long grind to reach some goal, you always know precisely how far along you are (in some cases to several decimal places).
So this applies in computer games but obviously not in school or life generally. Why not? The same computers that make computer games possible in the first place also make it possible to monitor students, not to spy on them but to calculate how many achievement points they should have (and tell them of such the very second they get a new achievement). Sometimes it can be demotivating if your working towards something and you won't know for a long time if you'll succeed or fail but tell them instantly and if they succeed they can sooner start the next challenge and if they fail they can have a shorter turn around time before the next attempt (also failing a year in college should not be made a mark against students, it discourages them from trying things (also don't count their education by the year, count it by the hour, it would be better divided into smaller increments. That would teach students to value their time more)). The greatest reward should be given not to the student who studies the longest but who figures out how to complete a task in the shortest time by being more efficient (the same should be applied to the work place as well, don't pay by the hour and don't have a minimum quote (they can be unrealistic if you work in a call centre) instead pay by output. Civil engineering projects could be completed in half the time.
I think the current curiculum is desinged to be inefficient and time consuming so that when students grow up they'll be conditioned to work longer hours.
The curriculum should be made far more flexible. If a student obsesses over his special interest let him, it could one day be a career. The kid who obsesses over dinosaurs could have the makings of a palaeontologist. It's true that you get to choose your own subjects after reaching a certain age (far too late) but even then you're given restrictions ? you have to choose choose two units of X and to units of Y. Even college students are sometimes made to do subjects that have little to do with their career choice. With a more flexible curriculum, every school could be made like a university. Let the little palaeontologist. spend the majority of his school time studying dinosaurs, the rest of his time spent on a minimal common curriculum of basic skills deemed necessary for everyone. You say that a 200 student school cant' specialise as much as a 20,000 student university? Well that's what computers are for. The internet allows for a high degree of specialisation and long distance collaboration.
It's true that gamification could be disheartening to students of lesser ability but it should be designed in such a way that students can redeem their failures quickly by trying again. If they fail something too many times they should simply be encourages to switch to different subject (something not easy in our current schools when subjects have fixed start and end dates on the calender). Anyway, are their really students of lesser ability or just ones that fail due to not conforming into their little boxes. We now know normal people can become masters in their skill if they work at it for 10,000 hours and with the right motivation 10,000 hours will come easily. To say that some students have lesser ability is to say that talent comes from nature not nurture. Doesn't nurture deserve more credit?
Schools should be gamified. The students will work twice as hard and never even know they're working.
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The days are long, but the years are short
24 Aug 2014, 9:43 pm
