A thought provoking piece from Robert Epstein on education wonders whether we’re doing more harm to kids with our current system than good. Snip:
Our educational institutions today are cursed by at least four fatal legacies of the Industrial Revolution—ideas that may have been helpful a century ago but have no place in today’s world.
First, although cars can be assembled on demand, it’s absurd to teach people when they’re not ready to learn. As the brilliant German educator Kurt Hahn (the founder of Outward Bound) said, teaching people who are aren’t ready is like “pouring and pouring into a jug and never looking to see whether the lid is off.”
Second, although mass education was exciting in the era that invented mass production, it does a great disservice to the vast majority of students. People have radically different learning styles and abilities, and effective learning—learning that benefits all students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced. This is the elephant in the classroom from which no teacher can hide.
Third, although it’s efficient to cram all apparently essential knowledge into the first two decades of life, the main thing we teach most students with this approach is to hate school. In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.
Finally, whereas that first compulsory-education law in Massachusetts was competency-based, the system that grew in its wake requires all young people to attend school, no matter what they know. Even worse, the system provides no incentives for students to master material quickly, and few or no meaningful options for young people who do leave school.
As the father of an elementary school student, I can appreciate how school seems to be more adept at making learning a chore, rather than a joy. Part of that, I suspect, comes from the curriculum itself, which seems to be based more on hitting SOL benchmarks than letting teachers teach and more importantly, giving kids the incentive to learn.
Ideas like those that Epstein puts forward here have almost no chance of being tested, let alone adopted, so long as Virginia’s political class and assorted interest groups remain so firmly wedded to the status quo. That’s a shame, bordering on a crime.
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