I believe the biggest criticism of the current education system (in terms of methodology/curriculum, not administration) is that most standardized tests only test recall rather than real understanding, meaning everyone wants their child/class/school/district/state to have the highest individual recall of certain curricula to receive recognition/monetary incentives. This teaching to the test causes everyone from teachers to textbook publishers to focus on individual facts that one is supposed to memorize rather than discussing how ideas came to be known and explaining them in an intuitive way. I think a lot of people argue that we should test understanding instead, but I don't think that moving to a system where we teach to the test with a focus entirely on understanding is a good idea either. I do not think tests of understanding within a single topic based on material that was just learned is the measurement we should be using to determine if children are educated. I think this is somewhat caused by a difficulty with language in that someone can understand something if they can explain the factors leading up to the first world war in a sufficiently detailed way, but if you ask the same person why for example we shouldn't flirt with nationalism (I know this is a little political I just couldn't think of a better example off the top of my head) they may not have a very good answer for you. I think that understanding is just a process of thinking about things you recall, which is a good step away from testing memory alone, but what we ought to test is whether they have integrated that concept into the way they view the world and other concepts without doing so intentionally. In the programming community (probably elsewhere as well, I don't know) there is a word 'grok'
When you claim to "grok" some knowledge or technique, you are asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental way but that it has become part of you, part of your identity.
I think we should test for children grokking concepts rather than simply remembering or understanding them at a specific time when prompted. We should not just teach children the details of Caesar's life and how he led the Roman empire, nor should we stop at giving a timeline of how events progressed for the Roman empire and brief excerpts about important philosophers and scientists. We should delve deep into how the Roman empire was established, what its economics were like, how people lived there, what kind of engineering they used, what mathematics they helped develop, how each of those things influenced the other, so on and so on. Children should be engaged in smaller group discussions that delve deep into all kinds of concepts and facts within a topic and how they relate to other topics they have learned about. We should not have an hour and a half of math, history or English lessons which jump across hundreds or thousands of years between classes with absolutely no discussion of how things affect each other, we should not attempt to force children only to memorize specific minutiae when there is a vast world of interconnected parts influenced by thousands of years of humans building upon each other's works. You can not understand the quadratic formula without having derived it yourself, this kind of teaching makes for an extremely shaky base upon which to lay higher education. I feel very confident in saying that if we had more open discussion type classes that were not limited to short time periods and had complex interweaving discussions, children would be much more educated and they would be much more interested in learning. If you can tell a kid that an emperor rose and he killed a bunch of his friends and conquered nations and was eventually betrayed, reading Shakespeare in the middle and discussing all the other important historical figures he influenced and what discoveries or inventions or events they affected, allowing the conversation to stray but remain in the context at hand, who would ever want to skip school?
It would take much longer to cover a given topic but why should that be an issue? If we studied one major historical era for few months in school after a certain point(before age 12 or so maybe only cover very basic topics), with conversations taking place every day which are free to bring up any past subject and with certain things being ordered by conceptual difficulty to be brought up at a proper time for the given class, we would have a much more efficient school system.
Additionally I think tests for grokking would have to be conducted in person, face-to-face with an approved expert. This needn't necessarily take long and we can certainly afford it if we can afford $700b for jets and aircraft carriers.
Submitted August 28, 2018 at 09:41PM by AvenattiForPresident https://ift.tt/2BX26gd
