Why A Person Learns (and what it means for education)

What the Hell is Wrong with Education Now?

I must admit I am deeply troubled by the continuing conversation about education that is going on in the echelons of government (No Child Left Behind), the elite corporate heads (need for higher order technical and soft skills), and the science/math cognoscenti (America is falling behind in producing scientists and engineers). The country as a whole seems to be self-flagellating over the fact that the vast majority of students in middle and high school don't go into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (known by the acronym STEM). There is a predominant myth floating about our society that the workers of tomorrow will be knowledge workers who need to have all the advanced knowledge and skills in order for the US to compete in the global marketplace (see writings of Tom Friedman - The World Is Flat). The presumption is that everyone in a modern technological society needs to be STEM-enabled or else we will fail to compete globally.

Here is a wake up call America (and other OECDs who think the same way). Not every human being is enthralled with STEM topics. There are, in fact, so many fallacies here that I hardly know where to begin. The big one, of course, is that technology (and science/engineering, etc) advanced in a world where ever more energy flowed to support growth and development and now that is coming to an end. Energy flow is on the way down and so the amount of wealth production that can be diverted to technical advances will soon be declining as well. The era of progress is over or soon will be so.

Of course the majority of all these so-called leaders in government, business, and education are completely blind to this reality. They are thinking about a future world that is just like the one we have now. They want to prepare for a world that is based on our long history of growth in energy availability because that is all they can imagine. Pity.

But the more subtle (and operative) fallacy is the belief that all human beings have the same capacity to learn these subjects. And by capacity I do not mean intelligence per se. I mean that they have the predisposition to find STEM subjects, well, fun. In fact this idea completely ignores the majority of personality psychology research that shows clearly that different people have different interests and tendencies from very early ages (and is largely influenced by genetic propensities). And here is the simple truth. Only a small number of people in the population find the content of what we call science and math curricula fascinating. The reason more people don't pursue STEM fields is really very simple. They don't like them and they don't, as a consequence, learn them. Yet in spite of how simple this fact is, our brilliant STEM practitioners and civil/government leaders wring their hands wondering why our education system is failing to produce yet more practitioners. They note how foreign countries seem to be more successful at producing more scientists and engineers and 'by golly' we should be able to do the same. Of course what they forget to consider is the vast differences in cultures, the fact that some of these so-called 'successful' countries have vastly larger populations seeking ways out of low income (motivation) and other factors that if taken into account would show that they are really no more successful than are we in the US. I have numerous students from India, and many Asian countries who do well enough in our higher education system, especially on the rote fact learning side. But I don't see much difference in their ability to practice critical thinking or meta-learning than any native US students.

In spite of this very simple fact our STEM curricula are designed as if every student has the potential to become a STEM practitioner. In other words, we assume the they all need to learn the same basic content which would prepare them to enter a STEM major and become the oh-so wanted scientists and engineers who are going to save our way of life. We literally shove STEM down students' throats from an early age (usually getting earnest in middle school). And what is the result? Not only do we turn most (and believe me I do mean MOST) students off on the whole education process, but I suspect a damaging side effect has been that even a few students who would learn to appreciate and dedicate themselves to STEM subjects are so turned off that they turn their backs on any further pursuit beyond what is absolutely required (e.g. Biology 101 in college for a general education subject). I wager that we actually end up losing students who might end up pursuing careers in STEM simply because of the heavy-handed, fact-learning way we pursue these topics.

Actually it really isn't much different for many other humanities subjects as well. Courses are pretty universally taught on the basis of ‘here is the factual information you need, now learn it’ basis. The possible exceptions are in the fine arts! And, ironically, at the same time we are talking about how to beef up STEM education we are talking about cutting fine arts programs. Why? Well because the energy-constrained economic downturn has decimated education budgets and, well, something has to go.

How Should We Design Education

Bear something in mind as you read what follows. I am not writing for you or the current society. I suffer no more illusions that the people of minimal sapience that make up the majority of our social milieu would ever be able to grasp these arguments (you might, but I doubt that there is much more than agree with me that you could do!) I write this with the expectation that one day, after the collapse of our society (and the potential evolutionary bottleneck), those who survive and want to build a better society will grasp that we (the current society) made horrendous mistakes in the way we approached education. With a little luck this will provide some guidance. Or maybe, if my hope for high sapient survivors comes to pass, they really won't need any guidance. It seems like an exercise is futility in some ways, but humor me.

The title of this blog entry says it all. If we understood why people (from the youngest child to the oldest adult) learn anything at all, they we would understand how to design education systems to assist them achieve their own goals and motivations without shoving so-called knowledge down their throats. There have been some extraordinary advancements in both asking the question of why people learn at all (also how they learn) in the field of psychology (see, for example: Montessori method, Constructivism for several examples). In spite of some criticisms of some of this work (like the examples), the fact is that these investigations were asking the right questions and starting the investigation of how education should be designed to match the answers (if we had them).

There is a lot we know, thanks to these and many other investigations. We know that every human is a learning machine. You cannot prevent humans from learning. Humans are naturally and generally inquisitive, curious, and motivated to gather information that ‘might’ come in handy one day. Humans are informavores. We also know that every individual operates at their own given pace. The insistence on an age-based grade level system is ludicrous; a pure invention of the industrial revolution applied to schools (Alvin Toffler describes this phenomenon as part of the Second Wave, the ideas implicit in the industrial revolution applied to all areas of society). But, perhaps most important is that we know that different humans have vastly different interests and they are most motivated to learn the details of those subjects in life that interest them the most. Setting up a system that insists that every student go through a common curriculum is a formula for failure. As we have experienced. There are so many different dimensions to personalities that make it literally impossible to force every type through a common pipe. Yet this is exactly what our current design of education attempts to do. It insists on conformance even as it supposedly offers so much ‘choice’ for students. What so many educators, and more particularly education administrators and society in general, don't seem to grasp is that the early insistence on conformance systematically teaches students one thing. Don't think, even while verbally telling them that that is what they are supposed to be learning. When you force a student to take a course they are not interested in, and especially before they are ready, you have lost them. Sure they can flunk the course and take it again, but then what have you told them? That they are failures and ‘different’. You have begun the process of de-education.

What about the ‘successful’ students? The ones who make it through high school with a high GPA and go on to college, where they may continue to perform well. Well, the answer is in that word ‘perform’. All too many of these students have, in fact, learned the rules of the game and have figured out that the name of the game is perform the tricks. Find out what the teacher thinks you are supposed to know (no matter how trivial or rote), learn it, regurgitate it on an exam. They are especially successful on multiple choice, or supposedly ‘objective’ tests. Now I must hasten to say I have had the somewhat unique (and very gratifying) experience of teaching a Global Honors class (the subject was Global Challenges) in which the majority of students were not of this ilk at all. They were genuinely intellectual beings with a continuing thirst for knowledge and a desire to actively guide their own education. We had explicit conversations about the nature of education and what they had experienced so far. They were uniformly critical of their general educational experiences to that date (except for their other honors classes), and given my approach to pedagogy, which let them explore their interests while still being rigorous, were feeling the freedom of genuine exploration for the first time in their lives (OK, a few had had other teachers that gave them a similar treatment, but I like to think I punctuated those rare cases!)

The way I would generally characterize such students is that they had somehow survived the education system with their thirst for learning in tact! Believe me, as an educator who has long lamented the seeming lack of motivation of students to understand and not just memorize, working with this group was a cherished experience. I continue to keep in touch with some of them even today and it gives me a thrill when they question everything!

What genuinely amazes me is that the education profession does, in fact, understand this need to let students follow their own interests. We've set up so-called magnet schools that specialize in various areas (while still requiring students to go through the standard STEM-type curricula). Generally these schools are pretty successful in terms of enrollments and graduations. You would think that somebody in high places would wonder why this is, think it through, and realize this is what we should do generally.

Here is the key to a successful general education that would inspire those who naturally are inclined toward STEM subjects while not turning off everyone else (and some STEM candidates). What is the central question that every human being asks (themselves or God or...) all of their lives? Why is psychology the most favorite initial degree declaration among undergraduates? It is just stupidly simple. Every person wants to know who they are, why they are here, and how do they relate to the rest of the world. It is the fundamental nature of autonomous, conscious beings (even if they are not super sapient!) to want to sort out these kinds of questions before worrying about what an atom's valence electron cloud is.

Where and when in the modern education system do these kinds of questions get addressed? I'm not suggesting that we educators have the answers and should just give them to students. We don't. In fact, our current system indirectly answers these existential questions with the answer: “you are just another brick in the wall” (Pink Floyd!). Oh sure, it isn't explicitly given. But the whole experience of education imparts that answer along with another dictum: “don't worry about those other questions, just earn a good living so you can have lots of stuff and you will be happy.”

What we do have is the knowledge that these are the most important questions that all of us ever ask. Just acknowledging these questions early in the education process would help a great deal. The rest is about framing these questions in the context of all the knowledge that we humans have garnered over all these millennia. If you can work in the fact that a great deal of why we are here is tied up in the valence cloud of carbon atoms you will find students are a great deal more interested in chemistry! You have to connect the knowledge of all the various areas to these fundamental existential questions. You have to help students discover that the world works in a certain way and that that way is what helps explain their being here in the first place.

In the end every individual has to find their own meaning and purpose in this world. That is what they are attempting to find from the very beginning of their lives (even in the womb!) Education shouldn't be forcing answers on them, it should be providing the background knowledge that allows them to construct their own interpretation of reality and their own place in that reality. In simple terms, education should be about supporting humans to self actualize.

Human contribution to society, productivity, and all of these social attributes that we strain to produce are natural outcomes of each human being being themselves. We do not have to frantically pound them into the skulls of our children and young adults. Given the right educational environment, they will work it out themselves. They start out as seekers and their whole lives are lived on their own pathways. But along the way they do glimpse bits and pieces of the truth that give them purpose and happiness. They contribute to society by simply following their own paths. We are not meant to be bricks in a wall. But as things stand, that is exactly what we are producing under the current system. Only a minority of people manage to get through education without being molded and shoved into miserable lives that only find the illusion of happiness in a materialist existence.

I must admit that my own belief is that a curriculum based on systems science (see my series on this subject; last series in the index) but centered on the key existential questions, appropriate to the stage of development, of course, would provide a basis for allowing those students who will naturally gravitate toward STEM subjects to do so while allowing all others to follow their own paths. Done right I strongly believe that even students of the traditional humanities would be more informed in the sense that they would be prepared to deal with more technical issues (like the truth of global warming) as citizens than is currently the case.

Of course, as I said, this is for the future. For more background and links to my ideas on the University of Noesis see A Dream of Education for the Future.

Comments

[porge]

George,
You will absolutely appreciate this young lady.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M4tdMsg3ts&feature=player_embedded

There is hope for the U of N yet.

[Sam]

George,
Once again, another excellent post, but let me expound on a few things.

First, as you are well-aware, education today is designed to track students towards certain goals. Education has become more about career preparation and less about learning for learnings sake, hence the emphasis on STEM and the frequent pleas I receive from family and friends not to major in the Humanities. (Good news, I won't!) But it is also a very important socialization tool. Education is supposed to impart values of national identity, and how to behave as a citizen. Look at Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, which discusses how the use of unified language and education systems helped to spread national identity in places such as Indonesia. Group work is supposed to help young people learn how to get along with one another--skills that are apparently lacking in many workplaces today. In your vision of the future, education can't be co-opted by whatever entity is in charge for use as a tool to reinforce their power. Everything, including power and social structures, must be questioned. Fortunately a diffuse network of independent learners united in a desire to self-actualize, as in your vision, makes it more difficult to enforce rigid values and hierarchies on learners. But that diffuse network also makes it harder for education to serve as a socializing tool. So something will need to fulfill that vacuum, because for sapience to flourish, cooperation must be emphasized over individualism.

Second, your vision of the future is one where students will be more motivated learners. Yes, those who guide them will be offering how and why-type questions (above all, why is a given bit of knowledge important, what is the relevance of it?) But as you mentioned briefly in one of your pieces on sapience, choice is critically important. And I would argue that a very real problem has to do with the fact that today, young people have more choices than ever as to how to spend their time, and they are being given more leeway than before about how to make those choices on their own. It is much easier for kids to spend their time playing videogames and not learning. As Barry Schwartz notes in his Paradox of Choice, it's extremely difficult for people to manage the plethora of choices available to them. But it becomes easier for kids to make certain choices if other choices (eg. learning seemingly irrelevant STEM material) aren't interesting. Of course, in an energy-limited society, those choices may very well be limited, and so young people will be more willing to ask and explore questions more fundamental to our lives and to human existence than what the next level of a videogame will look like. Nevertheless, the goal of self-actualization is a complex philosophical concept, not one I imagine a seven year-old to fully grasp. For those who are not motivated learners on their own, some means of giving them the big picture in a simplified manner--why learning is relevant--is key.

Third, education suffers from an overuse of metrics, and unfortunately efforts to improve schools (such as No Child Left Behind), and initiatives to make teachers more accountable seem to exacerbate this problem. Standardized tests allow easy comparison across students. Multiple choice tests are easy to grade and they have pretty good predictive validity. And metrics enable students to assess whether they are on the right track, whether they are learning what they 'should' be. But of course, metrics become less and less effective as students improve on the indicator that is being measured (and which serves as a predictor for other variables), but not on those indicators which are not measured. Hence an emphasis on rote memorization for many students and not on self-directed learning questions which may result in less of a boost to one's grade.

Therefore, as metrics become less and less useful, debate tends to swirl around what makes better metrics (that is, what metrics are more precise). However, the use of metrics to compare students to each other, and to predetermined indicators goes unchallenged. That is not to say that metrics are all bad. In areas such as international development, an increased use of metrics has led to greater accountability amongst foreign aid practitioners, reducing fraud and waste and improving aid effectiveness. But if metrics are not needed, or if the wrong thing is being measured, then it can unnecessarily oversimplify an evaluation without looking at the big picture. I haven't been able to find a compelling reason why metrics are a more effective way of monitoring an education system except for the fact that faculty and administrators need them to do their jobs as they've been set up to do.

[colinc]

Really? Only 2 comments to this article to-date?

Regardless...

Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.

Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat,...
(from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119654/quotes?qt0997317 )

...and still today a plethora of people believe in some incarnation of the flying-spaghetti-monster, free markets, war based on lies and greed and many, many other egregious fallacies. So, I have to ask, who has "learned" what?

For further consideration (and note the following is a "fair" reflection of most of the people I've known or encountered over the past 40 years)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE&feature=related

The collapse of "everything" has not only started, it is now moving under the weight of its own momentum. The juggernaut has been loosed. We're experiencing a conflagration of conundrums that are, in all reality, but mere symptoms of the "base problem," which I have yet to see ANYONE address. Pity. Maybe some day I'll stumble across a way to care about "mankind" again and elaborate on it myself. But don't hold your breath.

[colinc]

Ooops!! I forgot to mention...

porge (1st comment), thanks for that link, that "helped" my "affliction" a bit. Not enough, but a bit. :D

George, I tried to post a comment to 1 of your earlier articles using my TypePad login and your site wouldn't accept it!! This time, I just used the "Your Information" (below) and, obviously, voila. Maybe someday I'll email you the copy I saved.

[George Mobus]

Porge,

Thanks for the link. Indeed there are, thankfully, a number of very intelligent and sapient beings who noticed the faults of the education system!

------------------------------

Sam,

Thanks for these very insightful comments. To the rest, I shared this idea with Sam via e-mail:

One day I hope to get a post out on a discovery-based, challenge-based approach to pedagogy wherein the students are given a project challenge and some guidance as to what kind of knowledge they will needed to accomplish it. They are then on their own to solve the learning and information finding processes. Evaluation is not done to 'grade' the students but to provide feedback to them on how well they have learned and managed their learning. If they goof up it will probably be early in the project (assuming a well designed challenge) and they are always free to ask for help along the way, so an intervention might get them back on track. Otherwise, if they flunk they just have to do it over, hopefully having learned from their mistakes. I actually use this to a limited degree in my teaching (most students hate it because they are so used to the 'tell me what I need to know for the test' mode) but I have to report final grades so the evaluations are also summative. One day I would like to try it in a pure form, especially on younger students.

Your return comments to me in the follow-up e-mail were equally insightful and if you care to share them with the other readers, I'd encourage you to do so here. I would, but it was a private e-mail so I'm reticent to do it without your permission.

If I ever get things together to start a University of Noesis, I want you on the team!

---------------------------

Colinc,

Your sentiments are not too different from what drives me to hold out for evolutionary progress for the human brain. Maybe wishful thinking, but I don't believe in giving up without some kind of fight!

---------------------------

George

[porge]

George,
I heard that valedictorian in another interview say she will be attending on of the SUNY campuses. She might just end up mentored by Charlie Hall.

I really think that there are a lot more like her out here.

[Sam]

George invited me to share my follow-up comments that I emailed him with everyone else and I am more than happy to do so.

George,
Your idea of a challenge-based approach to learning sounds very insightful, but at first glance, I have a couple of concerns. It seems to be a project approach that is better suited for fields where information is the most important goal (eg. STEM fields). In many of the Humanities (incl. foreign languages), and some of the social sciences, knowledge and facts are important, but skills are arguably even more important. How do I write or speak cogently? How do I analyze a piece of text, or a public policy for that matter? How can I create and defend an argument? The projects you propose can certainly serve as means of demonstrating knowledge, but the art of communication and of defending one's position are skills that a project-based approach may underemphasize. Classroom discussions can be incredibly productive forums for sharing knowledge if the participants are motivated, and allow those participants to strengthen their ability to verbally communicate. And when learning a language, being mentored by a native speaker who understands tonal and grammatical nuances is key. It's not something which can very easily be learned independently. How would a project-based system incorporate these other forms of knowledge sharing and skill building which may be equally powerful depending on the subject?

The other concern I have is that even as humans evolve, I suspect that a great deal of our learning will continue to take place in early years of development. Early childhood education has been shown by myriad studies to prepare kids for further schooling because of the basic skills and socialization they acquire (see for instance pages 21, 76, 77, and 125 of this lovely document from the RAND Corporation http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG341.pdf). And as I'm sure you know, because of how the brain develops, certain bits of knowledge are better learned when young. Language acquisition is the proverbial example here. It's much easier for a three year-old to learn Arabic than it is for myself as a college student. So I don't know whether you could create challenges for three year-olds which would give them a lot of the knowledge that they need a foundation to process. Perhaps as children mature, they can be given more and more independence to pursue learning challenges. However, given that the early years are such a critical period, if they are to be maximized, it may make sense to avoid challenging students to learn independently until they have a baseline of knowledge and skills from which to work from. What would a transition look like between early education and the University of Noesis? And should I even be treating the two as discrete? I don't have a good answer here, but it may be something to contemplate when you do a further writeup.

[George Mobus]

I want to thank Sam for sharing this. I was impressed with the thoughts he had expressed in the e-mail and thought my readers would benefit from seeing them.

Sam is right about the emphasis of project-based discovery learning being on information acquisition. He contrasts this with humanities and skill learning. What I had in mind, however, isn't for just a single traditional discipline. The focus of my thoughts are on the universal existential questions that all humans ask. And 'projects' need not be just science projects (at least not overtly.

I am enamored with the permaculture approach which is systems science applied to living. Starting very early in life and prompting students to take an active part in raising their own food can be an entry point for exploring why we even need food, how does nature generate it and many other existentially directed questions that the student can explore. Always the emphasis has to be on how any subject is relevant to the individual. I feel this is the most motivational approach. Later as students mature the emphasis can be shifted to more socially relevant subjects as each individual has become comfortable with their own sense of purpose.

I suspect (from my experiences with the Global Honors students) that the habits of exploration, self construction of meaning, etc. will spill into all areas of learning, including those Sam has mentioned. After all, when a student is actively engaged in exploration they are going to come across material/questions that require help from others, from teachers. The ideal teacher is prepared to help the student find meaningful answers as a guide, but not as a dispenser of knowledge.

On Sam's second point, again he is right about early learning. But I would point out that the very phenomenon he mentions (socialization/learning language) is exactly what I am talking about. No one actually 'teaches' children their language, though they certainly guide them when they make mistakes. Children, immersed in a culture/language simply cannot fail to learn. Sam says:

Perhaps as children mature, they can be given more and more independence to pursue learning challenges.

My thought is that they are actually already independent and find all the challenges they need in making sense out of the strange sounds and behaviors of others. Certainly they need guidance. They need to learn the nuances of proper language and proper etiquette etc. But that they seek to learn is part of the human condition.

As far as giving challenges to three year olds, this is exactly how my older son learned arithmetic (OK he was more like four). Whenever we bought something for cash (small stuff) I told him he could keep the change for his piggy bank if he could figure out the amount before the cashier did. This led him to want me to give him problems so he could see how to do this. And, as a result, he started putting a fair amount of money into his bank! Of course not every child is going to learn arithmetic this way (my younger son needed more traditional methods!) but I bet there are many such cases where a teacher finding a suitable way to challenge a young student will result in the student learning fundamentals at an early age.

In this sense, I actually don't see there being a 'transition' from early childhood learning to the University of Noesis. I see every child starting in the University (or think of the University as housing all primary and secondary learning).

The main point is that the key motivation for learning comes from a natural need to know how the world works and what is my place in it. Make that the focus of education and many more human beings will achieve a much higher level of actualization.

George

[Adolfo Jurado]

George:
I appreciate your efforts to share your wisdom. A U of N is not far from reality, any billionaire can support that conception in one or more places. In education, what is needed, is to go the extra mile, to do our "homework", starting with research universities: they should provide the overall framework (intellectual enterprise)to "allow all the members of society to live in harmony"(as you suggested), leading to the establishment of "Integrated Valleys of Education and Research(K-1 to K21)taking advantage of the lessons learned, systems approach and most importantly , considering the most important interaction(within the rediscovered system and its emerging properties).And only "seed money" is needed!
If the above makes sense, I could elaborate later.
Adolfo

[George Mobus]

Adolfo,

Did you mean to elaborate on the billionaire??? My next blog will revisit the sapient ecovillage and U of N concept. All I need is time to get it together!

George