EMPTY LEARNING

I belong to a +Google discussion group, +Education Revolution. A recent post by +Richard Taylor, a frequent correspondent on that site, and published in #“retizine’ stimulated me to respond. I found the post insulting; therefore, chose to respond as follows.

When you write that: “The true nature of education in the United States is nothing more than a fraudulent show of subterfuge and deception.” It caught my attention.  Frankly, as a retired teacher and observer of education, I feel your words trivialized our collective efforts as teachers.

You speak of, “a magic ‘program’ hoping at least one . . . will create a solution . . .  .” I would suggest that the fanciful “magic program” you are looking for is in the minds of the more and more people who seem to be talking about teaching students “how to learn”, and not “loading them down with facts”. I often see this or some other version of empty learning in Educations Revolution discussions.

The use of adjective these folks attach to “facts” are “useless’, ‘trivial’, ‘nonsense’. I assume that do this to belittle teaching efforts and reinforce what they feel they suddenly discovered—their sudden enlightenment or eureka moment, which they think is the magic of “how to learn”. Perhaps the self-proclaimed educational philosophers who write these things should take a minute and think about what they are saying, which is that somehow you can teach people “how to learn” history, math, physics, chemistry, social studies, without teaching them anything.

Learning is hard work. All teachers know that students have variable ability and propensities toward some subjects more than others do; that is a given. However, first, we, as teachers, have to do the hard work of teaching the “facts” and molding lessons to the students, and then the students can have fun applying them—such as in a voting booth, on the playground, in a grocery store, or their work place or in a simulation of these things on a test paper. For example, every diagnosis a veterinarian or physician makes is test. It should be intuitively obvious that if all they learned was “how to make a diagnosis” and not know the “long list of trivial facts of disease”, they would not be prepared for life.  

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