Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
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Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#2Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar?
Highschool felt at best a dungeon, and at worst a torture chamber. That was primarily due to my mindset. I didn't really know how the world worked, and it seemed to me like the system had been designed for the purpose of dragging me down to the level of the brutes around me. But unfortunately the experience killed my interest in wanting to strive to attend a good (or any) university, which I now deeply regret. Not due to loss of credentials, but rather due to missing out on the social experience of uni.
If it were explained to me that the reason I was in school was because an industrialized society needs a place to put children for 8 hours each day so their parents can work, it would've made so much more sense than trying to believe the lie that we were there to learn. It felt so obvious that we weren't there to learn anything substantial. By learning to program video games I'd gotten a taste of the amount of effort real learning took, and memorizing historical dates or doing trivial math problems definitely wasn't any effort. So maybe one solution to "How do we cultivate the desire to learn?" is to relax on the idea that school is even supposed to be a place for kids to learn.
Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#3Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar? Highschool felt at best a dungeon,…
It seems that America has a higher rate of maverick learners than other countries.
It may be due to availability bias that I would know more American mavericks more than Asian mavericks. However, in the manga and anime that I watch, I do not know of any of the maverick learner archetype. It seems to be a trope that the smartest student usually have the highest score.
Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#4Over here in Indonesia, most of the more prestigious schools follow the Singapore model. Kids do end up studying a lot, but on the whole it doesn't seem more than I did as a kid (in rural America). They tend to be pretty well-rounded, teach three languages (English, Bahasa, and Mandarin), and follow roughly the math courses I remember as a child though perhaps a year advanced by 4th grade.
In the US, schools seem to be succumming to two very serious trends. The first, and most basic, is in the school attempting to replace rather than support the family as the basic unit of education. You can't do this though. Education begins and ends at home, and what schools offer is largely a supplement for the home.
This leads directly to the second problem which is the worship of innovation. I get told by friends in the US about how math classes are teaching Fibonacci parlor tricks for multiplication (like lattice multiplication, which I know enough math to understand but only because I know a lot more math than the average parent). This joins the high tech toys in the idea that gadgets and trinkets can teach our youth but parents cannot. The innovation focus further devalues the home as the center of learning, and it leads to a highly institutional, almost assembly-line view of learning.
In the end, I don't see how American higher education can survive another generation without some major adjustments to our public school system (and probably society as a whole, to be honest).
Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#5Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar? Highschool felt at best a dungeon,…
It seems that America has a higher rate of maverick learners than other countries. It may be due to availability bias that I would know more American mavericks more than Asian mavericks. However, in the manga and anime that I watch, I do not know of any of the maverick learner archetype. It seems to be a trope that the smartest student usually have the highest score.
Largely because it is the only option ;-)
Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#6Over here in Indonesia, most of the more prestigious schools follow the Singapore model. Kids do end up studying a lot, but on the whole it doesn't seem more than I did as a kid (in rural America). They tend to be pretty well-rounded, teach three languages (English, Bahasa, and Mandarin), and follow roughly the math courses I remember as a child though perhaps a year advanced by 4th grade. In the US, schools seem to…
The innovation focus further devalues the home as the center of learning, and it leads to a highly institutional, almost assembly-line view of learning.
I thought the whole world is about assembly-line learning rather than self initiated learning.
Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#7Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar? Highschool felt at best a dungeon,…
I feel like I'm in the minority here (backed up by a similar discussion on reddit today), but I really enjoyed high school. I liked the classes, I felt like I knew what I was doing with life when I graduated and went on to college, and then there's the whole social thing that people seem hit/miss on. I made a ton of lifelong friends in high school, played on sports teams all 4 years, and evolved from a shy little kid to a reasonably social adult by the end as I gradually learned to come out of my shell.
Maybe it's just the people who comment on these types of articles are the kinds of people who also didn't like school, but I personally wouldn't change my high school or college experiences for the world.
Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#8> the company is struggling to find Okies with the skills to fill even its most basic factory jobs. Such posts require workers to think critically
Perhaps those educated enough to think critically put that skill to work before accepting a factory job making mass produced biscuits. My critical thinking skills lead me to guess that is not the most fulfilling, high paying, or upwardly mobile job even for Oklahoma.
Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#9Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar? Highschool felt at best a dungeon,…
I have a somewhat similar, though critically different, story.
For much of school I wasn't very engaged in formal learning. I didn't hate it, but it didn't hold my attention, and the drudgery was boring. I would often not do homework and slack off on projects. As a consequence of this when I entered high school I was put on the advanced track on math and nothing else. To the everlasting credit of my adolescent self I realized this was a problem and I set about fixing it. I tested into the advanced English track for my sophomore year and I figured out how to get onto the advanced science track as well. I ended up graduating near the top of my class and I earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics after only 2 years of college.
Nevertheless, as much learning as I accomplished through school I achieved about the same level on my own. I read about what interested me. I read magazines (like Scientific American back when they were good) and even textbooks for fun. I was supposed to have taken a biology class in high-school prior to entering AP biology but I never could fit it into my schedule, so I didn't. And despite that I was still at the top of that class, often scoring the highest on tests. Because so much of that material was stuff I had learned on my own.
But I got lucky. If I had attended a different high school with different teachers or if I hadn't had the insight to realize that it was important to invest in my education or if my personality had been slightly different things would have turned out much different. I might have even dropped out. And I can't help but wonder how many other smart people have been ill served by the school system because they weren't so lucky.
Edit: as an aside, as I grow older I've become more and more disillusioned with formal education. I see the skills that the system instills in students and in many cases I'm of the opinion that those skills would be better not to have (the worst variety of competitiveness, concentration on minutiae and policy) while at the same time doing a poor job of instilling actual knowledge, problem solving skills, and so on.
Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
#10>Students forego calculators, having learned how to manipulate numbers in their heads.
Not true in Finland.