News Herald – Juliann Talkington
Recently a teacher told me she thought her students needed to spend less time learning.
Really? Psychologists say kids are happiest when they are exploring, creating, building and refining skills…. Learning!
Perhaps the teacher was talking about “learning” at school.
Sadly, in recent years, kids have been exposed to less diverse, interesting and challenging material at our K-12 educational institutions. Parents complain about busy work and the idea that kids are “bored into trouble.” Colleges and universities have had to introduce remedial courses to help students reach a base level, so they can begin learning college-level material. To make matters worse, good teachers gripe that they can no longer teach meaningful material. Many retire or change careers.
As we moved from the one room schoolhouse to the mega-school, something happened to the product and the experience.
First we forced teachers to become more specialized, making it difficult for educators to make the subject matter interesting. For example, to successfully teach math word problems, a teacher should provide instruction in art. To effectively teach science, an instructor should expose students to creativity and applied problem solving. To teach English, an educator should teach orderly problem solving (engineering). Unfortunately, teachers are no longer encouraged to make these ties.
Shortly after we increased specialization, we began to decrease the rigor of the academic material we taught, thinking kids would get whatever training they needed on the job. To make matters worse, we added counselors to direct kids into specific areas early in life. Early specialization means many young people have limited skills when they graduate.
Perhaps this strategy made sense thirty or forty years ago, however it is completely outdated in the information age. Today kids need to be broadly educated and have deep subject matter expertise in many disciplines.
This paradigm shift means we need to rethink our schools. Kids need to be challenged. “Techie” kids need to learn to draw, paint, create and solve open-ending problems. And the “artists” need to learn the language of numbers and how to process information in a neat, orderly way.