Many other animals learn, but humans are the only ones that actively teach. Active teaching is getting and keeping another's attention so that they can learn something. Thus it seems likely that education is an instinct in humans. This still doesn't necessarily answer my previous question, but it should put it into some perspective.
If teaching is a human instinct, then how come there are good and bad teachers? Even instincts need training to fine-tune them. The fact that teaching is a human instinct should be a rather condemning fact for most education departments turning out such rotten teachers.
Of course they are doing a rotten job of teaching . . . what? What is it that students need to learn? Do all students need to learn the same things? What is or should be the point of education? Does your answer apply to everyone at all times in every culture? Why should it? Or why shouldn't it?
4 comments:
There is a difference between teaching and indoctrination. Teaching is about how to learn, and indoctrination is about what to learn.
Well, one does always have to make a choice about what to learn as well. Otherwise we have the contentless education I've complained about previously.
Education should address the gap between evolved folk knowledge and our culturally transmitted knowledge base. Students do a better job of learning how to learn when they are taught what to learn. The constructivist assumption is that students will be intrinsically motivated to seek out and assimilate relevant content if they are learning about things they are interested in (student centered learning), but many of our most important cultural artifacts are so complex or counterintuitive as to be relatively inaccessible to undirected student interest.
I agree with Pinker's suggestion in Blank Slate that stats, evolutionary biology and basic economics should be given higher priority, but I think he misunderstands the adaptive value of the arts and humanities (Joseph Carroll said that first about How the Mind Works).
In terms of my own idiosyncrasies and prejudices, I'd like to see more great books taught in schools. These could be "Western" (Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Twain, Woolf, etc.) as well as translated classics from other cultures (like Kalidasa and Lao Tsu, not Amy Tan). Instead of always trying to tailor reading material to the adolescent condition, we should also be teaching adolescents to stretch their imaginations in order to better identify with an intelligent composite human condition. IMO, students have trouble "relating" to schoolwork because their imaginations are impoverished and because no one bothers to explain to them the use of being able read, write and think creatively in a future economy that will be increasingly based on information and innovation. Here the constructivist would probably argue that since content will change rapidly with the times, "process" should be emphasized, but the natural classicist might argue back that beauty, truth, and brains never go out of style, and that a healthy technology preserves (to some degree at least) its earlier forms and stages.
Sorry this is so long. I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this particular issue.
Do not apologize for such a wonderful, substantive post. That's exactly the thing I want going on here on this blog. Your thoughts and mine converge considerably on this topic (including our opinions of Steven Pinker's ideas).
I'm asking these kinds of questions because I think if we are going to revolutionize education (and that's what it needs at this point), we need to radically question it.
BTW, I just read Kalidasa. Loved him.
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