Objective of Education Is Learning

The mark of Education Is Learning *The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching* *In their book,** *Turning Learning Right situation Up Putting Education Back on Track*, authors Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg stop consonant out that todays education system is seriously flawed &8212 it focuses on article of faith rather than contracting. wherefore should children &8212 or adults &8212 be asked to do something computers and related equipment lav do untold wagerer than they clear? the authors ask in the future(a) excerpt from the book. Why doesnt education focus on what humans tramp do better than the machines and instruments they realize? * Education is an admirable thing, and it is wholesome to conceive from time to time that nothing that is worth unwraping can be taught. &8212 Oscar Wilde Traditional education focuses on teach, not acquirement. It incorrectly assumes that for wholly(prenominal) ounce of article of belief thither is an ounce of scholarship by those who atomic number 18 taught. However, some of what we swallow heed onward, during, and after attending schools is studyed without its manhood taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without human beingsness taught these things. But are there intrinsic barriers to acquire?Adults learn close of what they use at work or at lei authoritative magic spell at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant. In most schools, memorization is mistaken for learning. Most of what is remembered is remembered yet for a short time, but then is quickly forgotten. (How many remember how to take a square root or ever contribute a need to? ) Further more(prenominal), even young children are aware of the point that most of what is expected of them in school can better be d unrivalled by computers, recording machines, cameras, and so on .They are treated as poor surrogates for such machines and instruments. Why should children &8212 or adults, for that matter &8212 be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can? Why doesnt education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create? When those who conduct taught others are asked who in the classes learned most, virtually all of them tell apart, The teacher. It is apparent to those who have taught that teaching is a better way to learn than being taught. Teaching modifys the teacher to discover what one thinks about the outlet being taught.Schools are upside down Students should be teaching and mental faculty learning. After lecturing to undergraduates at a major university, I was accosted by a student who had attended the lecture. After some complimentary remarks, he asked, How long ago did you teach your first class? I responded, In September of 1941. screech The student said. You mean to say you have been teaching for more than 60 years? Yes. When did you last teach a crease in a subject that existed when you were a student? This difficult inquiry required some thought. After a pause, I said, September of 1951. Wow You mean to say that everything you have taught in more than 50 years was not taught *to* you you had to learn on your own? Right. You must be a pretty good learner. I modestly agreed. The student then said, What a shame youre not that good a teacher. The student had it right what most faculty members are good at, if anything, is learning rather than teaching. Recall that in the one-room > school base, students taught students. The teacher served as a guide and a resource but not as one who force-fed content into students souls. *Ways of Learning* in that location are many different ways of learning teaching is barely one of them. We learn a spacious accord on our own, in independent study or play. We learn a great deal interactin g with others informally &8212 sharing what we are learning with others and vice versa. We learn a great deal by doing, through trial and error. Long before there were schools as we know them, there was apprenticeship &8212 learning how to do something by trying it under the guidance of one who knows how. For subject, one can learn more architecture by having to design and build ones own house than by victorious any number of courses on the subject.When physicians are asked whether they leaned more in classes or during their internship, without exception they answer, Internship. In the educational process, students should be offered a wide variety of ways to learn, among which they could choose or with which they could experiment. They do not have to learn different things the same way. They should learn at a very early stage of schooling that learning how to learn is by and large their responsibility &8212 with the help they settlek but that is not imposed on them. The objectiv e of education is learning, not teaching.There are two ways that teaching is a powerful tool of learning. Lets abandon for the moment the loaded record teaching, which is unfortunately all too closely tieed to the notion of talk of the town at or lecturing, and use instead the rather awkward style explaining something to someone else who wants to find out about it. One panorama of explaining something is getting yourself up to snuff on whatever it is that you are trying to explain. I cant very well explain to you how Newton accounted for planetary motion if I havent boned up on my Newtonian mechanics first.This is a caper we all face all the time, when we are expected to explain something. (Wife asks, How do we get to Valley Forge from home? And husband, who does not want to fill he has no idea at all, excuses himself to go to the bathroom he quickly Googles Mapquest to find out. ) This is one sense in which the one who explains learns the most, because the someone to wh om the accounting is made can afford to forget the explanation like a shot in most cases but the explainers will find it sticking in their dispositions a lot longer, because they fightd to gain an sympathy in the first bulge out in a form clear enough to explain.The second aspect of explaining something that leaves the explainer more enriched, and with a much deeper understanding of the subject, is this To satisfy the person being addressed, to the point where that person can nod his head and say, Ah, yes, now I understand explainers must not only get the matter to commensurate comfortably into their own worldview, into their own personal frame of reference for understanding the world around them, they also have to figure out how to link their frame of reference to the > world view of the person receiving the explanation, so that the explanation can make sense to that person, too.This involves an intense effort on the fall apart of the explainer to get into the other perso ns mind, so to speak, and that exercise is at the heart of learning in general. For, by practicing repeatedly how to create links between my mind and anothers, I am reaching the very core of the art of learning from the ambient refining. Without that skill, I can only learn from direct amaze with that skill, I can learn > from the experience of the whole world. Thus, whenever I struggle to explain something to someone else, and succeed in doing so, I am locomote my ability to learn from others, too. Learning through Explanation* This aspect of learning through explanation has been overlooked by most commentators. And that is a shame, because twain aspects of learning are what makes the age mixing that takes place in the world at large such a valuable educational tool. junior kids are always seeking answers from older kids sometimes just somewhat older kids (the seven-year old tapping the presumed life wisdom of the so-much-more-experienced nine year old), much much older ki ds.The older kids love it, and their abilities are exercised mightily in these interactions. They have to figure out what it is that they understand > about the question being raised, and they have to figure out how to make their understanding comprehensible to the junior kids. The same process occurs over and over again in the world at large this is wherefore it is so important to keep communities multi-aged, and why it is so destructive to learning, and to the development of culture in general, to segregate original ages (children, old race) from others.What went on in the one-room schoolhouse is much like what I have been talking about. In fact, I am not sure that the adult teacher in the one-room schoolhouse was always viewed as the beat out authority on any given subject Long ago, I had an experience that illustrates that point perfectly. When our oldest son was eight years old, he hung around (and virtually worshiped) a very brilliant 13-year-old named Ernie, who loved science. Our son was unmatched about everything in the world.One day he asked me to explain some material phenomenon that lay within the realm of what we have come to call natural philosophy being a former professor of physics, I was considered a > conjectural person to ask. So, I gave him an answer &8212 the right answer, the one he would have entrap in books. He was greatly annoyed. Thats not right he shouted, and when I expressed surprise at his response, and asked him why he would say so, his answer was immediate Ernie said so and so, which is totally different, and Ernie knows. It was an enlightening and fair experience for me. It was clear that his faith in Ernie had been developed over a long time, from long experience with Ernies unfailing ability to build a bridge between their minds &8212 perhaps more successfully, > at least in certain areas, than I had been. One might wonder how on ground learning came to be seen primarily a result of teaching. Until quite rec ently, the worlds great teachers were understood to be battalion who had something fresh to say about something to state who were interested in hearing their message.Moses, Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus &8212 these were people who had original insights, and people came from far and wide to find out what those insights were. One can see most clearly in Platos dialogues that people did not come to Socrates to learn philosophy, but rather to hear Socrates version of philosophy (and his wicked and witty attacks on other peoples versions), just as they went to other philosophers to hear (and learn) their versions. In other words, teaching was understood as public exposure of an individuals perspective, which anyone could take or leave, depending on whether they cared about it.No one in his right mind thought that the only way you could become a philosopher was by taking a course from one of those guys. On the contrary, you were expected to come up with your own original worldview if you a spired to the title of philosopher. This was square(a) of any and every aspect of association you figured out how to learn it, and you exposed yourself to people who were unforced to make their understanding public if you thought it could be a worthwhile part of your endeavor.That is the basis for the formation of universities in the Middle Ages &8212 places where thinkers were willing to make pass their time making their thoughts public. The only ones who got to stay were the ones whom other people (students) found relevant enough to their own personal quests to make listening to them worthwhile. By the way, this attitude toward teaching has not disappeared. When quantum theory was being developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century, aspiring atomic physicists traveled to the unhomogeneous places where different theorists were developing their thoughts, often in radically different directions.Students traveled to Bohrs institute to find out how he viewed quantum th eory, then to Heisenberg, to Einstein, to Schrodinger, to Dirac, and so on. What was straightforward of physics was equally true of art, architecture you name it. It is still true today. One does not go to Pei to learn architecture one goes to learn how he does it &8212 that is, to see him teach by telling and showing you his approach. Schools should enable people to go where they want to go, not where others want them to. *Malaise of muddle Education* The trouble began when mass education was introduced. It was necessary To decide what skills and knowledge everyone has to have to be a reapingive citizen of a developed expanse in the industrial age To make sure the way this data is defined and standardized, to fit into the standardization required by the industrial culture To develop the means of describing and communicating the standardized information (textbooks, curricula) To train people to comprehend the standardized material and master the means of transmitting it (tea cher training, pedagogy) To create places where the trainees (children) and the trainers (unfortunately called teachers, which gives them a status they do not deserve) can meet &8212 so-called schools (again a term stolen from a much different milieu, endowing these new institutions with a dignity they also do not deserve) And, to provide the coercive climb necessary to carry out this major cultural and social tempestuousness In keeping with all historic attempts to revolutionize the social order, The elect(ip) leaders who formulated the strategy, and those who implemented it, perverted the language, using terms that had attracted a great deal of respect in new ways that dark their meanings upside down, but helped make the new order palatable to a public that didnt quite catch on. Every word &8212 *teacher, student, school, discipline,* and so on &8212 took on meanings diametrically opposed to what they had originally meant. Consider this one example from my recent experience . I attended a conference of school counselors, where the modish ideas in the realm of student counseling were being presented.I went to a posing on the development of self-renunciation and responsibility, wondering what these concepts mean to people infix in traditional schooling. To me, self-discipline means the ability to pursue ones goals without out-of-door coercion responsibility means taking appropriate action on ones own initiative, without being goaded by others. To the people presenting the session, both concepts had to do solely with the childs ability to do his or her assigned class work. They explained that a guidance counselors proper function was to get students to understand that responsible air meant doing their homework in a timely and effective manner, as prescribed, and self-discipline meant the determination to get that homework done. George Orwell was winking in the back of the room.Today, there are two worlds that use the word *education* with opposite m eanings one world consists of the schools and colleges (and even graduate schools) of our education complex, in which standardization prevails. In that world, an industrial training mega-structure strives to turn out identical replicas of a product called people educated for the twenty-first century the second is the world of information, knowledge, and wisdom, in which the real population of the world resides when not incarcerated in schools. In that world, learning takes place like it always did, and teaching consists of imparting ones wisdom, among other things, to instinctive listeners.