Here is a new slant on teaching. Have you ever been around a small kid about 4 years old? Notice how they are always saying, "Why?". This is the way most kids learned over the past hundred thousand years. Darwin created this model and it has seemed have worked very well. Now enter organized schools where the teacher sits up front and passes out "answers" to questions that have not been asked. How well has it worked? How about getting back to basics where the kids ask the questions and the teacher gives them the answers. That is the way parents did it for all those years, so why change?
Think of it this way. Inside the kid's mind is his own computer and file system. Like most of us, he can't think of more than one thing at single instant. When he is thinking about that "one" thing, he is at the address of that file location and if he can get the answer at that point, he will file it away in his own special place. Try this. He sees a new girl walking across the play ground and at that point he wonders what her name is and where she is from. There is an empty space in this file location. He asks the question, "What is her name and where is she from"? You give him the answer and he files it in just the right spot in his personal file. If you had told him the same info without the person seeing the girl or asking the question, there is no telling where or if the info will be filed away. If it is not filed in the right place, it will be very difficult for the person to call up the information when needed in the future. Starting to see how this works.
It can be taken one step farther and rather than answering the question, you tell the person how they can find out the information by them selves. This draws on the person's own unique file system and then having to do a little work to get the answer. Notice how something that you have to work or pay for has more significance. Is it starting to make sense how just having a teacher sit up front passing out facts does not get the job done.
Darwin used this principle to help us find food. When we were hungry and we looked for food, we did not forget where we found that food so that in the future when we were hungry we could search in similar places. It would be the same when you were cold or in pain.
I propose that a teacher give an assignment to the kids to come back with questions that they do "not" know the answers too. The teacher would then either give the kids the answers or direct them to where and how they could find the answer. Does this sound radical? Well, we all know that what we are doing is not working. People do not randomly search the Internet. They normally start with a question and then try to find the answer. We need to figure out how to do more of this type of thing.
