I have been blogging on education for some time and you know that I am very unsatisfied with what I have been seeing. In this blog, I will present a "new" concept that explains much of the problem with how we now deal with education. Don't think so? Read on.
What I have to say has nothing to do with IQ or race. As I see it, there are three basic rules in education. The first is plain old memorization. You know what I mean. This is where, in school, you are graded on how well you do on tests that ask the names of different things. Like, name the Presidents of the USA or name the states. There is no logic to those lists, you have no choice but to memorize the lists of "facts". Most of what our schools do is to make you memorize facts and see how good you are at reading them back. For the teacher, it is very easy to grade the students and it is easy for the students to figure out what they have to do to get a good grade. We all know that our parents have demanded that we get good grades. As a result of the above, we end up with a bunch of graduates who are good at memorization. If you are not good at memorization, you expect to have a lot of problems in our school system. Things like spelling get a lot of attention because it is mostly an exercise in memorization. In some prior blogs, I called students who are very good at reciting back memorized facts, "regurgatators". When students cram for tests, you can bet that the text will be based on memorization.
Biology is one of the subjects that depends the most on memorization. For some reason the, so called, good students are those who can name all the bones or tissues in the body. Does that take a smart student or just one who has the ability to memorize things, even if it is just for a short time required for the test? You know the answer. I think you could name a lot of college classes and majors that are mostly just memorization. You have to ask it this is really education.
When most students don't get good grades or do well on tests, their solution is to study harder. Now, what does that mean? It means try harder to memorize material that may be on a test. Are you starting to get the idea. I think that doctors and the medical profession is populated with a subset of the students who were very good at memorization. If you have ever had a real discussion with a medical doctor, it will be clear that they were good at memorization. This leaves the question about how smart they are or how well they might do in solving real medical problems.
The second rule has to do with learning algorithms. What is an algorithm, you ask? It is a procedure, much like a recipe to bake cookies. When you learned long division in 4th grade math, what you learned was an algorithm. Students who were, also, good at memorization did well with algorithms. It was like memorizing the recipe for baking bread. We call this memorization "learning". Using math as an example, I know many students who were very good at manipulating math algorithms and who were able to get the correct answers on the tests, but bombed out when they had to do "word" problems. If you look at other areas, you find that much of what we call learning in our schools is just the memorization of algorithms.
The last rule is the gut level real learning that goes on in the STEM's. In these areas, memorization is there too, but it is mostly on solving "word" problems. Engineering is a study of how to apply conceptual rules to a problem to get the most economical solution. Engineers do not use algorithms they learned in school to solve problems. They create their own algorithm to solve the problem at hand. This last area is where students learn principles and concepts that have universal application and that can be combined in different ways to solve, yet unknown, problems or to gain understanding.
Have you noticed how many students try to do well in the technical area by trying to memorize the material? It does not work and you know it. It is like doubling down with what worked back in the 4th grade and expecting it to work in this new area. What we need to do is to get away from blind memorization and to real learning. I have hired a lot of people and I have never given much weight to their ability to memorize facts. I have hired people who could apply principles and concept to solve new problems that they have not been exposed to before. I blogged in the past that many people look at "experience" as the most important criteria expecting that their memorized experience could solve problems that the person had never seen before.
This was not my best thought out blog, but I think that you can see that we have to get away for memorization as our criteria for a good education. Speaking a foreign language is an example of memorization and is really not true education as I have defined above. We need to rethink how we deal with education.
PS---On most IQ tests they ask you to find the "odd" item on a list or in a picture. Notice that this is not something you could have memorized before hand or solved using an algorithm. Sometimes, they ask you to "connect the dots" of related items. In life, we are confronted with a lot of data and to understand our world, you need to be able to "connect the dots". If that is the case, why don't our schools teach in this area more. In the case of Obama's actions, most people seem confused because they are not able to "connect the dots" that show Obama as a Judas wanting to destroy the USA. We need more real education, not more animal training and animal tricks.
