The inability to avoid maddening soundbytes and
oversimplified sentiments is one of the consequences of social media. Our friends, our co-workers, people we don’t
know pepper our screens with opinions, and, for the most part, we grow inured;
we scroll by. But there are always those
few that creep under our self control and erupt in internal tsunami of sheer
frustration.
For me, prime among those maddening memes are the ones
promoting the utter uniqueness of the learner and condemning all education for
not customizing teaching and evaluation tools to learners…each of whom is
evidently a genius if only judged on her or his personal criteria. When one of my friends posts one of those, I
break out in hives and bite my tongue.
They drive me insane.
It’s not the sentiment behind the quotes and statements that
drives me so mad. I’m a huge proponent
of learning styles and multi-modal education; after almost 20 years in college
classrooms, I’m a passionate advocate of encouraging people to learn in
different ways. It’s the implication in
the posting – the suggestion that if information is not processed and presented
in a way that is customized to each learner, keeping that individual within
their set mode of accepting information, then they are being somehow
violated. I find that deeply,
grotesquely offensive for a plethora of reasons, but for two in particular.
First of all the premise behind many of these casual
assertions is the same premise that I believe cripples much of the American
education system. It is the creed that
education is about conveying information.
In a world where Google’s algorithm can lead readers to more in-depth
answers than many college courses and Harvard professors explain ideas on
YouTube at the click of a button, merely presenting information to any learner,
no matter the methodology, is a pitiful and impractical goal. Not only that, that conveyance of information
has always fallen short of the true goals of education. Learning is not about information; it is
about thinking. If there is one thing
that the American education system today cannot grasp, it is critical
thinking. You can post quotes and images
that blame underfunding, lack of customization, or standards that do not take
the fragile learning ecosystem of your child into consideration, but the real
problem is that the education system is trying to present information instead
of understanding.
As a teacher, I encounter hundreds of students every
semester who are incapable of pushing beyond repetition of information. They have “learned” in that they can repeat
what they have been told. When they are
asked to go beyond that, however, to put together the facts beneath an
organizing set of ideas or principles, they often struggle. They have never been taught to think about
thinking. They know how to access information, but they have no framework of
understanding on which to position that data.
From the inability to do word problems to the abysmal hatred of essay
tests, American learners are lost when it comes to higher level thinking
skills. The education system has spent
more money than most other educational systems in the world in an attempt to
teach information in ways that learners will understand, but it has utterly
failed to teach them how to understand.
