Our kids are smarter than we are
“The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.”
My father called me today for technical help. First because he was adding images to a Word document, and wanted to wrap the text around it, and the second time because he was having trouble putting the resulting document on a CD. Operations that, because Word and Windows have lots of power but little consistency in how things are done, were difficult for him to intuit how to deal with.
Afterward, my co-worker Sandra and I were talking about the technology generation gap. Her parents have computer science degrees, but she still had to convice her mother that just entering her credit card on a website didn’t mean she was buying the product.
I made the observation that it was surprising how often you find product makers “dumbing down” for children, when children are often most able to figure out how stuff works. Dillon, for example has a new toy music player, an early Christmas gift from Grandma Pat to keep him occupied on the flight back to my parents house. He loves it, and it didn’t take him long to figure out which buttons switch songs and which button makes the music start. He still has trouble (he’s not even two, after all), but he grasps the basics, even if the can’t always figure out the right combinations.
Sandra, in response, sent me an interview with an India physicist (not an educator) who launched an experiment with poor, mainly illiterate kids in a New Dehli slum, and found that, despite their poverty, the children were surfing the web and drawing pictures, and once they were shown the thing could play music, hunting down all the Hindu music they could find, all on an English language machine.
I’m not a teacher, even though my whole immediate family and half of my other relatives are educators at one level or another. So I’m often made aware of how out of touch I am with modern teaching. The two things I hear complained about the most are:
- There are too many incompetent, ineffective, and/or apathetic teachers
- There are too few resources for the students to learn from
It’s pretty clear to me that these two are related. Teachers, particularly in the public school system, are actually the least expensive resource (human or otherwise) in a school’s budget. They’re usually the most visible, most replacable, and the easist to blame when things go wrong.
Materials for the students, like books and computers, are expensive, take expensive physical space to store, and are more rapidly obsolete, and so expensive to keep current. Naturally, given this tradeoff, you’re going to end up with lots of questionable teachers, and little for the teachers to teach with.
The Hole In The Wall article, aside from demonstrating quite convincingly how children have a natural desire and talent for soaking up information, argues that the answers to better education are more resources, better access to information, and fewer teachers. Fewer total teachers, and more of the right kinds of teachers that know how to direct a child’s natural curiousity.
Now, there’s a world of difference between functional skills like operating a computer, and academic knowledge usually covered in classrooms. The article has answers for that too, but even without that, remember the teachers you learned the most from? For me, it was not the ones that said, “This is the way it is.” They had nothing for me that I couldn’t find in a book. The ones that I learned from are the ones that asked me, “What can you find out about this?” and had me go look for myself.
I can only hope that Dillon has the opportunity to explore the world he lives in, to ask his own questions, to find his own path, rather than having his world shaped and set for him. There’s no greater source of creativity and imagination than in children, and no better way to discourage them than tell them, rather than ask them.
“… by the time we are 16, we are taught to want teachers, taught that we cannot learn anything without teachers.”
chipper