Yes, Alex, I agree with you that school is a place to learn long strings of facts, not just ideas. My daughter's school is actually quite structured--the children have to bring exactly the right kind of notebooks to each class, no gum chewing is allowed, and pagers have been outlawed as well. The children have lost the privilege of sitting on the roof to eat their lunches until they learn to keep it cleaner, with the trash picked up. There is quite a bit about natural consequences, and the idea that an orderly environment is more nurturing than a totally chaotic one.
As far as serious literature, this year in the ninth grade they are reading "Antigone", "Julius Caesar", a ton of serious poetry, "Chronicle of a Death Foretold", by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Life and Death in Shanghai" by Nina Cheng, and "Things Fall Apart", by Chinua Achebe. These dovetail with their history lessons, and reinforce them.
The idea in a school where learning styles are accessed and respected is not to avoid long strings of facts, but to learn them in ways which respect learning styles. For example, in history the students were studying Pangaea, and its gradually splitting continents and oceans, which have very long, hard-to-remember names. Aside from writing papers on this geological period, they made models out of clay, did group work in class, and put on a skit in the auditorium in front of all the students and faculty, writing and performing a song called "If You Want to Learn Pangaea" to the Spice Girls tune, "If You Wanna Be My Lover". These are all ways to learn a string of facts in short order with good recall.
They also have very cool graphing calculators in algebra, and big buckets of colored wooden blocks to help them work out equations. In the learning lab the computers are brand new IMacs, which I know would certainly intrigue me and make me want to learn a lot about them. In physical science, they are outside exploring and doing experiments which excite them, and do not have a textbook at all. In Spanish, the children play bingo and listen to music recorded in Spanish, and do plays in Spanish, and become immersed in Spanish culture. The point here is that by a multi-sensory approach, the retention of strings of facts is made much more likely, not that strings of facts are not important.
I think it is very sad when countries lose their common cultural understandings based on literature everyone knows, for example. I am not sure what happened which caused the education system to go so weird in Germany, but I would agree that it doesn't sound like a very good idea.
Given the grim choice, I would still argue that it is more important to keep the joy of learning alive than to teach strings of facts. I have no problem with strings of facts if learning them does not result in burnout. However, the thing I got from school was more intangible--the development of good writing, critical thinking skills, and an appreciation of cultural pleasures like visual art, music and film. I do think that life enrichment is a valid goal of the educational process. I wonder if a little bit of why we disagree somewhat is based on your being scientifically oriented, and me being more of a liberal arts kind of student. I still assert that reading Homer is a pointless waste of time if there is no recall, and I also wonder if a lot of the great works of literature and mythology might be better taught later than they are, or differently. Do most teenagers have the life experience to appreciate much of what they read? I know I didn't. I also think Shakespeare is absolutely ruined by being taught by reading the plays, instead of seeing them performed. They never came alive for me, and I soon tired of them altogether. What is the point of that exercise, really, except to deaden joy? |
