Is the approach of the teaching system correct?

“when students cheat on exams, it’s because our school system value grades more than students value learning” – Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

By Giorgio Grandi

The school system has been turning towards the wrong direction of teaching, it seems that the system does not care for the student’s personal development and performance in life, but to get grades which up to a certain point are important, but unquestionably should not surpass the student’s best interest in learning. This is where teaching methods are put up against educatory methods, and the difference between knowing and understanding.

School systems need to put a lot more emphasis on education. The term education derives from the Latin word ‘e-ducere’ which literally means to lead out, in other words, it means to extract information from within, this is something that also the great Greek philosopher Socrates believed in, he believed that the best way to bring knowledge to awareness was through always questioning and searching for answers to the questions inside ourselves that we ask, which lead us to more questions, this is known as the Socratic method. Asking more questions enlighten us and stimulates cognition further stimulating our curiosity.

Curiosity is encouraged when there is a gap inside our knowledge and it acts as a see saw, not small enough to be uninterested and not too big to think we know more than enough in that topic. It is not simply the absence of data that creates curiosity, but a gap in our existing information.

The school system needs more emphasis on education to stimulate curiosity from within, to make school more interesting for the student. Teaching is ‘the ideas or principles taught by authority’, in simpler words, feeding information from one body to another. It is difficult to truly educate large groups of individuals as it would take an inefficient amount of time to find what each student’s optimum learning environment is, it would be difficult to understand people’s minds and their best way to learn. It would seem that the only way to educate is by teaching students all in that same environment with the same process and way of being ‘taught’ instead of each student being in their bespoke environment where everyone is assessed for what they need to flourish, because in the end, it is the students who need to do majority of the work, not the teachers. The school system now has a teacher in every room in front of a class of 20 students who are expected to have their minds fed, and not being in a fun place of learning which it is described to be. Teachers are of course a necessity and are one of society’s most important figures, they give a student a course in life, but the way they teach is incorrect or at least not as efficient as it could be. When one goes into a classroom, the teacher should be able to give just enough information to the student for her to leave the classroom enlightened and really be hungry for more knowledge on that topic and do research on the topic, this would be more efficient and interesting for most students in the classroom. But that cannot be imposed straight away. There is a problem with the students’ mindsets, they assume that all the knowledge and facts they need to get a top grade in their exam is all given by their teacher. They are so dependent on their teacher on giving it to them that they have no interest in doing any work outside of class apart from the homework they are given every day. Homework is known to give students a negative attitude towards schooling and has no direct correlation to an improvement in academic grades.

A different approach to the schooling system could be to have smaller classes for each course people take, making the communication and relationship between the students and teacher deeper and more effective for the students. This helps the teacher find what the individual student wants and needs, the teacher is not there to answer the students’ questions, but to guide the students to the path of answering the questions they pose themselves. For example, a professor at New Mexico state university sets tough homework to his students without fully covering the topic until a few days after it is due. There could be greater difficulty for the student by utilizing this method, but there is a hidden value in difficulty. It is a principle that seems to apply with special force to the way we learn. The harder concepts are to understand, the more our brains rise to the challenge.

Understanding vs Knowing is another interesting topic which students struggle on. We often do not ask ourselves the difference between the two and assume they are the same. They are related concepts, but simply are not the same. Knowledge is ‘facts, information and skills acquired through experience or education’, in other words, knowing is static, you know a fact no questions asked (the fact does not tend to change). Whereas understanding is ‘the power of comprehending especially the capacity to apprehend general relations of particulars.’ It is to grasp the idea of something and being able to analyse and dig into it, to put facts into context and to link them all to a bigger picture. Linking this back to school, to put it in simple terms, we are fed facts five times a week and expected to accept them and not ask the simple question, ‘why?’. This, firstly, makes memorizing this information a near impossible task. Secondly, it makes school seem boring and a completely useless place to the student. Lessons should be taken slowly, and the topics explained in detail, enabling the students to join the dots and create the bigger picture in their heads. A cool experiment to do with the class is give them a research project for the next topic they are to do in that class telling them not to use the internet.

As schools are going towards a completely online education, the internet is a very important factor to consider, yes, we have billions of answers one click away, but is that truly beneficial? Even though the internet saves time and gives us answer straight away, it is destructive, it satisfies our questions in a matter of seconds. A boy was given an assignment to write about the largest shark in the world. After a few hours on the internet, he produced a detailed report on it. The boy then went on to show his father that assignment. After a while, his father asked him what the second biggest shark in the world was, the boy did not know, so he searched it up on the internet, and came back with an answer after a matter of minutes. The father then thought back to how when he was a boy, he would have not found the second biggest shark in the world in an encyclopaedia, there was no second-largest entry. He thought to himself that he might have been motivated enough to visit the library to find the answer. But what was more likely was that he would have gotten on with his life, feeling a faint itch of this unanswered question. The internet has such a strong ability to scratch itches in an instant, which could be seen as a mixed blessing…Ben Greenman said ‘By supplying answers to questions with such ruthless efficiency, the internet cuts off supply of an even more vulnerable commodity: productive frustration. Education, is not only, or even primarily, about creating children who are proficient with information. It’s about filling them with questions that ripen, via deferral, into genuine interests.’

(schools are feeding students with information, which is alien to their existential experiences, maybe a more philosophical approach is needed) To educate is to show students how to take care of themselves and responsibility, not to deposit information into their minds like a bank account. Schools should focus on abstract skills, e.g., problem solving, creativity, critical thinking, and curiosity. School systems have the transfer of knowledge at its core now, and it is helping no one. Now that we have google, it saves us from having to memorise facts schools can now help us develop abstract learning. We need a more integrated approach to schooling, of course grades are still needed, they are a very efficient way of measuring someone’s progress in school, but maybe to rethink the approach would be important during this fourth industrial revolution.