The new axis of evil — Canada: One third of American 8th graders think we live in a dictatorship

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You could look at the ‘fact’ that a third of American 8th grade students think Canada is a dictatorship as just another tragi-comic indictment of the US educational system, or of the blindness of the US to the existence or validity of any other country, or of a failure to get the message across about Canada, or that the message about Stephen Harper’s style of government actually has got out, albeit in a slightly distorted form. All likely have a glimmer of truth.

But, actually, the headline from The Province newspaper is false: I am pretty sure that very few US 8th graders really think that Canada is a dictatorship. They just don’t know. It was just a vaguely plausible option on the MCQ (note that the actual candidate answer did not mention dictatorship, though it was implied), so they made a disinterested guess because that’s what they have been taught to do. There’s no belief implied at all.

Should a kid in early teenage know about the political systems of other countries? Why? On the whole, things matter if they matter to those around you, and/or because you are curious about how they work, and/or if it has relevance to things you do or want to do. it is far from clear that any of these conditions is true for the kids in question.  If it is forced down your throat with the threat of reward (or punishment) but no one you care about cares about it, it doesn’t inherently interest you, and it doesn’t address any actual need you have, then why on earth should you learn it? But why are the kids not interested enough to know this? The answer lies, I think, in the means used to discover what they do not know.

Exam - public domain

 

Educational systems that are designed to churn out kids that get the right answers on tests like this have two main options. The first is to build rich, curiosity-driven learning communities in which teachers and learners share the journey, enthusing one another, supporting one another, discovering paths, sharing delight in their discoveries, and overcoming challenges together. This is how learning happens lastingly, efficiently and meaningfully. But, and it’s a big but, such a path may not cover what will be on the test at the time the test needs to be taken. There’s a great deal of intrinsic reward in such a path for all concerned but the extrinisic reward structures (most especially those tests), for both teachers and students, tend to actively militate against it. It certainly doesn’t help when all (teachers and students) are forced to do the same thing at the same time in lock step, whether it makes sense, interests anyone or has any relevance or not. The second path to getting those test results is much more direct: apply coercion (reward or punishment) and make students ‘learn’ what will be on the test. With enough pressure, it can work well enough to get the required test results, even though in the process it has disempowered teachers and learners, forced them into a controller/controlled relationship in which maintenance of discipline becomes a major teaching function and, as a result and perhaps most heinously of all, has likely destroyed any innate and lasting interest in the topic for the vast majority of students. To add the final cherry on top, the vast majority of what has been ‘learned’ will be forgotten once the need to pass the test has passed. Only the greatest teachers and most passionately interested learners can overcome this systemic failing. It’s not the kids that are ignorant. It’s the people who designed and continue to support the system used to teach them.   

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theprovince.com/news/national/axis+evil+Canada+third+American+graders+think+live/11063581/story.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

Why do we not ban use of cellphones in online learning?

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Banning mobile phones is cargo cult science is a good, laudably brief, dismissive, critical review of the dangerously-reported recently published study by the London School of Economics that, amongst other things, shows a correlation between banning of mobile phones in schools and improved grades. As the title of the post suggests, the report does not show that banning mobile phones in schools is what improves grades in any way at all, despite the fact that the report writers do seem to believe that this is what they have shown: indeed, they recommend banning mobile phones as a cost effective measure to improve grades! That is so opposite to the obvious conclusion it is not even funny. To me, it shows a terrible failure at a massive systemic level. It’s not cellphone use that’s the problem – it’s the teaching. More precisely, it’s the system of teaching. I am sure that the vast majority of individual teachers are doing wonders, under extremely adverse circumstances. But they are doing so in a completely broken system. 

The interesting thing for me is that this would never come up as an issue for online and distance learners. Well, almost never: perhaps occasionally, study guides might recommend you set aside undistracted time for some (not all) kinds of study and webinar leaders might suggest that participants switch off phones and other distractions. But this is only at most a bit of practical advice, not an edict.

The point here is that command-and-control teaching methods of traditional classrooms have no meaning or relevance in online learning. This makes it all the more odd that we continue to see substantially the same pedagogies being used for online teaching as those found in the over-controlling environment of teacher-led classrooms. Obvious culprits like lecture-based MOOCs are just the more visible tip of this weird bit of skeuomorphism but the general principle runs across the board from instructivist textbooks through more enlightened uses of social constructivist methods in discussion forums. Too often, implicitly or explicitly, we act under the illusion that how we teach is how people learn, as though we still had students trapped in a classroom, controlling (almost literally) their every move.  The unholy and inseparable continued twinning of fixed-length courses and the use of grades to drive student progress is very much to blame, though a lack of imagination doesn’t help. These technologies evolved because of the physics of classrooms, not because they are good ways to support learning. In almost every way, they are actually antagonistic to learning. Online learning can, does and should liberate learners, giving them control. So let’s stop teaching them as though we were the ones in charge. It is crazy that we should voluntarily shackle ourselves when there is absolutely no need for it.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.educate1to1.org/banning-mobile-phone-is-cargo-cult-science/