I followed my brother's Google+ link to Seth Godin's
Manifesto on Education and had to share with a bit of editorial, since there was so much great thought in it. 200+ pages.
For example:
43. How not to teach someone
to be a baseball fan
Teach
the history of baseball, beginning with Abner Doubleday and the impact
of
cricket and imperialism. Have a test.
Starting
with the Negro leagues and the early barnstorming teams, assign
students
to memorize facts and figures about each player. Have a test.
Rank
the class on who did well on the first two tests, and allow these students to
memorize
even more statistics about baseball players. Make sure to give equal
time
to players in Japan and the Dominican Republic. Send the students who
didn’t
do as well to spend time with a lesser teacher, but assign them similar
work,
just over a longer time frame. Have a test.
Sometime
in the future, do a field trip and go to a baseball game. Make sure no
one
has a good time.
If
there’s time, let kids throw a baseball around during recess.
Obviously,
there are plenty of kids (and adults) who know far more about
baseball
than anyone could imagine knowing. And none of them learned it this
way.
The
industrialized, scalable, testable solution is almost never the best way to
generate exceptional learning.
This encapsulates quite a bit of what he says in the manifesto...play baseball to learn baseball.
Being a doer and creator will spark passion and generate the kind of people and products our world needs. Learning by rote kills passion and kills ambition.
One comment on this subject that strikes close to home is this:
We can teach kids to engage in poetry, to write poetry, and to demand poetry—
or we can take a shortcut and settle for push-pin, YouTube, and LOLcats.
I'm as big a fan of YouTube and LOLcats as the next guy...but I do fear the consequences in wallowing in self-indulgent consumerism, of media as much as material. The upshot for YouTube (and the internet in general) is that it has empowered more creators of content than was imaginable a few decades ago, so perhaps the net effect is positive, even if many hours are wasted in consuming the content.
Finally, Godin shares this great quote from Horace Mann, which summarizes an ideal I share:
…be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
