Encefalus

There is a blog in Psychology Today called Freedom to Learn. Its author is Peter Gray. His resume is: "a research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology and author of an introductory psychology textbook, Psychology, now in its 5th edition."

This blog has some very interesting articles. It’s main theme is education, and actually, not education by itself, but a critique of the current educational system and recommendations on how to change it. I was thrilled to find a blog such as this in a magazine with the magnitude of Psychology Today. Mr. Peter Gray expresses some radical opinions that reach a great audience.

The theme of education is something that interests me a lot. The reason is that there are not many years that I ended my own circle of obligatory education and the memories of the whole system are still fresh. And the only thing I can say for sure, is that I haven’t learned a damn thing in school!

I have asked other friends and people about their experiences in school, and I still have to find one person who admits that he remembers anything from it. Most people will recall friends, experiences, girlfriends etc. However, not one will admit that he remembers what he was taught in the math class, and those who admit that they might remember anything, once I ask them to tell me what exactly is this that they remember, they find that they just had an impression that they remembered it.

That impression I believe, is something that is generated by the following series of speculations. We all spend about 10 years in school. So, we should have learned something, shouldn’t we? Well, as it seems, even if we spent 20 years in the educational system, we would still learn nothing.

I always knew that school sucked, but I had never made a large scale research into the subject. Peter Gray, however, does exactly this. He offers evidence, ideas and proposals.

First of all, there is the question as to why school is as it is. As I said before, it is pretty obvious that we learn nothing from it. I believe that the reasons are two and we’ll discuss both of them.

First, school is not a scientific product, or aproduct of logical thought, but rather school is a historical product. Peter Gray discusses this in Why Schools Are What They Are I: A Brief History of Education. As he explains in his post Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers, human children, traditionally, have learned what they needed to learn to survive in their environment, through self-play, exploration and observation of the adults. The change in the educational system and the foundation of schooling came much later.

The invention of agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago in some parts of the world and later in other parts, set in motion a whirlwind of change in people’s ways of living. The hunter-gatherer way of life had been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labor-intensive. To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of the plants and animals on which they depended and of the landscapes within which they foraged. They also had to develop great skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and gathering. They had to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and tracking game. However, they did not have to work long hours; and the work they did was exciting, not dreary. Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between work and play–essentially all of life was understood as play.

Agriculture gradually changed all that. With agriculture, people could produce more food, which allowed them to have more children. Agriculture also allowed people (or forced people) to live in permanent dwellings, where their crops were planted, rather than live a nomadic life, and this in turn allowed people to accumulate property. But these changes occurred at a great cost in labor. While hunter-gatherers skillfully harvested what nature had grown, farmers had to plow, plant, cultivate, tend their flocks, and so on. Successful farming required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labor, much of which could be done by children. With larger families, children had to work in the fields to help feed their younger siblings, or they had to work at home to help care for those siblings. Children’s lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work that was required to serve the rest of the family.

Professor Peter Gray

So, the children had become one more mouth to feed, and thus, they had to work in order to survive. Furthermore, the new historical conditions generated the system of "social classes". Obedience was something that needed to be taught to keep the order as it is. For these reasons, physical punishment was considered a useful means of teaching the principles of feudalism.

Schooling started to be developed from the 16th to the 19th century for reason that Peter Gray describes them as both secular and religious. These were for example the belief of Protestants or american puritans that school must teach the bible so that the souls will be saved. Employers in industry also required schooling for their workers, so that they could read and write and nations required faithful patriots to send to wars. However, there were also scholars who believed in the principle of education.

What all these theories had in common was that children can’t learn anything if left to their own, and they are pretty much like a tabula rasa that should have knowledge inscripted on it by the teachers.

Modern day tabula rasa and modern day engraveling

As schools were created and public education was founded, learning started to be considered as children’s work. The methods used before for obedience, were now used for teaching. The schooling system makes a distinction between play, which is deemed hurtful, and learning, which is considered the child’s main occupation.

The same holds true for today. Children’s time is seperated between "learning-time" and "play-time". Play can come only if the child has finished his homework and learning for the day. Additionaly, school characterizes children. Their grades show if they are "bad" or "good" children. Instead of being beaten they are medicated with ritalin. And all this teaches the children that learning is not play, nor it is something pleasant, but it is a work that must be done. No wonder then, why you’ll see many people have a negative attitude towards learning and books in their adult lives. Peter Gray concludes (and I agree with him) that scientists become scientists, not because of education, but in spite of it. Like Mark Twain had said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

21st century education

What I said about ritalin will take us to the second reason of existence of the current educational system. As Peter Gray explains in the post Why Schools Are What They Are II: Forces Against Fundamental Change, modern day schooling is part of the whole economic structure of current society. A lot of people are making money out of it. School is big business, and should this system change, the teachers, the publishing companies, the pharmaceutical companies, school psychologists and probably many more people, would lose their jobs.

And not only that, we all know that people and societies are many times characterized by a state of inertia. Things remain as they are and nobody cares for it. Peter Gray gives the explanation that people will send their children to schools even if they know that this is wrong, because they don’t want to differ from anyone else, and this is indeed a strong motive as cognitive psychologists know. What I may add, is that people hate school so much, that once they finish with it, they no longer want to have anything to do with it.

Furthermore, the schooling system tries to prove it is right by using cyclical arguments. For example, children think that school is good for them, because it prevents them from playing all day, instead of working. But the notion that work is learning and play is something bad comes from school itself. Furthermore, children might believe that school makes them "good children", because they get good grades, but school is once again the establishment that provides this notion. Furthermore, high paid and high status jobs, require university degrees, and so school grades are connected with what most people consider a good life. But besides that, these arguments do not prove that school really teaches anything. It really looks more than one big feedback loop.

Peter Gray believes that in 50 years from now, the educational system will change to something more like the Sudbury Valley School (Children Educate Themselves IV: Lessons from Sudbury Valley), where children teach themselves in a democratic setting where they are allowed to do as they please, within the boundaries of a set of democratic rules, without any supervision by adults or coercion.

Sudbury Valley School

I myself have some theories on the subject of learning. These theories don’t concern the education of children but the system of higher education. Through my experience through this blog, Encefalus, I came to realize how imporant self-exploration and self-education can be. I created Encefalus because I wanted to use it as an external hard drive of my brain, where I can store my thoughts, and to communicate with people who share similar interests. By surfing the web or, just by thinking about various subjects, I each time find the subject I want to discuss. Because I have to write an article that will be presented in front of the internet audience, I have to put a lot of work into making my thoughts and paragraphs as clear as possible. Furthermore, this can help me find inconsistencies in what I was thinking or develop new ideas, as I see my thoughts written before me. Of course, every article is always accompanied by a little research on my subject. This can range from a simple google search, to a full blown research in Science Direct and Scirus.

So, through Encefalus, I manage to consolidate my thoughts, to learn and to share with others what I have learned or thought. I trully believe that learning through such a means could be introduced into the system of higher education. Imagine for example a class of a 100 psychology students where each one studies and shares his thoughts and ideas. With the current system, one should spend 4 or more years in a university before he can start creating his own theories or make experiments and discoveries. With what I propose, these could happen just by chance, as one student communicates with the other.

This whole theory of education is something that I want to connect with other theories of information I have in my mind, like for example those I have posted before: The Digg Factor: The Digg Phenomenon and a Possible Elementary Model of the Core Processes of Digg, How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this has to do with the Flynn effect, More proof that video games make you smart .

So, I hope, like Peter Gray does, that the current system of education will one day be considered harsh and brutal and will be replaced by a system that exists for the student and not solely for the sake of its own existence. Maybe, it’s time to throw away an educational system based on the principles of the Middle Ages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Philosophical, Socio-Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.