My Opus

Traditional teaching makes use of instructional learning. Teachers are active, students are passive and parents are happy.

Instructional learning, however, has become out of favour in recent times. In the UK more than one in six young people leave school unable to read, write and add up properly. Somehow this is seen as the fault of the teaching pedagogy. The new vocabulary is ‘student centric learning.’ Students construct. The teacher becomes the guide on the side heaping praise and supposedly everyone ends up happy, apart from the parents.

Two Australians, Shelly Gare and Kevin Donnelly have been critical about this direction of education in their country. They highlight the lack of instructional learning and that school measurement is more about outcomes that follow a prescribed syllabus. Bring back rote-learning, discipline, exams, grammar, spelling, phonic reading and the realty of objective truth, is their message. Teachers must be supported as teachers, not just facilitators.

After all rote-learning is still important. There is a core knowledge mass that needs to be learned, e.g. basic arithmetic and key facts which place other things in context. The problem is defining this core. We learn facts because the facts point to events in history and we seek to understand their significance to us. If we cannot remember them, we cannot make any arguments or draw any conclusions from the relationships between them.

John Seely Brown, an American visionary, has suggested a hybrid learning approach ie instructional and constructional where schools can teach essential knowledge and crucial thinking through traditional means, but this should be complemented with learning that focuses on getting students more engaged with topic experts.

The existence of Google, Wikipedia and online libraries means that there is no useful place in school for old-fashioned rote learning, according to Don Tapscott, because such information is readily available a mere mouse click away. A far better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so that they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online. In other words, knowledge is useless as here is always an external source which makes information available quickly. But if you remove that external source you can get a bunch of people with short attention spans with an inability to retain facts. Surely, the desire for knowledge is part of what makes us human.

In the educational mantra student centric learning is the rage. It has developed as Gen Y students find they are faced with a complex chaotic world that is ever changing and unpredictable, where the things that have brought them here are not the things that will bring them there! The expectations of Gen Y youth include immediate results, preference for short term commitments, reluctance to do repetitive work, an aversion to reading books and a need for constant stimulation. Educationalists have answered this with student centric learning. Some go one step further to satisfy the whims of this generation by ensuring libraries avoid trying to look like libraries but reinvent themselves as life style centres which serve coffee and avoid trying to let slip elitist words such as ‘books.’

Ninety percent of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in gossip and social banter. According, to Mark Bauerlein, they live off the thrill of peer attention. Shelly Gare has described this new generation of kids on the block as Airheads. Where celebrity matters more than substance and knowing how to PowerPoint is more important than spelling. But could she perhaps be merely reiterating no more than the age-old argument against change?

In a report of a 2020 vision for schools the UK government want the youth to leave school with functional skills in English and mathematics as well as understanding how to think creativity and take risk. Personalised learning using information related technologies is encouraged. The proposed learning models in the report is a combination of learner centred, knowledge centred and assessment centred learning.

Notwithstanding evidence that shows IQ tends to the norm more and more people are graduating from universities. Not everyone should be encouraged to see university as some ultimate utopia.

The reality is as most educationalists know that students learn in different ways. Not all can think creativity and fewer want to take unnecessary risks. Certain basic skills should be instilled in all young people upon leaving educational institutions and this largely depends on good highly motivated lecturers. Beyond all this many students do enjoy lecturers, classes and homework