Education has at it's core a single underappreciated truth that is highly uncomfortable to the practitioners of education. The ONLY thing that matters in education is practice. How much practice, how good is the practice, and how targetted is the practice. Everything else is support.
Given this, the topic education has only 2 questions left.
I. How do you you get practice to happen?
II. What topics need covered (to what depth?) (do all students need the same topics?)
The first has an easy answer:
A. Get the student interested / motivated in the topic.
B. Ensure they don't hit an insurmountable roadblock that saps motivation.
However, the implementation is not so easy.
Motivation is normally accomplished by means of extrinsic rewards (Grades, approval, etc.).
More talented teachers do better by means of transferrance...if the teacher is interesting enough, then the subject gains interestingness by association.
The ideal choice is to rely on the inborn desire to learn in the human being, and construct a system such that responds to that. This is much harder. Montessori plays in this space.
Ensuring that the roadblocks are not hit is even harder.
Indeed, it becomes almost impossible for a teacher teaching a classroom...and without someone who is experienced in seeing what others do not understand, it is frequently not done at all.
The second major question is much much harder, and mostly beyond the scope of my exploration here today.
However, I wanted to come to this question to take a quick look at the difficulty that underlies half the conflict between "The Well Trained Mind" and "The Subury Valley School Experience".
Since PRACTICE is the whole of learning...is it better to give the child a head-start in practice, or is it better to permit motivation to blossom, and draw the drive to practice from that? As an educational theorist, it comes down to that: start practice sooner? or allow motivation to bloom? And can a hybridized approach work in general? Many consequences here.
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2 comments:
The problem with practice before motivation, it that it very often squashes motivation.
-J
Of course that's true.
But you have to, as a parent, trust in the untaught goodness of the kid in order to play that way.
If you believe that people do not begin good, but are socialized into acceptability (see new posts on Sowell's book) then there you are.
We all know that a parent who cares a lot about something can impose his loves onto a kid, even accidentally. Suzuki method of piano/violin, as well as Tiger Woods and WA Mozart's dads all did things this way.
Perhaps the idea is that if the parent isn't a good enough educator to show their love of something and share it with the kids so the kids go nicely into the "needed" area...is it better for the kid's life later to push?
Clearly I still land on the "no" side, but I don't think the issue is clearcut.
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