Radio Free Hamilton notes that
Educator Speaks at HCS Thursday
Educator and author Dr. Yong Zhao, who wrote World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, will speak in the HCS auditorium at 6:30 p.m. Thursday.
... ...
He also talks about “Black Collar,” or REAL (rigorous, entrepreneurial, authentic, life-long) learning and the need to create the entrepreneurial spirit in our students, as the learners of the new millennium.
The "entrepreneurial" theme is also visible this morning in Salon.com;
psychologist Peter Gray, author of
Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, says that
School is a prison — and damaging our kids - Salon.com
Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.
When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein)....
I have spent much of my research career studying how children learn. Children come into the world beautifully designed to direct their own education....
This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system of schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.
The focus of my own research has been on learning in children who are of “school age,” but who aren’t sent to school, or not to school as conventionally understood. ... In these settings, children’s natural curiosity and zest for learning persist all the way through childhood and adolescence, and into adulthood.
What I'd like to focus on is the "Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose" motivational research suggesting that the top-down rewards we use are not just non-optimal, they are specifically known to be counter-productive in cognitive tasks. There's a cute RSA Animate summary by Daniel Pink, author of
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which I'll embed here:
He's not talking about school, but about motivation for cognitive tasks generally. I think he's probably right. In fact I think all three of these are talking about the same thing.
Or then again, maybe not.
Update: Yong Zhao's blog, just last week, reported on
Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » China Enters “Testing-free” Zone: The New Ten Commandments of Education ReformNo standardized tests, no written homework, no tracking. These are some of the new actions China is taking...
So we become China and China becomes us? Maybe as the NSA gets more intrusive, they'll turn libertarian? (Or then again, maybe not.)
Also this morning... Economics Nobelist
Vernon Smith says
Discovery gives learning that touch of magic | learning, know, learn - Life - The Orange County RegisterWhat has endured from my early school years are memories of pleasure and excitement in learning, a search-and-discovery process that was intrinsically rewarding. But that process was increasingly compromised by the growth of performance testing in the schools. By the high school years, "learning" had become less important in proportion to scores on achievement tests. ... What I remember is how little of it was worth remembering.
It's all about motivation vs. control? Maybe.
Update 8/28 On the subject of Yong Zhao, I should probably have also mentioned
HamiltonCentralOptions: The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately which links to earlier posts mentioning him.
