I was back home in Edinburgh over the weekend and was chatting to my parents over breakfast. They were asking me what I was doing at uni so I started telling them what my last couple of lectures had been about.
Since the begining of the year the main message of the various lectures we've received is that the best possible thing we can learn is to be prepared and ready to adapt our skills for the future. We should not sit around thinking that at the end of our three years in education we will simply become a graphic designer. Some of us will, but the world is progressing at such a rapid rate we have to mold ourselves to fit it. Whatever new services, opportunities or problems come our way we must be ready to work with them. Solving the problems of tomorrow before we know what they are today.
My parents agreed with what I was telling them, however my mum who works as a class room assistant in a primary school and regularly helps with reading groups found what I was telling her a contradiction to what she witnesses every day in the school. She feels that in her primary school the children are simply being spoon fed education. There is no room for the children to solve problems and to show initiative? They are to dependent on adults telling them what to do and where to sit etc. everything is 'labeled' and put in boxes. If the children get used to everyone solving their every day problems for them now, how will they cope when they leave school and grow up?
In one 'incident' where my mum was taking a reading group of children aged 8 around a table where there wasn't enough chairs, the children looked at her blankly as if to say "do you expect me to do my reading standing up?" Not for a second thinking that they could solve the problem by going and collecting a chair from the table behind. She eventually had to tell the children to go and get extra chairs as they couldn't work it out for them selves.
It is slightly worrying that the education system is producing children with such limited problem solving skills, when we're being told over and over again in uni that it is our job to be the problem solvers of tomorrow. If feels that they are more concerned with getting the kids though the school like a conveyor belt, ticking the right boxes and making sure they leave with what looks good on paper.
Instead we should be educating our kids at the age of 8 all about the skills they will need to adapt for the jobs they'll be working in in 15 years time, most of which aren't even invented yet.
Or maybe we should just start with teaching them how to think for them selves a bit more?
Scott McLeod recently talked about a reliance on a "just tell me what to do" attitude [http://bit.ly/cHxiqa]:
ReplyDelete"We shouldn't be surprised when our graduates take that mentality with them into higher education and/or the workplace."
Having been dependent on adults to tell them what to do, I'm not surprised that children find it tough to change habits and think for themselves.
Properly (re)introducing critical thinking at an earlier age would be a good way to start helping children develop a more positive attitude.
That only works if your tutors then don't give you into trouble for taking the initative and trying to learn to do something through experimentation/trial and error and maybe not doing it right because they haven't explained how it works. And then they complain when you're too scared to have a go at something without first being given some very basic intructions on how that piece of machinery is used or that box of pigment is mixed up properly (because you've already been told off for doing it the wrong way) or because you haven't put something back in the right place because they never said that was where it was supposed to go once you were done with it. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
ReplyDelete"Spoon feeding" is a buzz phrase that comes up a lot in classes and as I understand it, what it actually often means is "we can't be bothered to show you how this thing works ourselves, but have a go anyway and when you accidentally break it we'll yell at you for trying it out". That's not what it's supposed to be, but that's what it's come to (well in our department anyway). I do agree with self-motivation being the key to success and that you get out what you put in; you make your own opportunities and all that jazz. I don't want to be spoon fed, I'd just quite like there to be a plate and spoon in the first place from which to feed myself.
*grumblestextilesgrumbles*