By Max Fawcett
In spite of Prince’s protestations to the contrary, the Internet is anything but dead. In fact, it’s been the one doing most of the killing of late. From enforceable copyright to respectful disagreements and the ability to listen to an album from front to back, the internet has left a litany of dead or dying cultural trends in its digital wake. But while some of these cultural casualties will be mourned, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who will miss the repetitive intellectual strains associated with rote learning.
It wasn’t that long ago that rote learning, and the regurgitative mimickery that is its most common form of expression, was the educational model under which students laboured during their primary and secondary years. They were expected to behave like inert intellectual vessels into which a series of teachers would dump ever-more complex packets of information and ideas, like computers receiving their regular software upgrades. But with the rise of the Google-powered universe and the ability to locate information about anything, anytime and (almost) anywhere, the need to remember the dates of the Hundred Years War or the name of Canada’s fourth Prime Minister has become an academic skill nearly as quaint – and irrelevant – as using an abacus or perfecting one’s ability to write in script.
“I don’t think the world needs more people who can play Trivial Pursuit, if you know what I mean,” says Chris McCullough, a Red Deer teacher. “There’s a place for that, but at the same time the world’s changing so fast in terms of what you can and can’t do. I think the schools need to reflect that.” In order to do that, schools need to – and are, increasingly – move away from the traditional memory-oriented model of education and towards a more dynamic and interactive one. Likewise, the role of the teacher must evolve, McCullough says, from that of a Socratic fount of wisdom to a tour guide to its possibilities. Making kids memorize names and numbers when they know perfectly well that they could just look it up on the internet is an exercise in mutual frustration, according to McCullough.
Tracy Lyons, the vice-principal of a high school in Onoway, Alberta, describes the move away from rote learning as nothing less than a paradigm shift for her entire profession. “We’re not sages on the stage anymore; it’s a different way of looking at things. It adds a kind of accountability, in that teachers are now forced to constantly be aware of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.” But it’s not all toil and trouble, either, she explains. “There’s a fun factor here, too. You can be so creative in what you do and how you do it, and it might look different from classroom to classroom and community to community. It really opens doors, yet at the same time it really reinforces what’s important.”
What’s important, Lyons says, is the school system’s ability – and willingness – to provide kids with the kind of intellectual tools that they’ll need to thrive in the 21st century. “There’s a push towards big question, big idea-thinking about things, and looking at process as opposed to just content,” she says. “There’s a real push for inquiry-based thinking, critical thinking, and collaboration. It’s about really paying attention to where the kids are, rather than ‘this is the box that we teach from.’
Of course, not everyone is quite as enthusiastic about the demise of rote as Lyons is. “It’s a personal thing,” Lyons says, “and everybody’s at different stages, just like our kids. Some teachers like the way things have always been. Change is a difficult thing.” But McCullough believes that reluctant adopters will find the benefits far outweigh whatever costs might be associated with the adjustment period. “From a teacher planning perspective, I guess that could be a little scary,” he says. “But 99 per cent of teachers are in it for those ‘a ha!’ moments where they’ve piqued someone’s interest or made someone interested in something. That’s why teachers teach. So when that happens, and they can see that the helped facilitate that, you have a very powerful situation happening.”
For Sir Ken Robinson, a renowned education expert and public speaker, that situation can’t unfold soon enough. In a recent TED talk on the subject of education in the 21st century, Robinson described the dangers associated with traditional approaches to education. “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it,” he said. “Or, more precisely, we’re educated out of it.” He describes the western education model as a tool – and a blunt one, at that – of industry and commerce, one that does more to enrich those in positions of power than the students themselves. “The consequence,” he said, “is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think that they’re not, because the thing that they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized. I think we can’t afford to go on that way. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
That process is already underway, it seems, if Lyons and McCullough and their attitude towards alternative approaches to education are any indication. And while traditionalists might bemoan the end of the test-obsessed, memorization-oriented approach to education under which they were schooled, Lyons thinks that they’re the ones that are truly out of touch. The kids, in other words, are just fine. “There’s that whole idea that there’s something wrong, and our kids are not the way they should be. You know what? Things are changing so much and so quickly, and it’s us, the adults, that aren’t keeping up. I really think we need to take that step back and try to realize that it’s not them that need to change, it’s us.”
Category: Work
Leave a Reply
