Chapter 10: Teaching People to Be Mindless Parrots
1. It
is important to understand that memorization and knowledge aren’t the same.
2. There
are three kinds of learning:
a. Mental
learning” memorized facts, consisting of storing certain chosen data in our
brains, much as we’d file away data in a computer.
b. Physical
learning: hands-on experience, involving all the senses, engaging most of the
nervous system.
c. Emotional
and subconscious learning: involving the student through feelings of joy, fear,
sorrow, love, compassion, and exultation.
3. Around
age eight, our educational system cuts out physical and emotional learning and
begins focusing almost exclusively on mental learning, primarily by overemphasizing
facts and memorization.
4. Mental
learning only teaches about the subject, while emotional and physical learning
is what happens when we actually do it. Learning about information on a bicycle
is different from learning how to ride a bicycle.
5. Too
often in education, the over-emphasis on mental learning, particularly for those
who don’t normally learn best that way, plants the seeds of self-doubt in our
minds. Our self-doubts can literally turn us against learning and growing; we
turn into the kind of person who belittles education and personal growth in any
form.
6. Teaching
only by memorization leaves people walking one of two roads, both of them dead
ends.
a. If
they were good at memorization and did well on tests, they left school
believing they were educated and smart, even though the only thing their good
grades really measured was their ability to memorize. Worse, they never left
their comfort zone because they learned that if they were to be rewarded at all
it would be for not making mistakes.
b. People
with these kinds of beliefs never progress very far in life. Fearful of making
a mistake, they constantly seek out environments where they are not asked to
take risks. Often they hold the same job for their entire lifetimes, all the
while suffering unfulfilled dreams, insufficient salaries and boredom.
c. The
other road is the one taken by people who don’t memorize very well and are
categorized as “not-so-smart”. They have lower self-esteem, deem themselves
stupid and accept that they are incapable of going very far. They hate making
mistakes because each mistake only reinforces their belief that they are
stupid. They never leave the comfort zone because they are certain they could
never make it.
7. Then,
the main reason for going to school is to get a job. School produces employees
by teaching them what employers want. Perhaps one of the hidden agenda here is
that as long as we train people in this way, employees aren’t likely to leave
their jobs or start companies of their own, which might create competition. For
many people, this leads to mid-life crisis.
8. Avoiding
mid-life crisis requires that we know how to leave the comfort zone, that we
don’t fear taking risk because we have experienced the process of leaving and
learning before, and we are confident that our lives will improve in the
process. It requires un-learning the fallacies of our educational system and
reconnecting with the gifts of learning that we received at birth.
9. Instead
of teaching through memorization and testing, teachers need to encourage students
to “go-for-it” – to take risks, leave their comfort zone of false security –
then to coach them as they discover their own wings and take to flight. And
above all, teach them to delight in the satisfaction of discovering their own
power to correct their mistakes and fly.
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