21st C. Learning: An Intro to the Disconnect between the organisation of schools and how humans learn

An introductory explanation of the disconnect between the organisation of schools and what the neurobiological, cognitive and behavioural sciences are discovering about how humans learn

John Abbott 2010

http://www.21learn.org/site/archive/an-introductory-explanation-of-the-disconnect-between-the-organisation-of-schools-and-what-the-neurobiological-cognitive-and-behavioural-sciences-are-discovering-about-how-humans-learn/

"By misunderstanding teenagers’ instinctive need to do things for themselves, isn’t society in danger of creating a system of schooling that so goes against the natural grain of the adolescent brain that formal education ends up trivialising the very young people it claims to be supporting? This is an unintended, but inevitable, consequence of an out-dated design brief (from the shape of schools, the nature of the curriculum, the structure of assessment, and the way teachers teach). By failing to keep up with appropriate research in the biological and social sciences, current educational systems continue to treat adolescence as a problem rather than an opportunity bequeathed to them through the genetic transfer of important mental pre-dispositions to learn in particular ways. These pre-dispositions, once activated, transform the clone-like learning of the pre-pubescent child through adolescence into the self-directed learning of the mature adult."

In this was the birth of the modern secondary school – a kind of holding ground in which the problems of adolescence could be worked through so that eventually youngsters would be mature enough to deal with adult society. School was the exact opposite of apprenticeship. Schoolchildren were required to sit docilely in classrooms, listening to the received wisdom of the teacher and then reproduce that knowledge when tested. Independent and creative thinking was not encouraged for that threatened the teacher’s control of the rest of the class. Young apprentices, on the other hand, had to be so put through their paces that the older they became the less dependent they were on the craftsman, and the more confident they were in demonstrating their ability to solve problems. Every skill learnt, every experience internalised, increased the apprentice’s sense of autonomy.

Ours is a world of information saturation where the power of computers doubles every eighteen months, and it is estimated that the world produces about five exabytes of new information per year (an exabyte is a billion gigabytes). That’s about 37,000 times the amount of information held in the Library of Congress.