Childhood learning and the commercial market

Lots of people in different countries round the world think of education as cramming. It is as though the child’s brain is an empty vessel that somehow has to be filled with knowledge. The goal of education then becomes to cram as much knowledge into the child’s head as quickly as possible. Even for very young children, teachers have a detailed syllabus that they have to get through by the end of the term or the semester. And when part of the syllabus has been ‘done’, it is assumed that the children have learnt the lesson: we did tens and units last month, so the children know how to add and subtract numbers up to 99.

Over the past thirty years or so, people who do research in education have found out an enormous amount about how children learn. The human brain is designed for learning, and even as adults we spend our time learning about new things: new faces and new buildings, we see new places on the television, and occasionally we learn new words. When you see a new face in the press or on the media, you can’t decide not to learn to recognise it. Learning is something we do automatically without thinking, and we have no choice but to learn.

The ‘empty vessel’ theory could scarcely be more wrong. And yet everybody seems to want to cram children’s heads. Parents naturally want to give their children the best possible start in life, so send them off to pre-school centres to get their heads crammed. Teachers naturally want to please parents, and so do their best to stuff knowledge into the heads of their offspring.

What about the commercial companies that make the learning materials for schools and pre-school centres? Well, if they produce materials based on what we know about learning, they are not going to sell very much and so go out of business. In practice, companies have little choice but to produce cramming materials.

Parents, teachers, and materials producers are locked into a vicious circle, and as a result children are crammed rather than educated. Politicians aiming to raise educational standards naturally put pressure on schools to intensify the process of cramming, and people who understand the problem are falsely dismissed as in some way opposed to educational standards. In this way, cramming has for a very long time enjoyed a position of hegemony, which means that it goes virtually unchallenged, and in practice it is taken for granted to the extent that it is assumed there are no other approaches worthy of serious consideration.

The truth is that large numbers of children have little or no understanding of the stuff that is forcibly crammed into their heads. Now intelligent people don’t spend time trying to learn things they don’t understand, and this is why children switch off in the classroom, and eventually opt out of education altogether. As the pre-school sector grows, the problem emerges earlier, and increasingly children are fed up with education by the time they arrive at primary school. And the point is hardly controversial, for it is one of the first things you learn in Education 101.

The question is what can be done about it. I think the private sector has an important role to play, and the people who are going to bring about change are parents who are highly motivated to give their children a better life than they have enjoyed themselves. Good education has traditionally cost a lot of money, but technologies associated with the internet have brought about huge cost savings. What is really needed is good ideas, and the insight and determination to turn them into practical realities in the classroom. I will be dealing with these issues in some detail in future posting to this blog.