Destructive Education

I've mentioned education a few times on this blog and the fact that I don't like the one-size-fits-all approach where everyone is expected to learn the same way.  The truth is there are many different ways that you can study or teach a subject and some people will prefer one style more than another.  The reasons most forms of education don't factor these into their programme is for one or both of the following reasons, either they don't have the resources whether financial, human, technological, or the amount of time they have etc, or the other reason is because they have a standardized curriculum that they have to adhere to with teaching methods that are prescribed by some authority or regulator that they can't overrule.

There are many different theories that centre around learning styles and teaching approaches, most of these are based on research and experimentation that have never been put into practice at scale and because they have never been tested they are never adopted.  This is a classic catch-22 like wanting a job to get experience but needing experience to get a job.

The three main methods of learning that I focus on when I think about approaches to studying involve audio/visual, logical/semantic, and physical/kinaesthetic study.  The first is perhaps the simplest to understand, you watch someone demonstrate what you want to learn, or you sit and listen to someone speaking about the subject you are learning, I associate these most heavily with the concept of theoretical learning, because there is no practice involved.  The second approach is that of logic and semantics, I consider this to be an approach that involves some practice but in a way that is structured, so in this scenario you are given a task, rules and instructions, and you try and complete the task.  You're still working with theory but in a way that it is underpinned and reinforced with practice.

The last approach is that of physical or kinaesthetic learning, this is an approach that is best described as trial and error.  It is almost entirely practical with minimal guidance, instead of being told how to do everything, you figure it out as you go along, with someone to provide explanation when you reach something you can't figure out on your own.

Each of these approaches vary in their potential application, you aren't going to be able to use a physical approach to learning about certain subjects because they are theoretical in nature, likewise there will be some subjects where you can't gain an understanding without practising what you are learning.

These are just three approaches, there are many more, such as individual versus cooperative learning, whether you work best alone or as part of a group.  I believe education could be made much more effective if the bodies administering the education programmes were to assess their students on learning style and then group students based on those learning styles.  In my experience most approaches to education resort to the basic approach of having students sit and listen to someone speaking.  I never really found that engaging and I lost interest very quickly when the subjects I was being taught were boring to me.  The way that I learn best is through practice, either physical if possible or through logic and semantics.

There is one last approach to study that I would like to mention and that is the concept of rote learning.  This is where you repeat something ad nauseum until you can recite it from memory.  I despise this method of education because you aren't being taught anything about the subject matter, you're just being taught to remember something and even at that it's a case of mental exhaustion that I believe can actually damage a student's cognitive functions.  I have wrote before about the concept of burn out and the physiological and neurological process that occurs in the mind when this happens, I said at the time how bad this is for your mental health and I stand by my assertion that rote learning is dangerous because you are actively pursuing that mental state for the sake of remembering something. If you took this to an even greater extreme, most people never forget traumatic experiences because they stay with them for the rest of their lives, if someone suggested making education as traumatic as possible as a means to ensure retention, how quickly would you be met with criticism?  Why is such unhealthy behaviour tolerated in some education systems because that's the way they have always been delivered.  I'd like to see statistics that compare education systems that used rote learning to the frequency of mental health disorders within the population of those countries as a whole and see if there is a correlation.