| Chieh on
Education / introduction Since its inception, the education system has maintained that learning is a serious business acquired only through discipline and hard work. This projection is so deeply imbued into our culture that we often forget the possibility of an alternative. Yet, we all know sports junkies who can recite the scores of every star football or basketball player, or youngsters who have memorized the energy damage of every sword in a video game. And we probably all know someone who has memorized the TV Guide. Although the practicality of those learning is debatable, this doesn't take away from the fact that these people have acquired a large amount of knowledge while having fun. There are probably more star sports players than there are presidents of the United States, yet some people are able to acquire an amazing amount of knowledge without ever considering it as work. This is made possible because of their personal desire for the knowledge. Without this personal connection, knowledge must be forced upon the student, and that is when it stops being fun. The main goal of this first series of essays is to address how our education system has largely failed to engage our students. The missing link is the lack of emphasis on inspiring our kids to embrace learning rather than grades and diplomas. We educators have put a lot of energy into teaching, grading, and examinations. But I argue that we, collectively, have not done enough to motivate our students to engage. We have not done enough to imbue confidence. Grades and tests are nice, but they have been the standard approach for thousands of years. It is time to look at education from a broader angle. Unlike the current perspective conceived from the head, this new approach would also contain the voice of our hearts. And the voice of our hearts is no trivial matter, as we will see later. When dealing with the heart, we educators have much to learn from the entertainment industry. Just observe how much useless and sometimes even detrimental information our kids learn from the media. The entertainment industry profits from its ability to engage people, and today it has evolved to a point where it has become a master at monopolizing our attention. We educators may have the ability to force our children to do their home work, we lack the lure to help them enjoy it. Needless to say, the entertainment industry is kicking education's butt. Yet, instead of viewing forces in the entertainment industry as the enemy, we must admit that there is much to learn in how they use psychology to motivate their viewers to stay with them. In our essays, we will spend a lot of time discussing how we can use those same techniques to engage our students in learning. The theme of these essays, in fact, is centered on the argument that if the entertainment industry can engage people to learn an enormous amount of useless information, then so too can the education system engage our kids to learn useful information. I want to note that these essays were written to address the below average student—the student who struggles just to get by. Many of the observations offered in these essays probably will not apply to the top students in the class. The focus is on the kids whom teachers sometimes would rather not have. I, myself, was once considered by teachers to be one of “those kids.†It took me a long time to realize that I was not. As I retraced the reasons why learning is so difficult for some students, I found many ways in which we could make education here in America better. While the first series of essays revolves around psychology, and namely with the study of motivation, the essays will become progressively more analytical. We will be looking at how technology can affect the efficiency of our teachers as well as how it can help us reduce current educational costs. We will then start analyzing education through the lens of economists and economical laws. By the end of the series, the essays will turn mathematical. The theories proposed in these essays are not only observational; they can actually be demonstrated using mathematical formulas. The purpose of these formulas is to show how we can start moving the field of education into the realm of science. There are, for example, ways to quantify the efficiency of teachers by viewing information transfer as an engineering system. Although I would be the first to admit the imperfection of these formulas, it is still a useful way to look at education. By applying well-developed concepts in economics, engineering, and psychology to the field of education, I believe this proposed interdisciplinary approach will forever change education itself. The following essays are the observations and conclusions of my years of research. |