From Learners to Researchers

The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery. – Seymour Papert

I graduated from Virginia Tech with a BA in English in 1996. With that degree, I was able to qualify for a car loan, but that’s all the use I’ve ever gotten out of it. Instead of going to work for a newspaper or public school like my peers, I went into web design, and then computer programming, all self-taught. I am now a senior software engineer, developing an application framework that my peers who have official degrees in Computer Science will be using for rapid application development.

One of my friends majoring in Computer Science dropped out of Virginia Tech after he was told the classes he had taken his freshman year were no longer valid. He was working while attending classes, and had spent too many years working on his degree as a result, what he had learned six years earlier was no longer current and had to be relearned. After dropping out, he went ahead and claimed a BS degree in Computer Science on his resume anyway, promptly got a job making six figures, and continues to be highly successful a decade later.

So much of University life is the art of gaming the system that a formal degree is a dubious credential anyway. Track the history of how Universities administer tests, and you will discover an arms race between students trying to cheat on exams and research papers using online services, and administrators trying to prevent them from doing so with increasingly sophisticated software. Clearly I remember my regular Monday-morning visits to the University bookstore to purchase the Cliff Notes editions of books I had failed to read on my own time; I was part of that arms race.

I recently had several professors complain to me about the new generation of students who were publicly educated under the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL), the state’s strategy for complying with the very important, however poorly-implemented No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). These students, who have spent their educational careers being taught that the purpose of all learning is to pass a standardized test, review their professors based on how well the lectures prepared them for the tests, not for how the course content prepared them for life when the course was over.

John Seely Brown, director emeritus of Xerox PARC and a visiting scholar at USC, best articulates why this strategy poorly serves our young scholars:

The whole notion of passively sitting and receiving information has almost nothing to do with how you internalize information into something that makes sense to you. Learning starts as you leave the classroom, when you start discussing with people around you what was just said. It is in conversation that you start to internalize what some piece of information meant to you.

I’m not bashing the SOL’s or NCLB. Enforcing standards and gathering metrics are a vast improvement over not standardizing education, but these strategies fail to empower students with the skills and willpower for self-directed learning. Students have been taught that the purpose of education is to memorize facts out of context long enough to earn high marks on a multiple choice test, and then promptly forget 99 percent of what they just learned to make room for the next test. We aren’t training students to win on the show Jeapordy, so why do Universities and Public schools insist on pumping their heads full of useless trivia?

Don Tapscott’s essay The Impending Demise of the University confronts this antiquated teaching strategy and argues for why the digital generation could subvert traditional academia’s grip on higher-learning:

Growing up digital has changed the way their minds work in a manner that will help them handle the challenges of the digital age. They’re used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What’s more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what’s going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

If students have the entire world of human knowledge within a few clicks of their web browsers, then how do Universities account for their ever-increasing enrollment statistics? What does the University offer students with lecturing professors that cannot be obtained more quickly and with greater interactivity online?

Credentialism. You can be a lifelong learner in a field of expertise, demonstrate your knowledge through you career, and earn the admiration of your immediate peers, but without the University seal of approval, the rest of the world won’t recognize your accomplishments. The best you can hope for is that an honorary degree be bestowed upon you.

And yet, the lifelong, self-motivated learner is exactly the ideal society aspires to produce through education. Nobody wants rote-memorization robots to come out of the school system, we want people enthralled with education, who will be inspired to spend the rest of their lives immersed in new subjects and fields of knowledge.

We can see this natural inquisitiveness in children:

[John Seely Brown] noticed that when a child first learns how to speak, she or he is totally immersed in a social context and highly motivated to engage in learning this new, amazingly complex system of language. It got him to thinking that “once you start going to school, in some ways you start to learn much slower because you are being taught, rather than what happens if you’re learning in order to do things that you yourself care about… Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

Total immersion in the subject matter is key. It’s like that famous essay, If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics…, or art, or music, we would force kids to learn sentence structure, note theory, and color theory before ever allowing them to write, sing, or finger-paint. Instead, we throw kids into these subjects, let them go freeform, and only later begin to instill form and structure to refine them. With computers providing an environment of total immersion, there’s no reason children can’t play with math and science the same way they experiment in art and literature.

Extending this principle to institutions of higher learning, professors would serve, less as an authority bestowing knowledge on the students, but more as an expert, guiding the students to find the answers themselves. This is exactly how I approach my online courses, never bothering with the professor’s lecture MP3s and Power Point presentations, rather I use the syllabus as a guide for what I need to learn and figure it out myself through the text. From there, I exercise this knowledge in class discussions, where the interactions with and perspective of my peers prompt me to do additional research. On average, I write five to ten pages worth of researched content for class each week, and I’ve internalized far more subject matter this way than I ever did in a real-life college lecture.

In 1988, Isaac Asimov saw the computer as the means to set learning free of the constraints schools imposed, and produce lifelong learners who were empowered to research anything they desired, and, through such freedom, they would come to love learning:

Once we have outlets, computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries, where anyone can ask any question and be given answers, be given reference material… no matter how silly it might seem to someone else–that’s what you’re interested in, and you ask, and you can find out, and you can follow it up, and you can do it in your own home, at your own speed, in your own direction, and your own time, then everyone will enjoy learning

Nowadays what people call learning is forced on you, and everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed in class, and everyone is different. For some it goes too fast, for some too slow, for some in the wrong direction, but give them a chance, in addition to school–I don’t say we abolish school–but in addition to school, to follow up their own bent from the start.

Carl Sagan once said, “When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it.” Learning facts isn’t so important now as learning how to find the facts ourselves. Stick that in your paradigm and shift it.