Teaching Material vs, Subject

I wasn't sure I believed it when I first heard that school was teaching a bunch of useless lies. I wasn't sure I didn't believe it. Now, the more I learn, the more I realize that it's not all useless, but most of it is lies. Think back to when you were in school, specifically grade school. I don't have any way of knowing what it was like for anyone else but me, not really; but, there was one thing that strikes me as important now. Everything was taught in absolutes. The only questions allowed were for clarifying the present material, not for understanding the subject. This is an important distinction.

For the duration of this piece, "subject" will refer to the phenomena and perceived problems of a particular area of interest as described and separated by our culture and history. Examples include but aren't limited to "physics", "chemistry", "literature", and "math". Material will refer to the specific concepts and methods taught in schools to try and explain parts of subjects. These must be made separate because the goal of science is to determine one specific set of rules to describe a subject whereas material is simply one of a set of possible explanations for a subject. Basically, the material describes the subject but can still change as a science progresses.

Early in school, subjects are presented to us in terms of the material, using only one book at a time to present the material. Often these books will gloss over the struggles and disparaging viewpoints leading up to a particular discovery or modification of a theory. names are associated with discoveries but the fact that before the discovery, people were working along different lines is completely missed. Think of the discovery of oxygen. That wasn't just the discovery of a particular discreet element, that was the discovery of elements as we think of them today. The discovery of oxygen changed the face of chemistry permanently. We don't waste any time on phlogiston theory in school. Strangely, in similar fashion, Newton's laws were proved to have defects... but because of a deficit in mathematical ability at the time children are able to learn physics, Newtons Laws are still taught as pure fact. (To be honest, the only reason I have any idea about Newton is that my Abnormal Psychology Professor was ranting about it.) Maybe we should look at an even more specific example that many people can relate to. When children are taught how to do long division, they start out with the simple, contrived numbers that always work. Since there aren't really very many of these, they are then taught "remainders". This form sticks around for a while until the children learn to do long division with decimals. After that, remainders simply disappear from the curriculum, never to be seen again. Remainders are not useful outside of a lower grade-school classroom. (In fact, though I haven't looked it up, the concept of "remainders" may be a big part of what makes the "fractions" unit so difficult to learn.) (Edit - I recently discovered a use for remainders. They're important when performing a "mod" problem, such as what day of the week will it be x number of days from now. Honestly though, what grade school kid is going to come across that often enough to matter?)

If I may be so colloquial as to refer to each step of the education process as chapters in a book, each chapter is taught as if it was the end of the book, with very little hint that there might be more. Every time a child learns how to solve a problem without the addendum that the problem isn't really solved, a lie is told. The child may form a mental block on a particular subject because the material known is presented as the end of it. Also, a child is taught to respect the teacher as the authority on the matter without mention that there are higher authorities and even different viewpoints. It's my opinion that this is an important factor in the overall success of an education program. The less a child is encouraged to question, the less the child will question, the fewer answers will be received, the less the child will understand. Is not the purpose of education to promote understanding? Perhaps specific teaching methods are less important than a general teaching philosophy. Instead of teaching to earn a paycheck, perhaps teaching should be done for students to learn. I'm very glad that there are movements in the works to change the philosophy of teaching in ways that are more beneficial to the student.

This is not a new problem, folks. Since I started writing this blog, I've been linked to two different web comics that describe how a good teacher should handle a tough question and how a bad teacher would. I would be interested in knowing how many people got which response given by the teachers in this comic: xkcd. With any luck, I'll be able to do some serious research on some of the hypotheses stated in here. The children really deserve better than we've given them. Our nation is weakened by a weak education program and it's no wonder that the Asian population is taking over our companies. I don't think I've covered everything in this short composition, but the ideas are big and my time is small so I have to settle for presenting it in bits and pieces.