Heroes Not Zombies

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is an intersting author. He’s promoted the concept of ‘flow’ experiences from his research into happiness. This article by him is about education.

It has turned out that mass education is more difficult to achieve than we had anticipated. To close the gap between the rather dismal reality and earlier expectations, researchers and practitioners have placed their faith in teaching methods modeled on computers and other rational means for conveying information – which in turn were modeled on industrial production techniques and on military human systems design. The implicit hope has been that if we discover more and more rational ways of selecting, organizing, and distributing knowledge, children will learn more effectively.

Yet it seems increasingly clear that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive in nature. It is not that students cannot learn, it is that they do not wish to. Computers do not suffer from motivational problems, whereas human beings do.

This strikes me as very true and it reminds me of Dickens’ character, the school-teacher Gradgrind, whose educational theory was that children were empty buckets waiting to be filled with facts!

if educators invested a fraction of the energy on stimulating the students’ enjoyment of learning that they now spend in trying to transmit information we could achieve much better results.

How many of your learning experiences have been fun ones? I’ll bet that the fun ones stuck and the boring ones disappeared.

He concludes –

There are two main ways that children’s motivation to learn can be enhanced. The first is by a realistic reassessment of the extrinsic rewards attendant to education. This would involve a much clearer communication of the advantages and disadvantages one might expect as a result of being able to read, write, and do sums. Of course, these consequences must be real, and not just a matter of educational propaganda. Hypocrisy is easy to detect, and nothing turns motivation off more effectively than the realization that one has been had.

The second way to enhance motivation is to make children aware of how much fun learning can be. This strategy is preferable on many counts. In the first place, it is something teachers can do something about. Second, it should be easier to implement-it does not require expensive technology, although it does require sensitivity and intelligence, which might be harder to come by than the fruits of technology. Third, it is a more efficient and permanent way to empower children with the tools of knowledge. And finally, this strategy is preferable because it adds immensely to the enjoyment learners will take in the use of their abilities, and hence it improves the quality of their lives.

I’m sure he’s right. Check out the full article. It’s short but worth reading and although his focus on helping children to learn, the exact same principles apply to grown ups!