What the weekend has taught me that school cannot...

Something peculiar happens nearly every weekend for me--something that never happens at school. Starting normally on Saturday night or Sunday morning, I find a deep curiosity for something, it escalates, and I pursue it until Monday morning. This weekend it was blind euphoria, last weekend it was cognitive dissonance. There's always something interesting to learn. The frustrating and increasingly evident fact is that these kinds of curiosities and interests are never provoked in a school setting. There's something about the way we've been taught for so long that discourages our own curiosity, and we don't even realize it. We get "educated" away from our curiosity in a school system that places right answers above questions and general intelligence above specific intelligence.

Today I learned how blue screens work, how ribbon microphones are manufactured, how ink is made, what clairvoyance has to do with pre-cognition and retro-cognition, what hot, cold, and warm reading is, that listening to an audio book at twice the normal speed is twice as productive, a myriad of other things, and I got to talk to a very talented cellist about compositional efforts and music education. All of these things I attribute to productive education, (I know at least, that the conversation I had with the cellist will greatly influence how I deal with my future) but I did them all while I should have been reading the Odyssey and taking notes from my government book. I do suck at time management and I do realize, teachers, that I could have done my homework and THEN done these things, but the reason I do this is because if I stifle my curiosity while it's at its highest point, I'll lose sense of how to achieve it and I'll lose my love of learning. I've learned that the best way to be curious is to never place anything above the need for curiosity. The reason I think students do not have high curiosity in school is because they are trained to ignore it. They're trained to get the "right answer" instead of questioning why the "wrong answer" is wrong.

A demonstrative scenario:

A teacher instructs a student to solve for the final velocity of a free falling object on a test. The student arrives at the correct answer, yet the teacher marks it wrong because he did not use the calculus based method he taught in class the day before.

The "educated student" -
Without questioning the context under which he's solving for the velocity, he tries to solve the problem logically, implementing physics, which makes the most sense to him, in order to solve the problem. The student asks why he got points deducted and is told that he must use the "correct method." He quietly submits with, "Okay" and goes to his desk.

The curious student -
Asks why he is solving for the final velocity. He receives the overly used excuse of "Because you need to know how." He seeks out a situation in which final velocity would need to be determined and ponders the benefits of solving for it. He then solves the problem using physics, which makes the most sense to him to solve the problem. He asks why he got points deducted and receives the same response as the 1st student. Instead of quietly submitting, though, he asks why the calculus based method is more efficient than the physics based method. He then argues for his case but considers the teacher's reasoning of why the calculus method is more efficient. He learns the calculus based method and applies it to the next problem he solves. He then commits to memory the different situations in which each method should be implemented and the reasoning behind both and considers its application in any other discipline that might concern him.

The first problem with both situations is that the teacher marked the problem wrong based on the rationale that the method he teaches is what the students must follow.

The second problem is that the teacher gave no context for the problem, which leaves the students with no real live application for the problem. In order to learn something, students need a reason to learn it. They need to want to learn it.

The third problem is that we have in conventional education systems way too many students like the 1st student. They have no impetus to determine why their teacher's method is the best and they don't attach what they learn in school to their lives outside of school.

The fourth problem is that students are rewarded for following the 1st student's approach. Doing exactly what the teacher tells you what to do will get you an 'A', but this approach is like reading a step by step instruction manual to playing monopoly that tells you every property to buy, which properties to build on, when to build, which token to use, with whom to trade, and what to trade. There's no fun in that. If you played that way, you would be bored and never learn why what you did produced the results you got. The potential for adaptability is lost. You would lose interest very quickly and there would be no innovation in playing.

All these problems are inhibitors of curiosity. I believe that real learning cannot happen without curiosity.

Students are losing interest. They're losing curiosity because they're being educated out of it.

If students are educated in order to be able to govern and direct the future, how can they do so without innovation? Innovation is derived from curiosity. You cannot have innovation without it. We don't know what the future will hold, but the type of education that we have is based on the presumption that we do.

Update: As a result of saying up late to write this, I probably won't get up in time to read the spark notes of the Odyssey for the quiz in 8 hours. Too bad I missed out on Homer's story of the great Odysseus for an explanation of why I could care less.