On her book “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College
Cover Interview of September 03, 2017
In a nutshell
Students do a lot of non-learning in school. They cheat, cut
corners, cram, forget everything as fast as they can, and are often miserable in
the process. This is a waste, a crying shame. But they are often excellent at
learning outside school, because humans are terrific learners. I have concluded
that the more school resembles the ways we learn outside school the more
successful and engaging it will be.
I noticed that students were really good at learning what
they wanted to learn and were really not invested in a lot of what I asked them
to learn. So, I wanted to understand better. For about 15 years I’ve been using
anthropological approaches to see how people learn in general and how that
contrasts with how they learn in school. I have come to realize that the ways
people learn in school don’t match the ways we learn in life in general.
I argue that if we are going to keep everyone going to school
and if we really want them to learn, we need to change the motivation
structure, the assessments, the activities, the goals. It can’t be that we
lecture to passive students who regurgitate the information in a test and
promptly forget it. This is not learning. It is a simulacrum of learning. To be
learned, material has to be used.
This critique of school has roots in John Dewey, and
progressive education, in the sense that we should be preparing students to
engage in learning for life, but also in ideas of Paolo Freire and his notion
of education for empowerment. The critique of industrial education, training
docile workers for factory jobs, is old. But schools for the most part haven’t
changed. And the lecture system from medieval times when book ownership was
limited so the lecturer spoke the contents of the book he—it was always a he—possessed
is still the paradigmatic model of school. We obviously don’t need that any
more.
What do we need? There are lots of experiments in every
corner of the education world, from flipped classrooms to problem-based
learning to badges to internships to clickers to theses. Sometimes faculty are afraid to use them,
though, because they’ll get dinged on evaluations.
Good students are doing what they’ve been trained to do.
From early childhood, they have been trained to focus on grades, on pleasing
teachers, on following instructions, on getting points in what I call the game
of school. Achievement is the measure.
But it has all kinds of negative side effects and this must
be attended to. Attention must be finally paid, to quote that great philosopher
queen, Linda Loman, Willy’s widow in Death of a Salesman, to “such a
person”: every single human being who comes our way.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Students do a lot of non-learning in school. They cheat, cut corners, cram, forget everything as fast as they can, and are often miserable in the process. This is a waste, a crying shame. But they are often excellent at learning outside school, because humans are terrific learners. I have concluded that the more school resembles the ways we learn outside school the more successful and engaging it will be.
I noticed that students were really good at learning what they wanted to learn and were really not invested in a lot of what I asked them to learn. So, I wanted to understand better. For about 15 years I’ve been using anthropological approaches to see how people learn in general and how that contrasts with how they learn in school. I have come to realize that the ways people learn in school don’t match the ways we learn in life in general.
I argue that if we are going to keep everyone going to school and if we really want them to learn, we need to change the motivation structure, the assessments, the activities, the goals. It can’t be that we lecture to passive students who regurgitate the information in a test and promptly forget it. This is not learning. It is a simulacrum of learning. To be learned, material has to be used.
This critique of school has roots in John Dewey, and progressive education, in the sense that we should be preparing students to engage in learning for life, but also in ideas of Paolo Freire and his notion of education for empowerment. The critique of industrial education, training docile workers for factory jobs, is old. But schools for the most part haven’t changed. And the lecture system from medieval times when book ownership was limited so the lecturer spoke the contents of the book he—it was always a he—possessed is still the paradigmatic model of school. We obviously don’t need that any more.
What do we need? There are lots of experiments in every corner of the education world, from flipped classrooms to problem-based learning to badges to internships to clickers to theses. Sometimes faculty are afraid to use them, though, because they’ll get dinged on evaluations.
Good students are doing what they’ve been trained to do. From early childhood, they have been trained to focus on grades, on pleasing teachers, on following instructions, on getting points in what I call the game of school. Achievement is the measure.
But it has all kinds of negative side effects and this must be attended to. Attention must be finally paid, to quote that great philosopher queen, Linda Loman, Willy’s widow in Death of a Salesman, to “such a person”: every single human being who comes our way.