I think you may be just slightly missing the point of the grand narrative and how it connects to education – or, at least, how I understand it. Education is less about, or should be, convincing students to adopt as dogma one narrative or another; it is about teaching the ability to construct a narrative for themselves – to tell the story of who they are, where they’ve been, where they’re going, and why. The key is to teach the skill of developing and editing our own narratives.

I think in real world when someone begin to work and apply what he have learned, the life will be like an open-book exam. It is no more about memorization, it is basically about understanding. The main problem that faces teaching is when the resources are constrained like the case where there are a lot of students in the lecture. If you have more resources and could separate students to small groups, you will be able to teach them more effectively and practically with the main goal to be understanding the topics rather than memorizing them. This also applies to chemistry/anatomy where students could have written formulas/body map while they are making experiments/studying a body model.

You are right to suggest that the basics are valuable – and even indispensable – in creating a foundation for further learning. An example from physics and engineering is the need for a mastery of calculus and differential equations before seriously studying quantum mechanics. Likewise, advanced and intriguing literature is inaccessible to the student without the requisite vocabulary. However, I feel this view of the “basics” of education is limited in that it really only makes sense to apply it within a discipline. For instance, statistics wouldn’t be part of the basics for theater like it would be for engineering.

Students often struggle to endow their education with meaning, you’re right. But you seem to take it for granted that the problem is how their being educated rather than the content of their education. Could we be too concerned with teaching things well instead of teaching worthwhile lessons, ideas and, skills? I think part of the tendency for glossing over this question has to do with the fact that the american obsession with economics tends to conceptualize schools as tools to increase worker productivity and consequently, corporate profits. Your mention of students’ concern in repaying their loans and discussion of vocational schools are examples of the economic mentality influencing the view of education – after all, isn’t the purpose of education make minds, not careers. We might agree (or disagree) that ought to be the purpose.

If we can re-frame the purpose of education from creating economically productive and consumptive adults to serving and protecting democratic society by endowing the populous with the capacity for dispassionate reflection, moral reasoning, responsible action, and independent thought, it becomes much easier to identify some “basics” of education that would be worthwhile to teach before we move on to the mechanics of how to disseminate the information.

I’d agree with you that formal, traditional schooling is not the optimal form of education for everyone. And while schooling can seem endlessly relentless (especially to graduate students…) it is surely much less relentless than the education that will come from the experience of our lives. You mentioned the importance of instilling a desire to learn in students. Using my proposed purpose of an education, a “desire to learn” – I would add, the means to learn – would be an important indicator that someone is well-educated. Your comparison of pursuing knowledge as a end (the PhD) vs. pursuing knowledge as a means (your M.D. friend) was also interesting.

I think this example is better being applied to college education as the video mentioned. For children at school, while it is better to change the way we deliver information to them, it might be hard to experiment every subject or topic. I think, practice-based learning could be applied but in narrower view depending on the nature of the topic being taught. Anyways, the No Child Left Behind Act was finally replaced by a new legislation two months ago named Every Student Succeeds Act that’s aimed to overcome the drawbacks of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Atiyeh, I think I have it a bit easier than you in that I am only teaching 6 students and only 3 at a time. But I think one way you might encourage more active learning is to have the students suggest and debate potential test questions. Perhaps incorporate the more intriguing questions into one of your evaluations. What is it that you teach?

Interesting point! Well, I personally think that it is our job (as teachers) to teach them how to think about the big picture. In your case it seems like identifying a tree is like fitting a puzzle together since they already know all the specifications of various trees and need to put all these specifications together to identify a tree. Maybe if they get a tree wrong a good exercise would be to ask them to write these ID features down and try to again to find the IDs that match this tree. Of course they should know the tree types that exist with the combinations of these IDs. My point is that, it is not the students, but it’s how we are designing the problem that makes them loose the big picture and want to get away with just memorizing a few IDs etc.

I also thank you for the historical perspective on how human societies have valued formal learning. The kinds of “school systems” articulated throughout much of the world today are products of the nineteenth-century industrializing economy (which needed trained workers. N.B. training is not necessarily the same as education) and the expanding liberal order (which linked formal learning with upward social mobility and economic opportunity. We are struggling with that legacy today. We speak of the “knowledge economy” and have some pretty unrealistic and largely un-examined assumptions about the merits of providing more than a dozen years of schooling (sometimes close to 20!) to large sections of the population.

Maybe one easy thing we can do is ask the kinds of why and how questions we think matter, instead of asking for “an answer”?

Yes! Watching my own child (and her friends) grow up, I was struck by how all of this good stuff we’re talking about came naturally to them as toddlers and young children: their learning was experiential, social, driven by curiosity about the world around them and how things work, etc, etc…..And then school happened. Rubrics and standardized tests replaced play and self-directed learning. I think many kids would echo the phrase from this post: “Learning is amazing but school is stress inducing and miserable.” As teachers in higher education, there isn’t much we can do to make quick changes at the K-12 level, but I’m committed to doing what I can to get my students back to the joyful, amazing experience of learning they savored as young children.

I like what you did with asking them to apply what they learned with the data collection and requiring them to submit their results to a conference. I took a course last semester that required a paper as apart of the course requirement. I think this is great (specially for graduate students) since considering that the course which you are taking applies to your research, you can get the chance to present it to the instructor of the course, and get some expert feedback (which in my case was very beneficial) and also have the motivation to write this paper since it is part of the course requirement and also applies to your research.

However, I think that this is more beneficial for a graduate level course and at a undergraduate level students might have a hard time putting a paper together and this might work better in the context of a report.