I completed my schooling in India (ages ago) before moving abroad for university. In my experience, education in India at that time could have been generalised to ‘drill and practice’ and ‘learn by rote’. There were certain Nationalised exams that had to be passed, competition was immense (considering the population), and so we crammed like hell. Teachers were well aware of this and did their best to steer us towards exam success. 250 algebra problems, all of the same kind, but only with different constants? Pah, child’s play. Just a regular weekend.
And it worked. We passed our exams (mostly).
Throughout my schooling, concepts - as opposed to facts - were given the backseat. Concepts were brought up and explained primarily when bright kids asked questions. Facts, on the other hand, were the mainstay of education. Why is the area of a circle = pi.r^2? Don’t ask! It just is! And we managed.
Those of us who were of higher ability asked around and were told the Whys and Wherefores, or we figured them out ourselves, or we had blinding conceptual flashes of the obvious ten years after by-hearting the facts. The rest just puttered along and went on through life without knowing why teacher insisted A = pi.r^2.
Now, I am a teacher myself. I teach mainly low-ability kids and kids with developmental disorders, but in a normal school. Thing is, I live and teach in an age and in a system where concept is king. You have explain the whys before you get to the hows.
And frankly, I’m a little…underwhelmed.
Yes, concepts are good. But does everyone really need to be burdened with them? I have little ones who are absolutely lost when I tell them that See, when you multiply something by 32, you need to put a ones place zero in the second line because you’re actualy multiplying by 30, not by 3. No amount of concrete materials or diagrams seem to help. Explaining why you’re carrying over a 1 when you add 34 and 9 seems pointless. And God help me if I try to bring concrete materials into the borrowing while subtracting scenario. It doesn’t help with these babies. In fact, it seems to make life more difficult for a lot of them. So, I attempt to give them the concepts, but I also give them shortcuts I learned from my teachers, shortcuts I figured out for myself…just to make life in the real world easier for them.
Sometimes I truly feel that if you empower children with the facts, the ones who are going to do anything long-term with them will figure out the whys anyway. And the rest, who’re going to become functioning members of society that don’t deal with areas of circles on a regular basis, hey, atleast they’ll have the pi.r^2 thing buried in some corner of their mind if ever the need should arise.
See, education resources are limited. The time a child is schooled for is limited. Holding a kid back a grade on account of lack of sufficient knowledge and understanding is becoming increasingly rare. (Heck, I can’t remember the last time I heard of a child being kept back in the system I’m in. Not USA.)
Well, why not maximise the time and resources we have and push facts, not concepts? At least for mid- to low-achievers?