I know you may have meant this to be a kind of encouragement, but I really have problems with the idea that learning is somehow more valuable the more it costs us in frustration. The mind is not a muscle; it does not have to be pushed to the point of exhaustion to grow.
What you say implies all learning ought to be difficult – or at least that you ought never seek a better way to learn, or apply yourself to how to learn. Instead, just learn what you’re told in the way you’re told.
As someone who has had learning problems no one really wanted to address in school, I frankly find the concept almost insulting - although, of course, you couldn’t have meant it so to me. But I can’t help wondering about people like me, or whether you’d consider the kind of difficulty I had to be less than legitimate.
Sure, there will always be something you need to learn that can’t be made any easier or any less necessary. It’s at those times when you really need to weigh the priorities, eg: how much more of this kind of learning is necessary, and is it a sign that I should choose another field of study?
But really, no, and I never attacked education or anyone else. If anything, most of the people replying to this thread decided to latch onto my one example rather than the overall focus of my post.
As for tree names, I still don’t care. Today I use an extremely tiny percentage of knowledge I learned in my younger years of education, mostly math or science stuff. I was simply trying to get a discussion started on why schools teach so much trivial knowledge that ends up producing students incapable of simple stuff like basic math and grammar, and that perhaps that time could be better spent focusing on those lacking areas.
Lots of people do play sports or go the gym a lot in “real life” though. And as soon as people say “We should get rid of PE…” then the jocks turn on them and they get accused of being “nerds” or “fatties” or any of the other things that jocks call people who don’t like sports.
Also, given that we increasingly live in an age where kids don’t get out much, I think there is some value to PE in the sense that it’s at least getting kids active for some time each day.
True in some ways. But I tell my kids at the beginning of the year that when we study, especially in math, sometimes the ideas will be so hard that they’ll get a headache from trying to think about them–**and that’s awesome[b/]. I tell them that when they get that headache, that means they’re facing a real challenge, and there’s absolutely nothing better than figuring one of those big challenges out.
I try to follow through, too, especially with my academically adroit kids. If they solve the regular classwork (figuring out how to make a rectangle from 15 squares), I challenge them to find a rule determining whether a given number of squares can make a rectangle with two rows, or I challenge them to find a number of squares from which I can only make one rectangle, or something like that. I want them to flounder in confusion, because it’s that disruption of schemas that leads to the refinement or replacement of schemas. And that’s the best kind of learning.
No. More pain is not more better. In learning as in weight lifting, you push against your current threshold, not just some arbitrarily difficult one.
I think you’re over-interpreting. Let me clarify: That something is difficult is not a good reason not to learn it. Entirely avoiding difficulty is in fact a bad idea, because difficulty will come. As I mentioned in the portion you quoted, there are some ways to learn without pain. But we must accept that this won’t be the case nearly as often as we like.
If you know any educators, you probably know how pre-occupied they are with reaching kids whose minds work in diverse ways. But it’s never always going to be easy, and finding a tact that is not a dead end, that will lead to a breakthrough if you put in the work, will require at some point just doing what you’re told. Even learning what isn’t going to work requires work, and if you ask a kid they’ll always report that it’s a dead-end right up until it isn’t. Worry it like a badly knotted shoelace and it’s always a surprise the moment you realize the knot is dissolving.
You tell me whether or not I’m talking about you. Did you give up when it got hard? Did you refuse to do the work? If you answer “no” to both those questions, then I’m not talking about you. Also, you might be from Krypton. The rest of us give up on things long before we really know what our strengths and weaknesses are. But we hope our children won’t.
The same principle applies. You benefit from putting in the work. Yet people are contemptuous of knowledge in a way that they are not of physical prowess.
The thing is, there’s a point at which something is so difficult that it’s not worth learning for that particular person. For example, most chemistry is complicated and boring to the average person and for them it’s not worth learning. That doesn’t make chemistry itself not worth “learning” (in the wider sense of having that knowledge promulgated) as a whole, though.
I can only posit that this is because, until surprisingly recently (1700s onwards), “Book Learning” was for Monks (and even then it was only Approved Books) and the Landed Gentry. The average person didn’t have a great deal of use for it, but being able to run quickly in armour, fight prolonged battes, plough fields, work forges, trim sails, and all that sort of thing was of paramount importance.
How do we decide where that point is for different people? Because many people when they push through the difficulty find that the sense of accomplishment is wonderful, and what they treated as something not worth their time is something that became a passion.
When you get back then, see if you can find me a copy of Shakespeare’s Robin Hood. While you’re still now, it’s worth noting that a lot of people think they’ll have the strength to hold onto a baby in case of an auto accident. They decided what was or wasn’t worth knowing quite prematurely, and they aren’t alone. But I’m not even talking about the practical utility of one or two bits of knowledge. I’m talking about the long-term consequences of being practiced in acquiring new knowledge.
Yes, now that you mention it… and thanks for the links. I foresee several hours of hilarity combined with weeping and gnashing of teeth in my near future. Thanks for the reminder
Very few people, I’d argue. Very few indeed. From my own experience, sure, you get the sense of accomplishment, but I’ve never gone from treating something as “not being worth my time” to having it become a passion. If I don’t think something is worth my time, there’s a good reason for it, IME.
What are you talking about? Babies have to be strapped into carseats in most places AFAIK. I’ve never heard of people trying to get buff just to hold onto infants in cars.
It’s entirely possible to be practiced in acquiring knowledge without being forced into it. Again, from personal experience: Maths (beyond arithmetic and related things like probability and area) has always been completely unfathomable to me. I look at an algebraic equation and it might as well be in Martian. And I hated being forced to learn it, and as soon as I was finished with high school maths I completely forgot it.
But I still like to learn things anyway- history in particular. Now, the history we were taught in School wasn’t bad, but it was New Zealand history, and New Zealand has one of the most boring histories of any English-speaking country. I wanted to learn about the Scramble for Africa and the British Raj and interesting stuff like that. But since I was never taught it in school, I decided to teach myself by acquiring books on the subject.
I’ve found my learnings on the British Empire to be extremely rewarding and enjoyable, and- amazingly- quite useful. Anyway, my point is that forcing people to learn things they hate “for their own good” is often counter-productive, but giving people a taste of things they might be interested in and helping them go from there can often be far more effective and rewarding, IMHO.
It would be too tragic to be amusing if they did, but what I’m talking about is plenty of people think they already are strong enough to hold onto an infant, and are resentful of laws built around the assumption that they can’t. Ask around, I don’t think it’s just my relatives.
To an extent. Then when your child reaches that limit, do you encourage quitting?
I’m not denying that people have different facilities, but I don’t believe the time you put into the study was a wash unless you just chose never to try anything hard again.
When they get to institutionalizing the idea that some subjects are not worth learning, History will be among the first subjects on the chopping block. And you already feel it wasn’t given the treatment it deserved.
In case the autocorrect people are listening, hey New Zealand has been a country for some time now. You can let it into the dictionary. Well, it was probably programmed by math-types who didn’t see why they should learn to spell in the first place.
I don’t fancy any teacher’s chances of accurately distinguishing between what a child doesn’t like and doesn’t have a talent for from what the child just doesn’t want to do the work of learning. Give them the choice, and the choice will be to game the system out of making them do work.
