In the Agora: Why We Learn

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April 25, 2005

Why We Learn

One of the signs that someone has turned off their critical faculties--or is hoping you've turned yours off--is when they cease relating concepts to first principles and relate them to slogans instead.

This Christian Science Monitor article offers a fine example. In the course of an interesting, if unfocused and overly given to multicultural mush, discussion of how schools should treat kids who are "quiet," the Monitor quotes one expert as saying that these kids shouldn't be punished or corrected for refusing to join in the verbal fray:

In fact, she says, the qualities that many quieter children express - thoughtfulness, studiousness, conscientiousness - are among those most needed for the complex problem-solving required by today's information-oriented economy.

What? Neither can I understand how "studiousness" is a competitive advantage in more than a handful of fields (frankly, friendliness and creativity appear to be leading the pack) nor can I understand why considerations of economic competitiveness have any role to play in this debate at all.

Kids are robust, and most of them will grow up fine, assuming that they aren't scarred for life by the age-old imbecilities of traditional sources or the brand-new insanities of pop psychiatry (or, occasionally, highbrow psychoanalysis, as with the generation of mothers told that they were to blame for their child's autism). But for experts and loudmouths generally, it still sounds good to point to the economy as a justification for the policy du jour they're advocating.

Some of the policies advocated in the piece, I should note, will embarrass kids--and, incidentally, trample over their native cultures--or leave them bleeding when the SAT, LSAT and GRE reading comprehension sections cut into them. One English teacher no longer asks her students to identify the main characters in the piece, for instance, but instead asks them to say whether they've ever been in a similar situation as the main character--sidestepping the occasionally interesting character of who the main characters are, while at the same time reducing literature to another piece of the modern therapy-confessional complex. The same teacher also brags about another innovation of hers:

"Kids are receptive if the teacher sets a social code," she says. "I have this little Asian girl who speaks so quietly I can hardly hear her. And every time she speaks up I go, 'Wow - Lindy's talking so we can hear her!' And we all clap, and the kids totally get it."

Had any of my high school teachers ever done anything like this, we would have had a lot more kids walking around in black trenchcoats. (Yes, this teacher is from California.)

For more on introversion, Jonathan Rauch has written the definitive article on bitempermental relations.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at April 25, 2005 06:28 PM

Comments

UGH. As someone who was softspoken in school himself, if a teacher ever said to me, "Wow - David's talking so we can hear him," and had the students applause, I never would have spoken again.

Posted by: davie d at April 26, 2005 11:59 AM | permalink

Teachers like that were the reason why I dressed in black, listened to The Smiths, read philosophy books in class, and generally avoided life in general.

And they NEVER got the hint...

Posted by: Harley Quinn at April 27, 2005 01:00 AM | permalink

April 25, 2005

Why We Learn

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