There are administrators, and even some teachers, who believe that slow learners do not want to learn, they are non-learners. The facts argue otherwise.
Some kids just don’t want to learn.”
The Incurious Child
I was talking with an education bureaucrat a few years ago, discussing the problems in education and how we might approach them differently, when this stunner popped out of her mouth. She believes that our slow learners are actually non-learners.
A few days later I was talking to a young man, maybe 12, who was considered a slow learner in school. In the 5 minutes we spoke, he avalanched me with information, about TV shows, things he’d seen, kids at school, comments his parents had made. He was a very thirsty sponge, he was learning constantly.
He just wasn’t learning about Thomas Jefferson, mathematical exponents, or the parts of a flower.
Slow Learners vs Biology
I thought about that a lot. I still do. It occurred to me that, from a biological standpoint, there is a highly technical scientific phrase to describe slow learners, and any child who does not want to learn:
Wild animal food.
At first consideration, humans are ill-prepared for survival. We have almost no fur to keep us warm. Compared to other primates we are weaklings. Our skin is rather delicate, and we have long, fragile fingers, toes, hand and foot bones that are easily broken (I set them all the time in the ER). We lack sharp teeth, and we are not particularly fast runners.
Human Superiority
All of these weaknesses are unimportant, however, because we have developed tools and technologies which more than compensate. We build fires for warmth, and wear skins and woven cloth to keep us warm and to protect our skin. Our relative weaknesses and lack of speed are compensated for by knives, spears and arrows, which fly faster than the swift, and which make us deadlier than the great white, the grizzly, and even the lion’s pride.
This is because the signal strength that allows humanity to dominate the planet resides, not in our arms or legs or teeth or claws, but above our eyes. Humanity represents an entirely new category of animal that triumphs by learning, thinking, and innovating.
Embedded deeply in her DNA, every normal child has the same ability, the same survival instinct: learn, learn quickly, learn constantly.
Educational Abuse
Children learn all the time. It’s just that our schools are designed to discourage it. Our educational paradigms are not designed around the natural curiosity of children, but around the joyless authority of the textbook.
And so we frequently end up with education that is a form of intellectual abuse. There are no slow learners in kindergarten; they are all curious sponges.
By high school, their curiosity is all but gone. In fact, a ‘nerd’ is nothing but a kid whose curiosity has survived into the teenage years.
So what happened in 13 years of ‘education’, that we take normal, healthy, curious, thriving children, and turn them into slow learners?
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Picture courtesy CollegeDegrees360 via Flickr.com.
Sadly, many ADULTS do not want to learn. They believe that once they are out of school, they don’t need to learn anything else. That strategy may have worked 100 years ago, but it certainly does not work today.
One of my favorite moments in college occurred when I was a second semester freshman. The professor arrived just before the class bell rang, and everyone was chatting back and forth. Near the front, one guy said to his friend “This is my last semester. Once I get my degree, I won’t ever have to crack open another book.”. The professor looked up when he heard this, and waited for the bell.
Once the bell rang, he mentioned the comment he had heard (but he did not single out the individual). He stated that he’d heard this before, and on too many occasions. He then said:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the diploma you get from this university is not the end of your learning. It’s just the beginning. It’s your license to learn.”
I’ve repeated this to many people, especially those who have resisted learning something new that would be useful to them.
You are, of course, right. But my concern is that at some level you knew that already; and probably the reason you remembered it is that it resonated. According to Pew, only 3/4 of US adults have read a book in the past year (that seems high to me). Just over half have read nonfiction, and of those I wonder how many are nonpartisan books on current events, or non-military histories? (Military histories are fine, but they don’t typically give the readers deep questions to think about.)
But either way, it’s the parents’ fault that we aren’t curious as adults, the parents and the schools…
One of the main things you should learn in college is how to learn. Education is lifelong learning. Turning information into knowledge.
Children learn in different ways. Reading information compared to listening to information. Visualizing compared to acting out subjects. History recreated in the classroom compared to lectures and discussions. Individual compared to teams or groups of kids working on a subject. Books compared to computers. Games compared to….You get the point.
For the most part, it is not the schools fault that some kids do not learn as quickly as some others. In many cases federal and state mandates that require certain regulations and outcomes create an atmosphere where teachers can not judge their students and design study material and learning processes to fit their classroom needs. One only needs to look at the decline in educational results and overlay that decline on the increasing intrusion on local schools by state and federal standards to find how they relate.
And one may also overlay the declining number of households where one parent did not work to this same decline in student achievement. When parents make the choice to not spend the required amount of time with their children to insure they are reading a certain amount of time each night once they begin reading and do not continue to monitor their children’s progress, education also declines.
And finally, when education develops “new and improved” methods (such as the change in the way to calculate mathematical problems), parents do not have clue as to what the kids are learning, so they are unable to help even if they wanted.