Schooling

In a book published more than ten years ago, David Perkins ¹ makes the claim that,

As far as I can see, this statement is true. In addition, he specifies some very basic goals for education:

1. Retention of knowledge
2. Understanding of knowledge
3. Active use of knowledge

These goals seem perfectly reasonable to me.

Perkins goes on to suggest a minimal notion of what a teacher and school should provide:

• Clear information
  Descriptions and examples of the goals, knowledge needed, and the performances expected.

  For example, when I learned to fly, I knew I had to learn to pilot the airplane slowly, at 1.2 times the speed at which the airflow over the wings starts to burble and the airplane loses lift, and while doing this to maintain altitude within 100 feet (30 meters) and turn to a specified heading within plus or minus 10 degrees.

• Thoughtful practice
  Opportunity for learners to engage actively and reflectively whatever is to be learned — adding numbers, solving word problems, writing essays.

  My flight instructor and I practiced for hours. I made a habit of saying out loud what I was doing, so he could understand my reflections.

• Informative feedback
  Clear, thorough counsel to learners about their performance, helping them to proceed more effectively.

  My flight instructor always told me both what I did right and what I did wrong. He tried to provide a `sandwich', telling first what I did right, then what I did wrong, then what I did right. (Sometimes he had a hard time finding `bread' to surround the `meat'.)

• Strong intrinsic or extrinsic motivation
  Activities that are amply rewarded, either because they are very interesting and engaging in themselves or because they feed into other achievements that concern the learner.

  I enjoyed flying more than I expected, even though much of the time I was terrified.

When you teach this way, students learn.

These conditions also give you a chance to evaluate whether a teacher or school is doing a good job.

In the early 1990s, Perkins found two kinds of problem:

• The first has to do with the kinds of knowledge that do not help you or anyone else; indeed, which may hurt you:
  • Missing knowledge: knowledge that students should know that is not remembered, like whether Jim Crow laws helped blacks. Present knowledge of this sort helps when you decide for whom to vote.
  • Inert knowledge: knowledge that simply does not do anything for the student, even when present, like failing to understand when to use a loop in a computer programming class although loops have already been studied. Active knowledge of this sort helps you become a programmer.
  • Naive knowledge: false beliefs that students still hold even after study, like the idea that winter is colder because the earth is farther from the sun. Truth helps you situate yourself.
  • Ritual knowledge: the learning of facts without knowing the underlying reasons of why, like not knowing when to convert a practical question, such as how long a car trip is going to take, into an arithmetic problem. Knowing why helps you decide when.

• The second problem is poor thinking. Perkins suggests two deep causes: one is the `trivial pursuit' theory and the `ability-counts-most' theory.
  • When students think in terms of gathering as many facts as possible, they tend not to think about what they have learned.
  • When students figure that ability is most important, they do not strive very hard. So they do not learn.

Indeed, Perkins says that although some students will take longer to learn certain things, they will learn them if given the time and help they need.

Moreover, Perkins says that

This is because, as he says,

1. We have plenty of sophisticated instructional methods but do not use them, or not very well.

2. Most instruction does not even meet minimal criteria for sound methods, never mind sophisticated ones. Our first urgency is putting into practice reasonably sound method.

3. Given reasonably sound method, the most powerful choice we can make concerns not method but curriculum — not how we teach but what we choose to try to teach.

All these concepts come from the beginning of Perkins' book; they prefigure the concepts of misleading metaphors that I have discussed, and more generally, explain why societies sometimes make the disastrous decisions that Jared Diamond considers. The failures mean that given the constraints under which we live, people will make bad choices.

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