There is one question ”walking” round the world: How come so many learnt to understand so little?
Below a quote from my blogg article: Comment re. need of good education in #AGU14 NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory shows surprising CO2 emissions in Southern Hemisphere. Norah4you 2014/12/21
This summer a very intersting book was published in UK. The book might explain WHY so many never learnt basic facts nor was given the chance to understand basic first, deep understanding next in order to learn how to go on to understanding more than bits and pieces.
Daisy Christodoulou did a tough research in true Theories of Science-maner writing: Exploding Seven Myths about Education….
Guess what. In the 1960’s the wave of returning to Rousseau’s thoughts about Freedom and Learning started to have a major impact on teaching and learning in UK as well as US. (Sweden is an other example 1960-talet fortsätter skada den svenska skolan, SvD ledarsidan 20 december 2014
So what was the Seven Myths:
* Facts prevent understanding
* Teacher-led instruction is passive
* The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
* You can always just look it up
* We should teach transferable skills
* Projects and activities are the best way to learn
* Teaching knowledge is indoctrination.
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A typical example of the incompetens the myths has caused around the world is:
Hur löser man klimatproblemet, Ledarsidan SvD 27 december 2014 Lösa ett problem är en sak – när det FINNS ett problem. Det existerar inte något som helst klimatproblem! There are no ”Climate Threat” only Threats due to bad education methods!
97 articles refuting the 97 consensus on Global Warming Please remember There are no such thing as Consensus in Theories of Science. Consensus is a political term!
From När juldagsmorgon glimmar, Norah4you 2014/12/25
Hisingen förresten. Stor ö med lång historia. I förrgår hade var enda isbjörn i Arktis ensam större yta än vad 2 och en halv gånger Hisingens yta är….. så finns det CO2-troende som glömt bort att vi inte skall ha någon annan Gud vid Guds sida. Glömmande den heliga nattens värde och innehåll har de gått på myten om ett Arktis som skulle bli isfritt. Glömmande det de lärt sig i skolan om årstider och infallsvinkel för solen. Glömmande midvinternattens köld som nästan men inte riktigt är den natten som går mellan den allt mörkare tiden fram till Jesu födelsedag och den ljusare framtid i form av mer dagsljus som undan för undan rör sig norrut. Nu är det evigt mörker och kyla i Arktis. Precis som varje år växer isen respektive smälter med årstiderna. Men verkligheten är väl inte alltid det som faller alla på läppen
English text:
Hisingen a large island on the other side of bridges from main Gothenburg. An island with a long history. [area of 199 km2 (77 sq mi)] The day before yesterday was the only polar bears in the Arctic alone larger area than two and a half times Hisingens area … .. there’s CO2 believers who forgot that we shall have no other God beside God. Forgetting the holy night’s value and content they have gone in the myth of the Arctic would be ice free. Forgetting what they have learned in school about the seasons and the angle of incidence of the sun. Forgetting a midwinter chill that almost but not quite the night that goes between the increasingly dark time until Jesus’ birthday and the brighter future in the form of more daylight gradually moves north. Now is the eternal darkness and cold of the Arctic. Just like every year is growing ice and blend with the seasons. But the reality is well not always what comes all on the lip
Background to uneducated students. My opinion
How come this started in the 1960's? Well I myself found three major reasons:
In 1960's the first of the War Children and those who like me were born in 1940's grow up. A numerous number who started having children compared to days before WWII.
The well educated teacher my own generation had had, had to first be "dublicated" and from late 70's replaced so many more teachers had to be "found" and educated to make it possible to teach all the newborn children when growing up.
But the third factor I myself found is the same as what caused the revolts around the World in 1968 – too many people became lefties… (Need I explain?)
Thus when the children of 1960's and early 70's grow up believing not only in an unfairness when some had high grades and some low the answer seemed to come from Sociology Studies of Society. Life isn't always fair but some believed that it was a Human Right not only to have the basic school education that's written in Human Rights but to have it anyway and that no one ought to stop them from having that no matter if they didn't had proper understanding enough to go on to higher studies.
What we had, unfortunatly in my opinion is a less educated growing number of students at University’s from there on…. Quantity instead of Quality…
From a review:
But as Christodoulou is at pains to point out, what looks like a peculiarly contemporary antipathy to teaching knowledge, ‘this endless transmission of information’ as national curriculum architect Mick Waters disparagingly put it in 2012, actually has a rather long ancestry. ‘It is an intellectual legacy of the Romantic era’, she tells me, ‘with Rousseau its forefather. It’s not a recent phenomenon.’
Indeed, as Seven Myths makes clear, there has long been a tradition of thought in which teaching children facts, inculcating them, sometimes by rote, with particular areas of knowledge, has been viewed as detrimental to the child. As Rousseau put it in Emile, ‘What is the use of inscribing on [children’s] brains a list of symbols which mean nothing to them?’. Rousseau even went so far as to call such teaching methods ‘immoral’ on the grounds that fact-learning robs children of childhood. Again in the late nineteenth century, American philosopher John Dewey argued that teaching children maths or the dates of historical events, rather than letting them learn through their own experience, made them passive, the recipients of ‘a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without’. And then, of course, there is Gradgrind, the Charles Dickens grotesque in Hard Times who, by famously insisting that ‘Facts alone are wanted in life’, left his pupils emotionally stunted – hardly a ringing endorsement of a knowledge-based education by that most canonical of authors.Exploding Seven Myths about Education, Daisy Christodoulou , a one-time University Challenge winner, UK secondary-school teacher, and now a researcher at ARK school. Review written by Deputy Editor Tim Black on spiked-on-line.com
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Today 27th December: Skolledarna vill att staten tar större ansvar för skolan, Matz Nilsson Sveriges skolledarförbund, Bo Jansson Lärarnas Riksförbund, Mats Ericson Sveriges Universitetslärarförbund och Göran Arrius Saco, på DN Debatt 27 december 2014
In Sweden we do have a lot of problems with roots in the Seven Myths mentioned above…. not only in re. of the CO2-faith instead of Basic knowledge re. our World….
More re. the book: Minding the Knowledge Gap, the Importance of Content in Student Learning, Daisy Christodoulou AFT.org periodicals
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