School Learning and Real Learning

A fresh graduate with a Master's Degree, I took an entry-level job in technical support at a software company.  I spent a little over a year in this position, answering questions about over 80 products, most of which I had only a passing familiarity with.  I always preferred getting customers "off the phone" as quickly as I could so that I could research and provide help through e-mail.

I found the position stressful and was happy to transfer into a non customer-facing position, but I gained more technical expertise in that year than any other year of my career, and probably more than my six years of collegiate education put together.

What sticks out to me now is the manner in which this learning took place.  On our first day, we were not put in a training class or lectured to, but given a project to develop.  We were given two days to complete it, and coding it required that we would learn a wide swath of our flagship program.  After a couple of token orientation classes, we were put on the phones within a few weeks.

Each support case presented an excellent opportunity for learning.  A real person had a real need that had to be met in a time-sensitive manner.  In turn, I had various resources to help the customers: a database of "solutions", other support engineers, and most importantly, the products themselves.  Occasionally, I would even have to disturb a grumpy developer.  Some cases were trivial or easily answered, but most represented a little project and challenge.  Given the motivation to learn an area in order to satisfy a customer, the right resources, and clear, attainable goals, I served many cases and learned more about 80 products than I could have imagined possible.

But even when I transferred to a new position, I was still stuck in a school frame of mind with respect to how to learn.  I had just experienced a year of incredible learning, and I should have thought more about why that was, and how it was different than school.  I wanted to learn about our internal software systems that I had not previously used, and how did I go about this?

By reading text.  I printed out the 200-page user's manual and committed myself to the mental drudgery of reading it cover to cover.  This was, after all, how I had been taught for more than ten years prior to my job: plod through mind-numbingly boring textbooks and hope to retain enough "material" for later use (in the case of schools, for tests).  There is no real justification for learning the material and no reason to think any part of it is more important or relevant than other parts.  There is no goal to strive for, and no hope for real satisfaction (perhaps other than having reached the end of the book).  I continued in the face of these obstacles because I believed learning has to be painful, and that I must be doing something useful through this work.

I am thankful that this attitude did not last the full 200 pages.  Given that there would be no real "test" like in school for whether I retained any of the material, I eventually gave up on the endeavor, frustrated but wiser.

There is certainly a place for reference and textbooks, but it is not as the primary vehicle for learning.  It is a failure in the school system that led me to think otherwise.  Textbooks, exercises, lectures, homework, and tests: whoever thinks this is the best model for real learning must think of the brain as a passive slate to be filled with endless facts at the discretion of teachers.  But when there is no real motivation or interest, and no hope for satisfaction on the part of the learner, the brain functions more like a sieve.

School's Failure to Motivate Students

Several months ago I posted a failure example of the standard education system.  I hope to pick this area back up and continue the series.  In this post, I will provide a second example of how the standard education system fails. 

"Why do I have to learn this?"

The question can be asked in any classroom.  Students are given material to master but rarely any good reason why they should bother.  Looking back at my own schooling career, I can find here and there a few lonely examples where the subject material was interesting and I enjoyed learning it for what it was.  Mostly, here are the reasons I found to try hard at school:

* To seek the approval of authority figures (teachers and/or parents)
* To prove one's superiority over one's peers
* To have the tools to succeed at the next tasks given

I pity the children who are seen as lazy and unmotivated.  Government school teachers tend to believe they should not be responsible for motivating the students and tend to blame the students (or their parents).  Rarely do they question the schooling system itself or the manner of their own teaching.

When asked "Why should I learn this?", no teacher says "So you can feel better about yourself by out-competing other students" or "So you can have my approval".  These are obviously unhealthy motivators.  The only fall back is "You will need this when you graduate."

Yet that answer only begs the question.  Of what use will it be when one graduates?

The education failure is that, for most students, there is no intrinsic motivation for learning.  I remember students occasionally asking why they need to learn a subject throughout all levels of school.  Always the answer was that it would be needed at the next level.  In grammar school, we needed to learn it to succeed in junior high school.  In junior high, so we could succeed in high school.  In high school, so we could succeed in college.

Having graduated college, I see that most of what I was taught along the way has either been long forgotten or is of completely no use to me (or actually detrimental to me).  The only validity to the "you'll need it at the next level" reason is with respect to having the external recognition of achievement on one's resume. 

The best subject that exemplifies this education failure is mathematics.  Math is presented as a cumulative series of recipes to be "learned" by the student.  There is no start or finish to the material, but it continues on and on.  The math is never applied to any actual problem of interest, and no justification is given for learning it.  Even as the top math student throughout most of my schooling, I really understood very little of the math.  It was always primarily recipes to memorize and apply.  (Though to be fair there were occasions where some understanding would accidently slip in and provide a fleeting sense of satisfaction).  Sadly, this paradigm for studying math was continued even into college. 

It was actually through my engineering classes that I most came to appreciate and enjoy math, where there was clear application and scope.  These classes provided me with an intuitive understanding for not only college-level concepts as the Fourier Transform but also high-school level concepts such as the matrix.  Of course, in high school the matrix is just some strange thing on paper for which you must memorize operations for a test.  These operations were quickly forgotten after the test, and in the process no actual understanding of the matrix was gained. 

If students were taught language the way they are taught mathematics, they'd march along for twelve years of school memorizing progressively larger words and sentences, yet never reading a single book.

Of course, purely intrinsic motivation will not work for every subject for every student.  But always we should seek to maximize this type of motivation, so that the student actually obtains some satisfaction in the process of his or her education.  When this is the case, actual understanding of the material will be gained and not just fleeting memorization for a test.  When this is not the case, the source of the problem is not the student but the education system; what is being given to learn and how it is being taught.
 

Paradigmatic Example (#1) of Education Fail

I am going to post a series of personal examples that I believe serve as particularly good exemplifications of failure modes of the standard education system. After I have posted these, I will provide more general analysis and discussion, culminating in what I hope will be suggestions of how these can be avoided.

Here is my first example:

I was taking a college graduate-level course in computation and automata theory. This was one of my favorite courses because it managed to combine computer science, mathematics, linguistics, and even some philosophy in a coherent, interesting manner. The general idea of the course was to define a computational engine (e.g. a finite-state machine) and investigate what sort of problems the engine could solve, and with what efficiency. Even the most powerful machine with theoretically infinite memory (a Turing machine) turns out to have well-defined limits of what types of problems it can be guaranteed to solve.

Now, this class required us to write proofs and in so doing exercise some degree of creativity. The problems were not mere restatements of earlier theorems or problems, and their solution usually required thinking really, really hard and then having an “a-ha!” moment. I found these to be stimulating, often fun, and ultimately satisfying.

During a class, one student raised her hand and asked the professor something like “How are we supposed to know how to solve these problems?” After a little discussion of what she meant, it was obvious that she was not interested in the details of any particular problem; what she was after was a general algorithm for solving all of the problems we were given! I cannot think of a greater insult to the professor and his beloved subject. To him, each problem was intrinsically valuable. Each problem had its own reason for being, its own lesson waiting to be unlocked by just the right stroke of inspiration on the student’s behalf. But to her, each problem was merely an exercise: at best, an exemplification of some general principle that should have been already given, and at worst, something that just needed to be completed to get course credit.

I cannot overly blame her though. This was, after all, presumably what everyone in the room was used to in math and science classes: start off with being given a set of general rules, then apply them to specific examples in a mechanistic fashion. The solution is produced in the most efficient manner, and with the least amount of thinking. Just figure out where to “plug in” the numbers and turn the crank. Education as the execution of algorithms.

The professor chided her and said “This isn’t high school.” Justice was served.

But that made me think: why does even high school have to be high school?