Learning is cool, school is shit
When you see little kids going to kindergarten it is obvious that learning stuff is cool. Then they get older and go to school and something goes wrong.
Does learning stuff stop being fun? No, but having stuff shoved down your throat makes it hard to swallow.
I used to teach math. A few students each year would ask ‘why do I need to know this?’ I never found a good answer. I could have said ‘because maths trains your brain to solve complicated problems and teaches you perseverance.’ But they would have stopped listening. The other answer is ‘because if you want to go to university and study anything remotely that’s likely to get you a job, you need it’. So, I could have scared them. But it’s probably now only a bit true, because going to university (in anglo countries anyway) will bankrupt you and there are no jobs anyway that won’t wind up sucking the life out of them. Fact is they were just thinking about how long they’d have to wait until they got laid. (Or was that just me at their age — I don’t think so).
And have I ever in real life needed to use algebra? If I was teaching them about how much credit card debt costs they might have listened, but they were too young to have a credit card. Compound interest — that’s worth knowing. But not when you’re 14.
The truthful answer would have been ‘I don’t know’ or ‘you don’t’ or because ‘it’s my job’ or because ‘the school will get in trouble if you don’t’.
My experience was if the teacher was enthusiastic then they make it interesting and I’d try my best. If the teacher was bored, I was bored and I didn’t care. Why would that have changed? Anything is potentially interesting if you believe it is. But most teachers are bored so they’re useless. It stands to reason. They go through school. They jump through the hoops. They go to university. They become teachers and they inflict the same horrible pain that was inflicted on them, on everybody else. Then after about 8 years they have a crisis and then they limp on for another quarter century to retirement age. Shit cycle.
Suggestion — nobody should be allowed to be a teacher until they are least 25 and have done something else with their life first. Because if they haven’t done anything with their life, what business do they have teaching kids? Otherwise it’s a big sausage machine churning out crap that everybody knows is crap. Maybe the best route for little Micky is to be a plumber. Fine. The world needs plumbers. It’s not about you, teacher, it’s not about you, Mrs Principalerin, it’s about the kid. Yeah, some of them will really want to be doctors or lawyers — but face it — not that many. And we don’t need that many.
How much of the advice we give our kids is based on our own fear of what’s going to happen to them. Whether they’re going to be living in the basement (I haven’t got a basement, but you know what I mean, the metaphorical basement).
Honestly, sometimes I want to work driving a street cleaning machine. I can see the result right away, and some of those machines are cool.
I love learning and I love teaching. I don’t like schools and I’m not that fond of teachers. It’s a paradox. I needed to learn German. I went to language school. What a con. Manipulate learners to pass meaningless exams. I thought — life is too short for this.
I taught myself and in the meantime made sure I could teach other people. Because if I can’t explain it, I don’t really know it.
We don’t need to be taught anything except how to learn. But if in the meantime our love of learning is murdered, knowing how to do it is not going to breathe life into the corpse.
Learning how to learn is about asking the right questions and identifying patterns so you can use the answers. Answers are trivial. Questions are priceless.
Peter Merrick PhD I run languagegym.net in Berlin that helps people speak German though deep grammar pattern recognition, reading novels, writing personal narrative and storytelling.
