#Twisted Education

Three characters from literature who are known all over the world: Hamlet, Alice, and Sherlock Holmes. The irony, of course, is that no one reads what Doyle regarded as his best work, but everybody reads about Holmes.

My ideas have been largely ignored, mostly on the grounds that readers believed they were included as an attempt of humor. Where I always wanted they take me as less humorous & more logical, maybe someday it will happen. I still have a big grin while sharing this, some people can never change one is definitely me.

You may judge for yourself. Here is one of the ideas. We could improve the quality of teaching, as it were, if math teachers were assigned to teach art, art teacher’s science, science teachers English. My reasoning is as follows: Most teachers, especially high school and college teachers, teach subjects they were good at in school. They found the subject both easy and pleasurable. As a result, they are not likely to understand how the subject appears to those who are not good at it, or don't care about it, or both. If, let us say, for a semester, each teacher were assigned a subject that he or she hated or always had trouble with, the teacher would be forced to see the situation as most students do, would see things more as a new learner than as an old teacher. Perhaps he or she would discover how boring the textbooks are, would learn how nerve-racking the fear of making mistakes is, might discover that a question that has unsuspectingly aroused his or her interest must be ignored because it is not covered by the syllabus, might even discover that there are students who know the subject better than he or she could ever hope to. Then what?

All in all, I believe the experience would be chastening and even eye-opening. When teachers returned to their specialties, it is possible they would bring with them refreshing ideas about how to communicate about their subject, and with an increased empathy for their students.

Here is another idea, not meant to be funny: We can improve the quality of teaching and learning overnight by getting rid of all textbooks. Most textbooks are badly written and, therefore, give the impression that the subject is boring. Most textbooks are also impersonally written. They have no "voice,'' reveal no human personality. Their relationship to the reader is not unlike the telephone message that says, "If you want further assistance, press two now.'' I have found the recipes on the backs of cereal boxes to be written with more style and conviction than most textbook descriptions of the causes of the Civil War. Of the language of grammar texts, I will not even speak.

But worse than this, textbooks are concerned with presenting the facts of the case as if there can be no disputing them, as if they are fixed and immutable. And still worse, there is usually no clue given as to who claimed these are the facts of the case, or how "it'' discovered these facts.

There is no sense of the frailty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possibilities of error. Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human struggle to understand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward the truth.

In one line I sum up my write-up “Genius are not born, but are made”.