Friday is swimming training evening for Smallsteps, and most weeks I either get to spend some time with my own thoughts while waiting, or spend it talking to one of the parents. Tonight, it was a talk with a parent I have spoken with a few times, who is super-excited to hopefully soon get ADHD diagnoses for her two children (8 and 5), so she can put them on medication.
Lucky kids.
While I was talking with the parent, they had their youngest on a tablet watching some "educational" animation program, saying that it is good that they are quiet and they are learning something.
I dunno....
I am pretty judgemental.
I am yet to see much value in most of these programs kids consume. Yes, there is information given that they might be able to regurgitate, but does that qualify as educational? As far as I can tell, being able to recite phrases from a TV show doesn't really provide any practical value, except for maybe at a pub quiz.
I often say that it is not what you know, but how you use it that matters, but that is only part of the equation.
It is not what you know, but how you learn it.
The process of learning is incredibly important, and I wish that more of school was dedicated to how to learn rather than what to learn. If people really believed that children should have their natural talents and interests supported, then they should be teaching them how to learn, not expecting they will be taught what they want to learn.
See the difference?
Learning methods can be topic agnostic, so once a person has the skills on how to learn, and how to adjust their learning methods themselves, they can learn from any domain they choose to learn. And they needn't be beholden to the teacher, or forced to suffer a teacher who doesn't suit their own learning methods, or isn't interested at all. With so much variation in talents and interests of the children, and the teachers themselves, it is an impossible task to adequately provide for individual kids.
I think that parents are leaving their kids behind educationally, because they leave the formal education up to the schools, but most of what the kids learn about their style is through passive entertainment. Kids spend more time in front of screens than they do in a classroom these days, and the screen is not only their entertainment, it becomes their peer. And, peers have a massive influence on us as children, and later in life. The kids are building and reinforcing their learning process through repetition, in a way that doesn't give them the skills to learn *whatever they want throughout their life, it just teaches them to consume more - and more.
We as a collective society have a lot to answer for in terms of the way kids are today, which is for a large part, pretty terrible. Like it or not though, they are a reflection of their environment - the one *we and others before us have created for them in the name of consumerism for profit. Everything has been affected by the model, including the education system, and the degrading ability they have to teach anything applicable.
Schools should teach too many "things" other than the practical skills of maths, reading, writing etc. But, what they should teach is ways to learn and help students build strategies to be able to learn from multiple domains effectively and efficiently. The world of education was opened up to all once literacy rates increased and reading wasn't a skill only known by the wealthy and the clergy. It gave people the ability to learn for themselves. Now we have all the information ever collected at our fingertips, yet - we ignore it in favour of being passively entertained instead.
I could be wrong, but a couple decades down the track, despite all the advancements in technology, the people who will be the most successful will still be the ones who can actively think and learn for themselves. And the ones they will control, are those who can only learn through passive consumption, which means, learn what they get told.
We are raising followers.
How many great minds of the future will never be, because their parents hopped them up on ADHD medication, and sat them in front of a screen? With the ubiquity of the practice, I would say,
Many.
Taraz
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