“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
― Stanley Kubrick
That's been a popular view among progressive education reformers as well. It's the basis of Montessori schools, for example. I went to one up through Kindergarten and liked it, finding regular 1st grade utterly dull in comparison. But I don't have a good guess as to whether it would've been a better overall schooling (I still found plenty of time to learn things on my own).
However in parallel to these kinds of views being popular among education reformers, it's also been popular to mock them as idealistic hippie views of education. And a different category of education reformer has had almost 180º opposite ideas, based around standardized, repeatable, scientifically measurable education (the basis of NCLB, MOOCs, etc.).
While a radical departure from the old school methods, Montessori is not intrinsically "progressive". It is built on the idea that there is a clear curriculum with the very big difference being children are primarily responsible for choosing from that menu of options, trusted that their own interests are an adequate guide.
Someone who definitely falls outside the progressive reformers would be John Holt, yet he passionately argues along similar lines as what Kubrick is saying here.
Holt: "... the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it."
By modern definitions, Holt is not even exactly "homeschooling". More accurately, he advocates what would be called "Unschooling" -- the idea that home life observing adults is a more than powerful enough motivator for young children to acquire basic skills.
Sophomore year of high school, in a Computer Programming course with a math teacher, a set curriculum, and specific grading rubrics mandating building to a specific set of guidelines, we built at best ANSI-blocked windows with titles to prompt the user for their name and maybe a dice roll.
Junior year in an independent study, with access to teachers but without worry for grades or blueprints, I built a robotic plotter/scanner with a PHP-based interface down to a C++ serial library from somewhere in the Linux kernel code.
I didn't get that much smarter in a year. The difference there was between a typical US public school and a progressive (albeit still public) free-thinking magnet school.
It's felt like the presumption was always that you could give the smart kids more freedom and they'd find more ways to grow. But this article has me thinking that's backwards: better to give everyone* that freedom and let them all grow.
*special education and dealing with particular learning disabilities being separate and not dealt with in this wholly unqualified opinion.
"I believe educational policy should be made under the assumption that everyone is a highly intelligent, curious and creative individual like myself" -- Stanley Kubrick
Instead, education policy is the opposite of that. It's lowest common denominator ass-covering, enforced through monopoly of control on the whole system.
Comments
“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” ― Stanley Kubrick
That's been a popular view among progressive education reformers as well. It's the basis of Montessori schools, for example. I went to one up through Kindergarten and liked it, finding regular 1st grade utterly dull in comparison. But I don't have a good guess as to whether it would've been a better overall schooling (I still found plenty of time to learn things on my own).
I've also long liked this Seymour Papert quote vaguely along those lines: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/papert85_logovisions.html
However in parallel to these kinds of views being popular among education reformers, it's also been popular to mock them as idealistic hippie views of education. And a different category of education reformer has had almost 180º opposite ideas, based around standardized, repeatable, scientifically measurable education (the basis of NCLB, MOOCs, etc.).
While a radical departure from the old school methods, Montessori is not intrinsically "progressive". It is built on the idea that there is a clear curriculum with the very big difference being children are primarily responsible for choosing from that menu of options, trusted that their own interests are an adequate guide.
Someone who definitely falls outside the progressive reformers would be John Holt, yet he passionately argues along similar lines as what Kubrick is saying here.
Holt: "... the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it."
By modern definitions, Holt is not even exactly "homeschooling". More accurately, he advocates what would be called "Unschooling" -- the idea that home life observing adults is a more than powerful enough motivator for young children to acquire basic skills.
Sophomore year of high school, in a Computer Programming course with a math teacher, a set curriculum, and specific grading rubrics mandating building to a specific set of guidelines, we built at best ANSI-blocked windows with titles to prompt the user for their name and maybe a dice roll.
Junior year in an independent study, with access to teachers but without worry for grades or blueprints, I built a robotic plotter/scanner with a PHP-based interface down to a C++ serial library from somewhere in the Linux kernel code.
I didn't get that much smarter in a year. The difference there was between a typical US public school and a progressive (albeit still public) free-thinking magnet school.
It's felt like the presumption was always that you could give the smart kids more freedom and they'd find more ways to grow. But this article has me thinking that's backwards: better to give everyone* that freedom and let them all grow.
*special education and dealing with particular learning disabilities being separate and not dealt with in this wholly unqualified opinion.
"I believe educational policy should be made under the assumption that everyone is a highly intelligent, curious and creative individual like myself" -- Stanley Kubrick
Instead, education policy is the opposite of that. It's lowest common denominator ass-covering, enforced through monopoly of control on the whole system.
What he fails to observe is that most kids don't have motivation to do anything.