Teaching- It Totally Needs Fixing, Man.

I think that the teaching of most subjects is exceedingly poor. Excluding the sciences and mathematics; that perhaps self-select students because the subject content and the way in which it can be taught are so close to one another; music, art, languages are taught in a particularly poor way.

The sciences are quite binary in their approach- beyond the playful philosophy of hypotheses you will eventually be proven right or wrong. Of course, it would be a tragic misstep to neglect the need for creativity in mathematics and the sciences. For example, DNA's structure was able to be hypothesised and eventually proven because of the associative leaps that were made by Francis Crick when under the influence of LSD. There are many other examples both real and hypothetical that describe the imagination's role in the sciences but the driving force behind such subjects is the search for objective truth... perhaps the role of human pettiness and jealousy should not be underestimated either. (Newton and Hooke and the entire world of topology. Nerds, what can you do huh?)

I think that humans, though we try in earnest, are not designed (poor choice of words, I know) to deal with the abstract. "But what about philosophy and the metaphysical?" I hear you say. It is almost a recursive argument of quality beneath "Gödel, Escher, Bach" but I think that such subjects are an example of our inabilty to understand the abstract and not an example of our ability to channel it. Again, to be recursive and perhaps mundane and redundant we have philosophy as a platonic shadow for what the abstract is.

My reasoning can be scoffed at, I would do the same, but still I think humans excel at dealing with reality, not the non-physical. Food, genetic propagation, noises, touches, smells etc. These are categorical things that our brain loves to sort out for us. So, when we reach the entire body of a subject whose mantra is one that encourages perspective and opinion our brains struggle to adapt, there has to be a right and wrong, duh!

So, we do what comes naturally. Dissect, arrange and categorise. We can see it happen with 16th century prescriptivists who took the unarranged idiomatic nature of developing language and shoe horned rules around it. We can see it in the way that musical theory (especially systems of tuning)* was developed and the way that art is institutionalised and wrought with elitism that values the ticking of boxes, perhaps not emotional impact of artwork. (PERHAPS!)

Music, language, art. These are the subjects that I would like to look at. The way they are taught is extremely lacking. With the advent of adventurous coding and the almost unlimited sharing of knowledge via the internet we have, I think, seen classical schools of teaching effectively challenged. I say effectively because, let's be honest, the liberation of music from standard harmony by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Coltrane etc was a rather incredible failure. A failure as in it did not catch on. We could blame education perhaps but alas, this is not my PHD and I refuse to defend myself so thoroughly!

Music for me is a tough example for the development of teaching as I still think it is still taught inefficiently- general approaches do not make room for standard human interest and is too uncompromising in how it appeals to students. For example with most classical instruments a student will not be allowed to pass on learning scales. They are, of course, essential for the mastery of an instrument but the mindset of teaching does not make allowance for goals that differ from the ideal. Sometimes this is good, the elitist mindset forces those that are capable to strive for more but for the majority of people it builds a wall that they are too uninterested or discouraged to overcome. The reason I bring up music is to illustrate a failure in teaching. Let's look at a positive.

Languages. There are many different ways to learn. I don't think humans are so different from one another to proclaim that there are as many ways to learn as there are people- as some people might overzealously state- but there is indeed great variation amongst our species. Some people might beneficially learn from the classical way of learning a language. That is, slogging through grammar and then learning how to speak it. However with, as I mentioned before, the emergence of the internet, individuals without the class or credentials are able to proliferate their ideas. Sometimes this is TERRIBLE (see Deepak Chopra) but in the example of languages such an opportunity may be indispensable. Look to "Benny the Irish Polyglot" from www.fluentin3months.com/‎ who has perhaps pioneered a method of learning a language based around how we learn our first language. Without the ability to confront the hoi polloi many years ago this might have just resulted in an obscure school of language learning that would have been unable to overcome the accepted methods of the day and languished and died in the pools of privileged Bohemia that academia can sometimes be made from.

I think I might be straying off point. I don't know if I ever knew my point but I think my message is one of positivity. Get hyped! Humans are learning how to most efficiently impart knowledge, finally! I suppose if you consider the Matrix as point zero for the pursuit of instantaneous learning (psst, it's not) then we're making pretty okay headway. Look at Ed Cooke's memory centric learning program "Memrise" that capitilises on the brain in the same way our brains and bodies capitilise on simple limiting factors in order to optimally grow food and retain functioning enzymes. The cross pollination of disciplines such as coding, the social sciences, design and more to reach more efficient means of learning than the textbooks of even 10 years ago can only be positive. We are gradually moving beyond the idea of the future of learning being learning the curriculum from an ipad.

We're doing alright and though putting an overly large USB stick into the posterior of your brain will [still] result in death [for now] we're making the horrifically inefficient process of learning better all the time.

Rejoice.




*So yeah, tuning systems, also known as temperament, are screwed up. Over time we have split series' of notes in different ways. In Pythagorean times you would tune in 5ths. A problem with this would be you would tune your first fifth C-G your second one G-D your third one D-A until you got all the way around to F-C. The first C would be out of tune with the last one! It would be like walking up a staircase and finding yourself on a weird floor just beneath the floor that the staircase was supposed to lead too; Escher style! It would seem that the division of frequencies into the alphabet of music is unable to be perfect due to how we hear frequencies. This is a very deep subject; the embarrassing Uncle that really shouldn't be left alone with children of musicology; that is quite hard to understand. If you are interested look up "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony and Why You Should Care."