They Call Me "Old School"

One of the biggest obstacles to my ability to enjoy my classes this semester has been the overwhelming tendency in both classes for the other students to hop on the "let's all learn together" bandwagon and espouse a form of constructivist philosophy that, boiled down, simply says that no one person can learn, that it takes a group of children working together - without the pesky interference of someone in an authoritative role (i.e. the teacher) - to learn anything. It's gone so far that my fellow students embrace terms such as "facilitator", "tutor" and (this one almost made me choke when it was first presented because I seriously thought they were joking) "learning guide." Learning guide? Did we somehow get beamed into StarTrek Voyager to consult with Chakotay? If I had a penny for every time someone quoted (with requisite awe and wonderment at the sheer insightfulness of it all) the little pithy "Be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage" I could pay next semester's tuition. In pennies.

At first blush, it really seemed like this was a reasonable idea. After all, if the students are more actively involved in the educational process and it's not hours of a teacher (Oh, heaven forfend, there I go using that "teach" word again) droning on and on, then the student have more ownership of the information and they take more pride and become self-directed and self-motivated and gosh, we'd have butterflies and twittering birds all year long! And then I started to really listen to what my classmates were saying that the job of a "learning guide" was in order for this to work - that now the onus was on the 'guide' to figure out how to appeal to each and every student's individual learning style and make it interesting for each one. We, as guides, are supposed to become mama birds and chew up the information and then go from beak to beak with each student and regurgitate the information in just the right way that the individual student - pardon me, learner - has an optimal educational experience. (Perhaps a quick caveat is in order - I am not 100% against this methodology, but I think it can work in smaller groups like a homeschooling family and in the younger years of education. As children grow and mature, there needs to be a departure from this, or at least an exposure to other forms of learning so that should a child end up in a college setting where more traditional forms of education take place, the child can still succeed.)

Then it occurred to me that with this idea, not only are we not encouraging self-directed learners who take responsibility for their education, we're actively fighting against it. If we never teach our children how to take information presented in something that is just simply not their learning style and still learn, if we never show them that they are responsible for their education even if it means it's a constant uphill struggle because the information is coming at them in ways that are not immediately digestible but they learn anyway and overcome, then what are we teaching them instead? It seems to me that we're teaching them to totally abdicate their personal responsibility and the fruits of this are already visible in our society as a whole.

(Maybe another caveat, I'm pretty sure this is a chicken-egg scenario - I don't know if education is simply following the trends of society at large or if society is feeding off educational trends. I suspect it's a combination and that we're rapidly rolling into a viscious cycle.)

Personal responsibility is becoming a huge hot button for me lately and I've gone back and forth about saying anything about it here - on one hand because I'm really not sure I can adequately give justice to my thoughts, on another hand because I haven't had time to put something lengthy together and I just figure it's going to be lengthy, and on another hand (maybe I'm an octopus?) because I'm pretty sure I've said most of it in one form or another and, well, do people really care?

But here's the thing - so many problems today could at least have the beginnings of a rational solution if people simply reclaimed a sense of personal responsibility and stopped looking for someone else to blame and stopped clamoring for someone else to "fix it" for them. The whole trans-fat ban in New York is, to me, a perfect example. Yes, Americans are an unhealthy and generally out of shape bunch. But seriously, who's to blame for that? Not the government. Not the restaurants. Not the grocery stores. Each individual unhealthy and out of shape person is responsible for their own unhealthiness and out of shapeness. And yet we want someone to blame and someone to fix it - so rather than say, "Gosh, if restaurants would just be healthy then I could eat out every night of the week and not have trouble." maybe we should be saying "Gosh, if I subsist solely on food prepared en masse in kitchens with the goal of providing very tasty food relatively quickly at a profit to the owner, then it's likely that the ingredients they use will be designed to give lots of flavor at a low cost and potentially be bad for me. So maybe I should figure out a way to get groceries and cook for myself occasionally." Instead of this though, we go clamoring for the government to intercede on our behalf and then stare in wonder and discontent when they try to manage all the other parts of our lives.

I just don't see how we can abdicate our responsibility in a limited manner. Either we are individually and personally responsible for our actions or we look for the government to take care of us. It's unlikely that we will find a way to pick and choose. I doubt very much that the government was originally intended to be the nanny of the people. Yes there are places where it's good for the government to step in and lend a temporary hand when someone has hit hard times and extenuating circumstances, but it's my opinion that those situations are few and far between and should only be the resort of someone who has done everything they can personally to shoulder their responsibility but finds that they aren't able to do it on their own or with the help of other, non-governmental resources.