Regurgitation vs. Education

As the school year gets started back, I want to talk about something a younger cousin of mine was talking about over the summer break. He said that all the tests he had to do at the end of the semester was a headache and it was basically just a giant review of everything they had learned in the year. In fact, the last three weeks of school before summer was nothing but being sure him and his classmates could recite every note they had taken throughout said semester. Now he is only a sophomore in high school, but this was interesting to me. Having experienced college already and seeing what the job market offers, this method of “regurgitation” learning does not sit well. Now I am not saying it was any different when I went to school. We had the same sort of “Megatest” at the end of the semester, but the questions were more hand-picked from everything we learned. However, from what he was saying, it sounds like it has gotten worse. Now it sounds more like you have to repeat everything you have learned verbatim as you pace through hundreds of monotonous questions that only want to know if you remember what you learned. This does not actually help kids. Because in the adult world, whether it be further education or the job market, professors and employers don’t want people who know a lot; they want people who can take what they know and apply it to a bigger scenario. In other words, they do not want regurgitation, they want someone who is actually educated. Imagine an example where a file has been lost in a system. Someone from this modern regurgitation style of schooling may know everything about the file and how the system works. They may even know why the file went missing. However, could they actually find the file? Moreover, if the file cannot be found, would they know what to do to remedy the situation that needed the file in the first place? My bet is no. They have a lot of knowledge and no means to apply it. An educated someone with actual problem-solving skills, however, would be able to not only fix the problem, but probably recreate the file from other files in the system. I know this example is a bit far-fetched and maybe even impossible, but it does speak to a growing problem in the education system. Children are taught to remember lots of things and not taught how those things can be used. Furthermore, it is often a situation that to teach so many things, the youth are given basic examples of the knowledge that makes a larger question nearly unanswerable using that base example. More than that, they are often taught to remember something until the test and then you can forget it. A theme of “you probably will never use it anyway.” It is disgusting. The original learning was “reading, writing, and arithmetic,” and while I won’t get into how wrong calling these the “three R’s” is, I will end by saying that knowledge for knowledge’s sake is fine, but to learn things and then learn how to apply them to life examples makes a population of very smart people that also know a lot of things. A population who remembers lots of information but also have the skills to work and create in a world that values adaptability and thrives on extending a base set is extremely important. By all means, let’s read and enjoy Tom Sawyer, but let’s also understand why Tom is inherently a bad character so we don’t end up painting the fence white. But that is just one man’s opinion. Thanks for listening to me ramble. I appreciate it. See you next time.