Maybe work should be put into make the curriculum more engaging so that it's less drudgery and boring work and more rewarding.
A practical example of this from fitness is turning exercise into a sport.
A practical example of this from fitness is turning exercise into a sport.
I'm a musician. I could get more people to come to my concerts if I just come up with material that's more engaging than Taylor Swift.
Even without knowing anything about your music, I'm 98 % certain that I would prefer to go to your concert than to a Taylor Swift concert. :-)
This forum has plenty of past comments from people who have learned a programming language for fun when they could have spent that time watching a TV series.
(Actually I remember hating C when I got to the part of K&R about pointers. I threw the book across the room. I hated it for about 12 hours. Then I woke up the next morning and was all like "pointers are brilliant", it was weird.)
I guess you can guide people into a subject, assuring them the whole way through that the subject is probably going to get enjoyable, and in the meantime making the experience enjoyable through social effects and entertainment - while allowing them freedom to back out if in fact you're boring them. But that doesn't demand their willpower. It hinges on their interest.
Yes?
It's great that learning things was fun for you. I'm there with you myself. I had amazing lucid dreams the night after I learned Ocaml...
But this entire thread is about teaching children, many of whom need guidance, support, and unfortunately sometimes control to mitigate their attraction to easy-but-unhealthy activities.
Not everyone is going to be a programmer. But even if we're talking about structuring learning such that it's compelling on its own, then we're kind of assuming everyone is going to have a calling and also find it relatively young. That feels pretty naive.
To push people into academic crap that they hate is:
1. Pompous,
2. Counterproductive.
Practical difficulties, then, can be used as an excuse for saying that an arbitrarily chosen 20% of control is vital, which is a reassuringly normal strategy, although there's no common agreement about which 20%, since this is just a performance.
The 80% figure I meant is not that I think this is applicable to 80% "of learning" or something, but rather trying to convey to you that I greatly sympathize with where you seem to be coming from. I'm mostly self-taught as well, even in college my classes were basically spent reading ahead the next chapter in the textbook to occupy my interest (and doing homework due in my next class), while half-listening to the lecture to confirm what I already knew (from reading ahead the previous class).
But still I think it would be naive to assume that all kids can do without most structure.
What I would say that there are enough fun things that provide learning that kids (especially younger ones - its difference once exams and qualifications start looming) can learn primarily through fun. Provide the environment and guidance and encouragement. Think about how many fun things kids do is learning. Playing games, making things, drawing. The TV series might be a documentary or produced by a different culture or be based on a book that is worth reading, or may be of cultural value in its own right. It may create an opportunity to talk to children about related topics (I am very much a fan of "conversational learning").
> The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower
I am old enough that I learned because my parents bought me what was then called a "home computer" and it was fun to learn programming. I did not have much skill or will power at that point (I would have been about 10).
More generally, children can learn a lot without skill and will power. It needs opportunities and guidance and encouragement. I agree that sticking kids in front of a TV or giving them a tablet with a bunch of simplistic games will mean they do not learn.
Its sometimes necessary to learn some thing that are not fun, buts is exceptional, especially for children.
You made me laugh anyway.
Second, in refuting me, it seems you are stating that learning should be Type 1 fun, which I totally disagree with. You are severely limiting your potential if you only do things that are entertaining. And not just in an accidental way: you are also setting yourself up for a life in which you follow the things that are made to be entertaining for you, by advertisers or whoever else thinks they can gain by leading you along.
I enjoy learning new things, I’ve learned new languages, musical instruments, and I’ve switched careers a couple of times which has led to all kinds of new things I had to learn to do. The fact is, that the real fun happens after mastery, and after a brief ”this is cool” bump where you bang a drum for a couple of minutes on the beach or whatever, there is a long period of practice where you pretty much have to put in the work before you can get to that fun flow state of mastery.
I suppose we often have to do painful things to maintain stability, or advance, and indirectly therefore they're necessary as part of a strategy to continue learning. Like, I don't know, work a terrible job to pay the rent. But that's indirect, not intrinsic to learning, so those things don't count.
If one chooses the modern life, then they're stuck within the constraints of society. You could be nearly self sufficient, but that would be even more difficult.
Teacher: "today we're going to learn about the three types of rocks, and the quadratic equation."
Student: "what for? I've never seen an adult discuss or use that in real life."
Teacher: "you might need it some day, and its part of the curriculum."
Education should attempt to somehow tap into that as a core motivation, though that will surely not be enough or good for everyone.
But learning is work, and there is no way around that.
True learning, and curiosity-driven learning, boosts dopamine, hence most learning in modern society should be inherently "pleasurable". Of course this excludes hard lessons we have to learn through painful experiences.
Even really difficult learning, like at the Masters - phD level, the painful parts of learning should constitute a small percent of the person's overall learning.
Children are often accused of being unmotivated or lazy, but these are usually accusations from boring adults who can't see the magnitude of their error. A child will focus on a video game for hours, even a difficult one, and will still remember the information a week later. But give a child a boring and pointless video game, with no specific goal or accomplishment, and no one will play it. This is why the quadratic equation has become such a meme among "anti-schoolers". It's the epitome of pointlessness for the general population.
Probably most people. 6 hour days, lunch provided, recess with your friends, no real responsibilities. Sounds better than most jobs.
Rocks are easy to turn into fun since they're physical things and you can go over knapping flint, etc.
I home educated by kids from about eight up to sixteen when they had done GCSEs (exams school kids in the UK do at 16). I very rarely had to force them to do anything, but I did have to make an effort to find the right approach to make things interesting.
I think the solution is to let kids do what they choose but intervene if they are not learning at all. This takes judgement and knowing them as individuals.
You could do it in schools if you have a very low student-teacher ratio (I say below 10 to 1 - so in the UK you would need about double the number of teachers in the state system), trusted teachers' judgement over metrics, and had more flexibility about learning to individual needs rather the prescribing exactly what kids need to learn at a particular age.
It's not not possible, but the problem is you'd end up with a majority uneducated populous who would decide that sacrificing goats and watering crops with Gatorade is the thing to do, and they would hang you if you disagreed
"You are a human."
"You are on this planet."
"This is what this world is like."
"This is what humans have made so far."
"This is what's out there."
and then let people be free from 10-20 to figure out their own goals instead of just funneling them into the endless capitalist churn.
"Here's the refrigerator."
"Here's a cell phone."
That'd be a much better way of teaching multiple subjects that are boring and irrelevant on their own.
You're not supposed to have phones or computers in class but you're supposed to somehow be interested in the math and other sciences that make those things possible?
You go home and your life there is much more entertaining than in school, but you have no idea how what you're being taught in school ties into the things at home.
Even using computers in class, which I endorse, involves acceptance that many of the uses will seem boring.
Making everything as entertaining as commercial media is too much to ask.
For me for example, a lot of the work in developing the game is mundane boilerplate and looking up solutions to solved problems, but I can bear through it because I really want to play the game I'm trying to make.
Education should optimize for finding such "goals" for each individual person, instead of just finding a "use" for each person to be put to, as another poster put it.
Before I realized this world is just as interesting, but school does everything to make you bored of it before you can explore it.
In a sense, the most important thing school does is to build up within students a tolerance of boredom and an appreciation of the fact that most work is potentially boring.
You can plow through boring work if the end goal is exciting. For example, when developing a game that you yourself want to play :)
Not that most people like games, but everyone has their own goal, even if they haven't discovered them yet, even if it's just to chill in a nice place and do nothing all day, they can still find better ways to be lazy! (build better furniture, explore the search for the ideal climate etc.)
What is with all this defeatist give-up-by-default attitude? There's NO fucking way that the current common system of human education, which has been pretty much the same for hundreds of years, is perfect.
Just enough to get you hooked into the "game" you've just spawned into.
We already have people say they wish they'd learned how to do their taxes or balance budgets - imagine what 12 year olds might think is uninteresting that comes up later, right?
This "capitalist churn" is how we get things done for society. While some exploration makes sense, the vast majority of people are not gifted in the arts or endowed with genius. They must be prepared for life with basic skills that can be put to good use. Even under communist "utopian" regimes, children are forced to do basically the same stuff they do under capitalist regimes, because people and their needs are the same under both.
There are 8 billion people. Not every single one can be ""put to good use""
We have enough technology now to let people slow down and fucking chill a bit.
"You are on this planet."
"This is what this world is like."
"This is what humans have made so far."
"This is what's out there."
That's basically what school is. Many of these topics can't be explained in reasonable detail and complexity until after 10 years old.