Saturday 9 October 2010

The Purpose of Education (Part 2)

By Dr. Bijan Riazi-Farzad
Education is not about WHAT you learn,
but what that learning MAKES of you.
In this part, I will demonstrate how education (by which I don’t just mean schools, colleges and HEIs) is not about teaching facts, but to empower learners to be able to evaluate information (either provided directly through the senses or indirectly through others) by being able to ‘see’ from different perspectives. The facts, or, in most cases, abstract ideas are a means to increasing the learner’s repertoire of thinking styles.
When you learn something new, you haven’t just picked up another fact, like a pebble that you may throw into a bag, you have picked up a cog that will change the way your mental machinery operates.  That means that it changes the way you see, evaluate, relate to, use and appreciate your surroundings.
-       So, how is learning that the tangent of a circle is perpendicular to its radius going to help me appreciate things more?
-       It depends on HOW you learn that.
-       What do you mean?
-       I mean that memorising this fact to spew out into an exam paper is one way of learning it, which incidentally does its bit in changing your perspective on life, but not in an empowering way.
-       How?
-       For example, it may lead to the disempowering belief that there are meaningless things that you have to do to get by in this life.
-       But you were going to tell me how it helps me appreciate things.
-       Oh yes.  Let’s imagine that you go into a lesson about circles and the teacher says that the tangent of a circle is perpendicular to its radius.
-       Yaaawn!
-       Exactly.  Now, imagine that you start a discussion by asking, so what?
-       That woudn’t go down very well.
-       In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to ask that question because the ‘so what’ would have been explained before the fact, but let’s assume that your teacher has the time and the inclination to talk you through it.
-       OK, so what?
-       Good!  Now, I can explain to you that actually, there is no such thing as a tangent.
-       What?
-       And there is no such thing as a radius. These are ideas that we have had to invent to allow us to predict and manipulate our environment.
-       You mean we just made them up?
-       Yes.  We made them up.  They are abstract concepts that help us use language to talk about things that don’t exist.
-       But why?
-       For the same reason that we make up other words to help us explain things that don’t really exist.
-       Such as?
-       How about the notion ‘love.
-       Love exists.
-       OK. Show it to me.
-       I can’t show it to you, but I can feel it.
-       How do you know what you feel is what another person feels when they talk about love.
-       Erm, well, I assume.
-       Exactly.  And that assumption is both necessary and very useful, is it not.
-       Yes.
-       So is the assumption that there is such a thing as a radius.
-       But there is such a thing as a radius, it tells us how far the centre of a circle is from its edge.
-       But circles don’t actually have radii, but creating that notion allows us to talk about the size of the circle and will help us calculate the amount of dough that we may need to buy and how much it would cost to bake a circular cake that would feed 10 kids at a party, a very practical application of a very abstract idea. We do that with love too.
-       What? How?
-       We represent the abstract idea of love, with a heart and then we put it on a card and sent it to someone.  Here, we are manipulating (in the practical sense of the word) a relationship using symbol for an abstract idea, but look how useful that symbol can be.
-       So how is knowing about the radius and the tangent of a circle going to help me then?  I mean people don’t need to know these things t bake cake.
-       If you do a job that requires it, then you may need to know it, and you never know when that may be.  But in fact, if you do go into such a job, you will quickly be able to pick it up from scratch, so it is not about the knowledge itself.
-       You haven’t answered my question.
-       I’m coming to that.  By knowing about tangents and circles and all the interesting ideas that are derived from them, you can now think about shapes from a different perspective?
-       I can?
-       Let me ask you a question; if you put an egg on a table top, is the surface of the table at a tangent to the egg?
-       Yeah.
-       But we said that a tangent is perpendicular to the radius of a circle and an egg is not a circle shape.
-       That’s an interesting point.
-       Well, I agree with you that the table top is at a tangent to the egg, but we are going to need to look at the egg in a different way to get our notion of tangent, as we have defined it, to fit into it.
-       An egg is an egg.  How can we look at it differently?
-       Think of a square.
-       Yeah.
-       Now imagine that you add a side to it so that you get a regular pentagon.
-       Ok.
-       Now, keep adding sides, hexagon, heptagon, etc.
-       Ok.
-       Can you see what’s happening?
-       Yes, it’s becoming more rounded.
-       Brilliant! What will happen eventually is you keep adding sides?
-       It will turn into a circle?
-       Exactly. So, a circle is not a one-sided object, it is an object made up of an infinite number of straight lines.
-       Is it?
-       Well, it would be very useful if, sometimes, we could think of it in this way.
-       Yeah, but what has this got to do with the egg?
-       It has, trust me! In fact, if you think things through enough, everything has something to do with everything else. But let’s get back to the egg.
-       Can’t wait!
-       Well, if we can think of a circle as an infinite or, to avoid getting philosophical, let’s just say a very large number of straight lines, then the tangent can be thought of as an extension of one of those lines in both directions. Can you see that?
-       OK. Yes, but what has that got to do with the egg?
-       Well, if an infinitely small part of a circle can be thought of as a straight line, then, an infinitely small part of a straight line can be thought of as being a minutely curved object that can be part of a circle.
-       What has that got to do with the EGG?
-       Don’t you see it yet?
-       NO!
-       The point at which the table top touches the egg is the tangent to A circle, part of which forms part of the shape of the egg.
-       What?
-       The egg can be thought of as being made up of lots of arcs of circles joined together and the table is tangential to one of these. QED.
-       OK, so you can play around with these in your head, so what?
-       So, now you se that learning about radii and tangents can give you a completely new perspective on eggs or anything else that you shoes to apply it to.
-       So what?
-       So, now you can walk into that maths, physics, geography or history lesson and think, “Wow! I wonder how what am learning here is going to change the way I see and appreciate the world, rather than, “I wish I were somewhere else”.
-       I’ll need to think about this.
-       Don’t do it by yourself.  Start a debating society or something and sit down with your friend and ask questions about how your perspective may have changes as a result of what you have been ‘taught’ in the lesson (or by any other of the day’s or the week’s experiences’

In part 3, I will discuss ways in which this kind of perspective could be propagated amongst learners, parents, policy makers and educators.

Tuesday 28 September 2010

The Purpose of Education (Part 1)

By Dr. Bijan Riazi-Farzad
If you DO NOT like school, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU!
For example, you may be (or know) someone who seems to be really interested in lots of things, such as socialising, football, films, trivia, fashion, reading, computer games, music, and so on, but is not very excited about going to school.  Clearly, you are (or this person is) capable of liking things and finding activities enjoyable.  S/he does not suffer from athymia.  What we can say is that this person, can feel positive about his or environment under certain conditions and that school does not SEEM to provide those conditions.
Similarly, you may be (or know someone) who finds it easy to remember people’s names, such as the names of celebrities or fictional characters, yet finds it difficult to remember the name of Henry VIII’s third wife.  Again, clearly, you are (or this person is) not suffering from anterograde amnesia.  Again, what we can say is that under the right conditions, you (or this person) is capable of remembering and recalling information and that, again, school does not APPEAR to provide the right conditions.
Likewise, you may be (or know someone) who can sit for hours and watch a film or play a computer game, but finds it difficult to concentrate in class.  Again, clearly, you (or this person) do not suffer from ADD, or one of its (burgeoning list of) derivatives. What we can conclude is that, under the right conditions, you are (or this person is) able to concentrate and become engrossed in whatever the focus of attention is, and once again, it COULD BE ARGUED that school does not to provide the right conditions.
On the other hand, if you DO like school, YOU HAVE AN ADVANTAGE.
-       Advantage over what, Bijan?
-       Advantage over the you who does not like school/college/university or whatever.
-       I don’t understand.
-       OK, let me explain: Imagine, it is 8am, and you are thinking to yourself, I don’t want to go to school today.
-       Yeah, so that’s pretty normal?
-       Or, you may be looking forward to going to school to see your friends, but not to sitting in that physics lesson where the teacher talks about things that you don’t see the point of.
-       Actually, yes, there are some things about school that I do like, but not sitting in boring, pointless lessons.
-       Like?
-       Like for example, what’s the use of knowing that humans evolved from the paramecium or whatever, or that the tangent of a circle is perpendicular to its radius. I’m never going to use that stuff am I?
-       You may or you may not.  Of course some people do use it; otherwise it wouldn’t occur to them to put it on the school curriculum.
-       OK, but I don’t get it and most of my friends don’t get it.  I mean, I can do it most of the time, but I don’t get what use it is going to be to me, EVER!
-       You see, you are right.
-       What?
-       I agree with you.
-       Oh! So what are you arguing for?
-       I am not arguing, in the confrontational sense, I am arguing FOR (in the ‘advocating’ sense) a different perspective.
-       But I am very happy with the perspective I already have, thank you very much.
-       What if I told you that I could show a way whereby, on the morning of a school day, you would leap up with joy and say, “yippee, I am going to learn more about circle theorems today.”
-       People would think I’ve gone mad.
-       OK, you have two options.  Option 1 is for people to see you as being sensible, whilst you sit in the class and feel bored out of your mind, or option 2 is for people to think that you are mad, but for you to feel ecstatic about whatever life throws at you, including judgemental people and trigonometry. Which do you chose?
-       That’s a hard one.
-       I would have said it’s a no brainer.
-       I was only kidding.
-       Oh … Well, this is the advantage that I am talking about.
-       What advantage?
-       The one we started this conversation with.
-       Remind me.
-       I said that if you do not like school, there is nothing wrong with you, but if you do like school, you have an advantage.
-       Oh yes, and I said, advantage over what and you said advantage over myself and I said that I don’t understand.
-       That’s right.
-       I still don’t understand.
-       Do you think that the person who wakes up in the morning and is excited about going to school has any advantage over the person who wakes up and doesn’t feel like going to school?
-       No, because they both have to go anyway.
-       OK.  Think of something you like to do.
-       I like going to parties.
-       What do you like about going to parties?
-       I see my friends and we have fun.
-       Can I suggest that when you say you have fun, you mean that you feel good inside.
-       Well, yeah, so?
-       But then, the person who is excited about going to school is also having fun, because he or she has a good feeling inside too.
-       I suppose.
-       So, being excited about going to school and not feeling excited about going to school is the difference between feeling good inside and not feeling good inside.
-       OK? Where are you going with this?
-       I think you are about to see, and this last question was a defence against the impending realisation that there is an ADVANTAGE to feeling good about going to school compared to not feeling good about it, because the person who is feeling good IS HAVING FUN and the person who does not feel good is WAITING to have fun when school finishes.
-       OK, OK, but I don’t think going to school is fun, OK.
-       So, what’s the difference between you and the person who does?
-       I don’t know anybody who does.
-       Hypothetically.
-       The person who thinks going to school is fun has more fun than the person who does not – Hypothetically.
-       Great.  So now, what I am going to help you see is that whether or not you have fun at school has less to do with what is going on in school and more to do with how you interpret what is going on.
-       WHAT?
-       OK, let’s just take it slowly.  Let me see … Oh, yes, take a look at this photograph.
-       Yeah well, it’s just an old lady.
-       Yes, not very exciting … Now, let’s assume that you found out that this old lady was your dad’s great grandmother and that she had four husbands.
-       What? That’s not true.
-       Let’s assume it is.  Now, look at that photograph again.  Do you feel any differently about the old lady?
-       It’s not true is it?
-       If it were, would you feel any differently about it?
-       Well yeah.  That would be amazing.
-       Has the picture of the old lady changed since you saw it the first time?
-       Well, no.
-       But your feelings about have changed, right?
-       Well, yes.
-       Good.  That’s the point I want to make.
-       What point?
-       That there is a YOU inside you that can see the picture of the old lady and feel nothing and there is another YOU inside you that can see the same picture and feel amazed.  Now, depending on the story that you tell yourself (or I tell you) about the picture, you can feel amazed, angry, guilty, curious, frustrated or a host of other emotions, simply by changing the story.
-       Oh! I see.
-       And that is why so many people read fiction novels or go to the movies.
-       Is it?
-       Yes.  It’s because we like to hear stories that shift our emotions.
-       So what?
-       So, I am going to help you to change the story you tell yourself about school so that you will feel good about (have fun in) school.
-       How?
-       In the same way that I changed your interest in the picture of the old lady by telling you a story about her.
-       Was that true?
-       Does it matter?

In Part 2, I look at how it is possible to change our perspective in relation to education. Specifically, what schools could be there for, and how we could see them as a potentially very empowering establishments.