Here's an interesting fact: The average English-speaking child learns over ten words per day through age seventeen (Paul Bloom, How Children Learn the Meaning of Words). I don't know about you, but I find this amazing. In elementary school, we were required to learn ten vocabulary words a week, and I still remember what an irksome chore that was. Yet it turns out I was learning ten words a day all the while without even noticing.
How do schools manage to take something that is so easy when it happens naturally and make it so hard? In their influential paper on situated learning, Seely-Brown, Collins and Duguid observe that "learning words from abstract definitions taken out of the context of normal use, the way vocabulary has often been taught, is slow and generally unsuccessful." Moreover, much of what is learned is "useless in practice," as evidenced by student-generated examples like, "I was meticulous about falling off the cliff," or "Mrs. Morrow stimulated the soup."
Seely-Brown, Collins and Duguid argue that the schools have a similar problem in virtually all subject areas because they "assume a separation between knowing and doing, treating knowledge as an integral, self-sufficient substance, theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used." This approach is the product of the school's main teaching paradigm, which is sometimes called the "empty vessel" model: the idea that knowledge can be poured into the minds of students like water into a container. A less floral label for this approach is "telling and testing".
How bad is the schools' pedagogical approach? Even ignoring what it does to kill off children's interest in learning - it's scandalous how it turns engaged, inquisitive five year-olds into bored and disinterested middle-schoolers - school fails even on its own terms, in the sense that most of what we "learn" in school is quickly forgotten. To illustrate this, Roger Schank used to challenge the audiences in his seminars to take a high school biology test. Over the course of several years, no non-biologist was able to answer more than a few questions correctly. That's pretty amazing when you consider that Schank's audience typically consisted of professors and graduate students in scientific disciplines at places like Yale, MIT and Stanford. (Continued)
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