It seems that the flood gates of conspiracy theory have opened wide in recent years. The earth is flat. We never went to the moon. The CIA…. The Russians…. The Government…. Global warming scientists…. Fats…. Well, one can start singing Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire. It makes me wonder what the heck is going on. Either someone just unloaded a busload of crazies (not making light of mental illness—please, don’t misinterpret) or something else is going. Personally, I believe that we are rapidly losing our critical thinking skills. Yes, I am somewhat blaming the education system—not teachers, per se, but a system that emphasizes recitation over critical thinking.
In twenty years as a Ph.D., I have learned that I am growing more ignorant. I am less of an “expert” today than I was the day I started graduate school at the University of Toledo. Not that I am forgetting things, but rather because knowledge is growing so rapidly around me. Moreover, I am recognizing my ignorance because I am willing to. I enjoy (maybe too much) challenging established ideas. I love science—the process of hypothesizing and testing…of questioning.
I used to lecture from carefully prepared PowerPoint slides. I quickly realized that students would mere write down what was on the slides (which, for the most part, was actually also in the book) and not engage in the discussion about the slide. I also found that questions from students who would engage or things I read prior to class would trigger me to go off on “tangents”. I often found myself on a soapbox, preaching about practices in exercise science that had no scientific basis. I could never quite keep to the order of my slides and notes. I have since gone to a style of talking about things as the come up. It is uncomfortable for the students, who have been trained to receive knowledge in a very linear fashion. Over all, though, I see more student engagement and learning.
I had an awesome Anatomy professor at the, then, Medical College of Ohio (we were able to take courses at MCO as UT graduate students). Dr. Dennis Morse had I work in small groups doing regional dissections in the lab. With tips from a few medical students, I got really good at dissecting. Once a week, Dr. Morse would quiz us on the structures we were examining. There were no study guides. He would fire questions at us, and, nearly always, to the person, we would miss our questions. We would know the answers to our peers’ questions, but never ours. Dr. Morse seems to intuitively know what we didn’t know and to ask questions that prompted us to think critically. In my experience, this is not how Anatomy (or most subjects) is taught. What I realized when I aced my oral comprehensive exam for Anatomy (not to be boastful—I attribute this entirely to Dr. Morse’s teaching) was that I had actually learned Anatomy.
Too often in education, we are focused to the recitation of what we expect our students to have learned. First, if we have taught them well and they have studied hard, we should expect everyone to get an ‘A’. Secondly, and more importantly, this approach does not expose what I believe to be the most critical outcome of education. It does not reveal to the students what they don’t know. Personally, I think the most enduring learning occurs after the exam. Nearly every student, after looking at the grade, looks at what they missed on the exam. Rarely, if ever, does one look at the questions they got right. As educators, we need to expose weaknesses and encourage the students to push forward to learn more—and to learn how to learn.
I saw a meme recently that read: “Modern education: Creating people smart enough to repeat what they’re told and follow orders and dumb enough to think this makes them smarter than everyone else.” It is a bit over the top, but it should make us question what we call “educated”. Successfully reciting what is taught to us is not an education. Today, access to information is overwhelming. We don’t need teachers to provide information anymore. We need teachers to educate us in how to process and use information. We need the foundational skills to understand the more complex information—i.e., the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) skills. Challenging everything without having these foundational skill is likewise not an education. I began this with discussion of conspiracy theorists. I don’t put much energy into these. I do think they are the product of us system that has fed us information and asked that we accept it without question. There is much truth to the above meme. It is unfortunate. If we come out of an “education” believing we know it all, the system has failed us. If we come out of an “education” hungry to learn more and having the skills to keep pursuing knowledge—new knowledge, not just more information—then we are truly educated.
Be your best today; be better tomorrow!
Carpe momento!