Over the past five weeks, I have been attempting to paint an updated picture of an educational process that is ever increasingly stifling our capacity to learn. This phenomenon’s growth is now being fertilized by the complacency of governments unwilling to incorporate the increasing levels of scientific achievement in research into their economies through sheer ignorance of its potential, or, as is the case in Canada, by the overinfluence of the world’s super-economies placing barriers in the rollout of such reform due to its potential to limit their continuing grasp of such power.
Unfortunately, teachers are having difficulty in getting government officials to sit down and discuss such factors, as there also exists a countervailing force within society whose appetite for any form of “strenuous” learning having been dulled by the seemingly unlimited knowledge available to them through the Internet and the ease at which such knowledge can be accessed, which is further complicated by such media presentations only providing “fact”, which by itself is fairly well guaranteed to be inappropriately interpreted by its writers.
None of these influential factors even consider how one even learns. For a parent or student to even grasp this very simple concept, I suggested in last week’s column that only Jean Piaget’s four stage cognitive developmental model fully examines this process, as well as linking its results of true learning are chemically stored in our brains. For instance, each stage of development is heavily weighted by one’s own age and maturity; unfortunately, too many adherents to this subject tend to ignore the possible overlapping of stages of development, particularly when discussing male versus female example.
For instance, in the sensimotor or “rote” stages of learning that occur mostly from birth to about two years of age, a female child may herself start simple toilet training techniques as early as seven or eight months, whereas males may have to be pushed to even consider the process at Year 1. As well, during this same period, the child’s response to language prompts from their parent teachers overtly influence other cognitive skill development; and as such both “sexes” are actually capable of beginning to learn several languages at once, then sorting them out in the preoperational or basic stage that follows up to age 7.
On a theoretical level, developmental progress is defined by the child learning to think “symbolically”, to represent ideas for which no picture exists, as well as working on increasing their language skills. Here, once again, we find teachers who are defining their children’s growth by their adherence to the semi-concrete walls of age learning paying scant attention to the “need” for the female child to seek more mature learning behaviours associated with the tasks they will be required to perform in an “adult” life, and as a result are ready to begin studies in subject areas people still incorrectly refer to as “left-brain” tasks, including analysis of data and an almost immediate understanding of introductory mathematical principles.
The final two stages of learning, concrete operational (application of a principle of learning, generally occurring from ages 7 through to 11 or 12) and formal operation (also known as the “intuitive” stage, usually starting at around age 12) completes the developmental process, first by allowing the child to take a specific learned fact (e.g.: a baseball) acted upon by something else (e.g.: gravity) to explain that reaction (e.g.: why the ball only goes to a certain height, before “stopping” then returning at an ever-accelerating speed towards the ground).
In all these situations of learning, the child’s mind is chemically etching a position on brain tissue, so as the learning tasks become more complicated, that process takes longer and longer. In the final intuitive stage of learning, a secondary thought wherein its results may pair with a previously “discovered” or remembered thought will naturally take a child longer to find any relevant solution with which to pair itself. This delay occurs because the mind merely allocates these factors randomly within the brain’s structure, so in looking for a solution, your brain is randomly etching an erratic pathway linking the two separate facts to one another, stopping at one piece of data to see is a solution is possible, then moving onward until it finally arrives at a point of clarity.
It is this “delay” in reaching a final solution to the problem that is the most frustrating to the child; however, that struggle is necessary in order to further understand how these seemingly unrelated thoughts or ideas are actually connected. Were the teacher to seek answers to similar forms of problems, eventually the pathway between the nodes is linearly shortened and the time to arrive at a solution radically cut back.
In measuring student development and progress, Piaget’s model is then used to create testing procedures to measure these factors. Generally speaking, these tests will allow for as much as 40 per cent of topics tested to be rote in nature, another 35 per cent to focus upon applied concepts, and the final 25 per cent then become problem orientated.
If this process sounds simple, that’s because it is; so why doesn’t it appear to work to the satisfaction of the Saskatchewan government, which has now chosen to “retire” provincial examinations altogether?
At this point, educators find themselves in a finger-pointing contest where teachers are paired against school boards and governmental consultants to find “fault” with the process, so in next week’s column we’ll try to address the sticking points annoying trustees and educators alike.
