Una verdad simulada

In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, discusses his experience teaching physics to undergrads in Brazil.

After a ot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words.

(italics in original, bold emphasis mine)

This criticism is apt in the Indian context as well. We teach students to pass exams, but not necessarily to understand and experience science. I was reminded of a post I made in my earlier blog on a similar topic. Thanks to Google cache, I have restored it below the fold

Education in India: A need to change the exam-centric system

At Education in India, Satyanarayan poses two vital questions regarding the exam-centric education system in India:

• What is the objective of schooling? Helping children learn or helping children crack exams?
• Do our schools […] end up ignoring the average performing students, who with proper help and attention have the potential to do much better?

This reminded me of an article by Paul Neitzel, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Georgia Tech, regarding a misguided move by the Georgia state school superintendent of focusing on SAT test scores instead of “training how to think.” I managed to get this article from someone in the ME department:

The Critical Lesson is on How to Think

State school Superintendent Linda Schrenko, in a well intentioned but misguided move, wants to spend $250,000 to fund a software–based SAT preparation course, which its providers promise will boost the scores of Georgia students by an average of 100 points. Such teaching–to–the–test techniques may make state and local school administrators look better on paper, but they miss the entire point of education: training young minds how to think.

A recent report on the results of international mathematics and science testing provided some insight into the mediocre performance of American students, particularly when compared with that of their Japanese counterparts. The study found that Japanese and American students spend comparable amounts of time in front of the television and that Americans spend more time in the classroom and are assigned more homework (whether it was actually done is another matter) than Japanese students.

The difference in performance appeared to be rooted in the manner in which material is delivered to the two groups of students. Japanese teacher spend about 80 percent of their time developing concepts, and only 20 percent working examples and on drill: American teachers do exactly the opposite.

It is my opinion that too many of our elementary and secondary school teachers are products of education programs rather than being specialists in the disciplines they teach. Teachers with only a surface knowledge of their subject are unlikely to have the deeper understanding that they should be communicating to their students.

My students at Georgia Tech, which has one of the highest average SAT scores of any public university, are examples of the overemphasis on test scores rather than understanding. Many of them have great difficulty thinking. Homework problems are most often solved by “pattern matching,” that is, finding a worked example in the text that appears to be of the same variety as the assigned problem and copying the solution as much as possible. Starting from scratch is unthinkable.

Such traits are not confined to students. In discussing this dilemma recently with a accountant friend, she told me she is experiencing these same frustration with some recent graduates she has hired. Rather than work from the fundamental principles of accounting, they begin with last year’s tax returns and modify as necessary.

Such behavior is learned in junior high and high school; regrettably, it is tolerated and even encouraged by many of my colleagues in higher education.

In the rapidly changing, highly technological age in which we find ourselves, we need a younger generation capable of making the next, more difficult, leaps to the future. We will need citizens who can think clearly and critically and communicate those thoughts to others.

There are no quick fixes to the dilemma we face in our schools, no shortcuts to honing the thought processes of our children’s minds. The action proposed by Schrenko, even if successful in raising SAT scores, does not address the real problem. At best, it is a example of artificial intelligence of the worst kind.

I believe this was originally published in Atlanta Journal and Constitution. I didn’t bother searching their site. The copyright of the above article belongs to either AJC or Dr. Neitzel, not me.

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