A Call for Educational Reform, Part Three
By Steven Hoelscher, Staff Writer
6/20/2008
What incentives and motivations encompass the education process? As a society, we seek to gain an understanding of the world around us, learning the many facets that make up this complex planet. Intrinsically, we seem to be motivated to pursue an academic career because economic success will follow.
Thus, a conflict of interests exists. The panacea for this ailment would be to remove the incentive of economic success from achievement in academia; however, this would prove impossible, for large conglomerates require the use of highly skilled professionals, paying them more than what the unskilled worker earns.
With a system founded on these principles, the goal of the student is dramatically shifted from learning the material and the concepts behind it to simply passing the tests. Although I concede that it is necessary to exert energy and time to consistently pass the tests, there is a crucial difference between passing a test on a subject and understanding the concepts behind the subject. Questions formulated by the teacher constitute these tests, so it is important that we redirect our attention to that of the teacher’s role in this system.
Like the rest of us human beings, the teacher chooses to travel down the path of least resistance. In our modern design of tests, the questions usually can be graded for a right or wrong answer: one can gain a point, or one can lose a point. Instead, teachers should test the students’ ability to explain their conceptual knowledge of the material given. Although this would require more effort on the part of both the student and the teacher, it will reap many benefits that the status quo fails to produce. However, this method would prove difficult to implement, for outside forces including pressures from parents, faculty, and the state do not allow a teacher to focus his or her test on this type of learning.
As the goal of the student shifts from learning to success, the nature of the challenge drastically changes.
A student, instead, assumes that if more effort is put in to remembering and retaining formulas and facts, then success results. No time is spent actually trying to understand and conceptualize the material. However, solving a problem does not essentially require just a plethora of time and effort; it entails applying logic and heuristics to locate the system that caused the initial problem to occur. Thus, if students are to reach their full potential, this methodology should be implemented. One should leave the burning of resources, exhaustion of time, and excess use of resources to computers and the actual elegance of solution to human beings.