Throughout
time humans have inevitably solved and created many problems. These problems
include going to the moon, ways of transportation, global warming, big
business, and etc… The list could continue on forever and ever starting as
simple as an idea like the wheel to the complexities of the ecosystem. In order
for humans to be smart there are several ideas that need to fall into place and
several problems that stand in the way. In the book The Anti Education Era by James Paul Gee he argues that although humans
have the ability to be smart, due to the obstacles that interfere with human
learning, humans really are quite stupid.
According
to Gee, in order for a human to solve problems in a smart way five conditions
must occur. “The conditions are: (1) initial mentorship to get us prepared to
learn from experience in specific domains ; (2) lots of prior experience; (3)
clear goals; (4) something being “at stake” (mattering to us emotionally); and
(5) the opportunity to act in a way that elicits a meaningful response from the
world.” (p. 13)
I find
these conditions extremely important in the day to days of my teaching career. I
can not emphasize the amount of times I have heard the students say in my
Algebra class “why do I have to learn this” or “my parents don’t know how to do
this and they say I will never use this.” The first three conditions as a
teacher I have a decent amount of control over. My students are given
mentorship through myself, most have prior experience necessary to begin my
class (but those who do not often do not stand a chance), and as a school it
has been a clear expectation that goals be focused and woven into classroom
lessons with meaning. However, it is often hard to make the content meaningful
to a students emotions with the resources, infrastructure and funding of the
school system. It is also extremely hard to create something that will have a
meaningful response from the world. Quite often what is taught requires little
action by the student, rather students are encouraged to read, listen, and
memorize. This leads to one of the many problems Gee speaks of, the human
memory.
As a
teacher, one of the topics that I have to teach my students is the idea of
author bias. This is often pointed out by finding readings on a historical account
of an event where the authors have very different accounts of what really
happened. For example is Christopher Columbus a hero or a murderer? It really
depends on whose point of view you account for. In his work, Gee states, “what
we store in our heads is not ‘the truth,’ but a version of reality as we see it
and sometimes as we wish it to be” (p. 20) Just like accounts of history, our
minds create memories based on the five conditions necessary to learn. What
matters and what the person wants to believe creates that persons account. The
memory is not like a computer and should not be used for this reason.
There are
two problems Gee speaks of that as an educator I see the most. The first is
“frozen thought”. Gee describes this as,
“once a solution is frozen, it takes lots of work to unfreeze it, to get people
to rethink it and refreeze” (p. 88). There is not a better description that
could describe people or schools. People do not like change. One of the hardest
jobs as an administrator (I have seen my boss get frustrated with this when
trying to sell the idea of formative assessment to the staff) it to create
change for the better. The second problem I identify with is the need for quick
solutions to complex problems. Gee references the idea of adding species into
different ecosystems without knowing what will happen. Sometimes this is a
great solution, but at times it causes chaos and more problems than were
needed. Humans need to take a step back and test hypotheses in simulations.
I believe
that Gee has some extremely interesting concepts that could positively impact
the learning community. If as an educator we know that these conditions must
exist and we understand the problems at hand, then maybe we can learn to accept
change and create a system that allows our students to take action, reflect,
and have patience to solve complex systems and create a smarter people. We can
adapt from old primitive methods to work less hard and much smarter.
Gee, J. P. (2013). The anti-education era: Creating smarter students through digital learning. United States: Palgrave Macmillan.
