Creating the school we want to attend

On Wednesday I held a forty minute lecture for fifty teenagers. The lecture explored language, philosophy, psychology and computer science using logical models of conversations. I tried to illustrate different forms of understanding by talking about what happens when we ask Google “What is Love?”, and by showing students an AI program that can participate in knock-knock jokes.

I think it went well. I seemed to hold the students’ attention, they laughed at the right times and we had an interesting Q & A session at the end. But I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface of their understanding, and not just because I’m so inexperienced at lecturing. I think the problem lies in the format of lecturing itself.

I’ve only ever given one lecture, but I’ve sat through hundreds. Attending boring lectures has been a complete waste of my time.
I find it incredibly difficult to concentrate on their content and to resist the temptation of the smartphone in my pocket. Many people would say that I just need to discipline myself, to force myself to listen and absorb the knowledge being transmitted in my direction. Because that’s good for me.

I don’t think being more disciplined will help. I don’t think more discipline leads to more learning. Instead of ordering students to be silent and banning their mobile phones, we should be creating content so engaging that they have no choice but to listen. The attention of a student is not a right of the teacher. It is a privilege that must be earned.

This is easier said than done. But is it impossible? The battle for attention is joined every day by entrepreneurs, filmmakers, musicians, writers and advertisers. Today, educators refuse to enter the fray, trusting that their authority will be enough to guarantee their share.

It might have been enough twenty years ago. Now we have an ubiquitous internet that can deliver gratification in the form of games, social updates, videos and instant messaging, at the touch of a button. Teachers and parents can try to outlaw these things or control their usage, and to sing the praises of inaccessible textbooks and interminable, repetitive exercises, but they are fighting a losing battle. You can put students in a classroom but you can’t make them learn. Not when everything outside it seems so much more fun.

When forced to pay attention, students can become very good at pretending to listen, by sitting quietly and staring at their teacher, and even answering questions using the right words. But unless they are really engaged, in a way that makes them ignore all distraction, they will forget everything they have “learnt” as soon as the authority figure looks away.

We all have a brilliant capacity to forget. Our brains have a limited storage capacity, so they will only store those ideas that they consider the most important. The more useful a piece of information, the more important it is. And if we can’t use a piece of information ourselves, it’s very hard for us to consider it useful.

So unless we can personally apply concepts like differential calculus or natural selection or utilitarianism, they’ll never seem useful enough for us to remember them.

But don’t we do this already? Don’t we collect knowledge from lectures and then apply it in exams, by solving problems and writing essays?

Not really. Usually what actually happens is this: we absorb almost nothing from lectures because they give us second-hand knowledge. Which is like reading a description of a place instead of visiting it.

Then we have to solve problems or write essays in a way that leaves little to no room for creativity. This means that we don’t experiment, or play around with ideas. What would be the point? If there’s only one right way to do something, and the goal is just to pass the exam, then any time spent exploring off the beaten track is wasted.

In the end, it all becomes memorisation. We memorise the pre-packaged knowledge presented to us in lectures and then we memorise how to apply that knowledge in exactly the right way for the exam. At no point do we apply any knowledge in a way that we want to, toward our own creative ends. At no point do we experiment or tweak things or fail constructively.

And that is why the tenuous knot of rote-learned knowledge will come undone as soon as the exam is over. When the grades are set that knowledge is no longer useful. So out it goes.

The key, then, would be to make knowledge seem useful to students. A pedagogical teacher might try to use more real-life examples, but without getting bogged down in unnecessary generalisation or detail. This is what I aimed for in my lecture.

It’s a step in the right direction but it still falls short. Because the students didn’t get to actively participate. They only saw me applying my knowledge; they didn’t get to do that themselves. And there’s no way they could have, in a format where fifty students sit watching one lecturer standing in front of a whiteboard.

But what if all the students had laptops? What if we took the pen and paper students use to passively copy things down and replaced it with a computer with which they can actively create?

What if we replaced lectures with workshops? What if we allowed students to write stories, make films and create games? What if we used calculus and linear algebra to launch virtual projectiles; evolutionary biology to code interactive simulations; philosophy and psychology to create three-dimensional characters; and decision theory to craft realistic narratives?

Would students then voluntarily read books and use interactive tutorials to gain knowledge they could apply on their own projects? Would they experiment to improve their work, for their own satisfaction? Would their every failed experiment trigger a search for a solution and then demonstrate the usefulness of the knowledge used to construct that solution?

Wouldn’t we be able to retire standardised problems and essays because we could evaluate those personal, creative projects instead? Wouldn’t this mean that we would learn things to improve our own work instead of because someone told us to? Wouldn’t we want to learn more physics to improve our games; to better understand human nature to improve our stories?

I think the answer to all of these questions is yes. Because that’s how I work, even though that’s not how I was schooled. Any one of my own projects gives me so much more satisfaction than any of my grades. Because they are what I want to do in the way that I want to do it. And I work on them because I consider them useful. Everything I’ve truly learnt, I’ve learnt from them.

I’d love to learn at school instead of just in my spare time. For that, I think school needs to change in the way I’ve described.

I need to talk to actual students to test my ideas and to work in their feedback. That’s why I’ll be experimenting and workshopping at Kungsholmens Gymnasium in the spring of 2014. My project is called “Hack Education” and it is my KTH Master’s thesis in reforming education with the help of technology, one small step at a time.

Send me an email at pascalc @ kth.se if you have any thoughts or would like to be involved!