🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct1.210832.26418@cbfsb.cb.att.com> osan@cbnewsb.cb.att.com (Mr. X) writes:
>In article <holly.224@mailhub.scf.lmsc.lockheed.com> holly@mailhub.scf.lmsc.lockheed.com (Holly Wise) writes:

>	Here's a little statistic that we kept getting thrown at us when we
>	were in college training to be teachers:  85% of what you learn is
>	forgotten within two weeks of having learned it without reinforcement.
>	We were also told that much (not all) of this forgeting is necessary
>	to the healthy condition of a person.  High pressure maintenance of
>	information works for a while, but eventually catches up with the
>	student.  Keep banging on the kid without cease and you will have
>	a stressed out, nervous wreck that may turn suicidal.  Yes there are
>	studies to this effect, no I do not have references handy.  This was
>	all from 10 years ago.
>
>>Any teacher can probably tell you 
>>that it takes months to re-teach the children what they taught them the year 
>>before after 3 months vacation.  
>
>	Not necessarily so.  Kids that were taught well, including having had
>	the right overall environment for learning tend to remember MOST of
>	what they learned the year before.  This is especially true when you
>	run an open book class where students are free to look materials up,
>	even during a test.  When you give then the basic skills required for
>	intellectual pursuits including the proper use of library resources,
>	you give them a virtually unlimited potential for learning and 
>	developing their skills and interests.
>
>	Also be aware that a child need not be a rocket scientist bt the
>	end of the first grade.  If left to their own devices and given
>	good conscientious guidance, they will develop themselves into
>	fine young intellects all by themselves without being man handled.
>
[some material deleted in the interest of paring down the article]
>
>	People are amazingly complex, and so the "bigger hammer" approach
>	will fail every time.
>
>	-Andy V.

Practical experimentation with this idea, that yes, amazingly enough, children
_do_ learn best when not being hammered at does exist. The most obvious
example of this that I can think of off hand is the Summerhill school in
England (running since the early part of the century.) While the circumstances
there are certainly difficult to reproduce, the basic idea that children's
native curiosity is usually the strongest motivator was fairly well documented
there. (The school in effect did not force children to even go to classes
or give out grades.)

My suspicion is that the primary reason more research on this has not been
done is due to the counter-intuitiveness of this - it is practically a paradigm
of our civilization that a child must be forcefed or they will not learn
anything.

	Geoff Tuffli