(I did see a parrot singing a Beyonce song the other day but I hope that this is the exception that proves the rule)
Animals do have skills and abilities but they don't need to be educated, those skills come naturally. Those skills are wired into every animal's very being, and the wiring is contained in their genes so those skills can be passed down through the generations. Those skills also evolve as their enviroment and situation changes.
Even the bird that can sing like Beyonce can do so because it has a heritable ability, wired into the animal at birth.
So anyone who says that we are a blank slate, a tabula rasa, is wrong.
We, like animals, are born with certain skills wired in. This does not mean we are born with those skills. What we are born with is an innate drive and ability to learn those skills ourselves. And we will learn those skills ourselves using the natural enviroment around us.
When a baby is born it has a huge motivation and drive to learn to move, grasp, look, flinch, crawl, stand, walk and run. These are all incredibly difficult skills. Anyone who has tried to design a robot will tell you it is easier to program them to work out chess moves than it is to make them pick up the chess pieces and move them. Baby's are like space probes. They arrive on this planet but instead of being programmed to collect dirt and take photographs they are wired to do what babies do. (grasp, look, flinch, crawl etc)
But babies are programmed to learn stuff that other animals aren't. Babies are programmed to learn to talk. Now this does not mean they are born talking. But you don't need to teach a baby to talk. They are born with the ability to teach themselves to talk. They just need to hear other humans talk. This is a very important fact about humans.
A child will teach themselves to talk but they will not teach themselves to read or write. Reading and writing is not something that we are born with an ability to learn ourselves. It is a skill that will develop through some sort of inflicted outside agency. (ie. a teacher has to force us to do repetitive stuff to develop that skill)
And reading and writing is such an important skill that we have as a species developed a huge system across the globe that teaches this skill. At a very young age we force children to spend all their days in a building where adults will force them to repeat over and over the actions required to learn to read. We also will force them to repeat over and over the actions required to learn their times tables, the order of the days of the week, the months of the year, what date the Norman's invaded England etc. Repetition is at the heart of so many skills that we were all taught at school.
So here are the things that I think get forgotten about education.
1) People intuitively learn some things but not other things. Education is about teaching what is counter intuitive.
2) Most knowledge and skills a based in part but fundamentally on some sort of repetive 'learning by rote' method.
3) People will intuitively repeat certain actions to learn certain skills but will not repeat other actions. Education forces them to do these fundamental but counter intuitive repetitions.
4) Knowledge as well as skill is based upon rote learning. You cannot 'know' history without memorising certain historical facts and you cannot 'learn' music without memorising certain scales and chords.
So to put it simply, in every subject there are intuitive aspects. ie. aspects the that the student will work out or develop themselves, and there are counter intuitive aspects that will need to be taught.
Education is the transmission of counter intuitive skills and knowledge.
'Talent' or 'ability' or ''aptitude' may be the student's individual motivation and inclination to partake in the repetitive actions required to develop the knowledge or skills associated with excellence in that subject. Why would a certain student possess more motivation than another? This is because we all like different stuff. People liking different stuff is possibly the key to humankind's success. Education is about developing these different likes. This is fundamentally why education has to be student focused.
In today's education we try and teach the student too much.
This does not allow for the repetition required to really develop the fundamental skill or knowledge needed to truly understand that subject. It is better to go deeply into a narrow but fundamental aspect of any given subject than try and cover everything. Inside maths is physics, chemistry, music. Inside music is art, history, maths. All the subjects are contained within each other. We should not value certain subjects over others (as in the preference for teaching the three 'Rs' or today's preference for STEM subjects)
We need to identify and develop a students likes and teach the fundamental,counter intuitive aspects of their likes in a way that opens them up to an understanding of all the subjects. We need to teach, to quote William Blake, the ability 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand'
A good teacher will always be looking for skill and knowledge development. It logically follows that they will know when those skills have been developed. In 2020 in the UK the government, unable to test this skill development in an examination setting because of COVID 19, decided to create an algorhythm that would assign grades to students based upon how close they were to the ideal, privleged, well off, middle class, rule follower that would make the perfect citizen in their view of a perfect society where everyone should be aspiring to be a privleged, well off, middle class, rule follower.
Of course it was a disaster
And so they had no choice but to ask the teachers what grade they thought the student would have achieved. This of course was much more accurate because teachers inherently will know this. On the whole they have no motivation to cheat in this regard, in fact most teachers only cheat when they are faced with another ridiculous algorythm than dictates to them how many students in their class should pass. (have I let that secret out the bag? No worries, no one is reading this...)
Let's scrap examinations and let the teachers tell us how good the student is in the same way we let doctors tell us what is wrong with us and driving instructors whether someone is fit to drive.
So there we have it. Find out what the student likes and focus on those areas, they will intuitively learn certain things, the teacher is there to teach the counter intuitive. Teach the fundamentals in a way that let's all the other subjects in and allow for repetition so that the student will develop a real understanding of the subject rather that memorising facts that they can trot out in an examination. In fact, scrap exams and trust the teachers to tell you how good they are and in doing this put the focus back on teaching and not assessment.
Is this what everyone has forgotten about education?
Well...perhaps forgotten is the wrong word.
You see school and college is not really about education is it? Really they are about contrition and conformity. This is why education, like the NHS and defence, becomes a political football. And this is because we also see education as a method of creating ideal citizens for whatever ideological political system you adher to.
Education is really there to create little politically correct drones that will only excel in the STEM subjects you will force them to excel in so they can contibute to your economy without asking too many questions. And this is why we don't really educate our children, because if we were to do that they might start thinking for themselves. The right want conformity, the left want contrition. It's all the same thing really. And that is really not to question anything or be truly creative but to adher to a set of values that have their root fundamentally in the unquestioned application of power, and this comes from both sides of the political spectrum.
This is truly a dangerous situation.......
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