If one gives students small, easy to complete tasks (”experiments”), it’s pretty easy to “understand” how well they went. Better yet, the difference between class A and class B’s performance will be easy to quantify, which makes administrators and, further up the chain, governments happy. Just as importantly, it maintains a baseline of self-worth for teachers by making positive evaluation of the student (and therefore themselves) easy.

When I teach (computer science), I try to make ample space for true experimentation. I’m lucky enough to be at an institution where that is more or less allowed. Students excel, their interest peaks, and learning outcomes, while almost impossible to quantify directly, are much better. But even here I’ve had to deal with the typical questions: why didn’t the students “produce” more? (Because they were experimenting and learning) How can we compare this year to last year? (Subjectively, with a healthy dose of self-reflection) Etc…

Keep up the good fight.

the deliberate dumbing down of america by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt may be more important to understand than Gatto’s Underground History.

@Aditya

Almost all of the public educational “systems” throughout the world have become dominated by the American / Prussian model.

The other commenter, swansont (who has a PhD in atomic physics), had a suggestion on his blog that would solve the “I already know the answer” relationship: you can simulate some things via computer and then change the physical rules. Instead of demonstrating some boring physical law, you change up the law and have the students devise a (computerized) way of figuring out what it is. There’s a link to his post in the comments if you’d like to take a look.

The Mathematician’s Lament is rather good, although I don’t quite agree with all of it.

“While I do agree with you that “labs are ways to teach” (like I elaborated in my blogpost), I don’t think letting students discover an existing relationship would actually work. Like the other commenters pointed out, if a person’s grade depended on it, they would no doubt read up beforehand (personally, that’s what I would do; I’d probably even use my iPod to check online during the lab itself…). Also, in my high school, we did have some labs like this, but everyone already knew the relationship cos people talk to each other and people don’t want to fail! So essentially (and not completely consciously), we end up trying to make the data fit with the expected relationship. One of the problems here of course is that the cost of failure (lower grade) is too high. But even if you corrected that, I doubt this would work.

On the other hand, a better approach might be to ask students to build things (ungraded, of course), that way, it would be more enjoyable than simply verifying a relationship.”

And yes, there are so many ways that education systems could be improved. I’m going to write a few more blogposts about how my school sucked.

Ah, The Mathematician’s Lament. Someone sent it to me a few days back but it was too long so I just glanced through it. I should probably read it now though. Sounds relevant and interesting.

I actually wrote about the problem a long time ago: http://blogs.scienceforums.net/capn/2008/02/07/so-much-for-labs/ Now that you’ve brought it back to my mind, I think I’ll start thinking about the subject again… education — and the failings of it — is one of my biggest interests as I head off to be educated even more, and I’m always trying to find ways to better teach science and math (my specialties). Think of the possibilities if our education systems functioned properly, teaching people to think creatively and critically.

I really like the concept in the TED talk, by the way. Have you ever read The Mathematician’s Lament?

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

@Aditya I think the same problems plague education systems all around the world including the ones in the UK and the US. I know, high schools were not originally designed to enable “creative thinking” but most people realized a decade ago that they should be and these people have tried to move in that direction. Undoubtedly, there’s been some progress here. India is probably too slow to implement such changes quickly. (Until 8th grade, I did the Indian CBSE curriculum and I know how pathetic it is because it’s all about memorization.) My high school is certainly a step up from that.

But here’s the thing – my school was started (I was part of the first graduating cohort) to do precisely this, make students more creative and yet, it fails in almost the same ways that normal schools fail. That’s sad.

@Sanchit Really, the school should give more free time but be glad that you’re almost done with high school.

High School is never meant to be productive in the sense you want. It establishes ones ability to follow directions, and instil a “process”. Time for creative thinking comes in college (if you go to the right one — which you are). Don’t worry, you’ll forget all about this the moment you step in to the next phase. Why do you think schools have gone un-changed for so long?

Aside: there has to be a law somewhere as to the number of footnotes you can have in a post. And might I suggest increasing the size of the text in this comment box? I love small fonts, but this is a little ridiculous.