OK, I'm back, and my glass is full. This is based on my experience as a music student and a music teacher, so not directly related to public education, but some of the same criticisms and the solutions I am developing can cross over easily enough.
First, the criticism:
My musical education was classical piano. Although they were private lessons, it was a "one size fits all" method, with specific books, specific repertoire, specific technical exercises, exams, competitions and an annual grading / graduating system. So, like school basically.
My major criticism with this method was that I never learned to
play the damn piano. I could only memorize complex sheet music and regurgitate it on demand. One day, I brought a simple composition of my own to my piano teacher and she had NO IDEA how to handle it. It was as though it had never happened to her before. She just brushed it under the rug and got on with her "one size fits all" agenda. Soon after that, I quit, because classical music is boring when you're 13. I took up guitar, and shunned training altogether. After one lesson from my dad, I figured it out on my own, refused to take any guidance from anyone, and never played anything I hadn't written myself. I make my living as a musician now - I play fiddle, guitar, mandolin, percussion, ukulele, sing, and teach, and I STILL can't play the damn piano, because of my classical training.
What I'm trying to get at is that too often, with a "one size fits all" approach to education, we miss our opportunities to nourish the individual talents and interests of any given student, and to encourage them in their own exploration of the areas that interest them. We also reject our opportunity to
learn something from them, and deny them the pleasure of sharing their discoveries. For example, it was a seven year old guitar student who made me realize that
the Alphabet song,
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and
Baa, Baa Black Sheep are actually all the same song. That will seem like a complete no-brainer to anybody who has ever noticed it before, but I had never noticed it before, so I was floored.
But I digress!
Kids love discovery. We shouldn't assume that we need to imprint a specific volume of specific information on their little brains in a specific way. We should simply guide and mentor them as they discover it themselves. Some kids really do want to learn to play Chopin, but most just want to learn to play
Someone Like You, and who am I to refuse them? Who am I to make them suffer through memorizing hundreds of stupid, boring little melodies they don't give a toss about before I give them what they came for?
So what am I doing about it?
Every time a new student comes to me, I ask them why they came. What kind of music do they like to listen to? Who is their favourite artist? What's their favourite song? I just talk to them until I get some sense of where their sweet spot might lie - whatever little string I can pluck that makes them excited to discover music on their own. Then I pluck the heck out of that string. I go learn whatever they want to learn (that takes me about ten minutes) and start teaching it (or a simplified version of it) to them the following week.
Of course, some of them won't talk, or they don't give a toss about music and their parents are making them come, so I just get those
doing stuff right away, and no matter what they do, I tell them it's great. In some cases, I do end up choosing "the book", because some kids respond to that - they get their sense of achievement from flipping a page, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as
they are excited about it.
Is it hard to teach this way?
Yes! There's nothing easier for a teacher than to teach the same crap to everybody who walks through the door. I throw up a little bit into my mouth every time I have to learn another Taylor Swift song on my own time, just to get some teenage girl excited about playing the guitar. But my job is to teach them how to become musicians. I simply can not do that unless they work hard, and if I don't tie a carrot to the stick for them, they just won't.
I once filled in for another teacher who uses the "one size fits all" approach, and the parents of one of her students told me the following week, in awe, "I don't know what you did, but she actually practiced all week!" They just couldn't believe it. She'd been taking lessons for two years, and never bothered to touch a piano on her own time.
Does it work?
I don't know!
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. My feeling is that it works extremely well on kids who love music, and does not work on the kids who don't give a toss about music. In some cases, I simply can not find that magic string that I can pluck, so they will not work, so will not advance. In those cases, although I'd love to just keep taking their parents' money despite the fact that I am failing to impart a musical education, I will usually let them know that their kid might rather be exploring some other activity, at least for the time being.
What does any of this have to do with public education?
Nothing, and everything. Our current system is set up to imprint every child with a fixed set of information and skills, regardless of their unique interests and abilities. An ideal system would change the relationship between the teacher and the taught, making it more of a two-way street. The child would have a lot more say into what they want to learn and how they want to learn it, and the basic skills we all need (reading, writing, math, science) would be worked into that process. The teacher would become a mentor, nudging the child toward culturally accepted norms of competence in any given field and helping them avoid the pitfalls.
Of course, we would need a lot more teachers for this system to work. You can't give any individual mentoring to a class of 35 kids, all by yourself. You could, on the other hand, bring in working professionals from any given field (on a voluntary basis, or with an honorarium) to mentor a small group of kids with an interest in that particular field. That would be a small, cheap and manageable change in the right direction.
But those seemed to be lacking when I went to Public school.... well, they had good classes for Newtonian physics and chemistry, but not everyone took those. As well in my last two years in public school (I went into homeschooling and private school after that) the entire State started a huge literacy initiative getting off it's feet and severely it beefed up the curriculum by adding an entire new class specifically for reading comprehension state wide. But hey, that's in America lol :help:
