A long time ago, I was the furniture department manager at the Wal-Mart in my hometown in New Jersey. My most powerful memory of that job was counting down the minutes until my one-hour lunch break. That’s when I would open up my brown bag lunch and dig into David McCullough’s awesome, incredible, 1,120-page biography of President Harry S. Truman. My co-workers thought I was a bit strange, always carrying around this enormous book, but I didn’t care. I was enthralled.
I became a great fan of U.S. History. Reading the Truman book got me interested in one of his contemporaries, General George C. Marshall. That got me interested in the Cold War, so I found a biography on John F. Kennedy, which led me to a study on the Vietnam War. I became intrigued by the political upheaval of the1960’s, and began exploring the Black Panthers. On and on it went.
That’s how I’ve always learned. I like to identify a topic of interest, pursue it in depth, and then follow wherever it leads. By focusing on micro-topics like General Marshall or the Black Panthers, I managed to give myself a pretty comprehensive understanding of 20th century American History. I learned the big picture by focusing on the individual episodes.
I think a lot of people learn this way, and it’s why so many kids find survey courses—in which “coverage” is deemed more important than depth—so dreadful.
I think this is also helps explain the popularity of “problem-based learning,” when students are placed in collaborative groups and given challenging, open-ended, ill-defined problems to solve. For example, they need to promote their rock band, so they learn what they need to know about advertising, design, and communicating with media. Next thing you know, they’ve learned all things they’d get in a Marketing 101 class.
In school, we do it backwards. We teach Marketing 101 as a survey class, offer up a set of required readings, and give students multiple choice bubble sheets test. Then we wonder why students who were able to pass the test can’t apply any of the principles in the real world.
In school, we do a lot of things backwards. This is a big one.
(Join the discussion at www.facebook.com/reeducate. Get updates at www.twitter.com/reeducate.)
