I will never send my kids to school

I am currently reading a book: "I would never send my kids to school".

This book is written by Piotr Wozniak, the founder of Supermemo, and the title expresses his core point.

In view of the fact that not everyone knows Supermemo, a few words: this is a memory software, and Anki, which is popular in the field of language learning, has its algorithm inherited from the second-generation algorithm open sourced by Supermemo.

This book is very interesting, Wozniak himself was under the control of the school system, and he went to the doctorate, but he refused to send his children to school. The depth of his resentment towards the school is self-evident.

Of course, as a Ph.D. in biology, Wozniak's critique of the school system also comes from cognitive and neuroscience. In this book, he mentions the central factor that underpins his argument: motivation to learn.

Learning motivation is an innate attribute of human beings, and its more general expression is the desire for information. From an evolutionary point of view, early humans had to work hard to collect information about their surroundings when they were in a dangerous environment. The lack of information directly threatens the survival of human beings, so the desire for information is engraved in human genes.

We are now facing the surging information flow and cannot stop swiping our fingers. To a certain extent, learning motivation is at work, but it is not a good thing to use the learning motivation in the wrong place.

Back on topic. According to the book, there are five characteristics of learning motivation:

1. Innate

2. Can be trained

3. Can be suppressed

4. Not stimulated by stress (or even the opposite)

5. Can generate returns

The first three points do not need to be repeated, and the last two points are mentioned.

The fourth point, is not stimulated by stress (or even has the opposite effect), means that instead of promoting the improvement of learning motivation, stress may inhibit it. And learning motivation, as its name suggests, is a key element of learning. Lack of motivation to learn, no matter what knowledge you learn, you can only get twice the result with half the effort.

For Wozniak, schools are the biggest source of stress. This kind of pressure is poured into students, so that their motivation to learn is suppressed, and the learning effect is naturally greatly reduced.

Fifth, it can generate returns. It means that learning motivation will drive students to learn a certain aspect of knowledge, and this kind of learning will make students feel happy, and the sense of pleasure will increase learning motivation, which will prompt students to be more engaged in the learning of this aspect of knowledge, which again produces Pleasure. Pleasure increases the motivation to learn again, and so on, forming a positive spiral.

The core of the fifth point is that the real reward of learning is the pleasure of learning, rather than other external incentives. All experts who have made achievements in any field are all because of the joy brought by knowledge itself. Nalda, Shigeru Miyamoto, fall into this category.

Based on this, we know that motivation to learn is a key factor in learning knowledge, and pressure can inhibit motivation to learn, and school is the biggest source of pressure, so it is logical that Wozniak doesn't send his children to school.

But the school's guilt goes beyond stress.

Above we talked about learning motivation, which is an instinctive attribute of human beings. However, learning motivation is not a cold for everything. Only knowledge that meets the conditions can enter the eyes of learning motivation:

1. The knowledge ranks high in the value sequence of students;

2. The knowledge is predictable;

3. The knowledge is surprising;

Everyone is a different individual with different preferences. The ignorant children are full of curiosity about the world and have the strongest motivation to learn. Although this motivation is constantly being stifled by the family, school and society as they grow up, because of their different growth trajectories, their likes and dislikes are also different.

Knowledge at the top of the value sequence is the most attractive to students. And the school forcibly framed this scope in terms of language, political history, geography, and physical and chemical biology, and forcibly raised the sequence of knowledge in a certain field.

The sequence listed by the school is in conflict with the sequence that the students have. When a student is forced to learn knowledge with a low value sequence in his heart, his motivation for learning will decrease, and even he will be resistant to learning.

However, the light sequence is not enough. If the knowledge itself is beyond the understanding of the students, it will also reduce the motivation of learning. Knowledge is like a tree, with the trunk first, then the branches, and then the branches, layer by layer. If you go directly from the trunk to the branches, there is a possibility of falling to death in the middle.

The school is a unified teaching, the rhythm of knowledge teaching is the same, and the decoding ability of different students is different. In this way, some students have just climbed up the trunk and asked them to reach the fruit on the branches. Of course, they are more than enough. Once students are frustrated, their motivation to learn will also decline.

Of course, if the knowledge learned has always been within the student's understanding, it is nothing new. Repetition is also a punishment for the brain, which also reduces motivation to learn. The knowledge taught in schools is limited in scope. Once the goal is reached within a certain period of time, it will stop learning new knowledge and repeat it over and over again.

This repetition is multiple tortures for students with poor decoding ability of this knowledge. On the one hand he was under enormous pressure, on the other hand he couldn't understand what he had learned, but he had to keep repeating it, which made it even more difficult.

For students, good knowledge is not only interesting to him, but also understandable to him, but new knowledge based on old knowledge will continue to emerge, so that his student motivation will be stimulated and maintained continuously. .

Schools, on the other hand, put pressure on students, distort value sequences, ignore individual decoding abilities, and punish the brain over and over again. These four counts are powerful indictments against the school system.

Wozniak believes that the best way to motivate students to learn is to allow them to learn freely. From birth, a person is exposed to the surrounding environment and information. Information means the right to choose. As a good parent, the best help that he can provide to his child is not to let him go to cram schools and interest classes since he was a child, but to let him get in touch with new things as much as possible. Everyone's innate talents are different, and the wider the range of choices, the more likely the child will touch his own talents.

Once children have established their own interests, good parents and teachers should try to help children get the information (and guidance) they want.

Free learning is driven by learning motivation, which makes each person's choice an autonomous behavior, and what he can grow must be different. Learning does not have to be constrained by schools. People can choose the education method they want. Family education, MOOC education, and learning are just ways to obtain information. Wozniak calls it the free market for education.

Although the book denounces the shortcomings of the school, no one can deny that the original intention of the school must be good, and the original intention of education must be good. But with the development of cognitive science, we may reflect on the pros and cons of this system.

As an authoritarian system, does school stifle students' right to choose? Are the talents cultivated under the unified system too convergent? And when students finish school, who will address the lack of purpose? Learning that is not driven by learning motivation, is it a quick recipe or a deformed monster?

Maybe we all have the answer in our hearts, maybe we just lack the strength and courage to change the reality.

Finally, I want to digress a bit. While reading this book, I happened to be listening to a podcast on algorithms. So I suddenly thought, isn't the algorithm, like the school, a kind of control?

When the information we receive is filtered, our choices are framed. This shaping is not just the so-called information stratosphere, does it have a deeper impact? For example, if my message is framed in cognitive science, then I probably won't listen to podcasts on algorithms, so how can I associate algorithms with schools?

Creation and innovation are essentially the association and collision of interdisciplinary knowledge. When the information we are exposed to is extremely vertically concentrated, have we lost the ability to create?

Maybe it's worth thinking about.