Lean Production: Inside the war on public education

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33. Lecturing went out a couple of decades ago eh?

I believe that was a bad move.

It's interesting that you would think separating a bunch of eighth graders and have them work independently wouldn't work.

Everyone has different learning styles and the only way you can evaluate an individual; is individually. They could be managed in an incentive based program. If a student is trusted to work independently and they betray that trust; they are relocated to a more restrictive environment. Obviously, the more restrictive environment should not be a punishment but rather an area with a higher adult to child ratio. With the purpose of evaluating what additional resources they need to learn the material. I think you would find students working to avoid that more restrictive environment.

Most of the courses that I took in college had hundreds of people sitting in a lecture hall; I would have been able to do that in 8th grade.

Certainly you wouldn't do that in an art class or a writing class, but I believe it is the best system for teaching most sciences and math. There was also an opportunity for individual attention, but the material was presented to a large group of people and the frequent tests were used to evaluate each students strengths and weaknesses. Of course in college it is up to the individual to make the additional necessary effort.

We should start with the assumption that people want to learn and wait until they demonstrate that they are 'other' directed before we begin treating them as though they are going to goof off once we've turned our back.

I've lectured in classrooms full of eighth graders as one of my duties as an engineer at the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department. Sometimes they consolidated multiple classrooms to prevent the presenter from giving a bunch of presentations, but usually I talked to about 30 students at a time.

I don't think you can pass on your passion for a subject without lecturing. I also don't think you'd have much trouble sending 200 eighth grade students to a movie theater to watch something that they're interested in; the trick is piquing their interest.