Goodbye Education, Hello Learning Algorithm
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
For a long time now, I have been wondering exactly how I could communicate to my readership what a difficult job it is to be a foreigner in a place like Korea, trying to teach English to Korean kids. Recently (January 2007), I received an e-mail from my editor back in England which finally crystallised my thinking on this subject, of which more below. But first: er, what is teaching in Korea actually like?
Saturday morning finds me awake early after a slightly nightmarish dream populated by fractious students, hardly surprising after a fraught day (comprising no less than sixteen lessons and lesson segments!!!) in which behaviour was generally terrible. Much of the trouble is new boys who have not been "conditioned" in how to behave by the hagwon before commencing lessons. It was an exceptional day in which I sent at least four boys out of the classes – one of whom was a regular "distractor" in class and who, after some two years of being a student here, only gets worse.
The amazing thing is that the kids are always happy to complain that "we don't play any games", but the point of any educational establishment is to achieve certain aims. Hagwons are nebulous in this regard at the best of times, usually because their owners have no real "plan" beyond simply making money – the parents' money – and if they have, they are not really inclined to discuss it with employees, least of all foreign employees.. But if they are going to take money from the parents to achieve the aim of better-educated children (and remember, this money-making enterprise is a private business which only affluent parents can afford), discipline (i.e. firm guidance in preference to actual punishment, however lenient) in the achievement of a defined goal is surely all-important; where these things are lacking, and in circumstances where a "lesson" may actually be just a lesson segment (i.e. a fraction of an hour), the achievement of the "target" within an appropriate time-frame goes out of the window. And so it was yesterday.
All of this is made worse by what can only be described at present as the "multiplicity" of lessons on a Friday. We are now well into the long Korean schools' winter vacation and believe it or not, this Friday schedule is a remnant of operations from two years ago, when the competition between individual hagwons (not just English but general study hagwons, math hagwons, taekwondo and hapkido joints etc.) became so extreme that the Boss had to reorganise everything to have the kids at the hagwon on alternate days, allowing the lessons to be longer, two hours apiece (shared between Korean and foreign teachers, hence my term "lesson segments") Monday to Friday. The downside was that this left a "tail-end" of as little as fifteen minutes for each class on Friday in order to make up their requisite total for each week!
So at this point in the proceedings, with no day school to contend with, we can have some classes earlier, and I start every afternoon now with a double conversation/writing class. But because the kids have no tiresome day school beforehand, they arrive full of beans, and this is a major problem. "Attention deficit" (i.e. they are very young and find concentration difficult) prevents them from settling down and fractious behaviour is the result. I honestly could not believe that I had to send anyone out as early as the fourth lesson, then again later, and finally two more boys in a late lesson. Two NEW boys who have almost no English and therefore immediately start talking in Korean – and in that class, a completely new "phonics" class where I also find that I have a large overgrown girl with some kind of "learning difficulties" who therefore needs more attention – arguing with just one student about being sent out can lose the whole lesson, I kid you not – such distractions are unhelpful.
I subscribe to many e-mail newsletters and one of them, which is aimed specifically at FOREX and other commodity traders (not that I am qualified to do such yet, of course) has regular input from Christian priests of various descriptions, and one of them hit the nail on the head recently. We fail to achieve things, he asserted, because we are kept in a state of distraction all the time. This man must be a friend of David Icke, who said basically the same thing in his recent jaunt on Channel Five (which is now all over the Internet, I wonder why???). TV in particular is a source of too much worthless disinformation. Lying and conniving politicians, "journalists' who don't do any "journalism" but simply parrot what they are told by the lying and conniving politicians, the US run purely by the Big Money interests, and so on. So it is in the schools. Kids are worst because of the constant distractions of things in their lives like computer games, which get their action hormones twanging away so that everything else is simply boring. And education IS boring for all but a few who want to achieve and don't want to be distracted. Boredom is the price people pay for lack of self-discipline and application.
Then we have the problem of the "foreign teacher". Too many of these private schools are places where the "foreigner" is a performing monkey, playing games by default under the pretence that this will lower the kids' collective affective filters for long enough to allow some learning to take place. This is a specious distraction from the educational process and is abhorrent, not least because others who want to teach (and learn!) find their efforts undermined by stupid, boring kids who are lazy and want the hagwons to be nothing more than play schools. But there is only a small proportion of any learning which can be transmitted in this way.
This "foreign teacher syndrome" is worsened by the inability or unwillingness of the employer, very often, not to engage in any meaningful "orientation" with regard to materials, methodology and local language and culture before throwing the newcomer into a classroom. It makes no real difference how well-trained and experienced that newcomer may be if they are committing social gaffes left, right and centre whilst not understanding fully how to use the materials they are required to use. And of course, top marks to really professional outfits like Berlitz English Schools, who subject their neophyte teachers to a full four weeks of training and orientation before they are allowed anywhere near a classroom!
But regarding bad classroom behaviour, the fact is that this is a disease caused by a combination of affluence, indulgence (by the parents), laziness, several generations of increasingly nebulous and poor educational systems and distractions. It's as simple as that. If the kids know what they want then they will work hard for it. If not, they are stupid and full of shit from day one. And there are simply too many of the latter. The Koreans in particular need to realise that by asking foreigners to come into classrooms like this, they are exposing them to their nation's very worst ambassadors. Thankfully, a few Koreans do understand this.
In a recent e-mail, my editor back in Stevenage, England, passed on the following amusing snippets of information:
Moving to your own field of education, the government has a new
idea….. wait for it. Instead of testing all kids at 11 or whenever, they
will be tested "when they are ready". Exactly what this means, I cannot
guess – but it sounds fishy to me, another way of spinning the performance
statistics. It has been suggested it is another way of ensuring that
"everyone wins a prize". Will they have thought it through ? I doubt it!
Poor old teachers… Oh, I never told you of the last "great idea". Parents
will be given their kids' teachers' email or cellphone details. This idea
is so stupid I cannot believe they will implement it – instead of coming
round to school to beat up the teachers, the yob parents can now give them
an electronic earful – who are the geniuses that dream up these mad
ideas ? You can be very sure that no-one will be given THEIR contact
details!
. . . and my lengthy response was as follows:
Actually, I don't think these things are as bad as they sound, but then I am in a rather different environment. Two issues:
(a) all kids mature at different rates, and girls at any age are always more mature both physically and psychologically than boys. "Conventional" education takes no account of this, because "conventional" education is simply a machine according to which there is a mythical "average" pupil who fits into the system well and can finish it all on time and matriculate. Any secondary school teacher will tell you what a bullshit notion this is. They all mature at different rates and the work they are asked to do suffers as a result, and therefore so does their education. And therefore so do the economy and the nation.
In connection with this, we should realise that what the kids are expected to know and understand before examination is radically more complex now than it was, say, fifty years ago. High technology has become much more invasive and the technical abilities to continue developing this stuff is in short supply in every field. Technology companies cannot find the trained minds they need to keep ahead of competition. Oil companies cannot get trained and experienced geologists. There is apparently a perennial shortage of competent computer programmers, everywhere. And as for the general shortage of scientists . . . the trouble is that they are trying constantly to force-feed the kids unintelligible technobabble and half-facts, and the kids' minds can't understand it. We find the same problem here, where the Koreans seem obsessed to the point of madness with emulating the worst excesses of American quasi-techno-bullshit in their speech and writing from day one, as opposed to logical simplicity and building up from ground level; too many long words which are actually meaningless to Korean kids in any case.
(b) I complain to myself about the fact that even when I give the kids my e-mail address, a single e-mail from any of them (and if they do, it will be a girl rather than a boy) is as rare as polonium dust. I do feel that if the kids have a problem asking questions in the classroom, by all means they should be able and willing to ask by e-mail. Admittedly, I have too much e-mail but in this life you have to prioritise and if they wanted to do this, they would become the Number One Priority because this is WORK – my Boss doesn't pay me a salary to mess around all week. I feel quite sincerely that this should be a legitimate extension of what I do, especially as the increase in size of a class leads to a proportional decrease in time available for individual students from the (single) teacher. There are a number of paid and free options which facilitate this and they are Internet-based and easily available. I think that this is necessary and some time soon I will be asking the Boss what he thinks.
We might ask why it is that, given all of this technology which extends right into a teacher's own bedroom (well it does in MY case, it often does for the kids, too), why it is that such technologies are not used more widely in the educational context? The answer is simple: limited resources of teacher time. As an example, each week I have to take a stack of work home of an evening for marking and correction, and this takes me through to the early hours. I did this last Wednesday and it took me until 2:00am to finish – in fact, I _couldn't_ finish it because I had a slew of "uncorrectables". A four a.m. finish is nothing unusual when doing this. People who go home at five in the afternoon, thinking they have had a hard day at work, don't know what work is!
So in this analysis, the reason why educational systems are beset by troubles is mind-numbingly simple: all but rote-learning systems cannot be efficient because they are too time-intensive to allow rapid learning. And in modern societies, as East Asia is learning to its cost, rote learning the traditional way tells you nothing about, say, the worst aspects of differential calculus, or semiconductor doping, or "brownheart" of sugar beet caused by a shortage of borate in the soil. Educationalists are so obsessed with "education" that they can't see the wood for the trees.
There is too much theory and not enough practice – a classic example emerged in the first module of my teaching course. The student is asked to read all of a book on phonetics and then make sufficient notes for EACH CHAPTER on a set of postcards, which are provided as course materials. But after all this (back in the days last year when I could do this until 4:00am instead of marking execrable "diaries"), Chapter Eighteen was – guess what? – a one-page DISCLAIMER by the author! This (female) professor ended her book by saying that the field was so wide and theories so many that she had, of necessity, to limit its scope – a scope which, of course, essentially boils down to her preferred theories. The problem being that one person's "theory" is another person's "prejudice". In other words, by adding this disclaimer to her book, she was admitting that everything she wrote was biased, and therefore flawed. This admission was also an acceptance that her "methodology" was strictly unscientific, since it was basically not falsifiable.
"But Andrew!" I hear you wail, "how on Earth can phonetics be scientific?". Answer: it needs to be scientific and falsifiable in order to progress. Spheres of knowledge which are not inherently falsifiable are unable to adapt when overwhelmed by accumulated anomalies, and therefore qualify as dogma only.
So now we come to the heart of the matter: In school, everything depends upon textbooks. But textbooks are a digest of perceived facts and personal opinions; they are not "facts" or collections of "facts" in themselves. This realisation came to me late in life, I'm afraid. All of the accepted "facts" that we hear and see and read about are all dogma worthy of the Mediaeval Church – and the different spheres of knowledge have their "Inquisition" (perhaps I should say "Gestapo"?) who insist that it must be just so and anything else is heresy and lies. But that is not science. If science is a process of observation, analysis, theorisation and verification/falsification, then what we have is an ALGORITHM, NOT KNOWLEDGE. Our knowledge of electrical phenomena, for example, is much more advanced now than it was a hundred years ago, but this does not mean that our knowledge of them is complete; we still need the algorithm. That's why we have this strange thing called "research".
The conclusion must be, therefore, that "knowledge" is merely a snapshot of what is "known" at a particular point in time; as time progresses, we have more "knowledge" but do not achieve full "verisimilitude", but only a more accurate snapshot. And if we are forever seeking new "knowledge", it follows that any definition of "knowledge" must at least partially include this aspect, otherwise it is also at least a partially false definition. And since knowledge must therefore become dated quite rapidly, it follows that textbooks are inherently useless, unless the information they contain remains relevant, say, twenty or thirty years down the road. I could do this when writing my book about simple chemical spot testing because the subsets of observable phenomena were of extremely limited scope; but you cannot do this with all kinds of knowledge. I was fortunate that this information could be recycled from earlier texts and still be relevant.
Education is useless, therefore, if it seeks only to impart "knowledge", because what is defined as "useful knowledge" changes from day to day and from year to year – indeed, from society to society. It needs instead to impart an algorithm which allows people not to stick with what they know but to acquire new information and integrate it usefully into their existing mental "schema" – their existing mental "snapshot" of the phenomena under discussion – including the ability to change the algorithm itself when circumstances demand it.
Education remains useless when it remains tied to the classroom. Bringing people together transmits diseases like colds and chicken pox and mumps and whooping cough, and it also transmits distraction (because social interaction between students cannot be prevented) and is therefore inefficient. I am not trying to suggest that the educational process should be a lonely one with no social interaction at all; what I am suggesting is that its effectiveness is minimised because there are too many distractions. I know from my college and university experience that social interaction, even in the same household, has of necessity to be limited to discussion of the matters in hand to arrive at a consensus; all of the other time must be devoted to study, or you will never achieve your stated aim. You won't catch so many colds, either!
Traditional education is also a useless fudge because it insists on not concentrating at the level of lessons, by which I mean that if I was studying seven or eight subjects at "O" Level in England all those years ago, you can bet there would be four or five of these each day, perhaps even more. This is a recipe for confusion, and here in Korea it is even worse, because the kids go to school all day and then probably go to two or three hagwons afterwards. They are tired, confused and irritable and what they are studying is dull and probably irrelevant to their future employment as a podiatrist or PC-room proprietor. Schooling needs instead to be a strange mixture of modularity and integration of subjects so that unnecessary learning is not forced and new knowledge is actively sought by the student. Imagine what an effect this would have on affective filters and motivation!
So when you hear people, especially so-called "education professionals" or "education policy-makers" spouting out on this subject, just remember this: all that they are interested in is promoting themselves and their careers. If their ideas are wrong, nobody is going to come breaking down their front doors demanding a refund, it just doesn't happen; this is the nature of "professions". They move on or die, but the rest of us still have to suffer for their mistakes. The attitude reaches its zenith in professorial posts, where, in many countries, incumbents in professorial chairs love the kudos and security of such a position. But this is a bad thing. For example, young Chinese people are reportedly leaving their homeland in droves to get an education in Europe or America or Australasia. Why? Because their own professors back in China are people who sincerely believe that they are there on merit, whereas in fact they are just peddlers of repetition. They repeat what they were taught when they were younger as if the world has not moved on, and are extremely harsh with anyone who disagrees; and their potential students know this, and have voted with their feet.
In the final analysis, we need to ask ourselves what suitable performance metrics might be for the educational process. Knowledge alone is not enough; logic – the logical application of what the student has learned – is also vitally important. Increased relevance of what is learned is relevant for both student and future employer, and therefore for the economy. This means that we need to divorce the process both from the dictatorship of so-called educationalists and their pet prejudices, and from the hegemony of the classroom, which is a distracting and inefficient place of learning. Students need to be able to learn what they want, when they want it, and metrics need to be in place which act as important feedback during the educational process to show them how well or how badly they are doing. And above all, we need to get away from the idea that there is or should be a corpus of immutable "knowledge", and transition to an understanding of the need for a "learning algorithm" which allows our understanding to change when knowledge changes. Then we will really know what "lifelong learning" is.
