Why Don’t Students Like School? summary

Imagine the effort it would take if, each time you chopped an onion, you had to figure it out anew: At what angle should you hold the knife, and where should you cut? Luckily, our brains have developed in a way that allows us to stockpile solutions to past problems – in memory.

Our memory falls into two categories. Working memory is best thought of as a form of consciousness. We receive inputs directly from our environments, and working memory handles the information appropriate to the task at hand. For example, when we’re temporarily memorizing a phone number or counting how many onions have been chopped, it’s our working memory storing those digits.

For the native English speaker, learning German, while hard, isn’t as tricky as getting to grips with, say, Japanese. Why is that? You would think that as they’re both foreign languages, they’d be equally difficult to learn. Well, unluckily for English-speaking expats in Japan, that’s just not how the brain works.

The truth is, your brain isn’t very good at processing new information cold; that is to say, it likes to have some prior contextual knowledge, alongside which new knowledge can be easily placed. So if there’s no contextual content we can work with, it’s hard to make connections, and thus harder to make information stick.

Everyone loves watching movies. But nobody fast-forwards through one just to get to the climax, even though that might be the best part of the movie. That would defeat the whole point. If you skip straight to the end, any climax will either be pointless or, worse, incomprehensible.

The same holds true of learning. Most teachers want their students to develop their critical thinking and analytic skills. This is understandable as these are valuable skills. Before the students can do that, however, it’s crucial they develop a firm understanding of the subject’s fundamental facts and principles.

You’ve probably heard someone describing themselves as either a visual, auditory or tactile learner. That is, they have a preferred “channel” through which they believe they most effectively absorb new information. It’s a powerful idea, but is it true?

In reality, this is one of the most widespread misconceptions in educational psychology. Almost no research supports the hypothesis. So don’t go blaming the fact that you didn’t have enough audiobooks as a kid for your lack of a Nobel prize today!

For a long time, it was simply assumed children were born with their talents set in stone; people were athletic or intelligent, and nothing could change that. However, these assumptions have come under attack of late. In the nature versus nurture debate, nurture is finally getting its due.

We now know that intelligence is the result of both genetics and environment. Intelligence is based on the brain’s capacity. But critically, it’s been shown that the brain is extremely malleable. This isn’t to deny the biological fact that children are born with different levels of intelligence; it’s just that those levels can be altered. This does, however, require sustained effort.

It’s stating the obvious to say that pupils go to school to learn. What’s easily forgotten, though, is that teachers must do likewise.

Educational establishments naturally place a premium on student learning. But, paradoxically, unless they take the time to encourage teachers to improve as well, pupils will suffer.