On apathetic students

After telling our education reform ideas to colleagues, many of them reply with, "some students just do not care, and only strive for a passing grade to graduate." Since our proposed mastery learning would completely remove grades (you must master the topic to move on), then the worry is that apathetic students would be held back longer and this could cause a strain on the institutions. In this blog post, I discuss how our mastery learning system will have less apathetic students than the current education system.

Apathy plays an important factor when building an education system. Students with passion achieve much more than students without. I remember fellow students in elementary school claiming, "I will NEVER need to know how to do this!" Perhaps a student knowing that he will never apply a particular knowledge in the real world causes apathy. Our mastery learning fixes this problem by allowing students to choose what higher level topics they want to learn, and then the sub-topic prerequisites are chosen automatically. This way the student will always be learning precisely what he wants to learn! I think this will motivate students more than the current system.

But shouldn't ALL students learn X? I personally believe what-to-learn is a choice. It is recommended to learn basic things in order to comfortably live, such as basic math for managing finances.

Certain students will accelerate in topics faster than others. It's reality. One shouldn't feel ashamed to learn a particular topic at a slower rate. People are different. But does this time-to-learn difference cause overpopulations in institutions?

Well, this brings us to another topic which can be better described in a separate post: current institutions need to be revised to provide better education. By "institutions", I am referring to elementary, middle, and high schools and universities. One revision is to remove the notion of "grade levels" and use "topic levels" instead. Not everyone needs to go to "class", but you must take a test (at anytime you wish) to advance the topic. Some students may just wish to study themselves in a library, and only visit the institution for guidance.

Another revision is that teachers should only teach, and should stay away from designing tests, grading, and deciding who passes the class. Teachers should guide students based on the standardized requirements for a particular topic, which is made publicly clear in our proposed system.

There is a need for a more standardized learning system, so that when Joe from Louisiana learns topic X and Mary from New York learns topic X we can safely assume they learned the exact same thing. When learning a new topic that requires understanding X, it is safe to say that Mary and Joe both have sufficient knowledge to understand this new topic, regardless where and how they learned X.

With our proposed system, I believe academic learning will happen at a much greater speed. Students will only struggle with topics at hand, since their previous topics are already mastered. This makes less problems for the student to deal with, and allows the student to focus precisely on the topic area which is most confusing.

More about how to implement such a standardized mastery learning system will be outlined in my next post.