This was a tough one to find studies for, but if you’ll bear with me, I think I have found a reasonable argument. The school system is failing us. They’ve stopped taking responsibility for teaching us, and are changing the way our society (and children) grow up; and I believe it is for the worse.

Some schools have changed their whole method of teaching. In my high school, some classes operated on what was called the “flipped classroom” principle. This is when a teacher makes a youtube video of him/her teaching the lesson,  then has the student watch this at home and take notes. Once in class for the day, the teacher briefly answers questions then helps the students with what would normally be considered homework. You could argue that this doesn’t help students, or you could say it does. It teaches students from an early age to be independent with their learning, to learn how to teach themselves. I personally believe that it is too early in the student’s life to be trusted with teaching themselves. This is something that you do when you pay to go to college and skip class; not something that you have to do in early high school. High school is still when you have the opportunity to take an entire year to learn a subject, take an hour a day in small classes to really learn the material.

Or do you? This article featured in the AAHE Bulletin, illustrates 7 principles of learning. Number 3 talks about Active learning. Active learning is “Learning by doing, time-delayed exchange, and real-time conversation“. Some people are Visual learners, who learn best by watching. Others learn best by hands on techniques. But you know what no one is good at? Book learning. This is what Andrew tries to eliminate by giving us practical applications and uses to apply what we learn. I feel that we as a culture are being bread for simple “learning”. We show up to class, we take notes, we read a book, we then get ready to take a test. Our test preparation consists of taking all of the information we learned, and cramming it in our Short term memory. We spit it out on our test answer sheet; then after the test we “flush” the information out of our brain to make room for the next round. We aren’t learning anything, we’re simply robots programmed to repeat what we need to repeat on a test, then move on to the next thing. I feel more teachers should be like Andrew, and try and focus on the practical implications of what we learn. By drawing connections on what we learn, we can start the process of transferring our info from short term memory into longer lasting ideas and concepts.