Curiosity is the Engine of Achievement

The title is a quote from a Ken Robinson Education TED talk. Another is "Teaching is not a delivery system." It's worth a listen:



One quibble. He says that the purpose of education is learning. I know that's obvious, but it's also easily misplaced, because it leads to the business of measuring learning. The truth is that nobody really knows what "learning" is, and it's probably not one thing at all. The simple-minded view that a teacher shows you how to perform a task, and then you can do it yourself is ubiquitous, but dangerously incomplete. Going back to the title of the post, the real purpose of education is to produce achievement. But schools almost uniformly get a pass on this--students aren't expected to achieve anything real, just pass tests. Ironically perhaps, this is absolutely not true in athletics, where it's not enough to play a good practice game. Nobody really cares about that.

The effect of this shift in perspective is subtle but powerful. If we want achievement, we should cultivate curiosity and intrinsic motivation, and this is a completely different pedagogy than lecture-test-certify. The thesis of an ongoing research project at my college is that the Internet allows the kind of direct engagement with the world that makes this achievement possible in all areas of study. Others are moving in that direction too. You can see an example in Auburn University's Quality Enhancement Plan. They don't take the idea as far as we are trying to, but it's a very nice project, and I love the tag line: Learn it. Live it. Share it.