Working in Movement

Learning is at its best when it's engaging. But formalized education isn't always engaging for many who attend. Perhaps the most succinct expression of this sentiment comes from A. J. Soprano, fictional son of the mob boss on the hit HBO series The Sopranos. When asked "How was school today?," the character shoots back "It sucked!"

It's not just fictional mob children who think that the school could offer a better approach to learning. Educational consultant Roger Shank airs his views in an occasional column he writes on the Socratic Arts website.

Shank takes on higher education's approach to on-line learning in The Future of Virtual Universities, and he fires a couple of shots at traditional classroom approaches, too. In a 2002 story, the New York Times pronounced the concepts of the virtual course as a failure. Shank basically agrees with this assessment, but says it's premature to bury the concept. The problem, says Shank, is that universities getting into the on-line learning world didn't take advantage of the inter-activeness offered by computers and networks when they designed this new courseware. Instead, they merely recycled the classroom approach with its dependence on shoveling information into students heads. Not a productive approach, according to Shank:

As far back as Aristotle scholars have pointed out that students learn by doing, but very few schools take this concept seriously. John Dewey complained bitterly in 1916 that's the state of American education was still dominated by the learn by telling model when everyone knows that people learn by doing.

and,

Universities shouldn’t spend time or money copying what they now offer on campus and offering it online because doing so makes the assumption that it is the content of those courses that is valuable. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the content that they offer online is available in textbooks. Students don’t simply buy text books and read them to get an education. The content is not the issue.

So, without the advantage of the computer interactiveness and the vast human capacity for learning from experience, virtual learning could suck as much as the classroom variety for kids like A.J. (and maybe for the rest of us, too.) The only the Sopranos scriptwriters know what would motivate A.J. to cut the crap and get down to learning. For the rest of us, we can learn by doing--if we get the opportunity.