Summer slide is an indictment of school

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This text is part of: "Problem of Schooling" by Piotr Wozniak (2017-2024)

Vacation condemns schooling

Schooling is so inefficient that a two month vacation can ravage memories and skills acquired during the prior school year. This is a blatant proof of the horrible quality of memories produces by schooling. However, even this glaring and patent demonstration fails to enlighten those who believe that the enlightenment can only come through schooling!

Vacation is a waste

Jeff Smink in New York Times wrote:

No matter how effective other school reforms are, our traditional 180-day school calendar creates an incredibly inefficient system of learning. We cannot afford to spend nearly 10 months of every year devoting enormous amounts of intellect, energy and money to promoting student learning and achievement, and then walk away from that investment every summer. This waste is preventable. According to the RAND report, good summer programs with individualized instruction, parental involvement and small classes can keep children from falling behind and reduce the achievement gap. Yet many districts, including New York City, have not fully embraced the summer’s potential. In New York, around 34,000 third through eighth graders are required to take summer school classes this year in order to be promoted to the next grade. The classes typically last only half the day, leaving many on their own for the afternoon

In short, Jeff Smink is saying that there are enormous costs to learning at school, and all the effort is easily destroyed by a short summer vacation. An obvious conclusion is: if school knowledge disappears so easily, we should give up school and think of some sensible learning methods that produce better stability of memories. For example, free learning (or its subsets, incremental reading). Instead, we mindlessly throw good money after bad. The stubborn mantra says that if 10 months of schooling produces unstable knowledge, we should try adding 2 months and pray they will make a difference. Superficially, it seems to work. With continual review and repetition, even the worst nonsense may seem to stick to memory. If we keep flapping the arms, the pressure of the feet on the ground seems lightened. We can then keep flapping in hope of starting off to a flight.

More of what is not working

Tom Durrie is an amazing nonagenarian (born 1931). In the 1960s, he was a teacher in a free school in which kids could enjoy free learning. He could see how freedom can remedy behavioral problems. He could see learning as a natural process based on emergence. In his delightful blog: "Rants and Raves of Tom Durrie", Durrie rants about the madness of summer learning:

Golly, what are these kids doing all summer? Just goofing off when they should be practicing math and spelling? Or is it just that what they have been “taught” matters so little to them that forgetting is perfectly natural and to be expected? I’ll bet they haven’t forgotten how to play soccer. As you might expect, the suggested remedy is more school. Cut out summer vacation completely or provide more school during the summer. The usual philosophy is: If it isn’t working, give them more of it

Shallow academic skills

Peter Gray put the same idea in different words, and noticed that schools like to take credit for child's own explorations:

Very little is learned in a few months of school that is remembered over time. There is even evidence that the skills schools are most concerned about — literacy and numeracy skills — are actually more deeply learned in out-of-school activities than in school

Gray explains the insanity of asemantic learning fostered by the early curriculum, and the importance of coherence for building memory stability. He explains why summer slide is just one of many indicators of the harm inflicted by early academic instruction:

The learning of academic skills without the appropriate intellectual foundation is necessarily shallow. When the drill stops—maybe for summer vacation—the skills are quickly forgotten. That’s the famous “'summer slide” in academic ability that some educators want to reduce by keeping children in school all year long! Our brains are designed to hold onto what we understand and to discard nonsense. Moreover, when the procedures are learned by rote, especially if the learning is slow, painful, and shame-inducing, as it often is when forced, such learning may interfere with the intellectual development needed for real reading or real math

Sieve metaphor of memory

The sieve metaphor explains the inefficiency of schooling:

Memory is volatile. We often compare memory to a sieve that fails to retain much of what we need. Cramming or asemantic learning is like pouring water through a sieve. If a child's brain refuses to accept the multiplication table, all memorization efforts are wasteful. The solution to the problem of memory is to let knowledge crystallize. Let it build little semantically coherent blocks. Crystals of knowledge will be retained in the sieve. Schooling evolves to be asemantic (see: Asemantic curriculum). The things that are hardest for the young brain (e.g. math, reading, etc.) receive the status of essential building blocks of knowledge. The brute force "solution" is to pour more water in hope of keeping its level high in the sieve. The learn drive guidance system determines the optimum pathway towards the semantic crystallization. However, the learn drive is systematically ignored, suppressed, and destroyed at school. As a result, the entire school system is based on fake learning. We pour chemistry through a sieve, and then physics, and then others subjects. In the meantime the sieve is getting rusty through abuse. Mental health and love of learning are systematically undermined. Instead, we should restore the pleasure of learning, and easily keep all golden nuggets of knowledge in the sieve. This is why compulsory schooling must end

If memory is like a sieve, pouring water through the summer will only make the sieve more rusty. With their last vestiges of freedom lost, children will start turning mad. The whole idea of invading the sacred period of vacation is criminally insane!

Celebrate summer

Summer slide provides evidence of the inefficiency of schooling. Instead of adding more schoolwork or homework in summer, we should celebrate forgetting. Let the mind get rid of all the garbage that is sustained only by staying busy at school. This forgotten knowledge has no coherence and no applicability that would make it solidify. The brain knows best. Let it re-organize. Summer is the time to deschool the free mind. Summer slide is the effect of a healthy garbage collection executed by the brain.

Alfie Kohn agrees with my indictment:

Summer loss thus should be seen not as a sad but inescapable truth about education, but as one more indictment of traditional education, with its reliance on lectures, textbooks, worksheets, grades, tests, and homework—all employed in the service of making students cram bits of knowledge into their short-term memories. How absurd to think that the solution to this predictable forgetting is to give students more of the same!

Kohn also emphasizes the value of mental garbage collection:

Experts who study creativity like to talk about doing and resting, painting and stepping back from the canvas, thinking about a problem and taking a break during which a new insight may sneak up when we’re not expecting it

Summer vacation is a sacred period of freedom and fun that should be protected with religious zeal



For more texts on memory, learning, sleep, creativity, and problem solving, see Super Memory Guru