Tape recorder model of education

Tape recorder model of education is a model based on the illusion that a perfect input of knowledge in education can be memorized with perfect accuracy, and played back perfectly when needed.

Short-sighted educators believe that curriculum can be optimized to perfection. It can reflect the optimum knowledge that each child should posses. It can reflect political and social needs that can be programmed by the authors of the content.

A tape recorder can record any algorithm. However, the playback of the algorithm is useless as the algorithm cannot be executed. A tape recorder is not an intelligent device. This is why education must look at the brain as a vast system of neural networks equipped with all necessary tools for acquiring abstract knowledge that can be optimized in use via generalization.

John Holt used a similar model: The bottling plant model in which children at school are like bottles filled with pre-programmed educational content in an industrialized fashion. All educational problems are simplified to the optimization of the content of the bottle (identical for all bottles), and the size of the opening through which the content is to be poured (i.e. child's "intelligence").

Recording knowledge on a tape recorder or filling up the brain bottles are good metaphors for the process of cramming, which is the opposite of semantic learning.

Failure of education systems around the world can largely be ascribed to the illusion that brains are similar to tape recorders

This glossary entry is used to explain "I would never send my kids to school" (2017-2024) by Piotr Wozniak