Sunday, October 17, 2010

The anachronistic pedagogy structure and process

While everybody is pointing the finger of blame at why American education has degenerated so, no one has dared to bring up 'the elephant in the living room'-that the structure and process of pedagogy, how knowledge is formally transmitted, has fallen behind the revelations of how individuals most efficiently comprehend and process stimulation for their learning. The structure of pedagogy is such that:

1-It provides a second to third hand experience that is inferior to the first hand experiences, which interactive media have brought back to our recollection of profound cognitive impact.

2-This inferior process is no longer the predominate medium, but one of many diverse media and the least desirable, because of its necessary and analog, tedious, mental and physical storage requirements that are time as well as cognitively inefficient in their transference of the requisite knowledge.

3-The process of instruction obstructs the direct interactive experience with the objective phenomena, as the 'instructors' are trained in forms that are, generally, detached from the subject and do not give the emotional sensory involvement that allows for profound comprehension. Thus, a sterile message with compelling-challenged form and content is given to individuals who are raised in a more direct interactive environment as their natural cognitive communication medium.

4-The exponentially and increasing commercialization of the educative process is evermore financially prohibitive for people to afford without mortgaging their lives away. Again, the result of this is that those knowledge areas requiring the greater funds for access produce people who are motivated to seek positions in careers that will enable them to pay the exorbitant charges for the learning they have acquired. This process drains away those who'd have the best comprehension of that knowledge to the 'instructor' professions. This does not insinuate that those who choose the instructor profession are less competent, but it does imply that those who'd have the genius to come up with better modes of learning end up in other professions.

5-The instructor-student relation obstructs the direct experience of the student with the subject phenomena. The student gets a sterile, homogenized version of the phenomena which comes in a form more alien to them than the normal modes with which they interact for experience.

6-The cultural bias the protocols instill in the instructors the form, and the content that is instructed. This creates an unnecessary 'white noise' of bias that further alienates those students who are less congruent in their experience to the form and content of the knowledge being 'biasly' presented to them.

There are ever more faults with pedagogy to be said. My recommendations for improving pedagogy would be to:
1-Recognize the more profound emotional, thus intellectual impact direct experience with the desired phenomena than with second and third hand verbal symbols of literacy.

2-A corollary to '#1'-Oral engagement is better than reading engagement.

3-Literary symbols should be used as signs and directional pointers.

4-As much direct and first hand interaction should be emphasized to give the student the greatest emotional and intellectual compelling comprehension possible.

5-Educators need a process that enables them to provide the compelling emotional comprehension for the subject material.

6-Education must become more democratized as a communal experience of access rather than an esoteric pursuit for the few and the chosen who are cloistered in financially prohibitive locations which the average income earner is precluded.

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