Sarah Meisinger

The Joy of Learning

When people talk about the current school system problems such as student laziness, over-inflated grades, lack of teacher training and over-crowded classrooms are just some of the issues brought up. The current education system is so focused on the amount of information children need to learn and performance on standardized testing that the love of knowledge has become a thing of the past. To truly create happy and educated members of society, the joy of learning needs to be put back into the school system.

For me and many other people I have talked to- the time where school stopped being fun seemed to be in elementary school. I can remember when my homework was to color a picture or read a story with my parents. In "The Organization Kid", David Brooks talks about the increasing amount of homework elementary students have: in 1981 six-to-eight year olds did fifty-two minutes of homework a week, whereas in 1997 that amount increased to two hours. I understand that homework is a very useful tool, but students at this age are still excited about learning and doing hours of homework is one of the best ways I can think of to destroy that. I've seen what types of homework my younger brother brings home-- the majority of it looks like busy work or work that requires no outside thinking. If a large amount of homework is necessary, it should be fun or creative something that a child of six would be excited about looking up. If it's not interesting, then they are going to be more likely to rush through it in order to have fun playing or watching TV and not get any benefit from it.

Kids are overwhelmed with homework and the need to know more and more information partially because of how the education system is designed. In order to get funding, schools must perform well on standardized tests. This puts pressure on the teachers to teach to the tests rather than to find new ways to get information across. A standardized test isn't going to measure how well a student is able to teach themselves or how creative and bright they are; all these tests show is a students ability to take information and give it back. Designing a classroom around a test with that as the goal is going to make the classroom extremely boring and limit what teachers can do creatively.

The one thing that I always hear when improving classroom interaction is smaller class size. In "End The Mediocrity of Our Public Universities," Murray Sperber suggests that a "slim down" in the number of college students is needed in order to avoid the larger fairly ineffective lecture classes. Of course it will cost more to build more classrooms or hire more teachers or whatever else needs to be done to decrease class size. I realize that money is an important part of any kind of institution, but when student learning is being affected then the joy of learning for the sake of learning gets lost in the dollars and cents.

To see how the system is negatively affecting students, one just has to look at their attitude toward school. A study of Appalachian freshman showed that 39.5% of male students and 29.9% of female students are not interested in their classes (Clark 3). This lack of interest spills over into absenteeism, lack of participation, and ultimately students not learning anything. In college these attitudes seem to be most prevalent in the general education classes. In my observation there seems to be no problem with students in their core classes. This makes sense with the student mindset-- core classes are needed to achieve their goals, something they have learned from their standardized testing experience, but they see no value in learning about new ideas just for the pure joy of knowing a little more about life and the world. Only 39.3% of a national survey of college freshman thought that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was important in contrast to the 85.8% in 1967 (Engle 3). Students aren't looking deeper into life, and I believe that this will make them less productive members of society because they will be so narrowly focused. It is my understanding that the purpose of general education requirements was to avoid a narrowly focused graduate. However if students refuse to take advantage of these classes and just do the bare minimum and forget the information after taking a final exam, then nobody has benefited and the student has wasted their money and time.

Students are partially to blame for lack of enthusiasm in the classroom, but some of the blame has to fall on the teachers. As a student myself I realize that it's a very easy thing to point the finger at professors and administrators, but the fact is that the format of general education classes is just not a good learning environment, no matter how great a student's attitude may be. Large lecture classes, burned out and bored teachers are how I would describe most of my experiences with prerequisite classes. Lecture classes have their place, but this often turns into a mindless cycle of writing down notes and giving them paraphrased slightly for an exam. These classes should be fun-- where are the discussions or group projects? Professors need to expect more from their students-- we are bright people who on a deeper level want to be engaged and interacted with. It feels good to challenge an idea or get excited about learning something new. Sadly many students aren't challenged until they reach college and even then they are still in a high school rut of doing the bare minimum and expecting their school work to require nothing of them intellectually.

Throughout my experience as a student the past fifteen years I've had teachers who got me excited about learning and discovering new things. These were the experiences that stay with me and influence the way I am today. Redesigning the education system to have smaller interactive classrooms that would encourage creativity would make it easier for students to find joy in learning.

Works Cited

Brooks, David. "The Organization Kid". Atlantic Monthly April 2001: 40-54.
Clark, Kathy and Dan Freidman. "Appalachian Freshman Survey". Student Life and Learning May 2000:1-3.
Engle, Shaena. "Political Interest on the Rebound Among the Nation's Freshmen". 20031-4.
Sperber, Murray. "End the Mediocrity of Our Public Universities". The Chronicle of Higher Education 20 Oct.2000.