| Thank you for this! 82% is right in the middle. Children who have been raised to value learning will, in all likelihood, value learning. This is not a surprise! I would also be curious to see the breakdown of what fields those students go into. Some people are capable of self-learning in certain fields where as others are not. A great example of this is math, we all have heard stories (or know the person, or are the person!) of someone who can learn math on their own straight from a text book. Then there are others who learn best from an interactive discussion about math with a teacher. And then there are those who learn best about math from a discussion within a peer group! If you look at our current teaching system, it tries to target all three learning styles to varying degrees. Hearing stories about some wonder-kid in 7th grade who taught himself everything up to calculus in a single summer by reading on his own doesn't really help the discussion around setting national educational policy, because that kid is, to say the least, an outlier. Writing is similar. Having an instructor guide students in areas to learn can be very valuable. Left to their own devices and being told to just write poems for a few hours a day for some length of time, I am betting most students wouldn't stumble upon haiku(s?) on their own! |
One of the major problems as I see it is that pretty much all kids are outliers in some way but en masse education tends to ignore this and force uniformity to a great extent (much greater than necessary IMO).