The Perfection Gap
Oct. 25th, 2017 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vit_r960 words, reading time: 4 minutes, this extra information may be necessary to understand further explanations.
Small children like to draw. They copy characters from comics and films, think out new creatures, tell stories through pictures. They enjoy the creative process.
Most school graduates are afraid of drawing and painting.
Why?
The school exist for obtaining new knowledge. This means in the course of studying children are supposed to learn new ways and new tools that help them to present their thoughts as images on a flat surface. But the result is the opposite: instead of continuing and improving they stop. What knowledge obtained in the school produces this effect? This is the Perfection Gap.
Children see perfect samples in their schoolbooks but they are struggling on the other side with their limited knowledge and their rudimentary skills. Pretty quick they understand that the Perfection Gap is too wide even to start an attempt to reach the other side.
Drawing inability is only the most prominent and the most obvious effect of modern education. The school systematically cultivates the inferiority complex. It shows children only best samples of completed items:
- perfect paintings without sketches, tonal studies and overpainted mistakes;
- best literature works without first drafts, second drafts, tenth drafts and thousand thrown away pages;
- physical laws without theories that were used many centuries until they were proved to be wrong;
- elegant mathematical formulas without tricky tangled calculation rules for Roman and Assyrian numbers;
- genial predictions of wise visionaries without their dumb mistakes;
- chemistry without misconceptions of alchemists;
- grammar without dialects and obsolete language features;
- questions where the right answer can be simple written into a small empty field.
The latest is the source of many problems in modern education. Only simplest questions can be answered after a clean graceful fly over the Perfection Gap. Almost all real world problems cannot be solved in one-step-thinking. Usually they also have many more or less correct answers. A person who tries to solve them must know how to travel to the other side through the swamp of doubts and errors.
True knowledge is not about destination but about the ways to reach the goal. Previous generations had perfect tools to discover them: a piece of chalk and a blackboard.
A teacher who forgets a sign and is forced to find the place with this mistake and redo the following calculations... A classmate taking wrong way in the middle of a theorem proof... A hint from the first row when a simple gesture returns you to the right path... This were the step stones that helped discover paths to the other side of the Perfection Gap.
Now children are forced to place a word or a number into predefined fields in their workbooks. They even do not strike their mistakes through but erase the ink and write a "correct" version on the same place. Drafts are banned from classrooms.
Step stones that had helped previous generations are systematically hidden, destroyed and removed. Consequently more and more children learn the bitter true: "Don't be down. This is perfectly normal. You simply don't have any talent for X."
Do not try to find here evil intentions or masterminds who plan to make people dumb. This is only the back side of the progress in pedagogical sciences and in educational industries.
A good schoolbook may teach many generations of students. A workbook which forces each reader to write answers on its pages must be thrown away at he end of each school year. Consequently a publisher that sells long-living books struggles to survive because of rare purchases and its competitor that sells throw-away workbooks receives a payment from each student. (Actually it is even better if this workbooks are bad written and not suitable for learning because you can sell additional workbooks for supplementary classes and special handbooks for parents who try to help their children.)
Teachers don't waste time trying to decipher children's scribbles but simply compare answers in the boxes on a page with the values that are listed in teachers' complimentary answer books. This is better for eyes and is more productive. In case the test is moved into a computer and children have to type their answers themselves the load on a teacher can be reduced to zero.
Teachers also won't be ashamed by making mistakes before their pupil. Instead of fighting for their authority with a piece of chalk in their hand they can show typographically perfect Power Point presentations with texts and funny images stolen from Internet.
Of course this also removes an awkward situation when a child plays dumb before a blackboard and the teacher must stop the class starting to laugh at their classmate.
As you can see the progress gives big advantages in comparison with old ways. The fact that it shows to children its back side (or something below the back) is a small collateral damage in comparison with benefits that it provides for teachers, pedagogical scientists and educational industries.
It is unwise to fight against the progress and the wisdom of the crowd but I'll try. To show ways across the Perfection Gap I'll use Intentionally Primitive Technologies (IPT).
This means:
- Standard office software will be preferred over specific educational applications and squared paper will be preferred over the office software.
- Hand-drawn sketches will be preferred over vector graphic and photos from internet.
- Simple layouts will be preferred over typographical perfection.
- Ideas in their draft state will be made available for public critique and correction instead of collecting them in a "perfect" form of a book or a lecture.
Of course this approach does not guarantee success and "Intentionally Primitive Technologies" are not quite primitive because I was on the other side but I think it is worth a try.
Next part will be posted in few days.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-25 06:06 am (UTC)В принципе, тема висит давно и ответов как не было так и нет. Серьёзно пришлось копать где-то с того момента, когда понял, что на тему качества бесполезна как книжка так и танцы перед экраном. Потому что сам формат такой передачи информации является источником многих фундаментальных проблем.
Текст предельно сжат. Только про рисование, лингвистику графических языков и культуру слов и изображений можно написать несколько полновесных статей. Школа обозначена грубыми штрихами, чтобы показать сам принцип, без разбора конкретных проблем. Если серьёзно копать, это тема для научного исследования со сбором статистики по обширной международной базе. То есть, здесь только иллюстрация на уровне интуиции. У меня она хорошо работает в основном потому, что учился я в 239 у лучших учителей СССР (получавших звания и ордена, а после развала ставших соросовскими) плюс в ЛИТМО было несколько совершенно фантастических преподавателей. Те, кто не видел хороших методик в своё время и ужаса в учебниках своих детей сегодня, может и не понять моих намёков.
Всё вышесказанное имеет непосредственное отношение к обучению софтописанию и к распространению информации в софтописательной индустрии, но глубоко и подробно говорить об этом я сейчас не готов. О том, что относится к очевидным вещам, я пытался писать лет пятнадцать-двадцать назад. Но, если начать копать, всё оказывается гораздо глубже и гораздо сложнее.
Словарь говорит, что бумага в клетку называется "squared paper", но также используются термины "quad paper" и "graph paper". Так как с американской и английской школой я не общался, со многими терминами такой же затык. Но в данном случае и на русском не понятно было бы как формулировать, потому что я не знаю, как сейчас на грамматически правильном литературном языке называется место, куда ученик должен вписать единственно верный ответ.
Название "intentially bad drawings" превратилось в IPT. Это не совсем правильно, но гораздо лучше. Пока остановился на нём.
Термин the Perfection Gap применяется обычно для описания причин прокрастинации, то есть отсутствия желания при наличии возможностей. Но это всё одно и то же. Надо будет как-нибудь сформулировать рабочую модель мотивации, собрав из разных психологических теорий разумные части.
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Date: 2017-10-25 06:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-25 09:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-25 11:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-26 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-26 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-26 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-26 07:45 pm (UTC)Поклонники Монтессори возражают.
Считать каждого, кого школа срезала, недостаточно талантливым - это и не наш метод.
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Date: 2017-10-26 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-25 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-25 07:08 pm (UTC)