February 2012
In a speech to the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute forum, Christopher Pyne (Australian Liberal Party's Manager of Opposition Business) said on education - "I don't see schooling as an opportunity to gain a set of skills. Gaining knowledge and gaining the ability to continue to learn is the pre-eminent purpose of education."
He went on "There has been a shift over the past several decades in schools from gaining knowledge to use for the rest of their lives into training children in a set of skills, which may or may not remain relevant for the rest of their lives. You have to teach kids about things, not just how to do things,"
There is no doubt that he isn’t right. For those who know about the teaching of the great Richard Feynman will of course appreciate Christopher Pyne’s remarks. Here is what Feynman had to say about the subject at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City. And later, in the 1981 BBC Horizon series, Feynman recalls his early leanings in the “The pleasure of finding things out.” Follow the link below to see the video.
Feynman tells the story when at school, kids would show off about how much their dads would teach them things. How for example, one kid learned the name of a particular bird – a brown-throated thrush from his dad.
Feynman’s father had already taught him the name of the bird. He had also taught him that, that doesn't tell him anything about the bird. He had taught him that It's a brown-throated thrush in english, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names, you still know nothing about the bird--
You only know something about humans in different places and what they call the bird.about
Feynman instead learned to look at the bird, learn about what the bird is doing, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=QCqj3wzlvtQ
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