The French are not supposed to make mistakes
Where else but France would you find a billboard advertising for after school remedial teaching named "zerofaute.com"? Is education's finality that learners never make mistakes? I was struck that this would never be an selling point in the US, where children are supposed to be superlative, to strive to be their best.Can one learn from one's mistakes, take risks, use trial and error methodology, if above all as a learner you mustn't make mistakes? Pushing the envelope of knowledge requires learning from one's mistakes. Otherwise learning is relegated to just replicating lessons? No wonder the French excel in Mathematics, where rigorous proofs can be made with no exceptions possible.
This paradigm puts the teacher in the impossible position of never being allowed to be wrong and of being the meter by which correctness is measured absolutely. How many of us have found somewhere along our learning career that we found the teacher was wrong and how disappointed we were.
This brings me to yet another point; the silence in a class, the absence of questions; successful students in France, those who have made it to the university, have learned that they best not ask questions. This absence of questions remains a frustrating mystery to me even today. I suppose that this may be part of the "no mistakes paradigm", where students fear they might be asking the wrong questions. I, on the other hand, as a teacher and learner feel that questions allow me to rectify my discourse and adapt myself better to what I understand to be the students' representations (or my own) of what I am explaining. This for me is a crucial part of teaching and learning; it is difficult for me to imagine learning without questioning.
posted by Brett @ 6:19 PM
9 Comments:
I think you can't learn without doing mistakes or this not a personnal apprenticeship, it's just memorised some informations and utilise it. Today, (I work with children after school) I see children who have to learn some lessons on history or civic education, and they have difficults to learn because they don't understand what they have to learn by heart! I think there are problems in this pedagogy!
On the subject of questions I don't know why studients don't have the courage to ask something during lessons...I feel personnaly fear to say something wrong!...but when you really want to understand, you take your courage and you ask the teacher,...I hope!
I agree entirely that passive learning and faultless repetition of existing models can only lead to stagnation, in the individual and in society. However, we can criticise all we want; these values are so much a part of the French consciousness that they can't be changed unless the people want them to change. I think that with current social and economic trends, France may lose faith in old ways and start looking for new ones sooner rather than later, but even then change is never easy.
The way the french people learn in class has been compared to mathematics before. From my experience in college, teachers and even the director had always a better view of the people who went in the scientific section.
Maybe the scientific orientation has a better social status in France. In my college, the director tried to push the best students to go in the scientific section. This is also a part of the problem.
I think that the main problem is the way we see education globaly. Most of the teachers just come in the class and read the papers they brought . This gives borin lessons, where students just write down what the teachers says, even without trying to understant most of it.
From my point of view there should be a debate, a discussion between the teacher and the student.
And that is the main problem in France: we want the student to be good sheeps who learn their lessons and spit it out at exams. Self reflexion is not important maybe to make good citizens...
I think that doing mistakes is a part of the learning process as asking question is. I am shy and I know that it could be hard to ask questions in front of a teatcher and many students. But since I am not a 15 years old student anymore I swear I 'll ask more questions!
Personally I've been in a class where a student asked a question (a relevant one, actually) only to have the teacher say, in a not too friendly fashion, that she refused to answer!!! The whole class (500 students) could not believe how coldly and flatly the teacher refused to give an answer..
Now, I don't know about you, but if I were that student, I would refuse to ask a question again!! Now that I think about it, I don't think there was a question again in the class of this particular teacher..
I understand that all teachers are not like this... But that was a very effective way to stop students from asking questions in the future!!!
French people are very proud about
French school. In my opinion, we have to be careful because if I compare the French system and the German system, I realize that German children have more time to play (for example, in the afternoon). In France, children have to stay in school until five o'clock. At the university, the systems are quite the same...but the German students are not really under pressure.
We have to be more humble.
In fact, the French education "crème de la crème" must change.
In our country, we are in fact not really democratic because for several schools like ENA, it's easier to rank high in a selection exam if you have all possibilities to prepare for it.
Otherwise, there are private schools (for example, business schools). Anyway, like in America, these schools can be very expensive.
I deeply believe that someone cannot learn without making mistakes, because this also implies, according to me, that the individual will simply adopt the "parrot learning" method.
Yet, I do agree that obtaining such results where correct answers are omnipresent would be a large improvement in education. I think this would be the goal to be achieved, one nearing perfection, so as to never be satisfied with your level and always strive to do better.
Still, learners should not start with a view to simply swallow the maximum amount of information; instead perhaps they should start with an open-minded point of view and mostly promote understanding. Once the base has been mastered, then the learner should be ready to reach a level to make the minimum amount of mistakes possible.
Although teachers find the silence unbearable, and have the tendency to constantly ask if there are any questions, they will be perplexed if all their students have perfect scores. The irony of the situation is that for the next evaluation, to identify the best, the teachers will make the evaluation such that the learners must make mistakes.
I thus think that viewing mistakes as a positive possibility to improve oneself is good, because although we may learn by other means, we are sure to learn by the mistakes we make...
Since I went to highschool in Luxembourg I don't know how intensive this phenomena of "bad" education is in French schools. But the circumstances of the French education system reminded me those I experienced myself : students and even young pupils are afraid of asking questions during the lessons because they fear that everyone else knows the answer and would break out laughing and make the asking student feel embarrassed..."I didn't understand but I have better not to ask because maybe from now on they will think I am stupid and they are going to reproach me with not knowing the right answer and, if it turns out worst, are going to bully me" is the main though preventing many individuals from interupting a lesson, a conversation or even a game. It's the peer-to-peer pressure that makes us fear knowing less than the others.
www
Post a Comment
<< Home