Education: everyone has an opinion
Saturday, 27 January 2018
“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught: it can only be learnt.”
An Oscar Wilde quotation is always a good place to start, and as we
have recently been discussing the topic of education, this seemed
appropriate.
Everybody has an opinion about education, maybe because we all have
personal experience of it in some way – as a student, a teacher, a
parent, or
all of the above. And most TELC students have experience of more than one education system: their own and England’s. So, discussion is always
lively and
well-informed.
School uniform, discipline, and ways to motivate children (and adult
learners) were some of our discussion points. One remarkable thing was
the general agreement that school uniform is a good thing! I think most
English schoolchildren might disagree. Maybe this is a case of
the grass being greener on the other side of the fence.
Learning styles also provided stimulating discussion material. Is
one-to-one always better than group learning? Well, it depends on your
motivation, and what it is that you are learning. An advanced student of
the classical guitar has a very different set of wants and needs from a
young child learning multiplication tables.
Another interesting question was: Are some people better at learning
languages than others? If you think about your friends and colleagues
the answer may seem to be a simple “yes”, but is natural ability more
important than, say, desire and motivation, when it comes to achieving
success? It goes without saying that they all play a part: the
most important thing is to find your own preferred style of learning,
accept that there are some things you will find difficult, and...
practise!
Words and phrases to learn and use:
all of the above: everything mentioned on this list of things
lively:energetic, the opposite of boring
well-informed:the product of good information; well-researched
the grass being greener on the other side of the fence:
an idiom which means: people always want what they don’t have
It goes without saying: It is obvious...
