I’m taking French classes at the moment, preparing myself for a bachelor in computer science taught primarily in French. It’s been a while since I was last sitting in a classroom being educated and it’s not exactly easy to adjust myself to the situation.

I’ve been having a real job with real responsibilities for a while and it strikes me how different the approach of education versus work is. In a typical classroom situation, we each get a copy of an excersise sheet to practice some particular grammatical rule or subset. We then all answer identical questions with hopefully identical answers until the teacher stops us and we each give an answer or two. She then, corrects it if it’s wrong, and proceeds to the next person if it isn’t. We might talk a little further about a specific grammatical rule afterwards, and there is a possibility for us to ask any questions regarding the topic we might have. Usually nobody asks about anything.

At work if I needed to learn something new, the situation was reversed. Instead of sitting in my seat, waiting for somebody to teach me what I need, I would usually try to judge the situation at hand and figure out what I needed to know to solve the problem. To attain that knowledge it would be up to me to look for it in the right places or ask somebody competent, and when I found something relevant I would have to try my best to apply it to my particular situation by trial and error.

To me the main difference between the two scenarios is how I at the language class passivly receives the same knowlegde as everybody else, why I in a work situation actively try to find the specific knowlegde that I need. There are of course many differences between solving a particular coding problem and learning another language, but I can’t help to wonder why a voluntary language class is based around an learning method where I have no say in my own learning.

If we all were perfect clones with similar capabilities and equal needs, then it would make sense, but we aren’t. In fact we are quite an add bunch from around Europe with different backgrounds in French and different needs and expectations for the course. Personally I speak French very well but couldn’t spell if my life depended on it, while many in my class has endured years of writing in French classes. Wouldn’t it be an advantage if we, instead of filling out the same worksheets, actually used each other and the teacher as a resource we could draw on to take responsibility for our own learning. Would that be impossible?

I don’t want to be promoting pure educational anarchy, but what I imagine is a situation where the teacher reviews our individual needs, provides tools, projects and knowlegde to help us achieve them, and makes sure that we take use of our collective knowlegde as a class. To make the time spent feel worthwhile the whole deal could possibly be packed up in a project that each person or seperate groups present in the end. This way the teaching is suddenly in our own hands, and we would get just as much out of our education as we put in it.

I suspect that when students are taught to passively receive knowlegde instead of actively gaining it, they will most likely end up doing the exact same thing in real life. I think that’s a shame, especially because it means I’ll be sitting through lots of boring lectures in the weeks to come.