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Engines for Education is a book written by Roger Schank and Chip Cleary that is available in different forms. It is online, on CD-ROM and available in traditional book form. The stated purpose of this book is "to raise consciousness about the changes needed in our educational system." The authors assert that there has usually been more emphasis in schools on making students into proper members of society than there has been on developing students who think creatively. Instead of having a curriculum, being a body of knowledge everybody should know, the authors assert that students should learn facts about the world that they feel they need to know because the facts will help them to do something that interests them. They oppose the idea of "cultural literacy" because this is an idea that presumes there is static academic knowledge. The authors propose some changes that should be made in the school system to create students who are creative thinkers. They believe students should learn to question rather than learn answers. Rather than learn some fact X, they should learn how to reason using fact X.
The authors note that progressive reforms to the educational system have been proposed as long as two centuries ago. One thing that has held back these reforms is economics, because the reforms require giving students individual attention. But now, with computers, we are able to overcome that hurdle, according to the authors. The authors propose letting students guide their own education rather than being force-fed knowledge on someone else's schedule. They also oppose studying to pass competency tests because studying is alien to what they call natural learning, which involves practice, but not studying. Practicing, they assert, is a natural concept. We should be mainly interested in getting students interested enough in something that they will want to learn more about it. This involves helping students to learn how something relates to their goals so that they will care about learning that thing. If they do not care about learning something then they will only cram the knowledge into their heads long enough to pass a test on it and they will immediately forget about it.
The authors assert that schools make a number of mistakes about learning. One of these mistakes is that schools operate as though students can learn without doing. But adults know that we learn best on the job by doing, by the experience of trying things out, so children should too. This I can agree with. It is one of those things that seems intuitively true. Another mistake that the authors assert schools make is in believing that assessment is the natural role of the schools. They take somewhat of a corporate attitude toward schools in this regard, stating that it is the buyer of the products, not the producer of the products who should do the assessing. I would question this by asking if this is so, do not producers test their own products before marketing them in order to ensure their acceptance in the marketplace? Should not schools do the same? It seems incongruous not to make sure that whatever you are producing is going to be successful before you market it. Related to this is the belief that schools feel an obligation to create standard curricula. The authors want to know why everyone should know the same things. I feel that the answer to this question is found in the answer to the previous so-called mistake. If it is necessary to test students before "marketing" them then certain standards must first of all be met in order to ensure the success of students in the "marketplace" for their products.
The authors believe it is a mistaken belief for teachers to think that they have an obligation to tell students what they ought to know. They favour teachers helping students learn what they ought to do. I am with them more on this one. I do think teachers have a role to play in telling students what they ought to know. This does not necessarily mean they should tell students all the specifics of what they ought to know, just what the general outline is of what they should know. This outline should include what students ought to know how to do. I do believe that the experience of the teacher counts for something. The role of this experience comes in guiding the students toward discovering what it is they should be learning. Without this students could think they had learned what they needed to know and only find out later that what they had learned was insufficient. It may be that students would learn what the teacher thinks is necessary to learn and even to go beyond this, which would be wonderful, but the teacher should be there providing sufficient guidance to enable students to reach worthwhile goals. This in no way implies preventing students from going off on a tangent if they discover something interesting. Students may discover things the teacher had never even dreamed of so student initiative should be encouraged.
One of the mistakes the authors point out that I believe most people would probably agree with if they gave it some thought is the idea that instruction can be independent of motivation for actual use. If, when we are learning something we can see that we could actually have a use for what we are learning I think that most of us would be far more inclined to put an effort into learning it. I am unsure that it is always possible to provide this motivation, however. There are some basic skills that we learn that only long after we learn them does it become apparent that we needed these skills. I think that the authors have not entirely considered the mindset of a child, for whom the future is tomorrow, not ten or more years down the road. Most skills we learn in school are for when we get out into the working world and have to support ourselves. Lacking the motivation inherent in having to support ourselves we can fail to see why it is important to learn skills that our future employers will need or that we will need for self-employment. When we as school children are being supported by our parents we do not usually have serious long-term goals to motivate us. This does not negate the need for more motivation in the schools but it should be placed in proper perspective. What motivates adults will not always motivate children.
The authors move on to discuss case-based reasoning as opposed to rule-based reasoning, claiming that most human reasoning is case-based rather than rule-based. In case-based reasoning we compare experiences to each other so we can learn from those experiences. Our minds search for old information to aid us in processing new information. This is a cumulative process of acquiring new information so we can make comparisons that enable us to understand the next case we are faced with. The authors see a problem with expert systems as a result of their stated belief that humans use case-based reasoning. Expert systems use rule-based reasoning, so as a result, when problems present themselves that the rules do not adequately address, the expert systems break down. They cannot fall back to the details of a similar case to apply to solving the new problem.
Related to this concept of case-based reasoning is natural learning, which begins with specifics and moves to generalizations, which is the opposite of what is usually practiced in schools, which begin with generalizations and then move to specifics. The authors assert that generalizations are really only valuable if you make them yourself. This is because generalizations come from lots of cases. There is an intimate relationship between generalizations and understanding. If we are just told a generalization we forget it quickly from lack of use. We have not asked the questions that should form the generalization that would make it meaningful to us, such as "Why do I want to know it?," "What are the exceptions?" and "How does this impact on other things I know?"
The authors believe that computers can give students the individualized attention required for natural learning. They list five teaching architectures that computers can be used to teach: simulation-based learning by doing, incidental learning, learning by reflection, case-based teaching and learning by exploring. The first one requires simulations that will be accurate portrayals of such things as people-to-people interactions. Incidental learning is founded upon tasks whose end results are inherently interesting. Learning by reflection posits that sometimes students do not need to be told something, they need to know how to ask about it and be opened to new ways of thinking about a situation. In case-based teaching the foundation is on two ideas, one being that experts are storehouses of cases and the other is that good teachers are good storytellers. Students should be told exactly what they need to know when they need to know it. Stories are the most useful way to present knowledge. The last architecture, learning by exploring, asserts that when students get involved, they naturally generate questions, which they learn from. Students' questions should be answered when they are generated. Computers are not necessary for these teaching architectures but they can be a medium of change to implement these architectures because they can provide the individualized attention that these architectures require, which would otherwise be economically unfeasible.
I have given an overview of selected parts of this online book, Engines for Education. If you check out the links on my Instructional Design page you will find a link to the book to check it out for yourself. I liked and agreed with parts of the book and disagreed with other parts. The last item I would like to comment on is contained in what the authors call "The Student Bill of Rights." In this they assert that "No student should have to learn something that fails to relate to a skill that is likely to be required in life after school." It would seem to me that this fails to consider such things as appreciation of art, literature, poetry and music to name a few things that for most people will not "be required in life after school." This sounds rather utilitarian to me. There is more to life and school than learning marketable skills. Going to school should be about learning to live life in a manner that makes us fully human. I do not believe that the all the onus should be on the schools to engage students in this pursuit, but this should certainly be part of school life. It may be that the authors did not intend to imply this but they did fail to mention a broader context for the purpose of schools. However, this does not negate the many valuable insights that they have about education.
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