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Overview
In "I Love Learning; I Hate School," Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she herself was transformed by this understanding. Blum concludes that the dominant forms of higher education do not match the myriad forms of learning that help students—people in general—master meaningful and worthwhile skills and knowledge. Students are capable of learning huge amounts, but the ways higher education is structured often leads them to fail to learn. More than that, it leads to ill effects. In this critique of higher education, infused with anthropological insights, Blum explains why so much is going wrong and offers suggestions for how to bring classroom learning more in line with appropriate forms of engagement. She challenges our system of education and argues for a "reintegration of learning with life."
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781501713484 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 04/30/2017 |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 360 |
Sales rank: | 1,104,949 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction: What the Good Student Did Not Know
Part I. Trouble in Paradise
1. Complaints: Crisis or Moral Panic?
2. The Myriad and Muddied Goals of College Part II. Schooling and Its Oddities
3. Seeing the Air: The Nature and Spread of Higher Education
4. Wagging the Dog: Learning for Schooling 5. "What Do I Have to Do to Get an A?": The Real Skinny on Grades
6. Campus Delights: Nonacademic Engagement and Responsibility
Part III. How and Why Humans Learn: Explaining the Mismatch
7. Beyond Cognition and Abstraction: Notes on Human Nature and Development
8. Learning in the Wild, Learning in the Cage
9. Motivation Comes in at Least Two Flavors, Intrinsic and Extrinsic
10. On Happiness, Flourishing, Well-Being, and Meaning Part IV. A Revolution in Learning
11. Both Sides Now of a Learning Revolution
Conclusion: Learning versus Schooling: A Professor's Reeducation
Appendix: A New Metaphor: Permaculture, or Twelve Principles of Human Cultivation
What People are Saying About This
Susan D. Blum wrote this vitally important book to understand the mismatch between learning, 'which students may love,' and schooling, 'which many students hate.' While so much of school and college is familiar to many of us, Blum uses anthropology's emphasis on holism and comparison to make it strange and interesting again. Extending beyond college campuses to consider all of mass schooling, 'I Love Learning; I Hate School' points out how many of the practices that are commonplace in today’s colleges and schools actually have a corrosive effect on student interest and engagement. It denaturalizes Western schooling to reveal its many 'oddities,’ including age segregation, decontextualized learning, an emphasis on grades, and the production of failure. Blum draws on research from anthropology, cognitive science, affective neuroscience, child psychology, and human development, as well as her own original research and classroom experimentation, to show how these practices are misaligned with ‘the way humans are’ and actually learn. Looking across cultural space and historical time, she examines the variety of ways humans have engaged in our primary adaptive advantage: learning. Observing that teaching itself is ‘very rare in the ethnographic record,’ Blum finds that people tend to learn in multimodal ways, when they have a need or desire to learn, by doing, by showing others, by being active, through observation, through play, through guided participation, and when there are genuine consequences. Importantly, motivation for learning is powerfully related to perceived relevance, sociality, and affective experience. All of this helps to explain, for example, why so many students today are more engaged with extracurricular activities than their academic work: because these activities are more tightly aligned with key human learning inclinations. ‘I Love Learning; I Hate School’ is a must-read for all who care about educational improvement and renewal. Moving beyond critique, Blum shows a way forward with practical ideas instructors at all levels can use to make their classrooms less school-like, and in Blum’s words, more ‘joyful, relevant, and humane.’
'I Love Learning; I Hate School' is beautifully written. It addresses a shared set of educational dilemmas experienced both intellectually and viscerally by teachers and students in our current university system. Susan D. Blum’s work is innovative in its approach and stimulating in its insight into educational history, theory, and practice. This book offers a thoughtful, intimate slant on how to make sense of our lived experience as teachers and students.
Susan D. Blum has written the book the majority of college faculty would write if they only had her encyclopedic knowledge, deep insight, and courage.
In 'I Love Learning; I Hate School,' Susan D. Blum courageously achieves the goal of anthropologists who work in their own culture: she makes the familiar strange. She does so by painting a vivid portrait of learning in today's universities, a portrait that those of us who love university teaching know but are reluctant to admit—the system too often fails even our most capable students. Blum leads the reader on an intimate, often uncomfortable, journey, a journey that everyone associated with higher education should take.