Teach Me and I will forget, involve Me and I will learn!

This message was a tweet written by Dr. Hartmut Feucht (@DrHartmutFeucht) as a comment on the article by Stefan Hagen in his pm-blog.com on Emergence and Project Management (Emergenz und Projektmanagement).

What can I say? The sentence says exactly what I feel. And what I have been feeling all my life.

At school, when I had to listen to teachers trying to teach us, my eyes wandered towards the windows where I saw the great outdoors. A little of what the teachers said remained in my memory – if it was interesting. Much of it got lost. Learning for an exam meant preparing in such a way that there was a chance to pass with a halfway acceptable grade.

It was a little better whenever I was permitted to solve a halfway interesting problem. This was often the case in mathematics. But I really only enjoyed it when I was a part of it. Those were the times when I really learned a lot, understood it and, in the truest sense of the word “got a grip on it”.

Here is what Stefan wrote in his article:

Basically, teaching at school, graduate school and university should leave far more room for students to come up with their own designs. The classical concept of a “reading” is, basically, antiquated.

I could not agree more. Except that I would leave the word “basically” out in both sentences.

The current problem, both at school and university – along with what I see as often rather devastating consequences for education and society – is probably that this is not (I hope: yet) understood.

RMD
(Translated by EG)