What is education? What do teachers really do? How should they be trained -
if at all? How much should they be paid? How much 'education' do children
need? And above all: When I teach you, what is happening inside your brain?
This last question is so important that we call it the Fundamental Question
of Education - the FQE. At EMRI, we've made great progress in answering it,
and doing so has helped to throw light on the answers to the other questions.
We have discovered a central concept, the Structure Triplet. Our brains are
structured. We learn easiest when we match an exernal structure with a
brain structure. Information about the universe around us is unstructured,
so we need to structure it, and do so to fit existing brain structures, if
we have them. The process of learning can be random or structured. If it's
structured, we can predict how long it should take and how effective it
will be. The Structure Triplet requires that we structure knowledge to fit
our brains, and structure the process by which we learn and teach it.
When we learn, our brains store instructions and make connections. A
computer program consists of data structures and algorithms for using them.
Learning means acquiring data structures, and the algorithms for using
them. Teaching means demonstrating these data structures, facilitating
their acquisition, and showing how they can be used.
But teachers don't teach ? we learn, often in spite of 'education'. Almost
everyone has noticed that children learn best what they don't learn at
school, and learn best from other children just a little older and more
worldly-wise than they are.
That's education in a nutshell, stripped of all the other baggage piled
into it over the centuries. Of course, there's much more to education. You
can read all about it in our book, What do teachers do, really? Visit
Publications to find out more.
We have developed tools for teaching language, mathematics and the hard
sciences. Visit Applications to read about tools such as the Phrazer,
which allows you to learn how to use the grammar of any language in 4
hours; or Mathemajix, which shows children how to own mathematics.
Children learn better in small groups than in large classes. They learn
better from people like them. And they learn better in small doses rather
than in large chunks. We've applied these insights to developing a system
for tuition in mathematics for children in the most surprising places,
including South Africa. If you teach mathematics, you'll want to read
Teaching Mathematical Intuition. Language teachers need to read Teaching
Language to the Language Brain. Visit Publications for these and other
books, and to find materials for enhanced, rapid acquisition of Spanish,
Slovio, Chinese, Arabic - and English too.
