Full Description
Frustrated by her students' performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter's problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experience at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students.
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."
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
