holistic learning

One of the most provocative idea presented in this text is early in chapter
system promote the process of critical thinking, as it now promotes the cramming of information.

Any study will show you that the retention rate for memorization vs. true understanding is vast. As I read this part of the text and the article, I thought of a commercial that aired a while ago. It
was a Sullivan tutoring commercial where it showed a kid shaking out his ears, and, instead of water flowing from them, it was knowledge seeping out. It then states a statistic that students lose 70% of the knowledge that they learned over the summer. Regardless of whether this is a true statistic or not, the fact is that students will lose little to no true knowledge of topics that they were able to process and understand fully.

Luke Towler, the author of the article, defines deeper learning as  “the process of fusing content knowledge with real-world situations.” This allows students to experience what they are learning, which is what Dewey suggests. Along with the experience is also the application of it to the real world. These 3 things combined allows students a comprehensive education and a greater chance of understanding the topic completely then if they were just trying to memorize the process of question. Although it does take a greater amount of time to fully comprehend a topic while using deeper learning, it allows for students be able to apply what they have learned to different situations. With the current education system, where students learn large amounts of new material, it allows them to understand different parts of a holistic machine. But, without fully comprehending the relations of each of the parts, they cannot achieve the type of holistic learning that the current education intends to do, but does not yet achieve.

Article:

http://neatoday.org/2014/11/25/deeper-learning-moving-students-beyond-memorization-2/