A couple of excerpts from Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor Musings (Mail) and an invitation to talk about this among yourselves for a while. I’ll chime in (referring to this post) another time…
From Harry Erwin, an university instructor in England:
There is a recent Scientific American article (August 2006) on expertise that suggests what we should do for our students is motivate them to continuously push themselves beyond their current levels of ability and then provide accurate feedback on their performance. I did that this summer with some of my programming students, and their performance was *much* improved. So perhaps the problem in education is not with the students, but rather with the approach to teaching–an interesting implication for the current high- stakes testing regime in the schools–it might be wrong-headed. The SA article also suggests that the differences in talent and intelligence between students are much less important than the differences in motivation. So when your goal is to educate experts, don’t worry about their raw talent and IQ, but instead keep them pushing their limits…
Pournelle rersponded, in part, with:
[T]hat experience exactly matches not only my own experience, but that of most of my generation. Being pushed to just beyond one’s limit is apparently the best way to learn almost anything; and the experience that motivation can be as important as intelligence is very much in line with the work of Marva Collins and some of the other inner city teachers…
Any thoughts?