Commentary: 2400 Years of education

An observation attributed to Plato is that “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders; and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers” [1]. This opinion came to mind when I was reading an analysis of differences between recent generations of baby-boomers, generation-X, and generation-Y [2]. Generation change would be relevant to teaching if a new generation of students is genuinely different and would benefit from different teaching approaches. However, cynics might argue that nothing much has changed about children since the time of Plato. Certainly one or two generations in our time do not change the gene pool significantly. Technology does change, and however, the iPhone [3] can now bring all human knowledge to users on demand, as well as entertain them. It may be that the iPhone is the harbinger of a genuine change in the teacher-learner balance that will do to teaching what the tractor did to the cart-horse.

As a school student I read the novel Fahrenheit 451 [4] in which people committed whole books to memory in a world where firemen burnt books. In a strange way we have partially created that fictional world by digitizing information and withdrawing books from shelves so that books have disappeared, almost as if they had been burnt. Keeping book-knowledge is as much a challenge to us as it was for the characters in Fahrenheit 451. The troubadours of medieval Europe travelled around giving book recitations from memory and Akira Haraguchi has apparently remembered the value of pi (π) to 100,000 decimal places [5]. Although the human brain has an astounding capacity for storing information; the minds of our young are being increasingly prepared for the transient 10-second sound bite of news and not for learning swathes of academic material. At an education symposium of the joint FEBS-IUBMB meeting in Athens this year I heard Donald Nicholson, now 92 years old and the creator of the first metabolic maps, argue the merits of studying metabolic pathways. I sensed that the audience was largely hostile to the study of metabolic pathways in modern courses. Now that genomes are revealing their many functions there is so much to teach that is new and exciting that traditional teaching of metabolism, delivered in traditional ways, seems out of place. However, some content must be an underlying core to a discipline, and I am not about to reduce my own teaching on metabolism.

I believe that there is a constancy of human nature that only allows satisfaction when there is depth as well as breadth to learning. This is what Professor Frank Vella encapsulated in the aphorism about teaching, “cover less and uncover more”. Serendipitously a search for this quotation led me to a project video created by a student at Kansas State University [6] that aspires to show how contemporary students learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams and what their lives will be like. My paradoxical interpretation of this video is that the e-generation still retains a place for real-time teachers to inspire and show by example. There is more to being a human being than responding to 10-second sound bites. Our life styles change, but human nature is less mutable. In preparing a talk on e-learning to give at the Athens FEBS-IUBMB meeting my thoughts turned to the origins of teaching with Plato and Aristotle in ancient Athens. Contemplating an idealized portrayal of Aristotle teaching in his celebrated peripatetic style (Fig. 1; [7]) reinforced my faith in the efficacy of conventional teaching proven over 2400 years. My talk in Athens was titled Blended Teaching, and illustrated how conventional teaching, such as lectures and tutorials, can be extended by e-learning. This is where I believe teaching must go so that information-needs and human needs are mutually satisfied. Teaching will reach a new peak when it blends the best of Aristotle with the best of the iPhone.

Figure 1. Gustav Spangenberg, De school van Aristoteles (Fresco 1883–1888).