What's Wrong with Our Education System? Is Bloom's Taxonomy the Culprit?

What is Wrong with our Education, Is Bloom's Taxonomy the Culprit?

Imagine a skinny person forced to take a bag of 50 kg on his shoulders. Most probably he wouldn't be able to lift or if he manages, he will crumble soon.

We may be putting the equivalent of sacks of cement bags on a tiny brain of our children when they are forced to listen, read and remember lots of information which are not relevant to their daily lives.

This methodology of teaching comes from a pedagogy that was devised sometime in the mid 1950's by Benjamin Bloom which came to be known as Bloom's Taxonomy.

At the base of it is: Remember. It is followed by understanding, application, analyse, evaluate and create.

Following this methodology makes children cram lot of information or knowledge into their tiny heads. This will be promptly forgotten after the examinations. Our brain only constitutes 2% of our body mass but consumes 20% of the daily energy needs. Perhaps our primitive brain hasn't adapted to this 'cognitive overload' which we put on our students and perhaps it never will.

Remembering lot of information and knowledge is like adding up big data on your computer system with more powerful software. Without understanding, the big data itself is useless, according to Beau Lotto in Deviate, Seeing Reality Differently.

"For instance, while traditional schools continue to teach what is measurable (eg. the kinds of answers that come through rote learning), such methods do not teach understanding in the children being measured. It's like teaching under the streetlamp, when we know that we dropped our keys somewhere else, in a place of darkness. Rather than search in the dark, we stay in the light and harvest more and more measurable data."

When the mind is overloaded with information how can there be space for understanding?

Where in the teaching curriculum students are encouraged to ask why which is the basis of philosophy? Philosophy questioning previous assumptions and tweaking or replacing them when required.

Questioning is a learnable skill and creativity stems from such behaviour. According to Beau Lotto, "schools rarely even teach children how to ask questions, much less what a good question is, or the craft of finding it. As a result, we're-metaphorically and in a way quite literally-"great engineers but crap philosophers."

Take Away Remember

If we take away remember from the Bloom's Taxonomy, will it be shaken or crumble? What if we replace remember with 'Awareness', followed by Questioning, Thinking and Understanding? With understanding recalling any topic will be easy. And this will reduce the cognitive load in students that puts them under lot of stress and anxiety.

Won't the education process and its evaluation and assessment become better and more scientific?

It is by questioning assumptions and biases that progress takes place. Then why wait to bring a change or why is the transformation not happening in education in the AI era?