The Sunday Times has an article The QI Equation for an Enriched IQ
"Lloyd and Mitchinson believe that there is a thirst for knowledge among all
age groups that is ill served by school ? which tends to turn people away from
learning. Even the best schools can take a fascinating subject ? such as
electricity or William Blake or classical civilisation ? and make it boring by
turning it into facts that have to be regurgitated for exams.
QI?s popularity also proves that learning takes place most effectively when it
is done voluntarily. The same teenagers who will zoom happily through a QI book
will sit at the back of geography class and do their utmost to resist being
taught."
SNIP
What, I asked them, would a QI school be like?
?There would be no work, for a start,? said Lloyd. ?It would all be play.
Plato said that education should be a form of amusement. That way you will be
much better able to discover the child?s natural bent.?
This approach is in direct contrast, of course, to the largely Gradgrindian
approach common to most schools. As Mitchinson points out, it is actually a
method of containment: ?There?s that great line: you?re taught for the first
five years of your life how to walk and talk; and for the next 10, you?re told
to shut up and sit down.?
For Mitchinson, schools have turned into wage-slave production farms rather
than places of learning. ?What do you remember from school,? he asks. ?Most of
us would probably recall one or two good teachers, some successes and many
humiliations, the ebb and flow of friendships, the torture of exams.
?But what about the actual lessons? Try it: sit down and make a list of the
first 10 things that loom out of the murk. Then examine the list and see whether
it passes muster as either useful or interesting. Unless you are gifted with a
photographic memory, you?ll be staring at a rag-bag of half-grasped theories,
fragments of other people?s books and a soupy residue of ?facts? ? many of them
not even true.?
SNIP
"In the QI edition of The Idler, Lloyd and Mitchinson present a five-point
manifesto for educational reform.
One: play not work
Schools should be resource centres, not prisons. Teachers should be returned
to their original roles as facili-tators, not bureaucrats or drillmasters. The
more ?work? resembles play ? telling stories, making things ? the more
interested kids will become.
Two: follow the chain of curiosity
Ask a kid what he wants to learn, and he?s unlikely to say: ?a broad-based
curriculum that offers the core skills?. Real learning is obsessive. It happens
through watching, listening and practising something that really interests you.
Encourage children to follow their own curiosity right to the end of the chain,
and they will acquire the skills they need to get there.
Three: you decide
The QI School isn?t compulsory and there are no exams: only projects or goals
you set yourself with the teacher acting as a mentor. This could be making a
film or building a chair. From age seven onwards, our core subjects might be:
philosophy, storytelling, music, technology, nature and games.
Four: no theory without practice
If you?re lost in wonder looking at, say, a lettuce, you will want to have a
go at growing it, too.
Five: you never leave
There is no reason why school has to stop dead at 17 or 18. The QI school
would be the ultimate ?lifelong learning? venue ? a mini-university where skills
and knowledge would be pooled and young and old could indulge their curiosity."
Sounds like an autonomous educators manifesto!