I just read some time ago we should always listen open-mindedly and not assume anything. Sure enough, I assumed you were talking about education. Shows even I’m not perfect. (Gasp!)

To be honest, I haven’t been to enough different martial arts clubs to be able to compare. At our club, everybody who does any teaching is more than happy to. (Of course, our university club is run by the students… for the students. Nobody is making a profit, all the money goes back into the club. Even our sensei is a volunteer.)

So I don’t know what it’s like to be forced to teach others and be taken advantage of.

I meant genuinely letting kids teach one another, because it allows better education for everybody involved.

I recently saw a great youtube video where Thom Hartmann talks about education. One of the things he talked about was his visit to a school in Taiwan.

In that school, he watched the teacher teach some science course. Towards the end of the lesson, the teacher summed up the whole lesson in 5 minutes on the blackboard. Then he asked the students if they understood it.

About 5 or 6 of the class of 30 stood up. The teacher then had them teach the rest of the class in groups, while he walked around and helped them out. And as students understood that day’s lesson, they too stood up.

At the end of the class, everybody was standing up.

Watch the whole video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yR9qd_GJeA&feature=related

Truly this blog and community are something special.

And as for yoga, I used to go to a club for a few months. I actually started to find it a bit monotonous – always the exact same poses. It would be nice if the instructors swapped out one or two of them for something that trains the same muscle groups, just to add variety.

By the way, great story about Yawara . That’s one of the most awesome things about learning some skill to mastery. You revisit the exact same concepts over and over as you progress, but you see them in a new light every time.

We all have blind spots and things that came so naturally that we have no idea how we do what we do. So having someone else who can explain a technique is useful. And having to teach through our blind spots erases them.

There is always something more to learn, even in the first techniques. Rolls were taught in the first class and every class opened with rolls, even black belt classes. One evening when I was a 1st degree black belt, after helping teach Yawara, the first list of techniques, to the first two grades, the school head took me aside and whispered to let the others go to the sauna and he was going to teach me the “real” Yawara. We went through the same 20 techniques from a black belt’s perspective instead. And it was different. Afterwards in the sauna he said that in several years, someone will take me aside and teach me the “real” Yawara and they will be right then too and it will be different too.

One of the key things to making this style of teaching work is having a curriculum. You can’t teach black belt things to white belts. The curriculum is an ordering of topics that people have found that works. In my beginning yoga class, too often the teacher, particularly substitutes, will get bored and throw in something they learned at some advanced workshop they just went to. Doesn’t work very well and often leads to injury.

I definitely think that skill based courses like math could be maintained. As long as a steady stream of new material came down the pipe it would be no problem. The difficulty would start to arise with the memorization based subjects.

History courses could not survive in their current fashion. There is no way that an AP History class could be taught student to student, at least not in a manner any more effective than the current model. That is not to say that it can not be done but an older student will never be able to bring an expertise to his subject like a high level teacher.

It could be done without doubt in skill based courses, one would have to guarantee new material from upper ranks in a constant manner. But the memorization based classes I have more doubt about.

And I like this sentence you said – “A huge change in the education might require society in general to change too.”
That might explain why the people at the top don’t want to change the education system. Because they’re quite happy with the current arrangement. THEY don’t want change.

@Jillian:
Hey. You said “it’s often much easier to learn from someone a few levels above you than from an expert.” That’s something I also noticed when learning chess. If I watched a game between experts, lots of the moves would make no sense, because they were based on deep strategy that went right over my head. But I learned quite a lot from watching players who were just a bit better than me (if we played each other, they would win about 4 times out of 5).

@Don:
I think you hit the nail on the head. We can’t do anything unless the students WANT to be taught.

That’s one of the reasons I started a blog. Instead of telling my ideas to friends, and getting mostly “meh” in return, I can get my ideas out to people who WANT to hear them.

By the way, nice website.

@Bdwho:
That’s one thing I’m still wondering about. Is there some way to map Jiu Jitsu teaching onto, say, maths, or are they so fundamentally different we’ll need a completely different approach? If so, which bits can we still use?

@Mad stratter:
Thanks for sharing the story. Too bad your school took only small tentative steps. I guess they were afraid of too big a change.

@Sheila:
My Jitsu club has about 25 people. That’s bigger than most school classes I used to be in. Having that many people in the Jitsu sessions actually helps to mix different skill levels. The same would hopefully be true for school classes, if the teacher delegated bits of teaching to higher grade students, instead of trying to teach everyone himself.

@Markus:
Sweet! Thanks for clearing up my doubts

Regarding 7 year olds teaching 6 year olds. Sure man. I think about my young cousins by now 10, 8 and 4 years. They regularly teach each other new things. Even the youngest can be a teacher.

Markus