Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Should students be educated differently based on intellectual ability?

I believe that students should be educated differently based on intellectual ability. It’s important to secure efficiency for education activity.


First, for higher level intelligence group, it’s a waste of time to repeatedly learn fundamental subjects they easily master. For example, I was good at Physics in my high school days. I could easily master fundamental issues of Physics. I was driven by curiosity to know higher level subject such as Einstein' equation. I used to teach myself through reading book.

Learning fundamental subjects could hamper further development of my interest.

On the other hand, for lower level intelligence group, it’s also a waste of time to learn subjects they can understand at all. For example, Chemistry was weak subject in my high school days. I could not master fundamental issues of Chemistry. Actually, my grade was pretty bad. I could manage to get the grade to graduate. But it’s far beyond my ability to learn higher level Chemistry. The opposite is also true. I don’t want to hamper other student’s progress.


Besides, we can expect to reduce teacher’s burden. They can specifically focus on either higher or lower level subject. We can avoid distraction of their efforts.


In conclusion, to avoid inconvenience for both sides, students should be educated differently based on intellectual ability.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The rise of "kobetsu" cram school

Nowadays "kobetsu" style cram school has got popularity. This type of cram school emphasizes on teaching its pupil individually, receiving the need of society that says "Everybody is different, so why don't our kids receive education individually according to his/her level. It is true there is a great difference in intelligence between a newborn baby and an average adult and a genius scientist. So are even kids in the same age group. Mass education system is just a makeshift to supress cost in education.
I do not know when kobetsu cram school started. I remember when I was a kid there was not such a style of teaching. Of course even then there was a tutoring system, but was expensive, so I could not ask my mom for it. In kobetsu style, the ration of tutor to student is 1:2, so it is much cheaper. I wanted to receive those individual teaching back then.
In talking about my history of learning English, what I can recall is just nasty memories, many of them are unfruitful endevores. Teachers were so bad, and in this case "bad", their personalities were also very bad. Intelligence always come with good personality, and vice verse. They did not have love for students, so they did not teach us enough. They did not teach me prepositions. Of course they could not explain well what "of which" meant. Their pronounciation also was terrible. So I had to teach myself, but even here I had a very hard time. Because so many of books also were not good. Their explanations were so poor. I remember a word of my friend who had lived in New Zealand and USA for 6 years and had almost nothing unable to understand in English, "The way of teaching by preparatory school's teacher is so poor." And it is also true that not all good teachers try to write books. Some of them leave teaching position in seek of better job and salaries. So the only way to receive good education is just to keep searching a good teacher, and ofcourse to maximize educational effect, individual teaching is the best. If personal tutor is too expensive, just go to kobetsu style cram school.

Anonymous said...

One correction

searching a good teacher->
searching for a good teacher