Description
Book SynopsisFrustrated by her students' performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter's problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experience at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students.
In I Love Learning; I Hate School, Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she herself was transformed by this understanding. Blum concludes that the dominant forms of higher education do not match the myriad forms of learning that help studentspeople in generalmaster meaningful and worthwhile skills and knowledge. Students are capable of learning huge amounts, but the
Trade Review
As I read 'I Love Learning; I Hate School,' I sprained my neck from nodding in vigorous agreement. The book casts an anthropological lens on education in general and higher education in particular, and the result is a catalog of many of the things that I believe ail us when it comes to teaching and learning.
-- John Warner * Inside Higher Ed *
We should take very seriously the critique of higher education offered by Susan Blum; the book is excellent, and I highly recommend it. Blum does the profession a service by drawing our attention to the ways in which traditional educational structures put barriers in the way of our students and their learning. She has a powerful command of educational history and theory, and her insights and anecdotes rang true to me throughout the book.
* Chronicle of Higher Education *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: What the Good Student Did Not Know
Part I. Trouble in Paradise
1. Complaints: Crisis or Moral Panic?
2. The Myriad and Muddied Goals of College Part II. Schooling and Its Oddities
3. Seeing the Air: The Nature and Spread of Higher Education
4. Wagging the Dog: Learning for Schooling 5. "What Do I Have to Do to Get an A?": The Real Skinny on Grades
6. Campus Delights: Nonacademic Engagement and Responsibility
Part III. How and Why Humans Learn: Explaining the Mismatch
7. Beyond Cognition and Abstraction: Notes on Human Nature and Development
8. Learning in the Wild, Learning in the Cage
9. Motivation Comes in at Least Two Flavors, Intrinsic and Extrinsic
10. On Happiness, Flourishing, Well-Being, and Meaning Part IV. A Revolution in Learning
11. Both Sides Now of a Learning Revolution
Conclusion: Learning versus Schooling: A Professor's Reeducation
Appendix: A New Metaphor: Permaculture, or Twelve Principles of Human Cultivation
