instructive versus deductive

I was in a discussion the other morning about the development of education and a theme came apparent about two distinct styles of teaching and their values in an educational scenario. These two types of teaching are those of instructional and deductive. To explain them a little more, the approach to instructional is that of having a teaching guiding you through a process. Much as with most modern education and that of the form of vertical thinking. Deductive thinking can be a result to instructive or a stand alone approach to education, but is based on the approach of learning from experience rather than secondary information retrieval. Teaching is an important and powerful way to get ideas, information and process across to large groups of people. The issue with this method is that it has, especially in recent years, become what can only be called "parrot' fashioned. By this it is meant that a teacher educates and the students repeat. This is done, like a parrot, until the mimicking is exactly as the teacher teaches it. The biggest disadvantage to this is that there is a greater concern to the correction to mimicking the information than to digesting the information and understanding its meaning and importance. Another great disadvantage to all that is that the information, due to its approach to teaching is not giving great association to the subject. What is meant by this is to give global respect to a given theme by associating it to connected themes or subjects that could make the cognitive process more receptive to developing a greater understanding to the education process. A good example to this is seen in the college in which I work. Many of the students are given instructional tutoring on the complexities of the applications they will need in their creative career. This is OK. It is much the same as learning to drive. You need to know the functions of something to know how to operate it, however after this there needs to be some greater need to throw a little experimentation into the works. With the computer applications, after the general instruction to the interface the students are lost to see how to apply the tools to their then given subject. This is where deductive education should start to make a mark.

Deduction is about knowing something and then linking it to another possible value. A very simple example would be having a teacher telling you the worth of two as a numeric value. Teaching you two plus two equals four (2+2=4). Deductively, you should then be able to figure out that 2+2+2=6 or even further you can see from the answer four that it could be constructed from other numeric values; 1+3=4. This is deductive education. From a starting point of instructional education there should be a drive to see how this can be extended without the continuation of instruction. Figuring things out for oneself. For the students in front of the knowledge base of photoshop, for example, there is no seeming connection between knowing how to use the blend tool on 'that' instructed photo, to applying the knowledge to a given project. This is because in the grand tradition of the instructive teaching process, they are clueless unless the actual steps that are needed are shown related to a specific task. This is not a failing of the education system. There is a need for instructive learning, but the issue is that the next step has not been given the best motivation start. Deductive learning needs a drive.

Without this drive creativity also gets affected. The instruction becomes redundant as the student has no drive to explore. Our brain is designed to cognitively take in information and to analyze and evaluate this information is such a way that we resolve the issues contained there within. If we allow the solution to be delivered before the cognition is initiated then the learning process is lost. The data, as explored in the lateral thinking theories, is not made into a pattern and more importantly, is not stored in the mind. This is basically why people forget things. Most things that are forgotten have not been analyzed. The reason they are not analyzed is for two reason. They hold no importance and cannot be stored as a simple shape, or there is no cognitive evaluation. Without cognitive evaluation are brain simply cannot see its importance. Therefore is washed from our short term memory and never stored in long term memory. Instructional education alone is not an effective way to deliver a successful educational approach. It should be seen as a method to deliver information that should then be instantly challenged in cognitive process. This cognitive process only becomes very successful when the participant defines its importance.

Watching Sir Ken Robinson's inspirational speech on how education destroys creativity, we can see that a standard method may not be the answer to showing the world's potential in what is possible. All the education system is doing is generating a series of drone like people that can just regurgitate data that delivers not apparent content to their life structure but was parrot fed to them in an educational system that didn't inspire ideas or innovation in the thought process. The most important key element to any development of a corrective educational structure is the basis that the individual counts. Generating mass content for mass audience doesn't not engage the cognition in such a way to inspire individual thinking. The great thinkers of the past and present and hopeful future are and will be the ones that break from the mould of instruction and find their own education via exploration and motivation in their own desire for knowledge. The brain works best when it thinks!