Quantity and quality of education in learning

In Gary Marcus’ book “Guitar Zero”, there is significant mention of the quantity of work (namely brute practice) a person must put in in order to learn. Additionally, he comments on the innate talent of a person when it comes to learning and a teachers ability to guide a student, namely the quality of education as well as the starting point of a student. Both of these concepts are issues that schools face in order to provide better education and outcomes for their students, as noted in the article “To Increase Learning Time, Some Schools Add Days to Academic Year”, by Motoko Rich.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/education/some-schools-adopting-longer-years-to-improve-learning.html?_r=1

Rich explains that approximately 170 schools across the nation have been making an initiative to lengthen the school year in order to provide better education for their students, which Marcus would say is an attempt to increase the amount of practice that students are getting with the skills they are learning. Increased practice definitely helps, as it helped Marcus improve from someone with no rhythm to someone who could then play the guitar in a band, and it has helped students in certain districts, where reading scores have improved on average to 65% from 51%. Additionally, longer school years reduce the time where a child is sitting idle and is not immersed in knowledge, which Marcus says is very important for acquiring new skills, as the beginning of his learning the guitar involved him immersing himself in it during his sabbatical.

An interesting fact that Rich notes is that the schools that are lengthening their days in order to improve scores are typically those from families in a lower socioeconomic group, and comments that it is this group that needs longer schooling in order to catch up to other schools. Although this line of thinking isn’t politically correct, the insinuation is that lower income families are probably carrying genes that aren’t necessarily geared towards academics – as Marcus would say, the inherent talent for this group of people is lower than average. Because of this, they need more practice to achieve what someone with higher innate talent can achieve with less effort. However, this is not to say that you simply have a set amount of talent and varying amounts of practice and that’s it – Rich and Marcus both agree that quality of education is just as important as quantity, and that with a good guiding teacher who can understand the needs of the student as well as help them learn in a fun and exciting way, the ability to acquire new skills and learn new things is a much more efficient and streamlined process.

To conclude, it isn’t necessarily nature or nurture individually that will determine a person’s prowess in learning, but an interaction between the two. Basically, practicing hard is very important in learning a new skill, but having a teacher guide you by noticing your strong and weak points and designing ways for you to overcome them are just as important.