One of the authors at the Freakonomics blog has an interesting post on how he learned far more French from a three-month “fast learning” CD course than by taking five years of French classes in college. His take away from this is that the way we teach language, and indeed many topics, is faulty.

This corresponds to some of my recent experience. I took Japanese for three or so years in high school but I can barely remember how to say “hello.” Meanwhile, I’ve been casually learning German over the past two months or so, and I’m pretty impressed with the depth of my vocabulary and grammar. I’ll often be thinking some thought, or talking to someone, and I’ll test myself on whether I could make the same point in German. With surprising regularity, I can.

What’s the Freakonomics writer’s main criticism about language education? That it’s a process of learning rules, as opposed to how to speak naturally.

If we learned our first language like we usually learn second languages, it might look like this. A young child says, “I am hungry.” The parent replies, “Wait! Before saying am, you first must learn to conjugate to be in all persons and number, in the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods, and in the past, perfect, and future tenses.” After a few months, or maybe weeks, of this teaching, the child would conclude that it has no aptitude for languages and become mute. And human culture would perish in a generation.

He also makes this interesting point about formal methods of learning (any subject.)

Most of the learning is spent passively copying down what the teacher puts on the board or, in the high-tech version, using ghastly PowerPoint slides. This method of knowledge reproduction made sense 800 years ago, when a book cost $20,000 (in today’s dollars). The invention of the printing press has changed book prices but not how schools and universities organize learning.

This isn’t an uncommon criticism — that the kind of learning rewarded in institutions is rote learning e.g. memorizing facts, figures and vocabularies. This doesn’t capture whether the student has really learned the subject, in the sense of being able to tie it together with their existing knowledge. They haven’t had that “ah ha” moment. As a result, the student gets little joy from learning.

I believe the solution to this problem would be to burn down all high schools and colleges.