ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Curtis Kelly

Marc Helgesen

Chuck Sandy

Chris Hunt

Panelists: Curtis | Marc | Chuck | Chris
Date: January 2006

Topic: "What was the best idea you had in the last year?"

Curtis Kelly

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I often ruminate on is the purpose of education. In particular, what role should a Japanese college education play? To know what to teach, I must answer that question.

“Education should help people live better lives. The answer is incredibly simple, but it has important ramifications.”

The answer I have come up with is simple. The basic purpose of education is to give people better lives. It does not matter whether you see education as a way to shape society, solve personal problems, or to help you get a job, it is all the same. Education should help people live better lives. The answer is incredibly simple, but it has important ramifications. It means that I must focus more on my learners' needs and individual growth than on general English proficiency.

The concept also shows that there are huge holes in the education. There are a lot of things that would improve people’s lives that we do not teach at all. This is not surprising since our educational model has not changed much in a hundred years. We still view the three Rs as being the most important learning areas and others (sports, arts, etc.) as subsidiary. So what are some of those holes, and how can we fill them? Most of the holes have to do with values, spirituality (as in finding the meaning of life rather than religion), etc., but a huge one, and maybe the most important, is learning about how to get along with others. The Brooking Research Institute thinks so, too. In Workforce 2020, they state that human relations and communication skills are one of the two greatest training needs of today’s youth.

Human relations; a rather broad area, but within it is one particular topic that is crucial to success in life, but is almost never even mentioned in the classroom. For some reason, we teach almost nothing about love, intimacy and romance.

Finding the right partner and relating to that person is one of our biggest challenges, and it has a huge effect on the quality of our life. It is especially pertinent for college students, who go through all kinds of misadventures and romantic turmoil. It is amazing that despite the incredible need for such knowledge, and despite a huge body of scientific information on it, that most colleges do not offer a single course on love and relating. Instead, our learners have to figure out what love is all about from women’s magazines and Hollywood movies. Unfortunately, the information these sources give is often appalling. John Gottman (the “Love Doctor”) and other psychologists point out that Hollywood movies tend to teach the exact opposite of what leads to a good marriage. The typical formula: 1) Guy and Girl fall in love, 2) Guy and Girl are forced apart, 3) Guy and Girl realize they can’t live without each other and rush back into each other’s arms, and 4) Guy and Girl get married as soon as possible ­ is precisely the wrong way to get married. Marriages done in this way have the highest correlation to divorce.

So what can I do to fill this huge hole in education? Fortunately, as English teachers we can teach any subject matter we want to, as long as it is delivered in English. So, at the beginning of this year, I changed my English for Life course topic from being “Desktop Publishing” to “The Psychology of Love.” I admit, I was nervous about the change, wondering what other professors would think or whether I could prepare the syllabus ­ after all, my degree is in Education ­ but it turned out to be an amazing success. It was definitely my best idea of the year.

The class turned out to be the most popular English elective at our university. More importantly, after two lectures on the psychology of love and one class in which they wrote love letters (mostly to friends or family), something happened I had never seen happen in class before. The whole mood changed. The lectures centered on love as an attitude, not a feeling, based on giving rather than getting, and this idea primed them to taking a loving attitude towards each other in class. In fact, I can pin down the exact moment the atmosphere changed. Every student in the class had elected not to let anyone else see his or her love letter, but then, one student, Yasuyuki, decided to share his. He read his touching letter written to the first girl he had fallen in love when he was a high school student and in sharing it, he created this amazing mood of trust and intimacy. After Yasuyuki, every other student but one decided to share his or her letter too.

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Panelists: Curtis | Marc | Chuck | Chris

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