There is a story about someone's PhD reseach about 7-13-year old Finnish children and studying English in today's Helsingin sanomat. The surveyed children don't consider the English they learn when gaming "proper English" , and don't see much relevance for lerning to write English (this is actually expressed rather vaguely in the article; it's possible that I misunderstood something). "Real English" is learned at school from books, the children think.
I don't remember if I had that kind of an attitude about English, but one of the bitternesses I harbor about school has to do with learning English. English lessons helped me learn English until I was in the 6th grade, after that my learning was from books I read and tv shows I watched. I remember the moment I realised that I know English; I was watching Bold and the Beautiful and had an epiphany - I wasn't reading the subtitles anymore but I was listening to what they were actually saying, in English. After that English lessons were really boring, and didn't really contribute to my use of it... I remember the only 2 words I learned on the 8th grade (obstruction and contempt). My teacher noticed that I was bored, but didn't really offer me anything more challenging or meaningful. Now when I think about who I was then I had a really deep need to be understood and to find ways to express my diverse thoughts, and even though I studied English, Finnish and French, none of those lessons fulfilled that need.
No wonder children have the attitudes they do; at school it is not really considered important what children are excited about or do in their free time. The researcher concludes that attention should be placed on forging connections between the children's experiences and their English lessons. That way, the article says, "children's attitudes would also change". I don't know how important that is, I think that the children's attitudes are a pretty clear indicator of how things actually are at school, and how their life outside of school is seen there. I would think that the point of the change would be that children could be excited about what they learn, could see the relevance of what they do learn, and they are seen as whole children and their learning outside of school is also valued.
I think that the same would apply to any school subject, and actually to anything outside of school; true learning has everything to do with our lives as they are now, and all that we willingly learn can change our life as it is now.
