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Every academic learning experience can and should be an interactive and enjoyable process

As my opponent is the one who is proposing a resolution challenging a "common notion," I believe that some burden is upon him to provide some substance to support his claim that every academic learning experience can and should be an interactive and enjoyable process. The reader should note that my opponent, who is asserting that we should doubt a proposition commonly presumed to be truth, is now proposing to rest his argument against it by doing nothing at all. The burden is scarcely on me to defend what is widely known by all, unless my opponent can offer some evidence against it. My opponent has misconstrued my task in other ways as well. I don't need to provide examples of academic learning that cannot and should not be experienced an interactive and enjoyable manner. I need only convince the reader that there are some instances where one or more of the considerations of interactivity or enjoyment cannot or ought not be primary. My opponent's brief commentary on his position may be taken as a claim that students are sometimes bored, and thus that the exchange between he and I should identify ways that we can pursue his resolution. This is quite different from his originally proposed debate, and I leave it to the reader to consider whether my opponent's gaslighting approach to debate is legitimate or desirable. I will debate the resolution that my opponent made, on the original terms, and as I explained in my acceptance, without any regard to my opponent's attempts to alter the nature of this inquiry. As I proposed in my acceptance, I will attempt to convince the reader that (1) some academic learning experiences can be more meaningful when my opponent's criteria are set aside; and (2) the exceptions to my opponent's propositions are numerous enough that we should take it more as an aspiration that we make education interactive and enjoyable when possible. 1. More meaning when the criteria are set aside. By this, I mean to propose that some academic learning is more meaningful when "interactivity" or "enjoyment" are not primary considerations. I don't mean that such experiences rule out interactivity or enjoyment, but rather that the meaningfulness of the experience comes from other qualities that a focus on interactivity or enjoyment might diminish. First, I turn to interactivity . As anyone who has observed young children might naturally conclude, a child's exploration of the world inherently involve a certain amount of solitude, and this is when children become more imaginative and creative. (https://suite.io...) In fact, children enrolled in early education show better creative thinking skills and better test scores when they were allowed to engage in solitary play. (http://ctr.concordia.ca...) This is not merely an early childhood phenomenon, but rather one that extends throughout life. (http://www.nytimes.com...) Solitude improves creative learning and thinking (id.), and learning in groups can increase fears of rejection and other psychological reactions that actually inhibit learning (id.). Furthermore, there are learners who gravitate towards solitary learning as their most effective mode. (http://www.tutorfi.com...) This is not to suggest that group learning is bad or always harmful--I do not agree with that position. I accept that group learning, even for people who learn best in a solitary environment, is at the very least part of adaptation to a society that will involve interaction, and is likely a necessary challenge to expose all students to different modes of learning, because we can learn how to benefit from secondary modes. (http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com...) But, if it is important to expose students to interactive learning experiences, why would it not also be important to expose them to solitary learning experiences, especially given that for some students this will be a preferred mode and given the evidence that shows that solitary learning experiences can enhance learning and thinking skills? The upshot is that introspective learning--learning that turns on a person's own exploration and self-evaluation--is important, and a learning environment that required that every academic learning experience be interactive would probably be diminishing. Furthermore, it would also make much of learning unenjoyable for those who prefer solitary learning or in cases where the neurobiological responses to group interaction are negative, suggesting that it is actually logically infeasible to achieve my opponent's two universal goals in concert. (http://www.nytimes.com...) Second, I turn to enjoyment. I believe that, from the outset, there are a number of academic learning experiences that cannot or should not be enjoyable. Preeminent among these is failure. Some may believe that failure is necessary for success--it's a popular notion. But more importantly, failure is important because we don't live in a society where whatever one chooses to do is acceptable as good enough. We value people who can help meet other people's needs. A student needs to be told when his efforts are unsatisfactory--and in fact, in an interactive learning environment, it is almost certain that a student will experience whether his efforts are unsatisfactory (or below the norm) without an instructor pointing it out. A student shouldn't be overwhelmed by failure, but a student also shouldn't be sold the irrational lie that he can accomplish anything, or that he doesn't need to sometimes engage in possibly unpleasant exertion to achieve a goal. But beyond failure, unpleasant tasks are often part of achieving goals--even goals that are part of a broader enterprise that a student enjoys. Memorizing calculus formulas is not particularly fun, even though working applied calculus problems is very enjoyable. But some memorization is necessary if you're not to repeat the discoveries of a millenium all on your own. And--I'll be the first to admit--that's somewhat idiosyncratic. Not everyone enjoys the same things. Has anyone discovered the formula for making everything enjoyable, such that "every" academic educational experience "can" be enjoyable? I think not. One solution might be to never require students to participate in anything that they don't enjoy, but I doubt that is the solution. I believe that basic literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking skills are important. While much of that can be enjoyable, there is a significant portion that, for at least some students, is unlikely to be enjoyable--even though it's conceivable that the classroom environment can be enjoyable or at least motivational, building competency is likely to be, at least occasionally, painful or frustrating. I believe that every student who is seeking to better themselves by finding challenges must be open to the fact that part of education will be failure, pain, and frustration. While it is true that running an enjoyable and motivational classroom and providing good out-of-classroom support is a worthy and necessary goal, a significant portion of the academic learning experience will not be fun. An instructor needs to accept that reality when assigning competency-building work that has a much different goal than immediate enjoyment. Societies that accept that education might not always be fun may have better outcomes (http://lawandeducation.wordpress.com...), even though it is also important that "fun" be part of an educational experience (http://blogs.edweek.org...). Meaningful education is better served by keeping in mind the goals of education, which sometimes involve challenge, feedback (even when unpleasant), diversity of learning approaches (including solitary learning), divergent as well as convergent learning, and, among still other goals, positive outcomes. The end of education is not interaction and fun, and the end of education is at times served well by putting aside those criteria. 2. Exceptions By "exceptions," I don't mean unique exceptions. I mean broad exceptions to the idea that every educational experience can and should be interactive and enjoyable. My discussion above already demonstrates that there are broad exceptions to that idea. Not only is meaningful education sometimes better served by not focusing on interactivity and fun, but also it is the case that sometimes education should be solitary or cannot be fun. A rehash of the discussion is not desirable, especially in light of the fact that I am the only one who has established an argument of any kind whatsoever. Conclusion In conclusion, there is ample reason to believe that education can and should sometimes be solitary and that it cannot always be fun. Additionally, while making education more fun is a worthy goal, focusing on interactivity to the exclusion of solitude is simply prejudicial to a method of learning and a group of learners and likely to decrease the quality of education. My opponent's resolution is wrong, because it is both impossible and undesirable.