We have all heard of pedagogical education.  In fact, for most of us pedagogy is synonymous with education.  This is not the case.  Pedagogy is a very specific style of teaching that places the teacher at the head of the classroom as the expert and the learners are considered to be blank slates ready to soak up that information.  Rumored to come from the monastic style of education from the middle ages, pedagogy has grown into the most pervasive type of education in the world.

Pedagogical learning completely ignores the fact that human beings, even children, come into a classroom with their own interests and expertise.  They walk in with expectations of finding interesting, or relevant, information.  When they don't find the relevance, those children stop paying attention in the classroom.  This becomes more and more true as we head into the high school years.

Here are some statistics that I found interesting about high school students:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: 1 in 5 students of high school age either hold down or are looking for a job: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm

According to the March of Dimes, 3 in 10 girls become pregnant at least once before the age of 20 and about 10% of all live births are from this group: http://www.marchofdimes.com/medicalresources_teenpregnancy.html

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse: Marijuana use is now ahead of cigarette smoking on some measures (due to decreases in smoking and recent increases in marijuana use). In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the past 30 days, while 19.2 percent smoked cigarettes. http://drugabuse.gov/infofacts/hsyouthtrends.html

And of course, there are tons more statistics on how hard it is to be a teenager, how many pitfalls high school students have to navigate.  Many students have to work through them without the support of caring parents.  Some have to work through them with parents who care but are working two or three jobs to keep food on the table.  The reality of their lives is one of constantly having to make corrective decisions.  In poverty stricken areas, the reality is one of survival where calculus doesn't factor into their daily struggle and becoming a computer scientist, or perhaps business major, is about as difficult to picture as being the President.

This is where Andragogy is most useful.  Andragogy was originally introduced by Malcolm Knowles as a theory on adult learning.  Note the wording because it makes a huge difference.  Whereas pedagogy is about teaching, Andragogy focuses on learning.  The term has expanded to include other age groups since its inception, but its core tenets stay the same.

The Tenets of Andragogy

The need to know — adult learners need to know why they need to learn something before undertaking to learn it.

Learner self-concept —adults need to be responsible for their own decisions and to be treated as capable of self-direction

Role of learners' experience —adult learners have a variety of experiences of life which represent the richest resource for learning. These experiences are however imbued with bias and presupposition.

Readiness to learn —adults are ready to learn those things they need to know in order to cope effectively with life situations.

Orientation to learning —adults are motivated to learn to the extent that they perceive that it will help them perform tasks they confront in their life situations.

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/knowlesa.htm

How This Applies

As mentioned before, many high school students make daily choices that other parts of the population tend to think of as adult decisions.  They are out on the streets trying to navigate around some rather powerful temptations.  They have jobs because their parents can't make enough to feed them or clothe them. Their experience makes them look at the world in certain ways and gives them certain notions of what's important and what's not.  So, we start to see the relevance of Andragogy.

Rather than presenting information just because it must be presented (pedagogy), the student is shown the relevance of the classroom to his or her life.  With Andragogical curriculums, the children are shown why the material in the class matters on the very first day of class; it is of utmost importance or the class will fail to capture students' attention.

The student's experience is taken into account.  Learning activities are shaped around tasks and ideas that the students can truly contribute to, rather than completely based on a written example that may or may not have any association to their experiences.  Students truly help shape the direction of the examples and see how they apply to their daily lives.  Students are engaged because they can clearly see how their situations are bettered by the information they are learning.

I'll leave you with this wonderful TED video by Charles Leadbeater about how children teach themselves in countries where education is poor if given the right tools and motivation:

http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_education.html