“Problem-solving and discovery approaches” is a neon-lit bureaucratic burst of creative nomenclature for teachers not teaching and students not studying. Students are bored, so they must solve the problem by “discovering” that boredom is alleviated by sleeping, excusing themselves from the class, talking with the person at the next desk, playing on their smartphones, scuffling, chatting loudly, daydreaming, or telling the teacher to get lost. It need hardly be said that actually learning something and committing it to memory, such as two plus two equals four, is a strain, an imposition, a humiliating waste of the student’s creative energies, and an oppressive and primitive act. Who knows what pedagogical barbarism might occur next?
Boredom is not confined to the industrial education classroom but it surely flourishes there. A result of mediocre and passive conceptions of learning? Empty vessels that need to be filled up. I’m bored: entertain me. The bored victim.