“Susan D. Blum wrote this vitally important book to understand the mismatch between learning, ‘which students may love,’ and schooling, ‘which many students hate.’ While so much of school and college is familiar to many of us, Blum uses anthropology’s emphasis on holism and comparison to make it strange and interesting again. Extending beyond college campuses to consider all of mass schooling, “I Love Learning; I Hate School” points out how many of the practices that are commonplace in today’s colleges and schools actually have a corrosive effect on student interest and engagement. It denaturalizes Western schooling to reveal its many ‘oddities,’ including age segregation, decontextualized learning, an emphasis on grades, and the production of failure.
Blum draws on research from anthropology, cognitive science, affective neuroscience, child psychology, and human development, as well as her own original research and classroom experimentation, to show how these practices are misaligned with ‘the way humans are’ and actually learn. Looking across cultural space and historical time, she examines the variety of ways humans have engaged in our primary adaptive advantage: learning. Observing that teaching itself is ‘very rare in the ethnographic record,’ Blum finds that people tend to learn in multimodal ways, when they have a need or desire to learn, by doing, by showing others, by being active, through observation, through play, through guided participation, and when there are genuine consequences. Importantly, motivation for learning is powerfully related to perceived relevance, sociality, and affective experience. All of this helps to explain, for example, why so many students today are more engaged with extracurricular activities than their academic work: because these activities are more tightly aligned with key human learning inclinations.
"I Love Learning; I Hate School" is a must-read for all who care about educational improvement and renewal. Moving beyond critique, Susan D. Blum shows a way forward with practical ideas instructors at all levels can use to make their classrooms less school-like, and in Blum’s words, more ‘joyful, relevant, and humane.’”—Peter Demerath, University of Minnesota, author of Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School

“Susan D. Blum has written the book the majority of college faculty would write if they only had her encyclopedic knowledge, deep insight, and courage.”—David F. Lancy, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Utah State University, author of The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings

“In ‘I Love Learning; I Hate School,’ Susan D. Blum courageously achieves the goal of anthropologists who work in their own culture: she makes the familiar strange. She does so by painting a vivid portrait of learning in today’s universities, a portrait that those of us who love university teaching know but are reluctant to admit—the system too often fails even our most capable students. Blum leads the reader on an intimate, often uncomfortable, journey, a journey that everyone associated with higher education should take.”—Christine Finnan, College of Charleston, coauthor of Accelerating the Learning of All Students: Cultivating Culture Change in Schools, Classrooms, and Individuals