Is it all fun and games? NO.
Is there optimism? Yes.
Is all education created the same? No.
Where does this leave us?
Learning Zeitgeist: The Future of Education is Just-in-Time, Multidisciplinary, Experimental, Emergent
The skills that are highly valued today are not even distantly related to the skills that are developed in our educational prison facilities year after year, week after week, class after class, when students are put into classrooms, disconnected from each other to fill tests, amputated from their prosthesis of thinking like mobile phones and their intellectual capabilities being hammered into the dirt by requiring certain outcomes rather than creativity and imagination. Why? Because there are three stages in the relationship between the individual and the knowledge during ones lifetime:
1) Stage one happens when a baby is born and starts a process of individual learning driven by exploration. Soon the limitations of this exploration requires finding adults who will tell things the child is unable to experiment with. 2) In stage two, the child enters school, where experiential learning is gradually replaced by learning by being told. The trauma is to stop learning and accept being taught. 3) Those who survive this strangling intellectual torture enter stage three which involves deschooling, learning to learn, experiencing and learning to be creative, effectively returning to stage one. Going back to stage one is in the heart of life-long learning.(Source: Seymour Papert) This is why it gets to be so hard for someone being educated in our present-day schooling systems to tune-in, find a space, learn and understand the ecosystem she is in. It is the educational system we use that makes so difficult for anyone to learn and comprehend reality using the tools and the means that present day technology, science and education suggest as best.
"A good educational system should have three purposes: a) it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; b) empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, c) furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known."Too bad, this is the vision of Ivan Illich, written over 50 years ago. Reality, in the world of education I see around me, is still very far from having even considered questioning its own very premises and methods. In the essay that follows, Teemu Arina introduces a vision for the future of learning as well as two interesting concepts you may want to explore further: Serendipic and Parasitic Learning. Here the details:
No comments:
Post a Comment