Are conventional ideas about education actually counterproductive? Does advocacy based on those ideas set back the cause in the long run?
The Globe and Mail ran an op-ed about education on Monday that got me on the subject. “Creating a culture of learning” addresses the problem of school dropouts, citing the success of Chinese immigrants and their hard work-oriented background.
Thomas Friedman’s latest column is in the same spirit:
Just a quick review: In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality…
I’m 100% agreed in the need to promote learning, but I’m worried by attempts to shoehorn today’s round students into the rectangular holes of yesteryear.
Most of the proposed solutions seem to take the form of top-down programs and incentives — as if education is inherently unpleasant, as if people won’t be willing to learn unless we entice them, or trick them with some extrinsic reward.
When we tell people what to learn and make the purpose of education something outside of it, the fundamental lesson learned is how to be taught: “don’t learn unless someone tells you to.”
Learning is not the same as being taught.
Education until now has been about teaching — which is to say, it was about the teachers, administrators, and the curriculum. Education of the future will be about learning. — which is to say, it will be about students and the opportunities they will have… the opportunities the will create for themselves.
Education of the past was about preservation. Education of the future is about potential — and the potential to generate potential… and the potential to generate potential potential…
We’re all students. It isn’t just a platitude anymore. We’re all learning to learn with the new tools made available by the web. The new models for education don’t exist yet. We have to discover and create those — and it’s often the youngest who are best positioned and equipped to make those discoveries.
What we need now is genuine passion for learning. At the very least, don’t get in the way...
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