Schooling and Learning should be synonymous
School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is "getting it”. - Seth Godin on his blog "Education at the Crossroads".
Ideally, schooling and learning should be synonymous. But it isn’t.
It would be so much easier to do the typical school thing of giving the fish instead of leading the fundamental change in design that will reframe the entire thinking premise and approach. As with building any foundation, the blueprint must first be laid out and then the foundation piled on. Once that’s down to pat, the rest of the building can take shape in the speed of change.
There are 2 ways to go forward and many other ways to get swept back by the wave of change. One, stopping the cogs and completely dismantling the schooling machinery as it is right now (no more excuses and imaginative experiments). We tell the government to give us some of that tax money back and we fund our own community schools.Two, start ‘getting it’ that the former is not going to happen soon enough and learning and schooling will remain out of sync as we navigate our children’s future into the 21st century.
You can read the Chinese translation here.
The fact that it is universally acknowledged, by adults and openly expressed by young people (violene in school, boredom, depression), that school is the last place you would go for learning proves that we have to rethink some of the basic assumptions we have about learning. One of them is that learning cannot happen unless one has been explicitly instructed.
As an ESL practitioner I often remind students, who are very reluctant to try and explore language outside of class, that they learned to say “Mummy” and “Papa” and “No” in their native tongue without these words/concepts being explicitly taught to them (either through flashcards or wearing nametags and pointing to them the whole day). I wanted to illustrate the point that almost all learning happens as a result of
- a need to fulfill a curiousity and then to express oneself.
- a drive to develop an innate quality / strength. All one needs is an environment that supports and encourages learning to unfold.
Another assumption is that it is irresponsible or impossible to teach our own children simply because we don’t know enough. The culprit to why we don’t know enough is because schooling was never meant to teach us to a point where we feel we’ve learned enough to navigate towards freedom from
time and meaningless work.
Schooling was created as a dance partner to the Industrial Revolution which needed factory workers that would obey the concepts of hierarchy and authority, not ask too many questions, obey the bell (punch in, punch out) and be used to boring, repetitive indoor work as opposed to the more free and unstructured time and learning of farm and rural life. Shouldn’t we have a new dance partner that can tap to the beat of a Knowledge-based economy within an Information Revolution?
Thinking requires courage. Change requires conviction. Even if all the reasons combined about the damaging effects of 20th century could not persuade us to shift our paradigms about education and learning, the new wave sweeping us into the 21st century might.
For 100 years, the research and literature has been pointing towards a child-centred approach which
looks to the child to lead the direction of learning and incorporating innovations in the classroom.
For 100 years, the research and literature has been condemning the disruptive psychological and physically damaging environments schools have operated under.
The internet has transformed how vital information can be made available to those who seek it. The internet destroyed the barricades to information and formed the genesis for connection and collaboration. If it was ignorance that kept us in an arrested development and our intellectual and creative self-esteem truncated then it must be information that liberates us.
The internet not only transformed the hierarchy and exclusivity of information for where Knowledge is Power, the internet has also redefined the power of markets, social change and the power of innovation. The adult preparing young people for 21st century learning needs to seriously reflect whether there is an urgent need to rethink the ways we learned, the ways we were taught about how learning happens and the relationship between Time, Work and Play.
There are 3 steps in preparing the platform for our 21st century learners. First, we need a new narrative for the world our children will grow up in. Second, we need to move away from the old definition of learning and develop a new one. It is insanity to go on depending on the same factors that have failed us to deliver a winner.
Finally, we need to return the respect and dignity to our children and rethink the ways we have been accustomed to thinking about education.
The pillars built upon that platform is about Community, about relationships, about connectivity,about access. To build the pillars of learning around Community, relationships, connections between people and ideas and having access to both free social media and innovative, inexpensive technology essentially guarantees a future for a child where scarcity is no longer a factor. These pillars places the child as a learner in the middle where school is only one of many ways a child learns.
In time to come, we hope that we will be able to push for schools to be a place where children go to in order to communicate, collaborate, share resources – a place where learning is networked and linked, not hierarchical and isolated as it is now. But until then, the place to develop the 21st century learner has to begin somewhere else.
Children need to develop higher order thinking and synthesis between disciplines instead of regurgitating solutions with a vending machine approach. The de-massification of society into niche markets calls into demand creativity, aesthetics and beauty, synergy and harmony. Such a world moves within a “speed of trust” which requires qualities such as ethics and empathy. Where will they model these qualities from? Who will they model themselves after?
The 21st century young adult will experience a level of freedom and knowledge never known before in the history of mankind. These are exciting times. In a knowledge-based information world, young people in the 21st century will solve new problems as they arise with the skills to acquire and synergize both knowledge and information. In the words of Michio Kaku, “Everyday I look in the papers, I see evidence...(that we are approachinga Type 1 Civilization). I am most privileged to be alive in the most important era of the history of the human race – the transition from a Type Zero to a Type One civilization.” (v)
Surely we are most privileged too. With privilege comes responsibility – the responsibility to play a role as parents of children who will inherit the world at such an exciting era in the entire history of the human race.
It would be so much easier to do the typical school thing of giving the fish instead of leading the fundamental change in design that will reframe the entire thinking premise and approach. As with building any foundation, the blueprint must first be laid out and then the foundation piled on. Once that’s down to pat, the rest of the building can take shape in the speed of change.
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