Asians for English

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.

 

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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

 

1. a need to fulfill a curiousity and then to express oneself
2. 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? 

 

 

The good news is anything we don’t know enough can be learned from someone else. There is no rule that says that an adult is prohibited to learn alongside their young charge but a lot of reasons to support the fact that learning is enhanced when an adult role model shows a younger person that initiative and humiliy is a quality of learning.

 

No one with a sound mind would condone and support the premise of what schooling has been throughout the 20th century. I have found many books on leadership and business and education which have lamented the state of schooling yet found virtually no research or publication in the last 100 years (except those propagandas written to pass our Pendidikan Moral) which praised the practices and philosophies embodied by schools. One example from the field of English language teaching is that in spite of the fact that research for decades has found nothing helpful in using the Grammar Translation method, the practice persists through the thousands of teachers using it across the world and seem immune against well-researched far more effective methods. (The Grammar-Translation method entails memorizing lists, grammar rules, doing exercises that are out of context but meant only as drills.)(i) Another is research in psychology proving that corporal punishment/harsh environment is psychologically damaging to a child yet until today, it is legal to harm a child in the so-called sanctity of a school where attendance is mandatory.

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.(ii) For 100 years, the research and literature has been condemning the disruptive psychological and physically damaging environments schools have operated under.(iii) For almost 100 years the people who went to school were dumbed down enough and cowerd enough to not seek out that information while the people who did not go to school could neither make sense of the literature nor validate it. (Gatto, 1992)(John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing us Down.)(iv)

The internet 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. It’s not about taking children out of schools but to stop depending on schools and expecting schools to deliver the learning that our children need. Finally, we need to return the respect and dignity to our children and allow them to tell us their story of why they came into this world at this point in time. We need to give them a chance to show us the way when our ways have brought us to a standstill.

 

The pillars built upon that platform is about Community, about relationships, about connectivity,about access. The definition of ‘poverty’ is essentially a perception that there is a scarcity in terms of opportunities for one to improve themself, to fulfill one’s potential. 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.

 

The opposite is also true. In economics measurement, of where humanity stands in terms of resources, poverty on the basis of scarcity is already a thing of the past. Poverty remains only in places where access to deep knowledge (aka power) about the fundamental currents moving a society has been denied. The new poverty is the inability to make sense of knowledge and resources in a Knowledge-based economy. The pillars built around community, relationships, connectivity and access 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.

At this workshop, I had to make a decision whether I was going to only provide methods and theories or to provoke an internal reflection in participants of the workshop. I remember early on in my teaching career, Teacher Trainer Lucille Dass explained to me that the reason why most of the best practices in teaching do not transfer over to teachers in spite of all the costs of these workshops and seminars is because people want to be told what to do instead of internalizing the knowledge that would guide them throughout their teaching.

I do expect that some people would come with the intention of bringing away with them a little rule book of methods but the nature of teaching is such that you would usually end up with an ecclectic mix of what works for you. I imagine teaching is like cooking; you can pick any recipe book but in the end it’s what you make of it and what works for your tastes.

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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(i)One reason it is said why the Grammar-Translation method persists in spite of the fact that research has proved that it does not help in language learning is because it is far easier for teachers to duplicate their own experience as a student rather than to put in the effort to apply the theories of teaching to their practise. Another reason is because it is easier to create standardised tests and do marking for right/wrong answers based on a script rather than benchmarking one’s effectiveness in teaching against more comprehensive observations and evaluations.

(ii)In 1940, innovative French educator Celestin Freinet was sent to an internment camp by the Vichy Government as a political agitator.

(iii)Maria Montessori was exiled by Mussolini mostly because she refused to compromise her principles and make the children into soldiers. This has similarities to the sentiments felt by parents who are concerned that their children’s futures will be endangered through exposure to negative role models and practices in schools/National Service.

(iv) For starters, visit http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/bookstore/dumbdnblum1.htm