The latest from dougbelshaw.com/blog
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- Things I Learned This Week – #10
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A quotation about schools and radical change
2 CommentsI’ve been up early this morning (well, normal time for a weekday but not for a weekend!) to work on fleshing out my Ed.D. thesis proposal outline. I’ve been looking at the articles in Learning for Life in the 21st Century, edited by Gordon Wells and Guy Claxton. The latter contributes Education for the Learning Age: A Sociocultural Approach to Learning to Learn and, on p.23, after explaining that education is essentially a moral activity where educators (the ‘elders’) decide what is appropriate today to shape the minds of young people for the world they will inhabit tomorrow, writes:
But it also depends on whether the elders see their world as stable or changing, and on their image of the future. The goals of education are relative to the future which the ‘elders’ of a society forsee (Cole, 1996). If that future is imagined accurately, and the curriculum is appropriate, the ensuing education will be empowering. If the methods are ineffective, or if they develop skills that are unequal or inappropriate to the demands of the real world-to-be, then education fails. In a stable society, yesterday’s education, if it was well designed originally, will do for the citizens of tomorrow. But if a culture is undergoing radical change, the demands of the future cannot be clearly preducted, and a different kind of preparation is required. If the main thing we know abou the future is that we do know much about it, then the key responsibility for the edcuator is not to give young people tools that may be out of date before they have even been fully mastered, but to help them become confident and competent designers and makers of their own tools as they go along.
I, and many others, believe that the present age is a period of ‘radical change’ and it is therefore precisely this learning how to learn and ‘tool creation’ that we should be teaching… :p
(I’m adding the rest of my quotations and notes to my wiki)
Published on November 11, 2006 · Filed under: Uncategorized;
2 Responses to “A quotation about schools and radical change”
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Diana Brodie said on January 2nd, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Interesting quote. Yes, I agree we must become “designers and makers of our own tools”, but I have an issue about equal access to these new tools for the less-than-well-off majority of people on this planet. As long as technology is cost-prohibitive for the poorer members of society, it will never really fulfill any of the promise it holds. I just went to Second LIfe to check it out, and discovered that one has to have a pretty fast computer and ‘net connection to participate. Satellite connections are no good- guess that leaves me out. We can barely get everyone using fairly modern computers- much less the latest and greatest. Access at libraries is being curtailed in various ways, and the promise of the fast and cheap computer has failed to materialize. While I find this concept exciting, I also think it is just one more way to further divide our society based on income & class.
If our nation could just find a way to really support the educational opportunities of all the citizens, rich and poor, and make the necessary expenditures to ensure that happening- then these new systems would really make a huge difference in this ongoing paradigm shift we are in. If not, this will just be one more “literacy” the poor have no access to. I love Moodle for the very reason that it is so affordable and egalitarian- something that can be used by people all over the world, even in poor countries.
One other thought- I feel like higher education is very much a “do-it-yourself” proposition. -
Yes, that does concern me as well. I think governments have a responsibility to step in here through initiatives such as the One Laptop Per Child Project. The digital literacy/skills divide could prove to be even larger than the existing inequalities we see in our society. And it's all to do with access… :-(
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