<< Go back to The future we deserve.
Author: Edmund Harriss, aka Gelada
Body of article: about 540 words.
Discussion page for this essay: Talk:TheFWD_Gelada_-_Future_Education
The simplest form of education is training, you turn up, acquire a skill and leave. This is easy to structure, and more importantly to test. Yet training gets quickly out of date and cannot cope with rare events. We therefore require our education to do more. Not just teaching skills, but how to learn them, how to deal with the unknown, how to find new solutions. In short it should activate people to learn for themselves. There are now two essential skills: creativity and discipline. You need to have the idea, and then you need to work to make it happen. The problem is if your system worships creativity it can be hard to give discipline, if you worship discipline you can squash creativity.
None of this is radical, I would think that most educationalists of the past 50 years would agree. Despite this however our education systems do not succeed in finding the balance. Exams and skills rule and the system pushes only discipline, often despite the best efforts of the teachers involved. Despite a long period of understanding, therefore, the solution still alludes us. We cannot predict how even the best ideas from the top might take effect in an actual school. In some cases they can even cause harm. At this point someone often says to just let teachers get on with it. I am not convinced by this. It gives freedom to bad teachers, and we have to admit there are plenty of them. Good teachers would get a break, but in most cases they are already "just getting on with it", sometimes fighting the system if they have to. So what can be done?
Think about education. What matters? When it comes down to it, it is the teacher in the classroom, the parent in the home. It is the child sitting at the internet, vast swathes of the knowledge of humanity just in front of them. This is where we can make things better. Here we do not have to persuade the whole system, here we do not have to worry about how the system will mangle the message. Of course how to help here is also an issue, it needs to take account of the style and skills of the people involved.
So the future is simple, talk to each other more. We have the tools to make it possible. If you are a teacher try new things and write about them. What worked? What didn't work?. Its already happening, there are some great blogs out there (some of the good maths ones are below). If writing things up is not your style, just take a look at what is out there. Try the suggestions and report back. Work out how you might improve. Build your own network and sources to give inspiration. Pick the battles where you can fight or subvert the system, Parents can do the same. Take advice from teachers, and find your own sources, make sure your children get exposed to lots of different ideas and activities. Finally children...no advice needed here. They have been doing this for years now, finding new ideas, learning to use computers, learning how to build things. Just imagine how much more could happen if we helped them?