<< Go back to The future we deserve.

Author: Edmund Harriss, aka Gelada
Body of article: about 490 words.
Discussion page for this essay: Talk:TheFWD_Gelada_-_Future_Education
Previous drafts: TheFWD_Gelada_-_Future_Education_drafts

Challenging Education and the "Harry Potter Letter"

It is not hard to get kids playing football. You leave them somewhere with a ball. At the weekend you take them to see the game. Imagine if we could do the same with mathematics!

We can. I have built mathematical sculptures with people in their own time, happily volunteered. I have taken mathematics to festivals and seen parents drag their children away to give time to the other exhibits. It is possible to get kids to play spontaneously with mathematics and to give them ideas from the deep reaches of the subject. I use my research in geometry and tilings. Just leave children with wooden Penrose tiles and they will start to play. They will then ask questions, and find answers. Along with other games with mirrors, and toys like http://www.zometool.com/ zometool] and polydron this can lead to topics like group theory, four dimensional space and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. In fact in any syllabus there are plenty of topics that can be motivated this way: Trigonometry can be used to help design a catapult and then quadratic equations will help aim it.

You will probably be surprised by how many students get inspired by these ideas, others might be interested but not want to get too deep and others will be bored. That is fine, the same happens for everything. As an example few would argue that my initial example, sport, cannot be interesting, yet it holds little appeal to me. What we need to move on from, however, is the idea that concepts should be hidden as they are too challenging or complicated. This is like forbidding someone learning football from seeing professionals play, or trying not to confuse a young pianist by playing them Bach or Rachmaninov. When they have entered school children have already learnt how to use their limbs, how to make sound and then how to give it meaning. They are used to challenge. Compared to that most mathematics is trivial. Education should be a challenge, with the acceptance that we might fail. In fact there is something wrong if anyone never fails. All schools and parents will have access to someone who gets excited and has expertise in something.

Challenging people will often get people excited. They become activated to learn for themselves. This has not always been easy, but today we have the internet. It is rapidly expanding and will soon be available to the majority of people on the earth. To the motivated nearly the whole of human knowledge is available here.

So we can help activate people by challenging them, and they can then set that spark to the tinder of the internet. What then? Can we find them, cultivate them? Something as simple as the number of pages a person views might make a credible metric. Could we use this, and then send out a "Harry Potter" style letter, connecting them to a postdoc to act as guide? How many Einsteins or Ramanujans are out there waiting to be discovered?

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