reverse education
10th June 2016 - Reverse Education
My son and his wife run an educational upliftment project in South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape, a depressing area. Last week he was in town to speak to potential funders and to make presentations on his Ph D thesis on the challenges facing rural education. After he left, I found myself concluding that education systems worldwide appear designed by old people to enable young people to live in an era long gone.
Take writing for instance. When I started school the desks had ink-wells into which we dipped our pens. Nowadays the only times I pick up a pen are to jot down a shopping list or fill in and sign a form. I really should use my phone for lists, while online forms and fingerprint recognition are cutting down on paper usage. There was a time when it was popular to take typing courses; today’s two thumbed tapping on small screens is sure to be overtaken by voice input to programs that produce perfect text with no spelling mistakes and perfect punctuation. Another barked command and it could be translated into any of hundreds of languages, again perfectly.
When I was in high school we used extensive logarithm tables to n decimal places to perform calculations. At university we cranked away at mechanical adding machines or punched Fortran instructions onto punched cards. Today just about every cellphone has a calculator and spreadsheet programs provide a glittering array of mathematical and statistical functions we could only dream of in my youth.
Geography, history, current affairs, times tables, biology and science still aim to cram big facts into small heads so they can be regurgitated when the time comes to be examined for promotion to the next grade or even to an institute of so called higher learning. Spelling competitions should be defunct. Recently my doctor daughter had to memorise a 400 page book of obscure eye conditions in order to pass her ophthalmology examinations. Yet just about everyone on the planet has access to the wealth of data contained on the Internet. Pupils should be taught to find, evaluate and collate information into a useful whole. Sure they need a basic framework of general knowledge, but I don’t think that’s what they get right now.
How do we design an education system for the future? The education professors in their ivory towers seem to think automating existing tired courses with MOOCS is the answer. Meanwhile the powers that be in education administration no doubt think that what was good for them thirty years ago is good for the kids of today. I would guess that the majority of teachers are not as tech literate as the ten year olds they teach. Their outdated pedagogic skills would render them redundant in classrooms where research and debate are the order of the day. So they’re not going to be much help designing the future.
In fact, does a modern education system need teachers at all? Sugata Mitra, in his inspirational TED talk on the Future of Learning, showed how poor kids in India taught themselves using computers housed in a wall. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, set up a laboratory in his childhood home where he learned by experiment. The three year old son of a colleague watched over the shoulder of his older brother as he played Minecraft on a computer; when brother went to school, he hopped into his chair and designed wonderful worlds oblivious to the words on the screen. There are any number of stories of kids too ill to attend school who immersed themselves in books and became geniuses. The list goes on and on.
Sugata Mitra suggests that today’s school systems were designed to help Britain control the Victorian empire. Perhaps, for inspiration for the future, we need to go much further back to the ancient Greeks where logic and rhetoric formed the cornerstones of learning. I was going to say it’s time we started with a blank sheet of paper, but a blank screen would be a better metaphor!
My son and his wife run an educational upliftment project in South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape, a depressing area. Last week he was in town to speak to potential funders and to make presentations on his Ph D thesis on the challenges facing rural education. After he left, I found myself concluding that education systems worldwide appear designed by old people to enable young people to live in an era long gone.
Take writing for instance. When I started school the desks had ink-wells into which we dipped our pens. Nowadays the only times I pick up a pen are to jot down a shopping list or fill in and sign a form. I really should use my phone for lists, while online forms and fingerprint recognition are cutting down on paper usage. There was a time when it was popular to take typing courses; today’s two thumbed tapping on small screens is sure to be overtaken by voice input to programs that produce perfect text with no spelling mistakes and perfect punctuation. Another barked command and it could be translated into any of hundreds of languages, again perfectly.
When I was in high school we used extensive logarithm tables to n decimal places to perform calculations. At university we cranked away at mechanical adding machines or punched Fortran instructions onto punched cards. Today just about every cellphone has a calculator and spreadsheet programs provide a glittering array of mathematical and statistical functions we could only dream of in my youth.
Geography, history, current affairs, times tables, biology and science still aim to cram big facts into small heads so they can be regurgitated when the time comes to be examined for promotion to the next grade or even to an institute of so called higher learning. Spelling competitions should be defunct. Recently my doctor daughter had to memorise a 400 page book of obscure eye conditions in order to pass her ophthalmology examinations. Yet just about everyone on the planet has access to the wealth of data contained on the Internet. Pupils should be taught to find, evaluate and collate information into a useful whole. Sure they need a basic framework of general knowledge, but I don’t think that’s what they get right now.
How do we design an education system for the future? The education professors in their ivory towers seem to think automating existing tired courses with MOOCS is the answer. Meanwhile the powers that be in education administration no doubt think that what was good for them thirty years ago is good for the kids of today. I would guess that the majority of teachers are not as tech literate as the ten year olds they teach. Their outdated pedagogic skills would render them redundant in classrooms where research and debate are the order of the day. So they’re not going to be much help designing the future.
In fact, does a modern education system need teachers at all? Sugata Mitra, in his inspirational TED talk on the Future of Learning, showed how poor kids in India taught themselves using computers housed in a wall. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, set up a laboratory in his childhood home where he learned by experiment. The three year old son of a colleague watched over the shoulder of his older brother as he played Minecraft on a computer; when brother went to school, he hopped into his chair and designed wonderful worlds oblivious to the words on the screen. There are any number of stories of kids too ill to attend school who immersed themselves in books and became geniuses. The list goes on and on.
Sugata Mitra suggests that today’s school systems were designed to help Britain control the Victorian empire. Perhaps, for inspiration for the future, we need to go much further back to the ancient Greeks where logic and rhetoric formed the cornerstones of learning. I was going to say it’s time we started with a blank sheet of paper, but a blank screen would be a better metaphor!
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