At some point a very clever person pointed out that “it’s not getting the answer that’s important, it’s knowing what the right questions are to ask”. This is an often overlooked point in traditional education, where the emphasis is squarely placed on the “right answer” syndrome, with the questions asked by the teacher, of course.
Similarly, maybe the larger problem with traditional education is that it’s trying to solve the wrong problem. It has always been mostly focused on content delivery. Right? Education as we’ve known it is a “content delivery system”. Put another way, it’s based on the idea that “there’s a bunch of stuff that we’ve decided is important for you to know and so we’re going to sit you down and tell you. You just need to remember what we tell you. Got it? We’ll check in periodically (test you) to see if you’re remembering”. I think that sums it up.
Now. forget that remembering isn’t learning. That’s s different point (addressed in an earlier post).
The issue is: what is the problem to be solved, really?
It is this: how do we “make” people who maintain their natural curiosity, desire to learn and excitement about making something of their lives and the world they live in? How do we create compassionate, resourceful, creative, collaborative, effective, confident, independent, respectful, tolerant people? (non-exhaustive list)
THIS is the problem to solve. We don’t have a knowledge problem.
More tomorrow.
Mark, well said sir!!
The whole top-down approach to education was the reason I guess why I look at university (and a lesser extent high school before that) as a necessary evil (like you mentioned in your last post).
Even with supposedly higher education, I learned that to `succeed` at uni, was to put aside my acquired practical knowledge and regurgitate what the professor wanted us to know.
Good start with the blog; lookin forward to part deux!
Chris – great thought. From someone “on the inside” you’d know best. Sorry state of affairs.
I wrote in an article recently that there’s a commonality between the “Montessori Innovators” out there (creators of Google, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, SimCity) – they all went to college, graduated and most went to grad school. Conversely, the non-Montessori techies (Gates, Dell, Jobs) all dropped out of college. What does this possibly say? That the Montessori children learned how to use education as a tool, they “owned” the process and didn’t feel the nedd to escape in order to be creative.
Thanks for writing!
[...] of learning. Learning is most emphatically NOT remembering. That’s been addressed here before, so let’s not go [...]