Education - Fit for purpose?

Readers of our blog know that Tomi and I are far more than just technology, or web 2.0 what ever.

The title of our book Communities Dominate Brands was meant to be disruptive as a metaphor of the world we now all inhabit.

Our posts cover many topics which we believe are important for how business can and will be conducted in the future, how marketing needs to adapt to the current prevailing zeitgeist.

We see the power of connected communities and the demise of the mass market towards a market of mass niche communities and social media. I could go on...

We see the power of communications, and the communion of communities, Group Forming Networks (Reeds Law) and the consequences these have on our wider society.

We want to take the opportunity to suggest how we might collectively help make the world a better place and of course I personally see education as something key in this process.

My personal interest in this is my own experience and that of my children, who are all dyslexic. One I would describe as a victim of state education, the other two are at schools which we believe can best help them - which are not in the state sector.

We educate our children from the waist up, then we focus on their heads, and then we only educate one side of their brain.

The whole purpose of education is to produce university professors. Who live only in their heads. Their bodies are only there to transport their heads to meetings.

Said Sir Ken Robinson, and of course we have a very rigid structure, a systemic industrial means of educating our children.

Don't fit the system - tough shit. I remember my English teacher's end of year report

"Moore writes in convoluted prose"

Thanks Mr Lorimer :-) Interestingly, it would have been nice to know that through that last school year - if you know what I mean. Or the maths teacher's who would just get exasperated that YOU didn't get it.

Sir Ken, reminds us that education in its present form is becoming a devalued commodity, and that the current education system educates creativity out of us.

Education was created at a time when the need was to fuel the explosion of industrialisation, Sir Ken argues passionately that we need to educate the whole child holistically. Children he believes have extraordinary capacities for innovation and creativity. Picasso argued that we are all born artists, the struggle is to hang on to that creativity as you grow up.

The whole world is engulfed in a revolution, which requires us to think deeply how we prepare our children for the future.

You have to be prepared to be wrong to create new things, education and companies stigmatise failure, leading to hubris and stagnation.

Every education system around the world has the same hierarchy of education. Is this right? Yet intelligence is diverse and dynamic. Intelligence engages us totally and collectively.

Creativity can be defined as orginal ideas that have value, and it will combinations of interdisciplinary capabilites that allows us to reframe the world in a new way.

Sir Ken argues that today creativity is as important in education as literacy. It will be the leaps of the human imagination that will build tomorrows companies and economies. Our only hope for the future is to redefine human ecology and rethink how we educate our children

So why is this important? Well there is a PETITION FOR A REVIEW our education system.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to undertake a major review of the Special Educational Needs policy as recommended by the House of Commons Education and Skills Committee and make provision for a system of special educational needs that is fit for purpose

If you have kids or are passionate what a real education might or could be for our future generations please click on this link and sign up the petition

Lets see if the science of Group Forming Networks works?

20th Century education no match for the needs of a 21st Century world || At last a chance for every child || democracy deserves the best thinking possible || I'm alright Jack: Ruth Kelly ignites public debate on our education system and special needs || Smart learning for the future || Class rooms without walls || Henry Jenkins et al on participatory culture and media literacy || Education 2.0: The next evolution of school software has arrived

Comments

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

How about education on demand? Who could build the Education 2.0 platform? Google or a federation of startups? Academic education doesn't work well. It's boring, it's antiquated, it should be fixed. There is a huge market all over the world.

Wikipedia + blogs + Facebook (social networks) + podcasting + videocasting (YouTube) + Flickr + mobile (cell) phones + gaming + IM + VoIP = Education 2.0

"Rather than spending 4 years of your life taking a bunch of courses that may or may not really matter in your life once you graduate, you can choose your education on an 'as needed basis,' based on your unique interests and talents."
http://ben.casnocha.com/2006/09/college_admissi_1.html

Who is interested in this idea?
http://divedi.blogspot.com/search?q=education

Dear Dimitar

Very interesting point

I wonder if anyone else has some suggestions?

Thanks for posting and I shall check out the links

Alan :-)

[Subbaraman Iyer]

I think the one of the fundamental disconnect in our current education system is between teaching and learning. Policy makers and the educationists see the education process as a matter of feeding some useful information to the students; in a standard rigid way, which is sub optimal as learners learn things very differently.

My comments on this 2 approaches as I see it are given below.

http://subbaiyer.wordpress.com/2007/01/14/the-education-and-learning-approaches/

[Patrizia Broghammer]

What should really do education?

The main and important goal of education is making a child "think".
I wrote on the heading of my blog "think and you'll have the problem of disposal of ideas".
Well education should be just this.
Creating the problem of disposal of ideas.
And teaching how to dispose of all the ideas the student has.

The second goald should be to teach not to be afraid to be critical.
"Critical thinking means being able to evaluate evidence, to tell fact from opinion, to see holes in an argument, to tell whether cause and effect has been established and to spot illogic."

And critical thinking helps to use good ideas and discharge the bad ones.
And that is all.
All the rest will come by itself.
Ideas generate new ideas and new ideas a new curiosity for what is around us, and new curiosity will generate new ideas and so on...
And this is what man was made for, living and progressing.

[Alan moore]

Dear Subbaraman Iyer

Thank you for your comments. I do believe you are right, and was also a point I was trying to make. Children in fact are not built like a machine, which can be fed exactly the same quantities of information in a formulaic way, with expected outputs also being the same.

This is a legacy of living in an industrialised world. In fact the more I think about it the dysfunctional it seems to me. Here we are in the early 21st Century, teaching our kids in much the same way we did 150 years ago.

Also learning is a very personal experience. I could not read until I was 10 years old. People thought at te time I was an ESN (educationally subnormal) Here I am writing away, running my own company. I had to find my own route to finding learning compelling and joyful.

Which is should be as it is also a journey to personal discovery.

I shall go and have a look at your post.

Thank yu for stopping by.

Kind regards

Alan Moore :-)

[Alan moore]

Dear Patrizia,

Thank you for commenting, the world you describe is one where creativity is unleashed as a perpetual engine that fuels greater curiosity to explore and to learn. And I certainly agree with that.

So thanks for stopping by

Alan Moore

[K Satyanarayan]

Robert Barr and John Tagg, in a landmark article titled "From Teaching to Learning" (published in the Nov/Dec 1995 issue of Change Magazine) suggested that there was a subtle shift in education taking place from the Instruction Paradigm (schools exist to provide instruction) to the Learning Paradigm (schools exist to produce learning). They compared and contrasted the two paradigms in detail. 12 years on, the shift is still happening.

This article by Barr and Tagg (full text available at
http://critical.tamucc.edu/~blalock/readings/tch2learn.htm) is "arguably the most widely cited piece that Change ever published," according to the editor of Change Magazine.

[Alan moore]

Hello K.

Thank you for pointing me to this article it is much apreciated.

Thank you for stopping by and leaving a valuable comment

Alan