Scientific Revolutions and How we Teach and Learn
Few paradigms (Thanks to Seb for the link) are as powerful as the one we use for education. It is absolutely accepted that education should not be experiential and should place the teacher in the position as fount of all wisdom. Education also should be prescribed - divided into silos that separate even further over time into minute slivers of knowledge. Most of all the purpose education has become confined into the narrow realm of the rational mind and to jobs.
Indigenous people and the classic world saw education in a radically different context. First of all the context for the purpose of education was the development of a good citizen or the good contributor to the whole tribe. A good citizen had not only skills of the intellect but more importantly knew who he was as a whole person.
The development of his Character was the central theme. The stories and myths of his or her people were the centrepiece of her context. For men, this is why sport was so important. Sport was not a launch pad to the NHL or to a coaching job, sport was the game of life that encultured boys to focus their boundless physical energy and competitive spirit into learning how to become valuable adults. Like young lion cubs, boys, were encultured by sport to understand the great lessons of life such as how to delay gratification, how to work with others, how to develop difficult skills, how to deal with defeat and with victory. How to lead and how to follow. In effect how to find their place in their society.
The tribal model for education was apprenticeship. The student learned by a series of experiences that had meaning ascribed to them by the mentor. In effect, mentors provided the context and the student learned the hard way. Graduation was being recognized as a contributing adult member of society.
Education as we think of it today has become an expensive, truly boring process, that fails to give society what it needs. We have lost the centrality of the need to develop character because we have discounted the emotional and physical development entirely. We then wonder why so many of our kids seem lost and act out. It is based on a process of instruction which violates the core learning process, experience. We then wonder why so many kids find school irrelevant and intensely boring and drop out. We have lost the whole idea of exploration and have replaced it with the idea of a known world. So we wonder why our kids find dealing with complexity so difficult and why they get so bored so easily.
Are we nearing a paradigm threshold where enough of us can "see" this? I am hopeful that we are. What do you think or "see"
