Learning in a post-scarcity environment
david_c
environment? Do you envision an educational "system"? Would you
endeavour to provide schools? What about other institutes of
education?
Modern information technology what it is, does it make sense to
continue to submit ourselves - for a significant portion of our early
lives - to a handful of "educators" who are putatively more qualified
to cultivate our intellectual potential than a potential host of other
teachers? I.e. when information, tutelage, and opportunities to learn
are abundant, why should we continue to lock ourselves, or the youth,
in classrooms?
Even if you didn't expect children to go to school, would you still
expect them to follow a cirriculum? Or would you to a large extent -
perhaps intervening occasionally to offer suggestions, advice, and
tutelage - allow them to direct their own learning?
I regard the "Unschooling" philosophy as the healthiest and most
compelling as far as theories of learning are concerned. This, of
course, is a negative definition - which merely signifies what we are
against. This is unfortunate, but - when confronted with something as
over-bearing and violent as the compulsory schooling system -
necessary.
Paul D. Fernhout
> How do you envision learning taking place in a post-scarcity
> environment? Do you envision an educational "system"? Would you
> endeavour to provide schools? What about other institutes of
> education?
"The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. (William Gibson)"
=== HOW:
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
"New to Homeschooling? Begin Reading Here"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
"There are three manifestations of a free school that operate today."
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite
end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand",
for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or
the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools
to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to
offer, schools themselves must change. ...
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools.
Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving
compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the
information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch
this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory
schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.
"""
http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Childhood-Protecting-Inner-Wildness/dp/0807032867
"Mercogliano (Teaching the Restless) isn't the first to take the current
over-controlling models of parenting and education to task, but the
co-director of the Albany Free School ("a noncoercive, democratic inner-city
school") is one of the most passionate, and he demonstrates compellingly how
institutions, over-structured schedules and "hyperconcern" are robbing
children of their childhood, smothering their creative spark and "inner
wildness." Exploring the life cycle from birth to adulthood, Mercogliano
covers a lot of ground, taking into account history, biology, psychology,
sociology, philosophy and literature, as well as plenty of anecdotes. But
even in his more intellectual moments, examining the work of leading
scholars and experts (including Albert Einstein and Henry David), his
message is simple: in order to save our children we must allow them time for
solitude and play, and restrain the urge to pathologize (and medicate) their
"disruptive" behavior. He makes a convincing plea for a return to a broader,
less judgmental definition of childhood "normalcy," a term that used to
evoke a "Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn archetype-brash, willful, naughty,
rambunctious, aggressive, and always dirty." Showing parents and teachers
how to curb the "domesticating" impulses that have turned growing up into "a
carefully scripted medical procedure," Mercogliano's book, full of insight,
enthusiasm and hope, is as readable and practical as it is illuminating."
http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html
"You can view Annenberg Media programs online with a broadband connection
whenever you see this icon."
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
"Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds. Free lecture notes, exams, and
videos from MIT. No registration required."
http://www.museumofplay.org/
"Recognized as one of the nation’s top museums for families and children,
Strong National Museum of Play® is home to the National Toy Hall of Fame®,
the National Center for the History of Electronic Games™, and the world’s
largest collection of toys, dolls, games, and other items that celebrate
play. You’ll want to play all day in the dynamic, hands-on exhibits: Shop in
a kid-sized market, stroll through Sesame Street, travel Down a Sunny Dirt
Road to meet The Berenstain Bears®, and enjoy so much more including
Videotopia and a new second-floor display, Celebrating America's Favorite
Doll . It’s unlike anything you’ve experienced anywhere! "
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
"Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, spells out 5 dangerous
things you should let your kids do. From TED University 2007."
http://processing.org/
"Processing is an open source programming language and environment for
people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used
by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning,
prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer
programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook
and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to
proprietary software tools in the same domain."
etc. etc. etc. etc.
=== WHY:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
"""
The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and
meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated
form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary
compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists. ... "They know,
better than anyone else that their power is based almost entirely on the
school. … [They want schools] not because they hope for the revolution of
society through education, but because they need individuals, workmen,
perfected instruments of labor to make their industrial enterprises and the
capital employed in them profitable... [They] have never wanted the uplift
of the individual, but his enslavement; and it is perfectly useless to hope
for anything but the school of to-day'
"""
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"""
I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for
American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation,
designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the
same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of
being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the
existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more
this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential
growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It
accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully
underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white,
male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished,
they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is
for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike
at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher
recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and
successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and
Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the
most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system
of education is designed to produce precisely that result.
"""
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the
professional’s lack of control over the political component of his or her
creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society
and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and
employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate
roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference,
undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even
democracy."
http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
"""
The truth, according to Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, is that there is
almost no evidence that homework helps elementary school students achieve
academic success and little more that it helps older students. Yet the
nightly burden is taking a serious toll on America's families. It robs
children of the sleep, play, and exercise time they need for proper
physical, emotional, and neurological development. And it is a hidden cause
of the childhood obesity epidemic, creating a nation of "homework potatoes."
"""
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"In my experience, the most impressive teachers are those who despise the
whole process of giving grades. Their aversion, as it turns out, is
supported by solid evidence that raises questions about the very idea of
traditional grading."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/
"""
At Last – An Award–Winning Teacher Pulls Back the Curtain to reveal the
actual "Fourth Purpose" for which Mass Forced Schooling was conceived. ...
The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers
to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem
incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness
which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.
"""
=====
In New York State, where I live, the states spends about US$20K per child
per year for schooling to produce a result where less than 70% of kids
graduate from high school, and of the ones that do graduate, most have got
almost nothing out of their education as far as life skills for surviving in
today's world.
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2008/08/11/2008-08-11_report_new_york_state_high_school_gradua.html
For thirteen years, at $20K a year, that is US$260K total, or with
compounding interest, that is perhaps closer to half a million dollars over
that time from kindergarten till a child graduates from 12th grade. Invested
well, a half a million dollars would mean that child would never have to
"work" a day in their life except at things they chose to do. Essentially,
rather than give kids half a million dollars when they turn eighteen, we
give them essentially a worthless high school diploma. Or, they could get a
nice house, a new car, and US$250K in the bank. Ask any kid or parent which
they would rather have. Which would you rather have for your kids?
Note: according to John Holt, it takes only 50 contact hours to teach
someone to read once they decide they want to, and about another 50 hours to
teach the basics of math, after which most kids can bootstrap themselves to
higher levels of literacy and general knowledge. So, those 100 contact hours
are costing your child US$500,000, or about $5000 an hour. These are some
web sites where kids can learn to reading, writing, and arithmetic online
for free.
http://www.poissonrouge.com/ (learn to use the mouse)
http://www.starfall.com/ (learn to read)
http://www.math.com/ (learn math)
http://www.powertyping.com/ (learn to type)
http://mail.google.com/ (to learn to write by writing to friends)
(Obviously, doing stuff with pen and paper has its place too, and may even
be preferable. Free computers can generally been had from people upgrading,
or a new netbook costs about US$200.)
Alternatively, the US$20K a year per child could be given directly to
parents who often would then no longer have to work while their child is
young (for example, a family with three children would have an income of
US$60K a year from that, an amount above the median family income in the
USA). Sure, a small percent of parents would blow the money on alcohol
instead of helping educate the child themselves or using tutors or private
schooling, but would the results even then be much worse than a greater than
30% failure rate of the current system where even high school graduates can
be illiterate? And with every other family around dysfunctional families
able to stay home and take care of their kids, even the kids of
dysfunctional families would have neighbors to turn to for help.
And this study shows that most addiction is caused by stressful
environments, and much stress might be reduced in such families that had a
lot more guaranteed income:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
"""
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the
apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats
exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any
addictive property of the drug itself. He told the Canadian Senate in 2001
that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in
cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that
"severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve
their distress pharmacologically if they can." ... The two major science
journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's
first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but
much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no
response. Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's
funding.
"""
Personally, I'd rather see a basic income per individual in society than
just kids five to eighteen and adults sixty-five and over get one. But,
current school costs is at least a starting point.
Note, these ideas could go global:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college
education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of
magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on
the planet K-12 using networked laptops."
Dissolving just one Ivy League school like Princeton University could also
produce enough money from the freed up endowment to educate a billion of the
poorest children (if several kids shared a cheap laptop). Between dissolving
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, all poor people in the world could probably
have an education via the internet as well as clean water via lifestraws. In
turn, what the rest of the world might learn from those billions of people
putting up blogs and websites detailing their lives and beliefs and cultures
and spiritual insights might be invaluable, clearly of far more worth that
what those three schools produce taken together, given we would still have
the rest of the Ivy League and the state universities and other private
schools like Swarthmore to make up for any slack.
The current system makes no sense from a human point of view, but it makes a
lot of sense from a systems point of view. From the Gatto book:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/review_duffy5.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your children or
your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to
stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of
abstract principles and rules which by its nature cannot respond. Under all
its disguises that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which
has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize
that the values you cherish are the stuff of madness to a system. In
systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs.
The only way they could be improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live and
die there."
Almost anything would be much better than what we have now. Homeschooling.
Freeschooling. Unschooling. Internet schooling. No schooling. A basic
income. Take your pick or mix and match.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
Nathan Cravens
Paul D. Fernhout
> We can use gadgets like Sixth
> a space how to assemble an object while it discusses with
> you verbally how and why the parts fit together and how the part fits into a
> whole.
>
> Once we've learned the theory and applied in simple ways on our own, we can
> locate group projects that welcome and further develop our skills and create
> friendships either virtually or face-to-face.
A related story:
"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Skills_of_Xanadu
--Paul Fernhout