What is the future of education? | INFJ Forum

What is the future of education?

Rakawi

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Apr 6, 2010
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What? No academic sub-forum?

No doubt many of you have already seen this, but it's so fantastic it bears repeating:

Sir Ken Robinson at the TED Conference: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY"]Do schools kill creativity?[/ame]

Per the subject line, what are your thoughts? How do we plan for an uncertain future in educating the residents of planet Earth? What do we have wrong? What have we got right? And how will that change, particularly in relation to the rise of academic inflation?

(And on a separate note in regards to personal and community growth, I think that INFJs in particular are predisposed to stigmatizing their own mistakes, academic or otherwise, and the mistakes of others --and it's one of the most important things that we can unlearn. Life seems to be as much about unlearning outmoded ideas as learning better ones, yes?)
 
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I saw him in person, and I probably would have bought his book, but I didn't have any money on me at the time.

I think we need to radically reform the education system, but my ideas are so radical that I'd rather not put them out there. They aren't practical. What Ken Robinsin says is interesting though, and I think you can find some Buddhist elements in there as well.
 
Sidewinding:

Pessimism is never useful... and only forgivable if it's been tempered with years of failure. We're about two decades shy of that badge.

ENTPs and INFJs, when optimistic realist meets realistic optimist.

On track:

I went to public school for the bulk of my education. --Private school for the earliest few years. Looking back, the religious indoctrination didn't hold past puberty, but who knows what might've happened if I'd remained?

Nonetheless, the private education was more consistent and demanding than public education. It's too bad really, but it is reality. However, I don't know if these two institutions don't share many of the same faults?
 
Religion has proven fairly well in the past that it isn't the solution. I still think that holds true.

I think society reform needs to happen. If spinnin' rims are the only thing that is seen of value in society, don't expect the kiddies to be rushing to the library...
 
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My alternative school that I went to after I got kicked out of regular HS was the best education I got. Why?

Because the teaches cared.

You can have the best cirriculum in the world, if the teachers are pissed or don't care, neither do the students (most of them)

Then again, my solution wouldn't necessarily be anyone else's.
 
To fix education, we need to look outside the sphere of schooling. Many of the problems don't stem from the schooling (although a reasonable number do come from schools themselves) We need to look at the socioeconomic causes in poor underdeveloped areas, and address those concerns. When education isn't valued by a subsect of people, because they see no applicable use for it, education standards will continue to fall. When getting an education prevents people from sustaining their lives (which they see no reasonable means of escaping from), education will be an afterthought.

Also, we need to revamp education spending. Lastly, I'm the future of education!
 
If i ever get a chance, in the future, my wife and I would like to open a new school. But the chances of that happening in the modern world are slim. We'd have to spend most of our money on anti-litigation insurance.

Any way, I'd run it the way my best teachers ran things. And there would be plenty of time for creativity, and no "high School age" textbooks.
 
Nothing beats a talented, interested, caring teacher. Nothing. A rare being, indeed.
 
i'm hoping technology will eventually enable us to greatly speed up learning, so that it becomes something like out of the matrix- the ability to absorb years of information in the span of a few minutes. that would be great if it were possible :) and considering how much we already know about the brain's elasticity & potential, the emergence of such technology might be a matter of "when" not "if" :p

if we're talking specifically academic education, i predict it'll become a lot more specialized in the future. greater interaction between the types of skills taught & industry demand for those skills, from an earlier starting point. it'll be more streamlined. probably more expensive too.

how should it be? imo, less books, more play. bring it back down to how people naturally learn. oh, and cost shouldn't even be a factor (though it likely will be)
 
non-competitive, interactive, real, applied, shared, participatory, with very high quality teachers making it fun and reasonable, with very free and open structure to allow everyone to develop at their own pace, using their own learning tools to match cognitive abilities, with lots of traveling, exploration and experimentation, out there, in the nature, and within real labs and technology centers

as a more concrete example, chemistry can be completely 3D-interactive, to the point when even scientific papers are created in the form of 3D-interactive videos, rather than text-based; same with all natural sciences, geography, biology, and math; history should show students real documents and real sources of reference, not what some textbooks teach you to recite; geology should show you the geo-layers and bones, how archeological reasoning works /pretty much detective work/; foreign languages should involve visiting of the native countries, that would speed up language studying like nothing else

eventually, people would even forget to use the classical latin names for bones and species, and rather would have complete experience with how they look and their functionality; after all, the separation of any of these systems is only for convenience, none of our bones is labeled as separate, and at the same time, some bones, like in the skull, deserve more attention than whole groups of bones

in astronomy, kids should have access to real equipment for star photography and all basic reasoning should be cleared as early as possible, not just thrown out there as law; actually our notions of natural laws are going to be redefined too, because they rarely explain exactly what happens, and still can't explain many important processes around us well enough; as an example, light propagation is not direct, but forms networks of reflections and shadows; real-life functionality should be emphasized and explained along with the laws, otherwise kids don't really get how it works

most importantly; start with the serious stuff immediately, even as babies we are already interested in theoretical physics :) don't hide it for later! and use wiki-principles to actually teach even the newest results that are getting published in journals while the teaching goes; results should be published as clearly and open as possible, and kids encouraged to read journals as early as possible, why not even publish their own results, that's how it works anyway, age doesn't matter
 
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It seems to me that most public schools tend to operate based on what the State thinks is best for the schools under their jurisdiction.

Most private schools seem to tend to operate based on what the main authority figure there (school governer/headmaster/whatever) thinks is best for their school.

Steiner schools (and similar organisations) tend to operate based on what the teacher thinks is best for their students.

Most home-schooling families tend to operate based on what the parents think is best for their kids.

And Montessori schools and unschooling families tend to operate based on what the student thinks is best for themselves.

-------------

In short, I'd like to see more of the latter and less of the former.
 
Psychologists are often keen to remind us that "The point of school is not about academia, but about socialising children."

I don't agree with this, but the way things are going I wouldn't be surprised if academia becomes less important in the future.

Our society is becoming increasingly mechanised. Increasingly burdened with procedure and beaurocracy. Academic merits are becoming less respected than they once were. "nerd" is now used in place of "intelligent", and carries a negative connotation, and it has become very pervasive nowadays. There appears to be a trend throughout schools of gradually lowering standards and trying to be more inclusive to the full range of abilities: People at the bottom are graded too generously, and people at the top are under stretched.

In England there is a fairly common belief that standards of education are slipping. Schooling prepares children for passing exams more than it really educates them. Exam questions follow ultra familiar templates that are easy to prepare for because you know within 3 words what they are going to ask.

There have been discussions recently of maybe allowing internet access in exams, because it is more commonplace nowadays than calculators. Calculators have been allowed in exams for over 20 years because they were commonplace.

It has been established that children nowadays are rather good with quickfire superficial answers, but have very poor depth of understanding.

I don't think I need to go into any more detail. You see the trend? I fear this trend will continue. I don't like it.
 
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i'm hoping technology will eventually enable us to greatly speed up learning, so that it becomes something like out of the matrix- the ability to absorb years of information in the span of a few minutes. that would be great if it were possible :) and considering how much we already know about the brain's elasticity & potential, the emergence of such technology might be a matter of "when" not "if" :p


I only fear those who will seek to exploit this technology. A direct feed into someone's head is a scary idea for manipulation indeed.
 
What if education is about to be wiped out by the capacity of the individual to learn everything they need to know from a module plugged into their heads? A direct central connection to a central database of continuously updated knowledge?

There are a list of potential technologies. 'The Matrix' is a distopian potential future and yet in each instant we've had a 'global distopia' hanging over our heads it's de-stabilized by the presence of variation throughout our culture.

Still, what we have as an 'education' system in just this country is completely devoid of learning. It's a control mechanism much like most of our major government services. They provide a positive re-enforcement for people to support the systems of bureaucracy that exist all around us and in a larger sense to support the involvement of 'top tier' persons. What are, in theory, the brains of our civilization.

Yes technology can be mis-used. It often is. It can also be used brilliantly. The internet may be the most mis-used piece of technology on earth and yet it us holding our civilization together like glue. What would a piece like a direct mind to mind information transfer do?

Brilliant. Sorry, off in my head. I get speculative sometimes.
 
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I only fear those who will seek to exploit this technology. A direct feed into someone's head is a scary idea for manipulation indeed.

Don't worry, this technology doesn't exist and there isn't a hint in extant knowledge that it will ever exist. The Matrix was entertaining fiction, but working embodiments of this educational technology would require a paradigm shift of the sort described by Kuhn in his book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." To have any credibility, scientific speculation needs to be extrapolated from current reality.
 
Don't worry, this technology doesn't exist and there isn't a hint in extant knowledge that it will ever exist. The Matrix was entertaining fiction, but working embodiments of this educational technology would require a paradigm shift of the sort described by Kuhn in his book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." To have any credibility, scientific speculation needs to be extrapolated from current reality.

True but there are significant advancements in the understanding and manipulation of the visual cortex which would be scary enough. Actual portrayal of thought is still long off I am sure and brain dumps are hard to imagine anytime soon but the former still scares the crap out of me. Emotional stimulation probably isn't too far off either.
 
I have to tack this on at the bottom here.

Brain reading technology has been developed. We can reconstruct a thought from a human mind's emanations. There have been several developments in brain reading technology over the last several years. We can re-construct an image and the resolution of the image is increasing. We can extrapolate instructions from brain waves. There are children's toys which use EKG's to translate thought into action.

We have large hard drives which can store more information than the human brain (which tops out at about 4 terabytes of solid data). We have computers faster than the brain.

Now, if we can re-construct a thought from the brain, we can read output from stimulus.

We have a very simple device that's been around for years to produce images for stimulus. We play video-games which allow us to calculate a VERY wide range of responses to what we see and to interact with those objects.

So, we can take something the brain does and say 'this is what the brain is doing'. We can produce something for the brain to respond to. We can use auditory signals to produce sounds for the brain to interpret. We call those hearing aids.

We can make interactive environments. Try Second Life. We can build suits which allow the human body to interact only within the simulation. We can project images into the brain. We're CLOSE. The Matrix isn't far off, and I for one...I welcome it. I'll be first in line for a wi-fi card in my brain.
 
He is quite right, I always felt supressed in school and forced to perform tasks that did not interest me.
My grades were alright, but I'd get my tests back where all my mistakes were marked.

I've often wondered what school would have been like, If it was not based on testing, but on learned knowledge.
SarahBS, showed me a site called khanacademy.com where there is a system in place for people to learn things untill they understand it.
Never do you get tested there, its simply based on understanding. I think all basics should be taught like this.

Right now I do an education in a creative field.
But when I was a kid, I did not dare to draw because I was afraid of making a mistake, and my drawing failing.
This fear only started after I had started getting tests in school where I was graded.
Currently I have a fear of failure. I am terrified when I get judged on something and completely black out when I am tested.

I do not know where education is heading, but this guy is completely right. Education right now kills creativity and It does not allow you to explore subjects to your own interests in subjects. If I ever have the fortune of becoming a father, then I'd like to homeschool my kid(s), allow them to take extra courses in things they're interested in, and persue hobbies and enter clubs that interest them.

Another interesting two videos by the same guy.


[video=youtube;wX78iKhInsc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX78iKhInsc[/video]
[video=youtube;r9LelXa3U_I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I[/video]
 
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I'm currently taking a break from sloughing through a bunch of repetitive academic assignments; what a great coincidence that I saw this thread!

I think one trend that I've seen in my education that troubles me is the increased superficiality. Many of the textbooks I've used do the analytical work for me, which is quite frustrating, because I believe the purpose of taking all these classes, going to school, is to improve an individual's intellectual independence.

I concede that in certain fields, like science, memorizing concepts might be more efficient, but there is a maddening lack of self-discovery in education. I could probably learn more about the world by interacting in it, as opposed to learning about it in a classroom. I know, I sound very much like Thoreau right now. Oh, the 'terrible' Thoreau. Anyway.

I also have some issues about the concept of homework, but I could write a whole other post about homework that would be just as long, so I'll spare your eyes for the moment. And besides, I still have my homework to do.