The world of modern education is not alive to the incoming solar flares of information that can only be absorbed organically. Nor is it aware of the anatomy, characteristics or capabilities that it seeks to change and enlighten...the human brain. Education empires have been built on little more than guesses and suppositions about the way the brain works, about the way a child actually learns. It is a world of intellectual darkness whose philosophy is built on myths.
Life asks us a new riddle to survive at each turn. Yet we work and teach in the cells of an excel spreadsheet with little more than bits of data in each one. Each bit of data is discrete and separate from the other. Still we seem lost in the belief that a little bit of information processed each day will soon a Newton make. We are riders in a series of buses changing to another at every stop, unrelated, unintegrated until at the end of each day we have arrived at some new unrelated destination that bears no connection to the arrival point of yesterday. And, so, we are confused about why we cannot educate our children...
Yet the information is passing by the bus windows along the way.
Life.
Organic life.
But the myths are still calling. The myth that standardized tests lead to intellectual growth, that data analysis of independent and discrete tiny facts will point to the way to educate any child and that slogans, innumerable meetings, "educational" experts who have not been in the classroom in years, curriculum specialists simply moved out of the classroom who magically change from teachers to experts on August 1 of the new year will have the answers.
To succeed we will have to get beyond the trivia, the meetings, the planning sessions to tackle the actual hard work of learning that most inscrutable of mysteries; the brain. We must get over our complete insensitivity to the brain to drop our belief in the myths of classrooms, testing and the "educational buffet" which has become school.
We must learn that education is the sum total of connections inside that fluid, wonderful, 3 or 4 pound miracle inside our skulls so soft, viscous and organic. And we must get away from the myth that it processes information in anything like the educational assembly lines we now run. Especially when an exemplary school can have students who passed the standardized test only because the passing standards are so low.
We must look at the great masters of literature, music, science, art, and all of the disciplines to find how the masters really learned. We must ask them when the connections started happening. We must ask them when they became masters and how.
Life asks us a new riddle to survive at each turn. Yet we work and teach in the cells of an excel spreadsheet with little more than bits of data in each one. Each bit of data is discrete and separate from the other. Still we seem lost in the belief that a little bit of information processed each day will soon a Newton make. We are riders in a series of buses changing to another at every stop, unrelated, unintegrated until at the end of each day we have arrived at some new unrelated destination that bears no connection to the arrival point of yesterday. And, so, we are confused about why we cannot educate our children...
Yet the information is passing by the bus windows along the way.
Life.
Organic life.
But the myths are still calling. The myth that standardized tests lead to intellectual growth, that data analysis of independent and discrete tiny facts will point to the way to educate any child and that slogans, innumerable meetings, "educational" experts who have not been in the classroom in years, curriculum specialists simply moved out of the classroom who magically change from teachers to experts on August 1 of the new year will have the answers.
To succeed we will have to get beyond the trivia, the meetings, the planning sessions to tackle the actual hard work of learning that most inscrutable of mysteries; the brain. We must get over our complete insensitivity to the brain to drop our belief in the myths of classrooms, testing and the "educational buffet" which has become school.
We must learn that education is the sum total of connections inside that fluid, wonderful, 3 or 4 pound miracle inside our skulls so soft, viscous and organic. And we must get away from the myth that it processes information in anything like the educational assembly lines we now run. Especially when an exemplary school can have students who passed the standardized test only because the passing standards are so low.
We must look at the great masters of literature, music, science, art, and all of the disciplines to find how the masters really learned. We must ask them when the connections started happening. We must ask them when they became masters and how.
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