Why schools are failing to bring out the best in humanity
For all teachers' early enthusiasm, lessons in schools involving computers are often the very lowest grade of monkey learning. Monkeys? No, actually, it is worse than that because monkeys are quite creative and playful. What schools and colleges today are pursuing is a very dull strategy in which students are 'programmed' with facts and sets of instructions, and then required to perform certain repetitive tasks.
This is exactly the kind of activity that robots excel at. And the irony is that in the near future, people will leave education and find themselves competing with real robots - and being found wanting.
Because as anyone who consults a search engine knows, robots know a lot more than us already, are much quicker at many tasks, and neither want nor take any lunch breaks, let alone holidays. The point is, what humans excel at is not memorization and repetitive tasks, but creative imagination and problem-solving.
Put another way, computers follow instructions, but only people actually think. The problem is though, at the moment, that education generally - from school right the way through to university - doesn't distinguish between a good answer that someone thinks of for themselves and one that has been learned and then recalled at the appropriate moment. Like a robot.
In theory, schools and colleges are supposed to gently draw students up the knowledge pyramid - from data, information, and knowledge, to analysis and (philosophers all sigh!) "wisdom". It is in the areas of analysis and evaluation that humans come into their own. Yet, almost by definition, higher-level skills are much harder to teach. Instead, they need to be encouraged and fed by creating a fertile learning environment. We're talking about something somewhere between the anarchy of experimental schools like Summerhill in the UK and the focussed creativity of the GooglePlex and the Apple Ring in California.
Let's say a bit more about Summerhill. We said 'anarchy' in a nod at the school's eccentric history, but these days Summerhill offers a very serious "thinking skills program" in which teachers "are trained on how to implement new thinking tools in their lessons and create thinking opportunities in class". The training involves the use of Edward De Bono's different "Thinking Hats" approach and graphical tools like Concept and Mind Maps. The former is what educators call a 'reframing technique' that encourages you to look at a particular issue from a range of different angles, and the latter are graphical tools that can reveal previously unsuspected connections and relationships
Summerhill today also draws on the thinking tools of the Harvard "Visible Thinking" strategy. This grew out of a project at Lemshaga Akademi in Sweden which focused on developing students' thinking skills in terms very different from those of conventional curriculum guidelines, such as those of the UK or France. Here in Sweden, the key dispositions are truth-seeking, understanding, fairness, and imagination.
It's enough to make even a top-grade robot freeze!
By our Science & Technology office in Domfront…
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