

RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms - jeeringmole
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/

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Groxx
Really good animations, really good points, but I don't recall seeing any
_concrete_ suggestions in any of these.

Are they just high-profile, high-quality rants, hoping to get _others_ to come
up with changes? Or is there something more concrete backing these that isn't
disseminated with them, preventing their (really good?) ideas from being
implemented?

I've only seen a few, but are others more _useful_? They're all _interesting_
, but those aren't the same thing.

~~~
araneae
Right. I really like his point about the schooling being a factory, with
people going through based on date of manufacture. I absolutely think it would
be awesome if you could go through your grades at your own pace, in different
subjects. A software based approach to learning would be excellent for this.

But of course this is completely antithetical to his latter point, which is
that group based learning/problem-solving is important. You can't have groups
if everyone is going at their own pace.

The happy medium might be to structure elementary education more like college,
with the ability to take 100 level classes in the 4th year or whatnot. But of
course, this is far more expensive than the batch method because you have to
have many more classes. To support so many classes you have to have many more
children, which means vastly larger schools, so you might only be able to do
it in densely populated cities.

~~~
dpatru
> You can't have groups if everyone is going at their own pace.

Isn't this how adults learn? (And children too, when out of the classroom.) If
you want to learn something new, say how to program in Haskell, what do you
do? You probably don't try to find an institution to which you pay a lot of
money and which offers you in return a seat in a room along with thirty others
like you in which an instructor talks to you for a few hours a week.

Instead, if you want to learn Haskell programming, you check for learning
materials online and go through them at your own pace. When you get stuck, you
find online forums where you can ask questions. Also, as you learn, you answer
other people's questions on the forums. You are learning at your own pace but
you are not isolated.

~~~
araneae
Well, that's how I learned programming, and to this day I haven't managed to
collaborate with anyone on anything.

My friends that did group projects in a class, by comparison, are quite good
at it.

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bugsy
For more detail on the background of factory education and the reason for it,
and a bit more details on alternatives, check out John Taylor Gatto's works.
He's a former NY state educator of the year who came to realize that school as
we know it is bad for people.

Transcript of one interview:

<http://www.ttfuture.org/files/2/pdf/gotto_interview.pdf>

mp3 of another interview:

[http://jari.podbean.com/mf/web/ja8dm2/LivingHero19--
JohnGatt...](http://jari.podbean.com/mf/web/ja8dm2/LivingHero19--
JohnGatto.mp3)

He also has a couple books in particular "Dumbing Us Down" and "Weapons of
Mass Instruction".

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nlco
I really like the animations (except for the arm, I wish the words just
"appeared" sort of like the music video for "heartless" by the fray). Does
anyone know of a tool that can help us make this easier?

