Education

“(Education gives) children something that can never be taken away.”( Julia Stiles’ character to David Walton’s character in The Makeover. )

The movie, one of a multitude of takes on Pygmalion, is not exactly a masterpiece but it’s entertaining enough if your primary reason for watching it is to have some sort of excuse for not going outside to mow the lawn. And a good quote is a good quote (or “Truth is truth,” as we learned in Enemy Mine) so I’m going with it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve a passion for considering the best nature of education and as I may have mentioned in previous posts, I understand that transforming that nature will unavoidably mean revamping the structure of our educational enterprise. On a macro scale, this will involve a massive and excruciating effort to turn the ship around. And that’s assuming that we can come together as to what education should look like. And unfortunately, government will be involved. Recent ‘discourse’ regarding affordable health care does not fill me with hope in this regard but heck, I can dream, right?

There are all sorts of discussions going on in various nooks and crannies about how best to educate ourselves and the next generation, and the next… And lots of those discussions question the fundamental definitions we’ve assumed we all understood. Questions like, what is education?

For at least a half-dozen generations, we’ve drawn a line between ‘education’ and ‘training’. Training means preparing people for work and has traditionally been the province of technical schools, apprenticeship,  in-house job training and preparation for untoward events (safety training, etc.). Education, on the other hand, has been designed to prepare us for lives driven by higher order thought. Or so the story goes.

As the world is changing, the line between the two is becoming less bright and probably, less useful.  Ascribing this change to the emergence of an Information Age does little to describe the sea change we are currently undergoing. Education and training are necessarily interweaving as we struggle to keep up with the phenomenal burgeoning of both knowledge and the dissemination of it.

Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, ETH Zurich et al are great schools but they may be on the brink of losing their pre-eminent status – the Times rankings notwithstanding – not because of any diminution of the quality of their teaching but rather by a loss of relevance of both their approach and their target audiences.  Certainly, a lot of the change is driven by the explosive increases in both information and interaction through the Internet. But the voices currently claiming that the Web is the sole driver of change in how we order the acquisition of knowledge miss the point by a wide margin.

The Web is a tool and a very important one. But the change in our ways of knowing has everything to do with how we make use of the tool. And this fact both encourages and worries me.

I am encouraged by the serendipity created when minds can readily find each other across distance, time and disciplines through the power of the web search. Where in the past a researcher could only be found through a sort of Old Boys network of those who considered themselves and each other eminent, now the construction of search criteria is more likely to be centered on content than an eminent author’s name.  

On the other hand, when anyone can stand at the virtual bully pulpit, we can’t control or even keep sight of the provenance of what we think we’re learning. Schlock reference sources such as Wikipedia abound and the researcher must go to some lengths to ensure that they’re reading from a legitimate primary source.

So how do we use this great tool? As a delivery medium? As a research platform? As an uber networking group?

Probably all of the above but the truth is that while the Internet will be used to expand the range of possibilities in how we share knowledge, it most likely won’t alter the way education works – people engaging with other people to expand their collective understanding.

Still thinking about where this one goes next so I’ll end here.

Thoughts?