The learning revolution must begin now if we are to successfully adapt to the digital age, according to Sir Ken Robinson, English author and education advisor. As I began researching what it means to be educated in this new era I came across this brilliant TED talk that discusses several issues with the modern paradigm for learning across the globe.
I wanted to share this talk because Robinson is a fabulous public speaker and he lays out his case against the system with a quick wit and intelligence that was fun to watch. He said we need a revolution in current education that separates people from their talents and shuffles them into a line of conformity and linear learning that is creating a great mass in the public unable to think for themselves.
As I inch closer to graduation, I have been thinking a lot about what I have accomplished and learned during my time at Dixie. My journey started 26 years ago and although we have moved to a digital age, many of the classes I have taken have been the same package with a different bow. Read, memorize, test, repeat...read, memorize, test, repeat and on and on. I have led my college career as what many would call a GPA chaser and have done well, but as each semester finished, I often said what the heck did I learn. I would spend endless hours studying and cramming for a full schedule of exams only to overload my brain and actually not learn much at all. The best classes have always been those that pushed me towards critical thinking and seeking out my own answers and solutions. The textbook has been my greatest enemy and after purchasing and carrying hundreds of pounds of pages for decades, I can barely remember a word.
Human beings are so different they need individual opportunities to experience and to be challenged. Whether it is developing personalized lesson plans for the region we live in, or embracing the advances in technology and disposing of the standard methods of learning that have demonstrated little success. Robinson made a great point that we need to go from an industrial model of teaching to an agricultural model. A shift from the one size fits all to a unique environment, like on a farm, that simply creates the conditions for the product to flourish and lets nature go to work. He said we do not need an evolution of our system, we need a revolution and like any major change in our past, the process will undoubtedly be a little painful. However, it is necessary to challenge the status quo, or we shall end up with a new generation of students wondering why going to class makes any sense.
The current system of public education has not worked in many ways and I have been a good example of why. High school was a troubling time in education for me. My mind has never worked along normal patterns and I had difficulty adapting to standard methods of teaching at Sacramento High School. Math was absolutely my worst subject. I earned a D in freshman algebra, an F in sophomore geometry and summed up my junior year with another F in Algebra II. It was a tale of two students on my transcript with straight A's in television, theater arts, marching band and English and constant failing grades in math and science classes. I just couldn't get excited and interested in classes that folded me into a box and ordered to conform. It was all about the testing and it made no sense and eventually drove me to graduate a year early. After that I lived under the assumption I was just stupid for math and even my Dixie Act scores reflected as much. I received 99 in English, 97 in reading and not surprising, a 67 in math studies.
I avoided math classes for years and when it finally came time for finish up my degree I found the method of teaching had transformed again to the digital age and everyone's campus favorite Mathlab computer programs. Once again I felt like a deer in headlights, struggling even to make sense of the first week of lessons, but unlike high school, I didn't have the choice to bail out and still get my diploma. I had to make it work and while many in the class saw the disadvantage of computer assisted learning and testing, I used it as a rallying cry to figure things out for myself. It was sites like Youtube and peer run blogs that saved my chances and gave me the opportunity to seek out learning on my own. Instead of accepting the reality promoted by educators that I didn't have a chance to understand, I located the resources on my own that worked and ended up with my first A ever for a math class. I then repeated the same for my science classes, standardized testing scores be damned. Sugata Mitra's method to learning of introducing the subject and letting the students explore and figure out what each means would have been my saving grace in younger years. These are the classes where I have found success and also left feeling like my mind has been challenged and actually became a better person. Last summer I was lucky enough to take a class from Jennifer Kohler called Voice and Civility in Public Discourse that similar to this class, was a good example of making you think for yourself. Each week had a couple of topics and it was up to the students to experience and bring information to the learning pool. It was a massive amount of work to consume everyone's ideas, but I left feeling I had accomplished something and learned more than I could have expected. This is the future of education. Instead of an instructor barking out education from the front of a room or a computer screen to a herd of sheep, a working co-operative where teachers, students and peers work together to better our minds. Not every student can be a cog in the machine and the sooner America grasps this concept, the better chances we have to develop programs that work.
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