Difference between revisions of "Talk:Education"

Revision as of 03:05, 30 June 2010

What is being explained must be made relevant to the person consuming it. Subjects should be linked together rather than artificially partitioned.

>> Aldous Huxley's utopian vision in Island featured a school that teaches a subject called 'Bridge-building', which is the study of how all the other subjects fit into each other. Bucky's ideas of comprehensive thinking and synergy are similar.

"Learn something about everything and everything about something"

It's actually astonishing how many great minds have come back to this point: that it is bad to separate areas of human knowledge. Education must create polymaths.

Aldous Huxley quipped that the only reason we divide human knowledge into separate subjects is to make life easier on college administrators. (I think it was Huxley, at least - can't find the quote now.)
Gregory Bateson says it very charmingly here.

It is more than fashionable, it is inculcated by our great universities, who believe there is such a thing as psychology which is different from sociology and such a thing as anthropology which is different from both and such a thing as esthetics or art criticism which is different... and that the world is made of separable items of knowledge in which, if you were a student, you could be examined... and the first point I want to get over to you is that the world is not like that AT ALL."

Steve Jobs too has said it here. He mentions that taking a course in calligraphy turned out to be useful in creating the first personal computers. And that is the key point: even the most wildly different fields of knowledge cross-fertilize in ways you would never suspect until you've tried it. Every one of us has experienced this cross-fertilization in our own life, but the education system actively opposed

Facilities - environment is very important to education. I think there are studies linking things like air quality, brightness, and the presence of natural elements (potted plants etc.) to learning. Find references.

Marian Cleeves Diamond's studies on neural 'enrichment' from a stimulating environment might be relevant here [1]

Stress has been shown many times to diminish learning, and stress is correlated with noise, overillumination and other environmental factors.

Some things can be learned theoretically (e.g. subjects currently taught in schools). These can be done by the open-content learning hub described.
Other subjects require practical learning: cooking, dance or anything physical. Skill-acquisition is different from theoretical learning. Cannot be taught online.
Other thing, like meditation, require repeated experience, but are not exactly skills.

Hands-on learning. Getting students to devise and undertake projects like designing and creating a new invention, social entrepreneurship. Teaches actual life skills of organization and getting-shit-done.

This actually enables the sort of cross-fertilization discussed above, because it is when you have to do something practical, some project, and you have to draw on all your resources, that you see the benefits of diverse knowledge.