Friday, October 25, 2013

Early education reinvention

Can creativity be killed?  Can the status quo be institutionalized?  It seems that is what some of the thought leaders are proving… delightful, as well as showing what it takes to move past it.

The latest article in Wired, "How a radical new teaching method could unleash a generation of geniuses" highlights.

"Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”"

The story in the article of a teacher in the slums of a border town (to USA) transforming the capabilities of his students is a real world example of what is possible.  Note in the article that the status quo is unable to accept this transformation.  Read the complete article here.

See Mr. Sugata Mitra's Ted talk "Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud" below to hear one of the leaders leading the above change across the world.

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