Fixing a System

What is the purpose of education?

Sir Ken Robinson says there are currently four reasons we educate and they are economic, cultural, social and personal.  He explained his favor for the last saying,  "If we know anything about people it is that they are different. They are driven by different talents, different abilities, different passions, different interests and different motivations"  RSA Replay- How to Change Education

Instead of leading the education of youth with a purpose established by an adult, what if we began simply with what we know about children, learning and the very able tool, the brain?   What I  suggest as a starting point is something we know about what ties us together and will enable each child to learn, our analytical natures.  Every person with a brain (which is everyone) has a powerful tool used to sort out the outside world.  It is powerful, analytical and problem solving in nature.   

I originally learned of this idea from Steven Pinker who wrote, "We have digital minds in an analog world. More accurately, a part of our minds is digital... Words and rules give rise to the vast expressive power of language, allowing us to share the fruits of the vast creative power of thought." (p. 287 of Words and Rules) 

"We must remember to honor the analytical skills of the child," my mentor and founder of Counterpane Montessori, Brenda Erickson, has said to me time and time again.

"Human beings are wired to solve, to make order out of chaos," David Kwong declared during TED 2014. 

Our school system does not honor what we know about the analytical nature of the human brain. The current practice in most schools today is a delivery system filled with many misapplied concepts, confusing instructional techniques, procedural assumptions and societal traditions.  If I were to liken our system to Steven Pinker's book. Words and Rules, I'd say our current system is trying to teach only the words for communication, disregarding the rules as mostly irrelevant.

I made a friend, Karen Goepen-Wee while at TED Active. She started a blog I cannot get enough of called Re(vision) It.  In her post, Thinking about the Future and Fear, she wrote, "They missed the future.  Wow.  I'd hate to think that that might be my legacy.  I'd hate to think that my students might miss the future because how I teach them disables their ability to play with, to toy with, two kinds of futures:  their own, and the one we will all live in together in the upcoming decades." Re(vision) It. 

The one prediction I can comfortably make about the future is problem solving will be needed. For starters, we have collectively created climate change and mass uneven distribution of wealth.  There are some predictable problems that need to be addressed. Today, we live in a much more global community with the Internet and social media and kids today will grow up to a lot of challenges left by generations before.  It's a good thing that their brains are wired for the challenge.  The human brain is naturally analytical and we need to stop systemically stifling the innate ability and instead work with that innate ability.  My efforts are currently focused on Solving Literacy, but I realize that relearning our abc's is just the start of what is needed...