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Why Everyone and Everything Involved with Education is Interchangeable and Expendable.
Except the Students That is.
[Ed: This is a weekly series detailing my plan for a new way of thinking about education, including, but not limited to, the way we use teachers in the classroom, school materials, curriculum, and school design/space.]
“But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world. Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects; every one, doesn’t matter where you go. You’d think it would be otherwise but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools then drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics.
Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting?”
–Sir Ken Robinson, speaking at TED. See the full video HERE.
Prologue
25 ninth graders walk into their classroom on a mild day in September. Aside from a table with a dozen charging laptops in the corner, and a bookcase lining a wall full of textbooks, the room is empty. No rows of chairs, no wood desk for the teacher, no blackboard. The walls are bare. The room could easily be mistaken for some sort of psychological ward.
The teacher, a woman in her mid-thirties, greets them at the door, handing our nametags so everyone can start to know who’s who. The students fumble with them awkwardly, standing in the center of the room, shifting their weight from side to side. One boy sits down. Another gravitates to the window and looks out. They don’t know each other yet, so there’s no jockeying for status, no power plays just yet.
Imagine if the first thing the teacher said, after introducing herself and taking quick attendance, was this:
“This semester, we’re going to be building the textbooks you’re going to need for the next four years. That’s it. That’s our project. And how well we accomplish this project will determine how well we do for the next four years. There’s only two rules: the textbooks have to be able to grow. The textbook we make for US history might end up being 50 pages, but we have to be sure it’s able to grow to a 100 if we need it to. You see those textbooks there?” The students nod dutifully. They’ve seen those textbooks, or ones like them, their entire lives. “Well we’ve got a lot of cutting and gluing ahead of us. Not one of those books can be the same at the end of this semester. That’s the other rule.”
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This thing has 3 Comments
Sounds like a cool idea Cohen. Learning about how we learn. I feel like the Met has already stumbled across this a couple of times, but never really picked it up or examined it. I’ll be interested to see how you integrate those laptops…
You’re right about the MET, especially when it comes to the way their campus is designed (nice if you’re running a school in R.I.)…open, easy to re-arrange, etc.
The more I think about it, the less laptops seem like a necessity. I mean you need a couple in case a group of kids want to “break out” and do their own thing in the hallway, but if you’re using “cloud computing”, where everyone’s documents are stored online, then what’s the benefit of a laptop? They’re more expensive and tend to get “misplaced”. The only thing I like about them is you don’t have five wires coming out of them, you have two, one for power and one for a printer, so it’s easier to move if you want to rearrange a room.
Do you see any advantages to having laptops that justify their almost 2x price?
Actually with bluetooth technology, you don’t even need two wires for a desktop anymore. Another reason not to use laptops.