I think a lot about the difference in schooling and learning: schooling being the traditional structures and formats we’ve come to expect as “proper” indoctrination of our children; learning being the actual transformation of all that formality, curriculum, and good-intentioned rationality by students. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved learning, but when I try to think back, I was never a big fan of schooling. It seems ironic that after finishing high-school early, earnestly attempting escape from there, then dropping out of my first attempt at college, I spent the past 15 years of my life back in colleges, and now teaching in elementary schools . Indeed I learned, but I can honestly say I didn’t always enjoy the fact that it came via schooling.
Last week a like-minded friend shared the following video with me, excerpted from a speech by Sir Ken Robinson, regarding our historic journey to schooling and the consequential disconnect from learning it often brings. In my friend’s wise words, “…11 minutes to watch, hours to discuss…”.
Surely I’ll talk about this difference often, but what do you think of this video?
Quite a video ! I’m such a longitudinal learner, that I wish I had the whole thing on a big poster so I could take time to answer some of the questions and question some of the answers.
Trying to deal with the first “child” labeled “cultural identity”. When we try so hard to achieve multicultural education, provide something for everyone, what happens to cultural identity? From the developing diagram, it would appear that the European and American (capitalistic) cultures are exactly where the video says – under the economic education system. So how does a unified cultural identity excite learning and how does a diversified culture have an identity? In some senses, there probably should not be any cultural identity. But even the diagram implies some sort of cultural identity, learning culture, educational cultural, divergent, convergent, all seem to aim toward a recognizable cultural identity beyond the idea of sociological or anthropological culture definitions. I’m afraid I don’t see such a broad and inclusive cultural identity in the current world. So in light of the expanding diagram, the jumping back and forth to try to scatter pieces and then pick them up again, I’ll have to think about this some more.
I’d like to suggest a “learning culture” that exists subtly. This video was surely about the flaws of a “western” culture, whereas friends and colleagues of mine from various eastern countries believe that ours is the most creative, even while this video eludes to our killing creativity. There is a humanity of that “learning culture” that doesn’t have a need for another “cultural identity” or even multiculturalism, because in learning, all questions answers, and angles are encouraged and explored.
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