Awaking the Digital Imagination

Illich claims in “Deschooling society/learning webs” that:

A good educational system should have three purposes:

1. It should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives;
2. Empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them;
3. Furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.

These purposes could be achieved through four networks:

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects: According to Illich, we have to facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning, and he thinks that the general physical environment must be accessible and there are two ways to do this: First, by letting the community arrange for all parts of the network to be open to all visitors at reasonable time; Or (second) the community could decide to provide citizens with limited entitlements, according to their age group, which would give them special access to certain materials which are costly, while leaving other simple materials available to everyone.
2. Skill Exchanges: which permit skill teacher to be listed and contacted. Skill teachers can list the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, they can restrict time, place and method that they will use.
3. Peer Matching: a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names of all those who had inserted the same description.
4. Professional Educators: Parents need guidance in directing their children, and learners need experienced leadership when they encounter a problem. Professional Educators can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals and freelancers, along with conditions of access to their services.

Our system of education isn’t perfect and we all know this, but that’s something that we should work on improving.

I think that one of the problems that we are facing is: Students think that grades are more important than learning. So, you learned because you got good grades, and you are smart because you have straight A’s.
In my opinion, nothing of this is true. I have very smart students in my classes but they don’t get good grades. They don’t like to memorize. Ask them any question that requires “thinking” they know how to answer it, give them some rules to memorize they fail! How should we categorize these students: “Good students” because they “think”? Or “bad students” because they don’t “memorize” and their grades are not high? What are the criteria here?

I’m not sure I completely agree with Illich. I liked going to school. I really enjoyed my classes. We had to do our researches and experiments; for me, this is the best way to learn. Asking students to drop from school and follows his methods seemed a little bit scary for me. Students are not identical, and his method will not work for everyone.

I will end my post with this video “Scary School Nightmare” …. I’m still wondering why most kids hate school?? there must be “something” and we (as teacher) are missing it … !!!