John Connell: The Blog

Sean Con­nery, in his thought­ful mem­oir Being A Scot, tells the story of find­ing him­self on a plane seated next to a com­pa­triot, a young woman. Talk­ing to her, he found that she was a lit­er­a­ture stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh, and that she was cur­rently study­ing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

“Do you see any par­al­lels between Roskol­nikov, in the Dos­to­evsky novel, and the char­ac­ter of Robert Wing­ham, in James Hogg’s Mem­oirs and Con­fes­sions of a Jus­ti­fied Sin­ner?” he asked her.

“Oh, I haven’t read that,” said she, “I’m in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture Depart­ment, not the Scot­tish.” Con­nery was bemused, but pre­sum­ably did not bother to ask why, given her odd per­spec­tive, she was study­ing a novel orig­i­nally writ­ten in Russian.

Con­nery had left school at 13 with lit­tle to show for his eight years in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion other than an abil­ity to read. But early in his act­ing career, a fellow-thespian had sug­gested a list of books that the young Con­nery ought to read, and he had sub­se­quently embarked on his own edu­ca­tion in fine lit­er­a­ture. His young trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, on the other hand, had suc­cess­fully com­pleted seven years of pri­mary school­ing, five or six years of sec­ondary school­ing, and by the time Con­nery met her at least a year or two at uni­ver­sity. So what was the dif­fer­ence between the famous actor with his paucity of for­mal school­ing and the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent with a decade and a half of insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion behind her?

In the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent, I believe that we can see some­thing of the schooled mind at work, in this case some­one for whom the books she read were pre­scribed by oth­ers and for whom read­ing was largely a means to an end. In Con­nery, a lover of lit­er­a­ture, we can see the inde­pen­dent mind of some­one who has taken con­trol of his own learn­ing, some­one for whom read­ing was a plea­sure in itself, and noth­ing to do with pass­ing exam­i­na­tions or gain­ing qualifications.

It is inter­est­ing to pon­der the dif­fer­ences between the truly autonomous learner and the schooled mind, to explore the nature of learn­ing in an age where, although the oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-directed learn­ing are expand­ing immensely as the ten­drils of the Inter­net extend into every facet of our lives, the endur­ing insti­tu­tions of the school and the col­lege and the uni­ver­sity (all of which I am happy to refer to col­lec­tively and con­cep­tu­ally as ‘the school’) remain stub­bornly tena­cious. This durable social con­struct, one that has been shaped and adapted con­tin­u­ously through­out his­tory to suit the needs of time and place and wealth and power, has allowed the myr­iad social, polit­i­cal and reli­gious enti­ties that have sus­tained it, and that con­tinue to sus­tain it, to retain an often insid­i­ous and reduc­tive grip on the minds of those who pass through their hands. And, despite that con­stant refrain of ‘the school is dead’ that we have heard in dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places, the school is arguably stronger in some ways today than it has ever been.

Of course, the tale of Sean Con­nery and the young lit­er­a­ture stu­dent raises more ques­tions than answers: the gulf between the autonomous learner and the schooled mind is rarely iden­ti­fi­able as a sim­ple dichotomy between the free spirit and the cap­tive will. The real­ity for most of us is that we find our­selves, through­out our lives, shift­ing back and forth along a con­tin­uum some­where between the two extremes, although we night hope that, as we grow older, we become more aware of the dan­gers of the schooled mind, and there­fore develop a greater capac­ity to break free of the con­straints placed on us by the school in our early years. Connery’s self-taught love of lit­er­a­ture was per­haps not entirely free of instru­men­tal inten­tions: as an actor, he rec­og­nized that an appre­ci­a­tion of lit­er­a­ture would be use­ful to him in his career, but it was his own recog­ni­tion, not one sug­gested by oth­ers or imposed from with­out. Equally, the young woman, we hope, would have taken up her course in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture because of a love of read­ing. But between those two routes into books, and most cer­tainly in the student’s response to Connery’s ques­tion, there lies a dis­cernible dif­fer­ence between the approach that each had pre­vi­ously taken to their mutual love of lit­er­a­ture. Con­nery, con­sciously or oth­er­wise, had dis­cov­ered that there is a higher and deeper and wider sig­nif­i­cance to learn­ing than can be gleaned from sub­mit­ting to the stric­tures of the class­room. The young woman had allowed her­self to be per­suaded that, like the over­whelm­ing major­ity of ‘edu­cated’ peo­ple, she had lit­tle choice but to accept those stric­tures as seem­ingly the only avail­able path to an edu­ca­tion in the dis­ci­pline that she enjoyed.

The road taken by Con­nery was one that led not only to a knowl­edge of fine lit­er­a­ture but also, I would con­tend, to a greater chance for attain­ing a degree of self-knowledge that, if not actu­ally denied by school, has rarely if ever been an explicit aim of school­ing. The school, his­tor­i­cally, has not actively encour­aged inde­pen­dence of thought, nor has it cul­ti­vated the truly spon­ta­neous or cre­ative mind. We develop such traits despite school not because of it. School is fun­da­men­tally about train­ing the mind, devel­op­ing the intel­lect (as opposed to intel­li­gence), pass­ing on the knowl­edge deemed impor­tant by a soci­ety to those whose role it will be to per­pet­u­ate and pre­serve that soci­ety at all lev­els. As such, the school con­tin­ues what already is and what has been; its func­tion, what­ever the rhetoric, is essen­tially back­wards look­ing, seek­ing to main­tain the struc­tures and rela­tion­ships from the past and present on into the future with min­i­mal change.

But given the ubiq­uity of the school, we can­not sim­ply equate the schooled mind with atten­dance at school. To do so would be ludi­crous. If the schooled mind were to be iden­ti­fied merely by dint of some­one hav­ing attended school there would no chance of escape from the con­di­tion for most of us. But school­ing does imbue the stu­dent, the scholar, with cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics that the learner has to find the means to over­come either while at school, or more likely once school­ing is complete.

I will come back to what that schooled mind is all about, why we must not be con­tent with the intel­lec­tual frame­work that school bestows on us, and how crit­i­cal it is that we are able to over­come at least the most dele­te­ri­ous and per­ni­cious aspects of the school’s legacy on our own devel­op­ment as ratio­nal, free-thinking human beings.

Evgeny Moro­zov dis­man­tles the lazy think­ing and the fun­da­men­tally anti-progressive notions out­lined in Gavin New­som’s recent book: Citizenville:How to Take the Town Square Dig­i­tal and Rein­vent Gov­ern­ment [bad book, so no link!]. California’s lieu­tenant gov­er­nor is taken apart in an arti­cle in Book­fo­rum.

[It is his] lack of any basic curios­ity about the tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions that he advocates—and espe­cially about their unin­tended consequences—that makes Newsom’s account so sus­pect. Pub­lic insti­tu­tions such as the BBC might be ter­ri­bly inef­fi­cient and scan­dal prone, but they still do a better—and more systematic—job at root­ing out cor­rup­tion than Newsom’s citizen-hackers armed with data­bases and sophis­ti­cated visu­al­iza­tion tools.

I don’t agree with every­thing Moro­zov writes (his Net Delu­sion described some crit­i­cal blind spots in our under­stand­ing of the Net today — delu­sion was too strong a word, but I sup­pose it helped to sell the book) but this piece gets it spot on with respect to Newsom’s Ayn Rand-induced, hacker-worshipping, anti-democratic nonsense.

Most of all, Moro­zov exposes the fun­da­men­tally con­ser­v­a­tive and regres­sive phi­los­o­phy that so many thought­less, slow-minded and mantra-spouting lovers of technology-for-its-own-sake mis­take for cre­ativ­ity, ‘think­ing dif­fer­ent’ and enlightenment.

Right now, all of the places we can assem­ble on the web in any kind of num­bers are pri­vately owned. And privately-owned pub­lic spaces aren’t real pub­lic spaces. They don’t allow for the play and the chaos and the cre­ativ­ity and bril­liance that only arise in spaces that don’t exist purely to gen­er­ate profit. And they’re sus­cep­ti­ble to being grad­u­ally gaslighted by the com­pa­nies that own them.

Anil Dash, on just one impor­tant issue amongst a num­ber, in a great piece on Rebuild­ing the Web we Lost.

Affirm­ing ‘the play and the chaos and the cre­ativ­ity and bril­liance’ of truly pub­lic spaces, namely spaces not intended purely for profit, is crit­i­cal to an open social web, and pre­cisely what the Face­books of the world can never engender.

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

Typog­ra­phy from Ron­nie Bruce on Vimeo.

“.…you’ve got to speak with it too.”

Tay­lor Mali, poet.

Won­der­ful, and of course true!

In a piece in the Inde­pen­dent, in 2011, Gor­don Brown wrote:

.…the inter­na­tional aid sys­tem for edu­ca­tion is fail­ing the world’s children.

He was intro­duc­ing his UNESCO report — Edu­ca­tion For All: Beat­ing Poverty, Unlock­ing Pros­per­ity.

On a num­ber of occa­sions over the past 6 years I have been able to watch the work of UNESCO at close hand and in the process gained con­sid­er­able respect for the orga­ni­za­tion. In keep­ing with that, I do believe that this report is  a superb, detailed and com­pas­sion­ate sum­mary of the state of edu­ca­tion for mil­lions upon mil­lions of chil­dren across the devel­op­ing world. It offers a descrip­tion of a state of affairs that should bring shame to the rest of the world — we are fail­ing all those chil­dren very badly.

Early in the report, he states that:

No edu­ca­tion sys­tem any­where in the world is bet­ter than its teachers.

And he goes on later to say:

Teach­ers are the back­bone of any edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Ulti­mately, learn­ing is the prod­uct of what hap­pens in class­rooms through a rela­tion­ship between pupils and teach­ers. That is why no edu­ca­tion sys­tem is bet­ter than the avail­abil­ity, acces­si­bil­ity and qual­ity of the teach­ers it pro­vides, and the level of sup­port that it deliv­ers to those on the front line of edu­ca­tion in the classroom.

With I Am Learner in mind, this begs many more ques­tions than it answers, but it would be churl­ish in the extreme not to accept the core point being made, that good qual­ity teach­ing should be cen­tral to a good edu­ca­tional pro­vi­sion, and most espe­cially for the edu­ca­tion of young children.

It is a dis­mal and unas­sail­able fact that there is a mas­sive short­age of good qual­ity teach­ers across the devel­op­ing world, espe­cially, but by no means exclu­sively, across the coun­tries in sub-Saharan Africa. Accord­ing to Gor­don Brown’s report, the world’s poor­est coun­tries need some­thing like 1.8 mil­lion addi­tional teach­ers over the next three years alone to pro­vide even basic pri­mary edu­ca­tion to their chil­dren, as well as around 4 mil­lion more class­rooms and all of the most basic items of equip­ment that we might expect to find in those classrooms.

Brown is absolutely right there­fore to state that:

The world is today fac­ing an edu­ca­tion emer­gency. That emer­gency does not make media head­lines. But it has dis­as­trous human, social and eco­nomic con­se­quences. It is con­sign­ing mil­lions of chil­dren to lives of poverty and dimin­ished oppor­tu­nity, hold­ing back progress in health, rein­forc­ing dis­par­i­ties linked to wealth and gen­der, and under­min­ing prospects for eco­nomic growth. And it is destroy­ing on an epic scale the most valu­able asset of the world’s poor­est nations – the cre­ativ­ity, tal­ent and poten­tial of the young generation.

An edu­ca­tion emer­gency indeed, and one on a vast and mas­sively con­se­quen­tial scale for human­ity world­wide. It requires equally vast and pro­longed global invest­ment to put right.

Else­where in the report, Gor­don Brown enthuses over the poten­tial for har­ness­ing tech­nol­ogy to improve edu­ca­tional pro­vi­sion. How­ever, he believes that:

New tech­nolo­gies do not offer a quick fix for sys­temic prob­lems in edu­ca­tion sys­tems. What they do offer is a vehi­cle for improv­ing access to oppor­tu­ni­ties for edu­ca­tion and the qual­ity of ser­vice provision.

The last thing this global emer­gency needs is any kind of quick fix. But I do believe that there is a poten­tially pow­er­ful appli­ca­tion of dig­i­tal and net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies that could play a sig­nif­i­cant role, along­side all the other big invest­ments needed, in con­tribut­ing to a much bet­ter qual­ity edu­ca­tion for many mil­lions of the poor­est chil­dren in the poor­est coun­tries around the world.

From Mas­sive Open Online Course to Mas­sive Open Online Class­room (MOOCl)

Any­one with even the remotest inter­est in higher edu­ca­tion of late will be aware of the MOOC. The basic con­cept of the Mas­sive Open Online Course (a term devised by Dave Cormier) is a sim­ple one, but the impli­ca­tions of the MOOC for the future of higher edu­ca­tion in par­tic­u­lar are the stuff of a debate that is wash­ing around global edu­ca­tion at the present time.

I will trust that any­one read­ing this already knows what a MOOC is, although I will not nec­es­sar­ily trust that every­one knows that there are MOOCs and there are MOOCs. If your knowl­edge of the con­cept of the MOOC is restricted to those ‘deliv­ered’ by the likes of Cours­era or Udac­ity, then I would urge you to go back to grass roots and read some of what you might find, for instance, in MOOC.ca, set up by Stephen Downes to host news, infor­ma­tion and dis­cus­sion around the con­cept, in the writ­ings of George Siemens, Dave Cormier, already men­tioned, and oth­ers. Open, exper­i­men­tal and con­nec­tivist in nature, the MOOC is an explicit and con­scious attempt to use the incred­i­ble affor­dances offered by the Inter­net to change the nature of education.

The massive-ness, open­ness and online-ness of the MOOC are all givens, of course, and are all crit­i­cal to the effect that the devel­op­ment is hav­ing at the present time. But I, for one, am less sure that the course-ness of the con­cept has to be a given too. I would recog­nise that the fact that the MOOC is built around the course is prob­a­bly what is keep­ing the con­cept fairly firmly within the broad arms of higher edu­ca­tion, for the moment at least. As Mar­tin Weller has written:

…after a decade of OERs, it’s inter­est­ing that we’re com­ing back to edu­ca­tor con­structed courses…

Class­room instead of Course?

When I look at the sit­u­a­tion faced by those mil­lions of chil­dren world­wide, in a con­text of poten­tial mas­sive global con­nect­ed­ness, and yet in cir­cum­stances where so many of them have no access to good teach­ing, I can’t but help won­der how the MOOC might be taken, re-shaped, and made into some­thing that could begin to ame­lio­rate some of the worst effects of that gen­er­ally awful situation.

I recog­nise, of course, that such a sim­ply stated change is, in fact, any­thing but sim­ple. The course is a gen­er­ally uncom­pli­cated thing, usu­ally (although by no means nec­es­sar­ily) lin­ear, struc­tured, a com­pre­hen­si­ble process in which ideas or con­cepts or infor­ma­tion are intro­duced, dis­cussed, dis­sected, re-shaped, com­bined, under­stood; it can be a sin­gle unit of ‘instruc­tion’ or a whole pro­gramme of learn­ing, or some­thing in between; and it can be deliv­ered or pre­sented (taught) by a sin­gle teacher or in some senses by every­one on the course (as the orig­i­nal con­cep­tion of the MOOC seeks to achieve).

The class­room, even the vir­tual, con­cep­tual class­room, is a quite dif­fer­ent beast. It is a ‘place’, a plat­form; it is the site where courses can hap­pen, where teach­ers can offer lessons across all dis­ci­plines, where learn­ers can go to access learn­ing, debate, insight, exper­tise, author­ity; it is a meet­ing place in which edu­ca­tion can hap­pen; it is the locus for teach­ing and learn­ing activ­i­ties of all kinds.

I believe we have many, per­haps most, of the ele­ments already that would have to be brought together to cre­ate the MOOCl. Instinc­tively, how­ever, I feel that a MOOCl would not be nearly as sim­ple as a MOOC to start up and sus­tain. It would require an oper­a­tional core of a kind and scale that is prob­a­bly not true of the MOOC, although that oper­a­tional core, I would sug­gest, need not be a sin­gle orga­niz­ing unit: it could be an open, dis­trib­uted affair, sym­pa­thetic to the ori­gins of the MOOC. It should offer access to masses of great teach­ing and learn­ing resources — the Khan Acad­emy is an obvi­ous exam­ple of what could be utilised, but so too could the thou­sands of other high qual­ity, freely avail­able teach­ing and learn­ing resources that increas­ingly throng the web, and across so many of the world’s major, and not so major, languages.

So far, so what? All of these resources are avail­able today. But the MOOCl would have to incor­po­rate some kind of orga­niz­ing layer, a sim­ple inter­face that would allow any indi­vid­ual any­where in the world not only to access the resources as such, but also to access courses, com­mu­ni­ties, teach­ers (who can be, and prob­a­bly will be, other learn­ers), exper­tise and guid­ance. The MOOCl might also be a device for those teach­ers who already are on the ground, so to speak, in the poor­est coun­tries, to grab hold of and use as a means of enhanc­ing their own teach­ing exper­tise. The MOOCl would be the teacher’s global men­tor, guide, teach­ing assis­tant, just as much as it would be the learner’s teacher too.

Again, you might say, this sounds like a descrip­tion of the World Wide Web. But the MOOCl would have to be more than sim­ply ‘avail­able’: it would have to be set up in a way that would allow it reach out in a proac­tive way, to find its way into those places in the world where we know there are young chil­dren who cur­rently have few or no teach­ers to help them learn, where there are few or no teach­ing and learn­ing resources. This will require much thought, huge orga­ni­za­tion, and of course invest­ment. Is there a role here for the big phil­an­thropic foun­da­tions as well as gov­ern­ments? I believe so.

But what of access to the net­work, access to con­nected devices? Of course, the MOOCl would have to be capa­ble of being used across the world’s mobile net­works and acces­si­ble on mobile devices — Gor­don Brown’s report tells us that mobile cel­lu­lar pen­e­tra­tion has reached 50% in the devel­op­ing world and is still increas­ing fast. The cell phone is the default access device for many mil­lions of peo­ple in the world’s poor­est coun­tries, and that is likely to be the case for many years to come.

How much of this can be done in the same spirit as the orig­i­nal MOOC? I don’t know, I sus­pect not much, but I would love to be proved wrong. I know I am merely scratch­ing the sur­face with an unde­vel­oped and poten­tially still­born idea — but if the acute minds of thought­ful and cre­ative peo­ple can come up with the MOOC, I would like to think those same, and other, minds could be applied to how we can turn the Mas­sive Open Online Course into the Mas­sive Open Online Class­room to serve the des­per­ate des­per­ate needs of so many mil­lions of chil­dren in dire eco­nomic and edu­ca­tional poverty across the world.

Dis­putes and con­tro­ver­sies and dis­agree­ments abound in every sphere of human knowl­edge and activ­ity. That is the very nature of human dis­course. The world would be a dread­ful, bor­ing place if we all agreed with each other all of the time on every­thing (some peo­ple, strangely, would define their heaven in just those terms). A lit­tle less dis­agree­ment here and there might avoid wars and blood­shed and point­less death and destruc­tion, but that pos­si­bil­ity does not appear to be a uni­ver­sal like­li­hood any time soon.

Dis­pu­ta­tion and debate dif­fer in kind though from one sphere of activ­ity to another. We can, for exam­ple, con­trast the kinds of dis­putes that sci­en­tists might have with dis­putes between reli­gious ‘schol­ars’: the for­mer might arise out of dif­fer­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of evi­dence whilst the lat­ter are more likely to be debates char­ac­ter­ized not only by a com­plete lack of evi­dence but often by a con­tempt for same.

My own prin­ci­pal sphere of activ­ity, edu­ca­tion, is an intense and con­stant bat­tle­ground of crossed swords, con­flict and con­tention, and it falls, I would attest, some­where between those polar­i­ties of sci­en­tific and reli­gious debate. The vigour of the man­i­fold dis­putes in edu­ca­tion is a func­tion of its intrin­sic nature as one of the human­i­ties, as an activ­ity aris­ing out of the human condition.

As one of the human­i­ties, there is sim­ply no absolute right or absolute wrong in edu­ca­tion. We make judge­ments and take posi­tions based on our rea­son­ing, of course, but also based on our val­ues and prin­ci­ples, philoso­phies and ide­olo­gies, inter­ests and self-interests, prej­u­dices and, indeed, big­otries. There are, oddly, very many peo­ple — teach­ers, writ­ers, philoso­phers, politi­cians, thinkers and non-thinkers alike — who will tell you, cat­e­gor­i­cally, that their stand­point on any par­tic­u­lar aspect of edu­ca­tion is unequiv­o­cally right, and there­fore that any dif­fer­ing take on the same issue is plainly wrong. Some­times, these same peo­ple will point to ‘evi­dence’ that ‘proves’ their stand­point, all the while for­get­ting that under­tak­ing research on edu­ca­tion is a bil­lion light years away from under­tak­ing research on par­ti­cle physics (for exam­ple). Edu­ca­tional research is in the same league as research in phi­los­o­phy or soci­ol­ogy or anthro­pol­ogy: out­comes are heav­ily depen­dent upon the ques­tions asked and the posi­tions taken by the researchers. Evi­dence is use­ful, of course, but it will rarely if ever con­sti­tute ‘proof’ of any­thing in edu­ca­tion — it gives us a start­ing point, if we are lucky, but never absolute validation.

Those who under­stand this dis­tinc­tion under­stand there­fore that they can never claim any absolute valid­ity for their views on edu­ca­tion, since they recog­nise that their per­spec­tive on any or all edu­ca­tion ques­tions is inex­tri­ca­bly bound up in the val­ues they hold, in the polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy to which they ascribe, in the psy­chol­ogy of their own learn­ing expe­ri­ences through­out their lives, in their (or their family’s, or their community’s) self-interest, whether con­scious or uncon­scious, and in so many other impon­der­ables in their lives.

Such peo­ple under­stand that they must argue and debate their stand­point con­stantly, and that they must be pre­pared to lis­ten to other’s views, to learn from oth­ers and to change their own views through debate with oth­ers. Equally we are per­fectly jus­ti­fied in seek­ing to explain and affirm our own philoso­phies in edu­ca­tion, and even to seek to per­suade oth­ers to see learn­ing and teach­ing and ped­a­gogy and all aspects of edu­ca­tion as we hap­pen to see them.

Don’t mis­take my argu­ment as one that endorses unal­loyed rel­a­tivism: we must always be will­ing to make crit­i­cal judge­ments on the basis of our expe­ri­ence and, yes, on the basis of what­ever evi­dence we can lay our hands on (going far beyond just the out­comes of aca­d­e­mic research). But we use expe­ri­ence and intel­lec­tual argu­ment and evi­dence to sub­stan­ti­ate and sup­port our own judge­ments, not to ‘prove’ that we are absolutely right and oth­ers are absolutely wrong. We must con­tinue to judge, to eval­u­ate, to dis­tin­guish between good and bad logic. Edu­ca­tion, as a human­ity, has to be based upon rig­or­ous intel­lec­tual analy­sis and rea­son­ing, as well as on moral and eth­i­cal considerations.

It is in that flux of ideas and con­flict­ing opin­ions gen­er­ated, main­tained and devel­oped by thought­ful, autonomous and ratio­nal minds that the beauty of coher­ent edu­ca­tional debate lies. We need not respect oth­ers’ views, but, mostly, we do need to tol­er­ate them (I am with Frank Furedi when he decries the mod­ern ten­dency to equate tol­er­ance with accep­tance and respect, and even the trend towards devalu­ing the mean­ing of respect itself). The caveat to such tol­er­ance, of course, will be the extent to which we feel that oth­ers’ views on edu­ca­tion are actu­ally phys­i­cally or emo­tion­ally harm­ful to chil­dren, to young peo­ple, or to learn­ers generally.

And that is a whole other debate in itself.

Tak­ing break­fast with friends in San Jose, Costa Rica, sounds like a nice way to start the day. But unfor­tu­nately I will not be able to take up my invi­ta­tion to the Com­mem­o­ra­tive Break­fast being held for the 25^th anniver­sary of the Omar Dengo Foun­da­tion on Fri­day of this week, 20^th July. It would be nice to meet up once again with friends such as Clothilde Fon­seca and Eduardo Monge, as well as the cur­rent Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of this great orga­ni­za­tion, Leda Munõz.

I first vis­ited the Omar Dengo Foun­da­tion back in 2007 and was struck imme­di­ately by the deter­mi­na­tion of every­one in the orga­ni­za­tion to work for a bet­ter soci­ety through the potent com­bi­na­tion of dig­i­tal and net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies with a pro­gres­sive phi­los­o­phy of edu­ca­tion. I have been back a num­ber of times since and I always come way greatly impressed by their work.

I hope the break­fast goes well, and I know that the Foun­da­tion will go from strength to strength, and will surely still be work­ing on behalf of learn­ers and teach­ers in Cen­tral Amer­ica and beyond 25 years from now!

.…for dis­cus­sion:

• The school as we know it is based on a lim­ited under­stand­ing of human nature
• School can­not be reformed in iso­la­tion from reform of the wider soci­ety in which it exists
• School has fail­ure built in
• The con­cept of mass school­ing — one-size-fits-all-schooling — is no longer valid
• School, by its nature, is designed to build soci­ety from the top-down, and ignores the crit­i­cal­ity of cul­ture in enabling learn­ing from the bot­tom up
• School iso­lates learn­ing from life
• School is the pri­mary instru­ment for social engi­neer­ing in soci­ety today — and all such social engi­neer­ing is doomed to failure
• Ped­a­gogy in school today is lim­ited by the struc­tures that school imposes
• Dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion will hap­pen (is hap­pen­ing?) to schools — but do not look to news­pa­pers, the music indus­try or the travel indus­try as mod­els of how this will play out

Just some thoughts.….

“Anthony.…has many prob­lems with writ­ing. He is uncom­fort­able with words on a page. He wants to use graph­ics and other media to make his points. He is more com­fort­able with the frag­ment, with the poetic than he is with the whole sen­tence. He is pre­pared to com­mu­ni­cate, but only on his own terms.”

Ron Bur­nett tells the story of Anthony, who he believes is “… build­ing and cre­at­ing a new lan­guage that com­bines many of the fea­tures of con­ven­tional lan­guages but is more of a hybrid of many dif­fer­ent modes of expres­sion…”, a process that some regard as a dis­as­ter for our cul­tural integrity. Anthony “…uses SMS and a vari­ety of social net­work­ing tools to com­mu­ni­cate with friends and fam­ily. He uses a small video cam­era to record his every­day life and edits the out­put on a lap­top and then uploads the mate­r­ial onto the Web. He is adept at video games, though they are not an obses­sion. Cell phones are expen­sive, but he finds the money…”

Ron, rightly, sees Anthony as “…a har­bin­ger of the future. He will not take tra­di­tional com­po­si­tion classes to learn how to write. Instead, he will com­mu­ni­cate with the tools that he finds com­fort­able to use and he will per­sist in mak­ing him­self heard or read. But, read­ing will not only be text-based. Text on a page is as much design as it is media. The ellip­ti­cal nature of the ver­bal will have to be accom­mo­dated within the tra­di­tions of writ­ing, but writ­ing and even gram­mar will have to change.

The prob­lem for edu­ca­tion (and espe­cially for­mal edu­ca­tion) is that too many sim­ply will not be able to under­stand the point that Ron is mak­ing here — their capac­ity to com­pre­hend the crit­i­cal­ity of these evolv­ing modes of expres­sion is more or less non-existent. But these are the peo­ple who are still able to define lit­er­acy in a way that Anthony and the mil­lions of other Antho­nys no longer accept.

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