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Hopes for exploring The Future For Education...

The structure of this course should help me to distill quite a lot of useful knowledge regarding the direction in which Education is heading; that is, the blend of learning resources (video lectures, readings, discussions, peer reviews) generate multiple different types of trigger stimuli – this aligns perfectly with the way that my mind likes to receive information. Although I perform adequately in a mono-stylistic learning (or information receiving) situation, I much prefer a situation where information is given to me in different ways at different times, allowing my to jump between pieces of information and make my own links! As an example, I enjoyed reviewing the differing theories mentioned by Drs. Hargreaves & Roger and trying to tie them to the theories mentioned in the later readings.

As a newcomer to education, the sheer heft of the topics to be covered in the next few weeks (intelligence, teachers, schools, government) is quite exciting for me – I look forward to finding out what assumptions about these topics I may have made misguidedly, whilst I am most eager to start forming deeper connections in my mind between them; do teachers and schools necessarily go together hand-in-hand? How easily can your ‘intelligence’ easily overcome school and government factors?

A beginner's idea on The Future For Education:

Putting all these things (which are currently big question marks!) together to form a clearer idea of the future of education will be a very challenging but hopefully rewarding journey. For now, my idea about education’s future rests on a general desire to see education based around social interaction, learning from a combination of trial & error and social sharing in the first instance (where possible). I.e. why should Formalised learning be the first port of call in education? I believe that we should reverse the current approach and focus on Acquisition-based learning in the first instance, really pushing ourselves to implement this as widely as possible. However, I do believe that this should be topped-up with specific instruction, but only in situations where personal experience is not possible! As an example, some science (e.g. learning about nature) can be experienced – acquisition learning – while some aspects of science (e.g. learning about astronomy and the planets) is more difficult and can be formalised.

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