As a teacher and a victim of various reforms and trials
concerning the need to change something in the educational system, I keep
wondering: why do they all fail? Of course there is no straight forward answer
for that question or a simple one. However I do believe that there are a number
of crucial elements that are continuously overlooked along the effort of
solving it.
Ever since the Internet has erupted into
our lives the whole world around us has gone into an accelerated process of
change. The change is enormous and touches every aspect of our lives and almost
every organization around us. It seems though that the educational system is lagging
behind. It is not such a surprise taking into consideration that the change
involves issues that are at the fundamental core of the system itself and the
logical foundation on which it was built. The fact that the information agents
(teachers) are no longer relevant as such, knowledge itself has gone global and
that the desirable adult coming out of school as it was defined in the past is
no longer relevant, combined with the archaic centralized structure of the
system itself made change impossible. Realizing that a problem exists many
attempts at solving it are being made, and the way I perceive it, all in vein.
I feel as though there is a fundamental mistake in the understanding of the
problem and the reality we are facing and hence forth, all attempts to tacle it
end up in failure. I will try to explain here where the current paradigm of
pedagogy fails to encompass the existing reality.
To begin with, lets take a look on what is
called "New Pedagogy" as it appears in various reforms, books and
theories. Looking closely will make us realize that there is nothing new about
it. The learning processes shown there are those outlined by Piaget, Vygotsky
and others only enhanced through the use of technology. The basic Idea behind
this pedagogy sais, lets use these fantastic new tools at our disposal and use
them to create better learning by becoming relevant and by our ability to
fulfil the classic pedagogical principles better. For example, it is well known
that peer/group learning and editing is an effective way to learn. Today, we
have the ability to enhance, extend and use this kind of pedagogy by using
social networking for learning. Let's throw Facebook into the mix and with
proper pedagogical consideration the outcome will be better learning. The
question arising and not addressed though is: What is the desirable outcome?
And who is the learner we are addressing? It just might be that he has changed
also.
At the end of the day, the educational
process is based on interaction between people. That interaction sums up to a
personal encounter however short it may be between an adult and a
child/teenager/young adult. professional teachers come to that encounter with a
bulk of knowledge they acquired during their training process which tells them
how the child in front of them learns. I think that there is growing evidence
is that that child is no longer there. The change that has affected the world
has changed that child from within. Children today are the same as we were in
many ways but they are also different even to the neurological level. Their brains
are changing to. For me that means that any teaching process based on past
theories is bound to fail since it is not relevant anymore. That leaves us with
a problem of how to form a new pedagogical theory. That problem is a lot bigger
than we think because of the way social sciences try to solve it.
In trying to see what theory might work
any "respectable" researcher will turn toward deductive reasoning.
Hence, the process will include forming a theory and checking its results on a
grand empirical and measurable scale. Two problems interfere with this method.
The first problem comes from the very fact that there is nothing to build the
theory out of since we are not sure what exactly are we facing. The second
problem and closely related to the first is that the rate of change in
technology usually surpasses the rate in which a "proper" grand scale
research can be administered. I wish to suggest a different way of solving this
problem.
When the Quantum Physics theory first
appeared in summoned up a lot of resistance. However the fact is that its
formulas work. No one can truly explain why since they defy classic logic but
they do. What if, we will do the same thing in pedagogy? First try to find out
what works and then try to explain it? That would mean changing our logic to
inductive rather than deductive. I will try to explain myself:
Instead of holding large scale research,
we can locate certain teachers that are doing their work differently. The logic
behind it claims that if children are undergoing a natural changing process,
some teachers will change their pedagogy naturally to suit the new reality.
They will probably be those who can create curiosity, motivation, a sense of
competence and well-being amongst their pupils. Once such teachers are located,
through observation and analysis can be performed to distill particular
pedagogical and interpersonal principles that are unique. These principles can
be the formula that works. All that is left would be to build a theory around
it and to test it.
I do think that change is bound to happen
anyhow in a generation's time. But, it would be a shame to have
missed the opportunity to be a factor in modelling that change and affect it so
that some of the valuable knowledge and theories accumulated so far will not be
lost.
