The following comes from an article found in Yes! Magazine entitled "Can Money Buy Education?" by Shannon Hayes.
"As a culture, we believe ... To be deemed “educated,” a person must be in attendance at an institution, where they pay money, accept the teachings offered by their professors, repeat back the opinions and lessons of the classroom, participate in a collegiate culture, and in exchange, receive a diploma. A person who becomes skilled at seeking lessons directly from the elders in their community, who learns to tap into the resources of a public library, who embarks on their own life adventures, who sets about creating their own experiments and challenging and teaching themselves, is considered “uneducated,” unless a piece of embossed paper is handed to them while wearing a cardboard hat and oversize dress."
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The entire text of the article can be found at http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/shannon-hayes/can-money-buy-education
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3 comments:
In my experience, schools do not, cannot, produce self-determined, self-directed, self-guided kids that can do what Yes mag's approach would create. It's impossible, unless they have tremendous guidance from exterior forces like parents. A kid doesn't need a year to study and learn american history, what I teach, only a few months, or one month....if they initiate the learning of it spontaneously as a result of their OWN volition. Once it's coerced, it becomes a chore for them, and certain motivational and cognitive roadblocks pop up. The, techers like me have to mtoivate them with extrinsic things, like the threat of a bad grade (or the promise of a good one), the fear of parental disappointment, etc. (Wouldn't it be cool if kids learned because they wanted to learn? Because they enjoyed learning? See more at the end)
Yes mag is on the cutting edge of challenging our very assuumptions of what being educated looks like -the "process" of learning and the "results" of learning.
Instead of asking, "Can Money Buy Education," we can ask, "Does Everyone Need Compulsory Education, and If Not, Then What Do They Do?" Yes Mag has an answer, as well as http://www.sudval.org/
I think that you touch upon a good path - where do we go when the status quo is failing us? Should we coerce our children to fit the current practices, or should we try to amend current practices to fit our children? What are viable alternatives to the traditional schooling model, and how do we create our own alternatives?
This is a nice article..It is very easy to understand and this article is very useful for us. Thank you for posting this valuable content..
ART 101 Week 9 Final Project
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