The school of hard knocks

After a few weeks in first grade my daughter got home; ‘Mommy, I hate primary school, we don’t learn about anything anymore. We only do reading and math.’

My daughter went to nursery school for three years before that. A school inspired by methods like Montessori and Steiner and the likes. She got used to working around a theme each week. Any activity, from the stories, to the painting, to gym class, singing a song and outside activities would revolve around that theme.

When she said they weren’t learning about anything anymore, in fact she opposed to the sudden switch from context based learning to abstract education. For some reason we teach children, during at least 12 years, all the things they will later ‘need to apply in the real world’, but we forget to mention that real world. The reality of things is filtered out, as if it were some kind of annoying noise, as if it would blur the essence of the subject matter. As if they are too young or it is too early to burden them with context.

“Greater perceptual development and learning occur in
environments that are rich with stimuli and provide useful
feedback in response to a learner’s efforts to act upon the
environment.” Stanford University.

In my talks about technology in education, I rant about experience based learning and how technology can put that into practice. I show fascinating experiments of using technology to create realistic context for learning. Sand boxes to teach how maps are the abstraction layer of real places. How realistic conversations with native speakers speed up learning without anyone moving out of the room. I truly believe this will become main role of technology in the classroom. (Except technology to accomplish collaboration between teachers, which is a whole different story.)

Today a lot of things are already possible. If you want to keep track of existing experiments I can warmly recommend a Twitter account and the #edtech hashtag. Every teacher should get time to look into these things and experiment in their own classroom. The exact answer to what education should look like in a digital world is a mystery. But you can easily step into the group of people that are trying hard to find out. Now is the time to experiment and learn.